Friends, Lovers, Chocolate id-2

by Alexander McCall Smith

  She invited them in and the introductions took place in the hall. Jamie did not give Louise’s other name, an endemic social failing which Isabel had stopped remarking upon; so many people now gave only their first names. In this case, though, there might be a reason. Was Louise openly in Jamie’s company, or was discretion still required?

  Isabel looked at Louise and smiled. She saw more or less what she had expected to see—a woman in her late thirties, of average height, wearing a longish red skirt and a soft padded green jacket of the sort which became perversely fashionable in the West in the days of Madame Mao—peasant chic. The skirt and the jacket were expensive, though, and overall there was a feel to this woman, Isabel thought, which suggested that she was accustomed to wealth and comfort. Material security brought a particular form of self-assurance—an easy confidence that things would simply be there if one wanted them, and this F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  woman had that assurance. The wealthy, thought Isabel, fit in.

  They are never out of place.

  And as for the face—high cheekbones and wide, dark eyes—it was a face which she had seen used in the faux nativities which artists painted when they tried to capture the spirit of Renaissance Italy. It was inarguably a beautiful face, and it could beguile any man, even a young man, thought Isabel. This was not a charitable thought, and she reminded herself to smile as she shook hands with Louise, who looked back at her, smiling too, and undoubtedly performing her own calculations as to who Isabel was and what she meant to Jamie. Was she a threat?

  Well, Isabel was attractive too, but she was a philosopher, was she not, buried in her books, a bit above all that sort of thing (young men, affairs, and the rest).

  They went into the drawing room and Isabel offered them white wine. Jamie said he would pour it, and Isabel noticed that Louise had picked up this sign of familiarity. Isabel found herself pleased at this: it would do her no harm to know that she and Jamie had been friends for years.

  “Your health,” said Isabel, raising her glass to Jamie first and then to Louise. They sat down, Louise choosing the sofa, where she patted a cushion beside her, discreetly, almost as one would give a secret signal, for Jamie to sit beside her, which he did.

  Isabel sat opposite them and looked at Jamie. Nothing was said, but Louise noticed the exchange of glances and frowned, almost imperceptibly, which was noticed by Isabel.

  “I have to go out to Balerno to look at a bassoon,” said Jamie.

  “One of my pupils lives out there, and he has been offered an instrument which he can’t bring into town. I’m going to tell him if it’s worth buying. It’s a bit complicated.”

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel nodded. Jamie was always looking at bassoons. “I thought perhaps Louise lived out there.”

  Louise looked up sharply. “Balerno?”

  Isabel smiled disarmingly. “My mistake,” she said. “Do you live in town?”

  Louise nodded, and although Isabel waited for her to say something else, no further information was forthcoming.

  “Louise has a job with the National Gallery,” Jamie said.

  “Part-time, but quite interesting, isn’t it, Louise?”

  “Most of the time,” said Louise.

  “Well, you get around with it,” said Jamie. “Didn’t you have to accompany a painting to Venice the other day? Sitting on the seat beside you, in its little crate?”

  “Yes,” said Louise. “I did.”

  Jamie looked nervously at Isabel, who said, “I suppose you can’t put paintings in the hold when you’re lending them for an exhibition.”

  “We can’t,” said Louise. “The small ones travel with us in the plane. They get tickets.”

  “But no meal,” said Jamie, weakly.

  For a few moments there was silence. Isabel took a sip of her wine. She wanted to say to Louise, And what does your husband do? It was a delicious thought, because it was such a subversive, tactless thing to ask in the circumstances—to bring up the husband, the ghost at this banquet. She could ask the question disingenuously, as if she had no idea of the nature of the relationship between Jamie and this woman, but of course Jamie would know that she had asked it mischievously, and would be mortified. But then he could hardly complain if he brought her here, to flaunt her. Could he not understand that F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  this whole meeting would be painful for her? Was it too much to expect that he should sense her unhappiness over all this?

  Isabel raised her wineglass and took another sip. Opposite her, Louise had begun to fiddle with a button on her jacket.

  This, thought Isabel, is because she is uncomfortable. She does not want to be here. She has no interest in me. In her eyes she is the adventuress, the passionate one, fashionable, a woman who can get a young man so very easily while this other woman, this philosopher woman, has nothing. She watched her, and she saw the eyes go to the mantelpiece and to the pictures with a look on her face that was utterly dismissive, though she had no idea that Isabel would see it. I am nothing to her, she told herself; I am beneath her notice. Well, in that case . . .

  “What does your husband do?” asked Isabel.

  C H A P T E R S E V E N

  E

  SHE HAD DECIDED to apologise, of course, at least to Jamie, but the next day she had neither the time to feel guilty nor to make the telephone call that would assuage her guilt. Shortly after she arrived in the morning to open up, a consignment of cheeses was delivered from a cheesemaker in Lanarkshire, and they had to be unwrapped by hand, priced, and put on display.

