The Lost Art of Gratitude

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

EVERY BIT THE ANGEL OF DEATH, Billy McClarty, scourge of foxes, chairman of the Dalkeith and Bonnington Model Railway Association, father and husband, stepped out of his van and made his way down the driveway to Isabel’s front door. He was carrying a metal-barred cage, heavy enough to give him a curious, unbalanced gait. The cage was surprisingly small if it were to accommodate a fox, but not built for comfort, of course. For most foxes finding themselves trapped within, this would be the condemned cell in which they would be incarcerated with their last meal—half a chicken, perhaps, or, if Billy’s advice had been heeded by the householder, a gamy portion of pheasant.

It was five o’clock, and Grace had gone home. Jamie had just returned and was having a shower, while Charlie and Isabel were playing with a set of building blocks that had been passed down to Charlie from a boy over the road who had outgrown them. Charlie was learning to balance one block upon another, three high, and then knock them down. He appeared to find this endlessly amusing; not much different, thought Isabel, from slapstick humour, from the antics of silent-film actors, from those flickering scenes where people stood up and then fell over, and we all laughed.

When the bell rang and she realised that it could be Billy McClarty, Isabel lifted Charlie and deposited him in his playpen with a couple of his bricks for diversion.

Billy McClarty was wiping his shoes when she opened the front door. Isabel glanced at the cage. “Mr. McClarty.”

“That’s me,” said Billy. “Sorry I’m a bit later than I thought, but there was a wasp bike in Morningside—a big one—and I had to get up on someone’s roof.”

Isabel assured him that it did not matter. As she spoke, she noticed the tattoo across his right forearm—the Hand of Ulster, with Ulster is British in shaded lettering beneath it. It was well executed, the hand itself in red and the motto in blue. I was right, she thought: Billy McClarty is an Orangeman, a follower of William of Orange, who had put the Catholic James VII to flight. That might have happened in the dying years of the seventeenth century, but it was not too long ago to be a very live issue for some, the symbol of the securing of a Protestant monarchy. And that, in due course, became all tied up with freedom from being told what to do and think by priests—a cause that at least was about liberty, at any rate from Billy McClarty’s perspective. Catholics, of course, thought otherwise.

She led Billy McClarty round the side of the house to the garden. “We last saw him in those bushes over there,” she said, pointing to the deep bank of rhododendrons. “He may still be there, but I’m not sure.”

Billy McClarty took a step forward and peered into the undergrowth. “Good place for one of these fellows,” he said. “Dark. Private. Good place.”

“Like us, they need shelter,” said Isabel.

“Aren’t like us at all,” said Billy. “Aren’t like anything, these boys. Just foxes.”

“That’s not exactly what I meant,” said Isabel. “I meant that they have the same needs as we do. That’s what I meant.”

Billy McClarty sniffed at the air. “They don’t have the same needs,” he said. “Not at all.”

He took a step forward and crouched to get a better view of the ground under the rhododendrons. “He’s been burrowing down there,” he said. “I cannae see him now, but he’s been there all right. I’ll put the trap in there, I think. He’ll be by.”

“It won’t hurt him, I take it,” she said.

Billy McClarty reassured her. “The most that can happen—the most—is that he gets his tail stuck in the door. That’s all.” He stood up again and gestured towards the trap. “You got that chicken?”

“A pheasant,” said Isabel. “It’s in the kitchen.”

“Even better,” said Billy McClarty, looking in the direction of the house. “You fetch it and we’ll set this up.”

She went into the kitchen and took the pheasant from the fridge, a whole bird, roasted for Brother Fox. When she returned to the garden, Billy McClarty had positioned the trap under the outer foliage of the rhododendron. He took the pheasant from Isabel, sniffed at it with approval and pushed it into the trap, up against the back. Then he pulled back on the small spring arm that would trigger the closure of the door once Brother Fox had succumbed to temptation.

The trap armed, Billy McClarty took a step back and inspected his handiwork. “Aye, that’ll do.” He turned to Isabel. “And then?”

