The Lost Art of Gratitude

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “I know it’s an odd time to come and see you,” said Isabel. “But there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  Peter smiled. “And it couldn’t wait?” he said. “Your impatience has always been one of your most charming qualities.” He gestured to a bench to the side of the front door. “We can sit there. It’s still warm enough to be outside. And light enough. The one consolation of our poor Scottish summers is the light, don’t you think?”

  Isabel agreed. Then there was a silence, during which Peter looked at her expectantly. Eventually he said, “Minty Auchterlonie?”

  She nodded.

  “I thought it might be,” said Peter. “Did Jamie tell you that I met him at Hughes’?”

  “Yes. And you said that you thought that she was in trouble.”

  Peter nodded. “I did. And she is.”

  She waited for him to expand on this, but when he spoke again it was to question her. “Are you … Well, I was about to say interfering again, but I realise that’s not exactly tactful. And I realise, too, that you can’t help yourself.”

  From someone else she might have resented this remark, but not from an old friend. “I don’t know if it’s interfering to respond to a clear request from somebody,” she said. “She sought me out. She asked me.”

  Peter conceded. “All right. I take it back. No interference.”

  “And I can help myself,” Isabel added.

  Peter was gracious. “Of course you can. Anyway, Minty: Do you want me to tell you what I know?”

  She wondered if he was teasing her. “Will you?”

  Peter looked at her as if weighing her up. “Well, I’m not sure if I can say much.”

  Isabel reassured him. “I won’t repeat what you tell me. I’m quite discreet, you know.”

  “Oh, I know that,” said Peter. “But I’m afraid I can’t give you all that much to be discreet about. I have my suspicions, though.”

  “About her honesty.”

  Peter thought for a moment. “Yes, you could say that. The definition of business honesty is a tricky thing, but it certainly covers what you don’t say just as much as what you do say.”

  Isabel knew what he meant. There were many situations where failing to say something one should say could seriously harm somebody else; the difficulty, though, was judging just when there was a duty to say something in the first place.

  “My understanding,” Peter continued, “is that Minty Auchterlonie has been accused of withholding information from an investor in her bank, a man called George Finesk. He’s furious as a result and is muttering about suing her. Nothing’s happened yet. But people have heard about it and that can’t be doing her much good.”

  “And did she do this?” asked Isabel.

  Peter hesitated before replying.

  “Perhaps,” he began. “She’s not a crook. I suspect that she’s far too clever to break the law. But she is what I call flaky. She bends the rules to suit her own interests. She’s got to the top in a man’s world at a very young age, and she has an extraordinary record of bringing home the bacon. So people have been prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt, as you did, wrongly in my view, over that insider-dealing affair, when she managed to push the blame on to a largely innocent colleague of her fiancé. And I am aware of several other occasions when she has taken unprincipled shortcuts.”

  Isabel absorbed this. Peter was careful in his judgements, and if he had reached this view of Minty there would be good grounds for it. “And this George Finesk?” she asked. “What about him?”

  Peter leaned back on the bench. “As it happens I know him reasonably well. He used to own a large tea estate in Darjeeling—the Finesks had stayed on in India after Independence, through difficult times politically and financially, and eventually George inherited the estate from his father in the late nineteen-eighties. He ran it for a while before he sold out to some big Bengali investment company. George loved India but his wife had an aged mother in the Borders, and for one reason and another he thought it better to come home.

  “They had money in Scotland too—they used to be shipping people from Glasgow, on his mother’s side. George used this to set up a family investment company—quite a successful one. Minty would know this, of course, and so when she was looking for a new investor in the bank, he was an obvious person to approach. George proved amenable and came up with one and a half million. That’s quite a bit of money, even for him.”

