“But let’s say that we believe it may be relevant information.
Let’s say that the mother takes the same view and believes it, even if it can’t be proved. What we will have succeeded in doing then will be to have introduced an awful, corrosive doubt into her life. We might effectively destroy her relationship with that man. And so she will have lost not only her son, but her man as well.”
When Ian spoke, his tone was resigned. He sounded tired.
“In which case we keep quiet.”
“We can’t,” said Isabel. She did not explain why she said this, as she had noticed Ian’s weariness and she was concerned not to tire him. It was to do with formal justice, and the duty F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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that one has to the community at large not to allow people like drunken drivers—if he had been drunk—to go unpunished if they cause death on the road. That was profoundly important, and outweighed any consideration of the emotional happiness of one unfortunate woman. It was a hard decision, but one which Isabel now seemed to be seeing her way to reaching. But even as she reached it, she thought how much easier it would be to walk away from this, to say that the business of others was no business of hers. That, of course, required one to believe that we are all strangers to one another—which was just not true, in Isabel’s view, indeed it was as alien to her as it had been to John Donne when he wrote those echoing, haunting words about islands and community. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, he had said. Yes. It is.
But even if she had reached the view that considerations of community and moral duty obliged them to act, she still had no idea what form this action should take. It was a curious, slightly disconcerting state to be in: to know that one should act, but not knowing how. It was rather like being in a phoney war, before the bombs and bullets are exchanged.
I N CAT ’ S D E L I CAT E S S E N, to which Isabel now made her way, Eddie was creating a small stack of tubs of Patum Peperium, an anchovy paste, on the counter, alongside a display of socially responsible chocolate bars. It was a quiet spell and there was only one customer, a well-dressed man looking at oatcakes and having inordinate difficulty in choosing between two brands. Eddie, watching him, caught Cat’s eye and shrugged.
Cat smiled and crossed the floor to offer him advice.
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“That brand on the left has less salt than the one on the right,” she offered. “Otherwise I think they taste very much the same.”
The man turned round and looked at her anxiously. “What I’m really looking for,” he said, “is a triangular oatcake. That’s the shape that oatcakes should be, you know. Triangular, but with one side a bit rounded. Oatcake shaped.”
Cat picked up a box of oatcakes and inspected it. “These are round,” she said. “And those other ones are round, too. I’m sorry.
We only seem to have round oatcakes.”
“They still make them, though,” said the man, fingering the cuffs of his expensive cashmere jacket. “You could get them, couldn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Cat. “We could get hold of triangular oatcakes.
Nobody has particularly asked . . .”
The man sighed. “You may think it’s ridiculous,” he said.
“But it’s just that there are so few things in this world which are authentic. Local. Little things—like the shape of oatcakes—are very important. It’s nice to have these familiar things about one.
There are so many people who want to make things the same.
They want to take our Scottish things away from us.”
The poignancy of his words struck Cat. It was true, she thought—a small country like Scotland had to make an effort to keep control of its everyday life. And she could see how it could be upsetting, if one felt at all vulnerable, to see familiar Scottish things taken away from you.
“They’ve taken away so many of our banks,” said the man.
“Look what happened to our banks. They’ve taken our Scottish regiments. They want to take away everything that’s distinctive.”
Cat smiled. “But they’ve given us back our Parliament,” she said. “We’ve got that, haven’t we?”
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The man thought. “Maybe,” he said. “But what can it do?
Legislate for triangular oatcakes?”
He laughed, and Cat laughed too, with relief. She had been thinking him a crank, but cranks never laughed at themselves.
“I’ll try to get hold of some triangular oatcakes,” she said.
“Can you give me a week or two? I’ll ask our suppliers.”
He thanked her and left the shop, and Cat went back to the counter. Eddie, having finished creating his carefully balanced stack of Patum Peperium, turned round. He saw Isabel outside, at the door, and called Cat.
“Isabel’s here,” he said. “Outside. Coming in.”
Cat greeted her aunt. “I’ve just had a wonderful conversation about oatcakes and cultural identity,” she said. “You would have loved it.”
Isabel nodded vaguely. She did not want to talk about oatcakes; she wanted to sit quietly with a cup of coffee and one of Cat’s Continental newspapers— Le Monde, perhaps. It never seemed to matter quite so much if foreign newspapers were out of date; yesterday’s Scotsman rapidly began to seem stale, but a newspaper in a foreign language remained engaging. Le Monde had been taken by somebody, but there was a three-day-old copy of Corriere della Sera which she appropriated and took with her to a table.
“Do you mind, Cat?” she said. “Sometimes one wants to talk. Sometimes one wants to think or”—she flourished the paper in the air—“read this.”
Cat understood, and busied herself with a task in the back office while Eddie prepared a cup of coffee for Isabel. Once that was ready he took it across to her table and placed it before her. Isabel looked up from her paper and smiled encouragingly at Eddie. Her week of running the delicatessen had cemented 1 6 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the friendship between them, but it was a friendship that relied more on smiles and gestures than on the exchange of ideas and confidences. At the end of her time there, Isabel had felt that she now knew him rather better, although he had told her nothing about himself. Where did Eddie live? She had asked him outright, and he had simply said on the south side, which was half the city, more or less, and gave nothing away. Did he live by himself, or did he stay at home? At home, he answered, but had not volunteered anything about who else was there. Isabel had left it at that; one had to respect the privacy of people. Some people did not like others to know about their domestic circumstances—out of shame, Isabel assumed. For a young man of Eddie’s age to be living at home was not all that unusual, but he may have thought that perhaps it reflected badly on him never to have left. I live at home, thought Isabel, suddenly. I live in the house to which I was taken from the Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion by my sainted American mother. I haven’t gone very far.
She would find out more about Eddie in future, she felt.
And then she might be able to do something for him. If he wanted to take a course somewhere, Telford College perhaps, then she could pay for it—if he would accept. She already supported two students at the University of Edinburgh through her private charitable trust. Not that they knew, of course; they thought it came from Simon Macintosh, her lawyer, which it did in so far as he administered it, but the real purse from which it was drawn was Isabel’s.