The Lost Art of Gratitude_ An Isabel Dalhousie Novel - Alexander McCall Smith [52]
The woman laughed, and returned to her sun worship. “No choice,” she said. “Like the rest of life. No choice.”
No choice. She was right, thought Isabel—most of us had no choice as to where we lived. Once again, she had cause to reflect on the fact that the big lottery was the very first one, the one that determined what we were: French, American, Sudanese, Scottish. And with that, there came a mountain of baggage—a culture, a language, a set of genes determining complexion, height, susceptibility to disease and so on. And for most people that was their fate: later changes, if they could be made at all, would be accidental or hard-fought-for. The woman on the bus would like to live in Spain or Portugal, she imagined, closer to the sun, but could not do so because she had a job, a husband and a past that tied her to Scotland and its weather.
What was the solution? To bemoan the fact, or to love where you were? To love where you were—obviously. And that, by and large, was what people did. They accepted, and the acceptance became love. Is that why I love Scotland, she asked herself, because it is simply the place that I have to love? No. It was not the reason.
She followed the winding road that led along the side of the Water of Leith before meandering up the brae to the Botanical Gardens. Turning round here, one was afforded an unusual view of the city skyline, of the Castle, of the spiky churches and the crouching lion of Arthur’s Seat, mantled gold in the sunlight. She took this in briefly, and then looked down at the river below her, its surface half silver, half peaty brown. It rarely became very deep: one could wade across and never wet one’s knees in most places. Only after heavy rains in the Pentlands did it seem at all impressive, but she felt a strong affection for it as the river of her childhood. They had picnicked beside it up in Colinton Dell, where it tumbled over a weir, her father demonstrating to her how to make flat stones skip over the surface, something she never achieved. And her mother lay back on their tartan picnic rug and drew on a cigarette, sending tiny clouds of smoke skywards. “You look like a volcano, Mummy. A volcano.” She remembered her words, after all this time, just as she remembered how her mother had not appreciated the remark. Isabel had felt hurt and surprised, because she had never been able to take parental anger or disappointment.
She took the path that led round the back of Inverleith House, which stood surrounded by trees in the middle of the gardens. Again there were memories—this time of being brought to see an exhibition in the days when the building was used by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. She had been brought with her class from school and they had been taken round an Anne Redpath exhibition. Miss McLaren, their art teacher, who believed that every twentieth-century artist of any note had been influenced by Cézanne, had duly found signs of this in the Redpath paintings. “Cézanne again,” she had said. “And Matisse. She was influenced by both, of course, as so many were. Look at the colours in this painting, girls. The hillside. The path. Does that not make you think of Cézanne?”
She had not thought of Miss McLaren for years. That outing to the gallery had until now been absent from her memory, and although she could remember the art teacher and what she said, she could not recall which of her classmates had been with her. It was a blank. Twenty years from now, would she have forgotten why she was here today, and what was about to happen? She imagined so. And then went on to think: twenty years on, Charlie would be coming to the end of his university days—a young man about to embark on a career. She could not picture it, nor could she imagine how she would feel, although it would be the same as everybody else feels in similar circumstances. That at least was a consolation: separation and loss were something that we all experienced; the pain was shared, and was perhaps easier for that.
She was approaching the hothouses. She looked at her watch: three