The Lost Art of Gratitude

by Alexander McCall Smith

  This thought crossed her mind—only to be quickly dismissed. It was not like that at all: there were plenty of perfectly eligible people who resorted to the services of an introduction agency or who advertised, and the results were often very successful. And there were plenty of women—there must be—who even if they proposed to a man might just as easily have received proposals themselves. No, the male monopoly of proposals, such as it was, was untenable and should be abandoned. And yet, and yet … the fact of the matter was that she had lacked the courage to propose to Jamie.

  It did not matter. She could now say my fiancé, and they could exchange rings. She wanted to give him one too and had already seen one she liked in a jeweller’s window in Bruntsfield. It was a discreet band made of rose-coloured gold; a lovely thing which it had never occurred to her she would eventually purchase. And when it came to a ring for her, when Jamie had mentioned it she had suggested something modest; she did not want him to spend too much. Of course, now that they were engaged the whole issue of the disparity in their respective means could disappear. Her possessions would be his by virtue of the marriage, and vice versa, of course; Jamie was about to become well-off.

  There were other things to think about that were considerably less attractive than rings. Prominent amongst these was the question of what, if anything, to say to Cat. Isabel’s niece had grudgingly accepted her aunt’s relationship with Jamie, her former boyfriend, but both of them, by unspoken agreement, kept off the subject when in one another’s company. Now Isabel had to decide whether to mention the engagement to Cat, or whether, in fear of her ire, to say nothing, leaving her to hear of it from somebody else. Eddie could be the messenger, perhaps, or even the personal announcements column of the Scotsman could break the news, not the bravest way out, but one that might make it easier for Cat to deal with news that almost certainly would not be welcome.

  Even if she was still feeling euphoric—almost lightheaded—after the evening’s events, Isabel had several things to do that morning. Jamie had hinted that breakfast in bed would not go amiss—for the second time, she observed, in three days, but she agreed, none the less, to make it for him.

  “When we’re married,” she said, “I take it that you won’t expect breakfast in bed every day. Or will you?” She would make him breakfast in bed every day if that was what he wanted; of course she would. She would do anything for him.

  “Of course not,” he said. “This will be the very last time. I promise.”

  It sounded so strange to utter the words when we are married. As a moral philosopher, and arbiter, in that role, of hypothetical private lives, she was used to talking about the marriages of others. Now it was her—Isabel Dalhousie—whose future was being referred to. Married: the word had a delicious flavour to it; like the name of some exotic place—Dar-es-Salaam, Timbuktu, Popocatépetl. Marriage was a whole territory, a citizenship, to be adopted and inhabited, as the neophyte takes on the ways and thinking of a new religion. She had been married before, of course, but it had been something false, something quite different.

  When she took the breakfast tray up to Jamie, she found that he had taken Charlie into bed with him and was reading to him, a story of a fox and his family who defeat a trio of unpleasant farmers. The story had been translated into Scots as The Sleekit Mr. Tod, and it was this version that Jamie was reading to Charlie. It was well beyond his understanding, of course, but the little boy was listening intently.

  “I want him to understand Scots,” said Jamie. “It’s our language, after all.”

  Isabel smiled. “Of course. But he probably has to understand English first.”

  Jamie looked doubtful, and returned to the story. “A tod is a fox in Scots,” he explained to Charlie. “That’s why he’s called Mr. Tod.”

  Charlie stared at his father with grave incomprehension.

  Jamie began to read again. “‘And so the wee tod askit his faither, Will there be dugs?’”

  Isabel left the room, a smile lingering on her lips. Will there be dugs? Will there be dogs? That might be the dread question that every fox thinks when contemplating his end—if foxes are aware of mortality. Will there be dugs, or will it be easy?

  LEAVING THE HOUSE shortly after ten, Isabel set off across the Meadows for George Square and the University Library. It was one of her favourite walks, as it afforded a good view of the skyline of the Old Town, a serrated line of chimney pots and spires that followed the ridge stretching down from the Castle to Holyrood. Behind that line was the Fife sky, across which scudded clouds blown in from the North Sea: wisps of grey, banks of darkening purple, splashes of white. Edinburgh could experience within a few minutes all four seasons, and the skies characteristic of each.

  The University Library occupied the south side of a square that had been largely destroyed by the architectural vandalism of the sixties. One side of the square survived though, and this was bounded by a cobbled street running south to north. The buildings on this side, a perfect row of Georgian houses three storeys high, were now occupied by university offices and chaplaincies, by small academic departments and the University Press. Here too was a chapel for students of Orthodox faith, a basement transformed by icons and the chanting of priests; here, Isabel remembered, was the office of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, a language that had words for this little bit of a small island, this land of rain and clouds and shafts of poetry.

