The Lost Art of Gratitude

brought about self-fulfilling prophecies once we realised they applied to us. Obadiah Slope might have become a schemer because his childhood companions expected him to be one. Professor Lettuce must have gone through his childhood being the butt of mockery from other boys—fortunate boys not named after vegetables—simply because of his unusual name, and perhaps for this reason his character had developed in the way it had. There was always a reason for wickedness, she was convinced—a reason to be found in the classroom or the playground, or even earlier, in the crib, when the mother failed to love, or the father withheld his approval, or something else dark and unhappy occurred. There was inevitably an explanation for the coldness of the heart that years later could be so damaging in its effect. Let that never happen to Charlie, she thought. Let him never be loved too little … or too much.

“Are you still there?” asked Lettuce, somewhat peevishly.

“Yes, I am. And yes, I’ll be happy to meet you for lunch.”

“Good,” said Lettuce. “Something light, I think, if I’m to do Hutcheson justice this afternoon. A salad perhaps.”

Isabel could not resist the temptation. “That would be very appropriate,” she said.

Lettuce did not notice. “Good,” he said quite evenly, and, once they had agreed where to meet, they brought the call to an end.

The telephone rang again almost immediately. This time it was Jamie, who was on a coffee break halfway through the recording session and wanted to chat. “This conductor is a slave-driver,” he said sotto voce. “We’re being given an eight-minute break. Eight minutes!”

Isabel made sympathetic noises and then told him about the call she had just taken. “You’ll never guess who’s just been on the phone,” she said. “Professor Lettuce. He’s invited me to lunch.”

Jamie laughed. “Perhaps he’s turned over a new leaf.”

Isabel smiled. There was something very reassuring about weak humour; it took the tension out of a situation, made children of us once more. But such humour was only possible when shared with the closest of friends and with those whom one loved; they always knew that you were capable of better.

“Poor Professor Lettuce,” she said.

“Don’t give him a dressing-down,” said Jamie.

“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.”