Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 06

by The Lost Art of Gratitude

  She slipped the cheque into an envelope and put it to the side. Not the same as posting it, she thought; and put on a stamp. Now the next letter: a rather bland-looking envelope with her name written on a label that had then been stuck on. Miss Isabel Dalhousie, Editor, The Review of Applied Ethics. There were several things about this that made her pause. Firstly, she was addressed as Miss, which now had a dated sound to it in a professional context; most people who wrote to her in her editorial role called her Ms., or, if they knew, Dr., which she had never really got used to. The problem with Dr. was that it made her think of Dr. Dalhousie, her father’s brother. He had been such a large Dr. Dalhousie, such a suitable and entirely proper Dr. Dalhousie—a country doctor in East Lothian, breezy, much loved, avuncular to his patients—that it seemed to her there could not be another one. This correspondent, though, had chosen Miss, which might be a statement, an attempt to put her in her place. And then there was the emphasis with which the word Editor had been written, with heavy down-strokes of the pen, again suggesting some sort of hinterland of meaning—a sneer perhaps. Or was she imagining things?

  Isabel thought for a moment of how somebody who was truly paranoid would view the morning’s mail—looking for signs on each envelope of possible slight or of a message beyond the clear meaning of the words. Ridiculous; absurd … But when she opened the envelope she immediately saw the letter-head: Professor Christopher Dove, Chair, Western Thought. She gasped. How could anybody, even a man like Dove, claim to chair Western Thought? She read on; the address of Western Thought was given, and then its telephone number, as if so great an intellectual movement should establish that it was always at hand, contactable by those who needed, by telephone or post, the reassurance of the Western philosophical tradition.

  She read the letter, and then read it again. She stood up. She had expected something like this from Dove; she had not imagined that he would let matters rest after his toppling—richly deserved—from his brief spell as editor of the Review; payment for his coup, as she thought of it. And now he had broken cover; unambiguously, with all the ill-concealed satisfaction of one who had long awaited his moment, and having finally found it, had now made his move.

  Isabel replaced the letter on her desk. There had been a time when she would have brooded on it, when she would have been unable to think about anything other than the contents of the letter. This was no longer the case. Charlie, oddly enough, had freed her of that; Charlie had taught her to think of more than one thing at a time, as small children inevitably teach their mothers to do. So now she thought of what Charlie would have for supper and then of his shoes, which she suspected he was already growing out of, and would need to be replaced. It was preferable to thinking of Dove, whose shoes, she suddenly remembered, had been green. It was a curious thing to remember, but the image came back to her of the last time she had seen Dove, which had been in Edinburgh, when he had come to the house wearing green shoes. Was that a new precaution she would need to add to the list of irrational propositions by which we live our lives, in spite of knowing that they are indefensible: that men who wore green shoes were not to be trusted? Of course that was nonsense—perfectly reasonable, trustworthy men wore green shoes, men such as … No, she did not know a single man who wore green boots, apart from Dove. And then she remembered: Charlie had a pair of little green shoes, given him by Grace. Well, the next pair would be red.

  “NO,” said the accountant, “this really isn’t good enough.”

  He looked reproachfully at Isabel over the top of his half-moon glasses, and then glanced across the room at Jamie, who was bending down over Charlie’s pushchair, tickling the small child’s palm. The accountant had a quiet voice and these were strong words for him.

  “Oh, Ronnie, I know,” said Isabel. “It’s just that paperwork—”

  Ronnie cut her short. “It’s not paperwork any more, Isabel. A simple spreadsheet. They’re not hard to set up. Perhaps Jamie could …”

  “Jamie is not all that good with computers,” said Isabel.

  Ronnie looked doubtful. “These days anyone—”

  “I’d be perfectly capable of doing it,” said Isabel firmly. “There are manuals, aren’t there?”

  Ronnie sighed. “Yes, there are. And if you simply entered everything on the spreadsheet as sums came in—or went out—then the program would do the work for you. It really is that simple.” He took off his glasses and polished them on a handkerchief. “Running totals.”

  “Running totals?”

