The Lost Art of Gratitude

The silence at the other end of the line made Isabel wonder whether Minty really understood about shame. But of course she did; Isabel had been wrong about her. Minty was quite normal; she was not a psychopath, as Isabel had once thought her to be, and that meant that she would have a normal understanding of shame, and guilt, and all the other emotions and feelings forming the emotional backdrop to our lives.

“You go over to Skye,” said Isabel. “And I’ll go to the Botanical Gardens.”

As she said this, Isabel suddenly realised that Minty was sobbing. “You’re really kind,” the other woman said. “I can’t believe that you’re doing this for me. We hardly know one another, and yet you’re doing this for me.”

“I’m very happy to do it,” said Isabel. She said so, but she was not happy to do it; she was not. She resented Minty, who had intuitively understood that Isabel would help her even though she had no right to make this claim on Isabel’s time and charity. But although she resented her, Isabel knew—and Minty knew too—that she would have no alternative but to act. If she had never studied philosophy and never wrestled with issues of our moral obligation to others, she would not have had to act at all. But she had done, and she could not unlearn everything she had acquired in Cambridge and Georgetown; nor could she forget that she was a citizen of Edinburgh, of the city of David Hume. I am obliged to act, she thought; by geographical propinquity, and by the mere fact of being human, I am obliged to act.

They discussed the details. Minty told Isabel a little more about Jock, where she should meet him and how she would recognise him. Then came the note of caution. “It would be best not to phone me,” said Minty. “Gordon might wonder.”

Isabel assented, but reluctantly. She did not like subterfuge in any form, and she felt uncomfortable about contacting Minty as if they were fellow conspirators. She was not in collusion with Minty Auchterlonie; she was helping her, out of charity, that was all. Sometimes, she thought, the barricades in this life are in the wrong place; but they are still barricades, and they have to be womanned.

CHAPTER NINE

ISABEL HAD DECIDED that the last thing one should do when one met a funambulist was to ask about tightrope walking. This exercise of tact was not particular to tightrope walkers; there were numerous situations, many of them much more mundane, in which one refrained from talking to people about what they did. One did not ask judges about how they felt when they sent people to prison; one did not enquire of airline pilots whether they had ever had a near miss; and one did not ask overweight chefs whether they found it difficult to keep from sampling their creations. In all of these examples such questions would stray into sensitive territory, and it was the same with tightrope walkers, who must feel, Isabel thought, the inherent absurdity of their profession.

“He may be proud of it, of course,” Jamie pointed out. “It may be exactly what he wants to talk about.”

Isabel suspected that even if Bruno were proud of being a tightrope walker, Cat would be cagey about it. “He’s in the theatre,” her niece had said opaquely, which gave the game away, in Isabel’s view.

“Let’s just not mention it,” she said to Jamie. “If he mentions it himself, then we can ask. Otherwise, let’s not say anything about it.” She paused. “Of course, there’s nothing wrong in being a tightrope walker. We need them.”

Jamie looked at her in amazement. “Do we?”

Isabel shrugged. “Perhaps not. But what I’m saying is that we must respect the dignity of all labour.”

Jamie shook his head. “But is it labour?”

“Oh, I don’t know. But let’s not raise it, anyway. Just don’t mention it unless she does.”

Jamie agreed, although reluctantly. “But I’m really interested,” he said. “I’d like to know how he trained for the job. I’d like to know what was the highest rope he’s ever walked on. Do you think he’s one of these people who walks across the Niagara Falls?”

“Nobody walks across the Niagara Falls any more,” said Isabel. “Waterfalls are very tightly regulated these days.”

Jamie burst out laughing. “That sounds very funny.”

“Or sad,” said Isabel, becoming thoughtful. She remembered reading about the visit of Pius XII to the Niagara Falls when he was a papal envoy to the United States. He had been taken to Niagara and had gazed out over the river. Then, presumably feeling that something was expected of him, he had proceeded to bless the falls. That had tickled her. What was the point of blessing a natural feature? Did he expect that the falls would behave better if blessed? Or would they just bring more pleasure to visitors if they had the benign disposition of blessed falls rather than unblessed falls? The irreverent thoughts gave way to more sober reflection. We all wished for places to be made special somehow; people had holy rivers, after all: the Ganges, the Brahmaputra. And Isabel was sure that there were others, even if she could not name them. Thousands have lived without love, not one without water. Auden again—he came back to her, at these odd moments; she could not help it.

When Cat rang the bell, Isabel was with Charlie in the sitting room, reading to him from a battered copy of Now We Are Six. A poem about the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace might not have been the most intellectual of fare, but for Charlie, not yet two, it was as metaphysically challenging as the most obscure lines of John Donne or Andrew Marvell. But whereas Donne and Marvell did not go tiddly-om-pom-pom in metrical terms, Milne did, and that was what Charlie liked. So it did not matter that Charlie had no idea why one of the sergeants should look after the guards’ socks or why Alice was about to marry one of the guards. Nor did it matter when Isabel read Hiawatha to him that he had no inkling as to what a wigwam or the shining Big-Sea-Water was; what counted was Longfellow’s use of metre, a monstrously repetitive business, which Charlie loved, and which could be counted upon to send him into a state of somnolence after fifty lines. Noticing this, Isabel had toyed with the idea of suggesting to some far- sighted publishers that they publish a book specifically targeted at insomniacs. This volume would not offer advice on how to tackle sleeplessness (there were far too many people advising us about everything, she thought); it would simply contain passages the reading of which could be relied upon to send the insomniac reader to sleep. Hiawatha would be there, but so would, for quite different reasons, excerpts from Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, and from one or two modern political memoirs.

Isabel put down the Milne and announced to Charlie that she would have to leave him for a moment to answer the door. She laid him down gently in his playpen, and then said, “Your cousin’s at the door, Charlie.”

Charlie looked up at her expectantly. “Olive,” he muttered.