Friends, Lovers, Chocolate id-2

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Isabel felt that there was not much that she could say. She wondered, though, what Jean felt about Ian’s claims. She had shown no real reaction to them and Isabel assumed that she discounted them.

  “I hope that you don’t mind my coming here with this story,”

  she said. “I feel very awkward about it. But I felt I had to come.”

  Jean shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. As for the story itself, well, people are always imagining these things, aren’t they? I’m afraid that I’m a complete rationalist on all this. I’ve got no time for mumbo-jumbo.” She smiled at Isabel; the no-nonsense veterinarian, the believer in science. “I’m afraid, Miss Dalhousie,”

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  she went on, “that I have never believed in any form of personal immortality. The end of consciousness is the end of us. And as for souls, well, the thing that strikes me is that if we have them, then so must animals. And if we survive death, then why should they not do so? So heaven, or whatever you want to call it, will be an awfully crowded place, with all those cats and dogs and cattle and so on. Does it make sense to you? It doesn’t to me.”

  There were things which Isabel might normally have said to this. We were not the same as other animals, she thought: their consciousness was very different from ours. But at the same time she did not believe, as Descartes had asserted, that dogs were machines. If the concept of a soul had any meaning, then there was some sort of canine soul there, and it was a loving one, was it not? And if there was any survival of consciousness, then she did not imagine that it would be attached to a bodily form; in which case if there were any place in which this survival was located, it could well be full of doggy souls as well as human souls. But on all of this she had an open mind. We strove for God—or many people did—and did it really matter what form we gave to that concept of God? In her mind it was a striving for the good. And what was wrong with striving for good in a way which made sense to the individual? Grace paid her visits to the spiritualist meetings; priests and bishops celebrated their rites at an altar; people bathed in the Ganges, travelled to Mecca. It was all the same urge, surely, and an urge that seemed an ineradicable part of our very humanity. We needed holy places, as Auden pointed out in his poem to water: Wishing, I thought, the least of men their/Figures of splendour, their holy places. As always, such a generous sentiment expressed in a few beautiful words.

  She looked at Jean. She had survived the death of her son 2 3 6

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h without the comfort of religious belief. And to do that, and not to have surrendered to despair, she must be a strong woman, who believes in something, in either just getting by in this life or continuing in the face of emptiness and lack of hope. Isabel glanced at Jean’s hands, those hands rendered rough, no doubt, from the soap that she had to use constantly in her work; and she reminded herself that this woman brought relief from suffering every single working day and that she must do that for a reason other than the need to live. So there was purpose there, even if she did not acknowledge it, or talk about it.

  There was something else that Isabel wanted to ask her, and she asked it as she rose to her feet to take her leave. Did Jean’s husband know that his son’s heart had been transplanted? No, said Jean. She had told him of the death by telephone and their conversation had been short. He did not know.

  O N T H E WAY B AC K she stopped at the bookshop in the village.

  Derek Watson greeted her warmly and led her into his kitchen behind the second-hand section. On the table a musical score was spread out, an arrangement in progress, with pencil mark-ings and notes. He put on the kettle and fetched a battered biscuit tin.

  Isabel looked at her friend. “You must forgive me, Derek,”

  she said. “I have come to see you, and yet I do not feel like talking. I have just been to see Jean Macleod.”

  Derek stopped where he was, halfway between a cupboard and the table. He winced. “That poor woman. Her son used to come in here regularly,” he said. “He was interested in books about the Highlands. I used to look out for things for him, and he would pore over them out there in the shop. And then I used F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  to see him staring out of the window, across the street there, at his father’s house. Sitting there staring.”

  Isabel said nothing. “Could you just talk to me, Derek, and let me sit here and listen? Talk to me about your composers, if you like.” He had written several biographies of composers.

  “If you insist,” he said. “I know how you feel, by the way.

  Sometimes I just like to listen.”

  Isabel sat and listened. Derek was working on a defence of the work of Giacomo Meyerbeer.

  “It’s shocking,” he said. “In the nineteenth century there was Meyerbeer, widely revered as one of the great figures of grand opera. Then suddenly—bang!—he fell from grace. And I’m very sorry to say that Wagner must take some of the blame for that, with his anti-Semitic views. Such an injustice. Meyerbeer was a compassionate man, a man of universalist outlook. A good man. And he was dropped. When did you last hear one of his operas? Well, there you are.”

  Isabel sipped her tea. Should she be doing more to rescue the reputation of Giacomo Meyerbeer? No, her plate was full enough as it was. She would leave Meyerbeer to Derek.

  “And then,” Derek continued, “I’m working on a symphonic poem. That’s it over there on the table. It’s all about Saint Mungo, for whom I have a great deal of time. His grandfather, as you know, was King Lot of Orkney, but they had that peculiar pimple-shaped hill down near Haddington. When Lot discovered that his daughter had been taken advantage of by one Prince Owain—in a pigsty, mark you—he had her, poor girl, thrown off the hill. She survived, only to be put in a boat and let loose in the Forth. Not very kind. We treat single mothers so much better these days, don’t you think?”

