Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 06

by The Lost Art of Gratitude

  She picked up the pen and wrote out a few words. Then she handed the piece of paper to the jeweller.

  The jeweller read the message. “Isabel Dalhousie gave this ring.” She smiled. “That’s nice wording. I was worried that you were going to write Eternal Love.”

  “I couldn’t,” said Isabel. “Because it isn’t. Nothing’s eternal.”

  The jeweller put the piece of paper down on her desk. “You should see some of the things that engravers are asked to do,” she said.

  “People are odd,” said Isabel, adding, “but generally they mean well.”

  The jeweller seemed intrigued by this. “Do you really think so?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “Most people know what’s right. Most people understand the needs of others. They know what we should do.”

  “Maybe,” said the jeweller as she looked for a suitable ring box. “May I congratulate you, anyway? I assume that the ring is for somebody special.”

  “My husband-to-be,” said Isabel.

  The jeweller smiled. “Congratulations. May I ask: Who is he?”

  Isabel had been looking out of the window. There was a small knot of pedestrians on the other side of the road waiting for the crossing light to turn green. One of them was Jamie.

  “As it happens,” she said, “that’s him over there, on the other side of the street.”

  The jeweller came round to the front of the desk. “Him? The one in the red sweater?”

  Isabel noticed that it was an older man. “No,” she said. “The one next to him.”

  The jeweller said nothing for a moment. She watched Jamie waiting to cross the road. “He’s lovely.”

  “Thank you,” said Isabel. “He is.” She hesitated. “May I bring the ring back for engraving later? I want to give it to him now. Since he’s there.”

  “Of course.”

  The jeweller passed over the ring. Isabel could come back later and pay, she said. She knew her; that would be all right. “I shouldn’t watch,” she said. “I promise I won’t.”

  “But you can,” said Isabel.

  She went out into the street. Jamie had crossed the road now and was heading towards her. Seeing her, his face broke into a broad smile.

  “I was going to Hughes’,” he said when he reached her. Hughes’ was the old-fashioned fish shop on Holy Corner, the intersection so-named for the three churches overlooking it. “I decided to make kedgeree tonight. I was reading about it and it made me want to make it. Is that all right with you?”

  “I love kedgeree,” she said. And then added, “And you.”

  He looked taken aback, but he was clearly pleased. “Thank you. And I love you too.”

  She was holding the ring in her hand, holding it tight. Now she opened her fist and he looked down. He raised his eyes to hers; surprise yielded to a tender look of enquiry. “For me?”

  “Yes.”

  He took the ring from her and slipped it on his finger.

  Now Isabel looked at him questioningly. “Does it fit?”

  “Yes. A tiny bit loose, maybe. But it fits.”

  “They can adjust it.” She tossed her head in the direction of the jeweller’s window; there was a slight movement within, nothing noticeable from outside.

  “You’ve beaten me to it,” he said. “That’s where I was going.” He paused. “Should we go there right away?”

  She nodded. “They’re open.”

  He looked at the ring, holding up his hand to admire it. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, Isabel.”

  He had to stoop slightly to kiss her. She raised her face to his. She saw behind his head, above the rooftops of Bruntsfield, a gull riding a current of air, briefly dipping and then disappearing behind the stone chimney stacks.

  ONCE THEY HAD FINISHED their business in the jeweller’s, Jamie would brook no opposition from Isabel. “I’m coming with you,” he said.

  “Is it wise?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe. Maybe not. But we can’t creep round the issue, can we?”

  She thought about this for a moment. She was not sure she had the stomach for this, but she decided he was right. Cat’s attitude was a boil that needed to be lanced rather than dressed. If she proved to be incapable of accepting the fact that Isabel and Jamie were together and would remain so—a strikingly dog-in-the-manger attitude—then there would just have to be one of those family ruptures that sometimes cannot be avoided. Cat would have to choose.

  They approached the delicatessen in silence. Jamie hesitated briefly at the door. “You know,” he began, “it makes all the difference to me, the fact that we’re engaged. It’s put everything else—everything with Cat—into the past, the real past.”

  Isabel said nothing, but reached out to take his hand.

  “So I really don’t mind about this,” he went on. “I’m going to look her in the eye. I’m not going to let her bully us.”

  “Good for you,” whispered Isabel.

  “She’s one of those people who uses psychological power over others,” Jamie replied.

  Isabel nodded her agreement. “She has her faults,” she said. “But I don’t want her to be unhappy.”

  Jamie swallowed. “Of course not.”

  “Here goes.”

  There were a couple of customers in the delicatessen, but they were engrossed in an examination of the shelves, scrutinising the list of contents of a packet of pasta. Pasta, thought Isabel; it was simple enough, but for some there was much to be said about the ingredients, sodium, potassium, trace minerals, fats and so on.

  Eddie greeted them from behind the counter. “She’s in there,” he said, nodding towards Cat’s office.

  Isabel took the lead, knocking gently. “Cat?”

