The Lost Art of Gratitude

“I’m sorry,” said Grace quickly. “I didn’t mean to say that. But it’s what I felt.”

Isabel made a gesture of hopelessness. “What do you expect me to say? How do you think I feel about that? Living in sin? What exactly do you mean?”

Grace was now becoming slightly flustered. “It’s an expression. That’s all. An expression. It’s what people say.”

“Used to say,” snapped Isabel, her growing anger now showing itself in her tone of voice. “Twenty, thirty years ago. It’s a dreadful expression.”

Grace shook her head vehemently. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s not sin. Not really.”

Isabel stared at her. She forgave Grace a great deal—her outbursts, her possessiveness of Charlie, the implied criticism in many of her remarks, but she found it difficult to accept this. “My relationship with Jamie may not be entirely conventional,” she said, “but one thing I am very clear about, and that is that it is not in any remote sense of the word sinful.”

“No. Of course not.”

“Then what did you mean?”

Grace looked down at the floor. Suddenly she started to cry. She started to say something, but the sobs obstructed her words. Isabel immediately felt guilty. She should not have reacted so sharply; it was only an expression. It had nothing to do with sin.

She reached out and touched Grace’s sleeve. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I overreacted. I know what you mean.”

Grace did not look up. “I only want you to be happy,” she said. “I really do. I wanted him to marry you. All along I wanted him to marry you, rather than to live …”

“Together,” supplied Isabel quickly. She was sure that Grace had been about to refer to sin again, and she helped her avoid it.

“Yes,” said Grace. “And now that he’s asked you, I really am happy.”

Isabel comforted her. Grace’s shoulder was bony—surprisingly so—and it was hard to pat it reassuringly; but she did, even though the thought came into her mind that it felt like patting an old horse, where blades of bone lay only just below the surface of the skin and felt like … felt like this.

“You must understand,” Isabel began, “that sometimes I feel a bit sensitive about the fact that Jamie is younger than I am. That’s probably why I bit your head off just then. I don’t mean it.”

Grace wiped at her cheek with a small handkerchief. Isabel noticed that it had been embroidered in one corner with an elaborate letter G. It was a small thing, but the sight of this made her feel a sudden rush of sympathy for the other woman. Our small possessions, she thought, can say so much about vulnerability.

“You shouldn’t feel like that,” Grace said. “Not these days.”

“Oh, I know that,” said Isabel. “Everybody says that it’s absolutely fine. They keep saying it, and I suppose I know that they’re right. But every so often, just every so often, you see an expression on somebody’s face that tells you that’s not the way they’re thinking.”

“A look of disapproval?”

“Exactly. Nothing too obvious, but it’s there. People can’t hide their feelings, you know.”

“Ignore them. It’s none of their business.”

Isabel sighed. “Oh, I do ignore them. But I don’t think they see it as being none of their business. We are great interferers, you know. We’re an inherently moral species. If we see something we disapprove of, we experience reactive feelings, even when we know it’s none of our business. And maybe it’s just as well that we do.”

Grace was puzzled, and Isabel explained. “If we didn’t react to the behaviour of others when we’re not directly affected, then people would get away with murder. Literally. We wouldn’t intervene over genocide if it was happening in somebody else’s country. We wouldn’t have done anything about Hitler. Tyrants could act with impunity.”

“They do, anyway,” said Grace.

“I suppose so. We’re selective in our moral outrage. We’re very ready to vent it on the weaker tyrants but not so much on the strong ones. Who did anything about Stalin?”

“They didn’t want a nuclear war.”

Isabel had to agree. “No, they didn’t. I suppose that demonstrates that moral philosophy has to be practical. It has to take into account who has a big fist. It also has to bear in mind who we are, our human limitations. It’s not just something that one does in armchairs.” As she spoke, she thought of her own armchair. The last time she had sat in it, she had drifted off to sleep while watching the news. For a moral philosopher’s armchair, she thought, it’s somewhat under-used.

GRACE WAS ONLY TOO PLEASED to be left in charge of Charlie that morning while Isabel went into Bruntsfield. She would take him down to the canal, she said, to look at the boats. And then there was her friend who lived in Harrison Gardens and who always welcomed a visit from Charlie. After that he could have his sleep.