Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

“We can’t,” said Louise. “The small ones travel with us in the plane. They get tickets.”

“But no meal,” said Jamie, weakly.

For a few moments there was silence. Isabel took a sip of her wine. She wanted to say to Louise, And what does your husband do? It was a delicious thought, because it was such a subversive, tactless thing to ask in the circumstances—to bring up the husband, the ghost at this banquet. She could ask the question disingenuously, as if she had no idea of the nature of the relationship between Jamie and this woman, but of course Jamie would know that she had asked it mischievously, and would be mortified. But then he could hardly complain if he brought her here, to flaunt her. Could he not understand 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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this whole meeting would be painful for her? Was it too much to expect that he should sense her unhappiness over all this?

Isabel raised her wineglass and took another sip. Opposite her, Louise had begun to fiddle with a button on her jacket.

This, thought Isabel, is because she is uncomfortable. She does not want to be here. She has no interest in me. In her eyes she is the adventuress, the passionate one, fashionable, a woman who can get a young man so very easily while this other woman, this philosopher woman, has nothing. She watched her, and she saw the eyes go to the mantelpiece and to the pictures with a look on her face that was utterly dismissive, though she had no idea that Isabel would see it. I am nothing to her, she told herself; I am beneath her notice. Well, in that case . . .

“What does your husband do?” asked Isabel.

C H A P T E R S E V E N

E

SHE HAD DECIDED to apologise, of course, at least to Jamie, but the next day she had neither the time to feel guilty nor to make the telephone call that would assuage her guilt. Shortly after she arrived in the morning to open up, a consignment of cheeses was delivered from a cheesemaker in Lanarkshire, and they had to be unwrapped by hand, priced, and put on display.

Isabel did this while Eddie prepared the coffee, and then there was a spate of talkative customers who took up her time with long-drawn-out conversations. There was an elderly customer who thought that Isabel was Cat, and addressed her accordingly, and a shoplifter whom she saw eating a bar of chocolate, unpaid for, while he stuffed a can of artichoke hearts into a pocket. At least we have discerning thieves, she thought, as she watched him run down the street; artichoke hearts and Belgian chocolate.

At one o’clock she signalled to Eddie that he should take over at the till while she took a break. Then she helped herself to a bagel and several slices of smoked salmon before moving over to the table area. The tables were busy, with all the chairs taken, except for one, where her lunching companion of the previous day sat, a frugal tub of salad before him, reading 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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newspaper. He had not seen her, and she hesitated. She was not sure if she wanted to sit at his table uninvited, and was about to go back to the office, to eat her lunch amongst the calendars and the catalogues, when he looked up and smiled at her, gesturing to the unoccupied chair.

He put the newspaper to the side. “You’re busy.”

She looked about her. “I prefer it that way. I find that I quite like being busy.”

“I used to,” he said. “I used to be busy and now I mark time, reading the papers, doing the shopping for my wife.”

She had not anticipated the reference to a wife; men who sat by themselves in delicatessens were likely to be single.

“She works?”

“Like me, a psychologist. Or at least, I used to be a psychologist. I gave it up just before the operation.”

Isabel nodded. “A good idea, I suppose, if one has been very ill. There’s no point—”

“In hastening one’s appointment at Mortonhall Cremato-rium,” he interjected. “No, I stopped, and found that I didn’t miss it in the least.”

Isabel broke her bagel in two and took a bite out of one of the pieces.

“I still read the professional journals,” he said, watching her eat. “It makes me feel that I’m on top of the subject, not that there is anything completely new and suprising to be said in psychology. I’m not at all sure that our understanding of human behaviour has progressed a great deal since Freud—awful admission though that is.”

“Surely we know a bit more. What about cognitive science?”

He raised an eyebrow. Her reference to cognitive science 6 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h was clearly not what he expected of a woman working in a delicatessen, but then he remembered that she was a philosopher.

Perhaps one should expect to be attended to by philosophers in Edinburgh delicatessens, just as one might be waited upon by psychoanalysts in the restaurants of Buenos Aires. Is the braised beef really what you want?

He picked at a lettuce leaf. “Cognitive science has helped,”

he said. “Yes, of course, we know much more about how the brain works and how we see the world. But behaviour is rather more than that. Behaviour is tied up with personality and how our personalities make us do what we do. That stuff is all very messy and not just a simple matter of neural pathways and the rest.”

“And then there’s genetics,” said Isabel, taking another bite of her bagel. “I thought that behavioural genetics might explain a great deal of what we do. What about all those twin studies?”