The Careful Use of Compliments

B O O K S B Y A L E X A N D E R M c C A L L S M I T H

I N T H E I S A B E L D A L H O U S I E S E R I E S

The Sunday Philosophy Club

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

The Right Attitude to Rain

The Careful Use of Compliments

I N T H E N O . 1 L A D I E S ’ D E T E C T I V E A G E N C Y S E R I E S

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

I N T H E P O R T U G U E S E I R R E G U L A R V E R B S S E R I E S

Portuguese Irregular Verbs

The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs

At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances

I N T H E 4 4 S C O T L A N D S T R E E T S E R I E S

44 Scotland Street

Espresso Tales

Love over Scotland

The Girl Who Married a Lion and Other Tales from Africa T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

E

This book has been optimized for viewing at a monitor setting of 1024 x 768 pixels.

T H E C A R E F U L U S E

O F C O M P L I M E N T S

E

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h p a n t h e o n b o o k s

n e w y o r k

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2007 by Alexander McCall Smith All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, Inc., and to Edward Mendelson, Executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden, for permission to reprint excerpts from “Heavy Date,” copyright © 1945 by W. H. Auden, and

“Refugee Blues,” copyright © 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden, from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc., and the Estate of W. H. Auden.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCall Smith, Alexander, [date]

The careful use of compliments / Alexander McCall Smith.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-375-42527-1

1. Women editors—Fiction. 2. Art dealers—Fiction.

3. Art—Forgeries—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6063.C326C37 2007

823'.914—dc222

2007015073

www.pantheonbooks.com

v1.0

This book is for Daniel Shuman

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

E

C H A P T E R O N E

E

TAKE ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE,” said Isabel.

Jamie nodded. “One hundred.”

“Now, out of those one hundred,” Isabel continued, “how many will mean well?”

It was typical of the sort of trying question Isabel asked herself, in the way in which we sometimes ask ourselves questions that admit of no definitive answer. She was an optimist when it came to humankind, unfashionably so, and so she thought the answer was ninety-eight, possibly even ninety-nine. Jamie, the realist, after a few moments’ thought, said eighty.

But this was not a question which could be disposed of so easily; it raised in its wake other, more troubling questions.

Were those one or two people the way they were because of the throw of the genetic dice—a matter of patterns and repeats deep in the chemistry of their DNA—or was it something that went wrong for them a long time ago, in some dark room of childhood, and stayed wrong? Of course there was quite another possibility: they chose.

She was sitting in a delicatessen when she remembered this conversation with Jamie. Now, from that convenient vantage 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h point, she looked out of the window—that man who was crossing the road right then, for example; the one with the thin mouth, the impatient manner, and the buttoned collar was perhaps one of that tiny minority of the malevolent. There was something about him, she felt, that made one uneasy; something in his eyes which suggested ruthlessness, a man who would not wait for others, who did not care, who would suffer from road rage even while walking . . . She smiled at the thought. But there was certainly something unsettling in his demeanour, a hint of poisoned sexuality about him, she felt; a whiff of cruelty, something not quite right.

She looked away; one did not want such a person to see one staring; nor, she reminded herself, did she want to catch herself engaging in such idle speculation. Imagining things about perfect strangers might seem a harmless enough pursuit, but it could lead to all sorts of ridiculous fantasies and fears. And Isabel was aware that of all her manifold failings, thinking too much about things was one of the most egregious.

Of course a delicatessen in Edinburgh was not the most obvious place to entertain such thoughts on the nature of good and evil, but Isabel was a philosopher and knew full well that philosophical speculation came upon one in the strangest places and at the strangest times. The delicatessen was owned by her niece, Cat, and in addition to selling the usual things that such shops sold—the sun-dried tomatoes and mozzarella cheese, the fresh anchovy fillets and the small bars of Austrian marzipan—this delicatessen served coffee at the three or four small marble-topped tables that Cat had found on a trip to the Upper Loire valley and that she had carted back to Scotland in a hired self-drive van.

Isabel was sitting at one of these tables, a freshly made cap-puccino before her, a copy of that morning’s Scotsman news-T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

5

paper open at the crossword page. Her coffee had been made by Cat’s assistant, Eddie, a shy young man to whom something terrible and unexplained had happened some time ago and who was still awkward in his dealings with Isabel and with others.

Eddie had gained in confidence recently, especially since he had taken up with a young Australian woman who had taken a job for a few months in the delicatessen, but he still blushed unexpectedly and would end a conversation with a murmur and a turning away of the head.

“You’re by yourself,” said Eddie, as he brought Isabel’s coffee to her table. “Where’s the . . .” He trailed off.

Isabel smiled at him encouragingly. “The baby? He’s called Charlie, by the way.”

Eddie nodded, glancing in the direction of Cat’s office at the back of the delicatessen. “Yes, of course, Charlie. How old is he now?”

“Three months. More or less exactly.”

Eddie absorbed this information. “So he can’t say anything yet?”

Isabel began to smile, but stopped herself; Eddie could be easily discouraged. “They don’t say anything until they’re quite a bit older, Eddie. A year or so. Then they never stop. He gurgles, though. A strange sound that means I’m perfectly happy with the world. Or that’s the way I understand it.”

“I’d like to see him sometime,” said Eddie vaguely. “But I think that . . .” He left the sentence unfinished, yet Isabel knew what he meant.

“Yes,” she said, glancing in the direction of Cat’s door. “Well, that is a bit complicated, as you probably know.”

Eddie moved away. A customer had entered the shop and was peering at the counter display of antipasti; he needed to return to his duties.

6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel sighed. She could have brought Charlie with her, but she had decided against it, leaving him instead at the house with her housekeeper, Grace. She often brought him to Bruntsfield, wheeling him, a wrapped-up cocoon, in his baby buggy, negotiating the edge of the pavement with care, proud in the way of a new mother, almost surprised that here she was, Isabel Dalhousie, with her own child, her son. But on these occasions she did not go into Cat’s delicatessen, because she knew that Cat was still uncomfortable about Charlie.

Cat had forgiven Isabel for Jamie. When it had first become apparent that Isabel was having an affair with him, Cat had been incredulous: “Him? My ex-boyfriend? You?” Surprise had been followed by anger, expressed in breathless staccato: “I’m sorry. I can’t. I just can’t get used to it. The idea.”

There had been acceptance, later, and reconciliation, but by that stage Isabel had announced her pregnancy and Cat had retreated in a mixture of resentment and embarrassment.

“You disapprove,” said Isabel. “Obviously.”

Cat had looked at her with an expression that Isabel found impossible to interpret.

“I know he was your boyfriend,” Isabel continued. “But you did get rid of him. And I didn’t set out to become pregnant.

Believe me, I didn’t. But now that I am, well, why shouldn’t I have a child?”

Cat said nothing, and Isabel realised that what she was witnessing was pure envy; unspoken, inexpressible. Envy makes us hate what we ourselves want, she reminded herself. We hate it because we can’t have it.

By the time that Charlie arrived, tumbling—or so it felt to Isabel—into the world under the bright lights of the Royal Infir-mary, Cat was talking to Isabel again. But she did not show much warmth towards Charlie; she did not offer to hold him T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

7

or to kiss him, although he was her cousin. Isabel was hurt by this, but decided that the best thing to do was not to flaunt Charlie before her niece, but allow her to come round in her own time.

“You can’t carry on disliking a baby for long,” said Grace, who, imbued with folk wisdom, was often right about these things. “Babies have a way of dealing with indifference. Give Cat time.”

Time. She looked at her watch. She had put Charlie down for his nap almost two hours ago and he would be waking up shortly. He would want feeding then, and although Grace could cope with that, Isabel liked to do it herself. She had stopped breast-feeding him only a few days after his birth, which had made her feel bad, but the discomfort had been too great and she had found herself dreading the experience. That was not a way to bond with one’s child, she thought; babies can pick up the physical tension in the mother, the drawing back from contact. So she had switched to a baby formula.

Isabel would not leave the delicatessen without exchanging a few words with Cat, no matter how strained relations might be. Now she rose from her table and made her way to the half-open door to the office. Eddie, standing at the counter, glanced briefly in her direction and then looked away again.

“Are you busy?”

Cat had a brochure in front of her, her pen poised above what looked like a picture of a jar of honey.

“Do people buy lots of honey?” Isabel asked. It was a banal question—of course people bought honey—but she needed something to break the ice.

Cat nodded. “They do,” she said, distantly. “Do you want some? I’ve got a sample somewhere here. They sent me a jar of heather honey from the Borders.”

8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“Grace would,” said Isabel. “She eats a lot of honey.”

There was a silence. Cat stared at the photograph of the jar of honey. Isabel drew in her breath; this could not be allowed to go on. Cat might come round in the end—and Isabel knew that she would—but it could take months; months of tension and silences.

“Look, Cat,” she said, “I don’t think that we should let this go on much longer. You’re freezing me out, you know.”

Cat continued to stare fixedly at the honey. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

“But you do,” said Isabel. “Of course you know what I mean.

And all that I’m saying is that it’s ridiculous. You have to forgive me. You have to forgive me for having Charlie. For Jamie. For everything.”

She was not sure why she should be asking her niece’s forgiveness, but she was. When it came to forgiveness, of course, it did not matter whether somebody was wronged or not—

what counted was whether they felt wronged. That was quite different.

“I don’t have to forgive you,” said Cat. “You haven’t done anything wrong, have you? All you’ve done is have a baby. By my . . .” She trailed off.

Isabel was astonished. “By your what?” she asked. “Your boyfriend? Is that what you’re saying?”

Cat rose to her feet. “Let’s not fight,” she said flatly. “Let’s just forget it.”

If this had been said with warmth, then Isabel would have been comforted by these words, and relieved. But they were said without passion, and she realised that this was far from a rapprochement; this was a mere changing of the subject. She wanted to protest, to take Cat in her arms and beg her to stop T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

9

this, but a barrier of animosity, one of those invisible clouds of feeling, stood between them. She turned away. “Will you come round to the house sometime?” she asked. “Come and see us.”

Us. She was getting used to the first person plural, but here, of course, in this atmosphere, it was heavy with significance, a land mine of a word.

She left Cat’s office. Outside, from behind the counter, Eddie looked up and exchanged glances with Isabel. For a young man who everybody imagined understood nothing, he understood everything, thought Isabel.

“HE WAS YELLING his head off,” Grace said. “So I gave him his feed. And since then he’s been perfectly happy. Look.”

Grace had been cradling Charlie in her arms and now handed him over to Isabel in the hall.

“Looking at him now,” said Isabel, “you wouldn’t think it, would you? So much volume in those tiny lungs.”

She carried him through to her study and sat down in the chair near the window. It still felt strange to her to have Charlie in her study, her place of work. Babies belonged to a world of blankets, colour, softness, not to this place of paper, files, telephones. And philosophy, which is what Isabel did as editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, seemed so far removed from the world of infancy. Would Immanuel Kant have known how to hold a baby? she asked herself. It was highly unlikely; babies were too irrational, too messy for him, although he would have acknowledged, of course, that each baby should be treated as an end in its own right, and not as a means to an end. So one should have a baby because one wanted that baby to be born and to have a life, not because one wanted the pleasure oneself 1 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h of having a baby; that was implicit in any Kantian view of the matter. But even if he had acknowledged the essential value of every baby, would Kant have had the faintest idea how to deal with a baby? Would he even have known which side was up?

That was the cold and informal face of philosophy, Isabel thought; something far removed from the world that ordinary people knew; their world of struggle, and messy passions, and unresolved pointless differences, such as her difference with Cat. That was Kant’s child-unfriendliness established; Hume would have known about children, she decided. He would have found babies good company because they were full of emotions, unexpressed perhaps, or made known only in the crudest of manners, but emotions nonetheless. And Hume, the Good Davey as he was called, was easy company, of course, and would have been liked by babies.

Content in his mother’s arms, Charlie now seemed to be dropping back to sleep. Isabel watched as his eyelids fluttered and then closed. She could watch him for hours, she thought, whether he was awake or asleep; it was difficult to believe that she—and Jamie, of course—had created this little boy, this person, had started a whole future on its track. That struck her as little short of a miracle; that a few small cells could multiply and differentiate and create an instrument of thought and language, a whole centre of consciousness.

Grace watched her from the doorway. “Would you like me to take him up to his cot?” she asked. “So that you can work?”

Isabel handed the sleeping child over to Grace and went to her desk. Charlie’s birth had had little impact on the Review of Applied Ethics; in her determination to be prepared well in advance, Isabel had put together two special issues during her pregnancy—an issue on moral particularism in the work of Iris T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

1 1

Murdoch (“the moral dilemmas of Oxford types,” Jamie had called it) and one on the morality of boundary controls. The Murdoch issue had gone to press shortly after Charlie’s birth, and the second would be published within a month or two.

It had caused her some anxiety, this second one, because the topic was such an uncomfortable one. States are entitled to have some control over their borders—there is general agreement on that—but when they try to keep people out, then passions are raised and accusations of heartlessness made. Auden had a poem about this, which she quoted in her editorial. He had written from the perspective of a displaced person who hears the rhetoric of hate of his persecutors; and there is that arresting line that brings it home so strongly: “He was talking of you and me, my dear,” says the man to his wife. You and me: at the end of every bit of exclusion, every act of ethnic cleansing, every flourish of heartlessness, there is a you and me.

And yet, she reflected, that was written in an era of Fascism. Modern states and their officials act very differently; they have to make difficult decisions against a backdrop of human rights laws and openness. We could not all go and live in the United States or Canada or Australia, or some other popular country, even if we wanted to. At some point the people already there were entitled, were they not, to say that there were limited resources for newcomers, that their societies could take no more. Or they could argue that even if they had the space, they were entitled to preserve the existing culture of their country by controlling the extent to which others came to it; we live here, they might say—it’s ours and we can decide whom to invite in.

But then somebody might point out that the current possessors themselves, or their ascendants, had probably taken the land from somebody else, and it was not clear why that should give 1 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h them the right to turn away those who came later. But history might provide few firm foundations: ultimately, almost everybody came from somewhere else, if one went far enough back, and even those who asserted their rights as original peoples were often not really indigenous, but had sailed over from some other island or walked across a long-dissolved land bridge.

Isabel found this intensely difficult, and had noticed that most people simply avoided the issue or did not discuss it in the open. The heart went one way—those who want a new life should be helped to get it, if possible—but the head might look in another direction, at the pragmatic impossibility of allow-ing the unfettered movement of peoples. So there were pass-ports and quotas and restrictions, all of which amounted to a discouragement. Please don’t come, these regulations said; please don’t ask.

She looked at the room around her, at her desk, at her books. None of this would belong to her forever; it would change hands and somebody new would be here, somebody who would not even know who she had been, somebody who would look at her with astonishment if she came back, in some thought experiment, and said, That’s my desk—I want it. Our possessing of our world is a temporary matter: we stamp our ownership upon our surroundings, give familiar names to the land about us, erect statues of ourselves, but all of this is swept away, so quickly, so easily. We think the world is ours forever, but we are little more than squatters.

Still deep in thought, Isabel stared at the pile of unopened mail. The harvest of just two days, it was neatly stacked in a red metal in-tray. Much of this was manuscripts; Isabel did not accept electronic submissions to the journal—she disliked reading on-screen—and required everything that was submitted T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

1 3

to be printed out for her perusal. This meant that a river of paper entered the house each month, swirled in eddies about her study for a week or so, and then was guided out in a stream of recycling bags. The rejected manuscripts, those that she judged unworthy of the editorial board’s scrutiny, were often the work of doctoral students, anxious for their first publication.

Isabel was gentle in her rejection of these, expressing the hope that the authors would find somebody else willing to publish their work. She knew that this was unlikely, that the Review may have been their fifth or sixth port of call. But she could not be brutal; she had been a doctoral student herself once and remembered what it was like.

She took an envelope off the top of the pile and slit it open.

“Dear Ms. Dalhousie, The enclosed paper may be suitable for publication in the Review of Applied Ethics and I should be grateful if you would consider it. The title is ‘The Concept of Sexual Perversion as an Oppressive Weapon’ and in it I examine some ideas which Scruton advanced in his book Sexual Desire.

As you know, the concept of perversion has been subjected to critical reassessment . . .”

She sighed and laid the paper aside. She received numerous submissions on the subject of sex; indeed, some philosophers seemed to imagine that applied ethics was more or less exclu-sively concerned with sex. Often these papers were interesting, but on other occasions they were distinctly scatological and she wondered whether she should be reading them with gloves on.

The absurdity of this struck her as quickly as the thought itself came to her, but it was amusing to think of editors handling such material with the protection of gloves, as if the grubbiness of the subject matter might rub off or infection might leap from the page.

1 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h A few days previously she had received a paper entitled “On the Ethics of Pretending to Be Gay When You Are Not.” If she had been taken by surprise by this title, then that was clearly the author’s intention. We expect the issue to be the ethics of pretending to be straight when you are not, he wrote, but that assumes that there is something shameful about not being straight. The conventional question, then, connives in the mar-ginalisation of the gay, and therefore any consideration of this form of passing should be from a viewpoint which recognises that some may wish to pass for gay rather than the other way round.

She smiled at the recollection of that paper, which she had circulated to the members of the editorial board for their verdict. The board would recommend publication, Isabel thought, even if they were not impressed by the content. “That’s exactly the sort of paper we should encourage,” one member of the board had already written. “We need to show people that we are not, as some suggest, old-fashioned in our approach.” This comment had come from Professor Christopher Dove, a professor of philosophy at a minor English university, and a man with a reputation for radicalism. It had been a dig at Isabel, who was herself thought by Dove to be old-fashioned. And she had risen to the occasion in her reply. “Thank you for your support,” she had written. “I wondered whether members of the board were ready for this sort of thing. I’m glad to see they now are.”

She picked up the next item, a bulky brown envelope which would contain, she thought, a catalogue of some sort. It did: Lyon & Turnbull, Forthcoming Sales. Lyon & Turnbull were a prominent Edinburgh auction house at whose sales Isabel had bought the occasional item, thus entitling her to their catalogues. This one was for a sale of furniture described as “good T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

1 5

antique furniture” and paintings, neither of which Isabel actually needed—in fact the house had too much furniture and too many paintings. But she found auction catalogues irresistible, even if she had no intention of buying anything.

