The Lost Art of Gratitude

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Surely your eight minutes is up by now,” Isabel retorted.

  THEY MET in the Tower Restaurant, a rather expensive place perched on top of the Royal Scottish Museum. Isabel had suggested the venue because she appreciated the view it afforded of the rooftops of the Grassmarket and the Castle beyond. And, as she had once said to Jamie, “When meeting for lunch somebody one’s uncomfortable with, it’s important to have somewhere to look, don’t you agree?”

  “I agree with almost everything you say.” Jamie paused before adding, “Within reason. And sometimes even with strange remarks like that.”

  “But I’m serious,” protested Isabel. “When you sit down with somebody and make eye contact, you’re drawn into each other’s sphere. Unless you can think of a better word for it.”

  “For sphere?”

  “Yes. Essence? Soul? Being?”

  Jamie thought. “I suppose sphere expresses it.”

  “So,” Isabel went on, “you need to be able to escape. And that’s why a table with a view is important.”

  She looked at Jamie as she said this, and he returned her gaze. She noticed that his eyes, which were hazel, had small flecks of another colour in them: green. His eyes were kind. Somebody—a friend of Isabel’s—had once described Jamie’s eyes as being Scottish. But of course they are, Isabel had said; Jamie’s Scottish, all of him. That’s not what I meant, the friend had responded. I meant that there’s a certain sort of look that you get a lot of in Scotland, in which the eyes are, well, almost translucent. You look through the eyes and you see something else—you see a whole country, light made thin by Scotland. You know our light, how thin it is; you know our colours.

  She looked up from the table. She had been the first to arrive, and now here was Professor Lettuce coming in, standing at the door, looking myopically across the restaurant. She raised a hand to wave but he did not see her; the waiter at Lettuce’s side did, though, and pointed to where Isabel was sitting.

  “What a fine choice,” said Lettuce, as he took his seat. “I didn’t know about this place.” He said this almost accusingly, as if he should know about restaurants and Isabel should not.

  “Yes, it is rather nice, isn’t it? I like the view. Have you looked at it?”

  Lettuce twisted round in his seat and looked out over Chambers Street. “Roofs,” he said.

  Isabel did not know what to say to that. She handed him the menu and he adjusted his glasses to read. “My stomach is not what it was,” he said. “I find that I take very little at lunch.”

  She thought of the word he used: take. Most people ate; one had to be terribly grand to take.

  “It’s best not to overeat,” she said. She might have said overtake, she mused, but that would have made a very odd statement, more about driving than eating.

  “You’re smiling.”

  Lettuce was staring at her. She noticed his slightly prissy expression, one that some large men have; an expression of fastidiousness that for some reason seems at odds with their size.

  “A passing thought,” she said. “I have a tendency to think about wordplay. Don’t you find yourself drifting off from time to time—some odd little notion?”

  He wrinkled his nose. “No. I can’t say I find that at all.”

  “Well, maybe it’s a thing that women do.”

  Lettuce smiled. “It’s as well that you said that, not me. These days it seems impermissible for men to make general remarks about the minds of women. Not the other way round, of course. You women can say what you like about men.”

  Isabel had to admit that this was true, although she did not like hearing it from Professor Lettuce. She had noticed that the constraints on such remarks seemed to apply only to men. Women could say, quite freely, that men could not multi-task, for instance, but men could not say that women could not reverse cars as well as males could. Or if they said that they would inevitably be accused of condescension, or sexism, or some other unforgivable-ism. It was contextual, she realised; it is not just what is said that is judged, it is what was said before. So what men say now is taken in the context of what they used to say—and what they used to do, too, which as often as not was to put women down and make jokes about how women reversed cars. Whereas the words of women, who rarely put men down—except in some Amazonian fantasy—were free of this contextual baggage. So the motives behind a man’s words were now evaluated in the light of what men used commonly to think. Yet that, surely, was as wrong as saying that a person with a criminal record is likely to have committed the offence with which he is now charged. There were rules of evidence that were designed to stop exactly that conclusion, in the name of simple justice. So Professor Lettuce was right about this; it was unfair, but she was not sure that she wanted to concede the point, to Lettuce at least.

