“No,” said Ian. “That’s not what I meant. What I meant was, does the mother of the donor know that this man could have been the hit-and-run driver?”
The question surprised Isabel. She had not thought about that, but it was an obvious possibility. She had assumed that she did not, but what if she did? That put a very different complexion on the matter.
“If she knows, then she’d be sheltering the person who killed her son,” she said. “Would any mother do that, do you think?”
Ian thought for a moment before giving his answer. “Yes,” he said. “Many would. These domestic killings that occur from time to time—the woman often shelters the man. A violent partner harms one of the children. The woman stays silent. Perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of helplessness. Perhaps out of misplaced loyalty. It’s not uncommon.”
Isabel thought back to her conversation with Rose Macleod. She remembered her expression of eagerness when Isabel had revealed that she might have some information on the incident. That had not been feigned, she thought. Nor was she mistaken about the man’s anxiety, shown in the tension of his body language when she had broached the subject—a tension which had visibly dissipated when she had come up with a description of the driver which so clearly excluded him.
“I’m sure that she doesn’t know,” she said. “I really think she doesn’t.”
“Very well,” Ian said. “She doesn’t know. Now what?”
Isabel laughed. “Precisely. Now what?”
“We can go to the police,” Ian said quietly. “We can just hand the thing over.”
“Which will lead to nothing happening,” said Isabel. “The police aren’t going to go and accuse him of being the driver on the basis of what they will probably call a dream.”
She saw that he agreed with this, and she continued, “So the issue now is whether we have a duty to go and inform that woman that the man with whom she lives was possibly the hit-and-run driver who killed her son. Just possibly, note. The whole argument is based, after all, on the pretty shaky premise that your vision has anything to do with anything. A very shaky premise.
“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 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.
IN CAT’S DELICATESSEN, 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.
“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?”
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 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. Whe
re 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.
She thanked Eddie for the coffee and he beamed at her. “Did that Italian phone you yet?” he asked.
Isabel looked at him blankly. “Italian?”
“Tomasso. He was in here earlier today. He asked Cat for your telephone number.”
Isabel glanced down at her coffee. “No,” she said. “He hasn’t phoned.”
She felt strangely agitated. She had offered to show him round the city—that was all—but the prospect of his getting in touch with her had an unexpected effect on her.
Eddie bent forward. “Cat’s giving him no encouragement,” he whispered. “I don’t think that she thinks much of him.”
Isabel raised an eyebrow. “Maybe she doesn’t want him to feel that there’s more to it than friendship,” she said.
“I feel sorry for him,” said Eddie. “To come over all the way from Italy to see her and then this.”
Isabel smiled. “I suspect that he can look after himself,” she said. “He doesn’t strike me as being the vulnerable type.”
Eddie nodded. “Maybe,” he said.
He moved away. It was the longest conversation that Isabel had ever had with him, and she was surprised by the fact that Eddie had picked up on Cat’s attitude towards Tomasso. She had assumed that he would be indifferent to such matters, but now she realised that this might be a serious underestimation of the young man’s powers of observation. And of his inner life too, she thought. We ignore quiet people, the shy observers, the bystanders; we forget that they are watching.
She returned to her perusal of the Corriere della Sera, but it was difficult for her to concentrate. She thought of Tomasso, and of when she might expect his call. She wondered what he would want to do in Edinburgh. There were museums and galleries, of course; all the usual sites of Scottish history, but she was not sure whether that would be what he wanted. Perhaps he would want to go out to dinner somewhere; she could arrange that. Cat would not come, presumably, and it would just be the two of them. What would Tomasso eat? He would not be a vegetarian, she thought: Italians were not vegetarians. They drank, they womanised, they sang; oh, blissful race of heroes!
She looked at the paper and struggled with a review of a book about suppressed photographs of Mussolini. Il Duce, apparently, took a strong interest in his appearance in photographs—well, she thought, he was an Italian dictator, and if Italian dictators aren’t stylish, then which dictators would be? The paper showed a few samples. Mussolini on a horse, looking ridiculous, like a sack of potatoes, or spaghetti perhaps. Mussolini with a group of nuns flocking around him like excited sparrows. (He did not like to be in the same photograph as nuns or clerics of any sort; and why was that? Isabel asked herself. Guilt, of course.) Mussolini dressed as an aviator, with white jacket and white flying helmet, in an open cockpit aeroplane—he pretended to be able to fly while the plane was actually controlled by a real pilot, crouching on the floor. And when he entered the lion cage at Rome Zoo, a splendid show of public bravado, the lions had been drugged; they would have had no appetite that day for a stout dictator! She smiled as she read the review. What a distance now stood between those days and these; ancient history to so many people, but just one generation, really, and did not Italy still come up with flashy, vain politicians who were often on the wrong side of the law? And yet how could one not love Italy and the Italians; they were so very human, built such gorgeous cities, and made such good, loyal friends. If one had to choose a nationality, in the anteroom of birth, would it not be tempting to choose to be an Italian? Isabel thought it would be, although the options might all be taken up before it was one’s turn and the grim news would be given: We’re sorry, but you’re going to have to be something else. What, she wondered, would be the most difficult identity to bear? Probably that of being something in the wrong place—one of those obscure minorities in some distant republic where all hands, and hearts, were turned against one.
