Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 06

Praise for the Isabel Dalhousie Series

Alexander McCall Smith
THE LOST ART OF GRATITUDE

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the international phenomenon The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the Isabel Dalhousie series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, and the 44 Scotland Street series. He is professor emeritus of medical law at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and has served on many national and international bodies concerned with bioethics.

www.alexandermccallsmith.com

BOOKS BY ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH

IN THE ISABEL DALHOUSIE SERIES
The Sunday Philosophy Club
Friends, Lovers, Chocolate
The Right Attitude to Rain
The Careful Use of Compliments
The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday
The Lost Art of Gratitude
The Charming Quirks of Others

IN THE NO. 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY SERIES
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
Tears of the Giraffe
Morality for Beautiful Girls
The Kalahari Typing School for Men
The Full Cupboard of Life
In the Company of Cheerful Ladies
Blue Shoes and Happiness
The Good Husband of Zebra Drive
The Miracle at Speedy Motors
Tea Time for the Traditionally Built
The Double Comfort Safari Club

IN THE PORTUGUESE IRREGULAR VERBS SERIES
Portuguese Irregular Verbs
The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs
At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances

IN THE 44 SCOTLAND STREET SERIES
44 Scotland Street
Espresso Tales
Love Over Scotland
The World According to Bertie
The Unbearable Lightness of Scones

Corduroy Mansions

La’s Orchestra Saves the World

The Girl Who Married a Lion and Other Tales from Africa

I
T WAS WHILE
she was lying in bed that Isabel Dalhousie, philosopher and editor of the
Review of Applied Ethics
, thought about the things we do. Isabel was a light sleeper; Charlie, her eighteen-month-old son, slept deeply and, she was sure, contentedly; Jamie was somewhere in between. Yet Isabel had little difficulty in getting to sleep. Once she made up her mind to sleep, all that she had to do was to shut her eyes and, sure enough, she would drift off. The same could be done if she surfaced in the course of the night or in those melancholy small hours when both body and spirit could be at their lowest ebb. Then all she had to do was to tell herself that this was not the time to start thinking, and she would quickly return to sleep.

She had wondered about the causes of her light sleeping and had spoken about it to a friend, a specialist in sleep disorders. She had not consulted him professionally, but had brought the matter up over dinner; not before the whole table, of course, but in the intimacy of the one-to-one conversation that people have with those sitting beside them.

“I don’t like to ask about medical things,” she said.

“But …,” he said.

“Well, yes. But. You see, you doctors must dread being buttonholed by people who want to talk about their symptoms. There you are at a party and somebody says: I’ve been having these twinges of pain in my stomach …”

“Have you?”

“No, I haven’t.”

He smiled. “The old cliché, you know. Somebody comes and says, A friend of mine has this rash, you see, and I wondered what it was. That sometimes happens. Doctors understand all about embarrassment, you know.”

Isabel nodded. “But it must annoy you—being asked about medical matters.”

He thought for a moment. “
Nihil humanum mihi alienum est
, if I may lapse into Latin. I don’t set my mind against anything human. Doctors should subscribe to that, I think. Like priests.”

Isabel did not think the comparison quite fitting. “Priests
do
disapprove, don’t they? Doctors don’t—or shouldn’t. You don’t shake your head over your patients’ behaviour, do you?”

“If doctors see self-destructive behaviour, they might,” he said. “If somebody comes in with chronic vascular disease, for example, and you smell the nicotine on his fingers, of course you’re going to say something. Or a drinker comes in with liver problems. You’re going to make it clear what’s causing the problem.”

“But you don’t ladle on the blame, do you? You don’t say things like, This is all your own stupid fault. You don’t say that, even if it patently is his stupid fault.”

He played with his fork. “No, I suppose not.”

“Whereas a priest will. A priest will use the language of
right and wrong. I don’t think doctors do that.” She looked at him. He was typical of a certain type of Edinburgh doctor; the old-fashioned, gentle Scottish physician, unmoved by the considerations of profit and personal gain that could so disfigure medicine. That doctors should consider themselves businessmen was, Isabel had always felt, a moral tragedy for medicine. Who was left to be altruistic? Teachers, she thought, and people who worked for charities; and public-interest lawyers, and … in fact, the list was quite long; probably every bit as long as it ever had been. One should be careful, she told herself, in commenting on the decline of society; the elder Cato was the warning here—a frightful old prig, he had warned that everything was in decline, forgetting that once we reach forty we all believe that the world is on the slide. Only if eighteen-year-olds started to say
O tempora! O mores!
would the situation be
really
alarming; eighteen-year-olds did not say that, though; they no longer had any Latin, of course, and could not.

“You were going to ask me a question,” he said. He knew Isabel, and her digressions, her tendency to bring philosophical complications into the simplest of matters.

“Why are some people light sleepers?” she began, and added hurriedly, “I’m one, by the way.”

“So am I, as it happens,” he replied. “It’s often respiratory—sleep apnoea, where you keep waking up because you’re choking. If not, it may be an idiosyncrasy of the brain. Is it a problem?”

“Not for me. Not really. I go back to sleep.”

He nodded. “You could get yourself checked for sleep apnoea. It’s pretty easy to monitor sleep patterns. You don’t look at risk to me, though—it tends to affect heavier people.”

That had been the end of the conversation, as another guest
had addressed the table at large and private conversations had trailed off. But now, lying in bed, in one of these brief periods of nocturnal wakefulness that she had decided were the product of brain idiosyncrasy rather than breathing problems, Isabel turned and looked at the sleeping form of Jamie beside her. She still experienced a sense of novelty, even if they had been together for a couple of years now; a sense of having been given a precious gift. And he felt it too; he had expressed it that way, too, when he told her that he was grateful for her. “I feel that I’ve been given something,” he said. “Somebody has given me you. Isn’t that odd? Because it doesn’t happen that way, does it?” She watched him breathing. The sheet that he had drawn up to his chest and that lay crumpled about him like a Roman toga moved almost imperceptibly, but still moved. The act of breathing was not really an act at all, as the will played no part. We did not tell ourselves to breathe—except sometimes, in yoga classes and the like—and when we were asleep, as Jamie was now, the system itself remembered to do what was required. And how many of the other things we did fell into that category?