A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h The question made clear the nature of the illness to which the newspaper notice had referred.
“No,” said Isabel. “I haven’t. I know what that’s all about, but I haven’t.”
Jean looked puzzled. “Then, forgive my asking, but why have you come to see me?”
Isabel held her gaze. “I’ve come because chance brought me into contact with somebody who has had a heart transplant.”
Jean’s reaction to Isabel’s words made it clear that Jamie’s assumption had been correct. For a brief while she said nothing, but seemed to grasp for words. Then she moved over to the window and stood quite still, looking away from Isabel, gripping the windowsill with both hands. When she spoke her voice was low, and Isabel had to strain to hear what she said.
“We asked for privacy,” she said. “We very specifically did not want to meet whoever it was. We did not want to prolong the whole agony of it.”
Suddenly she spun round, her eyes showing her anger. “I said yes, they could use the heart. But that was it. I didn’t want my other son to know. I didn’t want my daughter to know. It seemed to me that it would just make it all the more difficult for them. Another thing to come to terms with—that somebody else had a bit of their brother. That a bit of their brother was still alive.”
Isabel was silent. It was not for her, she thought, to tell others how to deal with this most intimate of tragedies. One could debate the matter at great length in the bioethical literature, but those who wrote of honesty and disclosure and the nobility of gift might not have lost a brother.
Jean sat down again, staring at her hands. “So, what do you want of me?” she asked.
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Isabel waited a moment before she answered, but when Jean looked up again she spoke. Then she told her of her conversations with Ian and of Ian’s anguish. “I know it sounds fanciful,” she said. “You’re a scientist, after all. You know that tissue is tissue and that memory, consciousness, is something else altogether. I know this just doesn’t make any sense. But that man, that man whose life your son saved, is experiencing what he claims to be experiencing.”
Isabel was going to say a bit more, but Jean had raised a hand to stop her. “It’s his father,” she said flatly. “That description is of my husband. Or it sounds like him.”
It was a repetition, Isabel thought, of what had happened before. She found it hard to believe. Coincidence piled upon coincidence. Names. Faces. All coincidence.
Jean had risen to her feet and opened the drawer in the table behind her. “My husband will be my ex-husband, I suppose, in a few months. When the lawyers get a move on.” She paused, riffling through papers. Then she extracted a small coloured photograph of the sort used for passport applications and passed it to Isabel. “That’s him.”
Isabel took the photograph and looked at it. A pleasant-looking, open-faced man stared at the camera. There was a high forehead, and the eyes were slightly hooded. She looked for a scar, but could not see one; there was not enough resolution in the picture. She handed back the photograph and Jean tossed it into the drawer.
“I don’t know why I should keep that,” she said. “There’s a lot of his stuff in the house. I’ll get round to clearing things out one of these days, I suppose.”
She closed the drawer and turned to face Isabel again. “You don’t know what happened, do you? Has anybody told you?”
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“All I know is what I’ve told you,” said Isabel. “I know nothing about you, or your son. Nothing.”
Jean sighed. “My son had not seen his father for months—
almost a year, in fact. When Euan—that’s my husband—left us, both of my sons refused to have anything more to do with him.
They were angry. I thought they would come round, but they did not. And so when my Gavin died—and it was the depressive illness that killed him, of course, he was in a very deep depression when he took his own life—he had not seen or talked to his father for a long time. He died in a state of estrangement. And Euan, you know, did not come to the memorial service. He did not attend his own son’s service.” She spoke slowly, but in a con-trolled way, looking at Isabel as she talked. “I assume that he felt massively guilty, and I suppose I feel sorry for him. But there we are. It’s done. It’s over. He has to live with his feelings now.”
She looked helplessly at Isabel. “He can’t bring himself to approach me for help. So that’s it. He still lives in the village, you know. So we have to try to avoid seeing each other. He drives out the other way, although it’s longer for him to get to his practice—he’s a vet, too. He can’t face the children.”
Isabel felt that there was not much that she could say. She wondered, though, what Jean felt about Ian’s claims. She had shown no real reaction to them and Isabel assumed that she discounted them.
“I hope that you don’t mind my coming here with this story,”
she said. “I feel very awkward about it. But I felt I had to come.”
Jean shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. As for the story itself, well, people are always imagining these things, aren’t they? I’m afraid that I’m a complete rationalist on all this. I’ve got no time for mumbo-jumbo.” She smiled at Isabel; the no-nonsense veterinarian, the believer in science. “I’m afraid, Miss Dalhousie,”
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she went on, “that I have never believed in any form of personal immortality. The end of consciousness is the end of us. And as for souls, well, the thing that strikes me is that if we have them, then so must animals. And if we survive death, then why should they not do so? So heaven, or whatever you want to call it, will be an awfully crowded place, with all those cats and dogs and cattle and so on. Does it make sense to you? It doesn’t to me.”