She skipped through the pages of furniture, pausing only to study more closely a set of library steps in mahogany, with brass fittings. The estimate seemed discouragingly high, and she moved on to the paintings. That was where she stopped. Lot number 87 was a painting of a man standing on a shore, a stack of lobster creels just behind him, and behind the creels a mountain rising sharply. It was unmistakably the landscape of the Western Highlands of Scotland, with its grey rocks protruding from thin soil, the verdant green of the grass, the gentle, shifting light; and the man’s face, with its weather-beaten look, further proclaimed the place. She looked at the description underneath: Andrew McInnes, Scottish, b. 1958, Sea Livelihood. Below this, in smaller type, the auctioneers went on to explain: “McInnes was perhaps the most talented of the students to have passed through the Edinburgh College of Art in the last years of Robin Philipson’s tenure as principal. He rapidly acquired a substantial reputation, and this was reflected in the prices achieved by his paintings during the years immediately before his death.”

Isabel studied the painting intently. It was the expression on the man’s face that interested her. This was a man who knew hardship, but was not bowed by it. And there was a kindness too, a gentleness that was sometimes squeezed out of those who wrested their living from a hard place—the sea or a windswept island.

She reached for the telephone and dialled Jamie’s number.

At the other end of the line, the phone rang for a long time and 1 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h she was about to put the handset down when Jamie suddenly answered. He sounded breathless.

“You’ve just run up the stairs,” she said. “Do you want me to call back later?”

“No, I’ll be all right. I heard it when I was on the way up and then I couldn’t get my key into the lock for some reason. But it’s all right now.”

Isabel looked at her watch. It was eleven thirty. She could put Charlie into his baby sling and take him with her; he slept very contentedly in the sling because, she thought, he could hear her heartbeat and he imagined he was back in the womb, back to the simpler life that perhaps he remembered—just—

and missed.

“Would you like to see your son for lunch?” she asked.

“Of course,” Jamie answered quickly. She knew he would say that, and it gave her satisfaction. He loved Charlie, which was what she wanted. It did not matter whether or not he loved her—and she did not know whether he did—the important thing was that he loved Charlie.

“And we could drop into Lyon & Turnbull beforehand,”

Isabel suggested. “There’s something I want to look at.”

“I’ll meet you there,” said Jamie.

She put the telephone down and smiled. I am very fortunate, she thought. I have a child, and I also have a lover who is the father of the child. I have a large house and a job that allows me to do philosophy. I am happy.

She moved to the window and looked out into the garden.

The summer profusion of shrubs made shadows on the ground below. There was a fuchsia, laden with red and purple flowers, and beside it a large rhododendron bush, popular with small birds. When they alighted on the foliage of the rhododendron, T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

1 7

these birds made the topmost branches bend almost imperceptibly under their tiny weight. But now the lower branches, those right down by the ground, moved suddenly, and for another reason. And I have a fox, she whispered. I have a fox who watches over my life.

C H A P T E R T W O

E

SO,” SAID JAMIE. “Which one is it?”

He asked the question in a way which suggested that he was not really interested in the answer. And the reason for that was in his arms: Charlie, his son, looking up at his father’s face, struggling to focus.

“Over there,” said Isabel, pointing to the other side of the saleroom. “I’ve already had a quick look at it.”

Jamie hardly heard the answer. He had strapped Charlie’s sling onto his front now, and was gently tickling the child under the chin. “He likes that,” he said. “Look, he’s going all cross-eyed.”

Isabel smiled indulgently. “Yes. He’s pleased to see you.

That is, if he can see you properly, which I’m never really sure of. I suppose he can, even if colours are still a bit confusing at that age.”

“He knows me,” said Jamie mock-defensively. “He knows exactly who I am. If he could say Daddy he would.”

Isabel took Jamie by the arm and steered him gently across the room to stand in front of a large painting in a gilded frame.

“What do you think of this?”

Jamie looked at the painting, watched by Isabel. “I T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

1 9

rather like it,” he said. “Look at that man’s face. Look at the expression.”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “It says rather a lot, doesn’t it?”

Jamie glanced away for a moment; Charlie had seized the finger of his right hand and was attempting to put it in his mouth. “You mustn’t,” he said. “Unsanitary.”

“Everything about children is unsanitary,” said Isabel. She turned back to the painting and pointed to its top right-hand corner. “Look over there. He’s really caught that west coast light.”

Jamie leaned forward to peer at the canvas. “The Inner Hebrides?” he said. “Skye?”

“Probably Jura,” said Isabel. “He lived there for a while. Jura scenes became his trademark, rather like Iona and Mull were for Samuel Peploe.”

“Who?” asked Jamie. “Who was he?”

Isabel handed him the catalogue. “Andrew McInnes.

There’s something about him here. Look.”

Jamie took the catalogue and read the few lines of description. Then he handed it back to Isabel and looked at her enquiringly. She noticed his eyes, which were filled with light; that brightness which attracted her so strongly, which spoke of a lambent intelligence.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You must be wondering what I’m going on about.” As she spoke to Jamie, she reached out and touched Charlie, who was gazing intently at her. “Do you know that painting I have on the stairs, halfway up? On the landing? It’s by the same Andrew McInnes. It was one of his earliest works. My father bought it.”

Jamie looked thoughtful. “Kind of,” he said hesitantly. “I think so. On the left as you go up?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “That’s it.”

2 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“I haven’t really studied it,” said Jamie. “I suppose it’s just one of those things one walks past.”

Isabel gestured towards the painting. “It’s much smaller than this, of course. About one quarter the size. But it’s exactly the same subject. Almost identical. That man and those hills.

The lobster creels. Everything.”

Jamie shrugged. “Artists paint the same thing over and over again, don’t they? The same models. The same scenes. They can be creatures of habit, can’t they?”

Isabel agreed. There was nothing surprising in finding paintings that were very much the same as one another, particularly if one was smaller. Her small painting was evidently a recurrent image in the artist’s mind, and that was nothing unusual. What she wanted from Jamie, though, was encourage-ment to bid for the larger version. Should she?

“It’s up to you,” said Jamie. “But . . . look at the estimate.

Twenty-five thousand. Isn’t that rather a lot?”

“They know what they’re talking about,” said Isabel. “He’s sought after. He’s not cheap.”

Jamie frowned. “But twenty-five thousand . . .” He was trying to recall what he made each year as a part-time teacher of bassoon and an occasional performer. It was not much more than that, if it was any more at all; of course there was the small legacy he had received from his aunt, and the flat, which had come from her too, but even then he had to watch his money carefully, as most people did. He knew that Isabel was not hard up, but to be able to spend twenty-five thousand pounds on a painting astonished him. People paid that, of course; some considerably more. But these were not people he knew; that was the difference. He glanced at her, as if with new eyes; she did not look wealthy, and there was none of that irritating self-T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

2 1

assuredness that sometimes hung about the rich, an air of power, of being able to take things for granted. Jamie had noticed that in the parents of some of his pupils. They were often well-heeled for the simple reason that the bassoon was an expensive instrument and there were many parents who could not afford to buy one. Most of these people were modest in their manner, but some condescended to him or showed a general arrogance in the way they expected everyone to fit in with their whims. The mothers in the expensive four-wheel-drive vehicles were the worst, he had decided. Why did they need these fuel-hungry contraptions in their urban lives? To barge their way past other, smaller cars, or to make a statement about who they were and what they had?

One of these mothers was interested in him. He had noticed it because she had made it so obvious, arriving early to collect her son from his lesson in the flat—the boy could easily have gone downstairs to meet his mother on the street, as the others did, but she came up, rang the bell, and waited in the kitchen until her son’s lesson was finished. Then she engaged Jamie in conversation, quizzing him about her child’s progress, while the boy himself lurked in the background, clearly embarrassed, eager to leave.

She stood close to Jamie while she spoke to him; the sort of invasion of the unspoken limits of bodily space that can be so disconcerting. He moved away slightly, but she followed him, inching nearer. He glanced at his pupil, as if for rescue from that quarter, but the boy looked away, his embarrassment compounded by the complicity that had now arisen between them.

Jamie’s deliberate distance seemed only to spur this woman on, and she had invited him to join her for coffee after the lesson. He had replied that he could not, as there was another 2 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h pupil, and then he added, “And I don’t think it would be a good idea anyway.” She had looked at him mischievously, and then, as if oblivious to the presence of her son on the other side of the room, had said, “It may not be a good idea, but it’s always fun.”

After that, he had asked her not to come up to fetch her son, but to wait for him downstairs.

She had been outraged. “Who exactly do you think you are?”

she had hissed.

“Your son’s bassoon teacher,” he said.

“Ex–bassoon teacher,” she said, and she had withdrawn her son from further lessons.

Isabel had laughed when she heard of this. “I can see her,”

she said. “I can just see her saying that.”

“But I haven’t told you who she was,” Jamie protested.

“But of course I know,” said Isabel. “Remember that this is Edinburgh. I can work it out. It’s . . .” And she had named the name, and got it right, to Jamie’s astonishment.

“Too much money,” Isabel went on. “She’s incapable of handling it. She thinks that it buys bassoon lessons—and the bassoon teacher.”

Isabel was not like that at all. But now this talk of spending twenty-five thousand pounds on a painting made Jamie feel vaguely uneasy.

“Should you spend that much?” he asked, but he went on to answer his own question immediately. “Of course, if you can afford it, then that’s your business.”

Isabel detected a note of disapproval in his tone; she had not expected this reaction. They had never discussed money; the subject simply had not arisen between them. And if there was a yawning disparity between their respective financial positions—which there was—it seemed to her that it was quite T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

2 3

irrelevant. Isabel had never judged people by their means; it simply was not an issue with her. But at the same time, she realised that it could be difficult for Jamie. Money gave power over people, no matter how tactful one was about it. With money you could get the attention of others; you could ask them to do things.

“I can afford it,” she said quietly. “If I want it. But the problem is . . . well, I feel guilty.” She paused. “And you’re not helping much.”

He frowned. “Not helping? I don’t know what you mean.”

“You disapprove of the fact that I can buy that,” said Isabel.

“You’re making it rather obvious.”

Jamie’s surprise was unfeigned. “Why should I disapprove?

It’s your money. What you do with it—”

“Is my business,” Isabel interjected. “If only that were the case. But it isn’t, you know. People watch what other people do with their money. They watch very closely.”

Jamie shrugged his shoulders. “Not me,” he said. “I don’t. If you think that I do, then you’re wrong. You really are.”

Isabel watched his expression as she spoke. She had misjudged him; what he said was true—he had no interest in what she did with her money; there was no envy there.

“Let’s not argue,” she said. “Especially in front of Charlie.”

Jamie smiled. “No. Of course.” The discussion had made him feel uncomfortable, as it had raised something which had not been present in their relationship before: a financial dimen-sion. As they left the auction house, with Charlie returned to his sling on Isabel’s front, Jamie thought about what had been said.

And there was something else worrying him, something else that had not been spoken about but that had to be discussed at some point. Who was financially responsible for Charlie? He 2 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h had not thought about this, in the drama of Isabel’s pregnancy, but a few days previously it had occurred to him that now there would be bills. He had seen an article in the paper about the cost of a child until it reached the age of independence, and the figure had been daunting. Tens—scores—of thousands of pounds were needed to feed, clothe, and educate a child, and the age of independence itself seemed to be getting higher and higher. Twenty-five-year-olds still lived with, and on, their parents, and the paper cited one case of a daughter of thirty-two, still in full-time education, still being supported by her father. Was Charlie going to be that expensive? And if he was, would he be able to pay his share?

They were going for lunch in the restaurant at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, which was on Queen Street, a short walk from the auction house. Outside, in spite of the fact that it was June, the wind had a note of chill in it, a wind from the east, off the North Sea. Isabel looked up at the sky, which was clear but for a few scudding clouds, wispy, high-level streaks of white.

“It’s so bright,” she said, shivering as a gust of wind swept up Broughton Street and penetrated the thin layer of her jersey.

“Look at that sky. Look up there.”

Jamie stared up into the blue. He saw a vapour trail, higher than the clouds, on the very edge of space, it seemed, heading westwards towards America or Canada. He thought of the shiny thin tube suspended, against gravity, in that cold near-void; he thought of the people inside. “What do you think of when you see those jets?” he asked Isabel, pointing up at the tiny glint of metal with its white wisp of cotton wool trailing behind it.

Isabel glanced up. “Trust,” she said. “I think of trust.”

Jamie looked puzzled. “Why would you think of that?” Then he started to smile; he knew the answer, and Isabel was right.

“Yes, I see.”

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

2 5

They turned the corner onto Queen Street. On the other side of the street, a block away, rose the red sandstone edifice of the Portrait Gallery, an ambitious neo-Gothic building which Isabel had always liked in spite of what she called its “Caledo-nian spikiness.” The gallery restaurant, tucked away and old-fashioned, was popular with people who wanted to sit, four to a table, in high-backed chairs reminiscent of suburban dining rooms. Isabel liked it because of its welcoming atmosphere and the overflow paintings from the main gallery hanging on its walls.

“I like coming here,” said Jamie, as they sat down at their table. “When I was a boy, I used to be brought here to see the pictures of the kings and queens of Scotland. I was interested in seeing Macbeth, but of course we haven’t a clue what he looked like.”

“A much maligned king,” said Isabel as she loosened Charlie’s sling. “Shakespeare cast him as a weak man, a murderer, but in fact he had quite a successful reign. Scotland prospered under Macbeth.”

“She was the problem,” said Jamie.

Isabel doubted this. It was only too easy to blame women, she thought, although she had to admit, if pressed, that there were some women who deserved any blame that came their way. Mrs. Ceau¸sescu was such a case, as she pointed out.

“She was shot, wasn’t she?” said Jamie.

“I’m afraid so,” said Isabel. “And nobody deserves that. Not even the most appalling tyrant, or tyrant’s wife. She pleaded for her life, we are told, as did her husband, in his long winter coat, standing there in front of those young soldiers. He said that they should not shoot his wife, as she was a great scientist. At least he tried to do something gentlemanly at the very end.”

They were silent for a moment; Romania and firing squads 2 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h seemed a world away from the atmosphere of the Portrait Gallery. Jamie looked at Charlie. The cruelties of the world, its viciousness, seemed so dissonant with the innocence of the child. He returned to kings.

“George IV,” he said. “That was another favourite picture of mine. Ever since I heard that the artist who painted the picture of his arrival in Edinburgh showed him in his kilt but without the pink tights that apparently he wore when he arrived in Scotland.”

Isabel laughed. “That sounds almost as bad as those Soviet portraits. I saw one in the State Gallery in Moscow years ago. It was a collective portrait of the politburo or some such group.

The ones who had been discredited or executed were simply painted out and replaced with large flower arrangements. But the contours of the paint showed that something had been done. Such a bad sign—the appearance of flowers in official portraits.”

Jamie looked at her quizzically. He was not quite sure how to take remarks like that from Isabel. It was, he said, her Dorothy Parker streak. “But I’d never take a streak from another woman,” Isabel had protested.

“There you go,” said Jamie.

But now there was this odd remark about flowers. “Why flowers?” he asked.

“Well,” said Isabel, “look at political broadcasts by presidents and prime ministers. The shaky ones, those one thinks are lying, or at least being economical with the truth—they bedeck the tables behind them with large floral arrangements. I take that as a sure sign that there’s something fishy going on. Flags and flowers. They’re stage props. And soldiers. Being seen talking to the troops is very good for votes.”

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

2 7

The waitress arrived and they gave their order. Jamie reached across the table and touched Charlie’s arm.

“So small,” he said. “Like a little doll.”

Isabel smiled and let her hand touch Jamie’s. He curled his fingers round hers, briefly.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

“Thank you for what?”

“For not going away.”

He gave a start. “Why should I go away?”

She nodded in the direction of Charlie. “Not every man stays,” she said. “You might easily have preferred . . . preferred your freedom.”

He stared at her. Had she misjudged him that badly? He felt an irritation, a crossness, that she should think that of him. And Isabel, watching him, immediately sensed that.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve offended you. I didn’t mean to. It’s just that . . . well, you’re younger than I am. You need your freedom. You don’t need to be tied down.”

Jamie swallowed. He looked about him briefly; the restaurant was busy, as it always was at lunchtime, but in the general hubbub it did not look as if anybody might overhear their conversation. “Of course I wouldn’t make myself scarce,” he said. “I told you that—right at the beginning. I told you when Charlie arrived. I was there, wasn’t I?”

“Of course you were,” said Isabel soothingly. “Please don’t be angry with me. Please.” And she thought, I’m making a mess of this. It’s exactly the same as my relationship with Cat. I make a mess of things by saying things that I don’t need to say.

Jamie was staring at the table, tracing on its surface an imaginary pattern with a forefinger. He looked up, and Isabel saw that he was flushed. “Jamie,” she said. “Please . . .”

2 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h He shook his head. “No. I want to say something. I should have said it before. Now I’m going to say it.”

She held her breath. I shouldn’t have imagined that this would last, she thought; now I’ll find out what I always feared.

To have had him, now to lose him; it was inevitable.

“Isabel,” he said. “I’d like you to marry me.” He paused. “I think we should get married.”

For a moment she thought that she had misheard him. But then he repeated it. She was surprised, but not surprised.

She had wondered whether he might say this, ever since she announced to him that she was pregnant. She had been unable to stop herself from entertaining the possibility, and had considered, at length, what her response would be. And now that the moment had come, she found herself hesitating. What if she said yes right there and then?

Instead she said, “It’s a rather public proposal, isn’t it, Jamie?” She gestured about her.

Jamie blushed. “I’m sorry. But it’s just that you brought up the whole issue of my being around. I felt that I had to say something.”

She reassured him. “Yes, I understand.”

“And?”

“I know you feel you have to ask me,” she said. “But I think we should wait. I really do. Let’s wait some time and see how things go. That makes more sense, you know.”

He did not say anything for a minute or two, and she imagined that he was wrestling with himself. If he really wanted to marry her, she thought, he would press her again. But if he had merely proposed out of a sense of duty, then he would probably accept her suggestion with some relief.

“All right,” he said at last. “Let’s see.”

