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
“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