  He refilled Isabel’s teacup. “She drifted over the Forth and 2 3 8

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h landed near Culross. There she was rescued by Saint Serf, no less, and she gave birth to Saint Mungo. So out of unkindness and a lack of charity can come something good at the end of the day.” He paused. “I propose to capture that in a symphonic poem. Or, rather, I shall try to.”

  Isabel smiled. Listening to Derek had made her feel better.

  There were countless injustices and difficulties in this world, but small points of light too, where the darkness was held back.

  C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - O N E

  E

  THE NOTE FROM JAMIE was short and to the point. I shall not be surprised, he wrote, if you do not wish to see me again. If I were you, I wouldn’t. So all I can say is this: I should not have walked out of the St. Honoré like that. It was childish and silly. I’m very sorry.

  “Dear Jamie,” she wrote in reply. “If there is anybody with any apologising to do, it is me. I had intended to telephone you and tell you how sorry I am but I didn’t get round to it in the excitement of . . . Oh, there I go. You won’t approve of what I’ve done, but I have to tell you nonetheless. I went out to West Linton and spoke to the mother. It wasn’t easy. But now I know, and I think that I am slowly coming to a full and rational explanation of what has happened. I am very pleased about that, even if you don’t approve of what you think of as my meddling. (I am not a meddler, Jamie, I am an intromitter. Yes, that’s an old Scots law term which I rather like. It describes somebody who gets involved. A person who gets involved without good excuse is called a vitious intromitter. Isn’t that a wonderful term? I, though, am not a vitious intromitter. )

  “But an apology is due from me and you are getting it. Your 2 4 0

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h feelings for Cat are your affair and I have no business passing comment on them. I shall not do that again. So please forgive me for telling you what to do when you hadn’t asked for my advice in the first place. />
  “There is one further thing. I am very pleased that you have decided not to go to London. London is all very well, in its place, which is four hundred miles or so south of Edinburgh.

  Londoners are perfectly agreeable people—very cheerful, in spite of everything—but I’m sure that you are so much more appreciated in Edinburgh than you would be in London. I, for one, appreciate you, and I know that Grace does too, and then there are all those pupils of yours whose musicianship would take a dive were you to absent yourself. In short, we have all had a narrow escape.

  “Does that all sound selfish? Yes, it does to me. It sounds to me as if I am giving you all sorts of reasons to stay in Edinburgh while really only thinking of myself and how much I would miss your company if you were to go. So you must discount my advice on that score and do exactly as you wish, should a future opportunity arise. And I must do the same. Although I have no desire to go anywhere, except for Western Australia, and the city of Mobile in Alabama, and Havana, and Buenos Aires, and . . .”

  She finished the letter, addressed it, and placed it on the hall table. When she left to go home in the afternoon, Grace would pick up the mail and deposit it in the postbox at the top of the road. Jamie would get her apology tomorrow and she would arrange to see him the day afterwards. She could ask him to bring some music and they would go into the music room and she would play the piano while he sang and it became dark outside. The editor of the Review of Applied Ethics (at the piano) F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  with her friend Jamie (tenor). How very Edinburgh. How very poignant.

  She thought to herself—and smiled at the thought—if one followed the well-ordered life one would start each day with the writing of one’s letters of apology . . . She wondered for a moment who else might be expecting an apology from her. Perhaps she had been a bit harsh in her rejection of that article on vice from that vicious Australian professor; perhaps he was gentle and sensitive and was in favour of vice only in the most the-oretical of senses; perhaps he wept by whatever shore it was when he received her rejection—more likely he did not. All the Australian professors of philosophy she had met had been fairly robust. And she had not been rude to him—a bit brisk perhaps, but not rude.

  She went through to the kitchen, thinking of form and friendship and how letters—and gifts—were the only vestiges of form which remained to us in the conduct of our friendships.

  Other cultures had much more elaborate forms for the recognition and cultivation of friendship. In South America, she had read, two men becoming friends might undergo a form of bap-tism ceremony over a tree trunk, symbolically becoming god-children of the tree and therefore, in a sense, brothers to each other. That was strange, and we were just too busy to arrange ceremonies of that sort; meeting for coffee was easier. And in Germany, where form is preserved, there would be linguistic milestones in the development of friendship, with the change to the familiar du address. Of course one should not too quickly start to use the first names of friends in Germany; in some quarters a good few years might be required. Isabel smiled as she remembered being told by a professor from Freiburg of how, 2 4 2

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h after several years of knowing a colleague, they were still on formal terms. Then, one evening, when the colleague had invited him to his house to watch an important football match on tele-vision, in a moment of great excitement he had shouted out “Oh look, Reinhard, Germany has scored a goal!” and had immediately clasped a hand to his mouth, embarrassed by the solecism.

  He had called his colleague by his first name, and they had known one another for only a few years! Fortunately, the visitor had taken a generous view of this lapse, and they had agreed to move to first-name terms there and then, drinking a toast to friendship, as is appropriate in such circumstances.

