The Lost Art of Gratitude

“May I ask you something?” Isabel said.

“Yes.”

“If I tell you that this is complete nonsense,” she said. “If I tell you that I spoke to you the other day purely as a favour for Minty and with no intention at all of intimidating you. If I told you all this—and if you believed me— would you still give up your claim to Roderick?”

“Yes.”

“For career reasons?”

It took him some time to speak. “All right. Yes. You won’t approve of that, will you?”

Isabel remembered T. S. Eliot. This was a clear case of doing the right thing for the wrong reason. But she said nothing about that.

“I think it’s the right thing to do,” she said. “It really is.”

She rose to her feet and offered her hand. “I think we should shake hands. We don’t have anything else to say to one another really.” But then she thought that in fact she did.

“We have both been wronged by the same woman,” said Isabel.

Jock Dundas looked thoughtful. Then he nodded his agreement. “Yes, we have.”

“And I hope that you find somebody else,” said Isabel. “Maybe somebody with a child, or children. It’s a good thing to be a stepfather, you know, even if you can’t be a father. It’s a good thing.”

They shook hands. Isabel noticed how soft his hands felt, like the hands of a woman, a young girl. She noticed, too, that he was wearing some sort of cologne—sandalwood, she thought. She had bought Jamie a bottle of something like that the previous Christmas, but he had left it on a shelf in the bathroom with the top off and it had evaporated. She had asked him, “Was that a mistake, Jamie? Or did your subconscious prompt you to do it because you don’t want to use it?” And he had looked at her, smiled, and said, “Why must you complicate everything, Isabel?”

It had not been an argument, merely a discussion about why things are done, or not done, the way they are— or are not.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

SHE LEFT THE OFFICES of McGregor, Fraser & Co. and walked the short distance into Charlotte Square itself. It was a little after noon, and she felt at a loose end. Grace had been left in charge of Charlie until two, and was taking him out to lunch with one of her spiritualist friends, Annie, a woman whom Isabel had not met but of whom she had heard a great deal. Annie, who came from the Isle of Mull, was said to have a particular gift of second sight. “A lot of people from the islands are like that,” said Grace. “They see things we don’t see. Annie often knows what the weather is going to be like. It’s uncanny.”

Isabel had been about to suggest that Annie might perhaps watch the weather report, but checked herself. She had discovered that there was no point in engaging with Grace on these issues, as her housekeeper usually interpreted even mild disagreement as a direct challenge to her entire Weltanschauung. Not that Grace felt undermined by such exchanges. “You’ll find out,” Isabel had once heard her mutter. “You’ll find out once you cross over.”

Isabel had thought about this. She was open-minded enough to recognise that the self—or the soul, if one wished—might have an extra-corporeal existence that might just survive the demise of the mass of brain tissue that appeared to sustain it; the rigid exclusion of that possibility could be seen as much as a statement of faith as its rigid assertion. That is what she believed, and it allowed her to concede that Grace could be right. It also allowed her to find room for spirituality in its attempt to give form to a feeling that there was something beyond what we could see and touch.

“I’ve never asked you this,” Jamie had once said, as they sat together one summer evening on the lawn. “Do you believe in …” He looked at her and spread his hands to create a space.

And that space, she thought, might be God. “In God? Is that what you’re asking?” She assumed so, although he could very easily have been about to ask, “Do you believe in Scottish independence?” or “Do you believe in pouring the milk in first when you make a cup of tea?” Both important questions, but not ones that would necessarily lead to much.

He picked a tiny blade of grass and idly began to strip it down; how complex—and perfect—the construction of even this little piece of vegetation. “Yes. I suppose that’s what I want to know.”

“And you?” she asked.

“You first. I asked you.” Children dared one another in this way: you jump first, no you, no you go, then I will.

She lay back on the grass. The night was warm as was the lawn itself, warm, breathing out into the darkening air. The earth breathes, she thought.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Not in the white-bearded sense. But I sense something that is beyond me. I’m not sure I would give it the name God. But one could, if one wanted to.”

He listened carefully, and she realised, turning her head slightly so that she could see him, that for him this was one of the most intimate conversations they had ever had. To talk about sex was nothing to talking about God; the body stripped bare was never as bare as the soul so stripped. “And what about you?” she asked gently.

“I don’t think about it very much. It’s not really the sort of thing that I think much about.”

The answer pleased her. She would not have wanted him to reveal a certainty concealed up to this point. And there was something unattractive about a belief that excluded all doubt.

“But you’re not an out-and-out atheist? You don’t deride people who do believe in God?”

Again his answer pleased her. “No, not at all. People need some idea … some idea of where they are.”