Friends, Lovers, Chocolate id-2

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “I went to see them,” she said simply. “I went to see those people. Rose Macleod. The mother.”

  Jamie sat down at the table. He folded his arms. “And?”

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

  “I went to the house in Nile Grove,” Isabel said. “I spoke to the mother, who invited me in. She was a rather nice woman.

  An interesting face.”

  “And?”

  “And I was just about to tell her about Ian’s vision of the man with the high brow and the hooded eyes when somebody arrived.”

  Jamie urged her to continue. He hasn’t guessed yet, thought Isabel.

  “It was her partner, her bidie-in,” she went on. “He came into the room, and I looked up and saw that he was the man whom Ian had seen. Yes. A high brow and hooded eyes. Scarred. Exactly the man I had imagined from Ian’s description.”

  For a moment Jamie said nothing. He unfolded his arms, and then he looked down at the table before lifting his gaze again to fix Isabel with a stare.

  “Oh no,” he said quietly. And then, even more quietly,

  “Isabel.”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “I was stopped in my tracks, as you might imagine. So I made up some ridiculous story about being a medium and having seen the accident in my mind. It was terrible, melodramatic stuff. Ghastly. But I couldn’t think of anything else to say.”

  Jamie thought for a moment. “That was quite clever of you,” he said. “I’m not sure that I would have been so quick on my feet.”

  “I felt pretty bad,” said Isabel. “That poor woman. It’s a pretty awful thing to do—to lie to somebody in her grief and claim to have seen the person she’s lost.”

  “You didn’t set out to do that,” said Jamie. “It’s not as if F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  you’re some charlatan exploiting bereaved people. I wouldn’t think any more about that.”

  Isabel looked up. “Really?”

  “Yes,” said Jamie, rising to his feet to make the tea. “Really.

  Your trouble, Isabel, is that you agonise too much. You worry about everything. You need to be a bit more robust. Lay off the guilt for a while.”

  She made a helpless gesture. “It’s not that easy,” she said.

  “Easier than you think,” said Jamie. “Look at me. I don’t worry about what I do all the time. You don’t see me plagued by guilt.”

  “That may be because you haven’t done anything you feel guilty about,” countered Isabel. “Tabula rasa—a blank leaf.”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Jamie. He hesitated for a moment and then he said, “I had an affair with a married woman.

  Remember that? You yourself took a dim view of it.”

  “That was because—” Isabel stopped herself. She had already hinted that she was jealous of Jamie’s company; she should not spell it out.

  “And then I did something else,” said Jamie. “A long time ago. When I was about sixteen.”

  Isabel raised a hand. “I don’t want to hear about it, Jamie,”

  she said.

  “All right. Let’s get back to this visit of yours. What a mess.”

  “Yes,” she said. “What do I do now? If Ian’s theory is correct, then the hit-and-run driver is the mother’s partner. And I suppose it’s a theory that isn’t all that improbable. Let’s imagine that he had been driving back from a party, or from the pub, and he’s had too much to drink. He’s almost home when Rory steps out from behind a parked car and he knocks him over. He’s 1 3 8

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h sober enough to realise that if the police are called—and they would of course turn up if an ambulance were summoned—he will be tested and found to be under the influence. Every driver these days knows that that means prison if you kill somebody in such a state—and a long sentence too. So he panics and drives round the corner or wherever it is that he parks. He checks the paintwork—no obvious marks. So then he goes home and pretends it never happened.”

  Jamie listened carefully. “That sounds perfectly credible,”

  he said once Isabel had finished. “So what now?”

  “I just don’t know,” said Isabel. “It’s not very straightforward, is it?”

  Jamie shrugged. “Isn’t it? Let’s say Ian’s description means anything, then all you’ve done is find out in pretty quick time that the person the police should be questioning is this man the mother’s living with. You just have to pass the information on to the police. And that will be that. You can drop out of it.”

  Isabel did not agree. “But what if he’s innocent? What if Ian’s story means nothing? Imagine the impact of my intervention on their marriage, or their relationship, or whatever it is they have.”

  “It’s one of your nice moral dilemmas, isn’t it?” said Jamie, smiling. “You write about them a lot in your editorials in that Review of yours, don’t you? Well, here’s one for you in real life. Very real life. I’m sorry, Isabel. You solve it. I’m a musician, not a philosopher.”

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  SCEPTICAL ME, thought Isabel. But one has to be, because if one were not sceptical about things like this, then one would end up believing all sorts of untenable things. The list of traps for the gullible was a long one, and seemed to grow by the day: remote healing, auras, spoon-bending, extrasensory perception.