  “Well, you can, can’t you?” challenged Lettuce. “You can say what you like and we can’t. I can’t, for example, say that science has demonstrated real differences between the male and female brain, and this makes for differences in the way in which men and women respond to distress or view art. Or even for differences in the way they reverse cars.” He laughed at his last example; he laughed.

  She realised that Lettuce was talking for men here—for the whole class of men. It was a major assumption. And did the generality of men, she wondered, want people like Lettuce to speak for them?

  “Oh, I don’t know. I think that there’s a time after a period of unfair treatment—or even oppression—when the tables are turned, so to speak. The victims of past injustice are given a bit more leeway, I think.”

  Lettuce’s lips were pursed in disapproval. “Two wrongs do not make a right, Miss Dalhousie. A simple adage, but applicable, would you not say, to many contemporary forms of social engineering?” He had always called her Miss Dalhousie, and the formality, it seemed to Isabel, was meant to exclude. She was not a colleague, in his eyes; she was not a man, with whom he would feel comfortable. It was as simple as that. And, of course, he resented her purchase of the Review and the restructuring of the editorial board; his exclusion at the hands of a woman must have cut deep.

  Isabel chose her words carefully. “Men have treated women badly in the past, Professor Lettuce. In many parts of the world, they continue to do so. They put women down. They try to stop them being educated, being given any opportunities.”

  Lettuce listened impatiently. Now he interrupted her. “Not in this country, Miss Dalhousie. Not in this country.”

  “Oh? Are you sure about that?”

  Professor Lettuce’s head shook slightly with irritation. “Such treatment is illegal. And nobody is stopping women being educated here. Look at university admissions. When I look out over my classes of undergraduates these days, all I see is women’s faces. The occasional man. But mostly women.”

  “Girls are doing better in the school-leaving examinations,” said Isabel mildly. “They appear to have better qualifications.”

  Lettuce’s irritation increased. “That is because boys are now at a disadvantage,” he said. “They are the ones who are being made to feel inferior.”

  The waiter appeared at the table. Isabel was relieved; she did not want to argue with Professor Lettuce, much as she disliked him. I must try to like him, she told herself; I must try to like this man, even if only a little.

  “I’m sure you’re right about boys,” she said. “We must do something for them. No, you’re quite right.”

  Her remarks seemed to assuage Lettuce’s tetchiness. “Yes, I really believe that we must. Not that this should in any way diminish our efforts on behalf of girls. But we must do something for the boys.”

  With this common ground identified, they ordered lunch. “I shall have this salad,” said Lettuce, pointing at an item on the menu. “What’s in it?”

  The waiter leaned forward to see which salad had been chosen. “Lettuce,” he said. “Tomatoes, olives and avocado.”

  “Perfect,” said Lettuce.

  Isabel made her choice and
the waiter moved off. For a few moments there was silence. Then Isabel spoke. “You said that there was something you wanted to discuss with me.”

  Lettuce looked out of the window. Isabel could tell that he was avoiding meeting her gaze.

  “It’s a somewhat unfortunate matter,” said Lettuce. “Not something which I would have wished to become involved in.”

  Isabel waited for him to continue. He was still looking out of the window. Now he cleared his throat. “Christopher Dove has drawn my attention to a most unfortunate matter,” he said. “I had not been aware of it myself, but he, quite rightly, I must say, brought it up.”

  Isabel sat quite still. She knew exactly what it was. So Dove had involved Lettuce; she should have guessed that from the start.

  “You’re referring to an apparent case of plagiarism,” she said.

  Lettuce transferred his gaze back into the restaurant. Now he looked directly at her and she was able to see his eyes with their small folds of flesh above and below.

  “Precisely.”

  “I received a letter from Christopher Dove about that,” she said. “I have been attending to it.”

