The Lost Art of Gratitude

“All right,” said Jamie. “We had mince. But when I was a music student we didn’t have a fridge in the flat.”

Isabel was politely interested. “Really?”

“Yes. And the hot water in the bathroom came from a tiny gas geyser.”

“Such hardship.”

“You may laugh. Today everybody has everything, right from the word go.”

Isabel looked at Charlie, who had been playing in his playpen during this conversation. “He’ll never remember mince and tatties,” she mused. “Because he refuses to eat them. Or haggis. And he will assume that people have always had mobile phones and the web to give the answer to anything you want to know at the touch of a key. And invisible mp3s instead of CDs.”

“Who remembers vinyl?” asked Jamie. “Do you?”

Isabel did; there was vinyl in the attic. One day she would mount an electronic rescue and save it, but she had been putting it off. In its vinyl form the music seemed somehow more tangible, more real. As a series of ones and zeros it seemed to her that something was being lost, in the same way that books might be lost when their contents are rendered digital. And bookshelves, and libraries, and printing presses, and binderies; if people spoke of books as friends—which they so often were—then could they say the same of an electronic file?

Jamie added, “And he’ll probably find it remarkable that there was a time when we thought that we would have water and fuel and food indefinitely.”

Isabel thought this was true. “I suspect he will.”

“And he’ll find it hard to believe that there really was ice at the poles and Amazonian jungles and creatures like polar bears and elephants.” Jamie paused. “His world is going to be very different, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It already is.”

He looked at her. This was a shared moment of loss, of the sort that lovers may experience when they realise they are to part, or when a parent helps a child pack on leaving the family home; a moment made poignant by impending separation. None of us, she thought, wants the world we know to come to an end; we do not want familiar things to be taken from us.

Charlie was dispatched to bed. He was tired, and settled well—almost immediately. Isabel kissed him and passed him the stuffed animal he liked to cuddle, although he was too sleepy even for that. I never imagined such happiness, she thought. And then she remembered Jock Dundas and his efforts, misguided and unrealistic though they were, to get to know his son, and it made her realise how fortunate she was, and in so many respects. She turned out Charlie’s lamp, leaving only the slight glow of his night-light to keep at bay the terrors of the night, whatever they were for him—ghaists and bogles, to use the Scots words. She had been frightened of these when she was a child, although her parents had reassured her that darkness was just an absence of light, nothing more. One does not believe one’s parents, of course, who would be so easily lulled into complacency by those self-same ghaists and bogles. Ghosts haunted not only houses, but hearts too. Isabel was going through the door, and stopped as the lines came back to her. Some ghaists haunt hooses, this ane haunts my hert / An’ aye I hearken for its lichtlie step. She went downstairs and into the kitchen, where Jamie was laying out slivers of smoked salmon on freshly buttered slices of brown bread. He looked up, and she crossed the floor to him. She put her arms around his shoulders and kissed him.

He was surprised; his fingers were fishy and he could not touch her. “Why?”

“Why not? I was thinking of a poem I once read, about a ghost that haunts the heart. I felt frightened.”

He smiled. “You shouldn’t. Not with me here.”

“I know.”

He reached for a kitchen towel to wipe his hands. She released him.

“The woman in the poem looks forward to her encounter with the ghost that haunts her heart. She’s not frightened at all.”

He looked away. Was she talking about Cat? Cat did not haunt him any more. And Isabel was no longer haunted by John Liamor, surely. He reached for the bottle of wine that he had opened and put into an ice-cooled sleeve. He poured two glasses and handed one to her.

“Are you ever frightened?” she asked.

He thought for a moment. He had been frightened, but it was a long time ago. At school there had been a boy who delighted in picking on him, twisting his arm behind his back until he screamed for mercy; it was something sexual, he later realised, but he was too innocent to know that then. The older boy wanted him but could not have him, so love became hate, as it so readily could. He had been frightened because he did not understand.

“I used to be frightened,” he said. “Of rather odd things. Not now, though. Not for a long time.” He looked at her. “And you?”

“I’m frightened of losing things,” she said. “I’m frightened that something’s going to happen to you—or to Charlie.”