The Careful Use of Compliments

“Isabel.”

“Yes, of course. Well, perhaps you’d like to have another look at the painting. It’s in the dining room.”

They followed him into the adjoining room. The painting was propped against a wall, half in shadow, and Walter moved it out, leaning it against the back of a chair. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

Isabel looked at the painting. “I can understand why people were so sorry about his death,” she said. “He would have been a very great painter. When did it happen, by the way?”

“About eight years ago,” said Walter. “It was all over the papers at the time. It made the front page of The Scotsman; even The Times deigned to notice it. He fell foul of the Corryvreckan.

It’s a bad bit of sea off Jura. People call it a whirlpool, but it’s more than that.”

There was silence. Walter pointed to the painting. “Just round the corner from that point. He’d taken to putting out lobster pots and so he had a small boat which he took out in the wrong conditions. Exactly what happened to Orwell, or just about. Orwell survived, and finished 1984. McInnes didn’t.”

Peter, who had been staring at the painting, looked up. “I’ve seen it. We were up on Islay once and went for a cruise round Jura. We stopped some way away from the Corryvreckan itself, but we could hear it. It was like a jet—a roaring sound. And there were amazing high waves rising and falling.”

“If you get the tides right,” said Walter, “you can sail right through it. It’s like a millpond at slack water. Then, when the tide turns, it hits a submerged mountain of some sort under the 1 1 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h surface and all hell breaks loose. That creates the whirlpool effect.”

As Isabel listened, her eye wandered back to the painting.

Perhaps that was what made these paintings sad for her—the knowledge that McInnes would die in the very place he painted so lovingly. But this, she thought, was not a McInnes. If one looked at the two paintings on the wall, and then at this one, it just felt different. They were not by the same hand.

“WELL?” SAID PETER as they walked back along Hope Terrace.

“That was interesting,” said Isabel. “Thank you for arrang-ing it.”

Peter stared at her quizzically. “Is that all you’re going to say?”

Isabel looked up, at the thin layer of high white cloud that was moving across the sky from the west. Cirrus. “No, I’ll say more if you want, but I’m not sure where to start. Him? Walter himself? A surprise. The way you’d spoken I thought of him as being much older. And there he is, living in that rather muse-umish house . . .”

“With his mother,” added Peter.

Isabel was surprised. “Really? I thought you said . . .”

“I thought that the parents were dead, but I was wrong.

She’s still with us, he told me. When you went out of the room to go to the loo, he said something about her. I was astonished.

I’ve never seen her, but she’s there apparently. She’s only in her early seventies, but he says that she doesn’t go out much.”

Isabel thought for a moment. Did that change anything?

The idea of Walter Buie living in that house by himself, with his ill-tempered dog—whom they did not meet—intrigued her simply because she wondered why he chose to live by himself.

What did he do about sex, or was he one of those asexual 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

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people—there were some, she knew—who did not care one way or the other, for whom sex was nothing too important, a minor itch at most. Was he gay? She found it difficult to tell these things, and often misjudged, particularly in the case of feminine men who were also resolutely straight. Or, finally, was it simply nobody else’s business, and therefore none of hers? That was true, but she decided to allow herself one final speculation. If his mother was still alive, was he there by choice, or because he was under pressure to stay? Some parents held on, and made it difficult for their offspring to leave. Walter Buie could be an emotional prisoner, the victim of a retentive—very retentive—

mother. And in that case, it was just possible that he was being made to sell the picture by his mother, who might be refusing to come up with the money that he thought he would be able to get from her. In that case, her conclusion that there was something wrong with the painting might be unjustified, and it might simply be a case of Walter’s needing to sell it.

“I don’t know what to think,” she muttered.

“You don’t have to do anything,” said Peter. “You’re under no obligation to him—nor he to you.”

Isabel smiled—not to Peter, but to herself. Peter was conscientious, but he was practical too. He made things work, whereas she could not help but be the philosopher. You and I are never going to agree on this, she thought. We are all under obligation to one another, deep obligation. I to you. You to me.

Walter Buie to us, and we to Walter Buie. And we are even under obligation to the dead, whose serried ranks in this case include one Andrew McInnes, painter, husband, our fellow citizen, our brother.

But she said none of this. Instead, she said, “Look at that cirrus uncinus up there. Just look at it.”

Peter looked up at the sky, at the wisps of cloud, and at first 1 1 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h said nothing. He wondered what the relevance of cirrus uncinus was. None, he thought.

“I would have described it as cirrus fibratus, ” he said quietly.

And that, he thought, should put her in her place. He liked Isabel, but every so often she needed to be reminded that she was not the only one who knew Latin.

Isabel turned to Peter and smiled. “The nice thing about you, Peter,” she said, “is that when you remind me not to be so obscure, you do it so gently.”