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

2 9

She realised how tense she had been; now she relaxed. But she felt a certain sadness that he had gone along with her suggestion, even though she knew that this was the right thing to do, and that quite the wrong thing for her to do would be to allow him to marry her. And that, in a way, was the burden of being a philosopher: one knew what one had to do, but it was so often the opposite of what one really wanted to do.

C H A P T E R T H R E E

E

BY THE TIME Grace arrived at the house the next morning, Isabel had bathed Charlie, given him his breakfast bottle, and was standing in front of the drawing-room window, encouraging him to look out over the garden. She was not sure how much he saw, but she was convinced that he was interested and was gazing fixedly at one of the rhododendrons. As she held Charlie before the window and rocked him gently, Isabel saw Grace walking up the front path, although Grace did not spot her.

Grace had a newspaper tucked under her arm and was carrying the white canvas tote bag that accompanied her to work each day. This bag was often empty, and hung flaccid from Grace’s arm, but on occasion it bulged with tantalizing shapes that intrigued Isabel and that she wished she could ask Grace about.

She knew, though, that there was usually at least a book in the bag, as Grace was a keen reader and had a sacrosanct lunch hour during which she would sit in the kitchen, immersed in a novel from the Central Library, a cup of tea getting steadily colder in front of her.

Since Charlie’s arrival, the nature of Grace’s job had changed. This change had required no negotiation, with Grace T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

3 1

assuming that Isabel would need help with the baby and that naturally this would take priority over her normal, more mundane duties of cleaning and ironing.

“I’ll look after him while you’re working,” Grace had announced. “And also when you want to go out. I like babies. So that’s fine.” The tone of her voice indicated that there needed to be no further discussion.

Isabel was happy with the new understanding, but even had she not been, she would have hesitated to contradict Grace. Although Isabel was nominally Grace’s employer, Grace regarded herself as still working for Isabel’s father, who had died years before and in whose service as housekeeper she had spent all her working life. Either that, or she thought of herself as being employed in some strange way by the house itself; which meant that her loyalty, and source of instructions, was really some authority separate from and higher than Isabel.

The practical consequences of this were that Grace occasionally announced that something would be done because

“that’s what the house needs.” Isabel thought this a curious expression, which made her home sound rather like a casino or an old-fashioned merchant bank—in both of which one might hear the staff talking about the house. But for all its peculiarity, the arrangement worked very well and indeed was welcomed by Isabel as a means of putting the relationship between herself and Grace on a more equal, and therefore easier, footing. Isabel did not like the idea of being an employer, with all that this entailed in terms of authority and power. If Grace regarded herself as being employed by some vague metaphysical body known as the house, then that at least enabled Isabel to treat her as a mixture of friend and colleague, which is precisely how she viewed her anyway.

3 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Of course the circumstances in which the two women found themselves were different, and no amount of linguistic sleight of hand could conceal that. Isabel had enjoyed every advantage in education and upbringing; there had been money, travel, and, ultimately, freedom from the constraints of an office job or its equivalents. Grace, by contrast, had come from a home in which there had been no spare money, little free time, and, in the background, the knowledge that unemployment might at any time remove whatever small measure of prosperity people might have attained.

Grace went into the kitchen, put the tote bag down on a chair, and made her way into the morning room.

“I’m here,” Isabel called out. “In the study.”

Grace entered the room and beamed at Charlie. “He’s looking very bright and breezy,” she said, coming up to tickle Charlie under the chin. Charlie grinned and waved his arms in the air.

“I think he wants to go to you,” said Isabel.

Grace took Charlie in her arms. “Of course he does,” she said.

It was not the words themselves, Isabel realised—it was more the inflection. Did Grace mean that it was no surprise that Charlie should want to go to her rather than stay with his mother? That was how it sounded, even if Grace had not meant it that way.

“He actually quite likes me too,” said Isabel softly.

Grace looked at her in astonishment. “But of course he does,” she said. “You’re his mother. All boys like their mothers.”

“No,” said Isabel. “I don’t think they do. Some mothers suf-focate their sons, emotionally. They don’t mean to, but it happens.” She looked out of the window. She had seen it in her family, in a cousin whose ambitious mother had nagged him until he had cut himself free and had as little as possible to do T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

3 3

with her. He had been civil, of course, but everybody had seen it—the stiff posture, the formal politeness, the looking away when she spoke to him. But had he loved her, in spite of this? She remembered him at his mother’s funeral when he had wept, quietly but voluminously, and Isabel, sitting in the row behind him, had put her hand on his shoulder and whispered to him in comfort. We leave it too late, she had thought; we always do, and then these salutary lessons are learned at the graveside.

“Mothers always mean well,” said Grace. “As long as they don’t try to choose their son’s wife. That’s a mistake.”

Charlie looked up at Grace and smiled. I have enough, thought Isabel; I have so much that surely I can share him.

Grace turned towards Isabel. Her face, Isabel noticed, seemed transformed by the close presence of the baby, her look at that moment one of near pride. “Do you want to work this morning?” she said, looking in the direction of Isabel’s over-crowded desk. “There’s not much to do in the house. I could look after Charlie.”

Isabel felt a wrench. Part of her wanted to answer that she would decide for herself, in good time, whether she wanted to work or whether she wished simply to be with Charlie; but another part of her, the responsible part, felt she should deal with the pile of correspondence that she had started to tackle the previous day but that she had abandoned in favour of the auctioneer’s catalogue. There were two horses in the soul, she thought, as Socrates had said in Phaedrus—the one, unruly, governed by passions, pulling in the direction of self-indulgence; the other, restrained, dutiful, governed by a sense of shame. And Auden had felt the same, she thought; he was a dualist who knew the struggle between the dark and the light sides of the self, the struggle that all of us know to a greater or lesser extent.

3 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h She sighed. “Work,” she said. She had never sighed over the prospect of work before; but now there was Charlie.

As Grace took Charlie from the room, Isabel sat down at her pile of mail. It had grown that morning by five letters, pushed through the letter box by the postman on his morning round, all of them concerned with Review affairs. She disposed of the top two quickly. One was a request for a further supply of offprints of her article by an author who had lost her carefully husbanded supply which the Review gave on publication. The offprints had been mislaid in the course of a move following the breakup of a relationship. Isabel had stumbled over this. Why was it necessary for her to be told that the move had been prompted by this? Was it an attempt to engage her sympathy so that the offprints would be given free, or was it an excuse for the loss itself—a life thrown into disarray by the bad behaviour of another? Isabel looked up at the ceiling and pondered this; if one was to err, then it was better to err on the side of generosity.

The offprints would be free, and she wrote a note to that effect.

The second letter asked why a book review of Virtues in a Time of Trial had not yet appeared; that, too, was easily dealt with.

The reviewer had died, of old age as it happened, before writing the review. A new reviewer had been approached and the review would appear in due course.

Ten minutes: that was all it took to read and reply to these letters. At this rate, Isabel thought, she would be finished in an hour, possibly even earlier. But then came an innocent-looking envelope, addressed in handwriting, and postmarked London.

She slit open the envelope and began to read the letter. The letterhead, once exposed, told her who the sender was—the oddly named Professor Lettuce, professor of moral philosophy at one of the smaller universities in London, and chairman of T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

3 5

the Review’s editorial board. In general, Robert Lettuce played a small role in the affairs of the Review, being content to allow Isabel to run everything. She reported to him and the board from time to time and he, in due course, reported to the Review’s owners, a small academic publishing firm. This firm published textbooks in veterinary science and biology; the Review of Applied Ethics came into its possession almost by accident when it bought the building occupied by the private trust that owned the Review. In the trustees’ relief at selling a building that had been a drain on finances, the Review had been thrown into the sale as a gesture of goodwill. The new owners were lukewarm about their ownership and had occasionally mentioned their willingness to sell the Review, should a suitable purchaser be found. But no purchaser had ever expressed more than a passing interest in a concern that made very little profit, if any at all. So there had been no change in ownership.

She read halfway through the letter, put it down for a few moments, and then picked it up to read the remainder.

Dear Isabel,

As you know, I’ve enjoyed working with you over the last five years. [He’s going to resign, she thought as she read this.] We have had very few disagreements, and I must say that I have always been very impressed with your editing of the Review. Under your editorship, the circulation has increased considerably—some would say dramatically—and the journal has been redesigned.

Remember how awfully dull it looked when we first started, with that curious mauve cover? [Actually, thought Isabel, you were against the change. I had to 3 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h persuade you; you liked mauve, as I recall.] And I have always appreciated the single theme idea, which was your brainchild and which has been, in my view, a great success.

But, Isabel, as I am sure that you appreciate, there is always a case for change, as well as for variety, and at the prompting of a couple of members of the board I carried out a sounding of the others to see whether people felt that it was time for a fresh incumbent of the editorial chair. I did not imagine that there would be much support for this, but unfortunately I was proved to be quite wrong on this. The view, I’m afraid, was pretty much unanimous: it’s time for a change.

I know that you will be both surprised and upset by this: both of these reactions were mine too. But I know, too, that you will understand that in voting for a change the members of the board are in no sense passing ad-verse judgement on your considerable achievements at the helm of the Review.

There was some enthusiasm for an immediate change of editor, but I took the view that the best thing to do would be for you to remain in the post for the rest of the year (if you are willing) and then we can start the next calendar year with the new person. That will give you time to look for something else, and also will provide continuity, which is so important.

As to your successor, Christopher Dove has offered his services and this choice is broadly acceptable to the rest of the board. No doubt you and he will be able to get together at some point to discuss the technicalities of the changeover.

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

3 7

And there the letter had ended, with Lettuce’s signature underneath and a pencilled postscript asking Isabel whether she had read the “wonderfully perceptive” obituary of the reviewer who had died before getting round to reviewing Virtues in a Time of Trial. “An excellent piece,” wrote Lettuce. “Did you know he was an accomplished violinist and a glider pilot in his earlier years?”

Isabel’s emotions were complex. She was shocked by the unexpectedness of the news, by the sheer surprise of being told that what she had taken for granted, her job, was being taken from her. Then there was a sense of disgust at the obvious plotting that must have been going on. Dove—he was the one, she decided. It had occurred to her before this that Dove probably coveted her post as editor; he was ambitious and the editorship of an established journal would help him on his climb up the pole of academic success. He was currently at an obscure university, one so low in the pecking order that it appeared in no tables at all. She had been told by a friend who knew him that he really would like to be elsewhere altogether, at Magdalen College, Oxford, of which he was a graduate. That involved an ascent on an Alpine scale, and the editorship of the Review would help. He would have been in touch with other members and poured poison in their ears, dangling some sort of carrot perhaps, cajoling, and enough of them had been craven enough to go along with this. Not one, she thought, not one had contacted her to discuss the issue; that was almost the most difficult thing to bear.

And as for Lettuce himself, he might have telephoned to break the news personally, he might even have bothered to travel to Edinburgh to discuss it with her. Instead, he had written this relatively impersonal letter—a document which 3 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h amounted to a letter of dismissal. It had been made worse by the fact that he had appended a chatty postscript. That is a hall-mark of guilt, she thought; he who feels acutely guilty attempts to establish that all is actually well by resorting to the quotidian remark that has nothing to do with the real business. That is exactly what Lettuce had done.

Isabel let the letter drop to the floor. It fell facedown, but the ink from the signature had seeped through the cheap paper to provide faint mirror-writing on the back. Ecuttel. That was a far better name for him, far more sinister than Lettuce. Ecuttel and his lackey, Evod. The thought made her feel slightly better, but only slightly; engaging in such childish fantasies is merely a way of protecting ourselves from the sense of hurt that comes from betrayal or injustice. But it works only for a moment or two.

G R AC E WA S I N T H E K I T C H E N , sitting in front of Charlie, who was strapped into a reclining baby chair placed on top of the table. She was holding a knitted figure of what looked like a policeman and moving it up and down to get Charlie’s attention.

She looked up when Isabel came into the room but then trans-ferred her gaze back to the baby.

“Fed up already?” Grace said. “Look at this. He loves this little policeman. I think it must be the dark blue. He thinks it very funny.”

Isabel nodded. She looked at Charlie, and then looked back at Grace. She wanted to say to her, “I’ve been sacked. I’m the victim of . . .” But what was she the victim of? A palace coup was perhaps the best way of describing it. Or maybe she should call it a putsch, which had a more strongly pejorative air to it, a hint of violent overthrow. That was perhaps overstating matters a bit . . .

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

3 9

“I’ve been—”

Grace interrupted her. “I think he’s tired,” she said. “Look, his eyes are shutting. There he goes.”

No, thought Isabel. I’m not going to tell her. I shall keep this humiliation private. Then, later this year, I shall simply announce that I have given up the editorship of the Review, which will be true, and if anybody should ask the reason I shall tell them. But until then I shall continue as before.

Grace now turned to Isabel. “Sorry, you’ve been what?”

“I’ve been thinking of going into town,” said Isabel. “If you’re happy enough looking after Charlie.”

Grace reassured her that this would be fine.

“Thank you,” said Isabel, and left the kitchen, lest Grace should see the tears that had come into her eyes. She had never been dismissed before and was unused to the particular form of pain it entailed. It was as bad as being left by a lover, or almost as bad, she thought, and in her case she did not even depend on the tiny salary she drew as editor, an honorarium really. What, she wondered, would it be like to lose the job that brought food to the family table, as happened to people all the time? That was a sobering thought, sufficient to forestall the self-pity of one in her position—and it did.

C H A P T E R F O U R

E

SHE WALKED INTO TOWN. Isabel very rarely took her green Swedish car into the city because of parking problems. She suspected, though, that she would use it more now that Charlie had arrived; babies required such a quantity of paraphernalia that the car, she thought, would become more and more tempting. She believed in public transport, and acted accordingly, but she was not one to become obsessed with the issue of her carbon footprints, or to lecture others on theirs. And the green Swedish car, she reminded herself, was green in another sense—unlike those intimidating machines which some people drove; those monsters with their tanklike bulk from which small, urban people stared down. Isabel had read of a man who had entered on a private crusade against these vehicles, attach-ing notes to their windscreens telling their owners just how irre-sponsible their choice of car was. She could understand that, even if she could never do it herself: it was one thing to think such things, another to tell other people what one thought.

But concern for the environment was not the only reason she chose to go by foot that morning; she wanted to put her thoughts in order, and it would be easier to do that while walking, making her way across the Meadows, the large park that T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

4 1

divided the Old Town of Edinburgh from its southern suburbs.

She had taken that path so many times before, and in so many moods. She remembered once, after a concert in the Queen’s Hall, she had walked home fighting back tears and had been stopped by a young woman and asked if she was all right. Those tears had been for the impossibility of her relationship with Jamie, whom she had seen during the concert intermission with a young woman she had assumed to be his girlfriend. It had never occurred to her then that not all that long afterwards they would become lovers and she would have his son. She would not have believed it; would have considered it utterly impossible. And now . . .

Nor would she have dreamed, she thought, that she would be walking across the Meadows, brooding with bitterness over her dismissal from the job to which she had devoted so much.

This would not have occurred to her because she would never have imagined that anybody else would actually want to be the editor of the Review. Nor would she have imagined that anybody would have thought that she had done the job badly. She had not. She had made a success of it, and had taken very little for her efforts.

Well, now it had happened and she wondered whether she should simply accept her dismissal as a fait accompli, or whether she should fight back. One thing she could do was write to Professor Lettuce, asking him to explain exactly why he thought a change of editor would be a good thing. Would Christopher Dove adopt a different editorial policy, and if so, how would that policy differ from her own? Of course he would find the words to deal with that by talking about something else and not answering her questions—he was very skilled at that—

so perhaps it would simply be a waste of time.

She reached the start of Jawbone Walk, at the entrance to 4 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h which giant inverted whale jaws served as an arch. Many Scots had been whalers, and these bones had been presented to the city by Shetland and Fair Isle knitters who had used them in an exhibition in the nineteenth century. Isabel thought that knitting and whaling did not sit together well; she did not like this reminder of something that she would have preferred to forget—our relentless pursuit of those gentle creatures, almost to the point of extinction. But the city was full of uncomfortable reminders of how things in the past were otherwise than one might wish they had been: memorials to wars which should never have been fought, statues of men who presided over so many remote cruelties—that was what came of having an imperial past. And Scotland had been an active participant in all that, supplying many of the soldiers, the engineers, and the officials who kept that vast imperial conceit going; nor did one have to look far to see the reminders. Old battles . . .

I’ll fight back, she thought. I’ll write to the publishing company and tell them that I’m being unfairly dismissed. There are industrial tribunals, are there not, and these could order my reinstatement; but are they intended to protect people like me?

Somehow I think not.

By the time she reached the High Street and had begun her descent of the Mound, Isabel’s mood had changed and she had resolved that she would do nothing. If Christopher Dove wanted the editorship, then she would let him have it. She needed neither the money—pitiful though the salary was—nor the work itself. There were other, more rewarding things to do, she had decided, than to sit in her study and read the manuscripts of obscure philosophers at remote universities. There was Charlie to be looked after; there were friendships to be cultivated; there were trips to be made to places that she had long T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

4 3

wanted to visit. She could take Charlie—small babies were easy to travel with, she had been told, by comparison with older children. She could make that long-awaited trip to her cousin Mimi McKnight in Dallas. It had been years since she had been to Texas, and when Mimi had come to Scotland the previous year she had pressed an invitation on her, as she always did.

These thoughts occupied her all the way down the Mound and over the brow of George Street. Then, after a brisk walk down Queen Street, during which she thought of quite other matters, she found herself outside the auction rooms of Lyon & Turnbull. The rooms were busier than they had been the previous day, and now, on the final day of viewing, were crowded with those who had left it to the last minute. There would be more tomorrow—people who decided on the morning of the sale that they would go for something after all, who might just have stumbled across the catalogue and seen an item they wanted. Then there would be the impulse buyers, who decided to bid without even inspecting in advance the item under the hammer, and who would crane their necks to get a better view of the lot from over the heads of the seated bidders.

The McInnes picture had been moved, and for a moment Isabel wondered whether it had been withdrawn. That sometimes happened; impulsive sellers had their regrets as much as impulsive buyers did. But then she saw it, in the more prominent place that had been found for it, alongside a large William Gillies landscape, a picture of lowland hills in the attenuated colours of late summer. Scotland was a country of just those shades, thought Isabel, looking at the Gillies; faded blues, patches of red and purple where the heather grew, the grey of scree on exposed hillsides.

