The Lost Art of Gratitude

“You can stay behind if you like,” said Isabel. “I don’t want to force you. I can say that you couldn’t make it, which will not exactly be a lie. The truth would be that you couldn’t make it because you couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm. Minty won’t care.” It occurred to her, though, that Minty might well mind. She had looked at Jamie with undisguised interest, and she might be disappointed if he were not there. And then the further thought occurred: perhaps that was why the invitation had been issued in the first place. Perhaps it had nothing to do with Roderick and Charlie, but everything to do with Jamie.

“I’ll come,” said Jamie. “It may have its moments.”

They dressed Charlie with care. Isabel thought that he might wear the kilt that she had recently bought for him—a small strip of Macpherson tartan, expertly pleated and complemented by a tiny sporran and ornate Celtic kilt-pin. The garment had been specially designed for a wearer who was still in nappies, thereby resolving, in a very evident way, the age-old question of what was worn under the kilt, at least in this case.

“Look at him,” said Jamie. He pointed to Charlie, who was standing up unsteadily, getting the feel of his new outfit. “Aren’t you proud, seeing him in his kilt?”

Isabel was. She knew that one’s nationality was an accident of history and that it was difficult to justify being proud of a heritage—one never did anything to deserve being Scottish or American or whatever one was. But national pride was something that people did feel—they could not help it—and she felt it now on Charlie’s behalf. And it was a form of love, she decided; loving one’s country, one’s culture, amounted to loving a particular group of people, and that, surely, was not something for which one had to apologise.

They set off, with Isabel at the wheel of the car, Jamie at her side and Charlie strapped into his child-seat in the back. He liked the car, and chuckled with excitement as they started the drive to Minty’s house. Halfway there, with the Pentlands rising on one side of the road and the hills of Peebleshire off to the other, Charlie suddenly said “olive” again. Jamie turned round and smiled at him. Charlie stared back, as if surprised by his father’s sudden attention.

“Olive?” Jamie said. “Olive, Charlie?”

Charlie said nothing, fixing Jamie with the disconcerting, utterly fearless stare that only babies and very young children are capable of.

“No olives, Charlie,” said Isabel over her shoulder. “Olives all gone.”

“Olives all gone,” repeated Jamie. And then, turning to Isabel, he said, “That would make a lovely title for a song, you know. ‘Olives All Gone.’ It’s very poignant.”

Isabel agreed. “And the words?”

“I’ll have to think,” Jamie said. “I’ll tell you once I’ve composed it.” The song would come to him, he was sure; it always happened when a line struck him in this way. “Olives All Gone”—it would be about loss, of course, as so many songs were; about what we once had, but had no more.

It did not take long to reach Minty’s house, which was just short of Carlops, a small village twelve miles or so out of Edinburgh. It was in a stretch of country that Isabel particularly liked. Here the land spread out to the south and east, gently rolling fields and folds, green here, ripening brown there, becoming blue in the distance. It was a landscape of mists and distances, beneath a sky that was somehow washed, attenuated, softened. It was a landscape that had been the same for a very long time, dotted with farmhouses and shepherds’ cottages that were there in Robert Louis Stevenson’s time, and in the time of Hume. People here did what they had always done—tending this part of Scotland, keeping it fertile, handing it on to provide for a new generation. It was a place of custom and fond usage.

Minty had given very detailed instructions, which Isabel had written down on the piece of paper she now handed to Jamie. He used these to direct her along the narrow farm track, pressed in upon by hedges, that led off the main road and past a large stand of Scots pines.

“That’s it,” said Isabel. “Look.”

Jamie drew in his breath. “Is that her place?”

“I assume so,” said Isabel. “I never imagined Minty in cramped accommodations, but all the same …”

The house was several hundred yards back from the farm track, which meandered off towards a low byre and a huddle of sheds in the distance. A driveway led from the track to the house; this was lined with rambling rhododendron bushes, flowering in clusters of pink and pale red. Beyond the bushes, a lawn swept up to the house itself, which was Georgian and far more imposing than the larger gentleman-farmers’ houses of the area. At the time of its construction this would have been the house of a family on its way up; not quite in the league of those who aspired to a country mansion, but heading in that direction.