The Lost Art of Gratitude

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Lettuce shook his head. He had coloured slightly, she noticed.

  “I had a wonderful visit there,” Isabel said. “A few years ago—in the spring. The blossom was out and it was just perfect. I was very well looked after. They took me to the Lilly Library. They have the most remarkable collection there—literary papers from all sorts of people, all neatly boxed away. And an astonishing collection of miniature books. Tiny ones. Smaller than that plum tomato you’re trying to eat. You should impale it on your fork, you know.”

  It took Professor Lettuce some time to marshal his thoughts. As she waited for him, Isabel, toying with her pasta, found herself feeling some sympathy for her now-deflated adversary, caught between ambition and loyalty to his dubious ally. He was like one of those lettuces that, when you squeeze them, are all air between the leaves and reduce to more or less nothing, just a few thin green leaves. Although Lettuce was older than Dove by at least a decade, if not more, he was not the ringleader; it was dawning on her that it was Christopher Dove who was the prime mover in whatever plans the two of them had hatched. Lettuce was the mere messenger here, and he had seen the ground completely cut from beneath his feet with this countercharge against Dove. Now, watching him try to recover, she felt sorry for him; he was like a great beached whale struggling to get back into the water. To be pitied rather than despised.

  “I’m most interested in Hume …,” Lettuce began. Then he stopped.

  Isabel reached out across the table and placed her hand on his wrist. “I have no desire to fight with you, you know. I bear you no ill will over what happened.”

  He opened his mouth to speak. “Christopher said—”

  “Christopher Dove does not like me. He tried, quite wrongly, to get me out as editor of the Review. I fought back. But I am quite prepared to regard all of that as past business. I really am. And I hope you are too.”

  Lettuce’s eyes were on her as she spoke. He looked down at her hand upon his wrist, as if trying to make sense of it, but he did not try to shrug it off.

  “I fear that Christopher may have misled me,” he said. “And if that is so, I believe that I owe you an apology.”

  “Which I am happy to accept,” said Isabel quickly. “So let’s forget all about it and talk about your new book on Hutcheson. Isn’t it extraordinary how the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment is still felt so strongly?”

  She moved her hand, and Lettuce went back to his salad. “You’re quite right,” he said. “And Hutcheson has not had adequate attention paid to him, I feel. His insights into morality and our sense of beauty seem so fresh, even today. I pay quite a lot of attention to those in my new work.”

  “Good,” said Isabel. “I very much look forward to reading it.”

  Lettuce now smiled. “I’ve been a rather foolish Lettuce,” he said.

  The strange turn of phrase caught her by surprise; referring to oneself in the third person always made Isabel feel uneasy, conveying, as it did, a slight sense of dissociation from self. Here it seemed almost comical—sounding like a childish reference to oneself as a vegetable; mind you, the French, she remembered, called one another chou, in affection. She reached out again and patted his wrist. “You’ve been human—that’s all. We all make mistakes.”

  He looked at her in gratitude. “Thank you.”

  She inclined her head. She had not expected him to thank her; indeed she rarely expected anybody to thank her for anything. Gratitude was a lost art, she felt. People accepted things, took them as their right, and had forgotten how to give proper thanks. Professor Lettuce, for all his faults, had at least said thank you and she, in turn, was grateful for that.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  JAMIE ANNOUNCED that he would cook dinner that evening—scallops, with green beans and dauphinois potatoes. Isabel, who had taught him how to make the potato dish, was pleased—and he was proud. “Nobody else in the orchestra can make potatoes dauphinois,” he said, adding, “as far as I know.”

  With his preternaturally sophisticated palate, Charlie liked potatoes done this way, turning up his nose at ordinary boiled potatoes.

  “Where did he get these sophisticated tastes from?” asked Jamie, looking firmly at Isabel.

  It was not from her, claimed Isabel. Boiled potatoes were fine with her; but so were scallops and truffle oil and smoked wild salmon. “His grandfather, of course, my father, had a liking for savouries—potted shrimps, angels on horseback—that sort of thing. Maybe it’s from him.”

