The Lost Art of Gratitude

Minty hesitated for a few seconds more. Then she made her decision. “Blackmail.”

“I wondered if it would be that,” said Isabel. “When you started to tell me—”

Minty interrupted her. “Not for money. Not that sort of blackmail.”

“Oh?”

“It’s more personal than that.”

Isabel reached out to touch Minty gently on the arm. She was not sure that she wanted to be burdened with this particular confidence. Minty, after all, was hardly more than a stranger to her. “You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to.”

But Minty had clearly decided. “I know I don’t have to. But I’d like to.” She paused. “It’s to do with Roderick.”

Isabel drew in her breath. “They’ve threatened to harm him?”

Minty shook her head. “No. It’s about him. You see, Roderick is … well, Roderick isn’t Gordon’s.”

It made immediate sense. Minty may be very much the successful banker, but she was a woman, too, with a husband.

“There,” continued Minty. “I’ve said it. I’ve told you something I haven’t told anybody else, not a soul. Roderick is the result of an affair I had with another man. It didn’t last long, but it was a full-blown affair and I became pregnant. I didn’t tell Gordon—obviously—and he thinks that he’s Roderick’s father.”

“Are you sure?”

Minty looked up sharply. “Sure? Of course I am. Why shouldn’t I be?”

Isabel found it difficult to put it delicately. “Because if you were still with Gordon when you were having the affair with … with this other man, then might it not be possible that …” She left the question unfinished. It hardly needed to be spelled out further, she thought.

Minty laughed. She seemed unembarrassed by the suggestion. “Oh, I see what you mean. Well, that goes with the territory, doesn’t it? If a married woman has an affair, then that could happen. All right. He could be Gordon’s, too, but he isn’t.”

“You’ve had a test?”

Minty explained that she had not. The thought had crossed her mind, but she had dismissed it, initially because she did not want to know the information, and then later because she knew already. “I don’t need a laboratory to tell me who Roderick takes after. You just have to look at him. Everything. Shape of head. Eyes. Everything.”

Isabel knew what she meant. Charlie was Jamie’s son; it was something that a mother simply could tell. “And now somebody’s found out and is making demands for money?”

Minty closed her eyes. “Not found out. Knew all along.”

Isabel waited for her to explain.

“The father,” she said. She added, “Not money. He wants Roderick.”

Isabel and Minty stared at one another for a few moments. Then Minty shrugged. “So there we are,” she said. “But let’s go inside and see what’s going on. Did I ask you to sign the visitors’ book?”

“No.”

Minty took Isabel’s arm. “Well then I must. Let’s do it now, otherwise it gets forgotten, and I like to have a record of everybody who comes to see us here.”

ONLY LATER THAT EVENING did Isabel tell Jamie about her conversation with Minty. She had wanted to speak to him about it in the car on the way home, but he had been full of what happened at the party and she did not have the opportunity. While Isabel had been out in the garden with Minty, Roderick McCaig, nominally under the control of his father, had thrown a piece of cake at Charlie. Apparently unsurprised at this behaviour on the part of his host, Charlie had calmly picked up the crumbs of the missile and eaten them, causing an outburst of rage from Roderick, who clearly regarded the cake as still belonging to him. The child sitting next to Roderick had then been sick over Roderick’s trousers, which had not led to any improvement in the young host’s mood.

“It’s a jungle down there,” said Jamie, smiling. “We forget what it’s like to be two.”

“Selvan,” muttered Isabel.

Jamie raised an eyebrow. “Sylvan? As in forests?”

“No, selvan. It’s a word that I think should exist in English, but doesn’t quite. Selva exists in English—just—for Amazonian forest, from the Spanish word selva. So I think we should be able to say selvan for forests that are too jungly to be called sylvan.”

Jamie smiled wryly. Isabel occasionally made new words when it suited her, and he found himself adopting at least the more apt of these. The pad under a toe, for instance, was a gummer, a neologism she had coined one day when inspecting Charlie’s tiny feet. And the crook of a bassoon, that curious curved pipe that held the reed, she had called a bahook, a word which seemed admirably suited to its purpose, even if it had to be used carefully—and never diminutively—in order to avoid confusion with the Scots word bahookies, a word that bordered on the vulgar, if it did not actually tip over that border. “Well, it’s certainly selvan down amongst the two-year-olds,” he said.

“And up here too, amongst the …” She almost said forty-year-olds, but stopped herself, and said, instead, “adults.”

“Meaning?” he asked.

She was about to explain about her conversation with Minty, when Charlie started to cry in the back of the car