“When he’s safely in there, I’ll call the vet.”

“And then?”

Isabel found herself irritated by Billy McClarty’s manner. It was condescension, of course—the condescension of a man who assumes superiority simply because he is a man. “I shall call the vet,” said Isabel. “I have already told him about this, and he’ll come out and treat his wound.”

Billy McClarty looked sceptical. “Foxes nip,” he said. “How will he be able to look at him without getting nipped?”

“I assume that he has a …” Isabel was not sure, but she was not going to let Billy win. “I assume that he has gloves. And a sedative.”

Billy McClarty shrugged. “I don’t know why you bother,” he said. “Nature, you know.”

“Because he’s suffering,” said Isabel. She stared at this man with his red Hand of Ulster tattoo and his tobacco-stained fingers. “Suffering, Mr. McClarty. Suffering calls for us to do something about it. Don’t you think that too?”

He stiffened. “You can’t fix everything.”

“No. You can’t. But you can fix some things.” She paused. He was looking at her with what amounted to a sneer. She would not tolerate that.

“I suspect you think that I’m just a sentimental woman,” said Isabel. “You do, don’t you?”

Billy McClarty shook his head. “No. Not me.” He was grinning like a schoolboy denying the obvious. Of course he did, and he did not care that she should know it.

“Yes, you do. I can tell what you think. And I can also tell that sometimes you can’t tell that people know what you think. Am I right?” She smiled as she said this, as if to indicate that the comment was not entirely hostile.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Billy McClarty defensively.

“Exactly,” said Isabel. She felt her heart pounding within her; any confrontation, even a small one, did this to her, brought on anxiety and its physical symptoms.

She indicated that they should go back towards the house, where she said she would pay him his one hundred pounds, fox or no fox. He looked sullen, but accepted the money quickly, and made his way down the driveway back to his van, tucking the twenty-pound notes into the side pockets of his trousers. Where the taxman will never see them, thought Isabel as she returned to Charlie’s playroom.

Jamie, freshly out of the shower, his hair still wet and ruffled, had removed Charlie from his playpen and was lifting and lowering him in controlled fall, a game which he called Aviation Boys, and which made Charlie shriek in high-pitched delight. Charlie had eyes only for his father now, and she smiled and left them to their game.

In the corridor she stopped for a moment, lost in thought, staring down at the floor as if transfixed by the pattern of red and blue lozenges on the Baluch rug. Her smile went away. I should not have spoken like that to Billy McClarty. It was wrong. He had condescended to her, not casually or inadvertently, but with intent. Even so, she should not have tried to put him down, as she had done, using her skill with words to derail him. Those who had words might on occasion use them against those who did not have them, but only with caution. It had been a cheap victory over a man whose life was much harder than hers, for all his bravado and his Orangeman posturing, and she felt embarrassed and ashamed, as anybody should feel after humiliating another, even when such treatment seemed richly deserved.

“SO,” said Jamie. “Minty.”

They were sitting in the kitchen after dinner, a quiet time in the day that they both relished. The evening at this stage could go either way—into a companionable state of relaxation, or into a final period of work, during which Isabel attended to the affairs of the Review, or Jamie might practise in the music room or transcribe pieces for his students.

It was as yet undecided how this evening would develop. Isabel knew that she had submissions to read—articles sent in for publication in the Review—but she felt that she could not face them now and that tomorrow would do. So when Jamie enquired about her lunch with Minty she was ready to talk.

“Where did the two of you eat?” he asked.

“I didn’t,” said Isabel. “She put me off my food.”

She explained what had happened, and at the end, with some reluctance, she admitted to Jamie that she might have misjudged Minty—yet again.

“If you have to keep changing your view of whether somebody’s telling the truth,” he said, “then that means she’s a liar.” He looked at Isabel quizzically. “What did you say Peter said about her?”

“He called her wicked.”

“Then she probably is,” said Jamie. “He’s usually right about people.”

