“Liveliness and engagement with the world,” said Ian. “The vacuous face shows neither of these.”
Isabel gazed at the painting of the good, and then looked at the painting of the proud. In an earlier age, it might have been possible to believe that goodness would prevail over pride, but not any more. The proud man could be proud with impunity, 8 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h because there was nobody to contradict him in his pride and because narcissism was no longer considered a vice. That was what the whole cult of celebrity was about, she thought; and we fêted these people and fed their vanity.
They went down to lunch, choosing one of the few private tables at the rear of the dining room. The main tables, both round, were filling up. One was presided over by a Scotsman journalist who held court in the club three days a week; at the other table a gaggle of lawyers sat, chuckling over some misfortune.
“It was good of you to accept my invitation,” said Ian, as he poured Isabel a glass of water. “After all, I was a perfect stranger when we bumped into one another the other day.”
“That’s what you thought,” said Isabel. “But I know more about you than you think.”
He raised an eyebrow. “How?”
“You told me that you were a psychologist,” Isabel explained. “I telephoned a psychologist friend and found out all I needed to know.”
“Which was?”
“That you had a distinguished career. That you were almost given a personal chair here in Edinburgh. That you published a lot. That’s about it.”
He laughed. “And I know about you,” he said.
Isabel sighed. “Scotland is a village.”
“Yes,” went on Ian. “But so is everywhere. New Yorkers say that about New York. And of course now we have the global village.”
Isabel thought about that for a moment. If we lived in a global village, then the boundaries of our responsibility were greatly extended. The people dying of poverty, the sick, the dis-F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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possessed, were our neighbours even if they were far away. And that changed a great deal.
“I asked our mutual friend Peter Stevenson about you,” Ian continued. “He can tell you just about anything. And he said that you were, well, who you are. He also said that you had a reputation for discreetly looking into things.”
“That’s a polite way of putting it,” said Isabel. “Some would call it indecent curiosity. Nosiness, even.”
“There’s nothing wrong with taking an interest in the world,” said Ian. “I’m curious about the world too. I like to speculate as to what lies behind the surface.”
“If anything,” interjected Isabel. “Sometimes the surface is all there is.”
“True, but not always true. Those pictures up there, for instance, the ones we’ve just been looking at: there’s so much behind each of them. But one would have to enquire. One would have to be a bit of a John Berger. You’ve seen his Ways of Seeing? It changed the way I look at things. Completely.”
“I picked it up a long time ago,” said Isabel. “Yes, it makes scales drop from the eyes.”
The waitress arrived at their table, placing a small plate of bread and butter before them. Ian reached out and pushed it over towards Isabel.
“We had a conversation the other day,” he said. “Or we started it, rather. I told you about how it felt to have heart surgery. But I didn’t get very far.”
Isabel watched him. She had decided that she liked him, that she appreciated his openness and his willingness to engage with issues, but now she found herself wondering whether this was to be an operation conversation. People liked to talk about 8 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h their medical problems—for some it was the most interesting of all subjects—but surely Ian could not have sought her out purely as a sympathetic ear for an operation saga.
It was as if she had given voice to her reservations. “Don’t worry, I don’t intend to burden you with the details,” he said quickly. “There’s nothing worse than hearing about the medical problems of others. No, that’s not the issue.”
Isabel looked at him politely. “I don’t mind,” she said. “A friend told me about her ingrown toenail the other day. It was quite a saga. It took her half an hour. Do you know that once the toenail starts to . . .” She stopped, and smiled.
Ian continued. “I wanted to tell you about something quite . . . well, quite unsettling I suppose is the word. Would you mind?”
Isabel shook her head. The waitress had returned with their plates and had placed a helping of mackerel fillets and salad in front of Ian. He thanked her and gazed, with resignation, Isabel thought, at the meal before him. She listened as he began to talk, telling her briefly that he had become ill suddenly, after a massive viral attack, and that his heart, quite simply, had given out. He told of receiving the news that he would need a heart transplant and of his feeling of calm, which surprised even him.
“I found that I really didn’t mind,” he said. “I thought it highly unlikely that a donor would be found in time and that I would be going. I felt no great regrets. I just felt this extraordinary sense of calm. I was astonished.”
The call for the operation came suddenly. He had been out for a walk, at the Canongate Kirk, in fact, and had been fetched.
They told him later that he had travelled over to Glasgow with the donor heart, which was in a container beside him, as the donor had come from Edinburgh. That was all that they said F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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about that, as the donor’s family had wished to remain anonymous. All he knew was that it was a young man, because they had used the male pronoun when they spoke to him about it and they had said that the heart was young.