  He replaced the glasses. “Yes. Running totals are a possibility.”

  Isabel tried not to smile. There was a wistfulness in his voice as he spoke about running totals; as a Bedouin might speak of an oasis in the desert, she thought, or a shipwrecked sailor of safe anchorage. She made up her mind. She would do as Ronnie suggested; or she would try to, at least. “Then that’s what I’ll do,” she said. “Spreadsheets it will be.”

  “From now on?” asked Ronnie.

  “From now on,” Isabel confirmed.

  They left the accountant’s office and began to make their way down the hill to the top of Dundas Street.

  “You made a promise back there,” said Jamie, as they passed Queen Street Gardens. “Look, Charlie. Trees. Trees.”

  Charlie looked, and gurgled—he saw only green, and movement, and blue above that—the high blue ceiling of his small slice of the world, his tiny part of Scotland.

  “I know,” said Isabel. “It was like promising one’s dentist to use dental floss.”

  Jamie did not approve of the comparison. “You should take it seriously,” he said. “Ronnie only wants to help. And he has to make up the accounts for the tax people. He puts his name to them.”

  Isabel nodded. She had taken it seriously, and she had meant what she had said to Ronnie; she would start a spreadsheet and try to stick to it. She felt slightly irritated that Jamie should think that she had tossed words about carelessly, when his own accounts, if they existed at all, were probably little better than hers.

  “You keep a spreadsheet, I suppose,” she said.

  He had been about to say something, but hesitated.

  “No?” she pressed.

  “It’s different,” said Jamie. “I don’t have … well, I don’t have much money.”

  She looked steadfastly ahead. She regretted her remark, and turned to him to say sorry. He was looking at her, smiling. “What a ridiculous conversation,” he said.

  She was relieved. “Isn’t it? One should never let spreadsheets come between one and one’s …”

  “Friends,” he supplied quickly.

  “Exactly.” He was more than that, of course, but she had not used the word lover to his face, nor he to hers. Significant other, she thought, and smiled—if some others were significant, then were the other others insignificant? Teenage argot, she knew, had a word for them: randoms, who were the people one did not really know. Eddie, Isabel’s niece Cat’s young assistant at the delicatessen, had used the term to describe the other guests at a party he had attended. “I didn’t know anybody,” he said. “The place was full of randoms.”

  “Randoms?” said Isabel.

  “Yes,” said Eddie. “Just randoms. Who could I talk to? So I left.”

  “You couldn’t talk to the randoms?”

  He looked at her with amusement; one did not talk to randoms.

  They crossed Heriot Row. “Robert Louis Stevenson’s house,” Jamie said, pointing to one of the elegant Georgian terraced houses that ran along the north side of the street. “I went to a party there once with …” He stopped, and Isabel knew what he had been about to say.

  “With Cat,” she prompted.

  “Yes. With Cat.”

  “I hope she enjoyed it.”

  He shook his head. “She didn’t. We fought.”

  Isabel thought, It wouldn’t have been his fault. But she did not say it; instead she made a remark about the Queen Street Gardens, which Stevenson would have seen from
his window, and about how you never saw anybody in them, except ghosts, perhaps.

  They went into Glass and Thompson, the place they both favoured for lunch, leaving Charlie’s pushchair outside. Charlie was wide awake and showing a close interest in his surroundings, delighted by the colourful display of olive oils and pastas that dominated the shelves on one side of the café. He was easily pleased by colour or movement and waved his little arms in approval and a desire to embrace the things he saw.

  It was just before the lunchtime rush and there were several free tables at the back of the café. While Isabel settled Charlie on her lap, Jamie went up to the counter and ordered—mozzarella salad for him and Isabel, and a piece of quiche for Charlie. In the display below the counter he saw a bowl of olives, and he added some of these to the order as a treat for Charlie. They were large and unstoned, and he would have to dissect them for Charlie, but they would add to his already considerable delight.

  Their order came quickly. Charlie saw the olives from afar, or smelled them perhaps, as he started to gurgle in anticipation even before they arrived.

  “He has some sort of sixth sense when it comes to olives,” said Isabel. “An intuitive knowledge of olives.”

