The Lost Art of Gratitude

It could wait, of course, but Isabel herself could not. If she did not see Peter now she would spend the night pondering the implications of what he had said to Jamie. And if she did that, then the next day she would be too tired to work, would get behind with the Review, and that would prey on her mind sufficiently to ruin her sleep the following night. No, she had to talk to Peter now.

Jamie tried to be gracious. “All right. But please don’t be too late—potatoes dauphinois get soggy if you leave them.”

She kissed him lightly on the cheek and went to the telephone. Susie, Peter’s wife, answered and said that Peter was in the garden with the dog. Of course he would be happy to see Isabel; they had no plans for the evening and she was not yet even thinking about supper. “We had a late lunch today,” she said.

Isabel put on a light coat; the day itself had been warm, but evenings in Edinburgh could be chilly, particularly when the sky was empty of clouds, as it was this evening. Deciding to add a scarf to the coat, she went out of the house and set off for the Stevensons’ house in the Grange. It was not a long walk, but it was an interesting one for Isabel, as wherever she walked in Edinburgh she passed places with particular associations for her. So now, by taking a shortcut, she found herself walking past the house of Alex Philip, the architect whom she had consulted about possible alterations to her house, and then past the house of Haflidi Hallgrimsson, the composer whose latest piece she had listened to a few days previously. And round the corner from that she saw the road that led to the house of a well-known politician, and past the house of another of whom she had heard a most cutting remark passed—ten years ago, but still clear in her mind. She knew that she should not find it amusing, but she did: somebody had said of that person, with devastating accuracy, “He always does the right thing. It just so happens that the right thing is always in his best interests.” It was a remark devoid of charity, and she wondered whether there was a duty not to bring such words to mind but rather to let them fade. It would be an act of memory-housekeeping of the sort that perhaps we all needed to undertake from time to time. In this way might one rid the heart of ghosts, she thought.

Could we remember, though, only those things we wanted to? Could there be acts of forgetting, just as there could be acts of remembrance? Human memory was frequently difficult and unruly, but it was not beyond telling. And it was possible, she thought, to say to another who wanted one to forget something, an embarrassing or shameful incident perhaps, Yes, I have forgotten it. That was a lesson that one of her school friends could take to heart; whenever Isabel saw her now she delighted in remembering how as twelve-year-olds they had teased a vulnerable teacher, imitating her voice when she turned to write something on the blackboard, unaware of her lack of sureness of herself, her crippling inadequacy in the face of taunting schoolgirls. Don’t remind me of that, Isabel wanted to say, but did not because it sounded like an abrogation of responsibility for what she, like the other girls, had been. And yet that twelve-year-old was a different person in the moral sense; she, the mature Isabel Dalhousie, would never do what that near-teenage girl had done. It was not her; it simply was not her any more.

She crossed the road at Church Hill and made her way along the road to the gateway of West Grange House. Peter was in the garden, bending over to examine something in a flower bed, and was alerted to the arrival of Isabel by the barking of his dog.

“I know it’s an odd time to come and see you,” said Isabel. “But there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

Peter smiled. “And it couldn’t wait?” he said. “Your impatience has always been one of your most charming qualities.” He gestured to a bench to the side of the front door. “We can sit there. It’s still warm enough to be outside. And light enough. The one consolation of our poor Scottish summers is the light, don’t you think?”

Isabel agreed. Then there was a silence, during which Peter looked at her expectantly. Eventually he said, “Minty Auchterlonie?”

She nodded.

“I thought it might be,” said Peter. “Did Jamie tell you that I met him at Hughes’?”

“Yes. And you said that you thought that she was in trouble.”

Peter nodded. “I did. And she is.”

She waited for him to expand on this, but when he spoke again it was to question her. “Are you … Well, I was about to say interfering again, but I realise that’s not exactly tactful. And I realise, too, that you can’t help yourself.”

From someone else she might have resented this remark, but not from an old friend. “I don’t know if it’s interfering to respond to a clear request from somebody,” she said. “She sought me out. She asked me.”

Peter conceded. “All right. I take it back. No interference.”