The Lost Art of Gratitude

She was relieved that he did not appear to be angry. But if he was not angry, then what had he been thinking when she made the offer?

“Minty mentioned a figure of fifty thousand pounds,” she continued.

He did not meet her gaze. He was looking at a bee orchid, now in flower: a blaze of gold. So are we all reduced by money, thought Isabel; so are we all corrupted.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ISABEL HAD TRIED not to think about Christopher Dove, ignoring him as one studiously avoids looking at an ominous rain-cloud spotted on a country walk. But such acts of self-delusion provide only temporary relief, and she knew that sooner or later she would have to answer his letter and the charge it contained. She was not a prevaricator by nature and she would get round to it, but it seemed at the time that there were just rather too many unpleasant or delicate duties waiting to be performed.

She would have to write to Christopher Dove; she would have to speak to Minty Auchterlonie; she would have to buy Cat an engagement present and make a further effort to like Bruno; she would even have to bring herself to watch Oil so that she could tell him that she had seen him on the screen. He would like that, Isabel thought, and it might be a way of building a relationship between them, which she knew she had to do. She had to do so many things, and most of them, it seemed to her, were things that she did not really want to do. That, though, was what life was like for most of us: doing things that we would probably not do if we really had any choice in the matter.

She thought about this as she sat at her desk the following day. Jamie had caught an early train from Haymarket to Glasgow, to play in a recording session—lucrative work that came his way occasionally and that he enjoyed. Grace had taken Charlie for a walk down Morningside Road, where there was household shopping to be done, and that left her with the time to get through the mail that had piled up again on her desk. But no sooner had she started than the telephone rang.

For a moment she toyed with the idea of not answering. It was a delicious feeling, ignoring the phone, a feeling of freedom almost wicked in its intensity. Why, she asked herself, should we be so enslaved by such instruments?

She looked at the telephone on her desk, struggling with the temptation to let it ring itself out. How many rings would that be? If it was Jamie on the line he would let it ring and ring because he would know that she was somewhere in the house. But if it was a stranger it might ring only five or six times before the caller gave up.

After eight rings she reached forward and lifted the receiver.

“Miss Dalhousie?”

The man’s voice was one that she had heard before, but not for some time and she could not place it.

“Lettuce speaking.”

Her hand tightened about the receiver. Of course, that was it; those precise, rather pedantic tones were familiar because it was Professor Lettuce, former chairman of the editorial board of the Review, professor of moral philosophy, author of Living Strenuously and, most significantly, friend and mentor of Christopher Dove.

“How nice to hear from you, Professor Lettuce.” The words came out before she could stop them. It was a lie, and she should not have uttered them. It was not nice to hear from Professor Lettuce—it never had been. Lettuce: what a ridiculous name, she thought. Poor Lettuce: his salad days were over. She smiled; a secret joke, even such a weak and childish one, made it so much easier.

“And I am pleased to be talking to you, Miss Dalhousie.”

Are you really?

“I happen to be in Edinburgh, you see,” Lettuce went on.

Isabel tried to sound enthusiastic. “Well, what a pleasant surprise. Shall we meet up?”

She did not want to meet him but felt that she had to say it.

“That would be a great pleasure,” said Lettuce. “I’m giving a paper this afternoon. The philosophy department at the university is running a series of seminars and they very kindly invited me up to say something about my new book on Hutcheson.”

Isabel caught her breath. “Hutcheson?” Realising that she sounded surprised, she corrected herself. “I didn’t know you were working on him. I knew of your interest in Hume, of course.”

Professor Lettuce chuckled. “Yes. It would be more logical, of course, to move on from Hutcheson to Hume. I have done things the wrong way round. But there we are. The point is this: Would you by any chance be free to meet me for lunch? I know it’s no notice at all, but I wondered.”

Isabel looked at her watch. It was almost eleven and she had accomplished virtually nothing that morning. If she went off for lunch now, then she would probably not get back to her desk until well after two, when Charlie would wake up after his afternoon sleep and she would want to spend time with him. The next issue of the Review would have to be ready for the printer in six weeks’ time and that meant …

“I do hope you can make it,” urged Lettuce. “I have something fairly important I’d like to discuss with you.”

Isabel tensed. It would be difficult now to decline Lettuce’s invitation as she knew that he would not talk about anything important on the telephone. He had always been like that when he had chaired the editorial board, alluding to information which he was party to but nobody else knew, or could be admitted to. “He’s talking as if he were the head of Secret Intelligence,” she had once whispered to a colleague at the annual meeting of the Review’s board.

“Perhaps we should call him C,” came the reply. “Or M, or whatever it is that these people call themselves.”

“L,” whispered Isabel. L suited Lettuce so well, just as one would have thought that D might have fitted Dove —but did not. Christopher Dove was a perfect name, in Isabel’s view; it had the ring of Trollope to it, every bit as suited to its bearer as was Obadiah Slope. She had always felt that people could grow into their names, just as we