The Lost Art of Gratitude id-6

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Very functional,” said Minty.

  Isabel thought of her failure as a gardener. “I should grow something,” she remarked. “Even a few potatoes. But we have a fox, you see, and he digs things up.”

  “Get rid of him,” said Minty. Then she added, “We had a fox too.”

  For a moment Isabel imagined a fox in this domain, using one of the espaliered apple trees to get to the top of the wall, sleeking his way along the top, and then finding his way down into the garden itself. What harm would he have caused? There was plenty of room for him to dig, to make his earth, without impinging on Minty’s vegetables. Four words showed that this woman, this successful banker, had no heart, Isabel thought: Get rid of him. Four words.

  Then Minty said, “I couldn’t bring myself to have him … well, they don’t mince their words in the country, the farmer offered to shoot him. I said no.”

  I have misjudged you, Isabel said to herself. Again, I have misjudged you.

  “I know how it is,” said Isabel. “I rather like him.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting that you do him in,” Minty explained. “But you can get somebody—there’s a man in Dalkeith, I think—who will come and collect him from town and release him somewhere in the country.”

  “I’ve heard of that,” said Isabel. “But I wondered whether he would really …”

  “We have to trust people,” interrupted Minty. And it seemed to Isabel that as she said this, the other woman looked at her more pointedly.

  Isabel wondered what had happened to Minty’s fox. Had the man from Dalkeith called?

  “What …”

  Minty seemed to have an ability to anticipate questions. “He died a natural death. I found him on the other side of the wall. At first I thought he was sleeping and then I saw that he was quite still. His grave is down by the burn over there.” She pointed away from the house. Isabel looked; it would be a fine place to be buried, she felt, with those hills crouching on the horizon like great sleeping foxes, vulpine deities, perhaps, the gods to whom foxes prayed at night. A good place for a fox.

  Isabel sighed. “Poor fox.” It was a trite thing to say, she knew, but what else could one say about living and then dying, as we—and foxes—all must do.

  Minty was silent. It was a strange moment: there was a wind, not a strong one, just a breath, and Isabel felt it against her cheek; a wind from over there, from the hills that ran towards the coast, towards the North Sea, towards the edge of Scotland. Then Minty spoke. “I don’t know how to say this,” she said.

  Isabel looked at her enquiringly.

  “I wondered whether I should raise it with you at all,” Minty went on. “I decided I could. You seem … well, you seem so sympathetic.”

  Isabel was about to protest. She wanted to say “I’m not really,” but when she opened her mouth all she said was, “Oh.”

  “Yes,” said Minty. “I’ve got plenty of friends—close ones too. But I don’t feel that I can burden any of them with this. I don’t know how they would handle it.”

  Isabel ran over the possibilities in her mind. Matrimonial difficulties? That was the sort of matter one was usually worried about raising with friends. But what possible insight could Minty imagine that she, Isabel, could bring to the matrimonial problems of a person whom she barely knew? Financial problems? Surely not; not with this house and the private whisky label and the bank.

  “You can speak to me,” said Isabel. “I don’t know whether I’ll be much help, but you can certainly speak to me.”

  Minty thanked her. Then she continued, “The reason I thought that I should speak to you is because I know you have helped various people. Remember how we met—over that awful business with that young man who fell in the Usher Hall? Remember? And then somebody else told me about something you had done for another person. So I thought that you might not mind if I told you.”

  “Told me what?” Isabel prompted.

  “Or asked you, rather. Have you ever been frightened?”

  In her surprise, Isabel blurted out, “Me?”

  Minty bent down to pick a small blue flower growing by the side of the path. “Wild hyacinth,” she said, showing the flower to Isabel. “Uninvited.”

  Isabel glanced at the flower. She remembered something she had read somewhere, some generalisation about women picking flowers and men letting them be. It was Lawrence, she thought; women were always picking flowers in his novels, watched by men. “Bavarian Gentians.” What a strange poem. Not every man has gentians in his house … Of course they didn’t …

  “We’ve all been frightened at some time or other,” Isabel said. “And I’m no exception.”