She looked at the McInnes and knew immediately that she 4 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h had to bid for it. It might have been different if she had not owned the smaller painting, the inspiration, perhaps, for this one. But now this picture spoke to her directly and she would bid for it. She swallowed hard. Isabel was used to giving large sums of money away, but not to spending them on herself. Now she was going to spend a considerable sum which could do so much good elsewhere. Scottish Opera had written to her recently about money, and the Meningitis Research Trust, and the University of Edinburgh . . . There were so many good causes, and she was about to spend money on a painting.

“Very interesting. Very nice.”

She turned round sharply.

“Guy!”

The man standing behind Isabel bowed his head in greet-ing, a rather old-fashioned gesture, she thought, but exactly right. Guy Peploe ran the Scottish Gallery in Dundas Street together with Robin McClure, and Isabel knew them both.

Both were the sons of painters, and Isabel had examples of both fathers’ work in the house.

She smiled at Guy. He reminded her in a way of Jamie, of whom he could have been an older version; the same dark hair, kept short, the same strong features, the same good looks unconscious of themselves. And did he know? she wondered.

Word had got round Edinburgh quickly enough about her pregnancy and Charlie, but there were still people who had not heard, who would be taken aback even if they did not disapprove.

“I take it that you . . . that everybody’s well?” enquired Guy.

And Isabel knew that he knew.

“Charlie’s doing very well,” she said. “Getting bigger.”

“That’s what happens,” said Guy. “My children did too.”

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

4 5

“And . . .” He searched for a name. He had seen him, that young man of hers; what was his name?

“Jamie is busy,” Isabel said. “And Charlie is making him busier.”

That settled that, thought Isabel. It was understandable that people should speculate as to whether Jamie had stood by her, but it still caused her minor irritation that they should. Of course, that was one of the uses of marriage; it made it clear that the father intended to honour his commitments.

She pointed at the painting. “Are you . . . ?” She paused. It was always awkward in the saleroom when one encountered a friend looking at the same item. One would not want to bid against a friend, but at the same time one hoped that the friend would feel the same compunction.

Guy shook his head. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re not going to go for this. Are you?”

Isabel looked at the painting again. She wanted it.

“I think so.”

Guy paged through his catalogue. “The estimate is a bit low,” he said. “But it’s difficult to tell. His works don’t come up very often these days. In fact, I can’t remember when I last saw one in the sales. It must have been years ago. Shortly after he died.”

He moved forward to examine the painting more closely.

“Interesting. I think this is Jura, which is where he died. It’s rather poignant to think of him sitting there painting that bit of sea over there and not knowing that it was more or less where he was going to drown. It’s rather like painting one’s deathbed.”

Isabel thought about this for a moment. How many of us knew the bed in which we would die, or even wanted to know?

Did it help to have that sort of knowledge? She stared at the 4 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h painting. In the past she had never worried about her own death—whenever it would be—but now, with Charlie to think about, she felt rather differently about it. She wanted to be there for Charlie; she wanted at least to see him grow up. That must be the hardest thing about having children much later in life—as happened sometimes when a man remarried at, say, sixty-five and fathered a child by a younger wife. He might make it to eighty-five and see his child grow to adulthood, but the odds were rather against it.

“He was quite young when he died, wasn’t he?” she asked.

“McInnes? Yes. Forty, forty-one, I think.”

Just about what I am now, thought Isabel. More or less my age, and then it was over.

“Why is it that it seems particularly tragic when an artist dies young?” Isabel mused. “Think of all those writers who went early. Wilfred Owen. Bruce Chatwin. Rupert Brooke. Byron.

And musicians too. Look at Mozart.”

“It’s because of what we all lose when that happens,” said Guy. “Owen could have written so much more. He’d just started.

Brooke, too, I suppose, although I was never wild about him.”

“He wrote for women,” said Isabel, firmly. “Women like poets who look like Brooke and who go and die on them. It breaks every female heart.” She paused. “But the biggest tragedy of all was Mozart. Think of what we didn’t get. All that beauty stopped in its tracks. Just like that. And the burial in the rain, wasn’t it? In a pauper’s grave?”

Guy shrugged. “Everything comes to an end, Isabel. You.

Me. The Roman Empire. But I’m sorry that McInnes didn’t get more time. I think that he might have developed into somebody really important. In the league of Cadell, perhaps. Everything was pointing that way. Until . . . well, until it all went wrong.”

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

4 7

“And he drowned?”

“No,” said Guy. “Before that. Just before that. Everything collapsed for him before he went up to that island for the last time, to Jura. I can tell you, if you like.”

Isabel was intrigued. “There’s a place round the corner,” she said. “We could have sandwiches. I’m hungry. It’s something to do with having a baby. One begins to need feeding at very particular times.”

Guy smiled at the thought. “A good idea.” He leaned forward again and peered at the painting. “Odd,” he said. “Odd.”

Isabel looked at him quizzically. “What’s odd?”

“It’s unvarnished,” Guy said, straightening up. “I seem to remember that McInnes always varnished his paintings. He was obsessive about things like that—framing, varnishing, signatures, and so on. This isn’t varnished at all.”

Isabel frowned. “Does that mean that it might not be—”

Guy cut her short. “No, certainly not. This is a McInnes all right. But it’s just a bit odd that he didn’t varnish this one.

Maybe it’s a very late painting and he died before he got it back for varnishing. Some painters sell their work before they varnish it, you know, and of course they can’t varnish it until the paint is dry. That might mean six months, or even more, depending on how thickly the paint is applied. So they sell it to somebody and suggest that they bring it back for varnishing later on. Sometimes people don’t bother.”

“So that’s all?” said Isabel.

“That’s all,” said Guy. “Nothing very significant. Just a bit odd.”

JA M I E CA M E to Isabel’s house most evenings, round about the time that Charlie was due to have his evening feed and bath.

4 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel was pleased that he did this, although she found that he tended to take over, leaving her little, if anything, to do; and what with Grace assuming so much responsibility for him during the day, Isabel sometimes wondered whether she would end up playing no more than a marginal role in the care of her own child. But she was generous about this, and stood back while Jamie performed his fatherly tasks.

“He’ll be ready for solid food any day now,” said Jamie that evening. “Look. If I put this spoon there he seems to want to take it into his mouth.”

“If you put anything there, he’d do that,” said Isabel. “He latched onto the tip of my nose the other day. It was very disconcerting.”

Jamie took the spoon away. “I’ve been reading a book,” he said. “All about feeding babies.”

Isabel said nothing.

“It says, of course, that breast-feeding is by far the best thing to do,” Jamie continued. “Apparently the immune system needs . . .” He stopped himself and looked up.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was tactless. I just wasn’t thinking.”

Isabel tried to smile. “Don’t worry. I know that you didn’t mean . . . didn’t mean to criticise.”

Unlike some, she thought. She had been a member—

briefly—of a mother and baby group in Bruntsfield and she had been given looks of disapproval by one or two of the mothers when she had revealed that she was not feeding Charlie herself.

Those women knew, she thought; they knew that there could be a very good reason for it, but they could not help their zeal. And she had felt guilty, although she knew that it was irrational to feel guilt for something that one could not help. Somebody had T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

4 9

once said to her that people with physical handicaps could feel guilty, as if the failure of a limb to work was the result of some fault of theirs. It had been a salutary experience for her, because she had never before experienced social opprobrium. She had never been a smoker and been frowned at disapprovingly by nonsmokers; she had never been in a minority of colour, and made to feel different, looked down upon unjustly. She had, of course, tried to imagine it, how it felt to be disliked for something one could not help, and had succeeded to an extent; now, in that petty moment of judgement, she had actually felt it.

She stole a glance at Jamie; stole: she did not like him to see her staring at him. There was something particularly appealing in the sight of this young man engaged in the tasks of father-hood. He held Charlie so gently, as if he were cosseting something infinitely fragile, and when he looked down at his son his face broke into a look of tenderness that became, after a second or two, an involuntary smile. It was difficult to explain precisely why this quality of male gentleness—a juxtaposition of strength and tenderness—was so appealing; yet every so often it was caught by a painter or a poet and laid bare.

After Jamie had finished feeding Charlie, they carried him to the bathroom, where his tiny bath had been placed on a table. The infant loved the water and waved his arms in excitement, kicked his legs.

“He’s so long,” said Jamie. “Look how his legs stretch out.

And his little body, with its tummy.” He reached out and placed a finger gently against Charlie’s abdomen, and when he took it away again there was a tiny white mark, which faded quickly.

“And here’s his heart,” he said, placing his finger where he might feel the beating within. “Little ticker. Like a little Swiss watch.”

Isabel laughed. “The naming of parts.”

5 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“Naming of parts?”

“A poem,” she said. “I remember reading it at school. We did war poetry for a few weeks and read an awful lot. There was a poem called ‘Naming of Parts.’ A group of recruits are being told the names of the various bits of the rifle. But what the poet sees is the japonica blossoming in neighbouring gardens, two lovers embracing in the distance, and so on. I thought it a very sad poem.”

Jamie listened. And Isabel thought of Auden, too, or WHA, as she called him, her poet. He had written “Musée des Beaux Arts” about much the same thing; how human suffering always took place against a background of the ordinary—the torturer’s horse scratching itself against a tree, a ship carrying on with its journey, all happening while Icarus plunged into the sea.

Isabel unfolded a towel, ready to wrap around Charlie. “So ordinary life continues,” she said, “while remarkable things happen. Such as angels appearing in the sky.”

Jamie reached carefully under Charlie and lifted him out of the shallow water. “Angels?”

“Yes. There’s a poet called Alvarez who wrote a lovely poem about angels appearing overhead. The angels suddenly appear in the sky and are unnoticed by a man cutting wood with a buzz saw. But then it was in Tuscany, where one might expect to see angels at any time.”

“Poetry,” said Jamie. “Even at bath time.”

He handed Charlie over to Isabel, and the baby was embraced in a voluminous towel. Jamie dried his hands and rolled his sleeves back down. Isabel noticed that his forearms were tanned brown, as if he had been out in the open. If I took him to Italy, she thought, he would be as brown as a nut.

Charlie settled quickly, and the two of them returned to the T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

5 1

kitchen. Isabel poured Jamie a glass of wine and began to cook their dinner. This had become a comfortable domestic ritual, which both appreciated, and it occurred to her that it would be simpler, and more satisfactory, if Jamie moved in altogether. As it was, he stayed some nights, and not others, and on the nights that he was not there she had begun to feel alone, even with Charlie snuffling and occasionally crying in his cot. But they had decided, each separately and without discussing it with the other, that it would be best to keep their own places. It was something to do with independence, Isabel thought, but neither of them used that word.

“Your day?” she asked as she took a saucepan out of the cupboard.

“Uneventful.”

“Nothing at all?”

“A rehearsal for Richard Neville-Towle’s concert. Ludus Baroque. I told you about it. At the Canongate Kirk. Are you going to come?”

Isabel put the saucepan on the stove. “Yes. It’s in my diary.”

Jamie picked up that day’s Scotsman newspaper and folded it neatly. He noticed that the crossword had been completed.

“And your day?” he enquired. Isabel hesitated for a moment, and Jamie noticed. Concern crept into his voice. “Something happened?”

Isabel looked blankly at the saucepan. She had started to make a roux and the butter had almost melted; only a tiny mountain showed in a yellow sea. “Fired,” she said. “Dismissed.” She stirred the molten butter briefly, causing the last part of the mountain to fall into the sea.

“I don’t understand.”

“From my post,” she said. And then she turned to him and 5 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h smiled. “You’re having dinner, you see, with the ex- editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. Or soon to be ex. My post is to be taken away and given to somebody else. To a certain Professor Christopher Dove, professor of philosophy at the University of . . .

someplace in London.” She felt immediately guilty about that description. Isabel did not approve of snobbery and it was rife in academic circles, where older and richer institutions looked down on their newer and poorer brethren; rife and pervasive—

with published lists which established the pecking order: Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, Cambridge, jostling one another in rivalry, while below them, almost beneath their notice, the struggling local universities with their overworked staffs and their earnest students. She should not have said someplace in London because that was precisely what some people would say from higher up the tree. “I mean the University of—”

Jamie interrupted her. He had been staring at her, open-mouthed. Now he said, “They can’t.”

“They can, and they have.” She told him about Professor Lettuce and his letter. She mentioned the inept attempt at the friendly postscript; Jamie winced. She tried to remain even-voiced—she did not want him to know how much she had been hurt—but he could tell. He rose to his feet and came to her, putting his arm about her shoulder.

“Isabel . . .”

She put a finger to his lips. “I’m all right. I really am. I don’t mind.”

“You’re playing the glad game.”

She looked at him and shook her head. “The best of all possible worlds . . .”

“Yes. Pretending that everything is fine, when it isn’t.” He paused. “How dare they? You work and work for that stupid journal of theirs . . .”

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

5 3

“Not stupid.”

“For that stupid journal of theirs. For nothing, or almost nothing. And this is the thanks you get.”

She returned to her roux, moving the saucepan slightly off the heat and beginning to sift flour into the mixture. “But that’s the way of the world, Jamie. It happens to just about everybody.

You work all your life for some company and at the end of the day you find somebody breathing down your neck, itching to get into your office and sit at your desk. And any thanks that you get are not really meant. Not really.”

Jamie sat down again. He was thinking of a brass player of his acquaintance whose lip had gone with the onset of middle age. The world of music could be cruel too; one either reached the high notes or one did not. “So you’re not going to fight back?

You’re not going to write to . . . to whoever it is who owns it?

Didn’t you say that there was a publishing company somewhere? Surely you could write to them, to the managing director or whatever?”

Isabel stirred the roux. There were people who never got lumps in their roux; she was not one of them. “The publishers have very little interest in the Review, ” she said. “They acquired it with a building. They tried to sell it once and would probably do the same again, if somebody came along with a large enough offer. No, they’ve got no desire to interfere.”

“So they don’t care?”

Isabel thought about this. It would not be correct to say that they did not care—they would care if the journal started to make a loss. But as long as it ticked over and made even a minuscule profit, they were content to let the board get on with it. She explained this to Jamie.

For a few minutes after that, neither spoke. Isabel stirred her roux, which was coming together well now; Jamie fiddled 5 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h with The Scotsman, folding and unfolding a corner, the obituary page. “He had a profound knowledge of aviation,” he read. “And his sense of the dramatic was legendary. Once, while speaking at a dinner, he announced that he proposed to buy an airline that . . .” There were such colourful lives in obituaries that the lives of the living seemed so much tamer, as did their names.

Who would announce the intention of buying an airline? Presumably somebody did. People—individuals—owned airlines, just as they owned ships and tall buildings and vast tracts of land; or nothing at all, as Gandhi had done at his death. As a boy, Jamie had been given a book about Gandhi by an idealistic aunt, who had shown him the picture of Gandhi’s possessions at his death: a pair of spectacles, a white dhoti, a modest pair of sandals . . . But when you leave this world you don’t even take that, Jamie, she had said; remember that. And he had stared at the picture, and stared at it, and had wanted, for some reason, to cry, because he felt sorry for Gandhi, who had owned only those few things and was now dead.

“Why don’t you sue them?” he asked.

Isabel was about to sample a small quantity of roux. She paused, the spoon halfway to her mouth. “Sue them for what?

For unfair dismissal?”

“Yes,” said Jamie. “Make them pay for getting rid of you.

Make them pay for it.”

“It’s not all that simple,” said Isabel. “And I’m not even sure whether I’m a proper employee. It’s very much a part-time job.”

Jamie was not convinced. “You could try at least.”

Isabel shook her head. “It would be demeaning. And I don’t like the thought of litigation. I just don’t.”

“Go on, Isabel,” he said. “Do it. Don’t just let yourself be walked over. Do it. Stick up for yourself.”

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

5 5

“I couldn’t.”

Jamie shrugged. “Well, think about it. Please just think about it.”

“All right,” she said. “I will.”

And she did, later that night, with Jamie beside her in her darkened room, she thought about it; and watched him, his arm across the pillow, so beautiful, she felt. If she did what he suggested, she could engage the most expensive, eloquent advocates to act for her, the cream of the Scottish bar. She could pay to have a spectacular day in court, in which her expensive lawyers would run rings around an inadequately represented Review. But she put the thought out of her mind because it was not her intention that she should ever, not even once, misuse the financial power which she had acquired through the laws of inheritance. If she had been wealthy through her own efforts it might be different; but she was not, and she would not depart from the code she had set for herself. It was hard, very hard sometimes; like the rule that a mountaineer makes that he should climb a certain distance each day, although the air is so thin and it is hard, so hard, to make the muscles do what one wants them to do.

C H A P T E R F I V E

E

DO YOU KNOW, I’ve never been to one of these before? My first time. I feel a bit like a schoolboy going into a bar.”

Jamie, seated beside Isabel, looked about the saleroom. A large number of people had turned up, thanks in part to the publicity attached to the sale of a private collection of Scots Colourists. This collection had been put together by a business-man who had done well with a small oil company and who had attracted attention by his colourful—and tactless—remarks.

The oil wells were on the shores of the Caspian, in one of those republics that people are not quite sure about—where it is and who runs it—and had suddenly dried up. There had been mutterings about geological reports and their manipulation at the other end, and the share price had plummeted. The sale of the Colourists was the result, along with the sale of a Highland sporting estate and a small fleet of expensive vintage cars. Of course people were sympathetic, but secretly delighted, as they are whenever those who boast of their wealth take a tumble.

The Colourists were prominently illustrated in the first few pages of the catalogue—landscapes, still lifes, a portrait of a T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

5 7

woman with an elaborate feathered hat—and there they were, in the expensive flesh, hanging on either side of the auctioneer’s podium. For the handful of saleroom voyeurs who came to auctions for the excitement of the high prices, this was the highlight of the day; these were the people who had taken the front row of seats although they had no intention of bidding for anything. They liked to watch the saleroom staff take telephone bids, connected to distant purchasers in exotic places, nodding to the auctioneer as the bidding went higher.

“Don’t wave to friends,” said Isabel. “Unless you want a painting.”