C H A P T E R N I N E

E

WITH THE INTIMACY of a married couple—which they were not—but with the sense of novelty and awe of lovers—

which they were—Isabel and Jamie prepared for their dinner with Cat. Isabel sat on the edge of her bed half dressed, examining a black cocktail dress and wondering whether it was the right thing for her to wear to Cat’s; Jamie came out of the bathroom wearing only a white towel wrapped round his waist, his hair wet from the shower, tousled, small drops of water on his shoulders and forearms. She looked up at him and then looked away again because she did not want him to see her looking upon him. That was a wonderful expression, she thought; looking upon somebody suggested that one was devouring the other.

One looked upon with lust, or with something akin to lust, and one would not want to be seen looking upon one’s lover in the way in which a gourmet, sitting at the table, would look upon an enticing dish.

Jamie moved over to the dressing table and picked up a brush. Bending down to look into the mirror, he brushed his hair roughly, but it sprang back up, as it always tended to do.

“Don’t worry,” said Isabel. “It looks nice like that. Your hair 1 1 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h sticks up naturally. Lots of women would commit murder for that.”

“It annoys me,” says Jamie. “Sometimes I think I’ll go to that place in Bruntsfield, you know the barbers near the luggage shop, and get a crew cut or one of those totally shaved styles.

What do they call them? A number one, I think.”

“You couldn’t,” said Isabel flatly. “It would be a crime.”

He turned to face her. “Why? It’s my head.”

She wanted to say, No, it’s not, it’s mine too, but she stopped herself. That was what she thought, though, and even as she thought it, she realised that Jamie was on loan to her, as we all are to one another, perhaps.

She picked at a loose thread on the cocktail dress. “I think it would be a pity to look shorn. And don’t you think that deliberately shaved heads look aggressive?”

“I’m not serious.” He paused. “Do you think I should get a tattoo?”

She laughed, and he did too, and the towel round his waist fell down. Isabel felt herself blushing involuntarily, but stood up and went to pick up the towel before he could do so himself.

She dried his shoulders with it, and then his chest. Jamie was not hirsute; he was like a boy, she thought, still.

They dressed. He said, “Will Charlie wake up, do you think?”

She did not think it likely. Grace was babysitting for them, and ensconced in the morning room, where Isabel kept the television. Charlie had been fed for the evening, and Isabel thought he would sleep through until midnight at least. “I doubt if we’ll be all that late,” she said. She left the reasons for this unsaid, but Jamie guessed what she meant. He was beginning to wonder whether he should have accepted Cat’s invitation. It might 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

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have seemed churlish to have refused, but now that he had accepted he felt a strong sense of anticipation over the meeting.

He decided to confide in Isabel. “I feel a bit jumpy about this,” he said. “I’m sorry. I just have these butterflies in my stomach.”

Isabel tried to reassure him. “The best way to deal with an old flame is to treat him or her as an old friend, or a cousin, maybe.”

He thought about this for a moment. “That’s all very well, but I don’t feel like this when I’m going to see an old friend. This is a different feeling.”

“Just don’t worry,” she said. “Just stop thinking about it.”

She reached out and took his hand. “Look, why don’t we go downstairs and have something before we go? A . . . gin and tonic.”

“For Dutch courage?”

“Yes,” she said. “Although I must say that that expression has always seemed to me to be a bit unkind.”

“Are the Dutch naturally brave?”

“I suspect that they’re the same as anybody else. Some are brave, some aren’t. But it’s got nothing to do with the Dutch themselves. It’s the gin they made.” She squeezed his hand.

“Don’t let Cat intimidate you.”

“Why has she asked us?” he asked. “Why?”

Isabel could not answer the question, and did not try to.

They went downstairs and into the drawing room, where she started to prepare the drinks while Jamie went into the morning room to speak to Grace. When he came back he said, “I’m going to call a taxi for Grace. She has a migraine coming on.”

Grace was prone to the occasional migraine, and would need to go to bed for twenty-four hours to ward it off. Isabel 1 1 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h handed the preparation of the drinks over to Jamie. “You do this,” she said. “I’ll phone for a taxi and get her organised.”

“Will we call off?” Jamie said. There was no disappointment in his voice.

Isabel, halfway out the door, gave him a look of mock surprise. “Why? Charlie can come in his carry-cot.” And why shouldn’t he? she thought. Cat could no longer pretend that Charlie did not exist; she had been cool towards him, barely acknowledging him, but that could not go on.

Grace kept a migraine pill at the house. She had taken it, and was feeling slightly better, but Isabel insisted that she should go home and bundled her into a taxi. Then she returned to the drawing room, where Jamie handed her her glass.

She raised it to him and took a sip. “Strong,” she said, making a face.

Jamie grinned. “We’ve got a long evening ahead of us.”

