The Lost Art of Gratitude

CHAPTER TWO

FROM HER STUDY WINDOW, Isabel watched Jamie and Charlie disappearing down the street. She gave a wave, but Jamie was looking the other way and did not spot her. It always made her feel proud seeing the two of them together. She used to think that her major achievement in life had been the editing of the Review, or perhaps her doctorate; she no longer thought so—now she felt that the most important thing she had done was to give birth to a whole new life, a whole new set of possibilities. She had made Charlie, that small, energetic and increasingly opinionated bundle of humanity, that tiny, olive-eating person; she had made him.

But, more than that, she had given Charlie just the right father—she could be proud of that as well. Jamie was good with children, although in his modesty he made little of his talents in this direction. But Isabel had heard it from the parents of his pupils. One mother had said of her son, “He never practised his bassoon. Never. We spent all that money on the instrument—three thousand pounds, would you believe—and the little devil never practised. You know what they’re like at that age. Then Jamie took him on and everything was different. He inspired him—it’s as simple as that; he inspired him.”

Isabel had passed on the compliment, and Jamie had been diffident. “Oh well, we’re getting somewhere with him.”

He would be good with Charlie—she had known it right from the very first time he held him in the hospital. The nurse had passed him his new-born son wrapped in a towel, and she had seen the tears in his eyes, and she had known. For her part she had thought this briefly, and then, through the residual, euphoric haze of the painkiller they had administered, she had entertained one of her habitual odd thoughts, on this occasion about the towel around Charlie. In the past it would have been swaddling clothes; they wrapped infants in swaddling clothes, did they not? They swaddled them in strips of bandage-like cloth to stop them moving too much. She was grateful that Charlie would not be swaddled. He had not come into this world to discover that he was bound against movement, against freedom. Little Charlie would be free to move, to kick his legs, to live in liberty. She hoped.

She went into her study and gazed at the array of books and papers. The room was on the side of the house that did not get the sun until mid-morning, yet even at this point in the morning the large windows let in a good amount of light. As she surveyed the room she thought that the scene before her could be a still life, Study with Books, of the sort painted by seventeenth-century Dutch artists. They liked rooms like this, and they liked the stillness hanging in the very air of such places. Vermeer, perhaps, might have painted this room, or de Hoogh, inserting the figure of a woman sewing or playing a lute—one of those quiet domestic scenes that they did so well. And such an artist would look, as the Dutch painters often did, through the room into the space beyond, in this case Isabel’s garden, the square of lawn outside the window bordered by its bank of rhododendrons and azaleas—a sort of courtyard, rather like an outdoor room. Somebody had told her—she had forgotten who, or whether she had read it somewhere—that the essence of a good still life was the feeling it inspired that something was just on the point of happening. What was about to happen here? Her eye wandered to the pile of letters on her desk, put there by Grace the previous day. That was suggestive of the beginnings of something—an exchange of correspondence, perhaps. Somebody was about to enter the room and deal with the letters and then leave again, and the stillness would return.

She sighed. She could have gone off to the canal with Jamie and shared Charlie’s delight in the ducks. He squealed with pleasure now when he saw them, waving his arms about in uncontrolled excitement; he loved to watch them swimming for the breadcrumbs Jamie tossed into the water. There would come a time—and it would not be long in arriving, she feared—when ducks would cease to amuse Charlie quite so much. The thought brought regret. Charlie would grow up only too quickly, as all parents said their children did; already she found it hard to remember what he was like as a tiny baby. She remembered the smell, of course, that very particular, soft smell that babies have, a mixture of animal warmth and milk, and blanket, which gave way so soon, in a young child, to something else, as individual and every bit as indefinable, but not quite the same.

She crossed to her desk and switched on the desk lamp. There were at least ten letters in the pile—and four of them looked as if they were manuscripts. Isabel stipulated that prospective authors submit articles for the Review on paper, a policy that led to grumbling from at least some of her would-be contributors. “Haven’t you heard of electronic submission?” wrote a professor of philosophy from a college in the American Midwest. “You really should accept electronic files, you know. Everyone does.” She had written back to explain that she did not read on screen—something for which she felt he should be thankful. “I give far more considered attention to something on paper,” she said. “I find that I can weigh it. I would have thought that contributors would appreciate this.” A day or two later his reply had arrived. “You could print things out,” he said. “Why not?” And after that he had inserted in the message a smiley face, winking.

