The Lost Art of Gratitude

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “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.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ISABEL’S DREAMS that night might have been about Brother Fox, or foxes in general, but it was Minty Auchterlonie of whom she dreamed: Minty in her garden, talking about something that she could not quite make out; Minty at a table in a restaurant pointing a finger at her, jabbing at the air to emphasise her point. And then, quite suddenly, Minty was no longer there, and Isabel found herself in a place that she thought might be Mobile, Alabama. She was with an aunt in a garden shaded by oak trees, and her aunt, whom she hardly knew, was talking about her sister, Isabel’s mother: “Such a pity she had an affair and your poor father was so upset by it.” Isabel felt embarrassed, and ashamed for her mother, and was about to protest that the affair was long ago and should not be talked about, when her aunt suddenly and severely said, “We must finish what we begin, Isabel. Your mother should have taught you that, but clearly has not. Too busy having an affair perhaps.”

  Jamie touched her lightly on the shoulder. “Isabel?”

  The garden in Mobile disappeared. “Oh.”

  “You were having an unpleasant dream.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were muttering, you know. It was quite loud.”

  She sat up. There was light flooding into the room through the chink in the curtains. Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was almost seven; Charlie would have had Jamie up already. She looked at Jamie, who was standing beside the bed, having lean
ed over to touch her; he was already dressed, in dark trousers and a lightweight navy-blue jacket.

  She got out of bed. “I was dreaming of Minty Auchterlonie,” she said. “Minty—of all people.”

  Jamie moved across to the dressing table. He picked up a silver-backed clothes brush and used it cursorily on his jacket. The brush had belonged to Isabel’s mother, and she wondered: What would she have thought about Jamie? She would have approved; Isabel’s mother had only wanted her to be happy, and Jamie made her happy. She would have understood.

  Jamie spoke without turning round. “That woman. You know what I think?”

  Isabel retrieved her dressing gown from the back of the door. “What do you think?”

  Jamie turned round now. “I think that she’s not going to go away.”

  Isabel frowned. “Meaning?”

  Jamie’s eyes met hers. “I think that she’s like a piece of unfinished music. It wants to resolve, but the notes aren’t there. So it goes round and round in your head until you work out an ending for it.”

  She fumbled with the cord of her dressing gown. It was frayed and she would need to replace it. The dressing gown was beginning to look shabby, but she still loved it. She looked up. Jamie’s words hung in the air between them; one of those observations that on occasion comes out as an accusation.

  “You think I should do something?” It was not what she expected; whenever Jamie offered her advice in this sort of situation, he usually told her to do nothing, to avoid further involvement.

  “Normally …”

  “Normally you wouldn’t.”

  “No. I mean, yes, you’re right, I wouldn’t. But it seems to me now that this Minty person has really got under your skin.”

  It was a good way of describing it. Minty had indeed got under her skin, like one of those little jigger creatures that one found in the American South; her aunt, the one she had dreamed of, had complained about those in the grass of her lawn. “Like a jigger,” said Isabel.

  “Those parasite things?”

  “Yes. My mother used to talk about how she took them out from under her skin as a child. With a pin.”

  Jamie shuddered. “Maybe. But you need to sort out what you think of her. You can’t leave things up in the air, as they are. Many people could—but you can’t. You’re too much of a worrier.” He paused. “Use a pin.”

  Isabel listened carefully. Why should she be surprised that Jamie thought of her as a worrier? Was she really?

  “Do you think that I should …?”

  “Have it out with her again?”

  “Yes.”

  He hesitated before replying. “Maybe. Just tell her what you think of her. Tell her that you don’t believe a word she says, and leave it at that. If you don’t do anything, she’s likely to draw you into something again. You don’t want that, do you?”

  She thought about this. Charlie, who was in his playpen downstairs, had begun to cry. He would have thrown one of his soft toys out of the playpen confines, like one prisoner helping another to escape over the prison fence, and now he was regretting it.

  “Fine. I’ll do it.”

  She thought: he’s right. And he often is.

  He seemed pleased with her response. “Do you want me to come with you?”

  She did not. He had done enough: he had pushed her in a direction that she might have gone in anyway, and she was confident that she could manage by herself. And she did not want to expose Jamie to Minty; she was not sure why, but she felt somehow that Minty was a threat to him, and that he was vulnerable.

  AFTER BREAKFAST, Isabel went to her study. There were letters that she had to write, some personal and some connected with the Review. Edward Mendelson had written from New York, and her reply to him was late. As Auden’s literary executor, he had been trying to trace a school magazine in which Auden had written an article when he taught at a small private school in the west of Scotland. A woman on the Isle of Mull, hearing about this, had written to say that they had no knowledge of the magazine, but had a typescript which they thought was Auden’s original draft. “My grandfather,” wrote this woman, “was on the staff of the school when Auden was there. He was friendly with him and he gave him a box of papers to look after, which he forgot about and never claimed.” The woman was happy for them to be looked at, but would not allow them out of the house, even on a promise of return.