There was a frisson to the drinking of a strong gin and tonic, but Isabel felt that she needed this. Jamie felt the same, and by the time he had drained his glass he felt more confident about the encounter with Cat; but that feeling still lingered, that anticipation, which he realised now was sexual excitement. He looked away from Isabel, as if she might see it in his eyes.

CAT H A D R E C E N T LY moved to a flat in Fettes Row. It was on the third floor of a Georgian block, reached by a winding common stair that connected the landings of each flat. They had travelled across town by taxi, with Charlie obligingly asleep in his carry-cot on the floor of the cab, and now Jamie was carrying him up the last few steps to Cat’s door. Isabel, standing behind 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

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Jamie, bent down and looked at her son. “How can she dislike him?” she muttered.

Jamie reacted sharply. “Who?” he asked. “Who dislikes him?”

Having kept off the subject of Cat with Jamie, Isabel had never mentioned to him the animosity that she had picked up in Cat’s reaction to Charlie; and she had not intended to do so now. Her muttered words, thoughts inadvertently expressed aloud, had not been meant for his ears, but they would not be easily retracted now. But she tried nonetheless.

“I don’t know if she does,” she said apologetically. “I sense something in her attitude, but perhaps I shouldn’t go so far as to say that she dislikes him.”

Jamie frowned. He cast a glance down the stairs. “We could go home, you know,” he said, in a lowered voice. “We have a perfectly reasonable excuse, with Charlie. Babies and dinner parties don’t mix.”

Isabel thought that she saw anger in him, which surprised her. Jamie was normally of a markedly affable temperament, but this appeared to have riled him. Of course he was a father, she reminded herself, and any parent, especially a newly besotted one, resents the thought that somebody else might find fault with his child; our children are perfect, especially when they have just arrived and not disclosed their hand. But she and Jamie had come this far, and she thought it likely that Cat had even heard the front door being opened and the sound of their coming upstairs. For a few moments Isabel imagined how it would be to leave now, to begin sneaking downstairs again, and then for Cat to open the door and look down at their retreat-ing heads. A hostess might have cause to reflect on such a scene and to wonder why it was that her guests should feel compelled to leave before arriving, but would Cat do that? Isabel thought 1 2 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h not, and nor, to be honest, would she do so herself: the light from such incidents rarely fell on ourselves and our faults.

A tall, slender young woman opened the door. Her eyes went to Isabel first, then to Charlie, and finally to Jamie, where they lingered. Isabel glanced at Jamie, who, if he had looked at the young woman to begin with, had now looked away. Our eyes give us away, she thought; they move to the beautiful, to the attractive; they slide off the others; they flash out our emotional signals as clearly as if they were Aldis lamps. Jamie seemed irritated, almost flustered. We have barely arrived, Isabel thought, and the evening’s becoming difficult.

The young woman gestured for them to enter. “I’m Claudia,” she said. “Cat’s flatmate.”

“Of course.” Isabel had heard that Cat had taken a flatmate when she moved into Fettes Row, but she knew nothing about her other than that she came from St. Andrews and that she played golf, which almost everyone in St. Andrews did. This information had come from Eddie, who had met Claudia when she came into the delicatessen. He had curled his lip around the word golf, and Isabel had scolded him. “You may not like it, but others . . .”

“Get their kicks from whacking a little white ball around,”

he said. “Yes, sure.”

“Each of us has something,” she said. She felt inclined to ask Eddie how he spent his spare time, but hesitated. Eddie was more confident now, but there was a fragility to him, a vulnerability, that was just below the surface. Yet he could not expect to make scornful remarks about golfers and get away with it. So she said, “So, what do you do, Eddie? In your spare time? What do you do?”

The question had taken him aback. He looked at her, almost in alarm. “Me?”

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Isabel nodded. “Yes, you.”

“I chill out.”

She laughed and straightaway regretted it, as his face had immediately crumpled. He was still too weak; whatever had happened, that thing that Cat knew about—and it must be some time ago by now—had damaged him more than people might imagine. Quickly she reached out and touched his forearm. He pulled back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just that chilling out—well, it doesn’t tell us much.

Maybe to you . . .” Absurdly, the thought came to her of people sitting in a cold place, scantily clad perhaps, chilling out, beginning to shiver . . .

Claudia led them into the hall. Like many flats in the New Town, this was a generous, classically proportioned space, in this case not very tidy—Cat had a tendency to disorganisation in her personal life, and Isabel noticed the pile of mail that lay unopened on the hall table, alongside a muddle of unsolicited advertisements for pizzerias and Indian restaurants. Claudia saw the direction of her gaze and laughed. “We meant to tidy it up for you,” she said, “but you know how it is.”

“I feel more comfortable with a bit of clutter,” said Isabel.

“And you do too, don’t you Jamie?”

