Friends, Lovers, Chocolate id-2

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “You’re not,” said Jamie sharply.

  “No,” said Isabel. “I’m not.” She paused. “You’ll find some -

  body else. There are plenty of girls.”

  “I don’t want plenty of girls,” Jamie retorted. “I want Cat.”

  C H A P T E R E I G H T

  E

  AND SALVATORE?” asked Isabel. “Tell me all about Salvatore.”

  “Charming,” said Cat, meeting Isabel’s eye. “Exactly as I told you he was.”

  They were sitting in the gazebo in Isabel’s back garden that Sunday afternoon, shortly after Cat’s return from Italy. It was an unusually warm day for Edinburgh, where summer is unpredictable and where the occasional warm day is something to be savoured. Isabel was used to this, and although she bemoaned, as everybody did, the tendency of the sky to disappear behind sheets of fast-moving cloud, she found a temperate climate more to her taste than a Mediterranean one. Weather was a test of attitude, she felt: had Auden not pointed that out? Nice people, he observed, were nice about the weather; nasty people were nasty about it.

  Cat was a heliophile, if there was such a word for a sun-worshipper, she thought. Italy in the summer must have suited her perfectly; a climate of short shadows and dry breezes. Cat liked beaches and warm seas, while Isabel found such things F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  dull. She could think of nothing worse than sitting for hours under an umbrella, an open invitation to sandflies, looking out to sea. She wondered why it was that people did not talk on beaches; they sat, they lay prone, they read, but did they engage in conversation? Isabel thought not.

  She remembered, years before, at the end of her spell at Georgetown, a visit she had paid to the Bahamas with her mother’s sister, the one who lived in Palm Beach. This aunt had bought, almost on impulse, an apartment in Nassau, to which she travelled once or twice a year. She had made there a group of bridge-playing friends, bored and unhappy tax exiles, and Isabel had met these people at drinks parties. They had little to say, and there was little to be said about them. And on one occasion, visiting the house of one of these bridge couples, she had been seized with a sudden existential horror. The house had white carpets and white furniture and, most significantly, no books. And they sat on the terrace, which was just above a small private beach, and looked out towards the ocean, and nothing was said, because nobody could think of anything to speak about.

  “Beaches,” said Isabel to Cat.

  “Beaches?”

  “I was thinking about Italy, and the weather, and beaches came into my mind.” She looked at Cat. “And I suddenly remembered going to the Bahamas and meeting some people who lived on a beach.”

  “Beach people?”

  Isabel laughed. “Not in that sense. Not people who had a tent or whatever and let their hair get full of salt and all the rest.

  No, these people had a house on a beach and sat on a marble 7 2

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h terrace, which must have cost heaven knows what to import, and they looked out at the sea. And there were no books in their house, not a single book. Not one.

  “He had lived in England and had left the country because he couldn’t bear to pay taxes to a socialist government, or to any government, I suspect. And there they were on their Caribbean island, sitting on their terrace, with their heads full of nothing very much.

  “They had a daughter, who was a young teenager when I saw her. She was as empty-headed as the parents and although they tried to do something about her education, nothing much got in. So they withdrew her from her expensive school in England and brought her back to the island. She took up with a local boy whom the parents wouldn’t let into the house, with its white carpets and all the rest. They tried to stop her, but they couldn’t. She had a baby, and the baby had nothing much in its head either. But they didn’t want their daughter’s baby, and I later heard that they just pretended that the baby didn’t exist.

  It crawled around on the white carpets, but they didn’t really see it.”

  Cat looked at Isabel. She was used to her relative’s musings, but this one surprised her. Usually Isabel’s stories had a clear moral point, but she was not sure what the moral point of this one was. Emptiness, perhaps; or the need for a purpose in life; or the immorality of tax havens. Or even babies and white carpets.

  “Salvatore was quite charming,” said Cat. “He took us all out for a meal at a restaurant in the hills. It was one of the places where they give you very little choice but just bring course after course.”

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  “They’re generous people, the Italians,” Isabel remarked.

  “And his father was very kind, too,” went on Cat. “We went to their house and met all the relatives. Aunts, uncles, and so on. Crowds of them.”

  “I see,” said Isabel. There was still the question of Salvatore’s father’s occupation. “And did you find out what the family business was?”

  “I asked,” said Cat. “I asked one of the uncles. We were sitting under the pergola in the garden, having lunch—a large table with about twenty people at it. I asked Salvatore’s uncle.”

  “And?” She imagined the uncle saying that he was not sure what his brother did; or that he had forgotten. One could not forget such a thing, just as one could not forget one’s address, as a Russian once claimed to Isabel when she asked him where he lived. He was frightened, poor man; those were times when one might not want one’s address in a foreigner’s address book, but it might have been better for him to say so, rather than to claim that he had forgotten it.

  “He said it was shoes.”

  Isabel was silent. Shoes. Italian shoes: elegant, beautifully designed, but always, always too small for Isabel’s feet. My Scottish-American feet, she thought, so much larger than Italian feet.

  Cat smiled at her; she had dispelled the suspicions which her aunt had expressed over Salvatore’s family business. Perhaps it had been embarrassment over shoes, which were, after all, somewhat prosaic items.

