The Lost Art of Gratitude

Isabel resumed the conversation. “I think it might be best for us to discuss this matter in person, rather than on the phone. Easier.”

George Finesk agreed, even if he sounded reluctant. Yes, she could come down immediately, if she wished. He would have to leave the house in about an hour, so he could not give her very much time. With that, he rang off, after the most cursory of goodbyes. He had not put the phone down on her, she thought—he was obviously too polite for that—but it felt to her as if he had.

Isabel went into the kitchen. Although it was a Saturday, Grace was there, making up some time ahead of her holiday. She was giving Charlie an early lunch, crushed peas with fried fish fingers—quintessential nursery food. The smell tempted Isabel, and she reached forward to sample a morsel.

“Please,” Grace reprimanded her. “We mustn’t take the food out of his little mouth.”

Charlie, strapped into his feeding chair, looked up at his mother. Then he looked down at his plate and reached for a small fragment of fish finger. He offered this to her.

“Why, thank you, darling,” Isabel said as she accepted the offering, glancing at Grace. “I can’t refuse his little present, you know.”

Charlie watched solemnly, and then offered a similar scrap to Grace, who frowned before she took it.

“We must be grateful for small mercies,” said Isabel, smiling.

Grace, tight-lipped, turned to Charlie. “You must eat up your food, Charlie,” she said. “Mummy and Grace have their own. We don’t really need yours.”

ISABEL TOOK A TAXI to the other side of town, getting out at the top of Learmonth Terrace and walking down the hill to the point where Ann Street joined the larger road. It was a part of town that she knew quite well; her art historian friend Susanna Kerr lived there, as had her father’s cousin, a clever, bird-like woman who had been an expert in palaeography and Celtic place-names. Cousin Kirsty had spoiled Isabel as a child with overly generous presents and regaled her with sanitised snippets of Edinburgh gossip, which her father claimed were exaggerated, or even untrue, but which he liked to have passed on to him anyway. When Isabel had been eleven, Cousin Kirsty had slipped on her highly polished kitchen floor and lain there unattended, in the cold, and died, which meant the end of Isabel’s visits to Dean Terrace. She had sobbed and sobbed over Kirsty’s death, her first real loss; and the second, and much greater one, had come not long afterwards, with the loss of her mother.

She found the house almost at the end of the street. The front garden was well tended, as were all the neighbouring gardens, and colourful too: there was California lilac, climbing roses and a small square of lawn at the side of which a stone bench had been placed. The bench was covered with silver-grey lichen; it did not look well used.

George Finesk was slow to answer, but eventually the front door opened. Isabel found herself standing before a grey-haired man wearing a loose-fitting white jacket, a pair of gold-framed spectacles tucked into the top pocket. He looked her in the eye briefly, but then his gaze fell away. He was a tall man, somewhere in his fifties, she thought, with an aquiline nose and blue eyes that seemed to be a small area of space, an area of nothing. She had seen such eyes before, in the north of Scotland; eyes that seemed to reflect the sky and its emptiness.

The drawing room in an Ann Street house would not be on the ground floor, she realised, and George Finesk, without speaking, motioned for her to follow him up the flight of narrow stairs that gave directly off the entrance hall. As they went up, Isabel noticed the paintings on the staircase walls and on the landing at the top. A portrait by Henry Raeburn, a woman against a background of rich greens and reds; a still life by Cadell; and a mezzotint print of a great Indian durbar.

“I have a Cadell too,” she said. “Rather different. One of those women in hats.”

He was still in front of her, and he did not turn round. She felt snubbed, and angry. She would not accept this rudeness; she would not.

“Mr. Finesk,” she said sharply. “You are clearly not at all happy to see me. However, may I remind you that I am a guest in your house. You said that you’d see me and you owe me the basic decencies that a host should offer.”

He stopped immediately, and spun round. He looked at her for a moment, as if speechless. “How dare you?” he said.

She held his gaze. There was outrage in the pale eyes.

“What do you mean?” she said. “What do you mean, ‘How dare you?’ ”