“MADELEINE CAKES,” said Peter Stevenson. “Isn’t that what they call these?”

“Yes,” said Isabel, looking at the small shell-shaped French cake on the plate beside her coffee.

They were sitting in La Barantine in Bruntsfield, at one of the two tables that gave a good view of passers-by on the pavement directly outside. It was at such an hour of the morning that the sunlight, slicing over the high roof-tops, cast a square of buttery light on their table. Before them were two steaming cups of milky coffee, their foamy surfaces decorated with a delicate fern-leaf pattern. Vuillard or Bonnard might have painted this scene, thought Isabel; the tables, their covers, the display case of delicacies—it was all a tiny island of colour and comfort that would not have been out of place in an intimiste painting: Man and Woman in a Café, Morning, perhaps, or Madame Dalhousie prend du café avec M. Stevenson. She liked the titles given to paintings; they could be so pithy and poetic, first lines of incomplete haiku.

Isabel often bumped into Peter at the fish shop, or sometimes in the supermarket where they both shopped, and they would occasionally have a cup of coffee together when they had completed their tasks. On this occasion, though, she had phoned him and asked him to meet her.

“I have to pick your brains,” she said. “Bring Susie too.”

“She’s at her bookshop.”

“Then just you.”

“About?”

“Lighthouses.”

He had laughed. “I think you may be confusing me with the other Stevensons,” he said. “But, as it happens, I know a bit about lighthouses. Not a lot—a bit. You probably need to talk to the real experts.”

“One doesn’t need to know too much about lighthouses,” said Isabel. “Although I assume there are those who know a great deal about them…” She wondered what they would be like—these lighthouse experts; not the life and soul of the party, she imagined; they would be people who liked the idea of isolation and getting away from their fellow men.

And now, sitting with Peter in the café, she told him about Kirsten and Harry. Peter was a good listener, and waited until she had finished the story before he said anything.

“So,” she said as she came to an end. “There you have it. Kirsten is anxious and the boy…well, he’s fairly matter-of-fact about it all. He doesn’t seem to think that it’s at all unusual. Children are like that, I suppose—they accept things we would find very strange.”

Peter took a bite of his madeleine. “I love these cakes,” he said.

Isabel slipped hers, untouched, from her plate to his, and he smiled at the gift.

“I wondered about this lighthouse he talked about,” she said.

Peter wiped a crumb from his lips. “Let’s get to that in a moment. What interests me is what you make of him—of Harry?”

“In what sense?”

“Well, is he…how might one put it? Does he seem balanced? No, that sounds odd. Does he strike you as being a normal little boy?”

She answered without hesitation. “Yes—as far as I know. I didn’t have much time with him when they came round. But he seemed to be absolutely normal. He was very interested in Charlie’s collection of toy cars. He was very straightforward.”

“And her? The mother?”

Isabel shrugged. “Nothing unusual—apart from her obvious anxiety over all this. Certainly, she expressed herself well.”

“Not a neurotic mother then?”

“Not at all. Solid, I would have thought, but not one to look for anything exceptional in her child.”

Peter stared out of the window. “And was he telling the truth, do you think?” He paused. “Or rather, do you think he himself believed what he was saying? That can be different from telling the truth.”

“I know what you mean. Something said in good faith may be false; that doesn’t make it a lie. I don’t think Harry was telling lies. No, I don’t think he was.”

“Although that line gets a bit blurred in children, doesn’t it?”

She nodded. “You’re right.”

Peter was silent for a while. Then he said, “You don’t believe any of this reincarnation business, do you?”

She was about to say “No, of course not,” but she stopped herself. There was some evidence, she thought, but it was impossible to say whether it had any weight. People came up with what they claimed was evidence for all sorts of unlikely things—for UFOs, for the Bermuda Triangle, for telepathy, even for the Loch Ness Monster. But close examination of this purported evidence tended to reveal its shaky foundations, particularly when it came to the Loch Ness Monster, which had somehow avoided affording an opportunity for anything but the grainiest and most ambiguous of photographs. No, there was never any satisfactory proof of any of these unusual phenomena, and yet the absence of proof was not grounds for denying the existence of something. We might believe that things did not exist because we had no evidence for their existence, but they still existed—in spite of our ignorance.

Peter smiled. “You seem a bit unsure?”

She attempted to explain herself. “I have no reason to believe in it,” she said. “But that’s not the same as saying I deny the possibility it’s true. I’ve done a bit of reading about it, you see, especially since I first heard of this boy. Most people who reject these things out of hand have never bothered to look at all closely. So what I’d say is this: reincarnation is a possibility. I don’t think it likely or probable, but it could exist, for all we know.”

She knew that she sounded vague, but then doubt never was all that convincing. She looked at him almost apologetically, as one does when one says something that one does not expect to be believed.

Peter said, “I’ve never seen any evidence.”

She remembered something. “Funny…” It had only just occurred to her. “It’s a bit of a coincidence.”

“What?”

“Your name. Stevenson.”

He looked at her blankly. “I don’t see what you’re driving at.” And then: “Oh, lighthouses? Of course.”