Isabel might have left it at that, but, puzzled by a motivation that she could not explain, she decided to make a concession. Then, after she had made up her mind, she looked for a reason for her decision. She imagined the professor in Iowa surrounded by a sea of cornfields and fresh-faced students, waiting for a message from somewhere beyond the vast horizons that bounded his world. “I’m sorry to have to get back to you on this,” she wrote, “but printing everything costs money and, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, takes time that I may not have. However, since this means so much to you, I’ll be happy for you to submit your paper electronically and I shall print it out.”

There was no reply to this, and so a week later she sent an enquiring message, asking if the paper had perhaps been lost in the ether. This time there was a reply: “Sorry—paper not yet written. Perhaps next year some time.” She had smiled at this; the whole exchange had been hypothetical. She wrote back to him—a real letter—and said, “I do hope that we get something from you, but I don’t want to put you under pressure. The summer, perhaps, might be a good time to put pen to paper, once the students have packed up and gone home. Until then, I remain, in hope, Isabel Dalhousie.” She folded the letter, put it into an envelope and wrote out the address. Why had she bothered? It had been a pointless exchange with a man she neither knew nor imagined she would ever meet, and yet for a short while they had engaged with one another. Treat everyone you meet as if it’s their last day, and while you know that, they don’t. She remembered the advice given her by her mother, her sainted American mother, as she referred to her. And it was good advice—a childish aphorism, perhaps, but none the less true for that.

And then the memory came back. Iowa: yes, she had been there, and she had forgotten all about it. Years ago, when she had been on her fellowship in Washington, she had been invited to a conference in a college town in Iowa, and there had been a young associate professor who had shown her and one or two others around the town; yes, she remembered now. And he had pointed out a large house on the edge of a river where, he explained, one of the members of a local philanthropic family had lived. He had said, “That is where Miss Ellie lived, and she believed in fairies with all her heart—with all her heart.” And with that he had looked at Isabel wistfully, and she had been struck by the thought of anybody believing in fairies with all her heart. To live in a house by a river and to believe in fairies with all one’s heart—that was enough, surely.

She could not remember the name of the man who had shown her round, but it occurred to her that this was the same person, which meant that they were not strangers to one another—not really—and that chance, pure chance, had brought them together twice. What was more interesting, though, was the fact that she had decided to make an exception in his case and offer to print out his paper for him. She had thought that this was because he was somehow isolated in his Midwest fastness, but now she knew otherwise: she had been prompted to do it because her subconscious mind recalled their meeting even though her conscious mind was unaware of it; she knew him, although she did not know that she did.

Now, seated at her desk, she began to deal with the letters. Usually she indulged herself in picking out the ones that interested her and attending to those first, leaving the mundane and the bills until last. But today she felt she should be sensible and force herself to deal with them according to their order in the pile; lunch with Jamie and Charlie would be her reward. So if she opened the electricity bill before anything else, it was because it was on the top of the pile, and for that reason deserved to be opened.

The next letter was from the printers of the Review—a technical enquiry about the quality of paper. They had bought a supply of superior Finnish paper, they revealed, and would keep some of this for Isabel if she wished; a sample was enclosed. The offer reminded her of her obliging butcher, who from time to time would pull something out from under the counter and say that he had been keeping it for her; some delicious cut that he thought she would particularly appreciate; small acts of commercial friendship binding together customer and provider. She looked at the paper and held it up to the light. She rubbed it between her fingers, and thought of where it had come from, somewhere in those wide forests where … where the ports have names for the sea. The line of Auden came to her, and made her think of how typographical errors may lend a certain beauty to a line; Auden had written of sea-naming poets, in Iceland rather than Finland, but poets had been misread as ports. That was a creative misunderstanding, she considered, and it made the thought behind the line much better, much richer, as some of our mistakes will do.

