The people who wrote the article are properly sceptical. All they say is that if there is such a thing as cellular memory, then this might be a case of it. Or . . .”
“Or?”
Isabel gestured airily. “Or it can all be explained by the fact that the drugs which the patient was taking led to hallucina-tions. Drugs can make you see flashes of light and so on.”
“But what about the similarities in the faces?” Grace asked.
“Coincidence,” suggested Isabel. But she did not feel much enthusiasm for this explanation, and Grace realised it.
“You don’t really think that it was sheer coincidence, do you?” Grace said.
Isabel did not know what to think. “I don’t know,” she said.
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“Perhaps it’s one of those situations where one simply has to say that one doesn’t know.”
Grace rose to her feet. She had work to do. But there was an observation that she felt she needed to make. “But I remember your saying to me—some time ago—that we either know something or we don’t. You said that there could be no halfway houses. You did say that, you know.”
“Did I?” said Isabel. “Well, maybe I did.”
“And perhaps what you meant to say is that there are some occasions when we must say that we just can’t be sure,” said Grace.
“Perhaps,” said Isabel.
Grace nodded. “If you’d like to come to one of the meetings some day you could see what I mean.”
For a moment Isabel felt alarmed. She had no desire to become involved in séances, but to refuse would seem churl-ish and would be interpreted as a recanting on the open-mindedness that Grace had just obliged her to acknowledge.
But would she be able to keep a straight face while the medium claimed to talk to the other side? Would there be knocking on tables and low moans from the spirit world? It was a source of complete astonishment to her that somebody as down-to-earth, as straightforward, as Grace could have this peculiar interest in spiritualism. It just did not make sense; unless, of course, as she had seen suggested, we all have a weak point, an area of intel-lectual or emotional vulnerability that may be quite out of keeping with our character. The most surprising people did the most remarkable things. Auden, she remembered, had written a line about a retired dentist who painted nothing but mountains.
That had interested her because of the juxtaposition of dentistry and mountains. Why was it that anything which a dentist would 9 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h do would seem almost poignant? My dentist collects toy trains, she might say—because it was true. But why was that any funnier than saying that a bank manager kept toy trains? Or was that funny too?
“I can tell that you think it’ll be funny,” said Grace, as she made her way to the cupboard where she kept her cleaning equipment. “But it isn’t, you know. It’s serious. Very serious. And you meet some interesting people there too.” She was standing in front of the cupboard now, extracting a broom, but still talking. “I’ve just met a rather nice man in our group, you know. His wife went over into spirit a year or so ago. He’s very pleasant.”
Isabel looked up sharply, but Grace had started to leave the room. She glanced at Isabel as she did so, but only briefly, and it was a glance that gave nothing away. Isabel looked through the open door, at the place where Grace had been standing, and mulled over what she had said. But then her thoughts returned to Ian, and to their curious, unnerving conversation in the Arts Club. He had said that he was concerned that the images that he was seeing would kill him—a strange thing to say, she thought, and she had asked him to explain why he should feel this. Sadness, he had said. Sadness. “I feel this terrible sadness when it happens. I can’t tell you what it’s like—but it’s the sorrow of death. I know that sounds melodramatic, but that’s just what it is. I’m sorry.”
C H A P T E R E L E V E N
E
ISABEL DID NOT LIKE her desk to get too cluttered, but that did not mean that it was uncluttered. In fact, most of the time there were too many papers on it, usually manuscripts that had to be sent off for peer assessment. She was not sure about the term peer assessment, even if it was the widely accepted term for a crucial stage in the publishing of journal articles. Sometimes the expression amounted to exactly that: equals looked dispassionately at papers by equals and gave their view. But Isabel had discovered that this did not always happen, and papers were consigned into the hands of their authors’ friends or enemies.
This was unwitting; it was impossible for anybody to keep track of the jealousies and rivalries that riddled academia, and Isabel had to hope that she could spot the concealed agendas that lay behind outright antagonism or, more often, and more subtly, veiled antagonism: “an interesting piece, perhaps interesting enough to attract a ripple of attention.” Philosophers could be nasty, she reflected, and moral philosophers the nastiest of all.
Now, seated at her cluttered desk, she began the task of clearing at least some of the piles of paper. She worked energeti-cally, and it was almost twelve when she glanced at the clock.
1 0 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h She had done, she thought, enough work for the morning, and perhaps for the day. She stood up, stretched, and went over to her study window to look out on the garden. The display of pinks in the flowerbed that ran alongside the far garden wall was as bright as it ever had been, and the line of lavender bushes that she had planted a few years previously was in full flower.
She looked down at the flowerbed immediately below her window. Somebody had been digging at the roots of an azalea and had kicked small piles of soil onto the edge of the lawn. She smiled. Brother Fox.
She very rarely saw Brother Fox, who was discreet in his movements, as befitted one who must have thought that he lived in enemy territory. Not that Isabel was an enemy; she was an ally, and he might just have sensed that when he found the chicken carcasses that she left out for him. Once she had seen him at close quarters, and he had turned tail and fled, but had stopped after a few paces and they had looked at one another. Their eyes met for only a few seconds, but it was enough for Brother Fox to realise that her intentions towards him were not hostile, and she saw his body relax before he turned and trotted off.
She was looking at the signs of his digging when the telephone rang.
“So,” said Cat, who always started telephone conversations abruptly. “Working?”
Isabel looked at her desk, now half clear. “I was,” she said.
“But have you any better ideas?”
“You sound as if you want an excuse.”
“I do,” said Isabel. “I was going to stop anyway, but an excuse would be welcome.”
“Well,” said Cat. “My Italian friend has arrived. Tomasso.
Remember the one I told you about.”
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1 0 1
Isabel was guarded. Cat was sensitive about Isabel’s past interference in her affairs, and she did not want to say anything that could be misconstrued. So she simply said, “Good.”
There was a silence. “Good,” said Isabel again.
“I thought that you might like to come and have lunch here,” said Cat. “In the delicatessen. He’s coming back once he’s put his car away safely at the hotel. He’s staying at Preston-field House.”
“You don’t think that I shall be . . . in the way?” she asked.
“Won’t you want to . . . to have lunch by yourselves? I’m not sure if you’ll want me there.”