Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

In this delightful second installment in Alexander McCall Smith's bestselling detective series, the irrepressibly curious Isabel Dalhousie gets caught up in a highly unusual affair of the heart.

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She moved towards the telephone, but stopped. The hopeless admirer would be eager to call the object of her affections. She was not that. She was the independent woman who happened to have a friendship with a young man. She would not behave like some overly eager spinster, desperate for any scrap of contact with the man on whom her affections had settled. She would not telephone him. If he wanted to speak to her, then he would be the one to do the calling. She immediately felt ashamed, it was a thought worthy of a moody, plotting teenager, not of a woman of her age and her experience of life. She closed her eyes for a moment: this was a matter of will, of voluntas. She was not enamoured of Jaimie; she was pleased that he had found a girlfriend. She was in control.

“Chocolate involves major philosophical problems,” she said. “ It shows us a lot about temptation and self-control.” She thought for a moment. There was a lot that one might say about chocolate, if one thought about it. “ Yes,” she concluded,” chocolate is a great test, isn’t it?”.

Isabel imagined what it would be like to give to others the gift of love. Not from oneself – as that may be unwanted – but from those whose love the recipient yearned for. Such a power that would be, she thought. Here my dear, is the girl whom you have admired for so long, and yes, she is yours. And here, for you, is that desirable boy whose eye you have so long tried to catch, in vain; well, try catching it now.

But clichés came from somewhere, and that was why they tended to have a measure of truth in them. If Italy was not romantic, then what country was?

We cannot choose the situations in which we become involved in this life; we are caught up in them whether we like it or not. If one encounters the need of another, because of who one happens to be, or where one happens to find oneself, and one is in a position to help, then one should do so. It was as simple as that.

She was not sure if she would want him to have known; we do not always wish for those for whom we long to know that we long for them, especially if the longing is impossible, or inappropriate. It was so easy, for instance, for a middle-aged man to fall for a young woman because of her beauty, or her litheness, or some such quality, and in most cases the response from the young woman would be one of horror, or rejection; to be loved by the unlovable was not something that most people could cope with. And so feelings should be concealed, as she had concealed her feelings from Jaimie – or so she hoped.

“You’re very nice as you are,” he muttered. “Don’t change.”

“He’s one of those men who listens to what you have to say. I always like that. A gentlemen.”

“Of course, you may not be the only one to like him.”

Peace was dull; conflict and violence were exciting.

The artist had painted a road that led off towards the horizon, green fields on either side, hills in the distance, but that stopped short, before it reached any destination. And that, she had been told by the person beside her, was because the artist knew that his life was going to be a short one. He knew.

Her mother, whose face she saw sometimes at night, as if she had never gone away, and who was still there, as we often think of the dead, in the background, like a cloud of love, against which weather we conduct our lives.

“I haven’t told her. I haven’t told her about anything.”
“Is that wise?”
“Probably not. But don’t we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?”
Isabel looked into his eyes for a moment. Yes. He was right.

There would have to be a paper on the moral issues raised by chocolate; the more she thought of it, the richer became the philosophical dimensions of chocolate. It brought akrasia, weakness of the will, into sharp focus. If we know that chocolate is bad for us (and in some respects chocolate is bad for us, in the sense that it makes us put on weight), then how is that we end up eating too much of it? That suggests that our will is weak. But if we eat chocolate, then it must be that we think that it is in our best interests to do so; our will moves us to do what we know we will like. So our will is not weak-it is actually quite strong, and prompts us to do that which we really want to do (to eat chocolate). Chocolate was not simple.

She was not a love-struck girl abandoned by a petulant boyfriend.

There were countless injustices and difficulties in this world, but small points of light too, where the darkness was held back.