  “And what else did you do?” asked Isabel at last. “Apart from these lunch parties with Salvatore and the Salvatore family. Turismo? ”

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

  “We went to see Etna.”

  “On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking,” said Isabel.

  “Lawrence wrote that in his curious snake poem. You know the one, where a snake comes to his water trough, and he’s in his pyjamas for the heat, and he throws a rock at the snake. Auden never threw rocks at snakes, and that’s the crucial difference, isn’t it: writers who would throw rocks at snakes and those who wouldn’t. Hemingway would, wouldn’t he?” She smiled at Cat, who was shading her eyes against the afternoon sun, and looking at her with what Isabel always described as her patient look.

  “I digress. I know,” Isabel went on. “But I always think of Etna smoking. And of Lawrence in his pyjamas.”

  Cat took control of the conversation. Isabel could talk for hours about anything, unless stopped. “That was with a cousin of Salvatore’s, Tomasso. He’s from Palermo. They live in a large Baroque palazzo. He’s fun. He took me to all sorts of places I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.”

  Isabel sat quite still. When Cat talked like this, about men being fun, it meant that she was interested in them, as she had been interested in Toby, with his crushed-strawberry trousers and his tedious skiing talk; as she had been interested in Geoff, the army officer who drank too much at parties and engaged in childish pranks, such as gluing people’s hats to the hatstand; as she had been interested in Henry, and David, and perhaps others.

  “Tomasso’s a rally driver,” said Cat. “He drives an old Bugatti. It’s a beautiful car—red and silver.”

  Isabel was noncommittal. At least Tomasso was at a safe distance . . .

  “And he’s bringing the car over to Scotland soon,” said Cat.
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  “It’s being brought over by train and ferry. He wants to drive it around the Highlands and see a bit of Edinburgh. He thought he might stay in Edinburgh for a few weeks.”

  “When?” asked Isabel. There was resignation in her voice.

  “Next week, I think,” said Cat. “Or the week after that. He’s going to call me and let me know.”

  There was little more to be said on the subject. As they talked about the delicatessen and about what had happened there over the week, Isabel’s thoughts returned to one of the central issues of her moral life. She had determined long ago not to interfere in Cat’s affairs, no matter what the temptation to do so was. It was very easy to see what was best for one’s family, particularly when one did not have many relatives, but she understood how this offended the principle of autonomy, which holds, so stubbornly, that we must each be left to live our own lives as we see fit. This did not mean that we could do anything we liked—far from it—but it did mean that we had to make our own decisions as to what to do. And if this meant that we made bad choices, then we would have to be left with the making of those choices. Cat saw her destiny in men who would make her unhappy, precisely because they were inconstant, and selfish, and narcissistic. That was what she wanted to do, and she had to be allowed to do it.

  “You’re fond of him?” Isabel asked quietly, and Cat, knowing what the question was about, was guarded in her response. Perhaps she was fond of him. She would see.

  Isabel said nothing. She wondered for a moment what Tomasso would be like. Of course, if one bore in mind that he drove an old Bugatti and lived in a Baroque palazzo, then the answer was clear. He would be stylish, raffish no doubt, and 7 6

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h he would make Cat unhappy, as she had been unhappy with the other men. And Jamie would be unhappy too, and would spend hours anxiously imagining Cat and Tomasso together, in the silver and red Bugatti, somewhere in Fife or Perthshire, on narrow, exhilarating roads.

  C H A P T E R N I N E

  E

  SHE HAD SUGGESTED to Ian that they meet at her house, but when he telephoned her it was with a counter-invitation.

  He would like to take her to lunch, if he might, at the Scottish Arts Club in Rutland Square.

  “They do mackerel fillets for me,” he said. “Mackerel fillets and lettuce. But you can have something more substantial.”

  Isabel knew the Arts Club. She had friends who were members and she knew the club president, a dapper antiques dealer with an exquisitely pointed moustache. She had even thought of joining, but done nothing about it, and so her visits to the club were restricted to the occasional lunch and the annual Burns Supper. The Burns Supper, which took place on or about the anniversary of Robert Burns’s birth, was of variable quality. In a year when there was a good speaker, the address to the Immortal Memory could be moving. But the occasion could rapidly drift into maudlin reflections on the ploughman poet and his carousing in Ayrshire, nothing of which Scotland could be proud, she thought. There was nothing edifying in the profound consumption of whisky, she felt. Every Scottish poet, it seemed, had drunk too much, or written about drink, or written 7 8

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h nonsense while under its influence. How much had been lost as a result—great screeds of unwritten poetry, whole decades of literature; lives unsung, hopes unrealised. And the same could be said of Scottish composers, or at least some of them—the sixth Earl of Kellie, for example, who had composed such fine fiddle music but who had often been drunk and who, it was said, laughed so much at his own jokes that he would turn purple.

  That, of course, was a marvellous social detail; one could forgive a great deal in a man who turned purple in such circumstances.

  One might even love such a figure.