He tried to smile, but the result was halfhearted. Isabel noticed that Claudia was staring at him again. This made her wonder whether Cat had told her flatmate that Jamie was an ex-boyfriend. And would she then have gone on to explain that he was an ex-boyfriend stolen by an aunt? If she had, then Isabel might as well play the part of the brazen cradle snatcher, the ruthless man eater; which she could never do, she thought—or at least not with a straight face.

Claudia asked where they would like to put Charlie. He could have her bedroom, if Isabel thought that would be suit-1 2 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h able. “It’s at the back,” she said. “It’s quiet. It looks over towards Cumberland Street.”

She took them into the room. There was a double bed with an Indian-print bedspread, a small bookcase, a writing table.

Above the bed there was a print of a Hopper painting, a young woman at a table, the light upon her. They put Charlie’s carry-cot on the bed and Jamie bent down to adjust his blanket.

“He’s out for the count,” Jamie said. It was his first remark of the evening, and Isabel noticed that Claudia seemed to listen to it with grave interest, as if Jamie had said something profound.

Then Cat came into the room. She was carrying a small piece of paper towel and she was wiping her hands with it. She looked at Isabel, but while she was looking at her she said,

“Hello, Jamie.” Then, “Hello, Isabel.”

Isabel gave Cat a kiss, a peck on the cheek. As she did so, she felt the tension in the other woman, a tightness of muscle.

“And there’s Charlie,” said Isabel. “Fast asleep.”

Cat glanced down at the carry-cot. She did not bend down to kiss him, nor did she touch him; she just looked. “Hello, Charlie,” she said.

Isabel watched her. She had not looked at Jamie, not once, and that hardly boded well for the evening. The recipes for social disaster were varied and colourful; within the small compass of Edinburgh dinner-party lore, they included the going to sleep of the host—at the table—during the soup course, the soup on the same occasion being so heavily salted that it was inedible and had to be left in the bowl by the guests; an argument between guests leading to the early departure of the offended party; and, of course, inadvertent guest-list solecisms, such as the placing, on one famous occasion, of the survivors 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

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acrimonious divorces next to one another. Her own worst experience had been the moment when, at a lunch party, a guest had blithely asked whether anybody had ever been tempted to commit an act of violence, and the hostess unfortunately, in a moment of dissociative aberration, had attacked a former lover and been convicted of assault, to the knowledge of all present except the questioner. Ill-judged remarks led to periods of embarrassment that could be measured in minutes, or sometime even seconds; tonight’s awkwardness, by contrast, might be measured in hours, if Cat was going to refuse steadfastly to look at one of the guests. This could be done—Isabel had heard of a woman in Edinburgh who cut another woman seated opposite her by looking through her for an entire dinner. That required some skill, and demonstrated, too, how human effort might be misapplied.

But then Cat suddenly turned to Jamie and said, “My, you’re looking fit, Jamie!”

Isabel breathed a sigh of relief; they were not in for the long haul after all. But then Cat added, “Somebody’s obviously keeping you rather well.”

The significance of this remark took a moment or two to sink in. Isabel, prepared for the worst, immediately saw the concealed meaning: Jamie was accused of being a kept man. The sheer effrontery of this was astonishing, but Jamie, unprepared, appeared not to notice the choice of words, at least not to begin with. As they moved through to the sitting room from the bedroom, he suddenly stiffened and half turned to Isabel. Their eyes met, and she gave a discreet shake of the head, a turning up of the eyes, as if to say, Don’t bother. Rise above it.

Claudia passed a glass of wine to Isabel and then one 1 2 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h to Jamie. Isabel raised her glass to Cat, who responded halfheartedly.

“We had to bring Charlie,” Isabel said. “Grace had one of her migraines. She doesn’t get them very often but . . .”

“Charlie sleeps through things,” said Jamie. “He’s very good.”

Both Cat and Claudia turned to look at Jamie as he spoke.

Then Claudia turned to Cat and said, “Who had that awful baby? The people who came to dinner, and it screamed and screamed?”

“Oh them,” said Cat. “Yes. It was heading for Scottish Opera, that one.”

Jamie frowned. “I’m sure it wasn’t their fault. You can’t stop a baby screaming when it gets going. What can you do?”

He looked at Cat, as if awaiting an answer. She met his gaze, but only for a moment. How does one look upon somebody whom one used to like? Like that, Isabel thought, watching Cat’s expression; quick glances, expressing self-reproach, or surprise, perhaps, at the fact that one could have liked the other. And in the case of an ex-lover who had left one, it could be resentment that prevailed—resentment that the other was leading a life in which one played no part, the ultimate slap in the face. Cat, though, had got rid of Jamie, not the other way round, and she could hardly resent his finding somebody else.

Perhaps not, but if that somebody was one’s aunt . . .

Isabel saw that Jamie still appeared to be waiting for Cat to answer his question. A change of subject, she decided, would help.