  Jamie laughed. He took an olive from the plate and cut the flesh from the stone with his knife. A small drop of oil fell from his fingers; Charlie watched intently.

  “Olive,” said Charlie.

  Jamie dropped the knife, which fell on the plate below with a clatter. Isabel’s mouth opened wordlessly, and she reached out to grasp Jamie’s forearm. “Did he?”

  Jamie beamed at his son. “Olive, Charlie?”

  Charlie looked at his father briefly, and then transferred his gaze again to the fragments of black olive on the plate. “Olive,” he said again. It was unmistakable.

  “At last,” said Isabel, and bent her head to plant a kiss on Charlie’s forehead. “You spoke, my little darling. You spoke!” They had been waiting for Charlie to say something and, although they had been reassured that first words at eighteen months, even if late, were still within the range of normality, they had been concerned. His gurgles were expressive, but they were impatient to hear Mama or Daddy; olive was a surprise, but a welcome one.

  Jamie grinned with pleasure. “I wouldn’t have guessed it would be olive,” he said. “What a clever little boy.”

  They tried to coax more out of him, but Charlie, now engrossed in the large quartered olive passed on to him by Jamie, was having none of it.

  “He doesn’t need to say olive again,” said Isabel. “He has what he wants.”

  They began their own lunch, while Charlie investigated his quiche, quickly reducing it to a pile of sodden fragments.

  “I don’t want to spoil the party,” said Isabel, “but there was a rather unpleasant surprise in the mail this morning.”

  Jamie raised an eyebrow. “A bill?”

  “Well, there were two of those. One for much more electricity than I think we’ve actually used, but that’ll be sorted out. No, something to do with the Review.”

  Jamie frowned. He enjoyed reading the Review, or the readable bits of it, and he took pride in Isabel’s ownership of it, but he was concerned about the burden it represented. Isabel worried about her Review—he knew that from her occasional muttering in her sleep—fragments from anxious dreams: revisions, proofs, deadline, words that revealed the tenor of at least part of her subconscious. He thought of the Review as some sort of presence in the house, rather like a demanding domestic pet that required to be fed and exercised and was always causing difficult dilemmas. By contrast, Jamie’s working life seemed to him to be so simple: he taught his pupils, he played the music put in front of him by the conductor, and when he put his bassoon back in its case then he could put it out of his mind.

  “You worry too much,” he said. “There’s always something, isn’t there?”

  She picked up a small piece of quiche and handed it to Charlie, who examined it, cross-eyed; he was looking for olives. “Maybe. But then it’s the sort of job that never seems to finish. You get one issue off to press and then there’s the next one to think about—and the one after that. It’s a bit like Sisyphus and his rock—pushing it up to the top of the hill and then having to do the whole thing all over again once it’s rolled down.”

  Jamie shrugged. “Yes, I can see that.” He thought for a moment. It seemed to him that just about everyone’s job was a bit like that; repetitious. He glanced at Russell Glass, the proprietor of the café, serving customers at the counter. It was the same for him; he served one mozzarella salad, somebody ate it, and then he had to come up with another one. Or if you were a judge, for instance: you decided one case, disposed of it, and there was another one in front of you.

  “We’re all Sisyphus,” he said. “Don’t you think? So isn’t the answer not to allow our jobs to prey on our minds too much? Sisyphus doesn’t have to think too much about what he’s doing—he just has to do it.”

  Isabel laughed. “You’re suggesting that Sisyphus could be happy?”

  “Well, he could be, couldn’t he? There are plenty of people who have repetitive jobs who are perfectly happy.” He came to this view without thinking; he would have to justify it. “They’re happy about other things. Yes, that’s possible, isn’t it? Horrible job, but other things to think about.”

  Isabel thought this was probably true, but she wanted to tell him about Dove. “Christopher Dove,” she announced.

  “Ah.”

  “Yes. He wrote me a letter. A bombshell.”

  Jamie looked alarmed. “What did he …”

  He did not finish his question. He noticed that Isabel had suddenly turned sharply to look towards the café’s front door. He followed the direction of her gaze.