  Not that she laid the blame at the door of the Arts Club, before which she now stood, awaiting admission by one of the staff. Members had their own keys, but guests must wait until a member arrived or the secretary heard the bell. Isabel pressed the bell again and then looked back, over her shoulder, at the Rutland Square Gardens. Rutland Square was one of the finest squares in Georgian Edinburgh, tucked away at the west end of Princes Street, behind the great red sandstone edifice of the Caledonian Hotel. The gardens in the centre were not large, but had a number of well-established trees, which shaded the stone of the surrounding buildings. In spring the grass was covered with a riot of crocuses, impossible purples and yellows, and in summer, at lunchtime, it was lain upon during brief moments of sun by people from the nearby offices, pale secretaries and clerks in their shirtsleeves, just as Isabel and her friends at the Ladies’ College in George Square had stretched out on the grass and watched the students from the university, the boys in particular, and waited for their real lives to start.

  Every part of Edinburgh had memories for Isabel, as any resident of any city remembers the places where things happened, the corners where there had been a coffee bar a long F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  time ago, or the building in which she had had her first job, the scene of an assignation, a disappointment or triumph. While she waited for the door to be opened, Isabel looked across the square to the corner where her friend Duncan had lived in his bachelor days. Behind an unassuming, black door was a common stone stair, winding and well-trodden over the years, that led up to four separate flats, one of them Duncan’s. And what parties had been conducted under that roof: parties that only started when everything else had finished; evenings of long conversations, one of which she remembered had ended with the arrival of the fire brigade when a spark from a log in the fireplace had started a smouldering fire in the floorboards—not anybody’s fault, as the firemen had pointed out as they stood in the kitchen later on and accepted a glass of whisky, and then another, and one after that, and had ended up singing with Duncan and his guests: My brother Bill’s a fireman bold /He pits oot fires. At the end, when the six firemen had made their way down the stair, one had remarked that it was a fine class of fire that one attended in Rutland Square, which was undoubtedly true. And another, the one who had proposed to Isabel in the kitchen, only to withdraw the offer ten minutes later on the grounds that he thought that he might already be married, had waved at her as he disappeared downstairs and doffed his fire helmet.

  The door was opened. Inside the club, Isabel made her way upstairs to the large L-shaped sitting room—the smoking room—where members congregated. It was a room filled with light, with two large ceiling-to-floor windows at the front, overlooking the square and its trees, and another large window at the back, looking down onto the mews behind Shandwick Place. There were two fireplaces, a grand piano, and comfortable red leather bench seats running along one wall, like the 8 0

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h seats of an old parliament somewhere, in some forgotten corner of the Commonwealth.

  The Arts Club usually had an exhibition of paintings hanging in the smoking room, sometimes by members, many of whom were artists. This exhibition was by a member, and Isabel picked up the explanatory sheet and examined the works. They were a mixture of small portraits and watercolours of domestic scenes. She recognised the subjects of a number of the portraits, and was impressed by the likenesses: Lord Prosser, a bril-liant, good man standing against a background of the Pentland Hills; Richard Demarco in an empty theatre, smiling optimistically. And then there was another one, a large picture that domi-nated the wall behind the piano, a portrayal of pride, an actor whom Isabel knew very slightly but who was well known in general, standing with a self-satisfied sneer on his face, a curl of the lip, pure arrogance. Did he recognise himself in the likeness, she wondered, or did he not see himself as others saw him?

  Burns had said that, of course, and it had been repeated at the last but one Burns Supper downstairs, in a bucolic address given by a former moderator of the Church of Scotland: the gift to gie
us/to see ourselves as ithers see us.

  “Yes,” said a voice at her shoulder. “That’s him, isn’t it? She’s really summed him up, hasn’t she? Look at the eyebrows.”

  Isabel turned round to see Ian standing behind her.

  “One might have to keep one’s voice down,” said Isabel. “He could be a member here.”

  “Not grand enough for him,” said Ian. “The New Club is more his territory.”

  Isabel smiled. “Look at this portrait here,” she said, pointing to another of the pictures. A man sat in his study, one hand on 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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  pile of books and the other resting on a blotter. Behind him was a window in which a steep hillside of rhododendrons was visible.

  “That’s a very different person altogether,” said Ian. “I know that man.”

  “As it happens,” said Isabel, “so do I.”

  They looked at the picture together. Isabel leant forward to examine the painting more closely. “Isn’t it extraordinary how experience writes itself on the face?” she said. “Experience and attitude—they both reveal themselves in the physical. One can understand people turning leathery, as Australians sometimes do, and one can understand how the pleasures of the table lead to fleshy jowls, but what is it that makes the spiritual face so different from the face of the venal? Especially with the eyes—how can the eyes be so different?”

  “It’s how we read the face,” said Ian. “Remember that you’re talking to a psychologist. We like to think about things like that.

  It’s a question of numerous little signals that create the overall impression.”

  “But how do internal states show themselves physically?”

  “Very easily,” said Ian. “Think of anger. The knitted brow.

  Think of determination. The gritted teeth.”

  “And intelligence?” asked Isabel. “What’s the difference between an intelligent face and an unintelligent one? And don’t tell me that there isn’t a difference—there is.”