“Speaking of Scottish Opera,” she said, “Did you see their Rosenkavalier, Cat?”

Cat’s answer was abrupt. “No.” And then she added, “No, I didn’t.”

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This, thought Isabel, is going to be difficult; perhaps they should have turned round on the stairway after all.

“Rosenkavalier has its moments,” said Jamie suddenly.

“Yes . . . ,” Isabel began. “I agree. I think . . .”

“I saw Carmen in London,” interjected Claudia. “English National Opera did it.”

For a few moments there was silence. Isabel smiled encouragingly. “Carmen is always fun,” she said. “Everybody loves it.”

Jamie shot her a glance. “Maybe,” he muttered.

Isabel persisted. “It’s like all the established repertoire,” she said. “People like the familiar in opera. Carmen fills the house.”

For a moment Jamie said nothing. Isabel noticed that his hands were clasped together tightly and that his knuckles showed white. When he spoke, his voice was strained. “Yes, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? All the old stuff leaves no space for anything new.”

“New operas,” said Isabel mildly, “can scare people away. It’s a fact of life.”

“So we shouldn’t perform them?” Jamie snapped. “Just the same old stuff? La Bohème, La Traviata? ”

Isabel glanced at Cat, who was staring up at the ceiling, perhaps to avoid looking at Jamie. She did not want to prolong the discussion that she had started and that had suddenly turned into an argument, but at the same time she found herself resenting Jamie’s deliberately provocative stance. She did not disapprove of new opera—he knew that—and it was unfair of him to portray her as a traditionalist. She was not.

“I didn’t say that there was no place for new operas,” she said firmly. “I didn’t. All that I’d say is that opera companies have to live in the real world. They have to sell tickets, and this means doing the things that people come to see. Not all the time, of course. But they do have to do them.”

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

“And that means no new works?” retorted Jamie.

“No,” she said. “No.”

Isabel felt ill at ease. It was unlike Jamie to be argumenta-tive, but it occurred to her that the tension of the evening was the explanation for his snippiness. She could understand that, but it still hurt her that he should pick a public fight with her, and she was reflecting on this when they heard Charlie begin to cry.

Jamie leapt to his feet. “He’s awake,” he said.

Cat looked annoyed. “Can’t you leave him to settle?” she said. “Won’t he drop off again?”

“No,” said Jamie, abruptly. “You can’t neglect a baby.”

Cat’s eyes flashed. “I didn’t say neglect, for heaven’s sake.

I said—”

“I’m going to go and get him,” said Jamie.

They watched him leave the room. Cat looked at Isabel and smiled conspiratorially. Isabel did not return the smile. In her view, Cat wanted her to be complicit in the judgement that Jamie was overreacting, that he would not really know how to deal with a niggling baby. But she was not prepared to do that.

“He’s very good,” she said.

Cat turned to Claudia and mouthed something. Isabel caught her breath. It was difficult to tell, and perhaps she had imagined it—surely she had imagined it—but it seemed to her that the words that Cat had mouthed to her flatmate were these: in bed.

“THAT WAS A DISASTER.”

Jamie nodded. “You can say that again.”

They were travelling home in a taxi. Going up the Mound, the lights of the Castle above them and the dark valley 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

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Princes Street Garden to their right, they watched the late-night life of the streets—the groups of students, boisterous, heading for clubs and pubs, the couples arm in arm, the clusters of people under bus-stop shelters. Charlie had niggled and cried from the moment he had woken up at that early stage, and the atmosphere at the table had been tense and uncomfortable. They had left the moment the meal was over and had gone down the stairs in silence. Jamie was cross with her, Isabel thought, but she did not know what she had to apologise for. For disagreeing with him over new operas? For accepting the invitation in the first place?

“I’m sorry,” she said as the taxi crested the brow of the High Street and began to make its way towards George IV Bridge.

“I’m sorry for whatever I’m meant to have done.”

“You didn’t do anything,” muttered Jamie. “It’s just that I hated the whole thing. I hated the way Cat behaved. I hated her attitude towards Charlie.”

Isabel sighed. “It’s very complicated,” said Isabel.

“Everything’s too complicated,” said Jamie. “The whole lot’s too complicated.”

“Why don’t we go away then?” said Isabel. She said this without thinking, but after she had said it she realised that it was a good idea. They needed to get away, with Charlie, to be by themselves. A few days would make all the difference.

Jamie did not reject the possibility out of hand.

“Go away where?” he asked.

Again Isabel did not think before she spoke. “Jura,” she said.

“All right,” said Jamie. He still seemed low, and she reached out and took his hand in hers. She sensed his tension, but he did not draw his hand away, and by the time they reached Bruntsfield Place and were travelling past the darkened windows of Cat’s delicatessen, he was stroking her wrist with his 1 2 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h fingers, gently, tentatively, with the touch of a lover who has found out again that he is in awe of the person he loves.

