The Lost Art of Gratitude

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “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 bite 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, middleclass 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.”

  Is
abel 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 the 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.”

  She sat down at the piano and played; Jamie sang. And when he got to the lines about Prestonpans, she faltered and stopped, her hands unmoving on the keyboard.

  At Prestonpans they laid their plans,

  And the Heilan lads they were lyin’ ready,

  Like the wind frae Skye they bid them fly,

  And monie’s the braw laddie lost his daddy.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t find this song very easy.” It was too painful to think of those boys deprived of their fathers, and these simple words made her think of how Jamie was so relishing being Charlie’s father. Charlie, her braw laddie, and his daddy.

  “All right,” said Jamie. “Let me sit down there.” He gestured to the piano stool, which was wide enough for two. Isabel shifted over, and he sat beside her. He reached forward and played a chord, and then moved to another. “That’s it,” he said.

  “That’s what?”

  He repeated the chords. “That’s the tune I was going to compose,” he said. “Olives All Gone.’ Listen.”

  He played a simple, rather sad melody; she thought it beautiful.

  Olives all gone, olives all gone,

  The olives I loved, now they are gone,

  Summer will bring more, you say,

  The trees will bear fruit;

  That may be true, my dear,

  But the olives are gone.

  Isabel listened, solemnly, then burst out laughing, to be joined by Jamie. She kissed him lightly on the cheek, and he kissed her back, not lightly, but with passion.

  She said, “Oh,” and he said, “Isabel Dalhousie, please marry me.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  THAT SHE SAID YES, and then yes, again, changed everything, but also changed nothing. There was no change in her world the next morning when she got out of bed to attend to Charlie; she was still Isabel Dalhousie, mother, with a child to look after and a house and philosophical review to run. She was still responsible for her somewhat unruly garden, with its attendant fox and rhododendron bushes; she was still the owner of a green Swedish car; she was still the aunt of the rather unpredictable and sometimes moody Cat; she remained a patron of Scottish Opera—to whom she reminded herself to send a cheque; all of that was the same. But now she was Jamie’s fiancée it seemed to her that her future—that bit of ourselves in which to a greater or lesser degree we live our lives—had changed utterly. Now the future was no longer a vague, uncharted territory; following Jamie’s proposal on the piano stool after the singing of his new song, “Olives A
ll Gone,” it had acquired a shape.

  Of course he had proposed once before. It was a year or so earlier, when they had come out of Lyon & Turnbull’s auction rooms and made their way to the Portrait Gallery restaurant. He had told her that he wanted to marry her; she had been reluctant and had put him off, not because she had any doubts about him, or his seriousness, but because she was concerned—overly concerned, perhaps—about his freedom. That was when she was more sensitive than she now was about the difference in their ages. But now she barely thought about it. So what? people had said. And the liberating effect of those two, sometimes immensely dangerous words, had eventually been felt. So what if Jamie was a bit younger than she was; so what?

  She had regretted her refusal and had hoped that he would mention marriage again, but he had not. Subsequently she considered broaching the subject herself, and on one or two occasions had come close to doing so, only to be inhibited by a vague sense of embarrassment. The problem was this: a woman did not ask a man to marry her, at least conventionally. There was no reason for it, of course, other than social custom, and Isabel knew that this was changing. People said that plenty of women were proposing to men—a third of all women, she had read—but prepared as she was to accept this figure, she could not think of anybody she actually knew who had proposed to their husbands. That did not mean that they had not done so, of course; there are some things that a large number of people do but few will admit to.

  Entertaining subversive thoughts, for example, in a society in the grip of a political hegemony is not something that people will readily admit to, such is the power of intellectual intimidation; and yet people do have such thoughts. And when it comes to something that reflects on a person’s desirability or popularity, then the tendency to reticence may be particularly marked. Not everyone would care to admit to finding a spouse through an advertisement—or to be the subject of an advertisement; where is the romance in finding somebody through a lonely hearts column, cheek by jowl with Cars For Sale and Miscellaneous Bargains? Therein lay an admission of personal failure: the glamorous, the attractive, the sought-after, they had no need to advertise, whereas the inadequate and the unwanted did.