The Lost Art of Gratitude

blue jacket.

She got out of bed. “I was dreaming of Minty Auchterlonie,” she said. “Minty—of all people.”

Jamie moved across to the dressing table. He picked up a silver-backed clothes brush and used it cursorily on his jacket. The brush had belonged to Isabel’s mother, and she wondered: What would she have thought about Jamie? She would have approved; Isabel’s mother had only wanted her to be happy, and Jamie made her happy. She would have understood.

Jamie spoke without turning round. “That woman. You know what I think?”

Isabel retrieved her dressing gown from the back of the door. “What do you think?”

Jamie turned round now. “I think that she’s not going to go away.”

Isabel frowned. “Meaning?”

Jamie’s eyes met hers. “I think that she’s like a piece of unfinished music. It wants to resolve, but the notes aren’t there. So it goes round and round in your head until you work out an ending for it.”

She fumbled with the cord of her dressing gown. It was frayed and she would need to replace it. The dressing gown was beginning to look shabby, but she still loved it. She looked up. Jamie’s words hung in the air between them; one of those observations that on occasion comes out as an accusation.

“You think I should do something?” It was not what she expected; whenever Jamie offered her advice in this sort of situation, he usually told her to do nothing, to avoid further involvement.

“Normally …”

“Normally you wouldn’t.”

“No. I mean, yes, you’re right, I wouldn’t. But it seems to me now that this Minty person has really got under your skin.”

It was a good way of describing it. Minty had indeed got under her skin, like one of those little jigger creatures that one found in the American South; her aunt, the one she had dreamed of, had complained about those in the grass of her lawn. “Like a jigger,” said Isabel.

“Those parasite things?”

“Yes. My mother used to talk about how she took them out from under her skin as a child. With a pin.”

Jamie shuddered. “Maybe. But you need to sort out what you think of her. You can’t leave things up in the air, as they are. Many people could—but you can’t. You’re too much of a worrier.” He paused. “Use a pin.”

Isabel listened carefully. Why should she be surprised that Jamie thought of her as a worrier? Was she really?

“Do you think that I should …?”

“Have it out with her again?”

“Yes.”

He hesitated before replying. “Maybe. Just tell her what you think of her. Tell her that you don’t believe a word she says, and leave it at that. If you don’t do anything, she’s likely to draw you into something again. You don’t want that, do you?”

She thought about this. Charlie, who was in his playpen downstairs, had begun to cry. He would have thrown one of his soft toys out of the playpen confines, like one prisoner helping another to escape over the prison fence, and now he was regretting it.

“Fine. I’ll do it.”

She thought: he’s right. And he often is.

He seemed pleased with her response. “Do you want me to come with you?”

She did not. He had done enough: he had pushed her in a direction that she might have gone in anyway, and she was confident that she could manage by herself. And she did not want to expose Jamie to Minty; she was not sure why, but she felt somehow that Minty was a threat to him, and that he was vulnerable.

AFTER BREAKFAST, Isabel went to her study. There were letters that she had to write, some personal and some connected with the Review. Edward Mendelson had written from New York, and her reply to him was late. As Auden’s literary executor, he had been trying to trace a school magazine in which Auden had written an article when he taught at a small private school in the west of Scotland. A woman on the Isle of Mull, hearing about this, had written to say that they had no knowledge of the magazine, but had a typescript which they thought was Auden’s original draft. “My grandfather,” wrote this woman, “was on the staff of the school when Auden was there. He was friendly with him and he gave him a box of papers to look after, which he forgot about and never claimed.” The woman was happy for them to be looked at, but would not allow them out of the house, even on a promise of return.

“I don’t like to impose,” wrote Edward, “but could you possibly go and take a look at them? Perhaps she’ll allow you to photograph them. And, as for the typescript, you can tell straight away whether Auden typed it. He never put a space after a comma—it’s as if it’s a signature. If you see that, then that’s almost certainly by him.”

Isabel wrote back and said she would do this. They would all go—Jamie and Charlie too—and look for crowded commas.

Then there was a letter from Steven Barclay, a friend who had a flat in Paris. Steven wanted Isabel and Jamie to spend a weekend with him in Paris. There was a hotel, he said, whose staff would love Charlie and it was not far from his place in the Latin Quarter. “I’ll take you to my favourite restaurant, La Fontaine de Mars,” wrote Steven. “It’s in the seventh arrondissement on rue Saint-Dominique, close to the Ecole Militaire—so you’ll be quite safe! And you’ve always been so keen on Vuillard—I can take you and Jamie to the place where Vuillard stayed when he was in Paris. And you can look at the Vuillards in the house of somebody I know. Vuillards that nobody else sees. Just you. Isabel, you’ve got to come.”

She wrote to Steven and assured him that she would. Then, musing on a life that included such calls to Mull and Paris, she turned her attention to Review correspondence. This was largely mundane,