  Peter stopped, and they sat in silence while Isabel thought over what he had said. She wondered whether there was a connection between the threats that Minty had been receiving and this argument between her and George Finesk. Could George Finesk have been so outraged that he might have started some sort of campaign against Minty, fighting underhand dealings with underhand methods? It seemed improbable, and yet the whole issue was unlikely if one stopped to think about it. It was unlikely that Minty would have an affair, and let herself become pregnant, and yet she had. It was unlikely that the father of that child would suddenly develop a burning interest in getting to know his son, and yet Jock Dundas had done exactly that. It was unlikely that she, a total stranger to these issues, should be enlisted as an intermediary—at the child’s birthday party, no less—and yet she had. It was all unlikely.

  “So what’s going to happen?” asked Isabel. Peter had explained it clearly enough, but she still felt a bit out of her depth. In particular, she felt that she was no match for Minty Auchterlonie and her machinations. The world of finance was not Isabel’s world, yet it was the very air that Minty breathed.

  Peter shrugged. “It depends on whether George continues to make a fuss. He may give up. Or he may not. I suppose that Minty and her co-directors are hoping to keep a lid on the whole thing—but I imagine they’ll still be frightened that George may be so angry that he’ll expose the matter regardless of the consequences to his investment.”

  They sat on the bench for a little while longer, joined after a few minutes by Susie, who brought out glasses of diluted elder-flower cordial. “From the garden,” she said. “We have an elder at the back that never fails us.”

  “I have one too,” said Isabel. “Each year I say this will be the year I make elderflower cordial, and each year I forget, or put it off, or think of an excuse. I suppose I’m just weak.”

  Susie shook her head. “You’re not. You’ve got a journal to run, as well as a child and a fiancé. You’ve got more than enough in your life.”

  “But I could do something about elderflower cordial. It’s not a big thing.”

  “Well, you have to draw the line somewhere,” said Susie.

  “The problem, though, is where to draw that line,” observed Isabel. “Don’t you think?”

  Peter looked at her. “Yes, that’s right. And it seems to me that you have difficulty with that. Hence your getting involved in other people’s problems.” He paused. “Are you doing that right now? Are you getting mixed up in Minty’s affairs?”

  She knew that she could not conceal anything from Peter; he would know immediately. And yet she could not tell him about Minty’s approach to her, as she had promised that she would pass that secret on to nobody but Jamie.

  “A bit,” she said. “Unfortunately, I can’t talk about it. I hope you’ll understand.”

  Peter did. “But I really feel I should warn you,” he went on. “Be careful. That woman is dangerous. Just be careful.”

  Susie looked anxious. “I’ve never liked her,” she said quietly. “She’s …” She looked around for the right word. Susie was charitable.

  “Wicked,” said Peter. “Susie’s too kind to say it.”

  Isabel looked over the lawn at the monkey-puzzle tree that grew in front of the Victorian greenhouse. There was something ruthless about Minty—that was clear enough—but was she wicked? There were plenty of people who were excessively ambitious and self-seeking, who would think nothing of tramping over others to get what they wanted, but were such people wickeds? Wickedne
ss was surely something very extreme: an attitude of utter and callous disregard for the feelings of others, coupled with a desire to hurt them; it was a deliberate, chilling perversity. She had no evidence that Minty showed such a cast of mind, even if she was selfish and greedy. No, she would have to reserve judgement on that just a bit longer.

  “Wicked,” repeated Peter. He looked intently at Isabel as he spoke, as if to make certain that she understood exactly what he meant.

  SHE ARRIVED back at the house slightly later than she had anticipated. She went into the kitchen to find Jamie leaning against the sink, looking disconsolately at a red Le Creuset oven dish on the draining board. He looked up when she came in, but then his gaze fell.

  “Your potatoes dauphinois?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Burned,” he said. “Ruined. I put them in and went off to play the piano. I forgot about them.”

  “And I was late,” she said. “It’s my fault. I’m very sorry.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “It was mine.”

  She walked across the room and put her arms around him. “Darling Jamie.”

