Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

She handed him the folder and thanked him.

“How is the Review going?” he asked her, as he took the folder from her.

“I’m almost putting the next issue to bed,” said Isabel. “It’s a busy time for me.”

He nodded. He would have liked to have asked her for a job, but he could not bring himself to do so. He would stay in the library service, he thought, and become old like those above him. And Isabel, looking at him, at his eager face, reflected on mortality. He could have been the young man in that photograph, but was not. Rory had died instead of this young man, F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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because Rory had had the bad luck to be at that precise point in Nile Grove at the exact moment when the driver of the car had struck him. And then she thought of the driver. That could have been me, she reflected, or this young librarian, but it was not.

That had been a man with a high brow and hooded eyes, and with that scar. Or it could have been. Just could have been.

S H E H A D A R R A N G E D to meet Jamie at the Elephant House, a cafe farther down George IV Bridge. It was a spacious, L-shaped room, with windows at the back which looked down on Candlemaker Row. High-ceilinged and with exposed floorboards, it had a slightly cavernous feel to it—a cavern adorned with pictures and models of elephants on every wall. Isabel felt comfortable there, amongst its elephants and students, and regularly chose it as a place to meet her friends. And if her Sunday Philosophy Club were ever to meet again—it seemed to be impossible to find a date that suited the members—then this would have been a good place to sit and talk about the nature of good and our understanding of the world. For Jamie, who taught bassoon for six hours a week at George Heriot’s School, it was less of a meeting place than a convenient place to go for a strong coffee after finishing with his pupils.

He was already there when she arrived, sitting at a table near a window in the back part of the room, a cup of coffee in front of him and immersed in one of the cafe’s copies of the Scotsman. He looked up as she arrived and rose to his feet in welcome.

“You’ve been here for hours,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Five minutes,” he said. “Still on page three of the newspaper.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h He put the paper to one side and offered to go and buy her coffee.

“That can wait, Jamie,” said Isabel. “I’ve been reading the newspaper too.”

He glanced at the paper. “And?”

“The Evening News, ” she went on. “In the library.”

“What an odd thing to do,” he said. “Unless . . .” He paused.

Isabel had that look about her which told him she was on to something. He could always tell when she was about to embark on some temporary obsession. It was a look in her eyes, perhaps, a look of determination, a look that said I shall not rest until I get to the bottom of this.

For a moment Isabel appeared embarrassed. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I suppose that I am on to something.” She held up a hand. “I know, I know: you don’t have to tell me again.”

Jamie sighed. “I wasn’t going to lecture you. I know that that’s no use—you’ll go right ahead, no matter what I say. All I would say is this: Be careful. One of these days you’re going to get involved in something which gets seriously out of hand. You will, you know. You really will.”

“I understand that perfectly well,” said Isabel. “And I’m grateful to you for saying it. I do listen to you, you know.”

Jamie took a sip of his coffee. He wiped a small trace of milk from his upper lip. “It doesn’t always seem like that to me.”

“But I do!” protested Isabel. “I listened to you over that business with Minty Auchterlonie. I listened to you very seriously.”

“You were lucky there,” said Jamie. “You could have got seriously out of your depth. But let’s not talk about the past. What are you getting involved in now?”

Over the next few minutes Isabel told him about her chance F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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meeting with Ian and about their conversation at the Scottish Arts Club. Jamie was interested—she could tell that—although he, like Isabel herself, seemed incredulous when she mentioned cellular memory.

“There’s a rational explanation for these things,” he said when she had finished talking. “There always is. And I just don’t see how anything other than brain cells could store memory. I just don’t. And that’s on the strength of my school biology course. It’s that basic.”

“But that’s exactly the problem,” retorted Isabel. “We’re all stuck with the same tried and trusted ideas. If we refused to entertain the possibility of something radically different, then we’d never make any progress—ever. We’d still be thinking that the sun revolved round the earth.”

Jamie affected surprise. “Isabel, don’t start challenging that now!”

Isabel accepted his scepticism good-naturedly. “I should point out that I’m completely agnostic on all this,” she said. “All I’m doing is trying to keep an open mind.”

“And where does this take you?” asked Jamie. “So what if the cells in the transplanted heart, or whatever, think they remember a face. So what?”

Isabel looked about her, for no reason other than that she felt a slight twinge of fear. That was in itself irrational, but she felt it.