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  She went into the kitchen. Grace left notes for her on the kitchen table—notes about household supplies and telephone messages. There was a large brown envelope waiting for her, and a piece of paper with a few lines in Grace’s handwriting.

  Isabel picked up the envelope first. It had not arrived with the normal morning delivery because it had been misdelivered to a neighbour, who had dropped it off. Isabel lived at number 6

  while the neighbour lived at number 16, and a harassed postal 3 6

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h official could easily make a mistake; but it was never bills that were misdelivered, Isabel reflected—bills always found their target. The envelope was simply addressed to the editor, and by its weight it was a manuscript. She always looked at the stamp and postmark first, rather than at the name and address of the sender: an American stamp, an aviator looking up into the clouds with that open-browed expression that befits aviators, and a Seattle postmark. She set the envelope aside and looked at the note which Grace had left. There had been a telephone call from her dentist, about a change in the timing for her check-up, and a call from the author of a paper which the Review had accepted for publication: Isabel knew that this author was troublesome and that there would be some complaint. Then, at the bottom of the list, Grace had written: And Jamie called too. He wants to talk to you, he says. Soon. This was followed by an exclamation mark—or was it? Grace liked to comment on the messages she took for Isabel, and an exclamation mark would have been an eloquent remark. But was this an exclamation mark or a slip of the pencil?

  Isabel picked up the envelope and walked through to her study. Jamie often telephoned; this was nothing special, and yet she was intrigued. Why would he want to talk to her soon? She wondered whether it was anything to do with the girl. Had Jamie sensed that there was something wrong? It was possible that he had waited for her after the Queen’s Hall concert, and he might even have seen her sneaking away. He was not an insensitive person who would be indifferent to the feelings of others, and he could well have understood precisely why she had left without speaking to him. But of course if he had realised that, then that could change everything between them.

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

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  She did not want him to think of her as some hopeless admirer, an object of pity.

  She moved towards the telephone, but stopped. The hopeless admirer would be eager to call the object of her affections.

  She was not that. She was the independent woman who happened to have a friendship with a young man. She would not behave like some overly eager spinster, desperate for any scrap of contact with the man on whom her affections had settled.

  She would not telephone him. If he wanted to speak to her, then he would be the one to do the calling. She immediately felt ashamed; it was a thought worthy of a moody, plotting teenager, not of a woman of her age and her experience of life. She closed her eyes for a moment: this was a matter of will, of voluntas. She was not enamoured of Jamie; she was pleased that he had found a girlfriend. She was in control.

  She opened her eyes. Around her were the familiar surroundings of her study: the books reaching up to the ceiling, the desk with its reassuring clutter, the quiet, rational world of the Review of Applied Ethics. The telephone was on the desk, and she picked up the receiver and dialled Jamie’s number.

  Isabel, said a recorded Jamie. I am not in. This is not me you’re talking to; well it is, actually, but it’s a recording. I need to talk to you. Do you mind? May I see you tomorrow? I can call round any time. Phone me later.

  She replaced the receiver in its cradle. Messages from people who were not there were unsettling, rather like letters from the dead. She had received such a letter once from a contribu-tor to the Review whose article had been turned down for publication. I cannot understand why you are unwilling to publish this, he had written. And then, a few days later, she had heard 3 8

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h that he was dead, and she had reflected on how her act had made his last few days unhappy; not that she could have reached any other decision, but the imminence of death might make one ponder one’s actions more carefully. If we treated others with the consideration that one would give to those who had only a few days to live, then we would be kinder, at least.

  She picked up the envelope from Seattle and slit it open, carefully, gently, as if handling a document of sacramental significance. There was a covering letter—the University of Washington—but she put this to one side, again gently, and looked at the title page of the manuscript. “The Man Who Received a Bolt in the Brain and Became a Psychopath.” She sighed. Ever since Dr. Sacks had written The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat there had been a flurry of similar titles. And had not this whole issue of brain and personality disorder been explored by Professor Damasio, who had dealt with this precise case of the ironworker and his bolt in the brain? But then she remembered: she would give this article her full attention.

  She began to read. Twenty minutes later she was still sitting with the manuscript before her, mulling over what she had read.

  That is what she was doing when the telephone interrupted her.

  It was Jamie.

  “I’m sorry that I wasn’t in when you called.”

  “You wanted to see me.”

  “Yes, I do. I need to see you.”

  She waited for him to say something more, but he did not.

  So she continued: “It sounds important.”

  “It isn’t really. Well, I suppose it’s important to me. I need to discuss something personal.” He paused. “I’ve met somebody, you see. I need to talk about that.”

  She looked at the shelves of books. So many of them were F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  about duty, and obligation, and the sheer moral struggle of this life.

  “That’s very good news,” she said. “I’m glad.”

