The Lost Art of Gratitude

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Jamie looked impressed, or tried to; Isabel could tell that investment banks meant little to him. And she liked that. There was nothing essentially wrong with investment bankers, but they were usurers, after all, and she was not sure that she would want to live with a usurer. A reformed investment banker, of course, would be another matter.

  She immediately reproached herself for that thought. It was immature, unjust, and above all uncharitable. She knew bankers, and liked them. There was an ocean of difference between a usurer, properly so called, and a banker. Usurers exacted excessive interest, whereas bankers extracted … moderate interest. We needed bankers, and they were entitled to the same moral respect as anybody else. Most of them did their jobs with integrity and care; some did not, of course, but there were plenty of greedy people in other professions, and philosophers were in no position to claim the moral high ground that they spent so much time and effort identifying for others. Look at Rousseau, who was so rude and ungrateful to David Hume in spite of all that Hume did for him. Look at Schopenhauer, who refused to speak to his mother for years. And look at me, she thought, who has just thought uncharitable thoughts about an entire section of commercial humanity …

  “Well done,” said Isabel.

  Minty’s pleasure at this compliment was manifest. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s hard, you know, for a woman. They claim that the playing field is level, but it isn’t really. The men still do private little deals amongst themselves. They still … huddle.”

  “And women?” asked Jamie, in a tone of innocence. “Isn’t there an association of professional women in Edinburgh that’s women-only? I played in a quintet for them once—at a dinner. All women. I was the only man there.”

  Minty laughed. “Yes, there is. There’s more than one, in fact.”

  “So women huddle too?” Jamie had a sense of fairness and little time for the hypocrisies of the age.

  Minty was not ready to concede so easily. “We have to. We have to do it to make up for past injustice.”

  Jamie nodded. “I see.”

  It was clear that Minty now regarded the topic as resolved—in her favour. Jamie might be an attractive young man, but he was still a man. She turned to Isabel and asked her about the Review. Isabel explained that she still edited it, but as owner. Minty had the good manners at least to return the compliment that Isabel had paid her. “That’s something,” she said.

  Minty’s order arrived and they continued their lunch. The conversation flowed rather well, Isabel thought, and when, at the end of the meal, Minty suggested that they exchange telephone numbers, her views on the other woman were beginning to change.

  “Roderick is having a second birthday party on Sunday,” said Minty. “I know it’s no notice, but why not bring Charlie? They seem to get on very well.”

  They do not, thought Isabel, but did not say it. She accepted, and Minty, who had some shopping to do, left.

  Jamie, who seemed relieved that Minty had gone, now said, “So, what did Dove write?”

  Isabel’s mind was elsewhere. She was thinking of the invitation; it would be Charlie’s first party. Would there be olives? “What?”

  “Dove. What did he write? You said it was a bombshell.”

  Isabel nodded. “He accused me of plagiarism,” she said. “Or of aiding and abetting it.”

  Jamie’s eyes widened. “Let’s sort him,” he said. Then he laughed. “I don’t mean physically. Or maybe I did. But if I did, then I don’t mean it any longer. It just slipped out.”

  Isabel reassured him that she had not taken him seriously. “We all say things like that,” she said. “Or think them.”

  Jamie looked thoughtful. “Revenge fantasies. There was a conductor once—I wanted to …” His thoughtful look turned to one of shame. “I wouldn’t ever have done it.”

  Isabel put on a look of mock censure. “I should hope not.” “It would have been very therapeutic, though,” mused Jamie.

  LUNCH—and defending himself against his new friend, Roderick McCaig—had exhausted Charlie, who was now sitting quietly on Isabel’s lap, fighting a losing battle to keep his eyes open. He would sleep, of course, in his pushchair, and Jamie now lifted him gently into it and strapped him in.

  “I’ll take him for a sleep-walk,” he offered. “You go to the gallery. Half an hour?”