  She pushed the door open. Cat was seated at her desk; in front of her was a fridge manufacturer’s brochure. She greeted Isabel warmly enough, and then, seeing Jamie behind, gave him a greeting too, although less enthusiastically, thought Isabel.

  “You aren’t busy, are you?” Isabel began.

  Cat shook her head. “Not specially. One of the fridges is on the blink though, and I’m going to have to replace it.”

  “Can’t it be fixed?” asked Jamie.

  Cat glanced at him, as if he had asked an unnecessary question. “No, not economically. These days everything is so expensive to fix that it’s cheaper just to replace it.”

  Like your men, thought Isabel, irresponsibly. But what she said was quite different. “I wanted you to know that …”

  “I was thinking of a red one next,” Cat went on.

  A red man?

  “Is something funny?” asked Cat.

  “No,” said Isabel. “I’m sure that a red fridge would do the trick very well. But what I wanted to tell you was that Jamie and I are engaged.”

  Cat stared fixedly at the fridge catalogue. For a few moments nothing was said, and Isabel glanced nervously at Jamie. He smiled back, and then looked at Cat.

  “We’re really pleased,” he said.

  Cat pulled herself together. “Of course. Well, that’s very nice.” Her voice was flat; it was not very nice. It was certainly not very nice. “Actually, it’s rather a coincidence. So am I.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ENGAGED TO a tightrope walker!” Jamie exclaimed as he and Isabel walked back to the house.

  “So it would seem,” said Isabel. “I hope that … well, I hope that he’s all right.”

  “We’ll see when she brings him round for a drink this evening,” Jamie continued. “What do you think tightrope walkers drink?”

  “Very little, I’d hope,” said Isabel. “One wouldn’t want to be under the influence of anything while on a tightrope. One has to be able to walk absolutely straight.”

  They both laughed. But Isabel was concerned: Cat had been engaged before, although not so soon after meeting the man in question. She was not sure how long Cat had known this new fiancé, but it could not have been very long.

  “So he’s
called Bruno,” she mused. “It seems quite suitable, doesn’t it? It’s a bit exotic. One wouldn’t expect a tightrope walker to be called something like Eric, or Jeff.”

  Jamie grinned. “I’m sure that he’s very nice,” he said.

  Isabel looked at him sharply. “Are you?”

  “Sure that he’s nice? Yes.”

  “But look at her recent boyfriends,” she said, mentally adding, not you. “The bouncer from that club. That other one whose name I can’t even remember. Toby—who was a cheat. No, I’m afraid I have less faith in Cat than you do.”

  “She said that he’s really a stunt man,” Jamie reminded her. “Remember. Tightrope walking is only part of what he does.”

  “We all have to diversify,” observed Isabel. She paused. “And I suppose that applies to funambulists as much as anybody else. What worries me in all this is that she may not be telling the whole truth.”

  Jamie seemed shocked. “I don’t think Cat’s a liar. She’s not exactly straightforward, but she’s not a liar, surely?”

  Isabel reassured him. No, she did not think that Cat was lying, but she wondered whether this announcement of her engagement to Bruno was not perhaps just a little bit in advance of the event. She might have been thinking of becoming engaged to Bruno but he might not yet have proposed, or he might have proposed but not yet been accepted. And then, hearing the news of Isabel’s engagement, Cat might have felt that she could not let her aunt get engaged before she did. And so this might have been a defensive engagement rather than one which had been entered into after due deliberation.

  Jamie listened to this, but it struck him as fundamentally unlikely, given that Cat had suggested bringing Bruno round for drinks that evening. “She’d realise that we’d talk about it,” he said. “And she would hardly have time to set it up by tonight.”

  “No. Probably not. It’s just that I feel a bit uneasy about it.”

  Jamie said that he knew what she meant. “We’ll just have to see,” he said. “The important thing is that she didn’t seem too fazed by our getting engaged. That’s a relief, at least.”

  Isabel was cautious. “Give her time,” she said. “Sometimes things take a bit of time to sink in.” She gave Jamie a look of caution. “One thing about Cat that we have to remember is that she’s unpredictable.” There was, of course, an inherent contradiction in that, she told herself. An unpredictable person could not be predicted to be unpredictable.

  “The liar paradox,” she said.

  Jamie, who was thinking of Cat’s unpredictability, looked perplexed. “What?”

  “A Greek philosopher named Eubulides,” said Isabel. “He had a Cretan say, All Cretans are liars. If what he said was true, then the statement itself could not be true. You see?”

  Jamie looked bemused. “If I’m going to be married to a philosopher, I suppose I should start reading up on some philosophy.”

  Isabel did not think this necessary. A couple did not have to know the same things; if she knew more about philosophy than Jamie did, then he knew more than she about history, and music, and a lot of other subjects. They were, she thought, just about equal.

  “You don’t have to start reading philosophy,” said Isabel. “And I can’t see where you’d find the time. Remember what Wittgenstein said: one lesson in philosophy is about as useful as one lesson in playing the piano.”

  “No use at all?”