  “Attending to it?”

  Isabel took a deep breath. She could feel the tension within her rising. This was a fight.

  “Yes. As is appropriate in such a case, I wrote to the author and asked for an explanation as to why the passage in question appeared to be lifted from somebody else’s article.”

  “So you wrote to this … what was his name?”

  “Dr. Jones.”

  “You wrote to Dr. Jones.”

  Isabel felt her resentment mounting. What business was it of Lettuce’s how she handled this issue? There were established ways of dealing with accusations of plagiarism, or accusations of anything, for that matter, and Lettuce knew this full well. He had been chairman of the editorial board for years, and during that time they had been obliged to deal with more than one allegation of plagiarism.

  “I followed the usual procedures,” she said testily. “You’ll remember yourself how things work. I wrote and asked the author to comment.”

  “And?”

  Isabel bit her lip; this was not a courtroom and she was not a witness. “He wrote back to me and explained that it was entirely accidental. He admitted that he had read the other person’s article and said that he had taken notes from it. He said that he must have inadvertently transcribed a paragraph or two into his own text.” She paused. Lettuce was watching her with a look that was almost triumphant. “It’s easily done, you know. You make notes and then you forget that a few sentences are word-for-word transcriptions. You’ve probably done it yourself, you know.”

  Lettuce snorted. “Highly unlikely.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I’m extremely careful about that sort of thing—as one should be.”

  Isabel rested her hands on the table. The gesture calmed her. “I’ve accepted what Dr. Jones said. And I’m going to put a small note in the next issue—in the corrections column—saying that his article inadvertently included material without acknowledgement, and that this acknowledgement is now made. Cadit quaestio.”

  “Cadit quaestio!” Lettuce exclaimed. “The question certainly does not fall, Miss Dalhousie. Cadit nihil! Nothing falls.”

  Isabel remained cool. “I really don’t see what else I can do, Professor Lettuce. I believe that I’ve acted fairly.”

  Lettuce reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and took out a folded piece of paper. “Oh really? Well, I’m afraid I must disagree with you on that, Miss Dalhousie.”

  Isabel stared at the piece of paper. “It’s Dr. Dalhousie, actually. I do have a doctorate, you know. Of course you know that.”

  Lettuce ignored this. “I’m afraid that I am going to have to ask you to resign,” he said. “I know that you now own the Review, but the Review is also its readers and you have a duty towards them and towards the wider philosophical community, and frankly I don’t see how you can possibly continue in office.”

  He unfolded the paper and handed it to Isabel. “This is a photocopy of a letter from the man who wrote the original article—the one that Jones plagiarised. It is the letter that he wrote to you before—before—you published the Jones article. You will see that he warns you that he believes that Jones has plagiarised him and asks you not to publish. But you know the contents, of course, even if you chose to ignore it.”

  Isabel looked at the letter in amazement. It was addressed to her, she saw, and it said what Lettuce claimed it did. But she had never seen this letter before; she was sure of that.

  “This letter may be addressed to me,” she said. “But I never saw it. Never.”

  Lettuce smirked. “Really?”

  She looked up from the letter. “Yes. Really. Let me repeat myself, in case you did not hear. I have never seen this letter before.”

  Lettuce spread his hands in a gesture of puzzlement. “Or you chose to ignore it? Do you not think that that is the conclusion people will reach?”

  Isabel closed her eyes. She was aware that the waiter had returned to the table and was laying plates before them. She kept her eyes shut. The waiter moved away and she looked down at her plate. She could not possibly eat, although Lettuce had now started to tackle his salad.

  “Either this letter is a forgery,” Isabel said quietly, “or, more likely, it simply failed to reach me. Many letters go missing, and I notice from the address that this person wrote to me from abroad. Letters from abroad are even more likely to get lost in the post, you know.”

  Lettuce dabbed at his mouth with his table napkin. “I wish I could share your certainty,” he said. “At any rate, I fear that the matter will look very embarrassing when Christopher Dove makes it public.”

