The Lost Art of Gratitude

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “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 Ru
ssell 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.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  MINTY AUCHTERLONIE.”

  It was said with as much intensity as if Sisyphus himself had walked into the café. Jamie was momentarily distracted by Charlie’s further pronouncements on olives, but then he looked again towards the door and saw the figure of a woman outlined against the light flooding through the café’s front windows. She was carrying a child and was looking around for a table.

  “Her?”

  “Yes,” whispered Isabel. “I’m sure it’s her.” She lowered her voice even further; the woman, having failed to find an unoccupied table near the window, was making her way towards their part of the café. Jamie watched her; Isabel looked away. He saw that the child she was carrying, a boy was roughly Charlie’s age, perhaps a little older, and was wearing a simple tee-shirt with a polar bear on the front and a pair of corduroy trousers. The woman said something to the child, who was looking about him with curiosity.

  Isabel raised her eyes at the same moment as Minty looked down. For a moment, neither moved or said anything. Then Minty smiled. “Isabel Dalhousie?”

  Isabel felt a fleeting urge to pretend that she had not recognised Minty, as one occasionally does when one wants to avoid engaging with a vague acquaintance—when one is too tired for small talk, or in a hurry or when one has forgotten a name. But this was not such an occasion, and she said, “Minty. Of course.” She saw Minty’s eyes slide to Jamie—appraisingly—and to Charlie.

  “This is Roderick,” said Minty. “And you’ve got …”

  “Charlie,” said Isabel. “And Jamie.” It was an unfortunate juxtaposition; she should have said, “And this is Jamie.” Yet they were both hers, although in a different sense, of course.

  Minty smiled at Jamie and then turned back to Isabel. She looked around her and saw that the remaining tables had all, rather suddenly, been taken. “You wouldn’t mind, would you?” she asked.

  Isabel could not refuse. She did mind, of course, as she had planned to tell Jamie about Dove’s letter and she wanted to talk to Charlie about olives. Such promising lines of conversation would now be impossible with Minty and Roderick there. “Please join us,” she said, “I’d be delighted.” And she thought, as she spoke, of how often what we say is the exact opposite of what we really mean.

  Minty had a portable infant’s seat, which she fixed to a spare chair before strapping Roderick in. “Could you watch him for a second while I order?”

  As Minty went up to the counter to place her order, Isabel whispered to Jamie, “Remember her?”

  He glanced in her direction. Minty was elegantly dressed and was being attended to by the young server.

  “She was that woman who told you about that man? Quite a long time ago?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “I thought that she was the one who was doing the insider trading, but it was really …”

  “The other one? That man?”

  “Yes.”

  “So she helped you?”

  Isabel nodded. “I think so. But I was never really sure about her.”

  Minty, having chosen her food, returned to the table. “Roderick has a very sweet tooth,” she said. “I try to control it, but he takes the view that if he comes out for lunch with me, he’s entitled to something sweet. So I cave in, I’m afraid.”

  “Charlie’s the opposite,” said Jamie. “He likes savoury things. Olives in particular.”

  “They’re funny,” said Minty. “Little individuals from day one.”

  Roderick was staring suspiciously at Charlie, who seemed unaware of the other child’s presence. “Look,” said Minty. “They’re making friends.”

  Roderick now reached forward and grabbed at Charlie’s small green boot, which he tried to pull off its owner’s foot. Charlie, vaguely aware that something was tugging at an extremity, looked to Isabel for clarification.

  “He wants to play,” said Minty.

  Isabel struggled not to show her astonishment. This was not play; this was an alpha baby trying to take her son’s boot from him by brute force. She had noticed this sort of behaviour in the playgroup that she took Charlie to three times a week. They were two-hour sessions, held in a local church hall and marked by an astonishing level of noise. Charlie, she had observed, was tolerant and put up in a good-natured way with the grabbing and pushing of his coevals. It was a quality he had inherited from Jamie, she thought.

  “Aren’t they sweet!” Minty remarked. They were not: Charlie was sweet; this Roderick, it seemed, was his mother’s son. She remembered Minty as a ruthless high-flyer in the world of finance; her son would be heading in the same direction, no doubt. But the thought, she decided, was an uncharitable one, and she checked herself; Roderick had not chosen his mother, and, besides, all babies were little psychopaths in their early years. Only later would there emerge the finer aspects of the personality—if there were to be any.

  “I wonder what they think of one another,” mused Jamie. “Presumably they see somebody like themselves.”

  Roderick, at this point having abandoned his attempt to remove Charlie’s boot, had grabbed hold of his ankle, which he was trying to twist. Charlie watched, wide-eyed, but impassively. Gradually Roderick gained purchase and began to dig his tiny fingernails into Charlie’s skin. It was too much; Charlie turned red and opened his mouth to cry.

  “He gets a little rough sometimes,” said Minty, moving Roderick away. “He doesn’t mean it. Sometimes I think he doesn’t know his own strength.”

  Isabel made light of this assault on her son. “Boys …,” she said.

  “And girls,” said Jamie. “I knew a girl who used to pull my hair when I was small.”

  Minty was looking at Jamie again, and Isabel found herself thinking, She’s undressing him. And how would she feel if Jamie returned a look like that, as some men would, flirtatiously; but he did not. He looked away; he was used to this, she thought, and was probably vaguely bothered by the admiring glances of women. Such things could become irritating to those who had them all the time; the turned heads, the quick glances. Women used to be discouraged from overt manifestations of interest; but not now, not now that the male body was presented for admiration on posters and in magazines. Men were being given a dose of their own medicine.

  She knew, of course, what Minty was thinking. She was calculating the difference in age and wondering how she, Isabel, had managed to catch a young man like this. This amused her. Minty was a type who would condescend to Isabel, but she could not
do so on this. She’s envious, thought Isabel.

  Minty turned to Isabel. “It’s a long time, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “And here we are with Roderick and Charlie. How’s Paul?”

  Minty stiffened. “Paul and I are no longer together,” she said. “I see him from time to time, of course—professionally. He’s fine.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Isabel. “I didn’t know …”

  “There was no reason for you to know,” said Minty. “I’m married now to Gordon McCaig. He runs a whisky broking business.”

  “Ah,” said Isabel. Minty, she reminded herself, came from a world where people were immediately interested in knowing what business others were in; she and Jamie did not. Particularly Jamie: his main interest was in the sort of music that people liked. “That man,” he might say, “that man who’s keen on Wagner. I saw him today.” Or, “That pupil of mine—the one who likes Chopin—left his rugby boots in the flat. Covered with mud.”

  “He has his own blend,” went on Minty. “One that he bottles himself. The Lochaline.”

  Isabel knew very little about whisky—no more, really, than she had picked up from her occasional attendance at a talk by her friend, Charlie Maclean. She had never heard of the Lochaline, which sounded rather obscure to her and not really deserving of a definite article, or at least not yet; a definite article took time. Some whiskies, she knew, adopted a definite article, as an affirmation of their fame. The Macallan was one; a practice justified in its case by habit and repute. And some Scottish clan chiefs did a similar thing. There was a MacGregor who simply called himself The MacGregor, which had the virtues of simplicity and clarity even if it implied that other MacGregors were, by contrast, indefinite.

  So Paul Hogg had been disposed of … no, she should not assume that. Paul Hogg may well have disposed of Minty, or indeed they might even have disposed of one another in an act of mutual emotional suttee. “And you?” asked Isabel. “Are you working?”

  Minty nodded. “Rather hard, actually. This is one of my rare days off.” She paused. She was looking at Jamie again, and it seemed to Isabel that her answer was directed to him. “I run a bank. An investment bank.”