  Isabel accepted the offer. The Scottish Gallery, run by her friend Guy Peploe, was a few doors down the road from Glass and Thompson, and she wanted to talk to Guy about an auction that was coming up in London. Isabel appreciated art and made the occasional foray into the art market—something she did with discretion and a degree of embarrassment. She sensed that Jamie did not entirely approve of the buying of expensive paintings, and she usually shielded from him the sums she actually paid for her acquisitions. In her view, of course, they were entirely justified; surely it was more selfish to leave money squirrelled away in a bank account than to recycle it? The people from whom she bought the paintings spent the proceeds no doubt—that was the reason they were selling them in the first place. And was it not generally better that money should circulate—which was, after all, its fundamental purpose?

  She had mentioned this to Jamie—gently—and he had listened carefully. “I suppose so,” he said. “I don’t really understand economics though. If you left it in the bank, wouldn’t it be working anyway? Being lent to people?”

  “But this is going even further,” argued Isabel. “I’m effectively giving it away. Nobody will be paying me interest once I’ve parted with the money.”

  Jamie frowned. “But you’re not really giving it away. You’re getting something in return.”

  “Those paintings have to hang somewhere,” Isabel retorted. “What point do they serve if they’re doing nothing?”

  The conversation had petered out after that. Neither really knew anything about the subject; all Jamie knew was that he did not really have any money and was not particularly interested in acquiring it, while Isabel, who had money, knew that it was not only an opaque subject but a rather dull one too. If money could be changed into art, that at least made it more interesting.

  Guy was summoned from the back office when Isabel came into the gallery.

  “I don’t suppose …,” Isabel began.

  “I do,” said Guy. “I’ve got Lyon & Turnbull’s catalogue. And one of the London catalogues too.”

  They went downstairs and into the small garden at the back of the gallery. Seating themselves on two French ironwork chairs, they began to page through the London catalogue. It was the usual mixture for the day sale, where the cheaper pictures were offered; the evening sale brought out the higher bidders, the collectors who would pay hundreds of thousands, or even millions, for pictures which the artists might well have exchanged for a square meal. Isabel was not in that league; she was interested in the day sale, and the less expensive end of it too.

  “Elegant company enjoying themselves again,” said Isabel, pointing to a French picture of a well-dressed group of people picnicking under a tree.

  Guy read out the description that the cataloguer had prepared. “Circle of François Boucher. Elegant company at ease under a tree, musicians in the background.”

  “I love the term elegant company,” said Isabel. “I wonder how one qualifies? And here, look at this. This is the opposite. Roughs drinking in a tavern. Frankly, the roughs seem to be having a better time.”

  Guy laughed. Turning the page, he came across another allegorical work. “Big,” he said. “Seventy-two inches by fifty-four. And not a bad frame. But look what it is.”

  Isabel studied the painting in the photograph. “The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. Oh look, Guy. See the wise virgins. Look at them.”

  The painting, by an obscure Flemish artist of the late seventeenth century, showed two groups of young women in a landscape. Six wise virgins, seated on the left, were demurely occupied in reading and sewing, while behind them a number of lissom figures danced on a patch
of grass before a church. In the sky above the church, a small group of angels, illuminated by convenient shafts of light, looked down benignly on the edifying scene below. Had these angels turned their heads slightly and glanced to their left, they would have seen a very different set of young women—six patently foolish virgins—drinking, playing cards and enjoying the courtship of sundry young males. Behind this group was a town clearly dedicated to easy living, vice and disorder.

  “There are some paintings which are unambiguously didactic,” Guy observed drily.

  Isabel smiled. “The wise virgins look very dull,” she said. “I rather suspect I should have preferred the company of their foolish sisters.”

  Guy turned the page, to reveal a display of three portraits. “Pieter Nason,” he said, pointing to the first of the paintings. “He did some very fine portraits. There’s one in the National Gallery on the Mound. And what have we here …”

  He pointed to the painting below—a much smaller photograph, and consequently less detailed.

  As Isabel gazed at the painting, she felt a sudden flutter of excitement. The face was unmistakable—that proud but ultimately rather weak face: Charles Edward Stuart, none other than Bonnie Prince Charlie.

