The Lost Art of Gratitude

She followed the winding road that led along the side of the Water of Leith before meandering up the brae to the Botanical Gardens. Turning round here, one was afforded an unusual view of the city skyline, of the Castle, of the spiky churches and the crouching lion of Arthur’s Seat, mantled gold in the sunlight. She took this in briefly, and then looked down at the river below her, its surface half silver, half peaty brown. It rarely became very deep: one could wade across and never wet one’s knees in most places. Only after heavy rains in the Pentlands did it seem at all impressive, but she felt a strong affection for it as the river of her childhood. They had picnicked beside it up in Colinton Dell, where it tumbled over a weir, her father demonstrating to her how to make flat stones skip over the surface, something she never achieved. And her mother lay back on their tartan picnic rug and drew on a cigarette, sending tiny clouds of smoke skywards. “You look like a volcano, Mummy. A volcano.” She remembered her words, after all this time, just as she remembered how her mother had not appreciated the remark. Isabel had felt hurt and surprised, because she had never been able to take parental anger or disappointment.

She took the path that led round the back of Inverleith House, which stood surrounded by trees in the middle of the gardens. Again there were memories—this time of being brought to see an exhibition in the days when the building was used by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. She had been brought with her class from school and they had been taken round an Anne Redpath exhibition. Miss McLaren, their art teacher, who believed that every twentieth-century artist of any note had been influenced by Cézanne, had duly found signs of this in the Redpath paintings. “Cézanne again,” she had said. “And Matisse. She was influenced by both, of course, as so many were. Look at the colours in this painting, girls. The hillside. The path. Does that not make you think of Cézanne?”

She had not thought of Miss McLaren for years. That outing to the gallery had until now been absent from her memory, and although she could remember the art teacher and what she said, she could not recall which of her classmates had been with her. It was a blank. Twenty years from now, would she have forgotten why she was here today, and what was about to happen? She imagined so. And then went on to think: twenty years on, Charlie would be coming to the end of his university days—a young man about to embark on a career. She could not picture it, nor could she imagine how she would feel, although it would be the same as everybody else feels in similar circumstances. That at least was a consolation: separation and loss were something that we all experienced; the pain was shared, and was perhaps easier for that.

She was approaching the hothouses. She looked at her watch: three minutes to eleven. There was nobody there, and for a moment she wondered whether Minty was playing with her, sending her off on a wild goose chase, wasting her time; there were unbalanced people who did that sort of thing. She looked behind her along the path that she had followed from the back of Inverleith House. In the distance a woman wearing a bright red jacket was pushing a small child in a pushchair. The child seemed to be wearing a bonnet of some sort and the woman had a large sunhat on her head. If Jock Dundas came now, he might think that the woman was Minty and that the child was Roderick; he could easily think that.

She turned round again and saw that the door of one of the hothouses was being opened from the inside. A man came out and closed the door behind him. He was not far away and Isabel saw that he was a tall man with a head of dark hair. He looked at her briefly and then up towards the woman on the path behind her. He screwed up his eyes, as the sun was bright, and stared at the other woman, momentarily uncertain.

Isabel was sure now, and was close enough to the man to address him. “No, that’s not her.”

She had approached him from the side, and he spun round sharply.

Isabel smiled. “That woman over there is not Minty.”

The man threw a puzzled glance in the woman’s direction and then looked back at Isabel. “I’m sorry, you are …?”

Isabel was struck by Jock’s profile. Of course Minty had fallen for him. “I’m Isabel Dalhousie,” she said. “I’m a … a friend of Minty’s.”

Jock did not react for a moment. Then he frowned. “Is there something wrong? Is Roderick all right?”

Isabel reassured him. “He’s fine. I’ve come instead of Minty, that’s all.”

At first Jock had been impassive, but now he began to look irritated. “Look, I don’t want to be rude, but I was due to meet Minty. I don’t really see why—”

Isabel cut him short. “Minty is very upset,” she said. “And I want to talk to you about that.”

He shook his head. “I don’t see what any of this has got to do with you.”

“She asked me to speak to you. She wants me to ask you to stop.”