Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

“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,” she 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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“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 seances, 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

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