  “It’s him,” said Isabel quietly. “The Young Pretender.” Her eye went to the description under the photograph. “Circle of Domenico Dupra, Turin, Portrait of Charles Edward Stuart.”

  “Dupra was a reasonably well-known Italian portrait painter,” said Guy. “He was first half of the eighteenth century, which would have made him a contemporary of Charlie’s.”

  Isabel looked at the estimate. “Should we go for this, Guy? The estimate is low. Look. It starts at two thousand pounds.”

  Guy thought for a moment. “It would complement your portrait of James VI,” he said. “We could have a tilt at it. You never know with these Stuart portraits. There might just be somebody who’s very keen.”

  “Jacobites,” said Isabel.

  Guy agreed. Historical enthusiasm kept the market in portraits alive: people had their heroes, likely and unlikely, he explained. “Somebody recently offered Gandhi’s spectacles at an auction in New York,” he said. “They were eventually withdrawn, but had they not been, they would have brought in a tremendous sum.”

  Isabel thought about this. Gandhi’s spectacles. She remembered seeing a photograph of his possessions at the time of his death: those small, oval spectacles, a pair of sandals, a dhoti; a photograph that had moved her almost to tears. That tiny patrimony spoke more powerfully of the greatness of his soul than any words could. And she reflected upon how curious it was that the people bidding for them could compete to pay thousands of dollars for things that proclaimed the ultimate unimportance of those very dollars.

  She looked more closely at the picture of Bonnie Prince Charlie. She did not like him—he was vain, a chancer really, who must have shared the inflated notions of entitlement that infected all those exiled Stuarts. Yet no matter how outrageous his claims, there was an undoubted romance in his story, and it was for this reason that she was prepared to have him on her wall. Scotland had not been well treated by the English at the time; the Scottish parliament had not been consulted by Westminster in the choice of the Hanoverians, and the Stuart cause had become synonymous with the resentment of a put-upon nation. This weak and rather effete Frenchman, bedecked in tartan, had become the focal point of Scottish resistance to London’s diktats, and that still resonated.

  “Will you bid for me?” Isabel asked. “Let’s try to get it below the estimate. Twelve hundred?”

  Guy made a note in the margins. “Good as done,” he said.

  They finished their perusal of the catalogue and went back upstairs. Jamie arrived a few minutes later; she saw him coming up Dundas Street, with Charlie clearly asleep, tucked up in the pushchair.

  “We went all the way down to Canonmills,” he said as she went out to join them. “He’s sleeping the sleep of the just.”

  Isabel bent down and looked at Charlie. The tiny features were in repose, the mouth slightly open to allow the passage of air. Such an intricate collection of cells, she thought, all miraculously put together to produce a centre of human consciousness, so fragile, so infinitely precious to those whose life was transformed by it. She straightened up. The summer sun was riding high now, gilding the hills of Fife across the Forth. A bus laboured up the hill, bound for Princes Street and the Mound, the passengers in shirtsleeves for the unaccustomed heat. For a moment, Isabel’s eyes met those of someone looking out of the window, a thin-faced woman with her hair done up in a bun. The woman began a smile, but stopped, as if conscious of somehow transgressing the conventions of isolation with which as city-dwellers we immure ourselves. The bus moved on, and Isabel felt a sudden desire to run alongside it, to wave to the woman, to acknowledge the unexpected exchange of fellow feeling between them. But she did not, because she never acted on these impulses, and because it might have puzzled or even frightened the other woman.

  She turned to Jamie. “Can you remind me of the words of “King Fareweel’?” she asked. She knew that Jamie had an impressive knowledge of Scottish music, including the more arcane corners of the subject. “King Fareweel” was mainstream, the sort of thing sung by Scottish patriots in moments of enthusiastic inebriation, and by nostalgic Jacobites in cold sobriety.

  The question took Jamie by surprise, but Isabel often said odd things; he was getting used to it.

