The Lost Art of Gratitude

AFTER BREAKFAST, Isabel went to her study. There were letters that she had to write, some personal and some connected with the Review. Edward Mendelson had written from New York, and her reply to him was late. As Auden’s literary executor, he had been trying to trace a school magazine in which Auden had written an article when he taught at a small private school in the west of Scotland. A woman on the Isle of Mull, hearing about this, had written to say that they had no knowledge of the magazine, but had a typescript which they thought was Auden’s original draft. “My grandfather,” wrote this woman, “was on the staff of the school when Auden was there. He was friendly with him and he gave him a box of papers to look after, which he forgot about and never claimed.” The woman was happy for them to be looked at, but would not allow them out of the house, even on a promise of return.

“I don’t like to impose,” wrote Edward, “but could you possibly go and take a look at them? Perhaps she’ll allow you to photograph them. And, as for the typescript, you can tell straight away whether Auden typed it. He never put a space after a comma—it’s as if it’s a signature. If you see that, then that’s almost certainly by him.”

Isabel wrote back and said she would do this. They would all go—Jamie and Charlie too—and look for crowded commas.

Then there was a letter from Steven Barclay, a friend who had a flat in Paris. Steven wanted Isabel and Jamie to spend a weekend with him in Paris. There was a hotel, he said, whose staff would love Charlie and it was not far from his place in the Latin Quarter. “I’ll take you to my favourite restaurant, La Fontaine de Mars,” wrote Steven. “It’s in the seventh arrondissement on rue Saint-Dominique, close to the Ecole Militaire—so you’ll be quite safe! And you’ve always been so keen on Vuillard—I can take you and Jamie to the place where Vuillard stayed when he was in Paris. And you can look at the Vuillards in the house of somebody I know. Vuillards that nobody else sees. Just you. Isabel, you’ve got to come.”

She wrote to Steven and assured him that she would. Then, musing on a life that included such calls to Mull and Paris, she turned her attention to Review correspondence. This was largely mundane, although she had to write to one author to inform him of a negative assessment of an article submitted for publication. “I’m sure that you will understand,” she wrote, knowing that authors often did not understand. Months, possibly years, might have gone into the turned-down article, and more than a few hopes might be dashed by rejection. For an untenured professor somewhere in the reaches of a university system looking for savings on salaries, the rejection might precipitate the end of a career. That worried her, but she saw no way round it. The world could be a hard place—as hard, even if in a different way, for philosophers as for salesmen or miners or anybody who lived on the edge of unemployment and financial ruin.

By eleven o’clock her correspondence was finished. She printed out and read through the last letter, to the Review’s printers; she noticed that in the final sentence of the last paragraph she had used unspaced commas—,thus, —and on impulse she left them. She would do that too, from time to time, as an act of homage, and because little rituals like that gave life its texture. Big Brother, masked as the intrusive state or the political censor of thought and language, might force us to do this and that, but we could still assert ourselves in little things—private jokes, commas without spaces, small acts of symbolic subversion.

She rose from her desk. She had decided what to do next, and she would do it without prevarication. She would pay a call on George Finesk, Minty’s wronged investor, and then she would go to see Minty, seek her out in the lair of the leopardess.

IT WAS NOT DIFFICULT to find where George Finesk lived. There were two Finesks in the telephone book—one in Tranent, a former mining town in East Lothian, and an unlikely place for a wealthy investor to live; another was in Ann Street, a highly sought-after Georgian street that was known for its elegant, if somewhat cramped, terraced houses. That was the number she dialled, and it was answered by a rather warm, welcoming voice.

She gave her name, and the warmth immediately disappeared; it was as if a window at the other end of the line had been opened to admit a chill blast.

“You said that you were Isabel Dalhousie?”

“Yes.”

There was silence at the other end. “And you wanted to speak to me? May I ask why?”

Isabel had been taken aback by the change in tone and took a moment to recover. “It’s about Minty Auchterlonie.”

A further silence ensued. Then, “I thought it might be.”

This puzzled Isabel. Why would George Finesk associate her with Minty? It would be unlikely that Peter Stevenson had said anything—he would never mention anything confidential.