Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

“Can you give me a week or two? I’ll ask our suppliers.”

He thanked her and left the shop, and Cat went back to the counter. Eddie, having finished creating his carefully balanced stack of Patum Peperium, turned round. He saw Isabel outside, at the door, and called Cat.

“Isabel’s here,” he said. “Outside. Coming in.”

Cat greeted her aunt. “I’ve just had a wonderful conversation about oatcakes and cultural identity,” she said. “You would have loved it.”

Isabel nodded vaguely. She did not want to talk about oatcakes; she wanted to sit quietly with a cup of coffee and one of Cat’s Continental newspapers— Le Monde, perhaps. It never seemed to matter quite so much if foreign newspapers were out of date; yesterday’s Scotsman rapidly began to seem stale, but a newspaper in a foreign language remained engaging. Le Monde had been taken by somebody, but there was a three-day-old copy of Corriere della Sera which she appropriated and took with her to a table.

“Do you mind, Cat?” she said. “Sometimes one wants to talk. Sometimes one wants to think or”—she flourished the paper in the air—“read this.”

Cat understood, and busied herself with a task in the back office while Eddie prepared a cup of coffee for Isabel. Once that was ready he took it across to her table and placed it before her. Isabel looked up from her paper and smiled encouragingly at Eddie. Her week of running the delicatessen had cemented 1 6 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the friendship between them, but it was a friendship that relied more on smiles and gestures than on the exchange of ideas and confidences. At the end of her time there, Isabel had felt that she now knew him rather better, although he had told her nothing about himself. Where did Eddie live? She had asked him outright, and he had simply said on the south side, which was half the city, more or less, and gave nothing away. Did he live by himself, or did he stay at home? At home, he answered, but had not volunteered anything about who else was there. Isabel had left it at that; one had to respect the privacy of people. Some people did not like others to know about their domestic circumstances—out of shame, Isabel assumed. For a young man of Eddie’s age to be living at home was not all that unusual, but he may have thought that perhaps it reflected badly on him never to have left. I live at home, thought Isabel, suddenly. I live in the house to which I was taken from the Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion by my sainted American mother. I haven’t gone very far.

She would find out more about Eddie in future, she felt.

And then she might be able to do something for him. If he wanted to take a course somewhere, Telford College perhaps, then she could pay for it—if he would accept. She already supported two students at the University of Edinburgh through her private charitable trust. Not that they knew, of course; they thought it came from Simon Macintosh, her lawyer, which it did in so far as he administered it, but the real purse from which it was drawn was Isabel’s.

She thanked Eddie for the coffee and he beamed at her.

“Did that Italian phone you yet?” he asked.

Isabel looked at him blankly. “Italian?”

F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

1 6 1

“Tomasso. He was in here earlier today. He asked Cat for your telephone number.”

Isabel glanced down at her coffee. “No,” she said. “He hasn’t phoned.”

She felt strangely agitated. She had offered to show him round the city—that was all—but the prospect of his getting in touch with her had an unexpected effect on her.

Eddie bent forward. “Cat’s giving him no encouragement,”

he whispered. “I don’t think that she thinks much of him.”

Isabel raised an eyebrow. “Maybe she doesn’t want him to feel that there’s more to it than friendship,” she said.

“I feel sorry for him,” said Eddie. “To come over all the way from Italy to see her and then this.”

Isabel smiled. “I suspect that he can look after himself,” she said. “He doesn’t strike me as being the vulnerable type.”

Eddie nodded. “Maybe,” he said.

He moved away. It was the longest conversation that Isabel had ever had with him, and she was surprised by the fact that Eddie had picked up on Cat’s attitude towards Tomasso. She had assumed that he would be indifferent to such matters, but now she realised that this might be a serious underestimation of the young man’s powers of observation. And of his inner life too, she thought. We ignore quiet people, the shy observers, the bystanders; we forget that they are watching.

She returned to her perusal of the Corriere della Sera, but it was difficult for her to concentrate. She thought of Tomasso, and of when she might expect his call. She wondered what he would want to do in Edinburgh. There were museums and galleries, of course; all the usual sites of Scottish history, but she was not sure whether that would be what he wanted. Perhaps 1 6 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h he would want to go out to dinner somewhere; she could arrange that. Cat would not come, presumably, and it would just be the two of them. What would Tomasso eat? He would not be a vegetarian, she thought: Italians were not vegetarians. They drank, they womanised, they sang; oh, blissful race of heroes!

She looked at the paper and struggled with a review of a book about suppressed photographs of Mussolini. Il Duce, apparently, took a strong interest in his appearance in photographs—

well, she thought, he was an Italian dictator, and if Italian dictators aren’t stylish, then which dictators would be? The paper showed a few samples. Mussolini on a horse, looking ridiculous, like a sack of potatoes, or spaghetti perhaps. Mussolini with a group of nuns flocking around him like excited sparrows. (He did not like to be in the same photograph as nuns or clerics of any sort; and why was that? Isabel asked herself.