  “We had mince and tatties when I was a boy,” said Jamie. “And rice pudding.” Mince and tatties were standard Scottish fare, as ordinary as could be.

  “But you were lucky to have the mince,” said Isabel. “Remember that there were those who had only the potatoes? A tatty and a pass? When the children’s potatoes were passed over the meat—just passed—to get a whiff of the flavour on them? Then the father ate all the meat.”

  “All right,” said Jamie. “We had mince. But when I was a music student we didn’t have a fridge in the flat.”

  Isabel was politely interested. “Really?”

  “Yes. And the hot water in the bathroom came from a tiny gas geyser.”

  “Such hardship.”

  “You may laugh. Today everybody has everything, right from the word go.”

  Isabel looked at Charlie, who had been playing in his playpen during this conversation. “He’ll never remember mince and tatties,” she mused. “Because he refuses to eat them. Or haggis. And he will assume that people have always had mobile phones and the web to give the answer to anything you want to know at the touch of a key. And invisible mp3s instead of CDs.”

  “Who remembers vinyl?” asked Jamie. “Do you?”

  Isabel did; there was vinyl in the attic. One day she would mount an electronic rescue and save it, but she had been putting it off. In its vinyl form the music seemed somehow more tangible, more real. As a series of ones and zeros it seemed to her that something was being lost, in the same way that books might be lost when their contents are rendered digital. And bookshelves, and libraries, and printing presses, and binderies; if people spoke of books as friends—which they so often were—then could they say the same of an electronic file?

  Jamie added, “And he’ll probably find it remarkable that there was a time when we thought that we would have water and fuel and food indefinitely.”

  Isabel thought this was true. “I suspect he will.”

  “And he’ll find it hard to believe that there really was ice at the poles and Amazonian jungles and creatures like polar bears and elephants.” Jamie paused. “His world is going to be very different, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. It already is.”

  He looked at her. This was a shared moment of loss, of the sort that lovers may experience when they realise they are to part, or when a parent helps a child pack on leaving the family home; a moment made poignant by impending separation. None of us, she thought, wants the world we know to come to an end; we do not want familiar things to be taken from us.

  Charlie was dispatched to bed. He was tired, and settled well—almost immediately. Isabel kissed him and passed him the stuffed animal he liked to cuddle, although he was too sleepy even for that. I never imagined such happiness, she thought. And then she remembered Jock Dundas and his efforts, misguided and unrealistic though they were, to get to know his son, and it made her realise how fortunate she was, and in so many respects. She turned out Charlie’s lamp, leaving only the slight glow of his night-light to keep at bay the terrors of the night, whatever they were for him—ghaists and bogles, to use the Scots words. She had been frightened of these when she was a child, although her parents had reassured her that darkness was just an absence of light, nothing more. One does not believe one’s parents, of course, who would be so easily lulled into complacency by those self-same ghaists and bogles. Ghosts haunted not only houses, but hearts too. Isabel was going through the door, and stopped as the lines came back to her. Some ghaists haunt hooses, thi
s ane haunts my hert / An’ aye I hearken for its lichtlie step. She went downstairs and into the kitchen, where Jamie was laying out slivers of smoked salmon on freshly buttered slices of brown bread. He looked up, and she crossed the floor to him. She put her arms around his shoulders and kissed him.

  He was surprised; his fingers were fishy and he could not touch her. “Why?”

  “Why not? I was thinking of a poem I once read, about a ghost that haunts the heart. I felt frightened.”

  He smiled. “You shouldn’t. Not with me here.”

  “I know.”

  He reached for a kitchen towel to wipe his hands. She released him.

  “The woman in the poem looks forward to her encounter with the ghost that haunts her heart. She’s not frightened at all.”

  He looked away. Was she talking about Cat? Cat did not haunt him any more. And Isabel was no longer haunted by John Liamor, surely. He reached for the bottle of wine that he had opened and put into an ice-cooled sleeve. He poured two glasses and handed one to her.