  Isabel did this while Eddie prepared the coffee, and then there was a spate of talkative customers who took up her time with long-drawn-out conversations. There was an elderly customer who thought that Isabel was Cat, and addressed her accordingly, and a shoplifter whom she saw eating a bar of chocolate, unpaid for, while he stuffed a can of artichoke hearts into a pocket. At least we have discerning thieves, she thought, as she watched him run down the street; artichoke hearts and Belgian chocolate.

  At one o’clock she signalled to Eddie that he should take over at the till while she took a break. Then she helped herself to a bagel and several slices of smoked salmon before moving over to the table area. The tables were busy, with all the chairs taken, except for one, where her lunching companion of the previous day sat, a frugal tub of salad before him, reading a F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  newspaper. He had not seen her, and she hesitated. She was not sure if she wanted to sit at his table uninvited, and was about to go back to the office, to eat her lunch amongst the calendars and the catalogues, when he looked up and smiled at her, gesturing to the unoccupied chair.

  He put the newspaper to the side. “You’re busy.”

  She looked about her. “I prefer it that way. I find that I quite like being busy.”

  “I used to,” he said. “I used to be busy and now I mark time, reading the papers, doing the shopping for my wife.”

  She had not anticipated the reference to a wife; men who sat by themselves in delicatessens were likely to be single.

  “She works?”

  “Like me, a psychologist. Or at least, I used to be a psychologist. I gave it up just before the operation.”

  Isabel nodded. “A good idea, I suppose, if one has been very ill. There’s no point—”

  “In hastening one’s appointment at Mortonhall Cremato-rium,” he interjected. “No, I stopped, and found that I didn’t miss it in the least.”

  Isabel broke her bagel in two and took a bite out of one of the pieces.

  “I still read the professional journals,” he said, watching her eat. “It makes me feel that I’m on top of the subject, not that there is anything completely new and suprising to be said in psychology. I’m not at all sure that our understanding of human behaviour has progressed a great deal since Freud�
�awful admission though that is.”

  “Surely we know a bit more. What about cognitive science?”

  He raised an eyebrow. Her reference to cognitive science 6 4

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h was clearly not what he expected of a woman working in a delicatessen, but then he remembered that she was a philosopher.

  Perhaps one should expect to be attended to by philosophers in Edinburgh delicatessens, just as one might be waited upon by psychoanalysts in the restaurants of Buenos Aires. Is the braised beef really what you want?

  He picked at a lettuce leaf. “Cognitive science has helped,”

  he said. “Yes, of course, we know much more about how the brain works and how we see the world. But behaviour is rather more than that. Behaviour is tied up with personality and how our personalities make us do what we do. That stuff is all very messy and not just a simple matter of neural pathways and the rest.”

  “And then there’s genetics,” said Isabel, taking another bite of her bagel. “I thought that behavioural genetics might explain a great deal of what we do. What about all those twin studies?”

  “My name’s Ian, by the way,” he said, and she said: Isabel Dalhousie, with an emphasis on the Dalhousie. “Yes, those twin studies. Very interesting.”

  “But don’t they prove that whatever the environmental influences, people behave as they do because of heredity?”

  “They do not,” Ian said. “All that they show is that there is a genetic factor in behaviour. But it’s not the only factor.”

  Isabel was not convinced. “But I read somewhere or other about these pairs of separated twins that keep turning up in America. And when they look at them they discover that they like the same colours and vote the same way and say the same sort of thing to the researchers.”

  Ian laughed. “Oh yes, it’s wonderful stuff. I’ve read some of the papers from Minnesota. In one of them they found that twins who had been separated at birth had actually both mar-F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  ried women of the same name, divorced them at roughly the same time, and then remarried. And the second wives of each man had the same name. Two Bettys or whatever to begin with, and then two Joans.” He paused. “But then, Middle America’s full of Bettys and Joans.”

  “Even so, the odds are very much against it,” said Isabel.

  “Two Bettys is not too unlikely, but then to pick two Joans. I’m no statistician, but I should imagine that would be astronomi-cally unlikely.”

  “But the unlikely can happen, you know,” said Ian. “And that, of course, can change everything we believe in. Single white crow, you see.”

  Isabel looked at him blankly, and he continued: “That’s something said by William James. The finding of a single white crow would disprove the theory that all crows are black. It’s quite a pithy way of making the point that it won’t take much to disprove something which we take as absolutely firmly established.”

  “Such as the proposition about black crows.”

  “Precisely.”

  Isabel glanced at Ian. He was looking away from her, out through the window of the shop. Outside, in the street, a bus had stopped to disgorge a couple of passengers: a middle-aged woman in a coat which looked too warm for the day, and a young woman in a T-shirt with a legend bleached out in the wash.

  “You’re looking worried,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  He turned back to face her. “I came across that quote from William James in an article recently,” he said. “Something rather close to home.”

