Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 06

by The Lost Art of Gratitude

  “Of course, Charlie will practise diligently,” Isabel had said. “When he starts playing his …” She looked at Jamie. He had said something once about miniature bassoons—something called a tenoroon. Somehow she could not picture a reduced bassoon, with miniature levers and shrunken key-work, being played by Charlie in his Macpherson tartan rompers.

  Jamie understood her hesitation as a sign that it would be for him to decide the shape of Charlie’s musical education.

  “Violin,” he said. “Let’s start him on strings. And anyway, they can’t blow wind instruments until they’re much older. Nine is probably the earliest. Before that their lungs aren’t strong enough and they can easily damage their lips. The muscles around the lips are still forming, you see.”

  She smiled at the thought of Charlie with his unformed lips and a violin. He would attempt to eat it if she gave him one now, but they could start when he was three, which would come soon enough. And then, after the violin, when he was old enough, ten or so, he could learn the Highland bagpipes, starting on a practice chanter before proceeding to a real set, ebony drones and all, to the full, primeval wail that sent shivers down the spine. He would wear the kilt—Macpherson tartan again—and play the pipes; oh, Charlie, dear little Charlie.

  That Friday, Jamie had no commitments and Isabel decided that, although she might take advantage of his presence to do some work in the earlier part of the morning, she would suggest that they should all go into town for lunch together. She had promised to see her accountant, but she had been putting it off; he had telephoned with an offer to come and see her if she would not come to him. She felt guilty about that, as he was a mild man with the air of one who was long-suffering, as no doubt he was.

  “I can only do so much with the figures I’m given, Isabel,” he had told her. “I can’t make things up, you know; we don’t work that way.” She wondered whether this implied that she worked that way—making things up.

  She had assured him she would give him what he wanted, and had dutifully put printing bills and postage receipts for the Review into a folder … until she had somehow forgotten. She had scrambled around and a few missing receipts had turned up, but not everything, she suspected.

  “I have to see Ronnie,” she said to Jamie. “I have to give him some papers. It shouldn’t take too long. Then we can go to Glass and Thompson for lunch. Charlie likes their quiche.” And he had indeed liked it on their last visit, even if most of it had ended up on the floor around the table. Charlie had sophisticated likes, his parents were finding out to their surprise; he enjoyed olives, and would wave his hands at the sight of quail eggs. It was almost a parody of the tastes of the privileged baby and Isabel felt slightly embarrassed at the thought of it. She did not remember giving him his first olive—it would never have occurred to her to do so; had Jamie done that? And quail eggs? Would it be oysters next? It was Jamie, she decided; he tended to feed Charlie with whatever they were eating, and Charlie never refused anything from his father.

  Jamie was happy with the suggestion. Isabel could make an early start in her study while he took Charlie down to the canal in the jogging pushchair, the one that allowed him to run while pushing. Then Charlie could have his mid-morning sleep and be bright and ready for the outing into town.

  They breakfasted together. Jamie, who did not like to eat anything very much before a run, had a cup of milky coffee and a slice of toast spread with Marmite. Charlie had rather more: a small carton of strawberry yoghurt, mashed-up boiled egg on fingers of toast, and an olive, stoned, of course, and cut into four minute parts.

  Grace arrived before they had left the table. She fussed over Charlie, who waved his arms enthusiastically, his unambiguous signal of pleasure.

  “Pleased to see me?” cooed Grace, hanging her hemp shopping bag on the hook on the back of the kitchen door. “Of course you are, you wee champion! And what’s that they’re giving you to eat? An olive. Surely not? Bairns don’t like olives, no they don’t.”

  Isabel glanced at Jamie, who smiled, and looked away; disagreements between Isabel and Grace were not his affair, and he tried to keep out of them. Privately he sided with Isabel and she knew that she had his support, but they were both aware that it did not help to declare it.

  “Some bairns do,” said Isabel. “This one, for example.”

  Grace ignored this. Still addressing Charlie, she continued, “It’ll be quail eggs next, my goodness! And caviar after that.”

  “Small children like all sorts of things,” said Isabel. “They’re people, after all, and people have peculiar tastes and beliefs.” The reference to beliefs slipped in; she had not really intended it, but it rounded off the observation nicely, and was tossed in rather like a depth-charge, thought Jamie. He looked at Isabel with concern. There had been a discussion between the two women the previous week about feng shui, in which Grace had enthused about chi forces and Isabel had expressed the view that they simply did not exist. If they did, she said, then surely we could detect them with some sort of electronic apparatus. This reference to peculiar beliefs was about that, Jamie thought. The debates about olives and chi forces were minutely intertwined.

  Grace had stood her ground during that discussion. “There are plenty of things nobody can see,” she said. “What about that particle thingy that they’re trying to find. That Higgs bison, or whatever.”

  “Boson,” Jamie had interjected. “Higgs boson. It’s a sort of …”

  “Boson,” said Isabel. “I saw Professor Higgs the other day, you know. He was walking along Heriot Row looking down at the pavement.”

  “He won’t find his boson down there,” said Grace.