  “I don’t like to impose,” wrote Edward, “but could you possibly go and take a look at them? Perhaps she’ll allow you to photograph them. And, as for the typescript, you can tell straight away whether Auden typed it. He never put a space after a comma—it’s as if it’s a signature. If you see that, then that’s almost certainly by him.”

  Isabel wrote back and said she would do this. They would all go—Jamie and Charlie too—and look for crowded commas.

  Then there was a letter from Steven Barclay, a friend who had a flat in Paris. Steven wanted Isabel and Jamie to spend a weekend with him in Paris. There was a hotel, he said, whose staff would love Charlie and it was not far from his place in the Latin Quarter. “I’ll take you to my favourite restaurant, La Fontaine de Mars,” wrote Steven. “It’s in the seventh arrondissement on rue Saint-Dominique, close to the Ecole Militaire—so you’ll be quite safe! And you’ve always been so keen on Vuillard—I can take you and Jamie to the place where Vuillard stayed when he was in Paris. And you can look at the Vuillards in the house of somebody I know. Vuillards that nobody else sees. Just you. Isabel, you’ve got to come.”

  She wrote to Steven and assured him that she would. Then, musing on a life that included such calls to Mull and Paris, she turned her attention to Review correspondence. This was largely mundane, although she had to write to one author to inform him of a negative assessment of an article submitted for publication. “I’m sure that you will understand,” she wrote, knowing that authors often did not understand. Months, possibly years, might have gone into the turned-down article, and more than a few hopes might be dashed by rejection. For an untenured professor somewhere in the reaches of a university system looking for savings on salaries, the rejection might precipitate the end of a career. That worried her, but she saw no way round it. The world could be a hard place—as hard, even if in a different way, for philosophers as for salesmen or miners or anybody who lived on the edge of unemployment and financial ruin.

  By eleven o’clock her correspondence was finished. She printed out and read through the last letter, to the Review’s printers; she noticed that in the final sentence of the last paragraph she had used unspaced commas—,thus,—and on impulse she left them. She would do that too, from time to time, as an act of homage, and because little rituals like that gave life its texture. Big Brother, masked as the intrusive state or the political censor of thought and language, might force us to do this and that, but we could still assert ourselves in little things—private jokes, commas without spaces, small acts of symbolic subversion.

  She rose from her desk. She had decided what to do next, and she would do it without prevarication. She would pay a call on George Finesk, Minty’s wronged investor, and then she would go to see Minty, seek her out in the lair of the leopardess.

  IT WAS NOT DIFFICULT to find where George Finesk lived. There were two Finesks in the telephone book—one in Tranent, a former mining town in East Lothian, and an unlikely place for a wealthy investor to live; another was in Ann Street, a highly sought-after Georgian street that was known for its elegant, if somewhat cramped, terraced houses. That was the number she dialled, and it was answered by a rather warm, welcoming voice.

  She gave her name, and the warmth immediately disappeared; it was as if a window at the other end of the line had been opened to admit a chill blast.

  “You said that you were Isabel Dalhousie?”

  “Yes.”

  There was silence at the other end. “And you wanted to speak to me? May I ask why?”

  Isabel had been taken aback by the change in tone and took a moment t
o recover. “It’s about Minty Auchterlonie.”

  A further silence ensued. Then, “I thought it might be.”

  This puzzled Isabel. Why would George Finesk associate her with Minty? It would be unlikely that Peter Stevenson had said anything—he would never mention anything confidential.

  Isabel resumed the conversation. “I think it might be best for us to discuss this matter in person, rather than on the phone. Easier.”

  George Finesk agreed, even if he sounded reluctant. Yes, she could come down immediately, if she wished. He would have to leave the house in about an hour, so he could not give her very much time. With that, he rang off, after the most cursory of goodbyes. He had not put the phone down on her, she thought—he was obviously too polite for that—but it felt to her as if he had.

  Isabel went into the kitchen. Although it was a Saturday, Grace was there, making up some time ahead of her holiday. She was giving Charlie an early lunch, crushed peas with fried fish fingers—quintessential nursery food. The smell tempted Isabel, and she reached forward to sample a morsel.

  “Please,” Grace reprimanded her. “We mustn’t take the food out of his little mouth.”

  Charlie, strapped into his feeding chair, looked up at his mother. Then he looked down at his plate and reached for a small fragment of fish finger. He offered this to her.

  “Why, thank you, darling,” Isabel said as she accepted the offering, glancing at Grace. “I can’t refuse his little present, you know.”

  Charlie watched solemnly, and then offered a similar scrap to Grace, who frowned before she took it.

  “We must be grateful for small mercies,” said Isabel, smiling.

  Grace, tight-lipped, turned to Charlie. “You must eat up your food, Charlie,” she said. “Mummy and Grace have their own. We don’t really need yours.”