Isabel had put the electricity bill to one side—not the same thing as paying it, she said to herself. The admission made her reach for the cheque book kept in the top drawer of her desk and write out a cheque for the requisite sum—an estimate, she noticed, based on what the electricity authorities had deemed a household such as hers likely to have used. That was not the same thing as what she had actually used; parsimony might have overcome her, for all they knew. Or its opposite might apply: she might have taken to growing cannabis and consumed those massive quantities of power that cannabis growers use to force their crop. It happened, she knew, but not in Edinburgh, not in this tree-lined street … which would be perfect cover, she realised, for just such a thing, or for a counterfeit currency operation, or for anything, really. And how the newspapers would revel in the unveiling of something like that in the very home of the Review of Applied Ethics. Perfect villains have to live somewhere, and even the most innocent-looking suburb can conceal its surprises. But they were so quiet and considerate, said one of the neighbours; who would have guessed that he had been a dictator?

She slipped the cheque into an envelope and put it to the side. Not the same as posting it, she thought; and put on a stamp. Now the next letter: a rather bland-looking envelope with her name written on a label that had then been stuck on. Miss Isabel Dalhousie, Editor, The Review of Applied Ethics. There were several things about this that made her pause. Firstly, she was addressed as Miss, which now had a dated sound to it in a professional context; most people who wrote to her in her editorial role called her Ms., or, if they knew, Dr., which she had never really got used to. The problem with Dr. was that it made her think of Dr. Dalhousie, her father’s brother. He had been such a large Dr. Dalhousie, such a suitable and entirely proper Dr. Dalhousie—a country doctor in East Lothian, breezy, much loved, avuncular to his patients—that it seemed to her there could not be another one. This correspondent, though, had chosen Miss, which might be a statement, an attempt to put her in her place. And then there was the emphasis with which the word Editor had been written, with heavy down-strokes of the pen, again suggesting some sort of hinterland of meaning—a sneer perhaps. Or was she imagining things?

Isabel thought for a moment of how somebody who was truly paranoid would view the morning’s mail—looking for signs on each envelope of possible slight or of a message beyond the clear meaning of the words. Ridiculous; absurd … But when she opened the envelope she immediately saw the letter-head: Professor Christopher Dove, Chair, Western Thought. She gasped. How could anybody, even a man like Dove, claim to chair Western Thought? She read on; the address of Western Thought was given, and then its telephone number, as if so great an intellectual movement should establish that it was always at hand, contactable by those who needed, by telephone or post, the reassurance of the Western philosophical tradition.

She read the letter, and then read it again. She stood up. She had expected something like this from Dove; she had not imagined that he would let matters rest after his toppling—richly deserved—from his brief spell as editor of the Review; payment for his coup, as she thought of it. And now he had broken cover; unambiguously, with all the ill-concealed satisfaction of one who had long awaited his moment, and having finally found it, had now made his move.

Isabel replaced the letter on her desk. There had been a time when she would have brooded on it, when she would have been unable to think about anything other than the contents of the letter. This was no longer the case. Charlie, oddly enough, had freed her of that; Charlie had taught her to think of more than one thing at a time, as small children inevitably teach their mothers to do. So now she thought of what Charlie would have for supper and then of his shoes, which she suspected he was already growing out of, and would need to be replaced. It was preferable to thinking of Dove, whose shoes, she suddenly remembered, had been green. It was a curious thing to remember, but the image came back to her of the last time she had seen Dove, which had been in Edinburgh, when he had come to the house wearing green shoes. Was that a new precaution she would need to add to the list of irrational propositions by which we live our lives, in spite of knowing that they are indefensible: that men who wore green shoes were not to be trusted? Of course that was nonsense—perfectly reasonable, trustworthy men wore green shoes, men such as … No, she did not know a single man who wore green boots, apart from Dove. And then she remembered: Charlie had a pair of little green shoes, given him by Grace. Well, the next pair would be red.

“NO,” said the accountant, “this really isn’t good enough.”

He looked reproachfully at Isabel over the top of his half-moon glasses, and then glanced across the room at Jamie, who was bending down over Charlie’s pushchair, tickling the small child’s palm. The accountant had a quiet voice and these were strong words for him.

“Oh, Ronnie, I know,” said Isabel. “It’s just that paperwork—”

Ronnie cut her short. “It’s not paperwork any more, Isabel. A simple spreadsheet. They’re not hard to set up. Perhaps Jamie could …”

“Jamie is not all that good with computers,” said Isabel.

Ronnie looked doubtful. “These days anyone—”

“I’d be perfectly capable of doing it,” said Isabel firmly. “There are manuals, aren’t there?”