  “He wouldn’t have been looking for it,” said Jamie. “It exists only in the mathematics he did. It’s a theory.”

  The argument about unseen forces had continued for some minutes and remained unresolved; both sides were sure of their position and both were sure that they had won. This reference now to peculiar beliefs threatened to reopen the issue, which Jamie did not think was a good idea. Fortunately, Grace paid no attention to it and changed the subject. There was a load of washing to be put in the machine, and did Isabel want Charlie’s clothes dealt with now or later? And there was the question of the vacuum cleaner, which had stopped working the previous day; had Isabel phoned, as she had promised, about that?

  “I shall,” said Isabel. “Today. Definitely. I’ll put it on my list.”

  Grace had nodded, and gone off to begin her tasks.

  “Quail eggs,” whispered Jamie. “She really disapproves.”

  Isabel nodded. “Mind you, it is outrageous,” she said. “What sort of child have we produced, Jamie? Quail eggs!”

  He smiled. He loved her. He loved Charlie. He even loved Grace, in a way. It was a perfect morning, the best sort of early summer morning, and all he felt was love.

  CHAPTER TWO

  FROM HER STUDY WINDOW, Isabel watched Jamie and Charlie disappearing down the street. She gave a wave, but Jamie was looking the other way and did not spot her. It always made her feel proud seeing the two of them together. She used to think that her major achievement in life had been the editing of the Review, or perhaps her doctorate; she no longer thought so—now she felt that the most important thing she had done was to give birth to a whole new life, a whole new set of possibilities. She had made Charlie, that small, energetic and increasingly opinionated bundle of humanity, that tiny, olive-eating person; she had made him.

  But, more than that, she had given Charlie just the right father—she could be proud of that as well. Jamie was good with children, although in his modesty he made little of his talents in this direction. But Isabel had heard it from the parents of his pupils. One mother had said of her son, “He never practised his bassoon. Never. We spent all that money on the instrument—three thousand pounds, would you believe—and the little devil never practised. You know what they’re like at that age. Then Jamie took him on and everything was different. He inspired him—
it’s as simple as that; he inspired him.”

  Isabel had passed on the compliment, and Jamie had been diffident. “Oh well, we’re getting somewhere with him.”

  He would be good with Charlie—she had known it right from the very first time he held him in the hospital. The nurse had passed him his new-born son wrapped in a towel, and she had seen the tears in his eyes, and she had known. For her part she had thought this briefly, and then, through the residual, euphoric haze of the painkiller they had administered, she had entertained one of her habitual odd thoughts, on this occasion about the towel around Charlie. In the past it would have been swaddling clothes; they wrapped infants in swaddling clothes, did they not? They swaddled them in strips of bandage-like cloth to stop them moving too much. She was grateful that Charlie would not be swaddled. He had not come into this world to discover that he was bound against movement, against freedom. Little Charlie would be free to move, to kick his legs, to live in liberty. She hoped.

  She went into her study and gazed at the array of books and papers. The room was on the side of the house that did not get the sun until mid-morning, yet even at this point in the morning the large windows let in a good amount of light. As she surveyed the room she thought that the scene before her could be a still life, Study with Books, of the sort painted by seventeenth-century Dutch artists. They liked rooms like this, and they liked the stillness hanging in the very air of such places. Vermeer, perhaps, might have painted this room, or de Hoogh, inserting the figure of a woman sewing or playing a lute—one of those quiet domestic scenes that they did so well. And such an artist would look, as the Dutch painters often did, through the room into the space beyond, in this case Isabel’s garden, the square of lawn outside the window bordered by its bank of rhododendrons and azaleas—a sort of courtyard, rather like an outdoor room. Somebody had told her—she had forgotten who, or whether she had read it somewhere—that the essence of a good still life was the feeling it inspired that something was just on the point of happening. What was about to happen here? Her eye wandered to the pile of letters on her desk, put there by Grace the previous day. That was suggestive of the beginnings of something—an exchange of correspondence, perhaps. Somebody was about to enter the room and deal with the letters and then leave again, and the stillness would return.

  She sighed. She could have gone off to the canal with Jamie and shared Charlie’s delight in the ducks. He squealed with pleasure now when he saw them, waving his arms about in uncontrolled excitement; he loved to watch them swimming for the breadcrumbs Jamie tossed into the water. There would come a time—and it would not be long in arriving, she feared—when ducks would cease to amuse Charlie quite so much. The thought brought regret. Charlie would grow up only too quickly, as all parents said their children did; already she found it hard to remember what he was like as a tiny baby. She remembered the smell, of course, that very particular, soft smell that babies have, a mixture of animal warmth and milk, and blanket, which gave way so soon, in a young child, to something else, as individual and every bit as indefinable, but not quite the same.

  She crossed to her desk and switched on the desk lamp. There were at least ten letters in the pile—and four of them looked as if they were manuscripts. Isabel stipulated that prospective authors submit articles for the Review on paper, a policy that led to grumbling from at least some of her would-be contributors. “Haven’t you heard of electronic submission?” wrote a professor of philosophy from a college in the American Midwest. “You really should accept electronic files, you know. Everyone does.” She had written back to explain that she did not read on screen—something for which she felt he should be thankful. “I give far more considered attention to something on paper,” she said. “I find that I can weigh it. I would have thought that contributors would appreciate this.” A day or two later his reply had arrived. “You could print things out,” he said. “Why not?” And after that he had inserted in the message a smiley face, winking.

