The Lost Art of Gratitude

She looked at the telephone on her desk, struggling with the temptation to let it ring itself out. How many rings would that be? If it was Jamie on the line he would let it ring and ring because he would know that she was somewhere in the house. But if it was a stranger it might ring only five or six times before the caller gave up.

After eight rings she reached forward and lifted the receiver.

“Miss Dalhousie?”

The man’s voice was one that she had heard before, but not for some time and she could not place it.

“Lettuce speaking.”

Her hand tightened about the receiver. Of course, that was it; those precise, rather pedantic tones were familiar because it was Professor Lettuce, former chairman of the editorial board of the Review, professor of moral philosophy, author of Living Strenuously and, most significantly, friend and mentor of Christopher Dove.

“How nice to hear from you, Professor Lettuce.” The words came out before she could stop them. It was a lie, and she should not have uttered them. It was not nice to hear from Professor Lettuce—it never had been. Lettuce: what a ridiculous name, she thought. Poor Lettuce: his salad days were over. She smiled; a secret joke, even such a weak and childish one, made it so much easier.

“And I am pleased to be talking to you, Miss Dalhousie.”

Are you really?

“I happen to be in Edinburgh, you see,” Lettuce went on.

Isabel tried to sound enthusiastic. “Well, what a pleasant surprise. Shall we meet up?”

She did not want to meet him but felt that she had to say it.

“That would be a great pleasure,” said Lettuce. “I’m giving a paper this afternoon. The philosophy department at the university is running a series of seminars and they very kindly invited me up to say something about my new book on Hutcheson.”

Isabel caught her breath. “Hutcheson?” Realising that she sounded surprised, she corrected herself. “I didn’t know you were working on him. I knew of your interest in Hume, of course.”

Professor Lettuce chuckled. “Yes. It would be more logical, of course, to move on from Hutcheson to Hume. I have done things the wrong way round. But there we are. The point is this: Would you by any chance be free to meet me for lunch? I know it’s no notice at all, but I wondered.”

Isabel looked at her watch. It was almost eleven and she had accomplished virtually nothing that morning. If she went off for lunch now, then she would probably not get back to her desk until well after two, when Charlie would wake up after his afternoon sleep and she would want to spend time with him. The next issue of the Review would have to be ready for the printer in six weeks’ time and that meant …

“I do hope you can make it,” urged Lettuce. “I have something fairly important I’d like to discuss with you.”

Isabel tensed. It would be difficult now to decline Lettuce’s invitation as she knew that he would not talk about anything important on the telephone. He had always been like that when he had chaired the editorial board, alluding to information which he was party to but nobody else knew, or could be admitted to. “He’s talking as if he were the head of Secret Intelligence,” she had once whispered to a colleague at the annual meeting of the Review’s board.

“Perhaps we should call him C,” came the reply. “Or M, or whatever it is that these people call themselves.”

“L,” whispered Isabel. L suited Lettuce so well, just as one would have thought that D might have fitted Dove—but did not. Christopher Dove was a perfect name, in Isabel’s view; it had the ring of Trollope to it, every bit as suited to its bearer as was Obadiah Slope. She had always felt that people could grow into their names, just as we brought about self-fulfilling prophecies once we realised they applied to us. Obadiah Slope might have become a schemer because his childhood companions expected him to be one. Professor Lettuce must have gone through his childhood being the butt of mockery from other boys—fortunate boys not named after vegetables—simply because of his unusual name, and perhaps for this reason his character had developed in the way it had. There was always a reason for wickedness, she was convinced—a reason to be found in the classroom or the playground, or even earlier, in the crib, when the mother failed to love, or the father withheld his approval, or something else dark and unhappy occurred. There was inevitably an explanation for the coldness of the heart that years later could be so damaging in its effect. Let that never happen to Charlie, she thought. Let him never be loved too little … or too much.

“Are you still there?” asked Lettuce, somewhat peevishly.

“Yes, I am. And yes, I’ll be happy to meet you for lunch.”

“Good,” said Lettuce. “Something light, I think, if I’m to do Hutcheson justice this afternoon. A salad perhaps.”

Isabel could not resist the temptation. “That would be very appropriate,” she said.