“Let’s hope,” said Grace, who had now opened a cupboard and was extracting a vacuum cleaner. As she brought it out and began to unwind the electric cord, she half turned to look at Isabel.
“I thought that you might be upset,” she said. “You and Jamie are so close. I thought that you might be . . .”
Isabel supplied the word. “Jealous?”
Grace frowned. “If you put it that way. Sorry to think that, it’s just that when I walked past that table the other day that’s how I felt. I don’t want her to have him. He’s ours, you see.”
Isabel laughed. “Yes, he is ours, or so we like to think. But 3 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h he isn’t really, is he? I had a dove. Do you know that line? The poet has a dove, and the sweet dove dies. But it could equally well fly away.”
“Your Mr. W. H. Auden?”
“Oh no, not him. But he did write about love quite a lot. And I suppose he must have felt very jealous, because he had a friend who went off with other people and all the time Auden was waiting in the background. It must have been very sad for him.”
“It’s all very sad,” said Grace. “It always is.”
Isabel thought about this. She would not allow herself to be sad; how sad to be sad. So she stood up briskly and rubbed her hands. “I’m going to have a scone with my coffee,” she said.
“Would you like one too?”
C H A P T E R F O U R
E
ISABEL HAD ARRANGED with Cat that she would call in at the delicatessen that afternoon and go over various matters. Cat was leaving for Italy the following day, and she wanted to make sure that Isabel knew how everything worked. Eddie knew most of the food-handling regulations and could see that everything was in order from that point of view, but Isabel would have to be shown the special customer list which gave the details of who needed what. And there was also the business of the burglar alarm, which was unduly complicated, and which must not be allowed to go off in error.
The delicatessen was only ten minutes’ walk from Isabel’s house. She made her way along Merchiston Crescent, past the line of Victorian flats that snaked along the south side of the road. Work was being done on the long building’s stonework, and several masons were standing on a scaffolding platform, while below them, at the foot of the structure, a stone-cutting machine whined and threw up dust. Isabel looked up and one of the men waved. Immediately to the side of the scaffolding, a woman stood at a window, looking out. Isabel knew who this woman was: the wife of a scholarly man who wrote obscure 3 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h books about pyramids and sacred geometry. This was one of the reassuring things about Edinburgh; if a person wrote about pyramids and sacred geometry, then the neighbours would know about it. In other cities even such an original might be anonymous.
She arrived at the delicatessen in Bruntsfield Place and found Cat standing be-aproned in the doorway.
“You look just like an old-fashioned grocer,” remarked Isabel.
“Standing there, waiting to welcome your customers.”
“I was thinking about a wedding present,” said Cat. “I suppose that they have everything they need, as everybody does these days.”
Much of it ill-gotten, Isabel said to herself, remembering the conversation about the gangster father. Though so much was ill-gotten, when one came to think of it. How did anybody become rich other than by exploiting others? And even those who did not exploit could enjoy the fruits of exploitation. Rich Western societies were wealthy because of imperialism, which had been a form of theft, and now the poor in those rich societies strove to obtain more generous payments from the state, which could only pay them because of the position of relative economic advantage which past plunder had set up. Living, just living, it seemed, meant that one had to participate in a crime; unless, of course, one changed one’s definition of a crime to include only those things that one did oneself. And surely this was the only practical way of looking at it. If we were all responsible for the misdeeds of the governments that represent us, thought Isabel, then the moral burden would be just too great.
With these burdens on her mind, she went inside, where Eddie, wearing the same style of apron as Cat, was opening F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
3 3
a large new hessian sack of wholewheat flour, leaving the unpicked neck open for customers to dig into with a scoop. He looked up at Isabel and smiled, which she thought was progress.
She walked over to him and held out her hand to shake his; Eddie lifted up his hand, which was covered in flour, and grinned.
Cat led the way into the small office which she kept at the back. It was a room which Isabel had always liked, with its shelves of samples and its well-thumbed Italian food producers’
catalogues. Her eye was caught by a large poster on the wall advertising Filippo Berio olive oiclass="underline" a man riding an old-fashioned bicycle down one of those dusty white roads which meander across the Tuscan countryside. Underneath the poster, Cat had pinned a leaflet from a Parmesan cheese factory which showed great rounds of cheese, hundreds of them, stacked up in a ware-house. She had been there, she thought, to that very factory, some years ago when she had been visiting a friend in Reggio Emilia, and they had gone to buy cheese direct from the factory.
There had been a mynah bird in a cage in the front office, where they cut and wrapped the cheese for visitors, and the bird had glared at the visitors before screeching, scatologically, Bagno, bagno! Later she had heard that the bird had been relegated to a cage outside after a visiting Brussels bureaucrat had complained that the hygiene regulations of the European Union, that vast pettifoggery, were being flouted by the juxtaposition of bird and cheese.
“You don’t have a sliver of Parmesan, do you?” she asked. “I have a sudden urge. Inexplicable.”
Cat laughed. “Of course. I’ve got a magnificent cheese which we’re working through at the moment. It’s just the right age and it’s delicious.” She stepped over to the door and called 3 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h out to Eddie, asking him to bring in a small piece of the cheese.
Then she took down a bottle from a shelf, uncorked it, and poured a small quantity of Madeira into a glass.
“Here,” she said. “This will be perfect with the Parmesan.”
Isabel sat down with Cat at her desk and went over the list which her niece had prepared for her. As she did so, she sipped at the Madeira, which was strong and nutty, and savoured the generous portion of cheese which Eddie had put on a plate for her. The cheese was rich and crumbly, a good cheese-mile away from the cardboard-like powder which people assumed was real Parmesan but which was nothing to do with Italy. Then, when everything had been explained, Cat passed over to her a small bunch of keys. Eddie would lock up that night, and the following morning Isabel would be in charge.
“I feel very responsible,” said Isabel. “All this food. The shop. Locks and keys. Eddie.”
“If anything goes wrong, just ask Eddie,” said Cat reassuringly. “Or you can call me in Italy. I’ll leave a number.”
“I won’t do that,” said Isabel. “Not at your wedding.”