Isabel thought of the outrageous thing that she had imagined Cat to have mouthed. True, she thought, and smiled to herself.

C H A P T E R T E N

E

HER SUGGESTION that they should go to Jura for a few days did not look as impulsive in the cold light of morning as she had thought it might. Jamie had been slightly taken aback by the idea—they had not planned to go away together, but now that the idea had been floated, he decided that he rather liked it.

“The Hebrides are ideal,” he said. “I was on Harris a few years ago—do you know it? I love it there. And we went down to South Uist as well. There’s this wonderful feeling that one is right on the edge.”

“And one is,” said Isabel. “The very edge of Scotland. Of Europe too.”

Jamie looked out the window—they were in the kitchen, having breakfast—and the morning sun was streaming in through the large Victorian window, illuminating floating specks of dust that were drifting like minute planets in space. “Isn’t it odd,” he said, reaching out and creating a whirlwind in the air before him, “how we think of air as being empty, but it’s full of things. Bits of dust. Viruses too, I suppose.”

Isabel was thinking of the Hebrides. “And Jura?” she asked.

“Have you been there?”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Jamie shook his head. “I get the Inner Hebrides mixed up,”

he said. “Jura is the one which is next to Islay, isn’t it? Off the Mull of Kintyre?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “Islay’s much bigger. It makes more whisky—it has six or seven whisky distilleries, I think. Then there’s Jura. The Island of Deer—that’s what it means in Norse.”

“Ah,” said Jamie. “I’ve seen it from Islay but I’ve never been on it.” He paused, and looked at Isabel with interest. “But why Jura?” He asked the question, and then he remembered; it was the painting that they had seen in the auction. That had been Jura.

Jamie raised an eyebrow. “It’s nothing to do with . . .”

Isabel shrugged. “I’ve been thinking about it,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about that painting. I suppose that it’s made me want to go there again. I have some friends there. I’d like to see them.”

“Who?” asked Jamie. He was suspicious. Isabel had a habit of doing things for very specific reasons, even if they appeared to be spontaneous or unplanned.

“Some people called Fletcher,” said Isabel. “The Fletchers have had Ardlussa estate up there for some time. I knew Charlie and Rose Fletcher slightly and I got to know their daughter a bit better. Lizzie Fletcher. She’s a great cook—she caters for hunting lodges and house parties in the Highlands, that sort of thing. Her brother’s taking over the house, but Lizzie still spends time up there when she isn’t cooking for people. You’ll like her.”

“Is that all?” asked Jamie. “Any other people?”

“Well, I went up there only two or three times,” said Isabel.

“I didn’t get to know many people. The manager of the distillery.

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The women in the shop in Craighouse.” She had been drinking coffee, and now she drained the last few drops from her cup; mostly milk, a few flecks of foam—Isabel liked her coffee milky.

“And you do know about Orwell?” she asked.

Jamie did. “He wrote 1984 there, didn’t he?”

“Yes, at Barnhill, a house up at the top of the island. He finished it there in 1948.”

“And that’s how . . .”

Isabel wondered whether Jamie had read 1984; his reading was patchy, but there were surprises. He had read Anna Karen-ina and Cry, the Beloved Country, but did not know who Madame Bovary was—which was half his charm, she suddenly thought; that he should not know about such things. “Who’s Madame Bovary?” he had asked once, and Isabel, unprepared for the question, had almost said, I am, in jest, and then had stopped herself in time. But it was true, wasn’t it? Like Madame Bovary, she had fallen for a younger man, although in her case she had no husband and there was no Flaubert to punish her.

Women who fell desperately in love in defiance of convention were punished by their authors—Anna had been punished too; Isabel had smiled at the thought, and wondered whether she would be punished for loving Jamie. She had no author, though.

Isabel was real.

Orwell: he punished himself, she thought, by staring at nightmares, and then writing about them. “Yes,” she said. “He reversed the figures to get 1984, which must have seemed an awful long way away then.” She stood up. “And then when the real 1984 came along, it didn’t seem too bad after all. Certainly, it seems quite halcyon when compared with what’s going on today. All those cameras constantly trained on the streets and so on. All that suspicion.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Jamie rose to his feet too and glanced at his watch. He was due at the school in an hour or so, and he thought of the boy who awaited him in the music room, a boy who did not enjoy playing the bassoon and who endured his lessons with barely concealed boredom. They disliked one another with cordiality; Jamie disapproved of his attitude to the instrument and was vaguely repelled by the boy’s incipient sexuality, a sort of sultry, pent-up energy, just below the surface, manifesting itself in an outcrop of bad skin along the line of his chin and . . . It was hard being a boy of fourteen, and fifteen was just as bad. One knew everything, or thought one did, and it was frustrating that the rest of the world seemed unwilling to acknowledge this. And girls, who were equally uncomfortable, seemed so mocking, so near and yet so far, so out of reach because one was not quite tall enough or one’s skin was uncooperative. Jamie shuddered.