Ronnie sighed. “Yes, there are. And if you simply entered everything on the spreadsheet as sums came in—or went out—then the program would do the work for you. It really is that simple.” He took off his glasses and polished them on a handkerchief. “Running totals.”

“Running totals?”

He replaced the glasses. “Yes. Running totals are a possibility.”

Isabel tried not to smile. There was a wistfulness in his voice as he spoke about running totals; as a Bedouin might speak of an oasis in the desert, she thought, or a shipwrecked sailor of safe anchorage. She made up her mind. She would do as Ronnie suggested; or she would try to, at least. “Then that’s what I’ll do,” she said. “Spreadsheets it will be.”

“From now on?” asked Ronnie.

“From now on,” Isabel confirmed.

They left the accountant’s office and began to make their way down the hill to the top of Dundas Street.

“You made a promise back there,” said Jamie, as they passed Queen Street Gardens. “Look, Charlie. Trees. Trees.”

Charlie looked, and gurgled—he saw only green, and movement, and blue above that—the high blue ceiling of his small slice of the world, his tiny part of Scotland.

“I know,” said Isabel. “It was like promising one’s dentist to use dental floss.”

Jamie did not approve of the comparison. “You should take it seriously,” he said. “Ronnie only wants to help. And he has to make up the accounts for the tax people. He puts his name to them.”

Isabel nodded. She had taken it seriously, and she had meant what she had said to Ronnie; she would start a spreadsheet and try to stick to it. She felt slightly irritated that Jamie should think that she had tossed words about carelessly, when his own accounts, if they existed at all, were probably little better than hers.

“You keep a spreadsheet, I suppose,” she said.

He had been about to say something, but hesitated.

“No?” she pressed.

“It’s different,” said Jamie. “I don’t have … well, I don’t have much money.”

She looked steadfastly ahead. She regretted her remark, and turned to him to say sorry. He was looking at her, smiling. “What a ridiculous conversation,” he said.

She was relieved. “Isn’t it? One should never let spreadsheets come between one and one’s …”

“Friends,” he supplied quickly.

“Exactly.” He was more than that, of course, but she had not used the word lover to his face, nor he to hers. Significant other, she thought, and smiled—if some others were significant, then were the other others insignificant? Teenage argot, she knew, had a word for them: randoms, who were the people one did not really know. Eddie, Isabel’s niece Cat’s young assistant at the delicatessen, had used the term to describe the other guests at a party he had attended. “I didn’t know anybody,” he said. “The place was full of randoms.”

“Randoms?” said Isabel.

“Yes,” said Eddie. “Just randoms. Who could I talk to? So I left.”

“You couldn’t talk to the randoms?”

He looked at her with amusement; one did not talk to randoms.

They crossed Heriot Row. “Robert Louis Stevenson’s house,” Jamie said, pointing to one of the elegant Georgian terraced houses that ran along the north side of the street. “I went to a party there once with …” He stopped, and Isabel knew what he had been about to say.

“With Cat,” she prompted.

“Yes. With Cat.”

“I hope she enjoyed it.”

He shook his head. “She didn’t. We fought.”

Isabel thought, It wouldn’t have been his fault. But she did not say it; instead she made a remark about the Queen Street Gardens, which Stevenson would have seen from his window, and about how you never saw anybody in them, except ghosts, perhaps.

They went into Glass and Thompson, the place they both favoured for lunch, leaving Charlie’s pushchair outside. Charlie was wide awake and showing a close interest in his surroundings, delighted by the colourful display of olive oils and pastas that dominated the shelves on one side of the café. He was easily pleased by colour or movement and waved his little arms in approval and a desire to embrace the things he saw.

It was just before the lunchtime rush and there were several free tables at the back of the café. While Isabel settled Charlie on her lap, Jamie went up to the counter and ordered—mozzarella salad for him and Isabel, and a piece of quiche for Charlie. In the display below the counter he saw a bowl of olives, and he added some of these to the order as a treat for Charlie. They were large and unstoned, and he would have to dissect them for Charlie, but they would add to his already considerable delight.

Their order came quickly. Charlie saw the olives from afar, or smelled them perhaps, as he started to gurgle in anticipation even before they arrived.

