Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

“I don’t know what you’re worrying about,” said Jamie.

“This character, Ian, has simply been hallucinating, or whatever you call it. It just so happens that the hallucination took a form which fitted that woman’s partner. That’s what we call coincidence, isn’t it?”

“And so what do I do?” asked Isabel.

Jamie leant forward and tapped Isabel’s wrist with a forefinger. “You do absolutely nothing. Nothing. You’ve done what you can for that man and you’ve come up against a dead end.

You don’t want to go chasing after the real donor . . .”

She stopped him. “The real donor?”

Jamie shrugged. “Well, he got the heart from somebody.

You jumped to conclusions too quickly. There must have been another sudden death involving a young man. You saw the one that happened to be in the Evening News. But not everybody who dies ends up in the Evening News or the Scotsman. Some deaths are unreported. Some people don’t put notices in the paper.”

She said nothing. He looked at her, waiting for her to speak, but she did not. She was staring at the Scotsman building, watching a man in a black overcoat make his way out of the revolving door and down the steps to a taxi that was waiting for him at the kerb.

“I could ask him,” she muttered.

“Who?”

Isabel pointed. “Him. Over there. I know him. Angus Spens. He’s a journalist on the Scotsman. He can find anything out. Anything. All we need from him is a name. That’s all.”

“But why would he do this for you?”

“It’s complicated,” said Isabel. “We used to share a bath 1 9 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h together.” She laughed. “When we were five. My mother and his mother were very close. We saw a lot of each other.”

Jamie frowned. “What’s the point? Do you really think it likely that this other donor, whoever he is, was done in by a person with, whatever it is, a high forehead? Really, Isabel! Really!”

“I have to see this thing through,” she said. Because you have to finish what you start, she thought, and I have started this. I have tossed a stone into a loch. But there was more to it than that. For Ian, the finding of an explanation for what was happening to him was a matter of life and death. He had told her that he felt his recovery depended on the resolution of these strange experiences, and she was sure that he meant it.

People sometimes knew when they were going to die. They might not be able to explain it, but they knew. And she remembered standing in a gallery once, the Phillips, looking at an early painting by Modigliani. The artist had painted a road that led off towards the horizon, green fields on either side, hills in the distance, but that stopped short, before it reached any destination. And that, she had been told by the person beside her, was because the artist knew that his life was going to be a short one. He knew.

She turned away from Jamie, watching the taxi which had picked up Angus Spens speed off up the road. From the mist of early years she could still summon the memory of sitting in a vast white tub with a little boy at the other end, splashing water in her face and laughing, and her mother standing beside her and reaching down for her; her mother, whose face she saw sometimes at night, in her dreams, as if she had never gone away, and who was still there, as we often think of the dead, in the background, like a cloud of love, against which weather we conduct our lives.

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

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I S A B E L A N D JA M I E walked back up Holyrood Road, mostly in silence; he was thinking, she suspected, of Part again, and she had Angus Spens to think of now, and of how she would approach him. Just before the Cowgate they said their goodbyes, and Jamie made his way up a narrow alley that led back to Infirmary Street. She watched him for a few moments; he turned round, waved, and then went on. Isabel continued along the Cowgate, a street which ran under South Bridge and George IV Bridge—a sunken level of the old part of the city.

On either side high stone buildings, darkened by ancient smoke, riddled with passages and closes, climbed up to the light above. It was a curious street, Isabel felt, the dark heart of the Old Town, a street in which the inhabitants, troglodytes all, did not seem to show their faces and doorways were barred; a street of echoes.

She reached the point at which the Cowgate opened out into the Grassmarket. Crossing the road, she began to make her way up Candlemaker Row. Following this route, she could pass Greyfriars Kirkyard, head across the Meadows and be home within half an hour. She looked up again; to her right was the wall of the kirkyard, a high grey-stone wall behind which lay the bones of religious heroes, the Covenanters who had signed their names in blood to protect Scottish religious freedom. They had died for their pains. That anybody should believe so strongly, thought Isabel, so strongly as to die for a vision of what was right; but people did, all the time, people who had a sufficiency of courage. And do I have such a measure of courage? she asked herself. Or any courage at all? She thought that she did not; people who 1 9 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h thought about courage, as she did, often were not courageous themselves.

Candlemaker Row was largely deserted, apart from a couple of boys from George Heriot’s School round the corner. The schoolboys, their white shirts hanging out, stood back against the wall to let Isabel pass, and then giggled. Isabel smiled, and looked back for a moment because one of the boys had had an impish face and it amused her, an echt small boy in an age in which children had suddenly and absurdly become young adults. And that is when she saw him, on the other side of the street, some distance behind her, but walking in the same direction as she was. She turned away immediately and walked on, her head lowered. She did not want to see Graeme again; she did not want to catch his eye and feel the force of his hostility.

She reached the top of Candlemaker Row and continued round the corner to Forrest Road. There were people about now, people and traffic. A bus lumbered past; a man with a scruffy black dog on a lead stood in front of a shop window; two teenaged girls in short skirts walked towards Isabel; a male student, his jeans slipping down, barely suspended, deliberately exposing his boxer shorts, walked with his arm around his girlfriend, while her hand