Friends, Lovers, Chocolate id-2

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Grace shook her head. “My mother could have done with one,” she mused. “But they didn’t work in those days. Or they didn’t have enough hearts to go round.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Isabel. There was a hinterland of unremit-ting hard work and suffering in Grace’s life, and occasionally this became apparent in what she said.

  “We all have to go,” said Grace. “And it’s only a question of crossing over. It’s nothing to be afraid of—the other side.”

  Isabel said nothing. She was not sure about the other side, but was open-minded enough to accept that we could not say with certainty that some form of spiritual survival was impossible. It all depended, she thought, on the existence of a necessary connection between consciousness and physical matter.

  And since it was impossible to identify the location of conF R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  sciousness, one could not rule out the persistence of consciousness in the absence of brain activity. There were some philosophers who thought of nothing but consciousness—“the ultimate knotty philosophical problem,” her old professor had said—

  but she was not one of them. So she simply said: “Yes, the other side . . . ,” and then, “But he never reached the other side, of course. His new heart saved him.”

  Grace looked at her expectantly. “And?”

  “And then he started to have the most extraordinary experiences.” She paused, and gestured for Grace to help herself to a cup of coffee from the coffeepot. “You see,” she went on, “he’s a psychologist. Or, rather, he was, and he had read articles about the psychological problems that people have after heart operations. It’s very unsettling, apparently.”

  “I can well imagine,” said Grace. “A new heart beating away within you. I would feel very unsettled.” She shuddered. “I’m not sure I would like it, you know. Somebody else’s heart. You might suddenly find yourself falling in love with the dead person’s boyfriend, or whatever. Imagine that!”

  Isabel leant forward. “But that’s precisely what he says happened. He didn’t exactly fall in love like that, but he has experienced some of the things that people are meant to experience in those circumstances. The most extraordinary things.”

  Grace now sat down opposite Isabel. This was very much her territory—the vaguely chilling, the inexplicable. But I’m just as interested in this, reflected Isabel: let she who is without gullibility cast the first stone.

  “He told me,” Isabel continued, “that from time to time he experiences a sudden jolt of pain. Not in his heart, but all over the front of his body and his shoulders. And then he sees something. Every time. The pain is accompanied by a vision.”

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Grace began to smile. “But you don’t believe in manifesta-tions,” she said. “You told me that. Remember? I had spoken to you about a manifestation that we saw at one of the meetings, and you said . . .”

  It was reasonable enough, thought Isabel, for Grace to feel a certain triumph over this; but he had not said there was a manifestation. There was at least some rationalist ground to be defended. “I didn’t say anything about a manifestation,” she said. “A vision and a manifestation are quite different things.

  One is outside you, the other inside.”

  Grace looked doubtful. “I’m not sure that there’s much difference. But anyway, what did he see?”

  “A face.”

  “Just a face?”

  Isabel took a sip of her coffee. “Yes. Not much of a manifestation, that. But it is rather odd, isn’t it? To see the same face.

  And to see it at the same time as the pain comes on.”

  Grace looked down at the tablecloth. With an index finger she traced a pattern; Isabel watched, but realised that it was nothing special, just a doodle. Did Grace go in for spirit-writing?

  she wondered. Spirit-writing had its possibilities—if it existed.

  Had somebody not been in touch with Schubert and acted as amanuensis while Schubert had dictated a symphony? Isabel smiled as she wondered whether the composer had suggested a name for this symphony: The Other Side might be appropriate, perhaps. She glanced at Grace, who was still staring fixedly at the table, and she suppressed her smile.

  Grace looked up. “So who does he think it is? Is it somebody he remembers?”

  Isabel explained that it was not. The face, Ian had said, was F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  of nobody he knew, but was memorable: a high-browed face, with hooded eyes and a scar running just below the hairline.

  “But here,” Isabel continued, “here’s the really interesting bit.

  As I told you, this person to whom I was talking is a psychologist.

  He looked up what has been written about the experiences of people who have had heart transplants. And he found that there was quite a bit. Some books. A few articles.

  “Somebody wrote a book about it some years ago. It described how a woman who received the heart of a young man started to behave in a totally different way. She became much more aggressive, which I suppose anybody might after having their heart taken out of them and replaced, but she also started to dress in a different way and to eat different food. She started to like chicken nuggets, which she had never liked before. Of course they then found out that the young man who donated his heart had had a particular liking for chicken nuggets.”

  Grace shook her head. “I can’t abide them,” she said.

  “Tasteless things.”

  Isabel agreed. But chicken nuggets were not the point of the story. “He also looked at various articles,” she went on, “and there he found something very interesting. He stumbled across an article by some psychologists in the United States who looked at ten cases in which there had been changes in behaviour by people who had received the hearts of others. One of them caught his eye.”

  Grace was sitting almost bolt upright. Isabel reached for the coffeepot and poured her housekeeper another cup. “With all this talk of the heart,” she said, “can you feel your heart beating within you? And does coffee make it go faster?”

