“Sardine?” she asked, and then immediately realised what he meant.
She felt herself blush, and began to explain, but he raised a hand. “Sorry, I didn’t make myself clear. I’ve had a heart transplant, and I have fairly strict instructions from my doctors. Salads, sardines, and so on.”
“Which can be made to taste perfectly nice,” she said, rather weakly, she thought.
“I don’t complain about this new diet of mine,” said the man. “I feel much better. I don’t feel hungry, and”—he paused, touching the front of his jacket, at the chest—“and this, this heart— my heart I should call it now—seems to thrive on it, and on the immunosuppressants.”
Isabel smiled. She was intrigued. “But it is your heart,” she said. “Or now it is. A gift.”
“But it’s also his heart,” he said. “And at least I know that it was a he. If it had been a woman, then that would be a bit odd, wouldn’t it? Then I’d be a man with the heart of a woman. Which would make me very much of a new man, wouldn’t you say?”
“Perhaps,” said Isabel. “But I’m interested in what you said about it being his heart. Things that we own remain ours, don’t they, even when we pass them on. I saw somebody driving my old car the other day, and I thought, That woman’s driving my car. Perhaps there are echoes of ownership that persist well after we lose possession.”
The man lifted his knife and fork to begin his meal. Noticing this, Isabel said: “I’m sorry. You have your lunch to eat. I should stop thinking aloud.”
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He laughed. “No, please go on. I enjoy a conversation which goes beyond the superficial. Most of the time we exchange banalities with other people. And here you are launching into linguistics, or should I say philosophical speculation. All over a plate of salad and a sardine. I like that.” He paused. “After my experience—my brush with death—I find that I have rather less time for small talk.”
“That’s quite understandable,” said Isabel, glancing at her watch. There was a small line of customers building up at the cash desk and Eddie had looked over at her table, as if to ask for help.
“I’m very sorry,” she said. “I have to get back to work.”
The man smiled at her. “You said you don’t really work here,” he said. “May I ask: what is it you do normally?”
“Philosophy,” said Isabel, rising to her feet.
“Good,” said the man. “That’s very good.”
He seemed disappointed that she was leaving the table, and Isabel was disappointed to go. There was more to be said, she thought, about hearts and what they mean to us. She wanted to know how it felt to have an alien organ beating away within one’s chest; this bit of life extracted from another, and still living. And how did the relatives of the donor feel, knowing that part of their person (Isabel refused to use the expression loved one, because it was so redolent of the world of its original coin-ers, American undertakers) was still alive? Perhaps this man—
whoever he was—knew about this and could tell her. But in the meantime, there was cheese to be cut and sun-dried tomatoes to measure out; matters of greater immediate importance than questions of the heart and what they meant.
5 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h S H E WO U L D H AV E L I K E D to do nothing that evening, but could not. It had been a demanding day, with many more customers than usual, and she and Eddie had been kept busy until almost seven o’clock. Now, back at the house, the sight of her unopened mail, neatly stacked on her desk by Grace and containing several very obvious manuscripts, dispirited her. What she would have liked to do was to have a light dinner in the garden room, and follow that with a walk in the garden, with a glimpse, perhaps, of Brother Fox, her name for the urban fox who lived part of his cautious, hidden life there, and then a long, warm bath. But this was impossible, as the mail would stack up and it would begin to haunt her, reproaching her every time she entered her study. So she had no alternative but to work, and had resolved to do so when the telephone rang and Jamie announced that he and Louise would be passing by on their way to Balerno (not en route, Isabel thought, but did not say), and would she mind if they called in for a quick cup of something. Isabel wanted to say yes she would mind, but even with the pile of mail in view she said no, she would not mind.
This made her think of akrasia, weakness of the will, by which we do that which we really want to do in the full knowledge that we should be doing something else. But why should she want to see Jamie and Louise? Curiosity, she assumed.
After the telephone call she could settle to nothing. She was no longer interested in dinner, and although she tried to deal with the mail, she could not concentrate on that and gave up. There were already more than twenty outstanding items; tomorrow there would be five or six more—sometimes it was many more than that—and so on. But even the thought 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 numbers (over a hundred and fifty letters in one month, three hundred in two) failed to motivate her, and she ended up sitting in the drawing room at the front of the house, paging through a magazine, waiting for Jamie to arrive. They were going to Balerno, were they? Balerno was a suburb in the west of Edinburgh, a place of well-set suburban homes, each planted squarely in a patch of garden, and each staring out on the world with windows that looked to all intents and purposes like two rectangular eyes. Balerno was somnolent, a respectable place in which nothing out of the ordinary happened.
Then she remembered something else which had been said to her by somebody a long time ago, perhaps when she was a schoolgirl or a very young woman. Somebody had said—or whispered, perhaps—that the suburbs of Edinburgh had a reputation for adultery, and that Balerno was a great place for that. Yes, somebody had said that and sniggered, as a schoolgirl might snigger; and of course it was easy to imagine. If you were tucked up in a suburb, then might you not feel the need to take some risks? And that would lead to the adventure of adultery committed after parties in insurance offices in town, on company training weekends in Perthshire hotels; snatched moments of excitement, lived out against the emptiness of a predictable life.
Jamie had been drawn into that world, and that was why he was going to Balerno. The thought made Isabel grimace. There was no romance there; only tawdry shame. And poor Jamie had been entrapped by this Louise person, this older woman, who probably cared nothing for his music or for his moral qualities, and for whom he was something to toy with.
One might work oneself up into a state of anger just thinking about Louise, and what she stood for. But Isabel would not allow this to happen; it was always a mistake, she thought, to 5 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h dwell on the cause of one’s anger, like Tam O’Shanter’s wife, Nursing her wrath to keep it warm, as Burns put it. No, thought Isabel, I must like Louise, because that is my duty; not because one has a moral duty to like people in general—an impossibility for those short of sainthood—but because I know that Jamie will be hoping that I should like her.
She was thinking of friendship and its duties when the bell rang. When she opened the door, she saw immediately from Jamie’s expression that she had been right about how he would feeclass="underline" there was a strange look on his face, one in which anticipation was mixed with concern. She wanted to lean forward and whisper to him, Don’t worry. Don’t worry. But could not, of course, because standing behind him was Louise, who seemed to be looking up at the evening sky.