I had very much hoped that we would have been able to make that trip together. I had found many places that I wished to visit, and you would have been a good guide, I am sure. I even found on the map a place called Mellon Udrigle, up in the west. That must be a very fine place to have a name like that and it would have been very nice to have visited it.
Unfortunately I have to go back to Italy. I have ignored my business interests, but they are not ignoring me. I must return tomorrow. I am taking the car on the ferry from Rosyth.
I hope that we shall have the opportunity to meet again some time, perhaps when you are next in Italy. In 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 meantime I shall remember our dinner together most fondly and remember, too, the trip that we never made. Sometimes the trips not taken are better than those that one actually takes, do you not agree?
Cordially, Tomasso
She lowered the letter, still holding it, but then she dropped it and it fluttered to the carpet. She looked down. The letter had landed face-down and there was nothing to be seen—just paper. She bent down, picked it up, and reread it.
Then she turned away and went to her desk. There was work to be done, and she would do it. She would not mourn for those things that did not happen. She would not.
She read through several manuscripts. One was interesting, and she placed it on a pile that was due to go out for refereeing.
It was about memory, and forgetting, and about our duty to remember. Its starting point was that we have a duty to remember some names and some people. Those who have a moral claim on us may expect us to remember at least who they are.
How long would she remember this Italian? Not long, she decided. Until next week, perhaps. And then she thought: It is wrong of me to think that. One should not forget out of spite.
All he did was flirt with me, as Italian men will do almost out of courtesy. The fault, if any, is mine: I assumed that he saw me as anything other than that which I am. I am the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics; I am not a femme fatale, whatever that’s meant to be. I am a philosopher in her early forties. I have male friends, not boyfriends. That is who I am. But it would be nice, even if only occasionally, to be something else. Such as . . .
Brother Fox, who was looking at her from the garden, although she could not see him. He was looking at her through the win-2 4 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h dow, wondering whether the head and shoulders he saw behind the desk were attached to anything else, to legs and arms, or were a different creature altogether, just a head-and-shoulders creature? That was the extent of Brother Fox’s philosophising; that and no more.
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - T W O
E
IAN HAD EXPRESSED DOUBTS, as she expected he would, but finally he agreed.
“It’s simply a matter of going to see him,” she said. “See him in the flesh.” She looked at him and saw that he was not convinced. She persisted. “It seems to me that there is an entirely rational explanation for what has happened to you. You have received the heart of a young man who died in rather sad circumstances. You have undergone all the psychological trauma that anybody in your position might expect. You’ve been brought up against your own mortality. You’ve . . . well, it may sound melodramatic, but you’ve looked at death. And you’ve har-boured a lot of feelings for the person who saved your life.”
He watched her gravely. “Yes,” he said. “All of that is right.
That’s how it has been. Yes.”
“These emotions of yours,” Isabel went on, “have taken their toll. They have to. They’ve been translated into physical symptoms. That’s old hat. It happens all the time. It’s nothing to do with any notion of cellular memory. It’s nothing to do with that at all.”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h
“But the face? Why should the face be that of his father?
His father—not my father.”
“The father of the heart,” mused Isabel. “That would be a good title for a book or a poem, wouldn’t it? Or, perhaps, The Father of My Heart. ”
Ian pressed her. “But why?”
They were sitting at one of the tables in Cat’s delicatessen during this conversation. Isabel looked away, to the other side of the shop, where Eddie was handing a baguette to a customer.
He was sharing a joke with the customer and laughing. He’s come a long way, thought Isabel. She turned back to face Ian.
“There are three possibilities,” she said. “One is that there really is some sort of cellular memory, and frankly I just don’t know about that. I’ve tried to keep an open mind, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more difficult it becomes to pin much on it. I’ve looked at some of the literature on memory, and the general view is that there just isn’t any convincing evidence for it—what there is seems anecdotal at best. I’m not New Age enough to believe in things for which there’s no verifiable evidence.” She thought for a moment. Was this too extreme? Some qualification might be necessary. “At least when it comes to matters of how the human body works. And memory is a bodily matter, isn’t it? So where does that leave us?
“The next possibility is sheer coincidence. And that, I think, is a more likely possibility than one might at first think. Our lives are littered with coincidences of one sort or another.”
“And the third?” asked Ian.
“The third is an entirely rational one,” said Isabel. “Some time, somewhere, after you had your operation, you saw something which pointed to the fact that the donor, your benefactor, was a young man called Gavin Macleod. Then, perhaps at the F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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same time, you saw a photograph of Gavin’s father. You may not even have been aware that your mind was reaching these conclusions.”
“Unlikely,” said Ian. “Very unlikely.”
Isabel raised an eyebrow. “But isn’t the whole thing completely unlikely? Isn’t it unlikely that you would have had these symptoms . . . these visions? Yet that is all very real to you, isn’t it?
And if something that unlikely can happen, then why shouldn’t there be further levels of unlikelihood?” She paused, assessing the effect of her remarks on him. He was looking down at his feet, almost in embarrassment. “What have you got to lose, Ian?”
For several minutes he said nothing, and then he had agreed, with the result that now they were making their way out to West Linton, with Isabel at the wheel of her old green Swedish car.
She rarely drove this car, which smelled of old, cracked leather and which, in spite of being largely neglected, never once in all its years had refused to start. I shall keep this car until I die, she had decided, a decision which had made her feel bound to the car in a curious way, as life partners are bound to each other.
Ian was silent, tense beside her. As they negotiated their way out of the Edinburgh traffic, he stared out of the window, balefully, thought Isabel, like a man on his way to punishment, a prisoner en route to a new, remoter jail. And even as they passed Carlops, and the evening sky to the west opened up with shafts of light, he did not respond beyond a murmur to Isabel’s remarks about the countryside. She left him to his mood and his silence, but just before they reached West Linton itself, he pointed to a house some distance off the road, a large stone house with windows facing a stretch of moor. The last rays of the sun had caught the roof of this house, picking it out in gold.