Jamie folded his hands on his lap. “Surely not?”

“It’s happened,” said Isabel, adding, “I think.”

The auction started. Isabel noticed Guy Peploe seated a few rows behind them; she smiled at him, and Guy made a thumbs-up sign for good luck. Now the Colourists started to fall: three hundred and twenty thousand pounds, two hundred and eighty thousand . . . Jamie let out a little whistle and nudged Isabel.

“Who’s got that sort of money?” he asked. “Galleries?”

“Even if it’s a gallery it will be for a private individual in the long run,” Isabel whispered. “Rich collectors.”

“Honest?”

“Probably. People with dishonest money tend to go for different things, don’t they?” She realised, as she spoke, that she did not really know what happened to dishonest money. She was a philosopher, who thought about what we should do and what we should not do, and yet what personal experience enabled her to speak with authority on these matters? She led a very sheltered life in Edinburgh. How many wicked people did she actually know? Professor Christopher Dove? Professor Lettuce? She smiled at the thought. If Dove was wicked, and she 5 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h really should give him the benefit of the doubt on that, then his wickedness was surely of a very tame nature, confined to academic machinations, jockeying for position on committees and the like. And yet wickedness like that appeared mild only because it occurred in a rarefied context; Trollope’s scheming clergymen may not have resorted to guns and knives—those were not the weapons of their milieu—yet, as people, they were probably just as bad as any Sicilian mafioso for whom the gun, rather than the snide remark, was the immediate weapon to hand.

After the Colourists had all been sold, a number of people rose and made their way out of the saleroom. That was the end of the excitement for them; there would be no more sums like that bandied about. Isabel and Jamie watched the paintings disposed of, and there were one or two highlights. An unflatter-ing portrait of a dancer, painted in the style of Botero by a Russian artist, went for forty-five pounds to a small man in an overcoat; a picture of a stag in the Scottish Highlands, by an unknown nineteenth-century hand, made the auctioneer wince—a momentary lapse which drew laughter from the crowd. It was an unfortunate slip, even if entirely understandable, but it did nothing to inhibit two telephone bidders who of course had not seen the wince and who bid against each other to drive the price up well above the estimate.

Then the McInnes came up, and Jamie reached over and touched Isabel lightly on the arm. She took his hand and gave it a squeeze. Her palm was slightly moist. But if I were bidding, I would be shaking, he thought.

“Nervous?” he whispered.

“No,” she said. And then a moment later, “Yes, of course.”

The bidding started low. The house had a bid in hand which had been put in for a client, and then it climbed. Isabel came in T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

5 9

after the fourth bid, with a bid of ten thousand pounds, but that was immediately raised by a telephone bidder. Then somebody from the back of the hall put in a bid and the price went up another thousand. Jamie turned in his seat to see who it was, but there were heads in the way. Isabel now raised her card again and a thousand pounds was added. There were consulta-tions on the telephone and a nod—another thousand.

At twenty thousand, Isabel was the highest bidder. The auctioneer looked up from his desk and surveyed the room.

“It’s going to be you,” whispered Jamie. “You’re going to win.”

“I’m not sure . . .” she began.

Jamie was alarmed. “Not sure you want it?”

The auctioneer glanced at Isabel and then looked over her head towards the back. He nodded at the bidder. “Twenty-one thousand pounds.”

“No,” said Isabel, slipping her numbered bidding card into her pocket.

The auctioneer looked at her enquiringly and she shook her head. Then he looked at his two colleagues with the telephones: both indicated that they were going no further. The auctioneer repeated the bid from the back and then dropped his hammer, a short tap, his hand covering the small wooden head.

Jamie looked at Isabel, who was reaching for the bag at her feet. “Bad luck,” he whispered.

Isabel shrugged. “That’s what auctions are about. They tell us something rather important, don’t you think?”

“That what matters—”

Isabel completed the sentence for him. “Is money. Yes. It doesn’t matter how much somebody likes something or deserves to get it—it’s money that decides things. A simple lesson.” She stuffed her catalogue into the bag.

Bidding had started on the next item, and they waited until 6 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h this had finished before they rose to their feet and began to make their way towards the back of the room. A couple who had been standing at the end of the row quickly took their vacant seats, smiling thankfully at Jamie, who had looked back at them.

Isabel turned to Jamie. “Did you see who got it?” she asked.

“There were heads in the way,” he said. “But it was somebody over there.” He pointed to the back, which was lined with thirty or forty people who had not managed to find a seat. “One of them, I think.”

Isabel looked at the crowd of people: any one of them could have been the bidder.

“Why do you want to know?” asked Jamie, from beside her.

“Pure curiosity,” she said. And she realised that there was no reason for her to know who had outbid her.

She stopped. There was a familiar face in the crowd, a man standing on the edge, examining his catalogue.

“Peter?”

Her friend, Peter Stevenson, looked up from his catalogue and smiled at Isabel. “I saw you,” he said quietly—the bidding had begun on another painting. “I saw you bidding for that McInnes. You must have wanted it an awful lot.”

Isabel made a gesture of acceptance. “All’s fair in love and auctions.”

Love. Peter glanced at Jamie, who was standing behind her: he thoroughly approved of the relationship between Isabel and Jamie and had once, at a dinner party, spoken up when somebody had made a pointed remark about the disparity in age between Isabel and her new boyfriend. Envy, he had muttered, sotto voce but just loud enough to be heard by the entire table and to bring a blush of shame to the countenance of Isabel’s detractor. Peter’s wife, Susie, had looked at him sharply, but she, like most others at the table, thought his comment well placed.

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

6 1

“Well, I’m sorry,” whispered Peter. “Walter Buie obviously wanted it more than you did.”

Isabel was interested. “He was the other bidder?”

“Yes,” said Peter. “He left immediately afterwards. But he was standing quite close to me. Just over there.” He looked at Isabel enquiringly. “Do you know him?”

Isabel thought. The name was vaguely familiar, but probably just because it was a rather unusual Scottish name. She had met Buies before, but not this one.

“He’s a lawyer,” said Peter. “He was with one of the large firms, but got fed up and set up by himself doing little bits and pieces for a few private clients. Modest stuff. I don’t think he liked the pace in the firm—you know what those legal firms can be like these days. He lives quite close to us in the Grange. I often see him taking his dog for a walk. Nice man. Not such a nice dog.”

“Well, he wanted it, obviously,” said Isabel. “Is he a collector?”

Peter put a finger to his lips. “We’re making a bit of a noise,”

he whispered. “I’m getting one or two looks.” He leaned over and whispered in Isabel’s ear. “Buie is a Jura name. His father probably came from there, or somewhere nearby. There are lots of Buies on the island. McInnes painted on Jura, didn’t he?”

Isabel indicated that she was going to leave. “Come and see us,” she whispered to Peter. “Bring Susie to have a look at Charlie. Any time.” She paused. “Why are you here, Peter?”

“Susie’s birthday is coming up,” he said. “There’s a little watercolour coming up a bit later on. Tiny one—this big. I might go up to eighty pounds!”

Isabel smiled. “Be careful.”

Jamie followed her out of the saleroom and out onto Broughton Street. He looked at his watch; he had to be at the 6 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Edinburgh Academy in half an hour to give a lesson. Isabel could not linger either; Charlie would need feeding soon and although Grace was looking after him, she wanted to see him. It was strange; a separation of just a few hours made her anxious.

Was this what being a parent was going to be like? A life of anxiety, of fretting about little things? Have a child and give a hostage to fortune; yes, but have any human link, any friendship, and a hostage was given.

Jamie explained that he would have to go; it would take him fifteen minutes to walk to the school and he liked to have a few minutes in hand. Then he inclined his head back in the direction of the saleroom. “You could have gone higher, you know.”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “I could have. But I didn’t.”

Jamie looked into Isabel’s eyes. “Just how well-off are you, Isabel?”

The question took Isabel by surprise. He had not spoken in a hostile manner, but it was a potentially hostile question.

“I’ve got enough to get by,” she said. “That should perhaps be obvious—not that I want it to be.”

Jamie continued to look into her eyes. He was experiencing a strange feeling: a feeling that she was his but not his. And at the root of it, he suspected, was the fact that their positions were so different. Everything about their relationship, in fact, involved contrasts; she was older than he was; she had so much more money; she lived on the south side of the city and he on the north; he was dark and she tended to the fairer. Jack Spratt and his wife.

Nothing was said for a while. “You’re not answering me,” he said eventually.

She remained patient. “Well, it’s a question that I don’t have to answer.” She spoke quietly. “And why do you want to know, anyway? I don’t ask you what you earn, do I?”

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

6 3

“I’m quite happy to tell you,” he said. “But, anyway, you’re right. It’s none of my business. I shouldn’t have asked.”

She looked at him. She might have been cross, but could not find it within her. She could not be cross with him; she could not. You can say anything to me, she said to herself; anything at all. Because we’re lovers. And I love you, Jamie, every bit of you; I love you so much.

She reached out and touched him. She swept the hair back off his forehead and then she slipped her hand down to the back of his neck. “There are shares in a company,” she said. “They came from my mother. The company had land and buildings in Louisiana, and in Mobile too. It did well.”

“You don’t have to tell me this,” said Jamie. “I’m sorry—”

“Eleven million pounds,” said Isabel. “Depending on the value of the dollar.”

Jamie was silent. He stared at her in astonishment.

“Is your curiosity satisfied?” she asked.

Jamie seemed flustered. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. I don’t know why I did. I really don’t.”

Isabel took his hand. “Could you telephone the school and tell them that you can’t come in?” she said on impulse. “We could go home.”

He shook his head.

“Go on,” she urged him.

He shook his head again. “Siren,” he said.

They kissed, and she watched him for a few moments as he walked down Broughton Street. He must have sensed her gaze, as he turned round and waved to her before continuing. She blew him a kiss, which he did not return.

Isabel turned away and began to walk along Queen Street.

The late-morning air was bright, the air warm for the east of Scotland. She was worried that she had divulged something that 6 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h she should have kept private. A few minutes earlier she had thought of the giving of hostages. Well, she said to herself, I’ve just given another one.

I S A B E L A R R I V E D H O M E to find that Grace had taken Charlie out into the garden in his pram, and was sitting under the sycamore tree at the back. Isabel peered down at Charlie, who was sleeping on his back, his head shaded by the pram’s retractable hood. His mouth was slightly open and his right hand was holding the silk-lined edge of the blanket, the fingers where they were when he had fallen asleep.

“Something seemed to be bothering him this morning,”

said Grace. “He was all niggly and he wouldn’t settle. Girned a lot. Then he became a bit better. I gave him some gripe water.”

Isabel stayed where she was, bent over the pram, her face just above Charlie, but she looked sharply at Grace. “You gave him gripe water,” she said evenly. “And?”

“And it did the trick,” said Grace. “No more girning. Well, no more after about ten, fifteen minutes.”

Grace used the Scots word girn, which Isabel always thought so accurately described the sound of a child’s crying.

But it was gripe water that concerned her. “I didn’t know we had any gripe water,” she said. And then, straightening up, she continued, “We don’t, do we? We don’t have it.”

“I bought some,” said Grace. “A few weeks ago.”

Isabel walked round the side of the pram. “And he’s had it before?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Grace. “Quite a few times. It really is effective.”

Isabel took a breath. She rarely felt angry, but now she did, T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

6 5

aware of the emotion welling up within her—a hot, raw feeling.

“But gripe water contains gin, doesn’t it? For God’s sake. Gin!”

Grace looked at her in astonishment. “Not anymore! It used to, I believe. I had it when I was a child, my mother told me.

She said that she would take a swig or two herself as well. But that’s years ago. You know how fussy people are these days.”

“So what does it have in it now?” asked Isabel. “I like to know what medicines Charlie’s taking, you know. As his mother I feel . . .” She knew that she sounded rude, but she could not help herself. And it did not help that Grace seemed so unapologetic.

“But it’s not a medicine,” said Grace. “It’s herbal. I think that the one I bought has fennel and ginger and some other things. It soothes the stomach, which is what they niggle about.” She looked up at Isabel. “You’re not worried about it, are you?”

Isabel turned away. She struggled to control her voice, and when she spoke she felt that it sounded quite normal. “No, I’m not worried. It’s just that I’d like to know if you give him anything unusual. I just feel that I should know.”

Grace said nothing, and Isabel did not look at her to gauge her reaction. She did not want to argue with Grace because she felt that it would be wrong for her to do so when Grace was her employee. That gave her an advantage over the other woman which she should not use; Grace could not fight back on equal terms, and that was unfair. But at the same time, it was not unreasonable of her, she felt, to insist on being asked before Charlie was given things like gripe water. Fennel! Ginger! Un-named herbs!

She began to move away, but Grace had something to say, and she stopped.

6 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“Cat telephoned.”

In the past, Cat had telephoned regularly. Then, with the breach in their relations, these calls had stopped; the significance of this was not lost on Grace, who said, “Yes. She actually telephoned.”

Isabel turned round. “What about?”

“An invitation. She wants you to go to dinner with her.” She paused, watching Isabel’s reaction.

Isabel decided to be cool about this. “Oh? That’s kind of her.”

“Jamie too,” said Grace. “She wants him to go too.”

Isabel’s manner remained cool, although this was a very unexpected development. “And Charlie?” she asked.

Grace shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “She didn’t mention him.”

Isabel went into the house, into her study. For a few minutes she just stood there, inwardly seething. Grace had no right to take over Charlie like that. She was acting almost as if he were her baby, not Isabel’s. And it irritated her, too, that the other woman should behave as if she knew more about babies than Isabel did; there had been many instances of that, sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle. Isabel knew that Grace had always thought of her as somebody who was otherworldly, somebody who did not really know how things worked. Isabel had ignored this in the past, but she found it hard to do that now.

She sat down. Things were going wrong: the job, her failure of nerve in the auction, that odd exchange with Jamie over money, Grace giving Charlie gripe water, and now this odd invitation from Cat. Why would Cat invite Jamie? To interfere? To try to get him back?

Isabel looked down at the floor. The carpet in her study was an old red Belouchi that had been in the house for as long as she T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

6 7

could remember. She and her brother had played on it as a child. He had used it to make a tent from which he had shot rubber-tipped arrows in her direction. One had hit her in the eye and he had been punished by their father. He had blamed her for his punishment, for telling on him. I’ll hate you forever, he had hissed at her. Wait and see. I’ll hate you forever. And now, after all those years, she hardly ever saw him, and he never wrote. It was not the Belouchi, of course; it was something else, something private and nothing to do with Isabel herself. Children hated for a very short time; they forgot, sometimes after a few minutes, while adults could keep hatreds going indefinitely, across generations.

She thought of Jamie. It would have been so much simpler if he had been her own age and she could have accepted his proposal of marriage there and then. It was bad luck, just bad luck to fall in love with the wrong person. People did that all the time; they fell in love with somebody who for one reason or another could never be theirs. And then they served their sentence, the sentence of unrequited, impossible love, which could go on for years and years, with no remission for good behaviour, none at all.

She looked up at the white expanse of ceiling. In her mind the most worrying thing about Cat’s invitation was this: Jamie had recovered from Cat—Isabel thought of it as a recovery—

but if he were to spend any time in her company his feelings for her might be reignited. It could happen. So should she conveniently forget to mention the invitation to him? Or should she go further and tell Cat that he did not want to come? For a short time the dilemma which this posed made Isabel forget her worries. If she simply did not pass on the invitation, she was merely omitting to do something; if she went further and told Cat that 6 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h he did not want to come then she was actually telling a lie. As to the omission, she was not sure what duty one had to pass on information to another. If A says to B please tell C something or other, does B have any obligation to do so? It would depend, thought Isabel, on whether B had agreed to take on the duty of passing on the message. If he had not, then a liberal individual-istic philosopher would probably say that he did not have to exert himself. That was liberal individualism, of course, with which Isabel did not always agree. Don’t go swimming with a liberal individualist, she told herself; he might not save you if you started to drown. No, liberal individualism was not an attractive philosophy. Except now. Now it offered a very attractive solution to her problem.

I’ll discuss the question with Jamie, she decided. And then she thought: How can I be so stupid? Oh, Christopher Dove, if only you could hear this interior monologue. If only. And you too, Professor Lettuce, you great slug!

She felt much better.

C H A P T E R S I X

E

TWO DAYS AFTER THE AUCTION, Isabel was seated at her desk, halfheartedly paging through a submission for the journal— not a good one, she thought, but she always read to the end, no matter how tedious. She had not done anything about Cat’s invitation, and was still uncertain just what she would do about it; so when the telephone rang she looked at it for a few moments, uncertain whether to answer. It could be Cat, in which case she would be put in an immediate spot for having ignored the invitation.

She picked up the receiver and gave her number. Cat always interrupted her if she did that. “I know your number,”

she would say. “I’ve just dialled it.” But, rather to her relief, it was not her niece, but Guy Peploe.

“I’m sorry that you didn’t get your picture,” he said. “I was crossing my fingers for you.”

“That’s what happens at auctions,” Isabel said. “And there’ll be another chance some day, no doubt.”

Guy laughed. “True words,” he said. “In fact, there’s a chance right now, if you’re interested. Not that picture, of course, but another McInnes. Interested?”

7 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel said that she was. But was it at auction?

“No,” said Guy. “Somebody has brought it in to the gallery and wants us to sell it on commission.”

Isabel thought for a moment. She was interested in seeing it, but she wondered whether she would want to buy it. The picture she had missed at auction had been a special one, as far as she was concerned, because of its link with the small study that she already owned; she had no particular desire to own a McInnes just because it was a McInnes.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll take a look at it some time over the next few days”

Guy hesitated at the other end of the line. “Sorry to press you,” he said, “but I think that you should come down more or less immediately. I’ve got somebody coming in later this afternoon to look at a number of other things who may well go for this one too. He buys for a collector in Palm Beach. This is exactly the sort of thing that his man in Florida likes.”

Isabel looked at her watch and then glanced down at the manuscript she was reading. “Look, Guy, I’m in the middle of something really tedious. It’ll take me about forty minutes to finish and then I can come. And can I bring Charlie?”