  She waited for him to continue. He had picked up his newspaper and folded it again, running a finger down the crease. “It was used as an introduction to an article about the psychologi-6 6

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h cal implications of transplant surgery, a subject obviously of some interest to me.”

  Isabel felt that she should encourage him. “Well, I can imagine that these are major. It must be a massive disturbance for the system. All surgery is to some degree.”

  “Yes, of course it is. But this article was about something very specific. It was about cellular memory.”

  She waited for him to explain, but instead he looked at his watch. “Look,” he said, “I’m very sorry, but I’m going to have to dash. I agreed to meet my wife ten minutes ago, and she has to get back to her office. I can’t keep her.”

  “Of course,” said Isabel. “You’d better go.”

  Ian rose to his feet, picking up his newspaper and the empty salad tub. “Could I speak to you about this? Could I discuss it with you later? Would you mind?”

  There was something in his tone which spoke of vulnerability, and Isabel thought that she could not refuse his request, even if she had wanted to. But, in fact, her curiosity had been aroused; curiosity, her personal weakness, the very quality which had led her into such frequent interventions in the lives of others and which she simply could not resist. And so she said: “Yes, by all means.” And she scribbled her telephone number on the top of his newspaper and invited him to call her and arrange a time to come round to the house for a glass of wine, if his regime allowed for that.

  “It does,” he said. “A minuscule glass of wine, almost invisible to the naked eye.”

  “The sort they serve in Aberdeen,” said Isabel.

  “Very appropriate,” he said, smiling. “I’m from Aberdeen.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Isabel hurriedly. “I’ve always found Aberdo-nians very generous.”

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  “Perhaps we are,” he said, adding, “in a frugal sort of way.

  No, wine is all right, in small quantities. But I have to avoid chocolate apparently. And that’s very hard. Even the thought of chocolate is difficult for me. It sets up such a yearning.”

  Isabel agreed with this. “Chocolate involves major philosophical problems,” she said. “It shows us a lot about temptation and self-control.” She thought for a moment. There was a lot that one might say about chocolate, if one thought about it.

  “Yes,” she concluded, “chocolate is a great test, isn’t it?”

  T H E A F T E R N OO N PA S S E D as the morning had, in a flurry of business. Again Isabel was tired by the time she locked the front door and drew down the shutters. Eddie had left a few minutes early for some reason—he had mumbled an explanation which Isabel had not quite caught—and Isabel had shut everything up herself. She glanced at her watch. It was seven o’clock, and she had still to call Jamie. But she thought that if she did so now, then there would be a chance that Louise might be there and it would be difficult for him to talk, if he wanted to talk to her, of course. The previous evening had been a social disaster. After Isabel had brought up the issue of the husband, with her inex-cusably mischievous question, Louise had become more or less silent, and had not responded to the question. The tactic had worked, though, Isabel realised, and although Louise persisted with her air of studied boredom, it was obvious that she had a new understanding of her hostess. Jamie had been flustered and had gulped down his wine before suggesting that it was time that they went on to Balerno. The farewells at the front door had been perfunctory.

  Isabel had almost immediately regretted her rudeness, for it 6 8

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h was simple rudeness to embarrass a guest, no matter what provo-cation the guest had offered. It had been a petty action, and not one from which she was likely to benefit. The bonds of friendship might appear strong, but she understood that there was nothing easier to break than friendship, with all its expectations.

  One might ignore a friend, or let him down, but you could not do something deliberate to hurt him.

  An apology could not be put off. Isabel remembered her father making this point when he considered Japan’s apology to China for what it did in Manchuria. Forty years is slightly late, he had observed, adding, but I suppose one doesn’t want to rush t
hese things.

  “Jamie?”

  There was a slight hesitation at the other end of the line, which is always a sign of resentment. This was the So it’s you pause.

  “Yes.”

  She took a deep breath. “You can guess why I’m calling.”

  Another moment of silence. Of course he could guess.

  “No,” he said.

  “About last night, and my bad behaviour. All I can say is that I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. Jealousy, maybe.”

  He came in quickly. “Why should you be jealous?”

  He doesn’t know, she thought. He has no idea. And this should not surprise her.

  “I value your friendship, you see,” she said. “One can see other people as a threat to a friendship, and I thought . . . well, I’m afraid I thought that Louise was not in the slightest bit interested in me and that she would cut me out of your life. Yes, I suppose that’s what I felt. Do you think you can understand that?”

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  She paused, and she heard Jamie’s breathing. Now there was silence, each uncertain whose turn it was to speak.

  “Nobody is going to cut anybody out,” Jamie began. “Anyway, things did not go well last night. It had nothing to do with you. We had an argument even before we came to see you. Then things got worse, and I’m afraid that’s more or less it.”

  Isabel looked up at the ceiling. She had not dared to hope for this, but it was exactly what she had wished for, subcon-sciously perhaps, and it had occurred much sooner than she would have thought possible. People fell in and out of love rather quickly, of course; it could happen within minutes.

  “What a pity,” whispered Isabel. “I’m so sorry.”