  Of course there was telepathy, which seemed to be something of an exception to these New Age enthusiasms; it had been around for so long that it had almost become respectable. So many people claimed to have had telepathic experiences—

  level-headed, rational people too—that there might be something in it. And yet had not Edinburgh University’s professor of parapsychology done exhaustive tests on telepathic communication and come up with—nothing? And if groups of volunteers, hundreds of them, could sit for hours in his laboratories and try to guess what card somebody in the next room was looking at, and never get above the level of chance in their replies, then how could people insist that it was anything more than coincidence that they thought of somebody the moment before that person telephoned? Chance; pure chance. But chance was a dull explanation because it denied the possibility of the para-1 4 0

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h normal, and people were often disappointed by dull explana-tions. Mystery and the unknown were far more exciting because they suggested that our world was not quite as prosaic as we feared it might be. Yet we had to abjure those temptations because they lead to a world of darkness and fear.

  And yet here I am, thought Isabel, walking through Char-lotte Square with Grace, bound for the spiritualist meeting rooms on Queensferry Road. It was part of her effort to be open-minded, she told herself; there had, after all, been people in Europe who had laughed at the idea of America before America was discovered by Europe. And there were people in Europe who still laughed at the idea of America; people who condescended to the New World. This infuriated her, because of the ignorance that lay behind such attitudes—on both sides. There were people in New York, or, more to the point, in places like Houston, who thought Europe—and the rest of the world—

  quaint and unsanitary. And there were people in places like Paris who thought all Americans were geographically challenged xenophobes. Such narrow prejudices.

  Mind you, there were at least some people in Houston who would probably find it difficult to locate Paris, or anywhere else for that matter, on a map, and who might be less than well informed about the concerns of French culture. That was indeed possible. She glanced at Grace as they walked round the south side of the square. Grace had left school at seventeen. But she had had, before that, the benefit of a traditional Scottish education, with its emphasis on learning grammar and mathematics, and geography. Would she know where Houston was? It would be interesting to know just what degree of Houston-awareness there was amongst people in general, and where Grace fitted into that. But
could she ask her, directly? 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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  would sound rude: one did not say to somebody out of the blue, Where’s Houston? (Unless, of course, one was actively looking for it at the time.)

  These were her thoughts when a heavily built man in a lightweight jacket, accompanied by a woman in a beige trouser suit, stepped up to them. The man extracted a folded map from the pocket of his jacket. Isabel noticed the fairness of his skin and the sun spots on the brow below the hairline.

  “Excuse me?” he said. “We’re looking for the National Gallery, and I think . . .”

  Isabel smiled at him. “You’re not far away,” she said. “You can reach it if you walk along Princes Street, which is just down there.”

  She took the map from him and showed him where they were. Then she looked up. She had an ear for accents. “Texas?”

  she asked. “Louisiana?”

  His smile was warm. “Houston,” he said.

  Isabel returned the map to him and wished them a successful trip. She and Grace began to cross the road.

  “Houston, Grace,” said Isabel conversationally.

  “I’ve never been there,” said Grace. “I went to Detroit once to see an aunt of mine who went to live out there.”

  Isabel could not resist the temptation. “Some distance apart, aren’t they?” she said. “Such a big country. Houston and Detroit.”

  “Depends on how you travel,” said Grace.

  Isabel did not give up. “I sometimes get Houston mixed up,”

  she said. “All these places. I get a bit confused.”

  “Look at a map,” replied Grace helpfully. “It’ll show you where Houston is.”

  Isabel was silent as they walked down the narrow lane that 1 4 2

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h led past West Register House to Queensferry Road. It had been an extraordinary coincidence that she should have thought of Houston, of all places, at precisely the moment that the visitor from Houston was about to ask directions. And it was unnerving, too, that this had all taken place in the context of thoughts about telepathy, and, to add to the strangeness of the situation, while she was on her way, as Grace’s guest, to a séance at the spiritualist meeting rooms, where they would presumably love to hear about such a thing.

  They reached Queensferry Road, and Grace pointed to a building on the corner. “That’s the place,” she said. “On the third floor there.”

  Isabel looked at the building on the corner of the road. It formed the end of an elegant terrace of grey stone, classical and restrained as all buildings were in the great sweep of the Georgian New Town. On the ground floor there were shop windows: a jeweller, with a display of silver, and a newsagent displaying the Scotsman’s blue thistle motif. It could have been any office building; nothing indicated that it was anything different.

  They crossed Queensferry Road and entered through the blue door. A stone staircase led from a small entrance hall up to the floors above. The stairs themselves were worn, indented where feet had trodden on the stone for over two hundred years, gradually wearing it down.

  “We’re at the top,” said Grace. “We’ve had trouble with this building, by the way. Lead pipes—everything had to be replaced.”

  Isabel sympathised. It was all very well living in an aged city, but the pleasure came with a large bill attached to it in the form of maintenance costs. And even the spiritualists would F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  have to bear the burden of those; no help could come from the other side.

  They made their way up to the top of the stairs. As they ascended, a man came down, a man in a brown felt hat. He nodded to Grace as he passed them on the stairs and she returned the greeting.

