Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 05 Read Free Page B

different ways.
    Grace had friends, but Isabel was not sure whether they were the sort to meet one another for dinner; somehow she thought they were not. Many of these friends, although not all, were members of the spiritualist circle to which Grace belonged, and Isabel felt as if she knew them from the accounts which Grace gave of their meetings. The previous evening, for instance, when she and Jamie had been at the dinner in Ramsay Garden, Grace had been at a spiritualist meeting, and one of her friends, Georgina, had received a message.
    â€œI know that you have your doubts about it,” Grace informed Isabel, as she began to load the dishwasher. “But there was a very good medium at the meeting last night. A man from Lerwick, a Shetlander. You don’t often get mediums from up north. It’s the first time, in fact, that we’ve had anybody from the Shetland Islands—or even from Orkney.”
    Isabel looked up from her crossword. She had heard about Georgina, who looked after an aged mother in Leith and whose husband had died on a North Sea oil platform. There had been an explosion, Grace had told her, and Georgina had been left alone with her aged mother. It was the explosion, Isabel imagined, that had begun the path that led to the spiritualist meetings and the quest for a message from the other side.
The other side
—that was what Grace called it, although Isabel preferred
the other shore,
if one were to have an expression for a place whose existence was debatable. How crowded that shore must be, she thought, and how lost the wraiths upon it, jostling one another, waiting for some ghostly ferry; but she immediately reproached herself for the thought. If people needed to believe in the existence of another shore, then who was she to deny them that comfort? And Isabel had enough humility to recognise that there might come a time when she would take comfort in just such language and precisely such a notion. Perhaps that time had already come; if the miracle of Charlie had done anything for her, it had made her more convinced that a life without a spiritual dimension—whatever form that spiritual dimension took—was a shallow one. Not that this would ever induce her to await a message from one of Grace’s mediums…
    â€œAnd this man—this Shetlander—had a message for Georgina?”
    Grace nodded. “He did.”
    Isabel looked down at the crossword.
A timely spirit?
Zeitgeist, of course. Another coincidence.
    â€œWhat did he say? Anything specific?”
    When she replied, Grace’s tone was cagey. “He said quite a bit. There was somebody on the other side who had seen her husband. That was the message.”
    Isabel’s eyes widened. “Seen him? In the flesh?” She could not help wondering: If the husband had died in an explosion, then what if…what if he was not all there? Or did the bits come back together again on the other side?
    Grace sighed. “The other side is part of the spirit world,” she said. “I did tell you, you know. We don’t have the same form once we’ve crossed over.”
    Isabel wondered how people recognised one another if they did not have the same form. Or did knowledge in that dimension not depend on the senses? She wanted to ask Grace about this, but the words died on her lips. Her question would not sound serious, however careful she was in the framing of it, and Grace, who was sensitive on these matters, would take offence, would become taciturn. It was just too easy to poke fun at spiritualist beliefs; Madame Arcati and her blithe spirits never seemed far away, with their knocking once for yes and twice for no and all their Delphic predictions.
    She folded up her newspaper and rose to her feet. As editor—and now owner—of the
Review of Applied Ethics,
Isabel was free of the tyranny of office hours, but she was conscientious to a fault. She had worked out that the editing of the journal