  Minty dropped the flower, dusting her hands as if to remove its traces. “Of course. Momentarily. It’s different, though, living with fear. All the time.”

  “I suppose it is,” said Isabel. Was Minty in that position? It was difficult to imagine this competent, successful woman living with fear; it just seemed somewhat unlikely.

  “Fear like that,” said Minty, “is really odd. It’s there with you all the time—you don’t forget it. It’s like … well, I suppose it’s like a thundercloud. It’s the backdrop to everything you do.”

  Isabel stopped walking. It was time, she thought, to find out what Minty was driving at. She was frightened—obviously—but why? Threats of legal action? Blackmail? The possibility occurred to Isabel as she looked at the house. It was respectability and success rendered in stone and mortar, but such edifices could so easily be toppled, brought down, by a few words.

  “What’s frightening you?” Isabel asked. “Is that what you want to talk about?”

  The directness of Isabel’s question seemed to irritate Minty. “I was just trying to explain,” she said. “People don’t necessarily know what it’s like.”

  “I can imagine,” said Isabel quickly. “But what is it? What’s making you feel that way?”

  “Somebody’s targeting me,” said Minty.

  “How?”

  “Small things. Or quite big, sometimes. A sudden investigation by the tax authorities. That often means that somebody has given them a tip-off or made an allegation.” She paused, looking sideways at Isabel. “Unjustified, of course. But very annoying—and expensive. Accountants’ fees.”

  “But you can’t really tell, surely,” said Isabel. “They do random checks, don’t they?”

  Minty ignored this. “Then my PA resigned. I relied on her and she suddenly announced she was leaving. A better offer. I said that we would match whatever they—whoever they were—had offered and add five per cent on top of that. But she wouldn’t even discuss it. I think she was threatened. Simple as that. Scared off.”

  Isabel admitted that this was rather strange. But, again, people changed jobs and had their reasons for not explaining why. Privately, the possibility crossed her mind that Minty’s PA disliked her, as one might; Jamie certainly did, and Isabel had in the past.

  Minty nodded. “Yes, yes, there are plenty of reasons for getting a new job. But there have been other things—quite a lot of them. The worst was last week. I came back from work in the evening and discovered that somebody had ordered flowers to be delivered to the house.”

  It now occurred to Isabel that Minty was not well. Paranoia showed itself in odd ways—she had had an uncle on her father’s side, a retired stockbroker, who had insisted that the postman was hiding his mail, and had eventually attacked and bitten him. The postman had been remarkably understanding and had joked about the frequency with which he and his colleagues had been bitten by dogs, suggesting that to be bitten by householders was really only a small escalation. That attitude—and an understanding procurator fiscal—had avoided an embarrassing prosecution. Uncle Fergus had spent his remaining days in a nursing home, quite content, it seemed, although suspicious to the end that the home’s matron was intercepting his letters. She, though, had been as many matrons used to be, built like a galleon and with attitudes to match. He would never have dared bit
e her, Isabel’s father had pointed out, and had then added the observation that deterrence and fear were major inhibitors of crime, and that criminologists might care to reflect on that.

  “Flowers,” said Isabel quietly.

  Minty’s eyes flashed with anger at the recollection. “In the shape of a wreath,” she said.

  Isabel was silent.

  “A wreath,” Minty said again. “A funeral wreath. And there were other things too. A fire in one of the greenhouses, for example. It was started deliberately. We were away at the time.”

  “Who might have done this?” asked Isabel. “Have you any idea?”

  The question seemed to distress Minty, and it was a few moments before she answered. “I think I do.”

  Isabel waited. Minty was looking away from her, out towards the hills.

  “Why don’t you go to the police?” She realised, of course, that this question was seldom helpful. In an ordered, middle-class world there was an assumption that people could go to the police and receive the help and protection that the police are meant to provide. But that was not the world as it really was. Often there was nothing the police could do; often there was nothing that the police wanted to do. Much of the time, people simply had to look after themselves.

