The Lost Art of Gratitude

“Well, I’m asking you now,” said Isabel. “He’s been injured and I want to get the vet to take a look at him.”

“Hundred pounds,” said Billy.

Isabel had no idea what the going rate for the trapping of a fox was. One hundred pounds sounded rather a lot—fifty? He was sure to be overcharging her.

“How about fifty?” she ventured.

“That would get you only hauf a fox,” said Billy. “You choose. Fifty for hauf a fox. One hundred for a whole fox.”

She agreed, and they arranged a time. Billy would try to get into town by four in the afternoon; he had work to do until then. She would need to have a roast chicken available—or, if possible, a pheasant. “He cannae resist a pheasant. Mind you,” he warned, “a sick fox sometimes doesnae eat. Even pheasant. We’ll see.”

Before she rang off, Isabel had a last shot to fire. “And a final thing, Mr. McClarty: I’m not daft.”

Billy McClarty laughed. “I wasnae meaning to be rude.”

“Well, in general people don’t like to be referred to in those terms …” She did not complete the sentence. It would not help to lecture Billy McClarty on this; it would merely confirm his view. And she needed him now; or, rather, Brother Fox needed him. The contradiction struck her forcibly—this agent of Nemesis for foxes was about to become his rescuer.

SHE DECIDED that it would be better to see Jock Dundas in person. A telephone conversation was sufficient for ordinary transactions, but not for those circumstances in which one needed to assess the other person’s reaction. Minty had mentioned the name of his firm, and it was simple work to arrange with his secretary an appointment for later that morning. Isabel looked at her watch; if she left now and walked to the lawyers’ offices in the West End she would arrive with a few minutes in hand.

She chose to walk down to the bridge at Harrison Gardens and to follow the canal towpath to the basin at Fountainbridge. There were few people about—a handful of dog owners taking their dogs for a walk, a couple of runners glistening with sweat and engaged in an earnest discussion between their exhausted pantings, a teenager on a bicycle—the youth wore a leather jacket on which the words Attack Squad were embroidered in red. Who was being attacked, she asked herself, and why? He looked pallid, not unlike Eddie, and certainly not the type to attack anybody, Isabel thought, which was probably why he wore the jacket in the first place. Real members of an attack squad presumably never advertised themselves.

The towpath afforded an unusual view of the city—the backs of tenement buildings with their rough stone walls making for a crazy-paving effect, pinched back greens on which drying washing was pegged on laundry lines, arched stone bridges, a disused brewery. And in the basin itself, where the canal came to an abrupt end, brightly painted barges were tethered against the side of the canal, smoke coming from their tin-can chimneys, bicycles and other day-to-day paraphernalia stacked on narrow decks. The corners of a city, she thought, are where the sense of place was strongest. The world saw the official Edinburgh, the elegant Georgian squares, the lines of fluttering flags in Princes Street Gardens, the bands and the spectacles. It did not see the back greens, the closes, the streets where people led ordinary lives. It was possible, she reminded herself, to love both equally—the Scotland of the romantic tourist posters and this unadorned, workaday Scotland—and she was, in fact, fond of both of them and not ashamed, as some were, of the romanticised vision. Myth could be as sustaining as reality—sometimes even more so.

She left the canal basin and made her way towards Lothian Road. Like all cities, Edinburgh changed quickly: a block or two could bring one to a different world. Lothian Road was traffic and bustle; all cheap Italian restaurants where spaghetti bolognese would count as the day’s special and low-life bars outside which black-suited pugilists served as bouncers, their broken noses bearing stark witness to their profession. Isabel did not like this street and wished it was not there, but knew that it had its role. Soldiers came here at night, down from the barracks at Redford, ready for hard drinking and picking up girls. If there was blood on Scottish pavements it was because of old wounds, not new; things that had happened a long time ago, old hardships, old cruelties, old exploitation and old injustice.

And then, quite abruptly, the surly atmosphere of Lothian Road gave way to the Edinburgh of law and finance, and, amongst other discreet entrances, to the doorway of Messrs McGregor, Fraser & Co., Solicitors and Notaries Public, Writers to Her Majesty’s Signet. Isabel went in that door, just on the edge of Charlotte Square, and found herself in a waiting room not unlike the drawing room of one of the Georgian flats that graced the square just a few hundred yards away. A sofa and several armchairs surrounded a low table on which a selection of the day’s papers were arranged alongside Scottish Field, Homes & Interiors Scotland and The Economist. There was an air of calm to this room that belied what the business of McGregor, Fraser was all about: conflict and holding on to what one had. In the back offices somewhere in the building, there would be people in their shirtsleeves watching turbulent markets and planning litigation; but out here, in the front, there was no sign of that.

The receptionist who had greeted Isabel smiled and spoke quietly into her telephone. Then she invited Isabel to wait. “Mr. Dundas will only be a moment.”

He was not much more than that. “Ms. Dalhousie?”

Isabel looked up from the magazine she was perusing. She had started on an article about a man and his friend who had transformed a run-down Glasgow flat into an elegant venue for entertaining. George (left) and Alice (right) had met at art college where they had both studied design. “We both liked red,” said George. “It was a bond between us,” explained Alice. “Reds brought us together.” And now the Glasgow flat which had been “the most ghastly beige colour when we saw it first—we were almost sick on the spot”—was largely red. “George knew a guy who made really good bespoke furniture. He had trained with Lord Linley and his work was all over London …”

She put the magazine down with some reluctance. She would never be able to find out more about George and Alice, but she was not worried about them—reds would hold them together, she had no doubt about that.

She stood up and looked at Jock Dundas, who was standing in the doorway. He looked grave, and she knew immediately that her instinct had been right.

“This way, please,” he said, indicating a short corridor. At the end, behind a half-ajar door, was a small interview room furnished in dark mahogany.

“Please sit down.”

“Thank you.”

He closed the door behind him and returned to take a seat at the table.