Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

down below and a rescuer appears on the balcony. ‘Get him down,’ the crowd shouts. Whereupon the helpful rescuer cuts the elastic.”

“That’s very sad,” said Isabel. “Poor man.”

The lawyer had remembered the outcome of that case, and had told her. But now Isabel had forgotten what he said it was.

She looked at Grace.

“But do you think that the person who takes the extra roll thinks that he’s entitled to it?” she asked.

“He may,” said Grace. “If I leave something on a table and say Help yourself, then surely you’re entitled to do just that.”

“But what if I took everything?” objected Isabel. “What if I brought my suitcase down and filled it with food? Enough for a week?”

“That would be selfish,” said Grace.

2 0 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel nodded her agreement. “Very selfish,” she said. “And is selfishness wrong, or is it something which the virtuous person should merely avoid?” She thought for a moment. “Perhaps the solution is that the invitation to help yourself is subject to an implied limitation. What it means is Help yourself to what you need. ”

“For breakfast,” added Grace. “Help yourself to what you need for breakfast. ”

“Exactly,” said Isabel. “I’m not sure how far we can get with the ethics of the buffet bar, but there are some rather interesting problems there. Shall I write to Julian, or would you like to do that?”

Grace laughed. “You, I think. Nobody would listen to me.”

“They would listen to you,” Isabel said.

Grace shuffled through the letters. “I don’t think so. And why should they? I’m just the cleaning lady to them.”

“You’re not,” said Isabel stoutly. “You’re the housekeeper.

And there’s a distinction.”

“They wouldn’t think so,” said Grace.

“There have been some very talented, very famous housekeepers,” said Isabel.

Grace’s interest was aroused. “Oh yes? Such as?”

Isabel looked at the ceiling for inspiration. “Oh well,” she said. And then she said “Well” again. She had made the comment without thinking, and now, when she put her mind to it, she could not come up with any. Who were the mute, unsung hero-ines? There must have been many, but now she could think only of the woman who had put Carlyle’s manuscript in the fire. She was a maid, was she not, or was she a housekeeper? Was there a distinction? She thought about it briefly and then decided that she was getting nowhere with anything, and the pile of mail was F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

2 0 7

effectively as high as it had been before she had started to think about buffet bars, and bread rolls, and housekeepers.

She looked at the next letter, but put it down again before opening it. Her mind had returned to the possible special issue on the ethics of food. There would have to be a paper on the moral issues raised by chocolate; the more she thought of it, the richer became the philosophical dimensions of chocolate. It brought akrasia, weakness of the will, into sharp focus. If we know that chocolate is bad for us (and in some respects chocolate is bad for us, in the sense that it makes us put on weight), then how is it that we end up eating too much of it? That suggests that our will is weak. But if we eat chocolate, then it must be that we think that it is in our best interests to do so; our will moves us to do what we know we will like. So our will is not weak—it is actually quite strong, and prompts us to do that which we really want to do (to eat chocolate). Chocolate was not simple.

S H E WO R K E D S O L I D LY that day until three in the afternoon, when she telephoned Angus Spens at the Scotsman offices.

Angus was not there to take her call, but he called back fifteen minutes later, when Isabel was in the kitchen, making herself a cup of tea.

“I saw you the other day,” she said. “You were getting into a taxi outside your office. You looked terribly smart, Angus, in your black coat. Very smart.”

“I was off to interview another Stuart pretender,” he said.

“We get these people turning up from time to time, claiming to be descendants of Bonnie Prince Charlie or his dad. They’re a pretty motley crew, as you can imagine.”

2 0 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“Cranks?” asked Isabel.

“Some of them,” said Angus. “The problem, as you no doubt know, is that Prince Charlie had no legitimate offspring. And his brother, who was a cardinal, enjoyed a very happy bachelor existence. He died full of years, but not exactly surrounded by descendants. So that was the end of the direct Stuart line. You learnt that in school, didn’t you? I certainly did.”

“But not everybody wants to believe it?”

There was silence for a moment. Then Angus sighed. “One of the problems of being in the newspaper business is that you get contacted by an awful lot of people who think the world is otherwise than we are told it is. They really believe that. And these Stuart people are a little bit like that. Some of them are perfectly reasonable people who really believe that they have a claim—and back it up with books on the subject. But others are fantasists, although every so often one comes along who appears to have a rather better claim. This one was an Italian and