  Everywhere in this city, everywhere Isabel went, there were memories. As an eighteen-year-old she had come to a poetry reading on this side of the square, in the School of Scottish Studies; it was given by a Gaelic poet, who read in both his own language and English. Isabel had been unable to understand his Gaelic, but had followed it on a crib sheet thoughtfully provided by the organisers; it had sounded like the wind and waves breaking on the shore; the words of a language that suited its landscape. And then, in English, he had read a poem about the death of his mother, whose breath, he said, had run out, like the tide draining out of a sea loch; now he ached, he confessed, for the star that had been extinguished. To be the mother of a poet, she thought, must be a fine thing.

  She went into the library, which, as a former member of the philosophy department—although a low-paid and junior one—she was still entitled to use. It was unusually quiet, as the undergraduate students were away for the summer, leaving the library to those studying for higher degrees, the pursuers of masters’ degrees and doctorates. She saw one of the librarians whom she knew slightly, a young man from the Isle of Skye who always looked vaguely apologetic, as if the service that they were offering was somehow unsatisfactory. She imagined his saying, We don’t have that book, I’m so sorry, but there are other books, you know, and we might have those … But that was not what he said as he scurried past Isabel on some errand. Instead he said, “Dr. Henderson has gone. Did you know that? He was such a nice man.” Isabel, who had no idea who Dr. Henderson was, expressed regret. What a shame. And it was, she said to herself; if this librarian considered him a nice man, then that was what he probably was. And he would be regretted, as nice men were when they left. But gone where?

  “Where?” she asked.

  The librarian frowned. “Where?”

  “Where has he gone?”

  The librarian looked askance at her; surely she knew. “He died. He was run over.”

  Isabel gasped. “I’m so sorry.”

  The librarian gave her a slightly reproving look and excused himself to continue his errand. That misunderstanding was not my fault, Isabel told herself. One does not say of a person who has been run over that he has gone. Gone before, perhaps, if one is both religious and euphemistic—not to say distinctly old-fashioned—but one did not simply say gone.

  She made her way up to what she called the philosophy floor, where the philosophical journals were shelved. There were very few people around at this level of the library, and she experienced the somewhat disconcerting feeling that can accompany being alone, or almost alone, in
a large room. Here it was intensified by the long rows of books, marching off to the vanishing point. Books are not mute, she thought; they have things to whisper, and here in this open-plan library there are no walls to mute their whispers.

  She made her way slowly down one of the passages between the stacks. There were so many journals, and these groaning shelves housed only those with a physical existence. Behind them, somewhere in the ether, were the electronic journals that never ended up on paper—a whole virtual world in which the exchanges of opinion were every bit as real as those that resided in print. And yet that virtual world seemed so shadowy by comparison with these squat volumes, and perilous too: Isabel had browsed a philosophical bibliography recently and come across a reference to a journal called Injustice Studies. The title had intrigued her, and all the more so because the list’s compiler had written underneath the title: “Seems to have disappeared.” She imagined the editor of Injustice Studies complaining: It’s so unfair, it really is. Our journal was really important, and then …

  But there was no danger of the journals around her disappearing. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, the American Philosophical Quarterly, Ancient Philosophy: these were names which were set for the long run. And the titles were so familiar, although some of them she had never looked at and these reproached her now. The bound volumes of Ancient Philosophy were important to somebody, and one of them contained a slip of paper where a reader had bookmarked an article. She would understand the issues if she chose to open one of the volumes, but she knew that there were conversations within which she would never have the time to participate in. And that, of course, was the problem with any large collection of books, whether in a library or a bookshop: one might feel intimidated by the fact that there were simply too many to read and not know where to start.

  Isabel sighed. At the end of the book stacks there was a window looking over the trees below. It was a bright morning, and the foliage was painted gold by the sun; I might be out there, she thought, sitting on the grass, gazing up at the sky, enjoying the warmth, rather than immured in here, with these dead voices and the sheer weight of old paper. For a moment she was tempted. She did not have to do this. She did not have to edit the Review and add to this great mountain of argumentative scholarship. Why did she? Did it change the world one iota? Did it make the faintest difference to anything? People acted as they did, made their decisions, treated one another well or badly according to the tides of their heart, and whatever little debates she hosted in her journal would have no effect on how they did any of this.

  She put the thought out of her mind: it was simply wrong, as undermining doubts so often are. Everything, every human activity that went beyond the purely functional, could be challenged in this way: painting, music, drama. And yet all of these made a difference—a major difference in many cases. The readers of Isabel’s journal were affected by the conversation within its covers—if nothing else, the living room of their moral imagination became bigger. And this must surely have some bearing on the way they dealt with the world, even in the small transactions of life: awareness of the pain of others here, a word of comfort there. Of course, the admission of kindness to one’s life did not spring from any contemplation of the views of Hobbes (selfish Hobbes) and Hume (the good, generous Davey), but it did no harm to know about all that. And that was where philosophy really did count: it set out the major choices behind all those practical day-to-day questions of charity and understanding and simple decency; it was the weather, the backdrop against which those practical matters were debated.