Charlie, she was told, would be very welcome: one could never start them on art too young. Isabel then returned to the paper she was reading. She had lost the thread of the argument, which was all about individual autonomy within the family, and had to go back several paragraphs to regain it. There was something wrong with this paper, she thought; something odd that she could not quite put her finger on. Then it occurred to her: the author did not believe what he was writing. He was making all the right arguments, saying all the right things, but he simply did not believe it. She looked at the title page, where his name T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

7 1

and institution were typed. Yes. It was just as she thought. That particular department of philosophy was known for its ideologi-cal position; one could not even get an interview for a job, let alone a job, unless one adopted a radical position. This poor man was uttering the shibboleths, but his heart was obviously not in them: he was a secret conservative! In this paper he had argued against the family, calling it a threat to individual autonomy, a repressive institution. That was the party line, but he probably loved his family and believed that the best way of growing up adjusted and happy was to have a mother and a father. But that was heresy in certain circles, and very unfashionable.

She finished the paper and wrote what she thought would be a quick note to the author.

I shall pass your article on to the editorial board for a verdict. I am about to give up the editorship of this journal, and so you will probably be dealing, in due course, with the new editor, who will be Christopher Dove, whom you may know. I am sure that he will be very sympathetic to the argument that you put forward in this paper, as he has often expressed views similar to your own. I think he believes them, but, and forgive me if I am wrong, I get the feeling that your heart is not behind the arguments you present. Not your heart. You see, there are occasions when a theoretically defensible position, based, say, on an argument of individual rights and equality, goes completely against what we see about us in the world. And what we see about us in the world is that the conventional family, where there is a loving mother and a loving father, provides by far the best envi-7 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h ronment for the raising of children. That’s the way it has been for thousands of years. And should we not perhaps take into account what the wisdom of thousands of years teaches us? Or are we so clever that we can ignore it? That is not to say that there are all sorts of other homes in which children may grow up very secure and very happy. Very loved too. But the recognition of that should not lead us to condemn and thereby weaken the conventional family ideal, which is what you do here.

Do you really mean that? Do you really think that we would be happier if we abandoned the conventional family? I’m sorry, but I don’t think that you do; you’re just saying that you do because it’s the position to take.

She read what she had written, and then read it again. Did she herself believe this? What was she providing for Charlie?

What did she want to provide for Charlie? She reached for her pen and crossed out the final sentence. But that made the letter useless; crossed-out words are still words. So she crumpled the letter up and tossed it into the bin. Then she reached for another sheet of letterhead and wrote: “Thank you. Interesting article. I’ll pass it on to the editorial board. You’ll hear from the new editor. I.D. ed.”

Coward, she said to herself as she rose from her desk. Just like him.

I S A B E L TOO K T H E B U S from Bruntsfield. Charlie slept contentedly in his sling; he had been fed and had shown no signs of colic or any other discomfort. Isabel had found the bottle of gripe water which had been purchased by Grace. She had T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

7 3

moved the bottle to the bathroom cupboard; Grace might find it there if she looked, but Isabel’s act of reshelving it at least made her point. In fact, she thought Grace had picked up on her irritation at her taking Charlie over—that morning she had very pointedly asked Isabel if she minded if she took Charlie out into the garden to walk him round the flowers; previously she had done that without asking.

Charlie slept through the bus journey and was still fast asleep when they entered the Scottish Gallery. Guy Peploe and Robin McClure were in consultation with a client when Isabel went in, but Guy detached himself from the group and came over to greet her.

“It’s downstairs,” he said. “Come with me.” He reached forward and tickled Charlie under the chin. “My own are growing up so quickly. One forgets one used to carry them all the time.”

“Did you use gripe water?” asked Isabel.

Guy thought for a moment. “I think so,” he said. “Doesn’t everybody? It tastes rather nice, if I remember correctly. Very sweet.”

Isabel smiled. “It used to contain gin.”

“Mother’s ruin.”

They made their way downstairs. The lower floor housed three rooms, one given over to jewellery and glass and the other used for overflow exhibitions from the main gallery above.

When they went into the back room, Isabel saw the painting immediately. It was propped up against a wall, directly below a small Blackadder watercolour of a bunch of purple irises.

“That’s it,” said Guy. “It’s a stunner, isn’t it?”

Isabel agreed. The painting was not quite as large as the one in the auction sale, but it was clearly the finer picture, she felt, and Guy, she could tell, agreed.

7 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“It’s—” she began.

“Even better,” he said. “Yes, it is.”

She moved forward to look more closely at the painting. It was a picture of a boy in a small rowboat, on the edge of a shore.

It was clearly Scotland—and somewhere familiar in Scotland, she thought; behind the shore there were buildings of the sort that one sees in the Western Highlands, or on the islands, low, white-painted houses. And then a hillside rising up into low clouds.

“You can almost smell it,” she said. “The peat smoke, the kelp . . .”

“And the whisky,” said Guy, pointing to a small cluster of buildings portrayed on the left of the painting. “This is Jura, you know, as the other painting was. And those are some of the distillery buildings. See them? And there are some of the kegs outside.”

Isabel bent down again and peered at the passage that Guy had indicated. Yes, it was Jura, and that was why it seemed familiar. She had been there on a number of occasions to stay with friends at Ardlussa. That was towards the north of the island; this was to the south, near Craighouse, where the island’s only whisky distillery was.

She stood back from the painting. “What makes this so special?” she asked.

Guy stared at the painting. “Everything,” he said after a while. “Everything comes together in it. And it captures the spirit of the place, doesn’t it? I’ve been on Jura only once, but you know what those west coast islands are like. That light.

That peaceful feeling. There’s nowhere like them.” He paused.

“Not that one wants to romanticise . . .”

Isabel agreed. “And yet, and yet . . . We do live in a rather T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

7 5

romantic country, don’t we? For us, it’s just home, but it’s very dramatic, isn’t it? Rather like living on an opera set.”

They both stood and gazed at the painting for a while. Then Isabel shook her head. “I don’t know, Guy. Or maybe I do.

Maybe not.” He was putting her under no pressure to buy the painting, but she felt that she should explain to him. “It’s just that the other painting had that particular significance for me. I hope you understand.”

Guy reassured her. The other prospective purchaser would almost certainly take the painting. It would leave Scotland, of course, but it was a good thing to share . . . “But again it’s odd,”

he finished. “And getting a little bit odder.”

Isabel frowned. “This one isn’t varnished either?” She bent down again and peered at the painting at close quarters. Charlie, feeling himself being tilted, let out a little murmur, something that sounded like a mew.

“No, it isn’t,” said Guy. “There’s that. But the other thing that puzzles me is that the two paintings should come onto the market one after the other, and within the space of a few days.

That’s a bit surprising, especially when the market has been starved of McInneses for a long time. People tend to hang on to them.”

“Somebody has obviously decided to sell,” said Isabel. “Or they’ve died and their family are disposing of them. You can imagine the scene. Young relatives with no interest in painting.

Highland scenes. Sea. Hills. Not what we need. Let’s sell and take the money.”

“That happens,” said Guy. “But these would appear to be from different sources.”

“Who?”

Guy sighed. “I can’t tell you, I’m afraid. I hope you don’t 7 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h think I’m being unhelpful, but I can’t really disclose who is offering this one. These things are confidential, you see—

clients like it that way.”

Isabel understood. People might not like others to know that they were having to raise money. “Of course.” But how would Guy know that this painting came from a different source if he didn’t know—and the same principle of confidentiality would preclude it—who had consigned the other painting to Lyon & Turnbull?

He saw the question coming. “You’ll be wondering how I know they’re from different places? Well, our client told us that he”—he corrected himself—“that she hadn’t heard about the painting at Lyon & Turnbull. Unless she’s misleading us, which I don’t think she is. In fact, it’s impossible. She’s not the type.”

“I wonder where she got it from?” asked Isabel.

“In this case, I believe she bought it from the artist himself.

Shortly before his death, I think. Sometimes there’s a gallery label,” said Guy. He reached forward and tilted the painting away from the wall. “Look—nothing on the back, apart from that writing over there.” He pointed to where somebody had written, in pencil, jura, with mountains. There was another handwritten line underneath: The boy’s called James.

“That’s McInnes’s writing all right,” said Guy. “I’ve seen our own labels that he scribbled on. Or sometimes he wrote instructions about where the painting was to be delivered. Or where he was staying when he painted it. Sometimes lines of poetry—he liked to put MacDiarmid in. Odd things.”

“MacDiarmid liked that part of Scotland,” said Isabel.

“ ‘Island Funeral.’ That was one of his better efforts, in spite of the flannel. He was a bit of a shocker, you know.”

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

7 7

“But he could . . .”

“Yes, he could,” said Isabel. “He could stop us in our tracks.

That poem about the island funeral makes the hairs on the back of one’s neck stand up.” She paused and remembered. “I went to one once, you know. An island funeral. An aged cousin of my father’s who had married into a family on South Uist. They were Free Presbyterians and there were no prayers. All those dark-suited men standing in a huddle, and the coffin left outside.

They sang psalms, those strange Gaelic psalms, and then they went and buried her in silence with rain coming in from the Atlantic, nothing heavy, just soft rain. And that light. The same light that’s in that painting over there.”

Guy said nothing for a moment. He could see the scene that she was describing, and there was nothing that he could add.

Isabel broke the silence. “Are you sure that this is a McInnes? Are you absolutely sure?”

He was. “I’m pretty certain, Isabel. We wouldn’t offer it as a McInnes if we weren’t. All my colleagues are sure. Robin.

Everybody.”

Isabel wondered how anybody could be certain about anything in the art world. There were all those fake Dalí prints still in circulation—almost mass-produced fakes, like the reproduc-tion paintings turned out to order from Russian studios. If they could do old masters for a couple hundred dollars, then surely with a bit more time they could do something considerably more convincing?

“I see you’re still doubtful,” said Guy. “And yes, there are forgers who will do a very careful job. But one develops an eye for particular painters, you know, and one can just tell. It’s like hearing somebody’s voice. Little things that all add up to an overall impression that this is it.” He paused. “And provenance 7 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h is pretty important. In this case, the person who brought this in knew him. Knew McInnes. We know that she did, and so it all makes sense.”

“All right,” said Isabel. “I was just thinking aloud.”

Guy said that this was reasonable enough. Then, “Do you know much about McInnes? Do you know about what went wrong at the end?”

“He drowned, didn’t he?”

“Yes. Off Jura. But it was very sad, even before that. He had a big exhibition here in Edinburgh—two years’ work. It went on just before the Festival and a whole group of London critics traipsed up for it. They decided to slaughter McInnes because he had given a lecture at the Tate in which he pointed out how the London critics had ignored Scottish artists. He did it quite politely, but he did accuse them of metropolitanism, and that’s the one thing you mustn’t accuse metropolitans of. So they decided to get their own back—in spades. They called him an overrated minor landscape painter. One of them headed his crit

‘Provincial Painting by Numbers.’ They egged one another on.”

Isabel felt outraged. But her outrage had nothing to do with painting by numbers; it was the word provincial. “Provincial!”

“Yes. Exactly. And the effect on McInnes was pretty disastrous. I saw him the day after the first of these notices was published. He was sitting in the Arts Club all by himself, a drink in front of him. I went and had a word with him, but I don’t think that he was taking much in. His hands were shaking. He looked awful.”

Isabel winced. “Poor man. I had a friend who made the mistake of being both an author and thin-skinned. Journalists toss off their cutting remarks without realising the effect they have on the people they’re talking about.”

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

7 9

“There are plenty of people like that,” said Guy. “But it wasn’t just the bad reviews in McInnes’s case. It was the timing.

On virtually the same day that things went wrong with the show, he found out that his wife was having an affair. It all came at once. He was devastated.”

Isabel suddenly thought of Cat. Sexual jealousy was powerful, and that’s what Cat felt about Jamie; she must, even if she had got rid of him in the first place; it was still there, cutting and cutting away.

“So . . . the drowning . . .”

She left the question unfinished. Had it been a suicide? If one wanted to make a death appear like an accident, drowning was probably the best way of doing that. There were seldom any witnesses; it was easy to arrange, especially in a place like the west of Scotland with its tides and currents. But what a lonely death it must be; out in those cold waters, on the edge of the Atlantic, like a burial at sea.

“No,” said Guy. “I don’t think that he killed himself. He went off to Jura after things came apart down here. He left his wife more or less immediately and hid away in a cottage he used to rent up there. Rather like Orwell, in a way, who went off to Jura to write 1984. Anyway, he went up there and a month later it happened. He had a boat which he often took out. That’s why I don’t think it was suicide. It was consistent with the normal pattern of his life up there.”

Charlie was now quite awake and was staring up at Isabel with that intense, slightly puzzled stare that babies fix on their parents. “I’m going to have to feed him,” she said. “I’ve got his bottle here.”

“I’ll get you a chair,” said Guy. “Then, if you don’t mind, I’d better go and speak to those people upstairs again.”

8 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“Of course.”

He fetched a chair and she sat down in a shaft of sunlight that came in from the back window. Like a woman in a Vermeer painting, she thought. Woman with child.

“One last observation,” said Guy. “McInnes’s death wasn’t suicide, as I said. In my view it was something worse. I think of it as murder.”

Isabel looked up sharply; an unfamiliar word in Edinburgh.

“Murder?”

“Yes,” said Guy. “A form of murder. By the critics. They killed him.”

She was relieved; nothing nasty—there was real murder and metaphorical murder. The first of these was a sordid, banal business; the second was considerably more interesting.

C H A P T E R S E V E N

E

SHE LET JAMIE in the front door.

“I left my key at home,” he said. “Sorry.”

She had presented him with a key shortly after Charlie’s birth, or slipped it into his hand; a presentation would have been more ceremonial. At first he had kept it on his main key ring, but then, for some reason, he had moved it onto another one, by itself. She had wondered about this—whether the separation of keys meant anything, but dismissed the thought; one could read too much into little things.

“You should keep all your . . .”

He bent down and kissed her, and her question trailed off.

“Yes, of course. Of course. Where’s Charlie?”

Charlie was lying on his back, on a blanket in the morning room, staring up at the ceiling. He appeared to be fascinated by the ornamental plaster rose in the centre and would gaze at it for long periods. “He must think that’s the sky,” said Isabel.

“And the plaster rose is a cloud.”

Jamie laughed and went down on his hands and knees beside Charlie, who lifted his arms up and gurgled with pleasure. Isabel left them playing with one another and went 8 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h through to the kitchen to prepare dinner. Charlie would be attended to and put to bed by Jamie while she cooked. Jamie liked to sing to him when he put him down, and Charlie seemed to like this, staring wide-eyed at his father, watching his lips, calmed by the sound of the voice.

Dreams to sell, fine dreams to sell, Angus is here with dreams to sell.

Hush now wee bairnie and sleep without fear, For Angus will bring you a dream, my dear.

She had stood transfixed when she first heard him singing that to Charlie, and had even found herself weeping. “Why?” he had said, turning round and seeing her. “Why are you crying?”

And she had shaken her head and muttered something rambling, something about lullabies being the saddest of songs, for some reason. “They always do this to me. The lullaby in Hansel and Gretel—you must know it: ‘When at night I go to sleep, Fourteen angels watch do keep. Two my head are guarding, Two my feet are guiding . . .’ ” He had put his arms around her and said, “Yes. Why not? All those angels. And Dream Angus too, with his dreams.”

Now she stood at the cutting board and asked herself: Is this complete happiness? Am I happier now than I have ever been before? The answer, she thought, was yes, she was. There had been periods of unhappiness in her life—the John Liamor episode being one of those—but she thought of herself as having been, for the most part, reasonably happy. But since the beginning of her affair with Jamie she had been conscious of being in a state of heightened happiness, a state of . . . well, she had to resort to the concept of blessedness. I am blessed, and being blessed is something more than just having something; it is a state of mind in which the good of the world is illuminated, T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

8 3

is understood. It is as if one is vouchsafed a vision of some sort, she thought, a vision of love, of agape, of the essential value of each and every living thing.

For a moment, Isabel stood stock-still. There were vegetables on the board before her, ready for the knife, but she did not move; her hand was arrested in its movement, motionless. She was aware of a physical sensation, a sort of rushing within her and around her, a current, which seemed to fill her with warmth. She closed her eyes and, oddly, there was no darkness, just light; it was as if she were bathed in light both within and without.

She opened her eyes again. The ordinary material world was there, the vegetables, the sink, the unopened bottle of wine, the recipe book lying open at the page to which she had turned, the pen-and-ink drawing on that page, everything. She breathed.

The warmth, the feeling of suffusion had gone, and she felt that she was back in the same place. She moved her arm and felt the coldness of the granite worktop under her skin, all quite normal.

But she felt different; she felt that the world had suddenly become infinitely more precious to her, and that there was more love within her. It was that simple, perhaps; there was just more love within her.

Later, with Charlie asleep, she and Jamie sat at the kitchen table. She had prepared scallops for them, to be followed by a risotto, which she knew he liked. They had chilled white wine with the scallops, and he raised his glass to her. To Charlie’s mother. She had laughed, and replied, To his father. She looked down at her plate. She wanted to tell him what had happened, there in the kitchen, while he was attending to Charlie, but how could she put it? I had a mystical experience in the kitchen this evening? Hardly. I am not the sort who has mystical experiences in the kitchen, she said to herself; the world is divided between 8 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h those who have mystical experiences in their kitchens and those who do not.

He said, “You’re smiling to yourself about something.”

“I suppose I am. Just a silly thought.”

He took a sip of his wine. “About?”

“About something that happened to me. I had a moment of . . . well, I suppose I might call it a moment of inspiration, while I was preparing dinner.”

He did not seem surprised. “I had one of those the other day,” he said. “I was waiting for one of my pupils and I had a moment of inspiration. A musical idea. I wrote it down as quickly as I could but when I played it later on . . . A great disappointment.”

She thought that they were not talking about the same thing. She had been wrong to call it a moment of inspiration; no ideas had come to her, rather an insight, and that was different.

But it was difficult to define it, because language was not suited to describing such things; one ended up talking at great length about what seemed ultimately to be something very small, as happens in the writings of mystics, where a cloud of words surrounds the brief light about which they write.