“No, not that. Reincarnation. Past lives. One of the books I read—no, I think two of them—were by a Professor Stevenson. I’d forgotten that.”

“Nothing to do with me.”

“No, I wasn’t suggesting that. It’s just that one of the people who looked into this seriously was a Professor Stevenson. I forget what his first name was…No, it was Ian. Ian Stevenson. I found out a bit about him.”

Peter was interested. “Well, I hope I have an open mind. Tell me.”

“He was a psychiatrist—Canadian, I think, but he spent most of his working life in the States. He was a professor at the University of Virginia. As I recall, he became interested in reincarnation because he felt that certain psychiatric conditions could not be explained in conventional medical terms—or their origins couldn’t—and that issues might have been inherited from a previous existence.”

Peter looked sceptical. “A bit of a surmise, I’d have thought.”

“Possibly. But what he did then was to look very carefully at people’s claims to have lived before. He travelled all over the world interviewing all sorts of people. Some of them were children—I suppose, children like Harry—who were convinced that they had had a past life. He considered them through a psychiatrist’s eyes, so to speak. Took case histories and so on.”

“And?”

“And he ended up concluding that there was enough evidence to suggest reincarnation as the most likely explanation. To suggest it.”

Peter then asked if to suggest something was different from proving it. “It sounds more tentative,” he said.

“Yes. I suppose it implies that the jury’s still out.”

He sat back in his chair. “And that’s your view too? Do you think that the jury’s still out?”

She had no hesitation on that. “Of course. I think, too, it’s highly unlikely.” But did she? She felt uncertain, even as she spoke. “Well, no, what I think is this—I think…”

He laughed. “You think you think…”

“No, what I know I think…What I think is this: It’s highly unlikely that people have lived past lives. I suspect—and this is just what I believe is the likely explanation—that all these cases can be explained in terms of imagination. Or where imagination is not at play, they can be explained in some other way. They may be instances of sheer coincidence, for instance, or they may be based on memories based on information laid down in the mind and then forgotten.” She saw he was nodding, and she continued: “There are so many things we take in subconsciously and are unaware we ever saw. There is plenty of lumber like that in our minds.”

Peter liked the word lumber. “The lumber of the mind,” he said. “Very nice.”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Our minds are full of lumber.”

He dwelt on it. “It’s a great word: lumber. It’s what you find in lumber rooms. Things that are stored.”

“Yes,” she said. “And useless things in general—things we’re lumbered with. Stuff in the attic that we’ll never use.”

She took a sip of her coffee, which had become cold. That was the trouble with conversation in a café: it cooled the coffee. Peter noticed, and signalled to the young woman behind the counter to bring them fresh cups. “Back to your professor,” he said. “Perhaps I should look at one of his books.”

“I can lend you one. I bought a copy of the book he wrote on unlearned language. I could pass it on. It’s extremely interesting, even if one ends up saying: well, maybe…or well, not really.”

“Unlearned language?”

“There’s a technical term for it,” she said. “Xenoglossy. It’s the ability to speak a language you’ve never learned. Some people appear to do so under hypnosis; they’re put into a trance and they start talking as another personality. It’s regression.”

Peter gave her a sideways look. “Isabel,” he said. “Don’t get caught up in all that business—it’s an awful waste of time. You’ll end up like that housekeeper of yours. Does she still go off to those séances?”

“She does. And I assure you I have no intention of getting involved in that sort of thing.” She sighed. “All I’m doing is trying to help this woman who, whatever one may think, is genuinely troubled. Now, I think it’s possible to do this without being so sceptical that one simply dismisses the entire phenomenon out of hand.”

Peter appeared chastened. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re quite right. It’s just that I don’t usually find myself sitting down and talking about people who speak languages they’ve never learned. It just seems so odd.” He paused. Their fresh coffee had been brought to the table, along with another madeleine cake each. Isabel again gave him hers.

“Four madeleines in one morning,” said Peter.

“They’re very small.”

“Perhaps I’ll start talking French.”

She said, “But you’ve learned it. I wouldn’t be fooled.”

He pointed to her coffee. “Don’t let it get cold this time. But tell me, anyway, what did he decide about these people and their unlearned language?”

“He decided that it was inexplicable in conventional terms. There are two main cases he writes about in the book: a woman called Gretchen in the United States and a woman in India. Gretchen appeared when the wife of a Methodist minister was put into a hypnotic trance. She spoke German, although the minister’s wife had never had any exposure to German. He went into that aspect of it very carefully. She had been brought up in a place where there were just no German speakers. And she had very specific things to say about a place in Germany and about events that happened there—in German, although apparently her grammar was not particularly good.”

Peter shivered. “Sorry,” he said. “I find this just a bit spooky.”

She agreed. “Yes, it is. So let’s talk about lighthouses.”

“I wondered when they’d come up.”

She explained to him about Harry’s description of a lighthouse. “I thought I’d ask you about it. I knew that you had an interest in the subject, although you aren’t a direct descendant of the lighthouse Stevensons, are you?” The lighthouse Stevensons were the family of Scottish engineers who over several generations had built most of the country’s lighthouses.

