The Lost Art of Gratitude

He listened carefully, and she realised, turning her head slightly so that she could see him, that for him this was one of the most intimate conversations they had ever had. To talk about sex was nothing to talking about God; the body stripped bare was never as bare as the soul so stripped. “And what about you?” she asked gently.

“I don’t think about it very much. It’s not really the sort of thing that I think much about.”

The answer pleased her. She would not have wanted him to reveal a certainty concealed up to this point. And there was something unattractive about a belief that excluded all doubt.

“But you’re not an out-and-out atheist? You don’t deride people who do believe in God?”

Again his answer pleased her. “No, not at all. People need some idea … some idea of where they are.”

“Exactly.”

He had been lying down too, and now he propped himself up on an elbow and faced her. “And there’s Mozart.”

She encouraged him to explain.

“Mozart, you see,” he said, “is so perfect. If there can be music like that, it must be tied in some way to something outside us—it has to be. Some combination of harmony and shape that has nothing to do with us—it’s just there. Maybe God’s something to do with that. Something to do with beauty.”

Something to do with beauty. Yes, she thought, that was one way of expressing it. Moral beauty existed as clearly as any other form of beauty and perhaps that was where we would find the God who was so vividly, and sometimes bizarrely, described in our noisy religious explanations. It was an intriguing thought, as it meant that a concert could be a spiritual experience, a secular painting a religious icon, a beguiling face a passing angel.

But that was on the lawn and this was in Charlotte Square. She looked at her watch again. The meeting with Jock Dundas had resolved itself well—in a handshake that had amounted to an act of reconciliation. Yet in another sense it had left her angry and disturbed. She had been used by Minty Auchterlonie, and had she not gone to see Jock Dundas, she might never have discovered that fact. It should not surprise her, of course. Peter Stevenson had spelled it out for her: Minty was, quite simply, wicked. Of course she would use people, as she had just used Isabel.

As she began to walk round the square, thinking of having lunch somewhere but not yet decided, Isabel found her anger mounting. Anger was like that, she knew: one did not necessarily feel at one’s angriest in the first few minutes after some act of provocation by another—one’s anger slowly grew as the implications of what had happened sank in. And there was a physiological basis to this too: levels of noradrenaline peaked in the system some time after the event. Anger of the moment was often less vivid than the anger that came later, once one got home and reflected on what had happened.

She stopped walking and stood quite still, closing her eyes. I am a philosopher, she told herself. I shall not allow myself to be overcome by this emotion of anger. I shall not. She opened her eyes. She took a deep breath, held it, and then exhaled. Her heart rate slowed. That’s better, she thought. That was the way to deal with noradrenaline. Minty is … Minty is nothing. But she was not nothing. There was no comfort to be obtained in thinking something so patently false. No, she is not nothing, she is simply a manipulative psychopath. But even that was not very satisfactory; labelling another may help, but not always. A label which one can preface with the word poor is capable of putting things in perspective and defusing antagonism, but we did not say poor psychopath.

She took another deep breath and began to walk again. She was now outside the National Trust for Scotland café on the south side of Charlotte Square. It was just what she needed: the National Trust stood for stability, for reason, and for conservation of what had gone before. The Trust looked after castles and gardens and stretches of coastline. It was synonymous with peace and calm, and Isabel decided she would order a bowl of soup in the café—there was nothing quite like soup as a comfort food—and she would have a sandwich or two and perhaps a glass of wine. All of which, she imagined, would remove any remaining traces of anger-inducing noradrenaline as surely as a glass of something rich in antioxidants will mop up circulating free radicals.

She went in and took a seat at one of the tables. She looked about her. A waitress was coming towards her, smiling, bearing a menu, and behind her was another waitress holding a plate of food. She looked in the other direction. The café was not crowded; only one or two tables were occupied as it was not yet the lunch hour. But the table next to hers was taken, and at it was sitting Minty Auchterlonie.