  Isabel had been intrigued. “But what happens,” she asked,

  “if two colleagues agree to address one another as du and then they fall out over something? Does one revert to the old formal usage and go back to sie?”

  Her friend had pondered this for a while. “There has been such a situation,” he said. “I gather that it occurred in Bonn, amongst professors of theology. They had to go back to the formal means of address. It caused a great many ripples and is still talked about. In Bonn.”

  She switched on the coffee percolator in the kitchen and looked out of the window while the machine heated up and entered upon its programme of gurgles. The next-door cat, arro-gant and self-assured, was on the high stone wall that divided her garden from its own—not that he recognised these human boundaries. The real boundaries, the feline lines of territory, were jealously guarded and supported by a whole different set of laws that humans knew nothing about, but which had every bit as much validity—down amongst the undergrowth of cat jurisdiction—as did the law of Scotland. The cat hesitated, turned round, and stared at Isabel through the window.

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  “That cat knew I was looking at him,” said Isabel, as Grace came into the room. “He turned round and stared at me.”

  “They’re telepathic,” said Grace, simply. “Everybody knows that.”

  Isabel thought for a moment. “I had a discussion with somebody yesterday about heaven. She said that one of the reasons for not believing in heaven—or indeed in any afterlife—is that there would be so many animals’ souls. It would be a terribly crowded place. Administratively impossible.”

  Grace smiled. “That’s because she’s still thinking in con-crete terms,” she said. And then, with the air of authority of one explaining New York to someone who has not been there:

  “Those physical things don’t apply on the other side.”

  “Oh?” said Isabel. “So cats and dogs cross over, if I may use your term. Do you . . . do you hear from them at the meetings?”

  Grace stiffened. “You may not have a high opinion of what we do,” she said, “but I assure you, it’s serious business.”

  Isabel was quick to apologise—her second apology of the morning, and it was not yet ten-thirty. Grace accepted. “I’m used to people being sceptical,” she said. “It’s normal.”

  Grace went out to the hall to check for mail. “No postie yet,” she said when she came back, using the Scots familiar term for the postman. “But this has been pushed through the door.” She passed over a white, unstamped envelope on which Isabel’s name had been written.

  Isabel laid the envelope to the side of the percolator while she poured her coffee. Her name had been written in an unfamiliar hand, Miss Isabel Dalhousie, and underneath the words a flourish of the pen like one of those on Renaissance manuscripts. And then she knew; it was an Italian hand.

  She took her cup of coffee in one hand and the letter in the 2 4 4

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h other. Grace glanced at her and at the letter, clearly hoping that Isabel would open it in the kitchen and she would find out the identity of the sender. But this was private business, thought Isabel. This was to do with their trip, and she wanted to read it in her study. The envelope had that charged look about it, something which was difficult, if not impossible, to identify, but which hung about love letters and letters of sexual significance like perfume.

  She stood by the window of her study while she opened it.

  She noticed that her hands were shaking, just slightly, but shaking. And then she saw from the top of the notepaper, Pres-tonfield House, that she had been right in her assumption.

  Dear Isabel Dalhousie,

  I am so sorry that I have had to write, rather than to call on you personally. I have some business in Edinburgh today that will make it difficult for me to see you before I leave.

  I had very much hoped that we would have been able to make that trip together. I had found many places that I wished to visit, and you would have been a good guide, I am sure. I even found on the map a place called Mellon Udrigle, up in
the west. That must be a very fine place to have a name like that and it would have been very nice to have visited it.

  Unfortunately I have to go back to Italy. I have ignored my business interests, but they are not ignoring me. I must return tomorrow. I am taking the car on the ferry from Rosyth.

  I hope that we shall have the opportunity to meet again some time, perhaps when you are next in Italy. In 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 meantime I shall remember our dinner together most fondly and remember, too, the trip that we never made. Sometimes the trips not taken are better than those that one actually takes, do you not agree?

  Cordially, Tomasso

  She lowered the letter, still holding it, but then she dropped it and it fluttered to the carpet. She looked down. The letter had landed face-down and there was nothing to be seen—just paper. She bent down, picked it up, and reread it.

  Then she turned away and went to her desk. There was work to be done, and she would do it. She would not mourn for those things that did not happen. She would not.

  She read through several manuscripts. One was interesting, and she placed it on a pile that was due to go out for refereeing.

  It was about memory, and forgetting, and about our duty to remember. Its starting point was that we have a duty to remember some names and some people. Those who have a moral claim on us may expect us to remember at least who they are.

  How long would she remember this Italian? Not long, she decided. Until next week, perhaps. And then she thought: It is wrong of me to think that. One should not forget out of spite.

  All he did was flirt with me, as Italian men will do almost out of courtesy. The fault, if any, is mine: I assumed that he saw me as anything other than that which I am. I am the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics; I am not a femme fatale, whatever that’s meant to be. I am a philosopher in her early forties. I have male friends, not boyfriends. That is who I am. But it would be nice, even if only occasionally, to be something else. Such as . . .