No, she did not want to appear foolish, and this was a subject on which she realised she knew very little about Jamie’s views. Did he believe in anything beyond the material? They had never talked about that, and she had no idea. But that was probably not unusual amongst couples—how many people these days, in her sort of society, talked to one another about that? She thought of her friends, and wondered which of them believed in the existence of God. She knew one or two of them went to church, and they, she assumed, either believed in God or wanted to believe. That was probably true of many people in any congregation, of course: they were there not T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

8 5

because they believed but because they felt the need for religion, for something beyond themselves. So what did Jamie believe in, if anything? Did he think that he had a soul?

She watched him pick up his glass. He was looking at her, his eyes smiling. Of course he had a soul, she said to herself; that gentle, kind, loving part of him. That was there, and she could see it.

“We’ve had an invitation,” she said. And immediately she wondered why she had said this. She had not been thinking about it, and even if she had, she would not have thought about bringing it up right now. But it came out, unanticipated.

“Oh?”

She swallowed hard. She had just had a vision of love, or something to do with love, and she had to go on in that spirit.

“Cat has asked us to dinner.”

She watched him closely. Sometimes words can be seen, she thought; one sees them travelling through the air and reaching their target as if an invisible wave had moved through the room. Isabel remembered how, as a young woman, she had once gone to sit through a trial in the High Court. She had a friend who was a junior advocate in the trial and she wanted to see her in action. It had been dramatic; she had seen the jury return its verdict and the judge had shifted in his seat to face the accused.

Then he simply said, “Six years,” and she saw the man in the dock reel backwards as if he had been hit by an unseen hand, pushing him back.

Jamie put down his glass and looked at her. The light that had been in his eyes, the smile, was no longer there; it had been replaced by something flat, something guarded. “That’s kind of her,” he said. “When?”

“She didn’t say. It was a message, actually. She left it with Grace.”

8 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“I see.”

She toyed with her fork. “Do you want to go? We don’t have to.” She thought that Cat would understand; they had kept off the subject of Cat, by unspoken agreement, because they both knew it was a wound that should not be breathed into.

He did not reply for a moment. “I’m over her,” he said, but he did not look at Isabel as he spoke, and she knew it could not be true. If Cat meant nothing to him anymore, then he would have looked at her; Jamie always engaged with people directly, looked them in the eye. But not now.

Isabel stared at him. This hurt her. “I don’t think you are, Jamie. I really don’t think you are.”

Now he looked up at her. “No. You’re right.”

“So do you still love her?”

His voice was low. “Maybe I do. Maybe. You know how it is.”

“Of course. I was in love for years and years. Even after John had left me I still loved him, went on loving him, so foolishly, pointlessly. But we can’t help ourselves, can we?”

He suddenly pushed his chair back and rose to his feet.

Something—his glass of water—toppled and was spilled, and made a long dark stain down the leg of his jeans. He came round to her and crouched down. He put his arm about her. His voice sounded hoarse; that was from emotion, she thought.

“Don’t you think that it’s possible that we can . . . that we can end up loving lots of people? People we used to love, still love.

Them. But they’re just there in the background, and we get on with loving other people, people from our present rather than our past. Don’t you think that?”

She reached for his hand and pressed it. Blessedness: she could not believe her state of blessedness; this young man, with T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

8 7

all his beauty and gentleness, in her arms, hers. “Of course I believe that,” she said.

“So do we go, or not?”

“I think we should go. Cat and I are family. I don’t want her cut out of my life with you.”

He kissed her on the brow, then on the lips. “All right.”

T H E M A I L T H E N E X T DAY brought two manuscripts that Isabel knew were coming and which she had been looking forward to receiving, and she read these in preference to the items immediately below them in the pile, some of which looked like bills. The manuscripts were as interesting as she had hoped, and she started to write grateful letters to their authors. Both were solicited contributions to a special issue on the philosophy of taxation, a subject that proved to be considerably more thought-provoking than Isabel had imagined. Why should the wealthy pay more tax than the poor? They did, or at least they did in most systems, but on what grounds was this defensible?

Should taxation be used as a tool to redistribute wealth? She thought it should, and many others thought so as well, but it was not so clear that taxation was the most appropriate way to achieve that. Should governments perhaps be honest and say that they intended simply to confiscate assets over a certain level? She gave some thought to that, wondering how she would feel if the government started to take her capital away, beginning right now, appropriating her funds, turning them into military equipment and welfare payments and new roads, as governments tended to do. I don’t have a very strong right to have what I have, she thought. All of it comes to me simply because a member of my family had it, and then died. What sort 8 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h of moral right did that give? Not a very convincing one, she felt.

But so much of life turned out that way—things were gained and then handed on; not just physical things but tastes, qualities, insights. Would Mozart have written what he did had it not been for Leopold Mozart, who had placed his tiny son on the piano stool? Presumably not; the genius, the particular capacities of the brain might have been there but could well have remained locked away, had there been no musical father to bring them out. And Mr. Getty, a rich man—and a very generous one too—had received his oil fields from Mr. Getty before him; he might never have found oil by himself. She smiled at the thought; of course he might not have looked for oil—it does not occur to everybody to go looking for oil.

Her train of thought was interrupted by a noise from within the house. Grace was not there that morning—she had a dental appointment and Isabel had told her not to bother coming in. That was more than just concern for Grace’s welfare on Isabel’s part; Grace was undergoing root canal treatment on a tooth, and Isabel knew from experience how miserable this made her feel. Grace did not like dental anaesthetics, and preferred to endure the pain rather than to experience the lingering numbness that went with the local anaesthetic, a bizarre preference, in Isabel’s view, but one which was firmly held. Isabel thought that this might be understandable, just, when it came to minor treatment, but root canal treatment, with its deliberate engagement with the nerve, could be an exquisite agony.

She had found out that Grace loved to give a blow-by-blow account of her visits to the dentist and she did not feel in the mood to listen to a long story about root canals punctuated by the sort of grumpi-ness that Grace could, on occasion, muster. By tomorrow the memory of the pain might be less vivid, and Grace’s mood might be restored.

So Isabel was now in sole charge of Charlie, and the sound T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

8 9

from within the house was of Charlie waking up and crying. She put the papers on the philosophy of taxation to one side and went through to the room at the back of the house where Charlie had his afternoon naps. He stopped crying when he saw her and looked up with that strange expression of astonishment that makes parents feel that their child has forgotten them entirely and is seeing them now for the first time.

She picked him up and cuddled him. He felt warm, his skin slightly damp. He started to niggle again.

“You’re hungry, aren’t you?” she asked. And answered on his behalf, “Of course. Of course. Feeding time.”

He took his formula hungrily, sucking strongly at the bottle.

Then she winded him, holding him over her shoulder, patting his back gently. This usually comforted him and brought up the wind in an audible burp, but today he seemed to resist her min-istrations, squirming in her hold, as if wanting to escape.

“Not right?” she muttered. “You’re not feeling right?”

Charlie answered with a wail, screwing up his features into an expression of minor rage, his face colouring from the exer-tion. He did not need changing, and Isabel felt a momentary twinge of alarm. She knew that she should not imagine things, that the flushed expression was not normally a sign of meningi-tis, that diarrhoea was not typhoid, but all parents had their anxieties and would think just that, even if only until reassured by somebody else. It’s normal, she thought. He’s been feeling a little hot—and that room was a bit warm when I went in—so he’s registering his displeasure. All quite normal.

She took Charlie through to the kitchen. He liked it there, picking up, she thought, the bright colours—the red of the Aga stove, the glowing yellows of a large print of flowers framed above the refrigerator, the chequered blues of the tea towels; but now he continued to whine, ignoring the distractions of colour.

9 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“Come on, Charlie,” she said. “It’s not all that bad! Surely not.”

But it was, and he began to cry again, at full lung. Once again she put him over her shoulder and patted his back, hoping to dislodge the wind that she suspected was causing his discomfort. This appeared only to add to his unhappiness and she stopped. Gripe water.

She laid Charlie down on the floor of the small playpen that she kept in the corner of the kitchen. He protested, screaming at the outrage, and was unconsoled by Isabel’s placatory cooing.

Then she went upstairs, momentarily leaving Charlie to his anger, and opened the door of the bathroom cabinet.

The bottle of cough syrup was there, as was the tin of sticking plasters, the aspirin, and the thermometer, but there was no gripe water. Isabel was puzzled. She had put it there, behind the cough syrup; she was sure of that. But it was definitely not there, which meant that Grace had discovered it and moved it.

Isabel felt angry. Grace must have searched for the gripe water and taken it upon herself to move it. She had no right to do that, she thought, no right. This was her cabinet, not Grace’s, and she and she alone would decide what it contained.

She went downstairs. Charlie was still protesting, his wail drifting up from the kitchen. “I’m coming, Charlie,” she called out as she made her way down the stairs. “I’m coming.”

The sound of her voice seemed to calm Charlie, and he fell silent. Or had he choked? Isabel asked herself, and began to run, taking the steps two at a time. He had not, and when she reached the kitchen he started crying again, waving his arms in impotent fury, his face flushed red with the force of his tears.

He calmed down a bit when she picked him up but was still obviously uncomfortable.

“What’s wrong, my darling? What’s wrong?”

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

9 1

Charlie seemed to listen to her, paused briefly, and then continued with his sobbing. There was so much wrong, he seemed to be saying; and it is all your fault, all of it.

Isabel decided that what was needed was a dose of infant aspirin. She had a bottle of the suspension in one of the kitchen cupboards, where Charlie’s formula and spare bottles were kept, and she cradled the baby gently as she opened the door with her free hand. There, beside the bottles, was the gripe water, with its characteristic old-fashioned label. Isabel smiled grimly. So it was Grace’s doing after all, just as she had suspected; she had been right.

She reached for the bottle of aspirin suspension and then stopped and took out the bottle of gripe water instead. Twisting off the cap, she sniffed at the colourless, slightly viscous liquid within; it had a sweet smell, exaggeratedly floral, like an overstated, cheap perfume. It was not unpleasant, she decided, and on impulse she held the open bottle under Charlie’s nose.

The effect was immediate and dramatic, as if she had applied smelling salts of the sort resorted to by Victorian ladies for their swooning. The crying stopped immediately, and Charlie made an inept attempt to seize the bottle.

Isabel extracted a teaspoon from a kitchen drawer and set it down on a surface at the side of the sink. It was difficult to pour the gripe water using only one hand—Charlie was still cradled in the other—and she spilled a bit of the liquid in the process.

But she succeeded by dint of a steady hand, then picked up the spoon without spilling any more and manoeuvred it into Charlie’s mouth. His expression of contentment was immediate; the crying stopped.

“Darling addict,” she whispered.

She looked again at the bottle. The contents were listed.

Common herbs, she read: ginger, fennel, and dill, all of which one 9 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h might see on the open shelves of a supermarket. She searched for the offending word, sugar, but she did not see it. Nor did she see any reference to alcohol. It was perfectly harmless.

Charlie settled, and after some time in the garden with Isabel, he dropped off to sleep again. Isabel put him in his cradle and returned to her study to deal with the rest of the morning’s mail. She had been distracted by the arrival of the papers on the philosophy of taxation, and then by Charlie, and so she had not seen the letter from Professor Christopher Dove. Now she opened it, knowing immediately from the printed letterhead within that it had come from him. You write to me, Dove, she thought. Not content with displacing me, you write to me .

She sat down to read the letter.

Dear Ms. Dalhousie [I have a doctorate, Dove, not that I use the title, but you might at least have shown the courtesy],

I believe that you may have heard from Professor Lettuce about changes that have been proposed at the Review. [You proposed them, Dove.] I have been asked by the board to assume the editorship, and although I am hesitant to take over a post which has been so admirably filled by another [Pass the gripe water!], I have nonetheless indicated that I am prepared to do this.

I am aware of the fact that we have a number of special issues planned, including one on the philosophy of taxation. I would not like to interfere prematurely, but I am a bit doubtful about the value of our doing too many of these, especially in areas as specialised as the philosophy of taxation. My own view is that we should not lose sight of the fact [ In other words, I think, muttered Isabel] that we are primarily a generalist journal.

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

9 3

There are, as you know, numerous more specialised journals, including several that deal with business ethics, and I think that the philosophy of taxation would be more appropriately covered by them, rather than by us.

[Come to the point, Dove.] For this reason, I think we should revisit our plans for that issue.

I think that this is just one of the matters which would be much better discussed in a meeting between the two of us. I believe that you now have a baby—

Congratulations!—and therefore it would be easier for me to come to Edinburgh than for you to come to London. If you would let me know what dates you are free, I shall come up for a meeting. We can then sort out the details of the handover, and I can look at the editorial archive. We will need to make arrangements for that to be sent down at some stage. I have quite a bit of stor-age space in my department—we do have empty cupboards, believe it or not, not that I advertise the fact, in case the university authorities convert them into offices (for junior academics!). [That was a joke.]

The letter ended with a few additional pleasantries. After she had finished reading it, Isabel stared at it for a moment and then rolled it up into a ball and tossed it towards her wastepaper basket. She had not expected it to go in, but it did just that, like a skilfully placed basketball. But then, almost immediately, she felt guilty and walked over to the bin, retrieved the ball of paper, and uncrumpled it. I shall not descend to the level of Dove, she said to herself. I shall not.

She sat down at her desk and took out a fresh piece of writing paper.

9 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Dear Professor Dove,

It was good to hear from you. Of course I shall be happy to see you in Edinburgh, and here is a list of dates on which I am free and on which we could certainly have a meeting. I must warn you that the editorial archives are quite large and need considerable space to be stored.

She paused and looked out the window. Should she? She resumed her writing.

And perhaps I should also warn you that I do not consider these archives to be anybody’s property but my own.

She read over what she had written. What she had said about the ownership of the archive was probably wrong. Some of it belonged to her—the letters written to her as editor were often of a personal nature and the copies of the letters which she had written, on paper which she had provided—those, she thought, were surely hers. But it was a warning shot, which she felt was worth firing.

She signed the letter, slipped it into an envelope, and stuck a stamp on the top right-hand corner. The stamp was simple in its design, almost stark, and bore, as always, the monarch’s head. To what correspondence, she thought, has Your Majesty been made an unwilling party, with your head, and all its gentle authority, attached to all sorts of unhappy and shameful letters—letters of rejection, threatening letters, letters from lawyers, anonymous letters . . . She stopped the list there. Her letter was to the point and dignified, the sort of letter which the Queen herself would undoubtedly write to a prime minister T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

9 5

attempting to usurp her authority. No, the letter needed no further justification: it would be posted, received by Dove himself in his obscure headquarters, and, she hoped, duly digested.

Be very careful, Dove, she thought. You may take one step too far. Be very careful when you come to Edinburgh.

She stood up and crossed to the window. She looked outside, at the large rhododendron bush, which was quite still; there were no birds, or so it seemed, no fox lurking below. What if Dove came to Edinburgh and something happened to him?

What then?

Within each of us, she thought, there is evil. It lurks in the deep recesses of the mind, those depths in which the atavistic clutter of our distant past still lodges. We should not delude ourselves that it is not there; it is there, but it is covered, thank heavens, by the veneer of civilisation, of morality. First came the early I, red in tooth and claw, then came Mozart, David Hume, Auden.

With a shock she remembered something—something that she did not like to think about. Auden had once almost killed somebody; had put his hands around the neck of his lover and had been on the point of strangling him, driven to this shocking extreme by jealousy. And then he had written about it, had confessed that he had almost become a murderer. If that could happen to him, to that great, humane intelligence, then how easily could it happen to the rest of us, who are weak, and subject to all the passions of our weakness.

No, Professor Dove; you are in no danger from me. By the time you arrive in Edinburgh I shall have mastered my anger. I shall love you, Professor Dove, as I am commanded to do. Or that is what I hope, most fervently hope.

C H A P T E R E I G H T

E

DON’T TALK TO ME about it,” said Grace the next morning.

“Just don’t talk to me about it!”

Isabel was on the point of agreeing. She did not wish to discuss dentists and would be quite happy not to go into the details of Grace’s dental trauma of the previous day. But then she realised that although Grace said that she did not want to discuss the matter, that is exactly what she intended to do.

“Yes,” said Grace, removing the headscarf she had worn on the journey to work. “The least said about yesterday the better.”

Isabel looked up from The Scotsman crossword. She had been constructing her own clue. Three words: four, five, and nine letters. A plant’s base beside a waterway precedes intervention. Root canal treatment.

“Uncomfortable?”

“Extremely,” said Grace. “He tried to persuade me to have one of those injections, but I said no. He told me that it would be very painful, but I stuck to my guns. I can’t stand that stuff, that . . .”

“Novocaine,” said Isabel. How might one express that in a crossword? Sounds like a new rod with which to beat another until numb? Not a very good clue, but it would have to do.

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

9 7

“Yes, that stuff,” said Grace. “I can’t bear it, you know. That awful feeling of being all puffed up, as if somebody had just hit you in the jaw. No thank you!”

“But if you don’t—”

Grace cut Isabel off. “I can take pain. I’ve never been one to dodge that. But this was really, really sore. He had to guddle about inside the tooth and it felt as if somebody was putting an electric wire down there. It was terrible.”

They were both silent for a moment, Grace remembering the pain, Isabel thinking about how much pain there was, that life itself floated in a vast sea of pain, numbed here and there for brief moments, but coming back in great waves.

“You see what he had to do,” Grace went on, “was to take out the nerve from the root of the tooth. Can you imagine that?

I kept thinking of it as a long piece of elastic being dragged out of me. Do you remember knicker elastic? Like that.”

“I don’t think nerves are like that,” said Isabel. “I don’t think that you can actually see them. They don’t look like elastic, or wires for that matter.”

Grace stared at her. “Well, what do they look like?” she asked.

“I think they must be tissue of some sort,” said Isabel. “A bit like . . .”

She shrugged. She had never seen a nerve.

“Well, whatever it looked like,” said Grace, “I felt it all right. But now . . . nothing! I can chew on that side and I feel nothing.”

“They are a very great boon to mankind, dentists,” said Isabel. “And I’m not sure that we are grateful enough to them.

I’m not sure that we even bother to thank them.” She paused.

Were there any statues of dentists? She thought not. And yet there should be. We had so many statues of generals and politi-9 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h cians and the like, who made wars and took life, and none of dentists, who battled pain. It was all wrong.