  “Now a young prince cam’ to Edinburgh toon,” he began, half singing, half speaking, “And he wasnae a wee bit German lairdie / For a far better man than ever he was / Lay oot in the heather wi’ his tartan plaidie.”

  “That’s it,” said Isabel.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE NEXT MORNING Isabel’s niece, Cat, telephoned at seven. Isabel had been awake since six and had taken Charlie on an outing in the garden. He had been late in starting to walk, but now seemed eager to make up for lost time, rushing off purposefully and quite indifferent to any falls that came his way. It was an exhausting business for her, if not for Charlie himself, as he had to be watched every moment. She had a playpen, which at least could give her time to get her breath back and do things that needed to be done in the house.

  “Do people approve of those things?” Jamie had asked when the pen had been delivered. “Don’t some people look on them as little prisons?”

  Isabel had read about this. “Some do,” she said. “But not everyone, by any means. It all depends on how long the child is in one. If they’re in it for short periods of time they can enjoy playing by themselves.”

  “But not for hours.”

  “No, not for hours. And nor should children be parked in front of the television.”

  “Which we don’t have,” Jamie pointed out.

  “No.”

  Jamie had bought something called a baby bungee, an apparatus that gripped on to the jamb of a door and allowed the child to bounce up and down on a strong elastic rope. Charlie had loved it, but on the second occasion it had been used he had bounced off one side of the jamb and then back against the other. He had been slightly bruised, even if he had not complained, but the baby bungee had been retired to a cupboard. Charlie, she had decided, was a stoic by temperament, a useful thing in this life. If this stoicism came from anywhere—rather than being an entirely random quirk of personality genes—then it must have been inherited from Jamie, who was fond of saying “It happens” when faced with any frustrating development. Stoicism and defeatism, of course, can be kissing cousins, but Isabel would never find fault in Jamie’s quite exceptional ability to accept setbacks. She had never seen him angry—not once; distressed, perhaps, but not angry, and it seemed that Charlie was the same. Of course the tantrum stage still lay ahead of him, and that would be a stringent test of any stoicism he possessed; it was no use saying “It happens” to a three-year-old brewing a stamping attack.

  “Sorry to phone so early,” said Cat. “Crisis.”

  Ca
t was visited by crisis rather more often than others, but the difficulties these crises entailed always seemed genuine enough, even if they were clearly of her own creation. A crisis was a crisis, Isabel believed, and it was unhelpful to allocate blame. You did not ask the drowning man how he ended up in the river, nor point to the No Swimming notice—you rescued him; even if he happened to be Dove, Isabel thought, or Professor Lettuce. A delicious scene came into her mind: Dove and Lettuce had both fallen into a loch and were calling for help. Isabel, passing by, would not hesitate, of course, nor would she relish their evident discomfort as it dawned on them who their rescuer would be. But what if it were in her power to rescue only one of them? It was the familiar and horrific dilemma that must cross the mind of at least some imaginative or overanxious parents: Which of my children would I save? The thought is usually too appalling to contemplate, and the question is suppressed rather than answered.

  But here it arose with Dove and Lettuce, both schemers and plotters of the same stripe, and in moral terms, Isabel reluctantly concluded, both of equal merit. The deciding factor in such a case would have to be age; all other things being equal, the sole remaining basis of just discrimination would be that Professor Lettuce, being the older of the two, had less claim for a future than the relatively youthful Dove. So Dove was saved. She did not like the conclusion, but doing the right thing, even if that took the form of making the correct choice in an entirely hypothetical situation, was often uncomfortable.

  Cat waited for a reply. Isabel was thinking, she decided, and was probably mentally chewing over something altogether different, as often happened.

  “You need me to do the delicatessen?” Isabel asked eventually.

  “Yes, if you don’t mind,” Cat explained. “The boiler in the flat has gone on the blink and the engineer is coming. However …”

  Isabel was familiar with such issues: the gas people were always unwilling to commit to a time, and would give only the most general indication of when it might be.