“He must get it wrong sometimes,” she replied. “And if people are wicked, will they necessarily be liars?”

Jamie was not sure. Isabel, though, was having further thoughts about her own question. The answer lay in character: if one’s character was base, then one did base things across the board. But that did not mean that one might not be good in some parts of one’s life: one might show loyalty, for instance. Gangsters were loyal to each other—some of the time at least—and could be loyal to their country too. But was loyalty always something to be admired, or did it require a good object? It was no good being loyal to the Mafia or the KGB; loyalty in itself was neutral—it only showed its colours when you saw what somebody was loyal to.

Of course, if one … She stopped. A strange yelp came from the garden, followed by a rapid, high-pitched barking sound. She looked at Jamie, who spun round to face the window. “Brother Fox?”

“Yes.” He stood up, but he was taking his lead from her. This was Isabel’s plan, not his. “Now what?”

Isabel crossed the room to take a torch from a drawer. “We investigate. And then we call the vet.”

They went out into the garden. With the lights still on in the kitchen, the lawn was partly illuminated. Some light carried to the cluster of rhododendrons in which the trap had been concealed, but only some. Now the beam from Isabel’s torch played on the outer fringes of the vegetation and, as Jamie held aside the branches, into the dark interior of the shrubs.

Brother Fox’s eyes were two small headlights, yellowy discs moving behind the bars of the cage. And beyond that, the red of his coat, half in shadow, half revealed in the swinging torchlight.

Crouching down, Isabel spoke to him in a low voice. “Don’t be afraid. You know me, don’t you? You’ve seen me before. I won’t hurt you.”

Jamie joined her, crouching too. “Should I move him?”

“Yes.”

There was a metal handle on the top of the cage. Jamie reached out to take hold of this and began to pull the cage from under the boughs of the rhododendron. In the confines of his prison, Brother Fox twisted himself round and snapped at Jamie’s arm. But the bars prevented his doing anything other than snapping at air—and at metal. “He can’t get you,” said Isabel. “Poor thing—he must be terrified.”

“He thinks we’re going to kill him,” said Jamie.

Isabel bent down over the cage. Moving the beam of the torch across the fox’s body, she found the site of the wound. She thought she could smell it too—a rancid smell, the smell of infection that is only one step away from the smell of corruption. She looked at her watch. “Simon told us to ring whatever time we needed him. Will you keep him company while I go and phone?” Simon was a vet whom Isabel knew; she was sure that he would never ignore an animal’s pain. She was right. “I’ll look after him,” he had said. “A fox is an unusual patient, but I’ll do my best.”

She went into the house and made the telephone call. Simon was in, and agreed to come immediately. “Try not to stress him too much,” he said. “I don’t think foxes are easy patients at the best of times.”

She rang off and went to join Jamie in the garden. Jamie had moved away from the cage in the hope that Brother Fox would calm down, but it did not seem to have made much difference. Every few seconds a whimper came from the caged animal—a whimper that sounded like a plea—and this would be followed by a yelp or a howl. There was no mistaking the distress in the sounds, and Isabel wanted to block them from her ears. “I can’t bear it,” she whispered to Jamie. “He’s appealing to us to help him.”

Jamie reached out and took her hand. “Which is what we’re trying to do,” he replied.

“I know.”

She felt the pressure of his hand on hers, joined in an intense moment of understanding. It was a little drama being enacted—a tiny thing in the context of the ocean of suffering that the world bore every single day; incessant suffering—but for Isabel it was immediate, and vivid. She returned the pressure of Jamie’s hand; he looked down at her and kissed her on the cheek, as if he might kiss away her pain, and with it the pain of Brother Fox.

Simon did not live far away and it was only a few minutes before they saw the lights of his car coming down the street. Isabel left Jamie with Brother Fox and went to the front gate to meet him. As she opened the gate to the vet, a particularly loud yelp came through the darkness.

“Sounds unhappy,” remarked Simon. “Poor chap.”

