The Lost Art of Gratitude

She went into her study and gazed at the array of books and papers. The room was on the side of the house that did not get the sun until mid-morning, yet even at this point in the morning the large windows let in a good amount of light. As she surveyed the room she thought that the scene before her could be a still life, Study with Books, of the sort painted by seventeenth-century Dutch artists. They liked rooms like this, and they liked the stillness hanging in the very air of such places. Vermeer, perhaps, might have painted this room, or de Hoogh, inserting the figure of a woman sewing or playing a lute—one of those quiet domestic scenes that they did so well. And such an artist would look, as the Dutch painters often did, through the room into the space beyond, in this case Isabel’s garden, the square of lawn outside the window bordered by its bank of rhododendrons and azaleas—a sort of courtyard, rather like an outdoor room. Somebody had told her—she had forgotten who, or whether she had read it somewhere—that the essence of a good still life was the feeling it inspired that something was just on the point of happening. What was about to happen here? Her eye wandered to the pile of letters on her desk, put there by Grace the previous day. That was suggestive of the beginnings of something—an exchange of correspondence, perhaps. Somebody was about to enter the room and deal with the letters and then leave again, and the stillness would return.

She sighed. She could have gone off to the canal with Jamie and shared Charlie’s delight in the ducks. He squealed with pleasure now when he saw them, waving his arms about in uncontrolled excitement; he loved to watch them swimming for the breadcrumbs Jamie tossed into the water. There would come a time—and it would not be long in arriving, she feared—when ducks would cease to amuse Charlie quite so much. The thought brought regret. Charlie would grow up only too quickly, as all parents said their children did; already she found it hard to remember what he was like as a tiny baby. She remembered the smell, of course, that very particular, soft smell that babies have, a mixture of animal warmth and milk, and blanket, which gave way so soon, in a young child, to something else, as individual and every bit as indefinable, but not quite the same.

She crossed to her desk and switched on the desk lamp. There were at least ten letters in the pile—and four of them looked as if they were manuscripts. Isabel stipulated that prospective authors submit articles for the Review on paper, a policy that led to grumbling from at least some of her would-be contributors. “Haven’t you heard of electronic submission?” wrote a professor of philosophy from a college in the American Midwest. “You really should accept electronic files, you know. Everyone does.” She had written back to explain that she did not read on screen—something for which she felt he should be thankful. “I give far more considered attention to something on paper,” she said. “I find that I can weigh it. I would have thought that contributors would appreciate this.” A day or two later his reply had arrived. “You could print things out,” he said. “Why not?” And after that he had inserted in the message a smiley face, winking.

Isabel might have left it at that, but, puzzled by a motivation that she could not explain, she decided to make a concession. Then, after she had made up her mind, she looked for a reason for her decision. She imagined the professor in Iowa surrounded by a sea of cornfields and fresh-faced students, waiting for a message from somewhere beyond the vast horizons that bounded his world. “I’m sorry to have to get back to you on this,” she wrote, “but printing everything costs money and, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, takes time that I may not have. However, since this means so much to you, I’ll be happy for you to submit your paper electronically and I shall print it out.”

There was no reply to this, and so a week later she sent an enquiring message, asking if the paper had perhaps been lost in the ether. This time there was a reply: “Sorry—paper not yet written. Perhaps next year some time.” She had smiled at this; the whole exchange had been hypothetical. She wrote back to him—a real letter—and said, “I do hope that we get something from you, but I don’t want to put you under pressure. The summer, perhaps, might be a good time to put pen to paper, once the students have packed up and gone home. Until then, I remain, in hope, Isabel Dalhousie.” She folded the letter, put it into an envelope and wrote out the address. Why had she bothered? It had been a pointless exchange with a man she neither knew nor imagined she would ever meet, and yet for a short while they had engaged with one another. Treat everyone you meet as if it’s their last day, and while you know that, they don’t. She remembered the advice given her by her mother, her sainted American mother, as she referred to her. And it was good advice—a childish aphorism, perhaps, but none the less true for that.

And then the memory came back. Iowa: yes, she had been there, and she had forgotten all about it. Years ago, when she had been on her fellowship in Washington, she had been invited to a conference in a college town in Iowa, and there had been a young associate professor who had shown her and one or two others around the town; yes, she remembered now. And he had pointed out a large house on the edge of a river where, he explained, one of the members of a local philanthropic family had lived. He had said, “That is where Miss Ellie lived, and she believed in fairies with all her heart—with all her heart.” And with that he had looked at Isabel wistfully, and she had been struck by the thought of anybody believing in fairies with all her heart. To live in a house by a river and to believe in fairies with all one’s heart—that was enough, surely.

She could not remember the name of the man who had shown her round, but it occurred to her that this was the same person, which meant that they were not strangers to one another—not really—and that chance, pure chance, had brought them together twice. What was more interesting, though, was the fact that she had decided to make an exception in his case and offer to print out his paper for him. She had thought that this was because he was somehow isolated in his Midwest fastness, but now she knew otherwise: she had been prompted to do it because her subconscious mind recalled their meeting even though her conscious mind was unaware of it; she knew him, although she did not know that she did.

Now, seated at her desk, she began to deal with the letters. Usually she indulged herself in picking out the ones that interested her and attending to those first, leaving the mundane and the bills until last. But today she felt she should be sensible and force herself to deal with them according to their order in the pile; lunch with Jamie and Charlie would be her reward. So if she opened the electricity bill before anything else, it was because it was on the top of the pile, and for that reason deserved to be opened.

The next letter was from the printers of the Review—a technical enquiry about the quality of paper. They had bought a supply of superior Finnish paper, they revealed, and would keep some of this for Isabel if she wished; a sample was enclosed. The offer reminded her of her obliging butcher, who from time to time would pull something out from under the counter and say that he had been keeping it for her; some delicious cut that he thought she would particularly appreciate; small acts of commercial friendship binding together customer and provider. She looked at the paper and held it up to the light. She rubbed it between her fingers, and thought of where it had come from, somewhere in those wide forests where … where the ports have names for the sea. The line of Auden came to her, and made her think of how typographical errors may lend a certain beauty to a line; Auden had written of sea-naming poets, in Iceland rather than Finland, but poets had been misread as ports. That was a creative misunderstanding, she considered, and it made the thought behind the line much better, much richer, as some of our mistakes will do.

Isabel had put the electricity bill to one side—not the same thing as paying it, she said to herself. The admission made her reach for the cheque book kept in the top drawer of her desk and write out a cheque for the requisite sum—an estimate, she noticed, based on what the electricity authorities had deemed a household such as hers likely to have used. That was not the same thing as what she had actually used; parsimony might have overcome her, for all they knew. Or its opposite might apply: she might have taken to growing cannabis and consumed those massive quantities of power that cannabis growers use to force their crop. It happened, she knew, but not in Edinburgh, not in this tree-lined street … which would be perfect cover, she realised, for just such a thing, or for a counterfeit currency operation, or for anything, really. And how the newspapers would revel in the unveiling of something like that in the very home of the Review of Applied Ethics. Perfect villains