  “Are you ever frightened?” she asked.

  He thought for a moment. He had been frightened, but it was a long time ago. At school there had been a boy who delighted in picking on him, twisting his arm behind his back until he screamed for mercy; it was something sexual, he later realised, but he was too innocent to know that then. The older boy wanted him but could not have him, so love became hate, as it so readily could. He had been frightened because he did not understand.

  “I used to be frightened,” he said. “Of rather odd things. Not now, though. Not for a long time.” He looked at her. “And you?”

  “I’m frightened of losing things,” she said. “I’m frightened that something’s going to happen to you—or to Charlie.”

  His face showed his concern. “What parent doesn’t feel that? You think that something awful will happen if you don’t do something or other. You bargain with fate.”

  She took a sip of her wine. “You have to put it out of your mind. Otherwise …”

  “Exactly.”

  “Minty Auchterlonie. There’s something about her that frightens me. I’m not really frightened, I suppose. But she makes me feel …”

  “Anxious?” Jamie prompted.

  “More than that. I get the impression that if you crossed her she’d think nothing of doing something really vindictive.”

  Jamie shrugged. “She might, I suppose. But sometimes …” He broke off. “I saw Peter Stevenson today, you know. In Bruntsfield. When I was getting the scallops from Hughes’ fish shop. He was buying kippers.”

  Isabel laughed. “How reassuring.”

  “Your mentioning Minty reminded me,” Jamie went on. “We got chatting. I was walking back up to Church Hill as I had to go to the supermarket. I mentioned to him that we’d recently met up with Minty again. Remember, he helped you first time round with her.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Yes. He still doesn’t trust her, you know. He’s convinced that Minty pulled the wool over your eyes over that insider-dealing matter a few years ago. He said that although she’s the head of that bank there are quite a few people in Edinburgh who don’t approve of her.”

  Isabel was interested, but only moderately so; there was nothing surprising in what Jamie had said. To get to the top of anything, and particularly finance, she imagined that one would have to be prepared to step on a lot of people. Minty must have done that—and made enemies in the process.

  “But then he said something that made me wonder. I meant to tell you when I got back, but I forgot to. Sorry.”

  Isabel waited. Jamie had now started to slice the potatoes for his potatoes dauphinois. “Why is this dish called dauphinois?” he asked.

  Isabel was not sure. “It may be because it’s from the Dauphinois Alps,” she said. “That’s probably the reason. On the other hand, there may be a more romantic explanation. Did the Dauphin like his potatoes done that way?” It was unlikely, but it brought the Dauphin to mind, and his brief marriage to Mary Queen of Scots. For a moment she pictured them sitting together at a table in the French court, Mary with her teenage groom, offering him potatoes dauphinois.

  “It was very tragic,” she said.

  Jamie sliced another potato and laid the slices on their bed of cream and garlic. “What was very tragic?”

  “The Dauphin. Francis. Mary loved him, you know, although they were betrothed when they were terribly young. She loved him. And then he went and caught an ear infection that led to an abscess in the brain. Imagine how painful his death must have been: screaming agony because pain in the ear is so close to where you are. Perhaps they had some painkillers in those days—various plants. I hope they did. Opium, maybe. Otherwise, just imagine it.”

  Jamie brought her back to the subject. “Minty,” he said. “Peter said that she was in trouble—or could be. He wasn’t very specific.”

  Isabel was immediately intrigued. Peter Stevenson was one of the best informed of her friends; he knew things others did not, but rarely spoke about them—which was one of the reasons, she thought, why he knew things in the first place. Could Peter Stevenson be aware of Jock Dundas and the issue of Roderick’s paternity? Surely not. Minty would hardly have talked about that, not if she wanted to keep it secret from Gordon. Edinburgh was a village: a word in the wrong place travelled every bit as quickly as a word in the right place.

  She asked Jamie what Peter had said, and he told her, “Just that. Minty’s in a bit of trouble, and he was not surprised. He said something about her sailing too close to the wind.”