  Isabel might have left it at that, but, puzzled by a motivation that she could not explain, she decided to make a concession. Then, after she had made up her mind, she looked for a reason for her decision. She imagined the professor in Iowa surrounded by a sea of cornfields and fresh-faced students, waiting for a message from somewhere beyond the vast horizons that bounded his world. “I’m sorry to have to get back to you on this,” she wrote, “but printing everything costs money and, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, takes time that I may not have. However, since this means so much to you, I’ll be happy for you to submit your paper electronically and I shall print it out.”

  There was no reply to this, and so a week later she sent an enquiring message, asking if the paper had perhaps been lost in the ether. This time there was a reply: “Sorry—paper not yet written. Perhaps next year some time.” She had smiled at this; the whole exchange had been hypothetical. She wrote back to him—a real letter—and said, “I do hope that we get something from you, but I don’t want to put you under pressure. The summer, perhaps, might be a good time to put pen to paper, once the students have packed up and gone home. Until then, I remain, in hope, Isabel Dalhousie.” She folded the letter, put it into an envelope and wrote out the address. Why had she bothered? It had been a pointless exchange with a man she neither knew nor imagined she would ever meet, and yet for a short while they had engaged with one another. Treat everyone you meet as if it’s their last day, and while you know that, they don’t. She remembered the advice given her by her mother, her sainted American mother, as she referred to her. And it was good advice—a childish aphorism, perhaps, but none the less true for that.

  And then the memory came back. Iowa: yes, she had been there, and she had forgotten all about it. Years ago, when she had been on her fellowship in Washington, she had been invited to a conference in a college town in Iowa, and there had been a young associate professor who had shown her and one or two others around the town; yes, she remembered now. And he had pointed out a large house on the edge of a river where, he explained, one of the members of a local philanthropic family had lived. He had said, “That is where Miss Ellie lived, and she believed in fairies with all her heart—with all her heart.” And with that he had looked at Isabel wistfully, and she had been struck by the thought of anybody believing in fairies with all her heart. To live in a house by a river and to believe in fairies with all one’s heart—that was enough, surely.

  She could not remember the name of the man who had shown her round, but it occurred to her that this was the same person, which meant that they were not strangers to one another—not really—and that chance, pure chance, had brought them together twice. What was more interesting, though, was the fact that she had decided to make an exception in his case and offer to print out his paper for him. She had thought that this was because he was somehow isolated in his Midwest fastness, but now she knew otherwise: she had been prompted to do it because her subconscious mind recalled their meeting even though her conscious mind was unaware of it; she knew him, although she did not know that she did.

  Now, seated at her desk, she began to deal with the letters. Usually she indulged herself in picking out the ones that interested her and attending to those first, leaving the mundane and the bills until last. But today she felt she should be sensible and force herself to deal with them according to their order in the pile; lunch with Jamie and Charlie would be her reward. So if she opened the electricity bill before anything else, it was because it was on the top of the pile, and for that reason deserved to be opened.

  The next letter was from the printers of the Review—a technical enquiry about the quality of paper. They had bought a supply of superior Finnish paper, they revealed, and would keep some of this for Isabel if she wished; a sample was enclosed. The offer reminded her of her obliging butcher, who from time to time would pull something out from under the counter and say that he had been keeping it for her; some delicious cut that he thought she would particularly appreciate; small acts of comm
ercial friendship binding together customer and provider. She looked at the paper and held it up to the light. She rubbed it between her fingers, and thought of where it had come from, somewhere in those wide forests where … where the ports have names for the sea. The line of Auden came to her, and made her think of how typographical errors may lend a certain beauty to a line; Auden had written of sea-naming poets, in Iceland rather than Finland, but poets had been misread as ports. That was a creative misunderstanding, she considered, and it made the thought behind the line much better, much richer, as some of our mistakes will do.

  Isabel had put the electricity bill to one side—not the same thing as paying it, she said to herself. The admission made her reach for the cheque book kept in the top drawer of her desk and write out a cheque for the requisite sum—an estimate, she noticed, based on what the electricity authorities had deemed a household such as hers likely to have used. That was not the same thing as what she had actually used; parsimony might have overcome her, for all they knew. Or its opposite might apply: she might have taken to growing cannabis and consumed those massive quantities of power that cannabis growers use to force their crop. It happened, she knew, but not in Edinburgh, not in this tree-lined street … which would be perfect cover, she realised, for just such a thing, or for a counterfeit currency operation, or for anything, really. And how the newspapers would revel in the unveiling of something like that in the very home of the Review of Applied Ethics. Perfect villains have to live somewhere, and even the most innocent-looking suburb can conceal its surprises. But they were so quiet and considerate, said one of the neighbours; who would have guessed that he had been a dictator?