They walked round the side of the house. Simon had a bag with him, which he now put down and opened. From it he extracted a pair of thick gauntlets—rather like gardening gloves, but heavier and providing more protection for the wrists. He looked up at Jamie. “I could use these,” he said. “But it might be better if you could keep him under control while I sedate him. Let him bite on one of them and use the other to hold the scruff of his neck. I’ll give him a jab while you’re doing that. Can you do it?”

Isabel felt that she had to protest. “Jamie needs his fingers to play the bassoon,” she pointed out. “Let me do it.”

Jamie objected. “No. I’ll be fine.”

“What if he bites through? I can edit the Review with a bandaged hand. You can’t play the bassoon like that.” She reached for the gloves. “Here, I’ll take them.”

Jamie knew better than to argue with Isabel once she had decided upon something, and so he watched as she slipped on the gloves. While she was doing this, Simon extracted a syringe and ampoule from his bag and attended to that; now they were ready.

“All you have to do is engage his jaws,” said Simon. “Then I’ll pop the needle in.”

He was calm, and his calmness seemed to be having an effect on Brother Fox; the yelping had stopped and he was cowering on the floor of the cage, watching them. Isabel moved forward and carefully opened the door. Then she advanced a gloved hand towards Brother Fox. “Gently,” said Simon.

She felt the pressure of his bite through the glove’s thick material. It was not as hard as she had imagined it would be; perhaps he was weakened by the infection—Simon had said that was likely to be the case. It was the first time that she and Brother Fox had touched—the fact struck her forcibly. He had lived in her garden, or at least passed through it every day—it was his corridor, perhaps—and they had seen one another but were like neighbours who remained strangers, never exchanging greetings or doing any of the other things that neighbours do. But now they were face-to-face, not as the friends that she thought they were, but, in his eyes at least, she as an assailant who was trying to kill him.

Simon was quick. Isabel hardly saw his hand as he reached in and slipped the needle into a fold of the fox’s skin. Then Simon withdrew, and she noticed, curiously, a tiny drop of blood on the tip of the needle—vulpine blood, the blood of Brother Fox. The blood of another creature seems always so alien; stranger to us than our own blood, the bearer of the biological secrets of the species.

“That should calm him down,” said Simon. “Give it a few minutes and he should be as docile as a lamb.”

Isabel looked at Brother Fox, who looked back at her. His jaw slackened and she released him. For a moment she thought that she saw puzzlement in his eyes, replacing the fear that had been there before. Then he shook his head, as if trying to clear it; the sedative was clearly having its effect. His head drooped, and then he collapsed to the floor of the cage.

“That’s him,” said Simon. “Now we can bring him out.”

The vet reached into the cage and took hold of Brother Fox’s front paws. There was no resistance. Once he was outside, lying on the grass, Simon reached beneath him and picked him up. “The kitchen might be the best place,” he said.

They took Brother Fox into the house. In the kitchen, Isabel covered the table with newspapers, copies of the Scotsman that Grace saved for the weekly recycling collection. Brother Fox lay prone across a front-page picture of the First Minister of Scotland. He is in your hands too, thought Isabel; this creature, this fox, is one of yours too—not one to whom you have ever said anything, but one of your constituents.

Simon washed his hands, dried them carefully and put on a pair of latex gloves. Then, very gently, he probed at the wound on Brother Fox’s flank. It was not a large wound; a cut of some sort, he said, that had become infected. He took a pair of scissors from his bag and snipped the fur away around the wound; there was congealed blood on the fur, a blackness. Then with a small scalpel he cut at what looked like small bits of string around the wound; dead tissue, he explained. Isabel watched, but Jamie turned away in his squeamishness. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t like this sort of thing.”

“It won’t take long,” said Simon.

Isabel had moved a lamp over to the table and was holding it above Brother Fox so that Simon could see more clearly. He worked nimbly, and was soon ready to suture the top part of the wound. “I’ll leave this lower part open to act as a drain,” he said. “And then all we need to give him is a big shot of antibiotic and that’ll be it.”