  “Glad?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. It was so easy to do the right thing, when the right thing involved just words; deeds might be more difficult. “I’m glad that you’ve met somebody. In fact, I think I saw her at the Queen’s Hall. She looked . . .” She paused. “Very nice.” The simple words were difficult.

  “But she wasn’t there,” said Jamie.

  Isabel frowned. “That girl in the interval . . .”

  “Friend,” said Jamie.

  C H A P T E R F I V E

  E

  SHE WAS THERE at the delicatessen the next morning a few minutes before Eddie arrived. One of the locks seemed stiff, and she had to struggle with it before it opened. Her fumblings triggered the alarm, and by the time she was inside, the first shrill braying of the klaxon could be heard. She rushed through to the office, where the system’s control panel was blinking in the half-light. She had committed the number to memory, but now, faced with the keypad and its array of numbers, only the mnemonic remained: the date of the fall of Constantinople. That was a date which she would never forget, of course, but now she did, remembering only Miss Macfarlane, the history teacher, in the black bombazine which she occasionally wore, perhaps out of deference to the headmistress, who wore nothing else, standing in front of the class of small girls in the room overlooking George Square and saying, A fatal year for the West, girls, a fatal year. We must not forget this date.

  Isabel thought: We must not forget this date, girls, and it came back to her and promptly silenced the alarm. 1492. She felt relief, but then doubt, and confusion. Constantinople had fallen not in 1492, but in 1453 when Sultan Mehmed had F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  defeated the defenders. Remember, girls, that the Turk had more than one hundred thousand men, said Miss Macfarlane, and there were only ten thousand of us. Isabel had looked at Miss Macfarlane and wondered, but only for a moment. Miss Macfarlane was Scottish and yet she claimed affinity with the defenders of Constantinople. Us? And who was the Turk?<
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  “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,” she muttered,

  “Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

  “And something happened in a place called Constantinople,”

  said a voice behind her. “That’s what Cat said. That’s how we’re meant to remember the number.”

  Isabel spun round. Eddie had entered, quietly, and was standing behind her. His suddenly announced presence had given her a fright, but it had at least solved the mystery. Cat had given her the number, written it down on her list, and at the same time had given the mnemonic that she used. And Isabel dutifully had committed the wrong mnemonic to memory, not thinking to correct it.

  “That’s how errors are made,” she said to Eddie.

  “You fed in the wrong number?”

  “No, but Constantinople did not fall in 1492. It fell in 1453.

  The Turk had over one hundred thousand men and we had only . . .” She paused. Eddie was looking confused. Of course he might never have been taught any history, she thought. Would he know who Mary, Queen of Scots, was? Or James VI? She looked at him, at the quiet, rather frightened young man whose life, she realised, had been ruined by something traumatic and who had done nothing to deserve that.

  “You’re going to have to be patient with me,” she said to him.

  “I really don’t know what I’m doing. And setting the alarm off like that was not very clever of me.”

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h He smiled at her, nervously, but still it was a smile. “It took me a long time to learn how to do this job,” he ventured. “I couldn’t remember the names of the cheeses for ages. Cheddar and Brie were all right—I knew those—but all those others, that took me ages.”

  “Not your fault,” said Isabel. “I’m not bad on cheeses, and wines too, I suppose, but when it comes to spices, I always get them mixed up. Cardamom and all those things. I always forget the names.”

  Eddie moved to switch on a light. The office had no outer window and the only light filtered in through the shop, past the coffee tables and the open-topped sacks of muesli and bas-mati rice.

  “I usually start by getting the coffee going,” said Eddie. “We get a few people coming in for a coffee on the way to work.”

  The delicatessen had three or four tables at which people could sit, purchase a cup of coffee, and read out-of-date Continental newspapers. There was always a copy of Le Monde and Corriere della Sera, and sometimes Spiegel, which Isabel found interesting because of its habit of publishing articles about the Second World War and German guilt. It was important to remember, and perhaps some Germans felt that they could never forget, but would there be a point at which those awful images of the past could be put away? Not if we want to avoid a repetition, said some, and the Germans took this very seriously, while others perhaps preferred to forget. The Germans deserved great credit for their moral seriousness, which is why Isabel liked them so much. Anyone—any people—was capable of doing what they did in their historical moment of madness—

  and their goodness lay in the fact that they later faced up to F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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  what they had done. Did the Turks go over their history with a moral fine-tooth comb? She was not aware of it, if they did, and nobody seemed to mention the genocide of the Armenians—an atrocity which was virtually within living memory—except the Armenians, of course.

  And the Belgians, she suddenly remembered, who had passed a resolution in their Senate only a few years previously noting what had happened in Armenia. Some had said that was all very well, but then what about what Leopold did in the Congo? And were there not islanders, somewhere in the Pacific, whose ancestors stood accused of eating—yes, eating the original inhabitants of the lands they occupied? Most unfortunate.

