Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 06 by The Lost Art of Gratitude Page B

the
Scotsman
could break the news, not the bravest way out, but one that might make it easier for Cat to deal with news that almost certainly would not be welcome.
    Even if she was still feeling euphoric—almost light-headed—after the evening’s events, Isabel had several things to do that morning. Jamie had hinted that breakfast in bed would not go amiss—for the second time, she observed, in three days, but she agreed, none the less, to make it for him.
    “When we’re married,” she said, “I take it that you won’t expect breakfast in bed every day. Or will you?” She would make him breakfast in bed every day if that was what he wanted; of course she would. She would do anything for him.
    “Of course not,” he said. “This will be the very last time. I promise.”
    It sounded so strange to utter the words
when we are married.
As a moral philosopher, and arbiter, in that role, of hypothetical private lives, she was used to talking about the marriages of others. Now it was her—Isabel Dalhousie—whose future was being referred to.
Married:
the word had a delicious flavour to it; like the name of some exotic place—Dar-es-Salaam, Timbuktu, Popocatépetl. Marriage was a whole territory,a citizenship, to be adopted and inhabited, as the neophyte takes on the ways and thinking of a new religion. She had been married before, of course, but it had been something false, something quite different.
    When she took the breakfast tray up to Jamie, she found that he had taken Charlie into bed with him and was reading to him, a story of a fox and his family who defeat a trio of unpleasant farmers. The story had been translated into Scots as
The Sleekit Mr. Tod
, and it was this version that Jamie was reading to Charlie. It was well beyond his understanding, of course, but the little boy was listening intently.
    “I want him to understand Scots,” said Jamie. “It’s our language, after all.”
    Isabel smiled. “Of course. But he probably has to understand English first.”
    Jamie looked doubtful, and returned to the story. “A tod is a fox in Scots,” he explained to Charlie. “That’s why he’s called Mr. Tod.”
    Charlie stared at his father with grave incomprehension.
    Jamie began to read again. “ ‘And so the wee tod askit his faither,
Will there be dugs?
’ ”
    Isabel left the room, a smile lingering on her lips.
Will there be dugs?
Will there be dogs? That might be the dread question that every fox thinks when contemplating his end—if foxes are aware of mortality.
Will there be dugs, or will it be easy?
    LEAVING THE HOUSE shortly after ten, Isabel set off across the Meadows for George Square and the University Library. It was one of her favourite walks, as it afforded a good view of theskyline of the Old Town, a serrated line of chimney pots and spires that followed the ridge stretching down from the Castle to Holyrood. Behind that line was the Fife sky, across which scudded clouds blown in from the North Sea: wisps of grey, banks of darkening purple, splashes of white. Edinburgh could experience within a few minutes all four seasons, and the skies characteristic of each.
    The University Library occupied the south side of a square that had been largely destroyed by the architectural vandalism of the sixties. One side of the square survived though, and this was bounded by a cobbled street running south to north. The buildings on this side, a perfect row of Georgian houses three storeys high, were now occupied by university offices and chaplaincies, by small academic departments and the University Press. Here too was a chapel for students of Orthodox faith, a basement transformed by icons and the chanting of priests; here, Isabel remembered, was the office of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, a language that had words for this little bit of a small island, this land of rain and clouds and shafts of poetry.
    Everywhere in this city, everywhere Isabel went, there were memories. As an