The Lost Art of Gratitude

He looked at her. “I never wanted you to do that.” He hesitated for a moment, and then took Isabel’s hand in his. “I’m the one who feels awkward about this. I know I don’t need to, but I do. I feel embarrassed, I suppose, that I’ve …”

She waited, but he did not complete the sentence. “Embarrassed that you’ve what?”

“That I slept with her, and now I’m sleeping with you.”

He spoke with transparent honesty, but the pain his words caused him was laid quite bare. Isabel pressed his hand. “But that’s …” She found herself at a loss as to what to say.

“Nothing?” said Jamie.

“No, of course it’s not nothing.”

“Then what is it?”

Isabel took a deep breath. “What I mean is that it’s something you simply don’t need to think about.”

He sighed. “You can’t just deny these things.”

“I’m not saying that you should deny it. What I’m saying is that you should forget it. That’s quite different.” She watched him. He had a way of looking at her when something she was saying interested him profoundly—it was a sort of searching look—and she saw it now. “Do you really want me to discuss it with you?”

“Of course. Why not?”

She pressed his hand again. “Because I sound like a philosopher, and I don’t always like that. Not when I’m with you. It’s just the way it is.”

He had not been returning the pressure of her hand; now he did so. “But that’s what I like,” he said. “It’s like being … like being married to Socrates.”

The analogy was so unexpected that Isabel burst into laughter. “Thank you! Socrates …”

Jamie grinned. “In a purely mental sense, of course. You’re far more beautiful than Socrates.”

“Poor Socrates—just about everybody is.”

Jamie steered the conversation back to its original subject. “But what about forgetting? How can you forget on purpose?”

She acknowledged the difficulty. “All right, I know that forgetting is normally something over which you have no control. But you can tell yourself to forget, you know. You say to yourself that you are not going to dwell on something and then the mind—the bits of the mind that are in charge of forgetting, so to speak—do the rest. The memory is suppressed, I suppose.”

“So?”

“So you tell yourself that the fact that you and Cat had the relationship that you did is something you are not going to think about—that you’re going to forget it. And then you will.”

For a few moments Jamie said nothing. He was looking up at the ceiling now, thinking; or perhaps trying to forget.

“Maybe I don’t want to,” he muttered.

She gently withdrew her hand. “Then don’t.”

She felt a stab of disappointment, and she wished that she had not started to discuss the subject with him. Perhaps his instinct had been better: to say nothing, to leave it where it lay. The past was so powerful that sometimes when we chose to deny its potency it reminded us just who we were—its creatures.

She crossed the room and drew open the curtains, flooding the room with morning light. “Let me make you something special for breakfast,” she said.

He sat up in bed, reaching for the cup of tea she had brought him. “Mushrooms,” he said. “And scrambled eggs with some of that truffle oil in them—not a lot, just a few drops.”

“And?”

“And a piece of very thin toast.”

“And?”

“And a mug of Jamaican coffee with really hot milk. Not milk heated up in the microwave but scalded in a pan.”

She smiled, and watched him get out of bed, his limbs caught in the sunlight. I do not deserve somebody so beautiful, she thought, or so gentle; but none of us deserves good fortune, perhaps—it comes our way, dispensed at random, irrespective of what prayer flags we string across our mountain passes, what chants and imprecations we devise; it simply comes.

She stopped herself. Do I really believe that? I do not, and never have; in thinking it I have simply succumbed to a defeatist impulse. Even young children understand that often, if not always, we get what we deserve; Charlie, at his tender age, is beginning to learn that good behaviour is rewarded with a treat. And there was no reason why she should not have been given Jamie: she was attractive and she had looked after herself. Jamie himself had referred to what he called her Pre-Raphaelite beauty; “Holman Hunt might have painted you,” he had said. She had protested that she found this most unlikely, but she had been flattered, and she had filed the remark away in her memory, to be taken out and reflected upon, as such compliments should be, when one was feeling one’s worst, on a bad-hair day.

ISABEL HAD OPENED UP the delicatessen by the time Eddie arrived. Eddie always looked sleepy when he turned up for work. He was rarely late, but he still managed to look as if he had tumbled out of bed only a few minutes ago—which he might well have done. Isabel knew that Eddie did not eat breakfast. “I’m not hungry,” he had said when she asked him. “The thought of breakfast makes me ill.” But within half an hour or so she would see him pop a piece of cheese or a slice of Parma ham into his mouth.

“Breakfast?” she asked.