  “He lived all his life with his mother,” Grace whispered, once the man was out of earshot. “She crossed over a few months ago, and now he’s trying to get information from her about some bank accounts. He doesn’t know where the bank accounts were kept.”

  She shook her head. “That’s not what this is meant to be about.

  We’re not meant to get that sort of information. People on the other side are above all that. They give us messages about how to live our lives—useful things like that.”

  Isabel was about to say that she thought that it would be very useful to know where bank accounts were, but stopped herself. She said instead, “He must be lonely.”

  “He is,” said Grace.

  They came to an open door on the top landing and went into the hall beyond. It had been an ordinary flat, Isabel thought—a house with the ordinary family rooms, not built as a place of pilgrimage or seeking, but now just that to the handful of people she could see seated in the meeting room beyond.

  Grace pointed through another doorway which gave off the hall. “The library,” she said. “One of the best collections of books on the subject in the whole country.”

  Isabel glanced at the wall of books. These were books about those things that could not be seen or touched, but in that respect they were probably no different from books about pure mathematics. She made an appreciative but noncommittal sound.

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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 now led the way into the meeting room, a large room with, at one end, a fireplace in front of which a platform and podium stood. Beside the podium was an easy chair and a table with an arrangement of flowers. A rather angular-looking woman, of about Isabel’s age, was sitting in the easy chair, her hands resting on her lap. She was gazing up at the ceiling, although as Grace and Isabel entered, her glance rested briefly, appraisingly, upon them. In the body of the room, rows of chairs had been set out in ranks. Grace pointed to seats near the back.

  “The best place to see what’s going on,” she said.

  Once seated, Isabel looked about her, discreetly. There was always a certain awkwardness, she felt, in the witnessing of the religious—or spiritual—rituals of others. It was rather like being an outsider at a family party, a Protestant in St. Peter’s Basilica, a Gentile at the Wailing Wall. One might sense the mystery, and understand its value for others, but one could not share it. Each of us is born into our own mysteries, thought Isabel, gazing at the flowers and then at the impassive face of the medium, but the mystery of another might just take us in and embrace us. And then what a sense of homecoming, of belonging!

  A man entered the room and took a seat immediately behind them. He leant forward and whispered something to Grace, who smiled and said something in reply that Isabel did not hear. Isabel noticed his coat, which he had not taken off and which was an expensive one. She saw his regular profile and his head of thick hair. He looked to all intents and purposes like . . .

  like what? she wondered. An accountant or bank manager?

  Somebody with a certain assurance about him.

  She noticed that the medium had transferred her gaze from F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  the ceiling and was looking at the man seated behind them. It was not a stare, but a gaze which moved on to somebody else, and then came back to him.

  A man in a dark suit walked up the aisle between the rows of chairs and mounted the platform. He nodded to the medium and turned to face the thirty or so people who were now seated in the room. “My friends,” he began, “you are welcome. Whether you are a stranger or a member of this body, you are welcome.”

  Isabel listened closely. The accent was Hebridean, she thought; a lilting voice from the islands. She noticed his suit, which was one of those black ill-fitting suits that Scottish crofters wore on Sundays, and she remembered, suddenly, how once as a young woman she had been on the island of Skye—was it with John Liamor? yes, it was—and they had driven past a croft house, low and white-painted, surrounded by fields and with a line of hills in the distance, and had seen a suit like that, freshly washed, hanging out to dry on the clothesline before the house. And the wind had been in the
arms and legs of the suit and had given it life.

  A few announcements were made, and then the man introduced the medium. He did not give a surname; she was just Anna. And then he stepped down from the podium and sat down in the front row.

  The medium stood up. She looked at the people in the room and smiled. Her hands were clasped loosely in front of her, and now she opened them in a gesture of supplication. She closed her eyes, her head lifted up. “Let us each dwell on our thoughts,”

  she said. “Let us open our hearts to the world of spirit.”

  They sat in silence for ten minutes, or more. Eventually the medium spoke again.

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  “I have somebody here,” she said, so quietly that Isabel had to strain to hear the words. “I have somebody here. There is a child coming through.”

  Isabel saw a woman in front of her stiffen, and she knew from this the nature of her loss. Such pain.

  The medium opened her eyes. “Yes, there is a child coming through and she is saying something to me . . .”

  The woman in the row in front leant forward and the medium’s gaze fell upon her.

  “It is you, my dear, isn’t it?” said the medium. “It is for you, isn’t it?”

  The woman nodded silently. Another woman seated near her reached out and touched her gently on the shoulder.

  The medium took a step forward. “My dear, there is a little girl who says that she is with you and watching over you. She says that her love will always be with you and around you . . . around you every moment until you join her. She says you are to be brave. Yes, that’s what she says. She says that you are to be brave. Which you are, she says. She says that you have always been brave.”

  “It’s a little boy she lost,” whispered Grace. “But sometimes they can’t see very well into the other side. It’s easy to get little boys and little girls mixed up.”