  Grace thought for a moment. “I don’t like to think about 9 6

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h that,” she said. “You have to leave your heart to get on with it. It’s rather like breathing. We don’t have to remind ourselves to breathe.” She took a sip of coffee. “But let’s get back to these cases. He said that one caught his eye. Why?”

  “They,” Isabel began, “that is, the people who wrote the article, went to see a man who said that since he had received his new heart he had sudden pains in his face, saw flashes of light and then a face. He gave a good description of this face, just as my friend did.

  “The researchers found that the person who had given the heart was a young man who had been shot—in the face. The police thought they knew who shot him, but could not prove anything. But the police showed the researchers a picture of the suspected gunman—and it was exactly like the face which the recipient described.”

  Grace reached for her cup. “In other words,” she said, “the heart was remembering what happened.”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “Or that’s what appears to have happened.

  The people who wrote the article are properly sceptical. All they say is that if there is such a thing as cellular memory, then this might be a case of it. Or . . .”

  “Or?”

  Isabel gestured airily. “Or it can all be explained by the fact that the drugs which the patient was taking led to hallucina-tions. Drugs can make you see flashes of light and so on.”

  “But what about the similarities in the faces?” Grace asked.

  “Coincidence,” suggested Isabel. But she did not feel much enthusiasm for this explanation, and Grace realised it.

  “You don’t really think that it was sheer coincidence, do you?” Grace said.

  Isabel did not know what to think. “I don’t know,” sh
e said.

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  “Perhaps it’s one of those situations where one simply has to say that one doesn’t know.”

  Grace rose to her feet. She had work to do. But there was an observation that she felt she needed to make. “But I remember your saying to me—some time ago—that we either know something or we don’t. You said that there could be no halfway houses. You did say that, you know.”

  “Did I?” said Isabel. “Well, maybe I did.”

  “And perhaps what you meant to say is that there are some occasions when we must say that we just can’t be sure,” said Grace.

  “Perhaps,” said Isabel.

  Grace nodded. “If you’d like to come to one of the meetings some day you could see what I mean.”

  For a moment Isabel felt alarmed. She had no desire to become involved in séances, but to refuse would seem churl-ish and would be interpreted as a recanting on the open-mindedness that Grace had just obliged her to acknowledge.

  But would she be able to keep a straight face while the medium claimed to talk to the other side? Would there be knocking on tables and low moans from the spirit world? It was a source of complete astonishment to her that somebody as down-to-earth, as straightforward, as Grace could have this peculiar interest in spiritualism. It just did not make sense; unless, of course, as she had seen suggested, we all have a weak point, an area of intel-lectual or emotional vulnerability that may be quite out of keeping with our character. The most surprising people did the most remarkable things. Auden, she remembered, had written a line about a retired dentist who painted nothing but mountains.

  That had interested her because of the juxtaposition of dentistry and mountains. Why was it that anything which a dentist would 9 8

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h do would seem almost poignant? My dentist collects toy trains, she might say—because it was true. But why was that any funnier than saying that a bank manager kept toy trains? Or was that funny too?

  “I can tell that you think it’ll be funny,” said Grace, as she made her way to the cupboard where she kept her cleaning equipment. “But it isn’t, you know. It’s serious. Very serious. And you meet some interesting people there too.” She was standing in front of the cupboard now, extracting a broom, but still talking. “I’ve just met a rather nice man in our group, you know. His wife went over into spirit a year or so ago. He’s very pleasant.”

  Isabel looked up sharply, but Grace had started to leave the room. She glanced at Isabel as she did so, but only briefly, and it was a glance that gave nothing away. Isabel looked through the open door, at the place where Grace had been standing, and mulled over what she had said. But then her thoughts returned to Ian, and to their curious, unnerving conversation in the Arts Club. He had said that he was concerned that the images that he was seeing would kill him—a strange thing to say, she thought, and she had asked him to explain why he should feel this. Sadness, he had said. Sadness. “I feel this terrible sadness when it happens. I can’t tell you what it’s like—but it’s the sorrow of death. I know that sounds melodramatic, but that’s just what it is. I’m sorry.”

  C H A P T E R E L E V E N

  E

  ISABEL DID NOT LIKE her desk to get too cluttered, but that did not mean that it was uncluttered. In fact, most of the time there were too many papers on it, usually manuscripts that had to be sent off for peer assessment. She was not sure about the term peer assessment, even if it was the widely accepted term for a crucial stage in the publishing of journal articles. Sometimes the expression amounted to exactly that: equals looked dispassionately at papers by equals and gave their view. But Isabel had discovered that this did not always happen, and papers were consigned into the hands of their authors’ friends or enemies.

  This was unwitting; it was impossible for anybody to keep track of the jealousies and rivalries that riddled academia, and Isabel had to hope that she could spot the concealed agendas that lay behind outright antagonism or, more often, and more subtly, veiled antagonism: “an interesting piece, perhaps interesting enough to attract a ripple of attention.” Philosophers could be nasty, she reflected, and moral philosophers the nastiest of all.