“I don’t remember a great deal of the next few weeks,” he said. “I lay there in my bed in Glasgow, not knowing what day it was. I drifted in and out of sleep. And then, I slowly came back to life, or that’s what it seemed like. I thought I could feel my new heart, beating within me. I lay and listened to its rhythms, echoed in a machine that they had linked me to. And I felt a curious sadness, a feeling of disjointedness. It was as if my past had been taken away from me and I was adrift. I found that I had nothing to say to anybody. People tried to coax me into conversation, but I just felt this great emptiness. There was nothing for me to say.
“I am told that all of this is quite normal. People feel like that after major heart surgery. And it did get better—once I was home I recovered my sense of who I was. I felt more cheerful.
The emptiness, which was probably some form of depression, disappeared and I began to read books and see friends. At that point I began to feel gratitude—just immense gratitude—to the doctors and the person whose heart I had been given. I wanted to thank the family, but the doctors said that I should respect their desire for anonymity. Sometimes I thought of the donor, whoever he was, and just wept. I suppose that in a sense I was mourning him—I was mourning the death of somebody whom I didn’t know, even whose name was unknown to me.
“I would have loved to have been able to speak to the family. I wrote a letter to them to thank them. You can imagine how difficult it was to do that—to find the words that could do jus-8 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h tice to my feelings. When I read the letter over, it sounded stilted to me, but there was nothing I could do about that. It had to be passed on through the doctors—I wonder if the family read it and thought that it sounded formal, and forced. I hate to think that they might have thought that I was writing out of a sense of duty—a formal thank-you letter. But what else could I do?”
He paused, as if expecting a response. Isabel had been listening intently. She had been intrigued by the idea of frustrated gratitude. Should one let people express their gratitude properly, even if one is embarrassed or reluctant to do so? There is an art in accepting a present, and indeed there is sometimes an obligation t
o let others give. Perhaps the family should have allowed him to meet them, and to thank them properly; one cannot put just any condition one wishes on a gift, a condition should not be unreasonable or demeaning. Isabel had always thought that legacies which stipulated that the beneficiaries should change their names were fundamentally offensive.
“You had no alternative,” she said. “That’s all you could do.
But I think that they might have allowed you to speak with them. You could argue that they had no right to insist on anonymity, given the natural desire that you would have to express your gratitude.”
Ian’s eyes widened. “You think I have the right to know? To know who he was?”
Isabel was not prepared to go that far. “No, I don’t think so.
But obviously you would know who he is once you spoke to them. Your right—if one can call it a right—is to be able to express your very natural and entirely understandable feelings of gratitude. You can’t do that at the moment—or you can’t do it properly.”
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He was silent for a moment. “I see.”
Isabel felt concerned. “I’m not necessarily suggesting that you should pursue that. I don’t have a particularly strong view about it. It’s just a thought—that’s all.” She paused. Was this what he wanted to speak to her about? Did he want her to trace the family for him? She would have to tell him that this was not what she did.
“You should know something,” she began. “Whatever people have said about me, I’m not in the business of going round and finding things out. If you want me—”
He held up a hand. “No, no. It’s not that at all. Please don’t think that—”
Isabel interrupted him. “I suppose that in the past I’ve become involved in, how might one put it, issues in people’s lives. But I’m really just the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. That’s all.”
He shook his head. “I had nothing like that in mind. I felt that . . . well, one of the problems that I’ve had to face is not being able to talk. My wife is worried sick over me and I don’t want to make it worse for her. And the doctors are busy and concerned with getting all the technical things right—the drug dosages and the rest.”
Isabel immediately felt guilty. She had not intended to inhibit him. “Of course I’m happy to hear about all this,” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean to sound so abrupt.”
He was silent for a moment. He had not yet tackled his mackerel fillets, and now he tentatively cut off a slice. “You see,”
he said, “I’ve had a most extraordinary thing happen to me, and I haven’t been able to talk to anybody about it. I need somebody who will understand the philosophical implications of all this.
That’s why it occurred to me that I could talk to you.”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h
“People rarely consult philosophers for their advice,” said Isabel, smiling. “I’m flattered!”
There was less tension in his voice as he continued. “All my life has been lived according to rational principles. I believe in scientific evidence and the scientific method.”
“As do I,” said Isabel.
He nodded. “Psychology and philosophy view the world in the same way, don’t they? So both you and I would take the view that unexplained phenomena are simply that and no more—
things that we haven’t yet explained but for which there is either a current explanation in terms of our existing understanding of things, or for which an explanation may emerge in the future.”
Isabel looked out of the window. He had simplified matters rather, but she broadly agreed. But was this the conversation that he had taken such pains to engineer: a discussion of how we view the world?
“Take memory, for example,” Ian went on. “We have a general idea of how it works—that there are physical traces in the brain. We know where some of these are. Mostly in the hippocampus, but there are other bits in the cerebellum.”
“London taxi drivers,” interjected Isabel.
Ian laughed. “Exactly. They found out that they had a larger hippocampus than the rest of us because they’ve had to memo-rise all those streets in order to get their licence.”
