Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

“Oh?” said Isabel. “So cats and dogs cross over, if I may use your term. Do you . . . do you hear from them at the meetings?”

Grace stiffened. “You may not have a high opinion of what we do,” she said, “but I assure you, it’s serious business.”

Isabel was quick to apologise—her second apology of the morning, and it was not yet ten-thirty. Grace accepted. “I’m used to people being sceptical,” she said. “It’s normal.”

Grace went out to the hall to check for mail. “No postie yet,” she said when she came back, using the Scots familiar term for the postman. “But this has been pushed through the door.” She passed over a white, unstamped envelope on which Isabel’s name had been written.

Isabel laid the envelope to the side of the percolator while she poured her coffee. Her name had been written in an unfamiliar hand, Miss Isabel Dalhousie, and underneath the words a flourish of the pen like one of those on Renaissance manuscripts. And then she knew; it was an Italian hand.

She took her cup of coffee in one hand and the letter in the 2 4 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h other. Grace glanced at her and at the letter, clearly hoping that Isabel would open it in the kitchen and she would find out the identity of the sender. But this was private business, thought Isabel. This was to do with their trip, and she wanted to read it in her study. The envelope had that charged look about it, something which was difficult, if not impossible, to identify, but which hung about love letters and letters of sexual significance like perfume.

She stood by the window of her study while she opened it.

She noticed that her hands were shaking, just slightly, but shaking. And then she saw from the top of the notepaper, Pres-tonfield House, that she had been right in her assumption.

Dear Isabel Dalhousie,

I am so sorry that I have had to write, rather than to call on you personally. I have some business in Edinburgh today that will make it difficult for me to see you before I leave.

I had very much hoped that we would have been able to make that trip together. I had found many places that I wished to visit, and you would have been a good guide, I am sure. I even found on the map a place called Mellon Udrigle, up in the west. That must be a very fine place to have a name like that and it would have been very nice to have visited it.

Unfortunately I have to go back to Italy. I have ignored my business interests, but they are not ignoring me. I must return tomorrow. I am taking the car on the ferry from Rosyth.

I hope that we shall have the opportunity to meet again some time, perhaps when you are next in Italy. In F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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the meantime I shall remember our dinner together most fondly and remember, too, the trip that we never made. Sometimes the trips not taken are better than those that one actually takes, do you not agree?

Cordially, Tomasso

She lowered the letter, still holding it, but then she dropped it and it fluttered to the carpet. She looked down. The letter had landed face-down and there was nothing to be seen—just paper. She bent down, picked it up, and reread it.

Then she turned away and went to her desk. There was work to be done, and she would do it. She would not mourn for those things that did not happen. She would not.

She read through several manuscripts. One was interesting, and she placed it on a pile that was due to go out for refereeing.

It was about memory, and forgetting, and about our duty to remember. Its starting point was that we have a duty to remember some names and some people. Those who have a moral claim on us may expect us to remember at least who they are.

How long would she remember this Italian? Not long, she decided. Until next week, perhaps. And then she thought: It is wrong of me to think that. One should not forget out of spite.

All he did was flirt with me, as Italian men will do almost out of courtesy. The fault, if any, is mine: I assumed that he saw me as anything other than that which I am. I am the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics; I am not a femme fatale, whatever that’s meant to be. I am a philosopher in her early forties. I have male friends, not boyfriends. That is who I am. But it would be nice, even if only occasionally, to be something else. Such as . . .

Brother Fox, who was looking at her from the garden, although she could not see him. He was looking at her through the win-2 4 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h dow, wondering whether the head and shoulders he saw behind the desk were attached to anything else, to legs and arms, or were a different creature altogether, just a head-and-shoulders creature? That was the extent of Brother Fox’s philosophising; that and no more.

C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - T W O

E

IAN HAD EXPRESSED DOUBTS, as she expected he would, but finally he agreed.

“It’s simply a matter of going to see him,” she said. “See him in the flesh.” She looked at him and saw that he was not convinced. She persisted. “It seems to me that there is an entirely rational explanation for what has happened to you. You have received the heart of a young man who died in rather sad circumstances. You have undergone all the psychological trauma that anybody in your position might expect. You’ve been brought up against your own mortality. You’ve . . . well, it may sound melodramatic, but you’ve looked at death. And you’ve har-boured a lot of feelings for the person who saved your life.”

He watched her gravely. “Yes,” he said. “All of that is right.

That’s how it has been. Yes.”