And yet, would anybody be able to take a statue of a dentist seriously? What if one were to go into some small town somewhere and find a bronze equestrian statue of a great dentist?

Would one be able to do anything but laugh? Of course there was St. Apollonia, the patron saint of toothache, and she had read somewhere that the British Dental Association had a small statue of her in their headquarters.

“Why are you smiling?” asked Grace.

“Just thinking of something odd. It suddenly occurred to me that there are no statues of dentists—anywhere in Scotland, as far as I know. Maybe they have them elsewhere—I don’t know.

But it does seem rather unfair, don’t you think?”

“Very,” said Grace. “Mind you, root canal treatment—”

The telephone went, and Isabel rose to her feet to answer.

“Isabel?”

“Peter.”

“I know that you sit there doing the crossword,” said Peter Stevenson, “and I would not want to disturb that. But I have some interesting news for you. Are you in a mood for interesting news?”

Isabel, who had kept the copy of The Scotsman in her hand, now put it down on one of the kitchen work surfaces. It was not a difficult crossword that day, and it could keep until later. “I’m always ready for interesting news.” She was intrigued. Peter was not one for idle gossip, and interesting news from him would probably be worth listening to.

“Your painting,” he said. “The one that I saw you trying to buy at Lyon & Turnbull—that painting of the island, somewhere over in the west. Remember that?”

She wondered whether he had found out something more T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

9 9

about the painting; would that really be all that interesting, or even interesting enough to warrant a telephone call? “Of course.

The McInnes.”

“Yes,” said Peter. “Well, do you want it?”

She was puzzled. Of course she had wanted it—that was why she had tried to buy it. “Well, I did want it. I bid for it, as you may remember.”

“Of course I remember that,” said Peter quickly. “But the point is this: Do you still want it? Because if you do, then it’s yours. For the price the purchaser paid for it. Not a penny more.”

She was not sure what to say. Did she still want it, or had her enthusiasm for the picture waned after she had seen it go to somebody else?

“I know that you’ll probably want to think about it,” said Peter. “So why don’t you do so and then come over this afternoon for tea with Susie and me? We can talk more about it, and Susie wants to see you anyway. She says that she hasn’t seen you since . . . since Charlie, and she’d like to see him, and you of course.”

She accepted the invitation. She would drive round in her green Swedish car, or they would walk, which would be more responsible. Talk of global warming had made her feel guilty about her green Swedish car, although for many people the possession of a Swedish car was almost a statement about the world. Swedish cars came with no baggage; they had never been used as staff cars by the officers of invading forces, they were built by well-paid labour that enjoyed full social welfare benefits, they were neither ostentatious nor greedy in their fuel con-sumption. But they were still cars, and it was cars that were ruining our planet. So that afternoon she would push Charlie 1 0 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h round to the Stevenson house in his baby buggy and push him back afterwards, leaving little or no carbon footprint behind them.

P E T E R M E T H E R at the door of West Grange House.

“I didn’t hear you arriving,” he said. “Did you drive?”

“Yes, I drove,” said Isabel, pointing to the road, where she had parked her car. “I didn’t intend to, but I drove.”

“I see,” said Peter, smiling. “The road to our house is paved with good intentions.”

“And copies of unsold romantic novels,” said Isabel, as they went in. “Did you know that unsold paperback novels make an ideal base for roads? Apparently they chop them up and com-press them and there you have it—a very good material for putting under tarmac.”

Peter had not heard this. “But why just romantic novels?” he asked. “Why not copies of . . . I don’t know, literary novels perhaps. Proust even . . .”

Isabel thought for a moment. There were some literary novels that would have been good candidates for such treatment, and the work of one author in particular, now that she came to think of it. There was something about his prose, she thought, that made him ideal for such a purpose. But she did not feel that she should reveal this to Peter, who was a fair-minded man who might feel her comment less than kind. And he would have been right; the thought had not been a charitable one and she made an effort to put it out of her mind—easier said than done, as the image came to her of quantities of that author’s latest novel being spread before an advancing steamroller. “Anything will do,” she said. “Even copies of the Review of Applied Ethics, I suppose. People could then drive roughshod over my editori-T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

1 0 1

als, as I expect they have wanted to do for a long time.” But then she wondered: How many people actually read her editorials?

Fifty? One hundred?

“I wouldn’t,” said Peter. “I would feel very bad about driving over you.”

They went into the hall, to meet Susie coming down the stairs. Susie smiled warmly and held out a finger for Charlie to grip. He accepted firmly and, cross-eyed, stared at the new person.

“He likes you,” said Isabel. “Look, he’s smiling.”

“A secret joke,” said Susie.

“Which he probably won’t share with us for a few years yet,”

added Peter.

They went into the kitchen, a comfortable, long room at the back of the house. It was a warm day, and the windows were all open, letting in the smell of newly mown grass from outside.

The usual faded green tea cups and plates were laid out on the kitchen table, the surface of which was marked with numerous dents and scratches from years of children’s homework. Susie took Charlie and perched him, supported, on her knee, while Peter attended to the tea.

“You’re so lucky,” said Susie.

Isabel wondered what aspect of her luck was being singled out, and realised that it was Charlie, the sheer fact of Charlie.

Yes, she was lucky, doubly so. She had been blessed with Jamie, and following upon that she had been blessed with Charlie.

“I am,” she said simply. “And I know it.”

Peter poured the tea. “Now, the painting,” he said, as he handed Isabel her cup. “It was bought by Walter Buie—I did tell you that, didn’t I? I was standing near him during the auction.”

“Yes, you did tell me,” she replied. “I had forgotten the 1 0 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h name, but you did tell me something about him. He’s a lawyer, isn’t he?”

Peter nodded. “Yes he is. He lives just round the corner in Hope Terrace. He has a rather nice house which belonged to his parents before him. Walter is one of those people who’s destined to die in the house in which he was born. Or that’s what he says.”

“Not a bad idea,” said Isabel. The thought occurred to her that she was one of them too. She had been away, of course, but she had come back to the house in which she had lived as a child. Would Charlie do the same? It seemed unlikely, now that the world was so fluid, so open. She glanced at her son and thought, For the first time in my life it matters to me, really matters, that the world should not change too much.

Peter smiled at Charlie, who was throwing his hands about enthusiastically. “Anyway,” he continued, “I met Walter Buie in the street yesterday. I was taking our dog, Murphy, for a walk when I saw him coming along on the other side of the road.

Walter has a horrible dog, a scruffy brown creature that has a criminal record with the local cats. I’ve always kept Murphy away from him but, surprisingly, Murphy and Basil, this dog of Walter’s, started wagging their tails as if they were old friends.

So I could stop and have a word with Walter while the dogs exchanged news with each other. I told him that I had seen him at Lyon & Turnbull and asked him how he was enjoying his new picture.

“Walter made some remark about not having put it up yet, and I then happened to mention that you had been after it too.

I told him that I thought it interesting that there were two people I knew who were going so strongly for the same thing.”

Peter paused as Susie handed Charlie back to Isabel so that she could refill the teapot.

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

1 0 3

“A happy baby,” said Peter, looking at Charlie. “You must be thrilled.”

Isabel settled Charlie on her lap. “Thank you. He is. And I am.”

“But back to Walter,” said Peter. “When I told him that you had been after that painting, he went quiet for a moment. He was obviously going over something in his mind and it took him a minute or so before he came up with his response. And what he said was this: ‘She can have it, if she wants it. She can have it for what I paid, which is not very much above her last bid.’

That’s what he said. So I told him that I would pass on his offer.”

Isabel frowned. What intrigued her about this was the question of why Walter Buie should want to get rid of something which he had just made some effort to obtain. That seemed strange, and again the thought occurred to her that there might be something wrong with the painting. Or could it be that once he saw it in his house, he decided that he didn’t like it for some reason, possibly because it clashed with something else, the wallpaper perhaps?

“I can see what you’re thinking,” said Peter. “I also wondered why he should want to get rid of it so quickly. So I asked him whether he had gone off it, and he simply shook his head and said no, not really. But he had realised that he didn’t have the great passion for it that he had felt at the auction. That’s what he said, anyway. ”

“In other words, altruism,” said Isabel.

“Precisely,” said Peter.

Susie had said nothing about this; now she joined in. “But if that’s the way he thought about it, then why would he have bid against Isabel at the auction? It must have been apparent then that she wanted it quite badly.”

“Perhaps altruism takes time to emerge,” said Isabel. “We 1 0 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h often think differently about things some time after the event. I certainly find that—don’t you?”

Susie was not convinced. “That may happen sometimes,”

she said. “But I don’t have that feeling about this. I think that there’s something wrong.”

“Well, I don’t,” said Peter. “Walter Buie is very straight-forward. He’s exactly the sort of person who would do this.

He’s . . .”

“A bit old-fashioned,” said Susie. “I don’t mean to be unkind, but he’s what some people would call old Edinburgh.

Just a bit old-fashioned.”

Old Edinburgh: Isabel knew exactly what that meant. And she used to laugh at it, or feel irritated by it, but now that the world was so different she was not so sure. Old Edinburgh had been so sedate, prissy even—like a maiden aunt—and it had been an easy target. But had the correction gone too far? Old-fashioned manners, courtesies, had been swept away everywhere, it seemed, to be replaced by indifference, by coolness.

And yet that had not made people any more free; in fact, the opposite, surely, had happened, as the public space became more frightening, more dangerous.

“It’s kind of him,” she said. It was the charitable interpreta-tion of his gesture and it made Peter nod his head in agreement.

“I think you’re right,” he said. “And I also think that you need to accept—if you still want the painting. I think that it’s very important to be able to accept things. People often know how to give, but they often don’t know how to accept graciously.”

Isabel looked at him, and Peter blushed. “I didn’t mean you, of course,” he said hurriedly. “I’m sure you know how to accept.”

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

1 0 5

Isabel was not so sure about that; now that she thought of what Peter said about accepting, she realised that she probably was not very good at it. She felt guilty when people gave her presents, because she did not like the thought that somebody had spent money on her. Where did that come from? She thought that perhaps it was a result of not wanting others to be put out on her behalf, which was ridiculous. And it made her remember the story of a Scottish government minister who had been so well-mannered that, when allocated a female driver, he had insisted on opening the car door for her. People had laughed, but it said a lot for the moral quality of the minister himself; it was the opposite of the sort of arrogance that one sometimes saw in people who had found themselves in positions of power.

She should accept Walter Buie’s offer, but did she still want the painting? Peter noticed her hesitation.

“Don’t take it if you don’t want it,” he said. “People change their minds. You can change yours.”

“I don’t know,” said Isabel. “I really don’t know.”

“Do you want to look at it?” asked Peter. “Walter said that he’d be very happy for you to take a look at it. We could go round and see him now.”

“But it would be awkward if I wanted to say no.”

“Not at all. You can turn him down if you don’t want it anymore. Just tell him that you’ve changed your mind.”

She was not certain, but Susie said that she would look after Charlie if they wanted to walk round to Walter’s house. Isabel thought for a moment and then said yes. She was intrigued by Walter Buie and wanted to know a bit more about him; a guilty feeling, because she knew that she should not be so inquisitive.

But I can’t help it, she thought; I just can’t.

1 0 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h I T WA S N OT a long walk, and the road was quite empty. “We’ll be at his gate in a moment,” said Peter, pointing down Hope Terrace. “That drive off to the right—that’s him. Walter has an old Bentley—a really old one. Sometimes you see its nose sticking out of the driveway and then the whole car emerges—it’s a wonderful sight. He goes on rallies, apparently. He tried to invite me along once but I didn’t see the point. Why go and sit around in a field with lots of other people who happen to own old Bentleys?”

It was not something that appealed to Isabel either, but she understood why people would want to be with others who share their interest. “Presumably they talk about Bentleys,” she said,

“which is fair enough. I go to conferences of philosophers.

We sit around, not in fields, admittedly, but we do sit around together.”

“Very odd,” said Peter.

They reached the driveway. A large pair of wooden gates, set in a high stone wall, prevented any access from the road, but there was a small door to the side which Peter pushed open.

Inside was a walled garden, with a greenhouse and, at the far end, an attractive Georgian house in the style of that part of town. It was built of honey-coloured stone which had weathered dark in uneven patches, giving it a not unpleasing mottled appearance. The windows at the front, with their white-painted astragals, had that pleasant, harmonious feeling of Georgian design, and the sun was on the glass, making it flash silver and gold.

Isabel took to the house immediately—at least to that part of it she could see. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “One to one point six one eight.”

T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

1 0 7

Peter looked at her sideways.

“The golden mean,” Isabel said. “If we measured the height of those windows and then their width, the ratio between the two would be that: one to one point six one eight, or near enough.”

“Ah,” said Peter. “Of course.”

“Most of classical Edinburgh observes that ratio,” Isabel said. “And then the Victorians came along and got all Gothic.”

“But your house is pretty,” said Peter. “And it’s Victorian.”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “I’m not being disloyal to my house. It was a child of its time. But the ceilings are just a little bit too high for the width of the rooms. Not that I sit there and fret about it, but it’s true.”

They walked up the drive. Peter had telephoned Walter, so they knew that he was in. They stood at the front door; Peter pressed the small white button in the middle of a brass fitting to the right; please push was written on the porcelain; old Edinburgh—modern buttons just said push, the simple impera-tive, not the polite cousin.

Walter Buie answered the door. He was younger than Isabel had thought he would be; she had imagined a man in his fifties or sixties, whereas the person who stood before them looked to be in his late thirties at the most. He was a tall man, with a thick head of sand-coloured curly hair. He had a strong face and piercing blue eyes; Nordic, thought Isabel, a type that one still encountered in the north and west of Scotland.

Walter held out a hand to Isabel. “We’ve almost met in the past,” he said, and named a mutual friend.

They shook hands and Walter gestured for them to come in. There was a formality about the way he spoke, and in his movements—old Edinburgh, as Peter had described it. And he 1 0 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h was right, thought Isabel, as they went into a large, airy hall. But there was something contemporary about Walter too: a fresh-ness, an athleticism, which seemed at odds with the formal manner. It was difficult to see him as a lawyer who had dropped out of private practice, even if one could see him behind the wheel of a vintage Bentley.

Walter led them through to the drawing room, a perfectly proportioned room at the end of which three windows descended from the ceiling almost to floor level. On one wall there was a large, white marble mantelpiece on which a match-ing pair of famille rose vases stood on either side of a Tang horse. In front of a further expanse of marble, serving as a hearth, there was a low gilt table on which there stood piles of books and magazines. Isabel’s eye ran discreetly to the magazine titles— The Burlington Magazine, Art Quarterly, and one she could not make out.

She glanced at the walls. Opposite the fireplace a very large Philipson nude gazed out of a wide black frame; to either side of it were what looked like two Ferguson portraits of women in extravagant, ostrich-feathered hats. And then, on another wall, above a long, white-painted bookcase, were two medium-sized paintings which Isabel immediately recognised.

Walter saw her eyes move to them. “Yes,” he said. “Those are McInnes, too. They’re quite early ones, actually. I think that he did those when he first started going to Jura. That was before he married. He was fresh out of art college, but already he had that very mature style. That’s what got him noticed.”

Now that he had drawn attention to them, Isabel felt that she could move over and look more closely at the paintings. Other people’s possessions were an awkward thing, she thought; one should not snoop too obviously when one went T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

1 0 9

into a room—a close examination of one’s host’s books always seemed to be too much like an attempt to judge their tastes—

but pictures were different. The reason for hanging them on the wall was for people to see them—and that included guests.

Indeed, many collectors wanted one to see their paintings, which was why well-known painters fetched higher prices. They gave no greater enjoyment, necessarily, than others; but they were evidence of wealth. There were people for whom the whole point of having a Hockney was that those who did not have Hockneys could reflect on the fact that you had one and they did not. Isabel did not care for this; she had no desire that others should see what she had.

She approached the paintings to look at them more closely.

One was of a group of people cutting and stacking peats: a man and a woman worked with the stacks of dark blocks, while behind them, seated on the edge of the cutting, a young woman unwrapped a packet of sandwiches. It was a compelling picture, with a certain sadness about it, although she could not understand why it should be sad. That, perhaps, was why McInnes was considered such a good painter: he captured the moment, in the way in which a great painter must; a moment when it feels that something is about to happen, but has not yet.

And what was about to happen in this painting was sad, inexpressibly so.

She turned to the other painting. This was a landscape, with the unmistakeable mammary hills, the Paps of Jura in the background. There was nothing in the subject matter which made it exceptional—so many artists had painted the western isles—

but again there was that quality of attenuation of light, of sadness, that made the painting stand out.

She became aware that Walter was standing directly behind 1 1 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h her. She heard his breathing and she straightened up. His physical presence was powerful in a way which she would not have been able to define; but it was there.

“That one of the peat cutters is one of my favourites,” he said. “The tones are almost sepia, don’t you think? Like an old photograph.”

Isabel agreed. “When I look at old photographs,” she said, “I often think of how the people in them are all dead and gone. It’s a thought, isn’t it? There they are in the photographs, going about their business without much thought to their mortality, but of course it was there all the time.”

Walter was intrigued. “Yes, of course,” he said. “There’s a photograph which really affected me, you know, when I was sixteen or seventeen. We had a book of poetry of the First World War—Owen, Sassoon, people like that—and there was a photograph in it of five or six men in the uniform of a Highland regiment—kilts—standing in a circle in front of the local minister. They were about to leave the Highlands to go off to the war.”

He paused, and his eyes met Isabel’s. “When I first saw it, I stared at it for quite some time. Half an hour or so. I just stared and wondered which of those men, if any, came back to Scotland. It was an infantry regiment, as the Highland regiments were, and their chances must have been pretty slim. They were slaughtered, those men. I remember looking at the faces, looking at the detail, thinking, You? Did you come back? Did you? ”

They were both silent for a moment. Then Isabel said,

“Rather like those pictures of the young men sitting on the grass around their Spitfires, waiting to be scrambled. How many of them lasted more than a few weeks?”

“Not many,” he said. “No. Awful. But have you noticed how those young pilots seemed to be smiling in so many of the phoT H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

1 1 1

tographs? Whereas those Highlanders just looked sad, uncom-prehending, I suppose. It seems somehow different.”

Walter took a step back and looked at Peter. “You’ve explained to . . .”