Had he been like that?

He thought of what Isabel had just said. Had things gone that badly wrong? And if they had, then why?

“Suspicion?” he asked. “Are we more suspicious?”

Isabel had no doubts. “Yes, of course we are. Look at airports—you’re a suspect the moment you set foot in one. And for obvious reasons. But we’re also more suspicious of everyone because we don’t know them anymore. Our societies have become societies of strangers—people with whom we share no common experience, who may not speak the same language as we do. They certainly won’t know the same poems and the same books. What can you expect in such circumstances? We’re strangers to one another.”

Jamie listened intently. Yes, Isabel could be right, but where did her observations take one? One could not turn the clock back to a world where we all grew up in the same village.

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“What can we do?” he asked.

“Nothing,” said Isabel. She thought for a moment about her answer. It was defeatist, and it could not be right. We could seek to re-create community, we could bring about a shared world of cultural references and points of commonality. We had to do that, or we would drift off into a separateness, which was almost where we were now. But it would not be easy, this re-creation of civil society; it would not be easy taming the feral young, the gangs, the children deprived of language and moral compass by neglect and the absence of fathers. “I don’t really mean nothing,” she said. “But it’s complicated.”

Jamie looked at his watch again. “I have to . . .”

“Of course,” said Isabel. “It’s a major project and you have only ten minutes.”

He leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She smelled the shaving soap that he liked to use, the smell of sandalwood.

For the rest of that day, Isabel did very little work. She made several telephone calls, though: to the ferry company in the west, to book the car passage on it to Islay and back; to Lizzie Fletcher, to see if she would be on Jura the following weekend, when they planned to arrive; and to the island’s only hotel, the hotel at Craighouse, to arrange a room, one that would be large enough for the two of them and Charlie. Then somewhat reluctantly, when it was almost time for lunch, she faced up to the thing that she had been putting out of her mind but which now abruptly claimed her attention. Christopher Dove was coming that afternoon. He was booked on a train from London that would arrive at Waverley Station at three o’clock. He had announced this on the telephone and then had waited, as if expecting Isabel to offer to meet him. That’s what people used 1 3 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h to do at Oxford; they would meet people at the station and then walk to their college with them. Isabel endured a brief moment of internal struggle. Her natural goodness dictated that she should offer to be there; but her humanity, which, after all, was not restricted to kindness and sympathy—qualities of humanity surely can be bad, because that is what humanity is like—that same humanity now prompted her to be unhelpful. Professor Christopher Dove, after all, was the man who had engineered the coup which had toppled her from her editorial post. He was a ruthless, ambitious man, a plotter, who should have been a politician rather than a philosopher, thought Isabel. And I shall not meet him at the station. He can take a taxi and come to me.

Of course, she relented. Shortly before nine o’clock that morning she telephoned his home to offer to collect him at Waverley. As the telephone rang, she imagined the desk on which it rang, in his house in Islington, where was where she was sure that he lived. There was no reply; he had left for King’s Cross and she had no mobile number for him. She rang off.

That was a lesson which she should not need to learn at this stage of her life. Do not act meanly, do not be unkind, because the time for setting things right may pass before your heart changes course.

A TA X I H A D D R AW N U P in front of the house. From her study window on the ground floor, Isabel looked out, beyond the rhododendron bushes and the small birch tree to the front gate; a figure in the back of the cab was leaning forward to pay the driver. Well at least he got that right, thought Isabel; in Edinburgh one paid the driver before getting out of the cab—which was the sensible thing to do, the Enlightenment way—whereas 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

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in London people got out and paid through the front window, which the driver had to lower. Isabel could not see the point of this, but it was one of those things, like driving on the left side of the road rather than the right, which just was. And these things, particularly the side of the road on which a nation drove, was not something that could easily be changed, although Isabel remembered that there had been at least one autocrat somewhere—it was in Burma, she thought, with its odd, unhappy history—who had capriciously insisted that people should abruptly change from driving on the left to driving on the right, with the result that they were confused and had numerous accidents. Rulers should not impose too much on their long-suffering people. Had not the King of Tonga, an extremely large man, insisted that the whole nation should go on a diet when he decided to embark on one? That would surely test the bonds between monarch and people.

She watched as Christopher Dove stepped out of the taxi, holding a small overnight bag and briefcase. He looked towards the front door, to check the number, which was prominently displayed in brass Roman numerals screwed onto the wood.

