The Lost Art of Gratitude

She chose to walk down to the bridge at Harrison Gardens and to follow the canal towpath to the basin at Fountainbridge. There were few people about—a handful of dog owners taking their dogs for a walk, a couple of runners glistening with sweat and engaged in an earnest discussion between their exhausted pantings, a teenager on a bicycle—the youth wore a leather jacket on which the words Attack Squad were embroidered in red. Who was being attacked, she asked herself, and why? He looked pallid, not unlike Eddie, and certainly not the type to attack anybody, Isabel thought, which was probably why he wore the jacket in the first place. Real members of an attack squad presumably never advertised themselves.

The towpath afforded an unusual view of the city—the backs of tenement buildings with their rough stone walls making for a crazy-paving effect, pinched back greens on which drying washing was pegged on laundry lines, arched stone bridges, a disused brewery. And in the basin itself, where the canal came to an abrupt end, brightly painted barges were tethered against the side of the canal, smoke coming from their tin-can chimneys, bicycles and other day-to-day paraphernalia stacked on narrow decks. The corners of a city, she thought, are where the sense of place was strongest. The world saw the official Edinburgh, the elegant Georgian squares, the lines of fluttering flags in Princes Street Gardens, the bands and the spectacles. It did not see the back greens, the closes, the streets where people led ordinary lives. It was possible, she reminded herself, to love both equally—the Scotland of the romantic tourist posters and this unadorned, workaday Scotland—and she was, in fact, fond of both of them and not ashamed, as some were, of the romanticised vision. Myth could be as sustaining as reality—sometimes even more so.

She left the canal basin and made her way towards Lothian Road. Like all cities, Edinburgh changed quickly: a block or two could bring one to a different world. Lothian Road was traffic and bustle; all cheap Italian restaurants where spaghetti bolognese would count as the day’s special and low-life bars outside which black-suited pugilists served as bouncers, their broken noses bearing stark witness to their profession. Isabel did not like this street and wished it was not there, but knew that it had its role. Soldiers came here at night, down from the barracks at Redford, ready for hard drinking and picking up girls. If there was blood on Scottish pavements it was because of old wounds, not new; things that had happened a long time ago, old hardships, old cruelties, old exploitation and old injustice.

And then, quite abruptly, the surly atmosphere of Lothian Road gave way to the Edinburgh of law and finance, and, amongst other discreet entrances, to the doorway of Messrs McGregor, Fraser & Co., Solicitors and Notaries Public, Writers to Her Majesty’s Signet. Isabel went in that door, just on the edge of Charlotte Square, and found herself in a waiting room not unlike the drawing room of one of the Georgian flats that graced the square just a few hundred yards away. A sofa and several armchairs surrounded a low table on which a selection of the day’s papers were arranged alongside Scottish Field, Homes & Interiors Scotland and The Economist. There was an air of calm to this room that belied what the business of McGregor, Fraser was all about: conflict and holding on to what one had. In the back offices somewhere in the building, there would be people in their shirtsleeves watching turbulent markets and planning litigation; but out here, in the front, there was no sign of that.

The receptionist who had greeted Isabel smiled and spoke quietly into her telephone. Then she invited Isabel to wait. “Mr. Dundas will only be a moment.”

He was not much more than that. “Ms. Dalhousie?”

Isabel looked up from the magazine she was perusing. She had started on an article about a man and his friend who had transformed a run-down Glasgow flat into an elegant venue for entertaining. George (left) and Alice (right) had met at art college where they had both studied design. “We both liked red,” said George. “It was a bond between us,” explained Alice. “Reds brought us together.” And now the Glasgow flat which had been “the most ghastly beige colour when we saw it first—we were almost sick on the spot”—was largely red. “George knew a guy who made really good bespoke furniture. He had trained with Lord Linley and his work was all over London …”

She put the magazine down with some reluctance. She would never be able to find out more about George and Alice, but she was not worried about them—reds would hold them together, she had no doubt about that.

She stood up and looked at Jock Dundas, who was standing in the doorway. He looked grave, and she knew immediately that her instinct had been right.