  Minty sniffed. “What help could they offer? None. And they’d treat it as some sort of neighbourhood dispute, you know. They don’t like to get involved in people’s private arguments.”

  Isabel knew that this was true. The police liked to talk of a light touch, but that light touch could mean inaction.

  She realised that Minty had not revealed the precise nature of her suspicions. So she asked again, “Who is it?”

  Minty turned and looked directly at Isabel. When she spoke, her voice was lowered. “I haven’t talked to anybody about this. And I don’t know why I’m telling you.” She stopped herself. “Well, I do, I suppose. There’s something about you … Well, I trust you. You can keep things to yourself, can’t you?”

  Isabel nodded. “I hope so.”

  Minty added a qualification. “Of course I assume that you’ll tell Jamie. That’s all right. But otherwise …”

  “I won’t. I just won’t.”

  Minty hesitated for a few seconds more. Then she made her decision. “Blackmail.”

  “I wondered if it would be that,” said Isabel. “When you started to tell me—”

  Minty interrupted her. “Not for money. Not that sort of blackmail.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s more personal than that.”

  Isabel reached out to touch Minty gently on the arm. She was not sure that she wanted to be burdened with this particular confidence. Minty, after all, was hardly more than a stranger to her. “You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to.”

  But Minty had clearly decided. “I know I don’t have to. But I’d like to.” She paused. “It’s to do with Roderick.”

  Isabel drew in her breath. “They’ve threatened to harm him?”

  Minty shook her head. “No. It’s about him. You see, Roderick is … well, Roderick isn’t Gordon’s.”

  It made immediate sense. Minty may be very much the successful banker, but she was a woman, too, with a husband.

  “There,” continued Minty. “I’ve said it. I’ve told you something I haven’t told anybody else, not a soul. Roderick is the result of an affair I had with another man. It didn’t last long, but it was a full-blown affair and I became pregnant. I didn’t tell Gordon—obviously—and he thinks that he’s Roderick’s father.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Minty looked up sharply. “Sure? Of course I am. Why shouldn’t I be?”

  Isabel found it difficult to put it delicately. “Because if you were still with Gordon when you were having the affair with … with this other man, then might it not be possible that …” She left the question unfinished. It hardly needed to be spelled out further, she thought.

  Minty laughed. She seemed unembarrassed by the suggestion. “Oh, I see what you mean. Well, that goes with the territory, doesn’t it? If a married woman has an affair, then that could happen. All right. He could be Gordon’s, too, but he isn’t.”

  “You’ve had a test?”

  Minty explained that she had not. The thought had crossed her mind, but she had dismissed it, initially because she did not want to know the information, and then later because she knew already. “I don’t need a laboratory to tell me who Roderick takes after. You just have to look at him. Everything. Shape of head. Eyes. Everything.”

  Isabel knew what she meant. Charlie was Jamie’s son; it was something that a mother simply could tell. “And now somebody’s found out and is making demands for money?”

  Minty closed her eyes. “Not found out. Knew all along.”

  Isabel waited for her to explain.

  “The father,” she said. She added, “Not money. He wants Roderick.”

  Isabel and Minty stared at one another for a few moments. Then Minty shrugged. “So there we are,” she said. “But let’s go inside and see what’s going on. Did I ask you to sign the visitors’ book?”

  “No.”

  Minty took Isabel’s arm. “Well then I must. Let’s do it now, otherwise it gets forgotten, and I like to have a record of everybody who comes to see us here.”

  ONLY LATER THAT EVENING did Isabel tell Jamie about her conversation with Minty. She had wanted to speak to him about it in the car on the way home, but he had been full of what happened at the party and she did not have the opportunity. While Isabel had been out in the garden with Minty, Roderick McCaig, nominally under the control of his father, had thrown a piece of cake at Charlie. Apparently unsurprised at this behaviour on the part of his host, Charlie had calmly picked up the crumbs of the missile and eaten them, causing an outburst of rage from Roderick, who clearly regarded the cake as still belonging to him. The child sitting next to Roderick had then been sick over Roderick’s trousers, which had not led to any improvement in the young host’s mood.

