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.”
“I don’t mind,” said Isabel. And she did not. It was good to see him, and now that he was here, in the flesh, her inappropriate feelings seemed a thing of the past, virtually forgotten. This was Jamie, who was just a friend, although he was a friend of whom she was very fond.
Jamie looked down, seeming to study the tablecloth. Isabel looked at his cheekbones, and at the en brosse hair. When he F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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looked up, she caught his gaze, and held it—eyes which were almost grey in that light; kind eyes, she thought, which was what made him so beautiful in her view.
“You’ve met somebody,” she prompted.
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And I’m not sure what to do. I’m happy, I suppose, but I’m all mixed up. I thought that you being . . .”
“The editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, ” she supplied.
“And a friend,” Jamie went on. “Perhaps my closest friend.”
No woman likes to hear that from a man, thought Isabel.
Men may think about women in those terms, but it’s certainly not what most women want to hear. But she nodded briefly and Jamie continued: “The difficulty is that this person, this woman I’ve met, is not somebody I thought I would fall for. I hadn’t planned it. I really hadn’t.”
“Which is exactly what Cupid’s arrows are all about,” said Isabel gently. “Very inaccurate. They fly about all over the place.”
“Yes,” said Jamie. “But you usually have a general idea of what sort of person you’re going to go for. Somebody like Cat, for instance. And then somebody else comes along, and wham!”
“Yes,” said Isabel. “Wham! That’s the way it happens, isn’t it? But why fight it? Just accept that it’s happened and make the most of it. Unless it’s impossible, that is. But that doesn’t happen much these days. Montague and Capulet difficulties.
Social barriers and all the rest. Even being the same sex is not a problem today.”
“She’s married,” Jamie blurted out, and then looked down at the tablecloth again.
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel caught her breath.
“And she’s older than me,” said Jamie. “She’s about your age, actually.”
She had not been prepared for this and her dismay must have shown. Jamie frowned. “I knew that you would disapprove,” he said. “Of course you would disapprove.”
Isabel opened her mouth to say something, to deny the disapproval, but he cut her short. “I shouldn’t have bothered you with this. It would have been better not to tell you.”
“No,” she said. “I’m glad you told me.” She paused, gather-ing her thoughts. “It is a bit of a shock, I suppose. I hadn’t imagined . . .” She trailed off. What offended her was that it was a woman of her age. She had accepted that he would want somebody of his own age, or younger, but she had not prepared herself for competition from a coeval.
“I didn’t ask for it to happen,” Jamie went on, sounding quite miserable. “And now I don’t know what to do. I feel . . .
what do I feel? I feel, well I feel as if I’m doing something wrong.”
“Which you are,” said Isabel. Then she paused. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be unsympathetic, but . . . but don’t you think you’re doing something wrong if you’re participating in decep-tion, which adultery usually involves? Not always, but often.