The Lost Art of Gratitude

GRACE WAS LATE in bringing Charlie home, but was apologetic. “Annie didn’t draw breath,” she said. “That woman! Talked and talked, which meant that lunch was late. I was getting hungrier and hungrier.”

Isabel thought of the contrast with her own lunch.

“Mind you,” Grace continued, “she had a lot to say. It was very interesting.”

“She’s seen something, has she?”

Grace nodded. “She said there’s going to be trouble.”

“Where?”

“She didn’t say.”

Isabel was silent for a moment. “But there’s always going to be trouble, isn’t there? Whichever way one looks at it? It’s like saying it’s going to get dark tonight. It always does. It’s the same with trouble. It’s always brewing.”

Grace put on a pained expression. She had explained these things to Isabel on numerous occasions, and her employer just did not seem to grasp them.

“It’s just that if people like Annie,” Isabel continued, “would be a bit more specific in their predictions it would be helpful. But they tend to vagueness, don’t they? Look at Nostradamus. He’s so opaque: those strange quatrains can be interpreted to cover anything. Why don’t these people say things like: ‘Next Tuesday at four in the afternoon there’ll be an earthquake’? Why do they have to be so Delphic?”

Grace sighed. “When you see something, you don’t see the details,” she explained.

“Why?” asked Isabel. “If one has good eyesight in this dimension, so to speak, then why should one’s eyesight be different in the other dimension?”

“You’re not taking it seriously,” said Grace.

“I am,” protested Isabel. “Look, I am. It’s just that …” She trailed off. There was something else that she wanted to ask Grace. “Do you mind if I change the subject?”

Grace made an indistinct gesture of assent; in her view, Isabel would never understand these matters—how could one ever see something that one was determined not to see?

“Do you think,” began Isabel, “that a man who loved his son would agree never to see him again? Let’s say that he had to choose between his career and his son?”

Grace gasped. “Jamie?”

“No, certainly not. Not Jamie. Somebody else.”

Grace looked out of the window. “Well, I’m glad it’s not Jamie. But if you want to answer that question, just apply it to Jamie. Imagine that it’s Jamie you’re thinking about. We know how much he loves Charlie. Would he do that?”

Isabel answered immediately. “Of course not.”

“Then there’s your answer,” said Grace.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

EVERY BIT THE ANGEL OF DEATH, Billy McClarty, scourge of foxes, chairman of the Dalkeith and Bonnington Model Railway Association, father and husband, stepped out of his van and made his way down the driveway to Isabel’s front door. He was carrying a metal-barred cage, heavy enough to give him a curious, unbalanced gait. The cage was surprisingly small if it were to accommodate a fox, but not built for comfort, of course. For most foxes finding themselves trapped within, this would be the condemned cell in which they would be incarcerated with their last meal—half a chicken, perhaps, or, if Billy’s advice had been heeded by the householder, a gamy portion of pheasant.

It was five o’clock, and Grace had gone home. Jamie had just returned and was having a shower, while Charlie and Isabel were playing with a set of building blocks that had been passed down to Charlie from a boy over the road who had outgrown them. Charlie was learning to balance one block upon another, three high, and then knock them down. He appeared to find this endlessly amusing; not much different, thought Isabel, from slapstick humour, from the antics of silent-film actors, from those flickering scenes where people stood up and then fell over, and we all laughed.

When the bell rang and she realised that it could be Billy McClarty, Isabel lifted Charlie and deposited him in his playpen with a couple of his bricks for diversion.

Billy McClarty was wiping his shoes when she opened the front door. Isabel glanced at the cage. “Mr. McClarty.”

“That’s me,” said Billy. “Sorry I’m a bit later than I thought, but there was a wasp bike in Morningside—a big one—and I had to get up on someone’s roof.”

Isabel assured him that it did not matter. As she spoke, she noticed the tattoo across his right forearm—the Hand of Ulster, with Ulster is British in shaded lettering beneath it. It was well executed, the hand itself in red and the motto in blue. I was right, she thought: Billy McClarty is an Orangeman, a follower of William of Orange, who had put the Catholic James VII to flight. That might have happened in the dying years of the seventeenth century, but it was not too long ago to be a very live issue for some, the symbol of the securing of a Protestant monarchy. And that, in due course, became all tied up with freedom from being told what to do and think by priests—a cause that at least was about liberty, at any rate from Billy McClarty’s perspective. Catholics, of course, thought otherwise.