  There was now a silence that lasted several minutes. Isabel sat quite still; Lettuce lifted up his napkin again and wiped his mouth, fussily, fastidiously. She saw a small speck of salad dressing on his cheek, missed by the napkin. At last she spoke.

  “I have nothing to reproach myself for,” she said. “I have acted quite properly, and I am telling you the truth when I say that I did not receive that letter. But you obviously do not believe me. That is very clear.”

  Lettuce shrugged. “It is not a question of whether I believe you, Miss Dalhousie—it’s a question of whether the readers of the Review and the general …”

  Isabel supplied his term. “Community of philosophers.”

  “Exactly, whether the general community of philosophers will believe you. That’s the question.”

  Isabel took a deep breath. “I shall tell you what I am going to do, Professor Lettuce.”

  Lettuce smiled. He was enjoying his triumph. “Please do.”

  “I am going to write to this person …” She gestured to the letter. “I shall write to him and explain that I never received his letter. I shall, further, tell him that I have received assurances and an apology from Dr. Jones and that I have accepted those assurances and that apology—”

  Lettuce interrupted her. “No good,” he said. “Not enough. You—”

  Isabel cut him short. “No, certainly not enough. I agree. I shall also be writing to your friend Christopher Dove, and will tell him that I have recently discovered a startling instance of plagiarism in his own work. It occurs in an article that he published some years ago. A piece he wrote on self-interest, in fact. I am sure that it was unintentional. I have noted the chapter and verse and will send them to you immediately when I return after this lunch. Perhaps you might discuss this with Professor Dove.”

  She watched Lettuce’s expression. She saw the small eyes open more widely in astonishment; she saw the chin sag suddenly. Her eye was drawn to the speck of salad oil—still there.

  “You have some oil on your cheek, Professor Lettuce,” she said. “Just there.”

  While Lettuce, flustered, reached for his table napkin, Isabel lifted her fork and began to tackle the small helping of fettuccine she had ordered. “
Now, perhaps we should discuss your friend for a moment, Professor Lettuce.”

  “My friend?”

  “Christopher Dove. You know, I’ve always found it odd that you and he are so close, bearing in mind his reputation.”

  Lettuce appeared to have recovered his composure. “He enjoys an excellent reputation, Miss Dalhousie. He is highly thought of by …”

  “You,” interjected Isabel. “Yes, but not by many others. Perhaps you’re not aware of his controversial friendship with a young woman who was a doctoral candidate of his. You may not have heard that the external examiner of that particular thesis lodged a note of reservation with the university. He said that Dove had interfered with the report on the thesis, slightly changing the tenor of some of his remarks.”

  “I cannot believe that,” said Lettuce. “A typographical error or two, at the most.”

  “That’s what the university chose to believe,” said Isabel. “But then I knew one of his colleagues, who said that the departmental secretary had told him that Dove had told her to do it. She was too worried about her job to complain.”

  “Nonsense,” said Lettuce. “Vulgar rumours.” He wrinkled his nose. “And I’m surprised to hear you spreading them, Miss Dalhousie, though perhaps I shouldn’t be.” He tried to affect a look of disapproval but failed. He looks dyspeptic, thought Isabel. He’s wilting.

  Isabel twirled a piece of pasta on to her fork. “I must say that I’m disappointed that you don’t seem to be ready to accept the very obvious truth about Christopher Dove,” she said casually. “Especially when Cambridge University Press has asked my advice about finding somebody of sound judgement to edit their new edition of Hume papers. I know the commissioning editor there, as it happens.”

  Lettuce stopped eating. “Hume papers?”

  “A very important new publishing project,” said Isabel. “Five volumes over ten years. And there’s to be a major conference to mark each new volume. Bloomington, Indiana. Tel Aviv. Helsinki. Siena. Sydney.”

  She watched him. He was quite still. “Starting off in Bloomington,” she went on. “Have you been there, Professor Lettuce?”