  It seemed to her as if he was somehow resisting her. His body felt taut, wound up like a spring. She touched his cheek with the back of her hand, gently, as if to take his temperature. His skin was smooth. His eyes had been closed; now they opened. She saw the flecks of colour.

  “I don’t love you just because you can cook potatoes dauphinois,” she said.

  His eyes widened. “You don’t?”

  They both laughed.

  “Nor because you play the bassoon,” Isabel went on. “Nor because your hair goes like that at the front and you can make up funny little songs out of nowhere.”

  “Stop.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re making me laugh when I don’t want to laugh. I want to feel cross.”

  She disengaged from him, smiling with pleasure. “Look,” she said. “Take off the top layer—like that—and, see, everything is fine underneath. We can have potatoes dauphinois after all.”

  He did as she instructed, laying each burned slice on a plate beside the oven dish.

  “Somebody phoned,” he said as he tipped the contents of the plate into the bin.

  Isabel licked a piece of creamy potato off the tip of her finger. “Who?”

  “He wouldn’t say,” Jamie replied. “He asked for you and then just more or less slammed the phone down when I said that you weren’t here. Rude.”

  Isabel felt a sudden twinge of concern. “Not a voice you recognised?”

  “No.”

  “Scottish?”

  Jamie looked thoughtful. “Maybe. Yes, probably. Not very broad. In fact, not broad at all.”

  Isabel wondered. “A lawyer’s voice?”

  Jamie looked bemused. “How does one tell that?” But then he nodded. “Yes, maybe.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SHE WOULD HAVE CALLED Jock Dundas at nine o’clock the next morning, which was the earliest she thought that his office switchboard would answer, had it not been for the fact that Jamie suddenly shouted from the garden. She immediately feared that something was wrong—he had taken Charlie out on to the lawn to pull him about on the small, red-wheeled cart that he loved so much. Charlie had fallen out of the cart; Charlie had cut himself; Charlie had swallowed something and stopped breathing—the possibilities ran through her mind as she ran for the back door and pushed it open.

  Jamie was standing in the middle of the lawn and Charlie—oh, relief—was sitting securely in his cart, looking up at his father, wondering why the ride had ended so abruptly. Adults could be relied upon, generally, but not always; there were puzzling interruptions of service.

  Jamie, looking over his shoulder, beckoned to Isabel to join him.

  “There,” he said. “Over there by that big …”

  “Azalea?”

  “Yes. That bush with all the red flowers.”

  She strained her eyes. “What?”

  “Brother Fox. Underneath.”

  She stared at the shadowy undergrowth. Was that red shape him, or leaves?

  “We were standing right here,” said Jamie. “And he went right past. Limping. He’s injured. I think quite badly.”

  Isabel now thought that she could just make the fox out; and then, yes, his tail moved, and she saw the shape of a haunch. She took a few steps forward; the fox was not far away and he must have seen her coming. There was a sudden parting of leaves and he emerged, his head lowered, his body strangely twisted. She saw the patch of black on his side—a mat of hair and dried blood.

  Brother Fox paused; he looked at Isabel, his head still held low, and then he moved away, going back into the undergrowth, heading for the back wall. She stood quite still. She wanted to go to him and tend him, but she knew that it was impossible; he would bite, and she would only make things worse.

  She went back to stand next to Jamie. He had picked Charlie up out of his cart, and the small boy was watching his mother intently as she approached.

  “Did you see that wound?” she asked.

  Jamie winced; he was more squeamish than Isabel, who could look at blood dispassionately. “Think of it as tomato sauce,” she had once said to him. But that had not helped, and had made him think of blood when he saw tomato sauce, which was hardly the desired result. “It looks nasty,” he said.

  “Has somebody shot him?”

  Jamie shook his head. Brother Fox had his enemies in the neighbourhood, for sure, but he doubted if they were armed. “Maybe a dog.” Will there be dugs?

  Isabel shivered; she did not like the thought of fox hunting. Why dress up, she wondered, to kill something? If foxes had sometimes to be killed—and farmers had to protect their lambs—she felt that it should be done with regret rather than delight. “His balance seems affected. When he came out he was … well, it was like a lurch.”

