The Lost Art of Gratitude

She moved her hand, and Lettuce went back to his salad. “You’re quite right,” he said. “And Hutcheson has not had adequate attention paid to him, I feel. His insights into morality and our sense of beauty seem so fresh, even today. I pay quite a lot of attention to those in my new work.”

“Good,” said Isabel. “I very much look forward to reading it.”

Lettuce now smiled. “I’ve been a rather foolish Lettuce,” he said.

The strange turn of phrase caught her by surprise; referring to oneself in the third person always made Isabel feel uneasy, conveying, as it did, a slight sense of dissociation from self. Here it seemed almost comical—sounding like a childish reference to oneself as a vegetable; mind you, the French, she remembered, called one another chou, in affection. She reached out again and patted his wrist. “You’ve been human— that’s all. We all make mistakes.”

He looked at her in gratitude. “Thank you.”

She inclined her head. She had not expected him to thank her; indeed she rarely expected anybody to thank her for anything. Gratitude was a lost art, she felt. People accepted things, took them as their right, and had forgotten how to give proper thanks. Professor Lettuce, for all his faults, had at least said thank you and she, in turn, was grateful for that.

CHAPTER TWELVE

JAMIE ANNOUNCED that he would cook dinner that evening—scallops, with green beans and dauphinois potatoes. Isabel, who had taught him how to make the potato dish, was pleased—and he was proud. “Nobody else in the orchestra can make potatoes dauphinois,” he said, adding, “as far as I know.”

With his preternaturally sophisticated palate, Charlie liked potatoes done this way, turning up his nose at ordinary boiled potatoes.

“Where did he get these sophisticated tastes from?” asked Jamie, looking firmly at Isabel.

It was not from her, claimed Isabel. Boiled potatoes were fine with her; but so were scallops and truffle oil and smoked wild salmon. “His grandfather, of course, my father, had a liking for savouries—potted shrimps, angels on horseback—that sort of thing. Maybe it’s from him.”

“We had mince and tatties when I was a boy,” said Jamie. “And rice pudding.” Mince and tatties were standard Scottish fare, as ordinary as could be.

“But you were lucky to have the mince,” said Isabel. “Remember that there were those who had only the potatoes? A tatty and a pass? When the children’s potatoes were passed over the meat—just passed—to get a whiff of the flavour on them? Then the father ate all the meat.”

“All right,” said Jamie. “We had mince. But when I was a music student we didn’t have a fridge in the flat.”

Isabel was politely interested. “Really?”

“Yes. And the hot water in the bathroom came from a tiny gas geyser.”

“Such hardship.”

“You may laugh. Today everybody has everything, right from the word go.”

Isabel looked at Charlie, who had been playing in his playpen during this conversation. “He’ll never remember mince and tatties,” she mused. “Because he refuses to eat them. Or haggis. And he will assume that people have always had mobile phones and the web to give the answer to anything you want to know at the touch of a key. And invisible mp3s instead of CDs.”

“Who remembers vinyl?” asked Jamie. “Do you?”

Isabel did; there was vinyl in the attic. One day she would mount an electronic rescue and save it, but she had been putting it off. In its vinyl form the music seemed somehow more tangible, more real. As a series of ones and zeros it seemed to her that something was being lost, in the same way that books might be lost when their contents are rendered digital. And bookshelves, and libraries, and printing presses, and binderies; if people spoke of books as friends—which they so often were—then could they say the same of an electronic file?

Jamie added, “And he’ll probably find it remarkable that there was a time when we thought that we would have water and fuel and food indefinitely.”

Isabel thought this was true. “I suspect he will.”

“And he’ll find it hard to believe that there really was ice at the poles and Amazonian jungles and creatures like polar bears and elephants.” Jamie paused. “His world is going to be very different, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It already is.”

He looked at her. This was a shared moment of loss, of the sort that lovers may experience when they realise they are to part, or when a parent helps a child pack on leaving the family home; a moment made poignant by impending separation. None of us, she thought, wants the world we know to come to an end; we do not want familiar things to be taken from us.

Charlie was dispatched to bed. He was tired, and settled well—almost immediately. Isabel kissed him and passed him the stuffed animal he liked to cuddle, although he was too sleepy even for that. I never imagined such happiness, she thought. And then she remembered Jock Dundas and his efforts, misguided and unrealistic though they were, to get to know his son, and it made her realise how fortunate she was, and in so many respects. She turned out Charlie’s lamp, leaving only the slight glow of his night-light to keep at bay the terrors of the night, whatever they were for him—ghaists and bogles, to use the Scots words. She had been frightened of these when she was a child, although her parents had reassured her that darkness was just an absence of light, nothing more. One does not believe one’s parents, of course, who would be so easily lulled into complacency by those self-same ghaists and bogles. Ghosts haunted not only houses, but hearts too. Isabel was going through the door, and stopped as the lines came back to her. Some ghaists haunt hooses, this ane haunts my hert / An’ aye I hearken for its lichtlie step. She went downstairs and into the kitchen, where Jamie was laying out slivers of smoked salmon on freshly buttered slices of brown bread. He looked up, and she crossed the floor to him. She put her arms around his shoulders and kissed him.