  “Well …,” Isabel mused. “Wittgenstein knew about playing the piano, of course. His brother was a very accomplished pianist—a one-armed pianist, as it happens. Composers wrote special one-handed pieces for him, but he could manage ordinary pieces too. Don’t you find that extraordinary?”

  Jamie looked thoughtful. He was wondering how the bassoon might be adapted for a one-armed bassoonist—it would be difficult, if not impossible. It was hard enough to play the bassoon with two hands and if one could only use five fingers at any one time, then that would require foot-operated keys, perhaps, or levers that could be squeezed by knee pressure. No.

  “You’re looking defeated,” said Isabel. “Was it the thought of a one-handed system for the bassoon?”

  He gave her the look that he sometimes gave her when he felt she was reading his mind. “As it happens, yes.”

  “Perhaps one will evolve,” said Isabel. “But talking of evolution, did you know that Charles Darwin mentioned the bassoon? He was fascinated with earthworms, who he said were indifferent to shouts and tobacco smoke and could not hear the bassoon.”

  Jamie smiled, and filed the information away in his memory. One of his pupils, a particularly grubby small boy, might like to hear that. Now, though, he wanted to get back to the discussion of Cat’s tightrope walker, and Isabel was leading them into something quite different—as she often did. “But what’s the liar paradox got to do with Cat’s tightrope walker?”

  “Nothing to do with him,” said Isabel. “But everything to do with her. I said that the one predictable thing about Cat is that she is unpredictable. But if that statement is true, then what I said about her unpredictability is untrue.”

  “Oh.”

  Isabel took Jamie’s arm. “You don’t have to bury yourself in philosophy. I can do enough philosophy for both of us.”

  “And I can play enough music for two,” he said.

  “Exactly.”

  They walked on in silence, content with one another, each aware that this moment, like a number of others that they had experienced since the engagement, had a noumenal feel to it: there was a mystery to it, a sense of the sacred. For his part, Jamie felt that he was looking at the world differently, that quotidian and unexceptional surroundings now seemed charged with an excitement and a feeling of possibility. Through lover’s eyes: that was how he was seeing the world again, and that would be the first line of a song that he felt was already coming to him, right there in Merchiston Crescent, halfway home.

  Through lover’s eyes

  I see your face;

  Through lover’s eyes

  I gently trace

  The contours …

  No. That was not going to work. He muttered the words again, with Isabel listening; she loved these impromptu songs Jamie seemed to be able to summon up from somewhere within him, so effortlessly.

  Through lover’s eyes,

  Through lover’s ears,

  I see and hold

  The wondrous world

  My lover sees, my lover hears.

  “That’s beautiful,” she said. “And the tune?”

  He hummed it first, without its words, and then sang it, softly, as they turned the corner into their road. Further down the pavement, a woman they both knew slightly, a neighbour from a few streets away, was walking her dog, a brindle greyhound. The dog looked up sharply, sniffing at the air, and Isabel knew at once that with its sharp hearing it had picked up Jamie’s song.

  Jamie stopped. “I need to work on it a bit,” he said. “The trouble about writing songs is this: Who’s going to sing them?”

  “You and I,” said Isabel. “And little Charlie when he’s a bit bigger. He’ll love that song about olives.”

  “He’ll have forgotten about olives by then. He’ll want songs about trains and bears and so on,” said Jamie.

  “You can write those too.”

  Jamie smiled. “He likes music. I sang him ‘Dance to your Daddy’ the other night, and he cooed with pleasure. I need to sing him ‘The Train to Glasgow’ some day, if I can find the words. All about a fortunate boy getting the train to Glasgow.”

  “Children like simple tales,” said Isabel.

  “And we don’t?”

  Isabel thought about this. It was just too easy to say that adults did not like stories that were simple, and perhaps that was wrong. Perhaps that was what adults really wanted, searched for and rarely found: a simple story in which good triumphs against cynicism and despair. That was what she wanted, but she was aware of the fact that one did not publicise the fact too widely, certainly not in sop
histicated circles. Such circles wanted complexity, dysfunction and irony: there was no room for joy, celebration or pathos. But where was the fun in that?

  She answered his question. “We probably do. We want resolution and an ending that shows us that the world is a just place. We’ve always wanted that. We want human flourishing, as Philippa Foot would put it.”

  “One of your philosophers?”

  “Yes, Professor Philippa Foot. She wrote a book called Natural Goodness. I would offer to show it to you had I not just agreed not to burden you with philosophy.”

  “I like the sound of her,” said Jamie. “Professor Foot. Is she naturally good?”

  “I think she is,” said Isabel. “Though usually people who are naturally good have to work at it. The goodness may be there, but they have to cultivate it, work to bring it out.” She paused. “She’s the granddaughter of an American president, Grover Cleveland. One does not necessarily expect an Oxford philosopher to be the granddaughter of anybody like that.”

  Jamie was lost in thought. “If you’re not naturally good—let’s say that your inclinations are, in fact, distinctly on the bad side, then can you become naturally good? Or will it just be superficial?”

  They were almost at the gate. “I think you can,” said Isabel. “Change your nature, that is. I suppose it depends on what sort of faults you’re talking about.”