“Not really,” he said. “There’s a distant connection, but it’s pretty tenuous. Still, I’ve read that book about them. I found it rather interesting. And I’ve visited quite a few of the lighthouses over in the west. I rather like them, actually. They’re in beautiful spots, of course.”

She gave him the description, as given to her by Harry, and Peter thought for a moment. “It sounds like Ardnamurchan,” he said. “Have you been up there?”

She had. She and Jamie had spent a few days in Argyll when she was pregnant with Charlie, and they had visited the Ardnamurchan peninsula. She remembered the lighthouse, which was a large one and in a dramatic position on the most westerly point of the Scottish mainland.

“If you’re looking for a view of a big island behind a small island,” Peter said, “then that fits, don’t you think? If you look up the coast from Ardnamurchan Point, you see Skye in the distance. But there are the Small Isles in front of it—between you and Skye. Muck’s the smallest of them, but there’s Eigg and Rum just behind it. You probably don’t see Canna—well, you might; I suppose it depends on the angle. Anyway, that sounds a bit like it to me.”

She asked him whether he could think of any other possibilities. “There might be, but this is the one that springs to mind.” He hesitated. “Unless, of course, you’re thinking of the lighthouse on the Cairns of Coll. That’s a Stevenson lighthouse, I think, but nowhere near as big as the one on Ardnamurchan Point. You’d see Skye and the Small Isles from there, but the Cairns of Coll are just a small group of islands and they haven’t been inhabited since some time back—the nineteenth century, maybe earlier. So they wouldn’t really fit the bill, would they?”

Isabel said that she thought it all pointed to Ardnamurchan.

“Well,” he said, “at least that narrows it down. Are you going to try to find this house? Is that what you’re planning?”

“I haven’t planned very much. But I suppose that’s what Kirsten—the mother—would like me to do.”

“Even if it’s a wild-goose chase?”

“Even if it’s that. I think I’ll try.”

Peter sipped at his coffee. “I could help you, I think.”

“You mean you’d go up to Ardnamurchan?”

He shook his head. “No, I can’t get away at present, I’m afraid—much as I’d like to take Susie up there for a couple of days. No, what I meant is that I know somebody there who knows everything there is to know about the history of the place and who’s who. He’s one of those people who’s steeped in local knowledge. He could be helpful.”

“He would be,” agreed Isabel. “Could you get in touch with him?”

“I’ll phone him,” said Peter. “He’s called Neil Starling. It’s a rather nice name, isn’t it? All those bird names are rather appealing, I think. He and I were at university together. He took over his father’s accountancy business in Edinburgh and then he inherited a house up there from an uncle. He gave up the business in Edinburgh, and he and his wife upped sticks for Ardnamurchan. She hadn’t been particularly well, and I think it just suited them. He loved it, and became fascinated with the history of the place. He learned Gaelic as well and started a Gaelic choir with some local people. I think they were quite good.”

She thanked him. Peter never let her down when she sought information—about virtually anything.

He pointed at her coffee. “You haven’t drunk a drop of it. It’s going to be cold.”

She picked up her cup. “No, it’s fine.”

She looked at the last-remaining madeleine cake. “Can you take back gifts?” she asked.

“Is that a general moral question you’re asking me?”

She smiled. “No, it’s specifically to do with the second madeleine cake I gave you. I’d like to eat it, you see. I’ve changed my mind.”

He moved the cake back to her plate. “Of course. That will mean I’ve only had three. I shall feel less guilty.”

She picked up the tiny cake and tasted it. “Very nice.” And at that moment she saw somebody she knew walking past the window of the café. Peter followed her gaze.

“That’s John Scott Moncrieff, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Isabel.

She looked at the half-consumed madeleine cake. “A pure coincidence,” she muttered.

Peter looked puzzled. “I don’t get it,” he said. “What’s pure coincidence?”

“John’s some connection—a great-nephew or something like that—of C. K. Scott Moncrieff who was…”

“Proust’s translator.”

“Exactly. His version of À la recherche has never been equalled.” Isabel gestured towards her plate and what remained of the cake. “And who ate madeleines? The young Marcel. Remember how he dipped his madeleine into tea and felt all those feelings and memories wash over him. All evoked by the taste of the madeleine. It was the most famous Proustian moment of all.”

“Of course.”

“And here I am eating a madeleine and Proust’s translator’s great-nephew or whatever he is walks right past.”

Peter took a final sip of his coffee. “It proves nothing,” he said. “And I mean that semi-seriously.”

Isabel laughed. “Oh well,” she said. “One shouldn’t let a Proustian moment stand between one and the rest of a madeleine.”

She put the rest of the cake into her mouth and closed her eyes. She saw a lighthouse, high on a promontory, and the sea beyond, with a fishing boat. The boat was moving slowly, describing a white line of wake over which gulls dipped and mewed. Beyond the fishing boat she saw an island, and an island behind that, a distant mountainous coast of attenuated blue, washed so faint as to merge with the sky.