  And then there were the British who behaved extremely badly in so many parts of the world. There was the woeful story of the extinction of the Tasmanian aboriginals and so many other instances of cruelty and theft under the bright protection of the Union Jack. When would British history books face up to the appalling British contribution to slavery, which involved the Arabs, too, and numerous Africans (who were not just on the receiving end)? We were all as bad as one another, but at some point we had to overlook that fact, or at least not make too much of it. History, it seemed, could so quickly become a matter of mutual accusation and recrimination, an infinite regress of cruelty and oppression, unless forgetfulness or forgiveness intervened.

  All of this was very interesting, but nothing to do with the running of a delicatessen. Isabel reminded herself of this and opened the safe with the code which Cat had noted down for her: 1915. The year that the Turks fell upon the Armenians, Isabel noted, though Cat could hardly have intended that. She 4 4

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h had never heard Cat mention the Armenians—not once. Nineteen fifteen were the last four digits of Cat’s telephone number, an altogether more prosaic choice.

  She heard Eddie tipping the coffee beans into the grinder and savoured the smell of the grounds. Then she busied herself with putting the float in the till, and checked that there was an adequate supply of plastic bags for the packing of purchases. Now we are ready, Isabel thought, with some satis-faction. Trading begins. She looked at Eddie, who gave her a thumbs-up signal of encouragement. We feel the common feeling of employees, she thought; that peculiar feeling of involvement with those with whom one works. It was not like friendship; it was a feeling of being together in something which afflicts all humans—work. We are working together, and hence there exist between us subtle bonds of loyalty and support. That is why trade unionists addressed one another as brother and sister. We are together in our bondage, each light-ening the load of another; somewhat extreme, she reflected, for a middle-class delicatessen in Edinburgh, but nonetheless something to think about.

  T H E M O R N I N G WA S B U S Y, but everything went well. There was one rather difficult customer who brought in a bottle of wine—half consumed—and claimed that the wine was corked and should be replaced. Isabel knew that Cat’s policy was to replace or refund in such circumstances, and to do so without question, but when she sniffed at the neck of the offending bottle what she got was the odour of vinegar and not the characteristic mustiness of a corked wine. She poured a small amount of 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 wine into a glass and sipped at it gingerly, glared at by the customer, a young man in a rainbow-coloured woolly hat.

  “Vinegar,” she said. “This wine has been left opened. There’s been oxidation.”

  She looked at the young man. The most likely explanation, in her view, was that he had drunk half the bottle and then left it open for a day or two. Any wine would turn to vinegar in warm weather like this. Now he thought that he could get a fresh bottle of wine without paying. He must have read about corked wine in a newspaper.

  “It was corked,” he said.

  “Then why is so much of it drunk?” asked Isabel, pointing to the level in the bottle.

  “Because I poured a large glass,” he said. “Then, when I tasted it, I had to throw that out. I poured another glass just to be sure, but that was as bad.”

  Isabel stared at him. She was sure that he was lying, but there was no point in persisting. “I’ll give you another bottle,”

  she said, thinking: This is exactly how lies prevail. Liars get away with it.

  “Chianti, please,” said the young man.

  “This isn’t Chianti,” said Isabel. “This is an Australian Shi-raz. Our Chianti is more expensive than this.”

  “But I’ve been inconvenienced,” said the young man. “It’s the least you can do.”

  Isabel said nothing, but crossed to a shelf and took down a bottle of Chianti, which she handed to the young man.

  “If you don’t finish it,” she said, “make sure you put the cork back in and keep it in a cool place. That should slow down oxidation.
”

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

  “You don’t need to tell me that,” he said truculently.

  “Of course not,” said Isabel.

  “I know about these Spanish wines,” he went on.

  Isabel said nothing, but caught Eddie’s glance and his suppressed look of mirth. It was going to be fun, she thought. Running a delicatessen was different from running the Review of Applied Ethics, but, in its own way, might be every bit as enjoyable.

  B E I N G B U S Y, she had little time to think about the impending arrival of Jamie, who had agreed over the telephone to meet her for lunch at the neighbouring coffee bar and potted plant shop.

  Eddie ate his lunch in the delicatessen and did not need time off, he said, and so she was able to slip out at one o’clock when Jamie arrived.

  The coffee bar was uncrowded and they had no difficulty finding a couple of seats near the window.

  “This is rather like eating in the jungle,” Isabel said, pointing to the palm fronds at her back.

  “Without the bugs,” said Jamie, glancing at the palm and the large Monstera deliciosa behind it. Then: “I’m very glad you could see me. I didn’t want to discuss this over the telephone.”