  Now, seated at her cluttered desk, she began the task of clearing at least some of the piles of paper. She worked energeti-cally, and it was almost twelve when she glanced at the clock.

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h She had done, she thought, enough work for the morning, and perhaps for the day. She stood up, stretched, and went over to her study window to look out on the garden. The display of pinks in the flowerbed that ran alongside the far garden wall was as bright as it ever had been, and the line of lavender bushes that she had planted a few years previously was in full flower.

  She looked down at the flowerbed immediately below her window. Somebody had been digging at the roots of an azalea and had kicked small piles of soil onto the edge of the lawn. She smiled. Brother Fox.

  She very rarely saw Brother Fox, who was discreet in his movements, as befitted one who must have thought that he lived in enemy territory. Not that Isabel was an enemy; she was an ally, and he might just have sensed that when he found the chicken carcasses that she left out for him. Once she had seen him at close quarters, and he had turned tail and fled, but had stopped after a few paces and they had looked at one another. Their eyes met for only a few seconds, but it was enough for Brother Fox to realise that her intentions towards him were not hostile, and she saw his body relax before he turned and trotted off.

  She was looking at the signs of his digging when the telephone rang.

  “So,” said Cat, who always started telephone conversations abruptly. “Working?”

  Isabel looked at her desk, now half clear. “I was,” she said.

  “But have you any better ideas?”

  “You sound as if you want an excuse.”

  “I do,” said Isabel. “I was going to stop anyway, but an excuse would be welcome.”

  “Well,” said Cat. “My Italian friend has arrived. Tomasso.

  Remember the one I told you about.”

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  Isabel was guarded. Cat was sensitive about Isabel’s past interference in her affairs, and she did not want to say anything that could be misconstrued. So she simply said, “Good.”

  There was a silence. “Good,” said Isabel again.

  “I thought that you might like to come and have lunch here,” said Cat. “In the delicatessen. He’s coming back once he’s put his car away safely at the hotel. He’s staying at Preston-field House.”

  “You don’t think that I shall be . . . in the way?” she asked.

  “Won’t you want to . . . to have lunch by yourselves? I’m not sure if you’ll want me there.”

  Cat laughed. “Don’t worry,” she said. “There’s nothing between him and me. I’m not thinking of getting involved, if that’s worrying you. He’s good company, but that’s as far as it goes.”

  Isabel wanted to ask whether Tomasso thought that too, but said nothing. She was serious about not interfering and any remark like that could easily be seen as interference. At the same time, she felt relieved that Tomasso was not going to be Cat’s new boyfriend. She knew that it was wrong to judge him on the basis of scanty evidence—no evidence at all, in fact—

  but surely there was good reason to feel concerned. A handsome young Italian—she assumed he was handsome: all of Cat’s male friends were—with a taste for vintage Bugattis would hardly be the reliable, home-loving sort. A breaker of speed limits—and hearts, she thought, and almost muttered, but stopped herself in time.

  “Will you come over?” said Cat.

  “Of course,” said Isabel. “If you really want me to.”

  “I do,” said Cat. “I’ve got a salad specially prepared for you.

  Extra olives. The ones you like.”


  “I would have come anyway,” said Isabel. “You know that.”

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Upstairs, she looked at herself in the mirror. She was wearing the dove-grey skirt that she often wore when editing. It was complemented, if complemented were not too strong a term, by a loose, cream wool cardigan on which a small smudge of ink had appeared on the left sleeve. She smiled. This would not do. One could not meet a man with an interest in vintage Bugattis in such an outfit; indeed, one could not meet any Italian dressed like that.

  She opened her wardrobe. Guilty by Design, she thought, looking at a black shift dress she had bought from the aptly named dress shop in Morningside, for there was a great deal of guilt involved in the buying of expensive dresses—delicious guilt; she had loved that dress and had worn it too often. Italians wore black, did they not? So something different—a red cashmere polo-neck would transform the skirt, and a pair of dangly diamanté earrings would add to the effect. There! Cat would be proud of her. Tomasso’s own aunt would probably wear widow’s weeds and have a moustache and— She stopped herself. Not only was that uncharitable, but it was probably also incorrect.

  Italian aunts used to run to fat and excessive hair, but things had changed, had they not, and now they were more likely to be slender, fashionable, tanned.

  She called out a goodbye to Grace, who replied from somewhere deep within the house, and then made her way outside.

  The students from Napier University nearby had lined the street with their cars, which irritated the neighbours but which Isabel did not mind too much. Local people were never all that real to students; they were the backdrop for the student drama of parties and long conversations over cups of coffee and . . .

  Isabel paused. What else did students do? Well, she knew the F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  answer to that, and why should they not, as long as they were responsible about it? She did not approve of promiscuity, which she thought made a mockery of our duty to cherish and respect others; an emotional fast food, really, which one would not wish on anybody. But at the same time one should not starve oneself.