Now Isabel studied Brother Fox on the table. She stared at the pads of his feet—rough and scarred—and the imperfections in his coat. His fur was rough and unkempt, but thicker than she had imagined. His tail, she thought, was beautiful; she had admired it so many times when she had seen him walking along the top of the high wall that surrounded the garden at the back, as firm-footed and assured as … as a funambulist. Bruno. She had not thought of Cat’s fiancé recently as she had been too preoccupied with the Minty issue. Now he came vividly to mind, and she imagined him, absurdly, on her garden wall, walking along in his elevator shoes with Brother Fox behind him.

Simon spoke. “Something amusing?”

She shook her head. “No. Just thinking about something else.”

“Isabel’s mind works in wondrous ways,” contributed Jamie, from behind her.

Isabel half turned to Jamie. “I was thinking about our friend Bruno,” she said.

Jamie smiled and raised an eyebrow. Now that Simon had finished attending to Brother Fox’s wound, he was taking the opportunity to study the animal at close quarters. “He’s lovely,” he said. “He really is.”

“They’re interesting creatures,” said Simon, standing back from the table. “They might have become domesticated way back—like dogs—but kept their independence. They’re survivors.” He moved forward to pick up Brother Fox, whose eyes opened briefly, but then shut again. “We can leave him out under the bushes,” Simon went on. “It’s a nice summer night. He’ll come to in due course and wonder whether he dreamed it all.”

“He’s going to be all right?” asked Isabel.

“I would have thought so,” said Simon. “He’s tough, and he’s got a bit of fat on him. Some of these chaps are half-starved, but he’s been getting a reasonable diet.” He paused, looking enquiringly at Isabel. “You?”

“Perhaps,” said Isabel. She knew that there was a view that one should not feed wild creatures as it interfered with the balance of nature, but how could she not give Brother Fox the occasional treat?

“I’m sure he appreciates it,” said Simon.

Isabel and Jamie followed Simon as he took the limp form of the fox out of the house and laid it carefully under the rhododendron bush. Then they accompanied the vet back into the house to retrieve his bag, and while Jamie went to check on Charlie, Isabel saw Simon to his car. “Will you send the bill?” she asked. “Or just let me know how much I owe you.”

“Nothing,” said Simon.

She looked at him. “You don’t have to,” she said gently.

“I know. But why should I charge you for looking after a wild creature? He belongs to nobody. And there’s no point sending him a bill.”

Isabel laughed. She imagined Brother Fox hiding a purse away somewhere, a purse with a few gold sovereigns, perhaps—his life’s savings.

“You’re very kind,” she said. It was true. People who looked after animals were by and large kind people; they simply practised kindness, unlike those who made much of it. Thus, thought Isabel, are virtues best cultivated—in discretion and silence, away from the gaze of others, known only to those who act virtuously and to those who benefit from what is done.

She went back into the house to find that Jamie, having checked on Charlie, was clearing up in the kitchen. As he removed the newspaper on which Brother Fox had lain, a small piece of fur fell to the floor. Isabel picked it up. “A memento,” she said, handing it to Jamie. “The Victorians loved putting hair in jewellery. I could put it in a locket.”

Suddenly she smiled, and Jamie, for whom smiles were as infectious as yawns, grinned. “What are you thinking about now?” he asked.

“I suddenly remembered something that I hadn’t thought about for a long time.”

“Tell me.”

Isabel looked doubtful. “It’s silly.”

“Life’s silly.”

“All right. A long time ago, when I was a student, I volunteered to work for a month in France. It was during the summer. A gorgeous, sultry August.”

She had told him about this before. “The place for kids from Paris? The children who’d never seen a cow?”

“Yes.”

He looked at her expectantly. “And?”

“And there was another girl there. There were three of us, in fact—all Scottish, as it happened. There was somebody in Edinburgh who recruited volunteers for this place. Anyway, there were the three of us. Me, a rather frightened-looking girl called Alice, and Jenny. Jenny was the one I was thinking of.” She smiled again at the memory.

