The Lost Art of Gratitude_ An Isabel Dalhousie Novel - Alexander McCall Smith [43]
Jamie smiled, and filed the information away in his memory. One of his pupils, a particularly grubby small boy, might like to hear that. Now, though, he wanted to get back to the discussion of Cat’s tightrope walker, and Isabel was leading them into something quite different—as she often did. “But what’s the liar paradox got to do with Cat’s tightrope walker?”
“Nothing to do with him,” said Isabel. “But everything to do with her. I said that the one predictable thing about Cat is that she is unpredictable. But if that statement is true, then what I said about her unpredictability is untrue.”
“Oh.”
Isabel took Jamie’s arm. “You don’t have to bury yourself in philosophy. I can do enough philosophy for both of us.”
“And I can play enough music for two,” he said.
“Exactly.”
They walked on in silence, content with one another, each aware that this moment, like a number of others that they had experienced since the engagement, had a noumenal feel to it: there was a mystery to it, a sense of the sacred. For his part, Jamie felt that he was looking at the world differently, that quotidian and unexceptional surroundings now seemed charged with an excitement and a feeling of possibility. Through lover’s eyes: that was how he was seeing the world again, and that would be the first line of a song that he felt was already coming to him, right there in Merchiston Crescent, halfway home.
Through lover’s eyes
I see your face;
Through lover’s eyes
I gently trace
The contours …
No. That was not going to work. He muttered the words again, with Isabel listening; she loved these impromptu songs Jamie seemed to be able to summon up from somewhere within him, so effortlessly.
Through lover’s eyes,
Through lover’s ears,
I see and hold
The wondrous world
My lover sees, my lover hears.
“That’s beautiful,” she said. “And the tune?”
He hummed it first, without its words, and then sang it, softly, as they turned the corner into their road. Further down the pavement, a woman they both knew slightly, a neighbour from a few streets away, was walking her dog, a brindle greyhound. The dog looked up sharply, sniffing at the air, and Isabel knew at once that with its sharp hearing it had picked up Jamie’s song.
Jamie stopped. “I need to work on it a bit,” he said. “The trouble about writing songs is this: Who’s going to sing them?”
“You and I,” said Isabel. “And little Charlie when he’s a bit bigger. He’ll love that song about olives.”
“He’ll have forgotten about olives by then. He’ll want songs about trains and bears and so on,” said Jamie.
“You can write those too.”
Jamie smiled. “He likes music. I sang him ‘Dance to your Daddy’ the other night, and he cooed with pleasure. I need to sing him ‘The Train to Glasgow’ some day, if I can find the words. All about a fortunate boy getting the train to Glasgow.”
“Children like simple tales,” said Isabel.
“And we don’t?”
Isabel thought about this. It was just too easy to say that adults did not like stories that were simple, and perhaps that was wrong. Perhaps that was what adults really wanted, searched for and rarely found: a simple story in which good triumphs against cynicism and despair. That was what she wanted, but she was aware of the fact that one did not publicise the fact too widely, certainly not in sophisticated circles. Such circles wanted complexity, dysfunction and irony: there was no room for joy, celebration or pathos. But where was the fun in that?
She answered his question. “We probably do. We want resolution and an ending that shows us that the world is a just place. We’ve always wanted that. We want human flourishing, as Philippa Foot would put it.”
“One of your philosophers?”
“Yes, Professor Philippa Foot. She wrote a book called Natural Goodness. I would offer to show it to you had I not just agreed not to burden you with philosophy.”
“I like the sound of her,” said Jamie. “Professor Foot. Is she naturally good?”
“I think she is,” said Isabel. “Though usually people