  It was a metaphor that Isabel liked, and used herself. It conveyed very well the notion of taking full advantage of something and then being just a little bit too greedy and suffering the consequences. It fitted Minty perfectly, except that it seemed that she always got away with it. There she was, head of an investment bank, living a life of comfort in her Georgian house with the view of the Lammermuir Hills, and she had ended up in that position by … by sailing too close to the wind—there was no better expression for it. And Christopher Dove too? Had he sailed too close to the wind? No, in his case another meteorological metaphor was appropriate perhaps: he had reaped whirlwinds—or at least what he had sown.

  She looked at her watch. It was not too late to phone Peter. If he was in, she could walk round to his house in ten minutes or so, talk to him and then be back within the hour. How long would the potatoes dauphinois take?

  “I know this sounds impetuous,” she said, “but I want to see Peter. Could I go round there while your potatoes are dauphinoising?”

  Jamie looked at her in astonishment. “Why? Can’t it wait?”

  It could wait, of course, but Isabel herself could not. If she did not see Peter now she would spend the night pondering the implications of what he had said to Jamie. And if she did that, then the next day she would be too tired to work, would get behind with the Review, and that would prey on her mind sufficiently to ruin her sleep the following night. No, she had to talk to Peter now.

  Jamie tried to be gracious. “All right. But please don’t be too late—potatoes dauphinois get soggy if you leave them.”

  She kissed him lightly on the cheek and went to the telephone. Susie, Peter’s wife, answered and said that Peter was in the garden with the dog. Of course he would be happy to see Isabel; they had no plans for the evening and she was not yet even thinking about supper. “We had a late lunch today,” she said.

  Isabel put on a light coat; the day itself had been warm, but evenings in Edinburgh could be chilly, particularly when the sky was empty of clouds, as it was this evening. Deciding to add a scarf to the coat, she went out of the house and set off for the Stevensons’ house in the Grange. It was not a long walk, but it was an interesting one for Isabel, as wherever she walked in Edinburgh she passed places with particular associations for her. So now, by taking a shortcut, she found herself walking past the house of Alex Philip, the architect whom she had consulted about possible alterati
ons to her house, and then past the house of Haflidi Hallgrimsson, the composer whose latest piece she had listened to a few days previously. And round the corner from that she saw the road that led to the house of a well-known politician, and past the house of another of whom she had heard a most cutting remark passed—ten years ago, but still clear in her mind. She knew that she should not find it amusing, but she did: somebody had said of that person, with devastating accuracy, “He always does the right thing. It just so happens that the right thing is always in his best interests.” It was a remark devoid of charity, and she wondered whether there was a duty not to bring such words to mind but rather to let them fade. It would be an act of memory-housekeeping of the sort that perhaps we all needed to undertake from time to time. In this way might one rid the heart of ghosts, she thought.

  Could we remember, though, only those things we wanted to? Could there be acts of forgetting, just as there could be acts of remembrance? Human memory was frequently difficult and unruly, but it was not beyond telling. And it was possible, she thought, to say to another who wanted one to forget something, an embarrassing or shameful incident perhaps, Yes, I have forgotten it. That was a lesson that one of her school friends could take to heart; whenever Isabel saw her now she delighted in remembering how as twelve-year-olds they had teased a vulnerable teacher, imitating her voice when she turned to write something on the blackboard, unaware of her lack of sureness of herself, her crippling inadequacy in the face of taunting schoolgirls. Don’t remind me of that, Isabel wanted to say, but did not because it sounded like an abrogation of responsibility for what she, like the other girls, had been. And yet that twelve-year-old was a different person in the moral sense; she, the mature Isabel Dalhousie, would never do what that near-teenage girl had done. It was not her; it simply was not her any more.

  She crossed the road at Church Hill and made her way along the road to the gateway of West Grange House. Peter was in the garden, bending over to examine something in a flower bed, and was alerted to the arrival of Isabel by the barking of his dog.