“What about her?”

“Well, she had a boyfriend,” Isabel continued. “And she talked about him non-stop. He was called Martin. Martin says this. Martin says that. Martin and I went to Germany once. Martin will be visiting his aunt right now, as we speak. I wonder if Martin is all right. And so on. All the time. She was so annoying.”

“Maybe she loved him,” said Jamie.

“That’s putting it mildly. But it drove me up the wall. Alice was too timid to say anything, and so she just sat there and listened to the Martin stories. I switched off.”

Jamie shrugged. “People get … how should one put it, fixated?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “You could say that. But it was not so much her talking about him that I was thinking of. It was the mention of mementoes.”

“She had a memento of Martin?”

Isabel’s smile widened. “Yes. His boxer shorts. She slept with a pair of his boxer shorts under her pillow. We all shared a room and I saw them. They were a sort of red check. She took them out from under the pillow before she went to bed, waved them about a bit and then put them back under the pillow before she got into bed. Stupid girl.”

Jamie burst out laughing. “How touching.”

“She was so stupid,” said Isabel. But then she thought: Was she? People fell deeply in love, and the clothing of a lover can so easily become symbolic of the object of that love. She glanced at Jamie. She could easily talk about him, just as Jenny had talked about Martin. Just as easily. And would she sleep with his boxer shorts under her pillow? Yes, she thought, I could. Yes. Like a silly schoolgirl, I could.

“Actually, she wasn’t stupid,” she said. “Not really. I shouldn’t have said that.”

Jamie reached out and touched her gently. “I have an old pair of boxer shorts if you’d like them,” he said, in mock seriousness.

“But I have you,” she said.

“Of course.”

SHORTLY AFTER THREE that morning, Jamie woke up and slipped out of bed. Half-awakened, Isabel watched him drowsily from her side of the bed. He had gone to the window and had drawn back a curtain sufficiently to look out on to the garden.

“What are you doing?”

He replied in a low voice, not much more than a whisper. “I wonder how he is.”

“He’ll be off. Simon said a few hours.”

Jamie moved back from the window. “I’m going to go and check.”

She said nothing, but watched him as he moved naked across the room.

“I’ll just be a minute.” And he was gone.

She sat up in bed, suddenly and for no reason concerned. What if something happened to him? What if he were taken from her? Boxer shorts. She would have just his boxer shorts. Absurd! Don’t even think like that. You think like that just because it’s dark—that’s all.

She got out of bed and crossed the room to the window. She looked out. He was there, on the lawn; there was nobody to see him, just her. She watched. He was so beautiful—she kept telling herself this, and now she told herself again. This was a neoclassical painting—a Poussin perhaps—with the naked athlete in the sylvan setting. She drew back from the window. She should not think in this way because it was … No, there was no reason why she should not think it, because beauty was to be celebrated, and that it occurred before her eyes, that it dwelt within her tent, was the greatest of possible good fortunes; like being vouchsafed a vision for which others are waiting but which has come to you of all people, descended to you.

He returned shortly, and she was back in bed.

“Gone?”

“Yes,” he said. “He’s off on his fox business, whatever that is.” He slipped under the sheets. “Will you tell me a story about a fox?”

“I’m so tired. It’s three. Do you really …”

He took her hand. “Please. I do.”

“All right.” She thought for a moment. “Fox went out; prowled about.”

“Yes,” he prompted. “I can just see him.”

“Moonlight night; quite all right.”

He pressed her hand. “Yes. All safe.”

“Shadows dark; foxes bark. Saw the moon; above the toon. Fox went home; shouldn’t roam. Warm as toast; tasty roast. Fox, good night; moon night-light.”

Her voice had become drowsier, and now she was silent. Jamie held her hand gently, and then moved it, laid it carefully by her side, and lay still, looking up at the ceiling in their shared darkness.