  “It’s her,” whispered Isabel. “See?”

  Jamie looked. “Her over there?”

  Isabel did not reply.

  “Olive,” Charlie said suddenly, clearly, decisively. “Olive.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  MINTY AUCHTERLONIE.”

  It was said with as much intensity as if Sisyphus himself had walked into the café. Jamie was momentarily distracted by Charlie’s further pronouncements on olives, but then he looked again towards the door and saw the figure of a woman outlined against the light flooding through the café’s front windows. She was carrying a child and was looking around for a table.

  “Her?”

  “Yes,” whispered Isabel. “I’m sure it’s her.” She lowered her voice even further; the woman, having failed to find an unoccupied table near the window, was making her way towards their part of the café. Jamie watched her; Isabel looked away. He saw that the child she was carrying, a boy, was roughly Charlie’s age, perhaps a little older, and was wearing a simple tee-shirt with a polar bear on the front and a pair of corduroy trousers. The woman said something to the child, who was looking about him with curiosity.

  Isabel raised her eyes at the same moment as Minty looked down. For a moment, neither moved or said anything. Then Minty smiled. “Isabel Dalhousie?”

  Isabel felt a fleeting urge to pretend that she had not recognised Minty, as one occasionally does when one wants to avoid engaging with a vague acquaintance—when one is too tired for small talk, or in a hurry, or when one has forgotten a name. But this was not such an occasion, and she said, “Minty. Of course.” She saw Minty’s eyes slide to Jamie—appraisingly—and to Charlie.

  “This is Roderick,” said Minty. “And you’ve got …”

  “Charlie,” said Isabel. “And Jamie.” It was an unfortunate juxtaposition; she should have said, “And this is Jamie.” Yet they were both hers, although in a different sense, of course.

  Minty smiled at Jamie and then turned back to Isabel. She looked around her and saw that the remaining tables had all, rather suddenly, been taken. “You wouldn’t mind, would you?” she asked.

  Isabel could not refuse. She did mind, of course, as she had planned to tell Jamie about Dov
e’s letter and she wanted to talk to Charlie about olives. Such promising lines of conversation would now be impossible with Minty and Roderick there. “Please join us,” she said, “I’d be delighted.” And she thought, as she spoke, of how often what we say is the exact opposite of what we really mean.

  Minty had a portable infant’s seat, which she fixed to a spare chair before strapping Roderick in. “Could you watch him for a second while I order?”

  As Minty went up to the counter to place her order, Isabel whispered to Jamie, “Remember her?”

  He glanced in her direction. Minty was elegantly dressed and was being attended to by the young server.

  “She was that woman who told you about that man? Quite a long time ago?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “I thought that she was the one who was doing the insider trading, but it was really …”

  “The other one? That man?”

  “Yes.”

  “So she helped you?”

  Isabel nodded. “I think so. But I was never really sure about her.”

  Minty, having chosen her food, returned to the table. “Roderick has a very sweet tooth,” she said. “I try to control it, but he takes the view that if he comes out for lunch with me, he’s entitled to something sweet. So I cave in, I’m afraid.”

  “Charlie’s the opposite,” said Jamie. “He likes savoury things. Olives in particular.”

  “They’re funny,” said Minty. “Little individuals from day one.”

  Roderick was staring suspiciously at Charlie, who seemed unaware of the other child’s presence. “Look,” said Minty. “They’re making friends.”

  Roderick now reached forward and grabbed at Charlie’s small green boot, which he tried to pull off its owner’s foot. Charlie, vaguely aware that something was tugging at an extremity, looked to Isabel for clarification.

  “He wants to play,” said Minty.

  Isabel struggled not to show her astonishment. This was not play; this was an alpha baby trying to take her son’s boot from him by brute force. She had noticed this sort of behaviour in the playgroup that she took Charlie to three times a week. They were two-hour sessions, held in a local church hall and marked by an astonishing level of noise. Charlie, she had observed, was tolerant and put up in a good-natured way with the grabbing and pushing of his coevals. It was a quality he had inherited from Jamie, she thought.