“It isn’t really. Well, I suppose it’s important to me. I need to discuss something personal.” He paused. “I’ve met somebody, you see. I need to talk about that.”
She looked at the shelves of books. So many of them were F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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about duty, and obligation, and the sheer moral struggle of this life.
“That’s very good news,” she said. “I’m glad.”
“Glad?”
“Yes, of course,” she said. It was so easy to do the right thing, when the right thing involved just words; deeds might be more difficult. “I’m glad that you’ve met somebody. In fact, I think I saw her at the Queen’s Hall. She looked . . .” She paused. “Very nice.” The simple words were difficult.
“But she wasn’t there,” said Jamie.
Isabel frowned. “That girl in the interval . . .”
“Friend,” said Jamie.
C H A P T E R F I V E
E
SHE WAS THERE at the delicatessen the next morning a few minutes before Eddie arrived. One of the locks seemed stiff, and she had to struggle with it before it opened. Her fumblings triggered the alarm, and by the time she was inside, the first shrill braying of the klaxon could be heard. She rushed through to the office, where the system’s control panel was blinking in the half-light. She had committed the number to memory, but now, faced with the keypad and its array of numbers, only the mnemonic remained: the date of the fall of Constantinople. That was a date which she would never forget, of course, but now she did, remembering only Miss Macfarlane, the history teacher, in the black bombazine which she occasionally wore, perhaps out of deference to the headmistress, who wore nothing else, standing in front of the class of small girls in the room overlooking George Square and saying, A fatal year for the West, girls, a fatal year. We must not forget this date.
Isabel thought: We must not forget this date, girls, and it came back to her and promptly silenced the alarm. 1492. She felt relief, but then doubt, and confusion. Constantinople had fallen not in 1492, but in 1453 when Sultan Mehmed had F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
4 1
defeated the defenders. Remember, girls, that the Turk had more than one hundred thousand men, said Miss Macfarlane, and there were only ten thousand of us. Isabel had looked at Miss Macfarlane and wondered, but only for a moment. Miss Macfarlane was Scottish and yet she claimed affinity with the defenders of Constantinople. Us? And who was the Turk?
“In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,” she muttered,
“Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”
“And something happened in a place called Constantinople,”
said a voice behind her. “That’s what Cat said. That’s how we’re meant to remember the number.”
Isabel spun round. Eddie had entered, quietly, and was standing behind her. His suddenly announced presence had given her a fright, but it had at least solved the mystery. Cat had given her the number, written it down on her list, and at the same time had given the mnemonic that she used. And Isabel dutifully had committed the wrong mnemonic to memory, not thinking to correct it.
“That’s how errors are made,” she said to Eddie.
“You fed in the wrong number?”
“No, but Constantinople did not fall in 1492. It fell in 1453.
The Turk had over one hundred thousand men and we had only . . .” She paused. Eddie was looking confused. Of course he might never have been taught any history, she thought. Would he know who Mary, Queen of Scots, was? Or James VI? She looked at him, at the quiet, rather frightened young man whose life, she realised, had been ruined by something traumatic and who had done nothing to deserve that.
“You’re going to have to be patient with me,” she said to him.
“I really don’t know what I’m doing. And setting the alarm off like that was not very clever of me.”
4 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h He smiled at her, nervously, but still it was a smile. “It took me a long time to learn how to do this job,” he ventured. “I couldn’t remember the names of the cheeses for ages. Cheddar and Brie were all right—I knew those—but all those others, that took me ages.”
“Not your fault,” said Isabel. “I’m not bad on cheeses, and wines too, I suppose, but when it comes to spices, I always get them mixed up. Cardamom and all those things. I always forget the names.”
Eddie moved to switch on a light. The office had no outer window and the only light filtered in through the shop, past the coffee tables and the open-topped sacks of muesli and bas-mati rice.
“I usually start by getting the coffee going,” said Eddie. “We get a few people coming in for a coffee on the way to work.”
The delicatessen had three or four tables at which people could sit, purchase a cup of coffee, and read out-of-date Continental newspapers. There was always a copy of Le Monde and Corriere della Sera, and sometimes Spiegel, which Isabel found interesting because of its habit of publishing articles about the Second World War and German guilt. It was important to remember, and perhaps some Germans felt that they could never forget, but would there be a point at which those awful images of the past could be put away? Not if we want to avoid a repetition, said some, and the Germans took this very seriously, while others perhaps preferred to forget. The Germans deserved great credit for their moral seriousness, which is why Isabel liked them so much. Anyone—any people—was capable of doing what they did in their historical moment of madness—
and their goodness lay in the fact that they later faced up to F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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what they had done. Did the Turks go over their history with a moral fine-tooth comb? She was not aware of it, if they did, and nobody seemed to mention the genocide of the Armenians—an atrocity which was virtually within living memory—except the Armenians, of course.
And the Belgians, she suddenly remembered, who had passed a resolution in their Senate only a few years previously noting what had happened in Armenia. Some had said that was all very well, but then what about what Leopold did in the Congo? And were there not islanders, somewhere in the Pacific, whose ancestors stood accused of eating—yes, eating the original inhabitants of the lands they occupied? Most unfortunate.
And then there were the British who behaved extremely badly in so many parts of the world. There was the woeful story of the extinction of the Tasmanian aboriginals and so many other instances of cruelty and theft under the bright protection of the Union Jack. When would British history books face up to the appalling British contribution to slavery, which involved the Arabs, too, and numerous Africans (who were not just on the receiving end)? We were all as bad as one another, but at some point we had to overlook that fact, or at least not make too much of it. History, it seemed, could so quickly become a matter of mutual accusation and recrimination, an infinite regress of cruelty and oppression, unless forgetfulness or forgiveness intervened.
All of this was very interesting, but nothing to do with the running of a delicatessen. Isabel reminded herself of this and opened the safe with the code which Cat had noted down for her: 1915. The year that the Turks fell upon the Armenians, Isabel noted, though Cat could hardly have intended that. She 4 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h had never heard Cat mention the Armenians—not once. Nineteen fifteen were the last four digits of Cat’s telephone number, an altogether more prosaic choice.