  The thought cheered her. All these volumes, passive and unmoving, rarely opened, it seemed; all of them were building blocks in the edifice of ideas that made for a humane and civilised society. And her own journal, shelved in this very room, was part of that. Well worth doing, whatever hours of sitting in the sun it precluded; books cost that. She remembered reading a poem that somebody had written about Walter Scott and his Herculean writing labours. What hours of love that great literary effort had deprived him of, the poet wrote. Yet Isabel thought that this observation might be misleading. Hours of love left little behind, unless the love was directed at mankind in general; Walter Scott’s years of exile at his desk created a voluminous legacy.

  Her eye ran down the titles of the journals on the shelves, and she stopped. Reaching into a pocket, she extracted the slip of paper on which she had written the reference: the name of the journal, the volume year and the page number. And the author’s name, of course: Dove, Christopher.

  She bent down. The journal in question was stored on the bottom shelf, and its volumes as a consequence were dustier. She ran her finger along the spines, and stopped at the year she had written down. She eased the book from its shelf, a tight fit, and then took it to one of the tables at the window. From the dim semi-darkness of the book stacks to the light of the window table—the contrast was sharp, and she shut her eyes for a moment. But then she turned and looked out through the great sheet of glass, out to the rooftops of Marchmont across the Meadows; and beyond that, just visible in the distance, the inner slopes of the Pentlands. She had climbed there with Jamie on a bright day in January when the hills had been covered in snow right down to the burns below. The wind had come in from the west—a knife-like wind in spite of the broad sunlight and the high cloudless sky. Off the tops of the hills powdered snow had streamed in thin white veils from the ridges, blown by the whistling wind, white against blue, like smoke from the top of a volcano. Now, in the summer, the hills were nothing to do with January; green, blue, gentle.

  She opened the volume and found the page she was looking for: “Reflections on Free Riding,” by Christopher Dove, M.A., D. Phil., senior lecturer in philosophy, University of Durham. It had been written before Dove was appointed to his chair at the newly minted university in London where he now professed, a university that Isabel thought sounded more like the destination of a bus rather than a place of learning. The lack of charity behind that thought jarred, and she reminded herself that Dove’s institution would be doing good and useful work, even if it was unglamorous, and pedestrian, and staffed by self-important people like Dove: education, however administered, was a good in itself, and not everyone could receive it in a grove. More than that, it might well be all the more precious when passed from teacher to pupil in a prison cell, or in a tumbledown classroom, or by the flickering light of a candle. No, it was mean-spirited to tar Dove’s university with the brush that should be reserved for him, and she would not think like that. Or she would try not to. Yet how could any academic institution worthy of the name not see through a man like Christopher Dove …

  She began to read Dove’s article. Free riding, he explained, involved taking the benefit of collective action without contributing in return. I know that already, thought Isabel. The free rider might not vote, then, because it might be irrational to expend the energy involved in seeking out a polling station when he knows that his vote will make no difference to the outcome. How ridiculous! Isabel read on, her irritation increasing with each page. Dove, it seemed, was pinning his colours to the mast of the free rider, endorsing the argument made by a small group of philosophers who had supported this thoroughly dubious position. It was unadulterated selfishness, she thought; an example of the individualistic posturing that had once been so fashionable and had encouraged both greed and economic disaster. It was not rational to look after oneself at the expense of others, for the simple reason that we sank or swam together. But of course Dove would have thought this a clever position to affect: to take out a pin and prick long-established notions of civic duty. Cast a vote? Why bother if it takes one away from something more individually enriching. Did he really believe that?

  Isabel struggled to contain her irritation. She had a job to do and she began to tackle it, making her way through Dove’s footnotes and writing down the cited references. The literature on the subject was surprisingly large and Dove was not one to hide his learning under a bus
hel. Isabel wrote down each citation, noticing that one article, in particular, seemed to have caught Dove’s attention. “Self and Community” had been published in an American review ten years earlier and was the work of one Herbert Ponder, adjunct professor of philosophy at a Southern California university. “Ponder’s defence of the enlightened self-interest position is masterly,” wrote Dove. “Indeed, it is widely regarded as the locus classicus of the argument against pointless involvement in joint action.” It is not enlightened, she said to herself. It is the opposite of everything that the Enlightenment stood for.

  Isabel wrote down the reference and returned to the stacks. Professor Ponder’s article had been published in the American Philosophical Quarterly, and she quickly located the relevant volume. Taking it back to her seat at the window, she went straight to the article. Again there were footnotes, though fewer than in Dove’s own piece—four in all, only one of which had a reference to another paper. She noted down the reference, this time to the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, and to an article by a professor from the University of Toronto. Armed with her note, she made her way back to the stacks, replacing the American Philosophical Quarterly in its place as she went past. A, B and then C: the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, special symposium on “Reasons for Action.” She opened the volume and began to read as she walked back to her table. She stopped. It met her eye, leapt from the page, the result of an absurdly long shot. But some long shots come home to roost, just as some metaphors are destined to be mixed. Dove, she thought, you shouldn’t have done this. But you have. And now it is with your own petard that you are hoist.

  CHAPTER SEVEN