So absorbed was Isabel in these ruminations that she did not notice the other tables in the delicatessen filling up. When she lowered the paper and reached for her cup of coffee, now cold from neglect, she saw that a number of people had entered the shop. Cat was at the counter attending to customers, and Eddie was hunched over the coffee machine in the background. Isabel looked at the new arrivals and immediately froze. Two tables away, near the large basket of baguettes, were Rose Macleod and her partner, Graeme. They had both been served coffee by Eddie and were talking to one another. Graeme had in his hand a list which he showed to Rose, who nodded.
Isabel did not want to see them. Her embarrassment over her encounter with them was still fresh in her mind, and she did not imagine that they would particularly want to see her. She quickly looked down again at her paper. If she sat there, absorbed in the news from Italy, they might not notice and they would eventually go away. But what if Cat came over to speak to her, or Eddie topped up her coffee? That would draw attention to her.
She tried to concentrate on the newspaper, but could not. After reading the same sentence three times, the meaning jumbled in her mind, she sneaked a glance at the other table, and looked directly into Rose’s stare. Now she could not very well look away, and so she began to force a smile of recognition. The other woman was clearly shocked by the encounter; she smiled too, hesitantly, raised a hand in a gesture of greeting, and then dropped it again as if uncertain that it had been the right thing to do.
Isabel lowered her eyes to the paper again. She felt calmer; they had met, greeted one another after a fashion, and that would be that—they could go their separate ways. She thought, though, that if she had had the courage she would have walked across to the couple’s table and told Rose that she had misled her. Then she might have made a confession as to why she had come to see her in the first place. She could have given them the full facts, related Ian’s extraordinary experiences, and left it up to them to decide what to do about them. And if there were any remaining public duty, she could have encouraged Ian to contact the police and tell them too. And that would have been the end of the whole affair. But she did not do this, and thus remained enmeshed in a situation which was causing her growing moral discomfort.
She looked again at the couple. Graeme was leaning forward and saying something to Rose, something urgent and angry. Rose was listening, but shaking her head. Graeme’s manner seemed to become more animated. She saw him lay a finger on the tabletop and move it up and down in a fussy, insistent way, as if emphasising a point. Then he turned and looked in Isabel’s direction, and she saw a look of pure malevolence directed at her. Meeting his gaze was like being assaulted physically—a tidal wave of dislike and contempt, moving across the room and crushing her.
He stood up, reached for his coat, and walked away from the table. Rose watched him leave. She almost got to her feet, but then sa
nk back into her chair. Once he was out of the door, she reached for her cup of coffee, picked it up, and made her way over to Isabel’s table.
“Do you mind?” Rose asked. “Do you mind my joining you?” She put down her cup alongside the Corriere della Sera. “You do remember me, don’t you? Rose Macleod. You came to my house.”
Isabel indicated the empty chair. “Please sit down. Of course I remember you. I wanted to say how sorry . . .”
Rose cut her off. “Please,” she said. “I’m the one who should be sorry about what happened. Graeme was very short with you when you came to the house. He shouldn’t have said what he did. I was very cross with him.”
Isabel had not expected this. “He had every right to be angry with me,” she said. “I barged into your house like that and told you something that, well, was just not true.”
Rose frowned. Isabel noticed the high cheekbones and the delicacy of her features. She was an even more attractive woman than she had appeared to be when Isabel had seen her first. There was a particular delicacy in her face, a sorrow perhaps. The sorrowing face is, in a way, a calm face. There is no complexity and change: just one constant emotion.
“Not true?” Rose asked.
Isabel sighed. “I’m not a medium,” she said. “That was utter nonsense. I had intended to say something quite different to you, and then I panicked and made up that ridiculous story.” She paused. She could see that her disclosure was not being well received.
“Then why did you say . . .” Rose could not continue. Her disappointment was written on her face.
Isabel reached a decision. The whole ridiculous situation needed to be resolved. She had to get back to truth and rationality and put an end to this absurd dalliance with the paranormal. “I’m going to have to tell you a rather odd story,” she said. “I don’t come out of it very well, I’m afraid, but I suppose I might say in my defence that I was well intentioned.”