  “It’s a jungle down there,” said Jamie, smiling. “We forget what it’s like to be two.”

  “Selvan,” muttered Isabel.

  Jamie raised an eyebrow. “Sylvan? As in forests?”

  “No, selvan. It’s a word that I think should exist in English, but doesn’t quite. Selva exists in English—just—for Amazonian forest, from the Spanish word selva. So I think we should be able to say selvan for forests that are too jungly to be called sylvan.”

  Jamie smiled wryly. Isabel occasionally made new words when it suited her, and he found himself adopting at least the more apt of these. The pad under a toe, for instance, was a gummer, a neologism she had coined one day when inspecting Charlie’s tiny feet. And the crook of a bassoon, that curious curved pipe that held the reed, she had called a bahook, a word which seemed admirably suited to its purpose, even if it had to be used carefully—and never diminutively—in order to avoid confusion with the Scots word bahookies, a word that bordered on the vulgar, if it did not actually tip over that border. “Well, it’s certainly selvan down amongst the two-year-olds,” he said.

  “And up here too, amongst the …” She almost said forty-year-olds, but stopped herself, and said, instead, “adults.”

  “Meaning?” he asked.

  She was about to explain about her conversation with Minty, when Charlie started to cry in the back of the car and Jamie had to turn round to attend to him. So it was not until later, over dinner, that she told him of Minty’s unexpected frankness in the walled garden. Jamie listened attentively, sipping on the glass of New Zealand wine Isabel had poured him. She was trying the products of new vineyards and had chanced upon one they both liked.

  When she finished, Jamie asked her whether she had believed Minty. “I’m not sure about her,” he said. “Even if you believe what she says—and it sounds rather unlikely, I would have thought—you still have to wonder why she’s telling you all this. What’s it got to do with you?”

  He asked t
he question but almost immediately realised that he knew the answer. Isabel was about to interfere in matters that did not concern her. She did it all the time, as a moth will approach the flame, unable to stop herself. She had to help; it was just the way she was.

  Isabel sensed what he was thinking. “I didn’t commit myself,” she protested. “But it was a real cri de coeur. She was frightened—she really was.”

  “But what are you meant to do?” asked Jamie. “Why doesn’t she hire somebody? A close-security guard or whatever they call themselves. She’s got the cash.”

  “It was difficult for her to speak about it,” said Isabel. “I don’t think that she would find it easy to open up to a total stranger.”

  Jamie sighed. “Isabel, you’re a lovely, helpful person. Everybody knows that, and it means that anybody could take advantage of you. Minty’s as sharp as all get-out—she knows that you’re a soft touch.”

  Isabel looked into her glass. “All I said was that I’d look into it. I gave no promises.”

  Jamie shrugged. “Well, all that I would say is be careful. Don’t get in too deep. That woman’s dangerous.”

  “Come on!” said Isabel. “She’s ambitious and a bit pleased with herself, but she’s not dangerous.”

  “Well, her son is,” countered Jamie, and then laughed. “Just don’t get sucked in.”

  “If I’m sucked in, I’m sure I’ll be spat out,” said Isabel.

  Jamie was not sure what she meant by this, and neither, in fact, was she. So he drained his glass and stood up.

  “Let’s go and sing something. Or rather, you accompany me and I’ll sing. What would you like to hear?”

  Isabel thought for a moment. “ ‘King Fareweel’?” she asked.

  Jamie agreed. She had enquired about the words a couple of days earlier, on Dundas Street, outside the Scottish Gallery. Why was she thinking about Jacobite songs?

  “Because I saw a picture of Charles Edward Stuart,” Isabel explained. “The song came into my mind. That’s all.”