“At least they know how to get you there,” said Isabel.
“Unlike some places. I had to take control of a taxi in Dallas once and do the map-reading and direct the driver. I was visiting my cousin there. Mimi McKnight. And when I eventually arrived at her house, cousin Mimi remarked: ‘Every society gets the taxi drivers it deserves.’ Do you think that’s true, Ian?” She answered F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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her own question. “No. The United States is a good country. It deserves better taxi drivers.”
“And better politicians?”
“Undoubtedly.”
He ate a bit more of his mackerel, while Isabel finished her potato salad.
“Could memory be located elsewhere?” he asked. “What if we were wrong about the physical basis of memory?”
“You mean it might be located somewhere other than in the brain?”
“Yes. Bits of it might.”
“Unlikely, surely.”
He sat back in his chair. “Why? The immune system remembers things. My immune system remembers, doesn’t it?
Worms that are fed other bits of worms have been shown to have absorbed the characteristics of the consumed worm. It’s known as cellular memory.”
“Then why don’t you show the characteristics of a mackerel?” Isabel asked. “Why don’t you start remembering how to do whatever it is that mackerel do?”
He laughed. Although he might not have, thought Isabel.
And I should be more careful in what I say to him. He’s trusting me in this conversation and I must not be flippant.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was a rather silly thing to say.”
“It was very amusing,” he said. “I’ve been surrounded by rather literal people recently. It’s nice to have a change.” He paused, looking out of the window at the trees in Rutland Square. Isabel followed his gaze. There was a slight breeze and the branches of the trees were swaying against the sky.
“I’ll get to the point,” Ian continued. “Cellular memory 9 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h theory—if you can call it that—would find it perfectly possible that the heart may be the repository of memory. So when I received the heart of another, I acquired some of that person’s memories.”
Isabel was silent. Then: “Did that happen?”
He looked down at the table, fingering the edge of the tablecloth. “I don’t know what to say. My instinct as a scientist—as a rationalist—is to say that it’s complete nonsense. I know that there have been all these stories about people acquiring the characteristics of the donors who have given them an organ.
People have made films about it. I would have dismissed all that as pure fantasy.”
“Would have?” asked Isabel.
Ian looked at his mackerel, moving it to the side of the plate. “Yes. Would have. Now I’m not so sure.” He paused, searching her expression for signs of ridicule. And she watched him too. He is embarrassed, she thought, as any rational person might be in the face of the inexplicable.
“I’m not going to laugh at you,” she said quietly.
He smiled. “Thank you,” he began. “You see, I now have a recurring memory, one I didn’t have before. It’s very vivid. It’s something which I think I remember, but which I never experienced, as far as I know.”
“You can tell me about it,” she said. “Go on. Tell me.”
“Thank you,” he said again. “It’ll be a great relief just to talk about it. I’m actually feeling a bit desperate, you know. This thing that is happening to me is very unsettling, and I fear that it’s going to hinder my recovery, unless I can sort it out.” He paused, staring down at his plate. “In fact, I’m worri
ed that it’s going to kill me.”
C H A P T E R T E N
E
GRACE WAS EARLY the following morning. “A miracle,” she announced as she entered Isabel’s kitchen. “An early bus. Two, in fact. I had a choice.”
Isabel greeted her absent-mindedly. The Scotsman, open in front of her on the table, reported a bank robbery that had gone wrong when the robbers had inadvertently locked themselves in the vault. Isabel finished reading the report and then told Grace about it.
“That goes to prove it,” said Grace. “There are no intelligent criminals.”
Isabel reached for the coffeepot. “Surely there must be some,” she said mildly. “These criminal masterminds one hears about. The ones who never get caught.”
Grace shook her head. “They usually get arrested in the end,” she said. “People don’t get away with things for ever.”
Isabel thought for a moment. Was this true? She doubted it.
There were unsolved murders, to start with: Jack the Ripper was probably never caught, and Bible John, the Bible-quoting murderer who had so terrified Glasgow, was probably still alive 9 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h somewhere in the west of Scotland, a man now in early old age, leading a normal life. He appeared to have got away with it, as had various war criminals. Perhaps the bigger the crime the more one was likely to go unpunished. The dictators, the com-missioners of genocide, the looters of the treasuries of nations—
they often escaped, while the small fry, the non-commissioned officers, the small-scale fixers, were pursued and caught.
She was about to say something to this effect, but stopped herself. Grace could dig in over a position and the discussion would reach no conclusion. Besides, there was something else that she wanted to tell Grace about. Her discussion with Ian over lunch the previous day was still fresh in her mind; indeed, she had awoken in the early hours of the morning and thought about it, lying in bed, listening to the wind in the trees outside.
“I had the most extraordinary conversation yesterday,” she began. “With a man who has had his heart replaced. Have you ever met anybody who’s had a heart transplant?”
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