“I had the most extraordinary conversation yesterday,” she began. “With a man who has had his heart replaced. Have you ever met anybody who’s had a heart transplant?”
Grace shook her head. “My mother could have done with one,” she mused. “But they didn’t work in those days. Or they didn’t have enough hearts to go round.”
“I’m sorry,” said Isabel. There was a hinterland of unremit-ting hard work and suffering in Grace’s life, and occasionally this became apparent in what she said.
“We all have to go,” said Grace. “And it’s only a question of crossing over. It’s nothing to be afraid of—the other side.”
Isabel said nothing. She was not sure about the other side, but was open-minded enough to accept that we could not say with certainty that some form of spiritual survival was impossible. It all depended, she thought, on the existence of a necessary connection between consciousness and physical matter.
And since it was impossible to identify the location of conF R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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sciousness, one could not rule out the persistence of consciousness in the absence of brain activity. There were some philosophers who thought of nothing but consciousness—“the ultimate knotty philosophical problem,” her old professor had said—
but she was not one of them. So she simply said: “Yes, the other side . . . ,” and then, “But he never reached the other side, of course. His new heart saved him.”
Grace looked at her expectantly. “And?”
“And then he started to have the most extraordinary experiences.” She paused, and gestured for Grace to help herself to a cup of coffee from the coffeepot. “You see,” she went on, “he’s a psychologist. Or, rather, he was, and he had read articles about the psychological problems that people have after heart operations. It’s very unsettling, apparently.”
“I can well imagine,” said Grace. “A new heart beating away within you. I would feel very unsettled.” She shuddered. “I’m not sure I would like it, you know. Somebody else’s heart. You might suddenly find yourself falling in love with the dead person’s boyfriend, or whatever. Imagine that!”
Isabel leant forward. “But that’s precisely what he says happened. He didn’t exactly fall in love like that, but he has experienced some of the things that people are meant to experience in those circumstances. The most extraordinary things.”
Grace now sat down opposite Isabel. This was very much her territory—the vaguely chilling, the inexplicable. But I’m just as interested in this, reflected Isabeclass="underline" let she who is without gullibility cast the first stone.
“He told me,” Isabel continued, “that from time to time he experiences a sudden jolt of pain. Not in his heart, but all over the front of his body and his shoulders. And then he sees something. Every time. The pain is accompanied by a vision.”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Grace began to smile. “But you don’t believe in manifesta-tions,” she said. “You told me that. Remember? I had spoken to you about a manifestation that we saw at one of the meetings, and you said . . .”
It was reasonable enough, thought Isabel, for Grace to feel a certain triumph over this; but he had not said there was a manifestation. There was at least some rationalist ground to be defended. “I didn’t say anything about a manifestation,” she said. “A vision and a manifestation are quite different things.
One is outside you, the other inside.”
Grace looked doubtful. “I’m not sure that there’s much difference. But anyway, what did he see?”
“A face.”
“Just a face?”
Isabel took a sip of her coffee. “Yes. Not much of a manifestation, that. But it is rather odd, isn’t it? To see the same face.
And to see it at the same time as the pain comes on.”
Grace looked down at the tablecloth. With an index finger she traced a pattern; Isabel watched, but realised that it was nothing special, just a doodle. Did Grace go in for spirit-writing?
she wondered. Spirit-writing had its possibilities—if it existed.
Had somebody not been in touch with Schubert and acted as amanuensis while Schubert had dictated a symphony? Isabel smiled as she wondered whether the composer had suggested a name for this symphony: The Other Side might be appropriate, perhaps. She glanced at Grace, who was still staring fixedly at the table, and she suppressed her smile.
Grace looked up. “So who does he think it is? Is it somebody he remembers?”
Isabel explained that it was not. The face, Ian had said, was F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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of nobody he knew, but was memorable: a high-browed face, with hooded eyes and a scar running just below the hairline.
“But here,” Isabel continued, “here’s the really interesting bit.
As I told you, this person to whom I was talking is a psychologist.
He looked up what has been written about the experiences of people who have had heart transplants. And he found that there was quite a bit. Some books. A few articles.
“Somebody wrote a book about it some years ago. It described how a woman who received the heart of a young man started to behave in a totally different way. She became much more aggressive, which I suppose anybody might after having their heart taken out of them and replaced, but she also started to dress in a different way and to eat different food. She started to like chicken nuggets, which she had never liked before. Of course they then found out that the young man who donated his heart had had a particular liking for chicken nuggets.”
Grace shook her head. “I can’t abide them,” she said.
“Tasteless things.”
Isabel agreed. But chicken nuggets were not the point of the story. “He also looked at various articles,” she went on, “and there he found something very interesting. He stumbled across an article by some psychologists in the United States who looked at ten cases in which there had been changes in behaviour by people who had received the hearts of others. One of them caught his eye.”
Grace was sitting almost bolt upright. Isabel reached for the coffeepot and poured her housekeeper another cup. “With all this talk of the heart,” she said, “can you feel your heart beating within you? And does coffee make it go faster?”
Grace thought for a moment. “I don’t like to think about 9 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h that,” she said. “You have to leave your heart to get on with it. It’s rather like breathing. We don’t have to remind ourselves to breathe.” She took a sip of coffee. “But let’s get back to these cases. He said that one caught his eye. Why?”
“They,” Isabel began, “that is, the people who wrote the article, went to see a man who said that since he had received his new heart he had sudden pains in his face, saw flashes of light and then a face. He gave a good description of this face, just as my friend did.
“The researchers found that the person who had given the heart was a young man who had been shot—in the face. The police thought they knew who shot him, but could not prove anything. But the police showed the researchers a picture of the suspected gunman—and it was exactly like the face which the recipient described.”
Grace reached for her cup. “In other words,” she said, “the heart was remembering what happened.”
“Yes,” said Isabel. “Or that’s what appears to have happened.