“He has some sort of sixth sense when it comes to olives,” said Isabel. “An intuitive knowledge of olives.”

Jamie laughed. He took an olive from the plate and cut the flesh from the stone with his knife. A small drop of oil fell from his fingers; Charlie watched intently.

“Olive,” said Charlie.

Jamie dropped the knife, which fell on the plate below with a clatter. Isabel’s mouth opened wordlessly, and she reached out to grasp Jamie’s forearm. “Did he?”

Jamie beamed at his son. “Olive, Charlie?”

Charlie looked at his father briefly, and then transferred his gaze again to the fragments of black olive on the plate. “Olive,” he said again. It was unmistakable.

“At last,” said Isabel, and bent her head to plant a kiss on Charlie’s forehead. “You spoke, my little darling. You spoke!” They had been waiting for Charlie to say something and, although they had been reassured that first words at eighteen months, even if late, were still within the range of normality, they had been concerned. His gurgles were expressive, but they were impatient to hear Mama or Daddy; olive was a surprise, but a welcome one.

Jamie grinned with pleasure. “I wouldn’t have guessed it would be olive,” he said. “What a clever little boy.”

They tried to coax more out of him, but Charlie, now engrossed in the large quartered olive passed on to him by Jamie, was having none of it.

“He doesn’t need to say olive again,” said Isabel. “He has what he wants.”

They began their own lunch, while Charlie investigated his quiche, quickly reducing it to a pile of sodden fragments.

“I don’t want to spoil the party,” said Isabel, “but there was a rather unpleasant surprise in the mail this morning.”

Jamie raised an eyebrow. “A bill?”

“Well, there were two of those. One for much more electricity than I think we’ve actually used, but that’ll be sorted out. No, something to do with the Review.”

Jamie frowned. He enjoyed reading the Review, or the readable bits of it, and he took pride in Isabel’s ownership of it, but he was concerned about the burden it represented. Isabel worried about her Review—he knew that from her occasional muttering in her sleep—fragments from anxious dreams: revisions, proofs, deadline, words that revealed the tenor of at least part of her subconscious. He thought of the Review as some sort of presence in the house, rather like a demanding domestic pet that required to be fed and exercised and was always causing difficult dilemmas. By contrast, Jamie’s working life seemed to him to be so simple: he taught his pupils, he played the music put in front of him by the conductor, and when he put his bassoon back in its case then he could put it out of his mind.

“You worry too much,” he said. “There’s always something, isn’t there?”

She picked up a small piece of quiche and handed it to Charlie, who examined it, cross-eyed; he was looking for olives. “Maybe. But then it’s the sort of job that never seems to finish. You get one issue off to press and then there’s the next one to think about—and the one after that. It’s a bit like Sisyphus and his rock—pushing it up to the top of the hill and then having to do the whole thing all over again once it’s rolled down.”

Jamie shrugged. “Yes, I can see that.” He thought for a moment. It seemed to him that just about everyone’s job was a bit like that; repetitious. He glanced at Russell Glass, the proprietor of the café, serving customers at the counter. It was the same for him; he served one mozzarella salad, somebody ate it, and then he had to come up with another one. Or if you were a judge, for instance: you decided one case, disposed of it, and there was another one in front of you.

“We’re all Sisyphus,” he said. “Don’t you think? So isn’t the answer not to allow our jobs to prey on our minds too much? Sisyphus doesn’t have to think too much about what he’s doing—he just has to do it.”

Isabel laughed. “You’re suggesting that Sisyphus could be happy?”

“Well, he could be, couldn’t he? There are plenty of people who have repetitive jobs who are perfectly happy.” He came to this view without thinking; he would have to justify it. “They’re happy about other things. Yes, that’s possible, isn’t it? Horrible job, but other things to think about.”

Isabel thought this was probably true, but she wanted to tell him about Dove. “Christopher Dove,” she announced.

“Ah.”

“Yes. He wrote me a letter. A bombshell.”

Jamie looked alarmed. “What did he …”

He did not finish his question. He noticed that Isabel had suddenly turned sharply to look towards the café’s front door. He followed the direction of her gaze.

“It’s her,” whispered Isabel. “See?”

Jamie looked. “Her over there?”

Isabel did not reply.

“Olive,” Charlie said suddenly, clearly, decisively. “Olive.”