  It seemed to Isabel that this was no different from any other situation where somebody needed her help. “We have to do something.”

  “Yes.”

  They walked back towards the house. She remembered the man in Dalkeith with his traps; she had never thought that she would have occasion to contact him, but now perhaps she did. They would never be able to catch Brother Fox unless they could get him into a trap. If they did that, then they could call the vet and the wound could be cleaned out. If they did not do this, then Brother Fox would either get better himself, as happened in the wild, or die a slow and painful death, as also happened in the wild. It seemed to Isabel that the second possibility was the more likely.

  “I’m going to phone the man from Dalkeith,” she said. “His number must be in the yellow pages. Under Pest and Vermin Consultants.”

  “Rat catcher,” said Jamie.

  They went inside. Charlie was beginning to niggle, which meant that he was ready for his morning nap; he had been up since six that morning. While Jamie took him to his room, Isabel went into her study and took out the heavy volume of yellow pages from the drawer in which she kept it. She paged through it: Painters and Decorators—Quality Work Since 2001. And before that? Potato Merchants, Pipers—who would pay them? she wondered. Finally she found it. Pest and Vermin Consultants. She saw the distinctive advertisement, with its picture of a small army of cockroaches, wasps and moles in panic-stricken retreat. Moles? She did not think of them as pests, but then she had none burrowing under her lawn; her attitude might change if moles were actively undermining her. So William McClarty of Peebles Street, Dalkeith, was a mowdie man as well. The mowdie man was the mole-catcher in Scots, the subject of a poem she had once known by heart. The mowdie man came on to the land a figure of vengeance, and stalked the mole, the mowdie, whose velvet coat and tiny paws would break the heart of anyone, the poet said—except the mowdie man’s.

  There were two numbers—one with (house) beside it; the other with (all other times). She telephoned the house first but there was no reply. She imagined the phone ringing in the empty co
rridor of the mowdie man’s house; a dog barking perhaps at the insistent ring, but the mowdie man himself out, stalking the land, driving off those armies of pests. She dialled the other number and the mowdie man answered immediately, or so she thought. But it was not him. “It’s his brither,” came a voice. “You wanting Billy?” She explained that she was, and she was asked to hold the line. So the mowdie man had a brother, she thought, who …

  “Billy McClarty speaking.”

  She told him who she was. Then: “I have a fox.”

  “There’s a lot of them in Edinburgh. They’ve been breeding like Cath …” He stopped himself. “Like nobody’s business.”

  Isabel was astonished. She had heard that a long time ago, but nobody said it these days, she thought…. And yet, his name was Billy McClarty and the Billy could be a giveaway. An Orangeman: Billy McClarty was an Orangeman.

  “Like rabbits, you mean,” she said.

  Billy McClarty was silent for a moment. Then he continued, “You want him away?”

  She caught her breath. She felt as if she were a conspirator, contacting a hit man with a view to a contract killing—which it was, in a way. Their victim was a sentient being, with memory, plans, a family—with some sense of who he was. For a moment an intrusive, unwanted thought crossed her mind: one might invite Billy McClarty to take Minty away; to set a large trap in her walled garden, baited with … What would one bait a Minty trap with? The answer came to Isabel almost immediately: money.

  “No, I don’t want him away.”

  Billy McClarty continued. “Cannae kill him there,” he said. “I get into trouble with neighbours. Where are you, by the way?”

  She told him, and there was a grunt of recognition at the other end of the line. “There are lots of folk there who encourage foxes,” he said. “I’ve heard of a daft wumman there who gies chicken to the fox. Those dafties wouldnae like it if I killed him, ken?”

  Isabel said nothing. She was that daft woman. So one of the neighbours had considered trapping Brother Fox, for how else would Billy McClarty know about her? It was a very uncomfortable feeling; Brother Fox belonged to her.