Then his gaze moved to the study window, and Isabel drew back sharply into the shadows. Dove must not, under any circumstances, feel that his visit made her anxious. Isabel had decided that she would remain dignified with Dove and treat him as she would treat any other colleague. That, after all, was the only thing she could do. Anything else—any pettiness or irritation on her part—would compound Dove’s victory over her, make it all the more glorious.

She had met him before, of course, and so his appearance was no surprise; the haughty good looks, the high cheekbones and brow; the thick, carefully groomed blond hair like that of 1 3 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h one of those men in the perfume advertisements, the men who stood there, shirtless for some reason (the heat, perhaps), looking in such a steely way into the middle distance. That was Dove.

“Isabel!” He had put his bags down on the doorstep and was standing there when she answered the bell, his arms extended as if to embrace her. And he did, leaning forward and putting his arms around Isabel’s shoulders, kissing her on each cheek. She struggled with her natural inclination to draw back, but even if she mastered that, he must have felt her tenseness.

“It’s so good of you to see me,” he enthused. “And at short notice too!”

She thought: It’s not at all good of me to see you; I had to see you. It would have been ridiculous not to see you. “It’s no trouble,” she said. “We have to get the handover right. After all, there are a lot of readers now. A lot. We wouldn’t want to lose them.”

It was a charged remark. She had not intended to fire off a shot quite so early, but she had. The fact that there were so many readers was attributable almost entirely to her editorship; when she had come to the job, the readership had been per-ilously small.

“Of course,” he said, smiling. “And that’s thanks to your efforts, of course. You’ve built the readership up marvellously.

You really have.”

Isabel thought, Well, why change editors in those circumstances? Should she say that? She decided not to, and instead invited Christopher Dove in. “Perhaps we should go through to my study,” she said. “You can leave your bags in the hall.” She looked pointedly at the overnight bag. “You have a hotel?”

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was no, then she would be obliged to offer him a bed for the night, and she was unwilling to do that. I was hungry and you took me in. Yes, but that was in respect of somebody poor, not somebody nasty.

“No,” he said, and her heart sank. But then he went on, “I’m going back on the sleeper train. Do you ever use it? I like it.”

“Norman MacCaig didn’t,” said Isabel. “He wrote a poem about it. I think there’s a line, ‘I do not like this being carried sideways through the night.’ ”

Dove grinned. “Poets get crotchety,” he said. “We philosophers are more sanguine, more stoic.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Isabel. “Hume was even-tempered, I suppose, but there have been plenty of unpleasant philosophers.” Such as you, she thought.

“I have never fully appreciated Hume,” said Dove, not too discreetly inspecting Isabel’s shelves. “I understand the appeal, but I take the view that there’s so much more to be learned about our emotions from contemporary cognitive science. Hume wouldn’t have exactly understood a magnetic resonance scan.”

Isabel stared at him incredulously. This was pure nonsense.

But she decided that she did not have the energy to engage with Christopher Dove on the point, and she moved over towards the filing cabinet behind her desk. “When I took over the editorship,” she said, “I threw out a lot of old files. There were boxes and boxes of papers which my predecessor had done nothing about sorting out. There were all sorts of things which would have been of no interest to anybody. Letters from the printers, and so on. I cleared it all out. There was even an ancient letter from Bertrand Russell about a claim for a train fare to a sympo-sium that the Review had organised.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h now spun round. “Russell? But what about his biographers?

What if they had wanted it?”

Dove’s tone was one of subdued outrage, and Isabel bristled defensively. “Would his biographers be interested in a claim for a train fare? Surely not, unless Russell questioned the reality of the train journey, or something like that. I think that I boarded a train at Paddington, but can I be sure? ” She laughed, but Dove did not; he was concerned with posterity, and could not laugh at such things. Isabel wondered what conclusion biographers might draw from such a letter: that Russell was always one to claim expenses? Or that his finances were not in a good state and that he needed to watch even very minor outlays?

“What else?” asked Dove peevishly. “What else did you throw out?”

“I can assure you that I got rid of nothing significant,” said Isabel. “It was all what would be called ephemera.”

Dove’s irritation seemed to mount. Isabel noticed that he was flushed, and that this showed very clearly, given his complexion. And she thought, too, that he was a very good-looking man and that he carried no extra weight. He would be a squash player, perhaps, or a cricketer; he had that look about him.

“Ephemera can be valuable,” he said. “Very valuable. The signatures of well-known people on even the most mundane of letters can go for a great deal of money.”

Isabel realised that this was true. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Perhaps I should have been more careful. It’s just that there was so much paper, and I really thought that . . .”

Dove suddenly seemed conciliatory. “Never mind,” he said.

“I understand your feelings about mounds of paper. It really does accumulate, doesn’t it?”

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They sat down at the desk, Isabel on her side and Dove on the other.

“I thought that we should go over plans for the next three issues,” said Isabel. “Things are fairly far advanced with them, and if the current issue is going to be the last one I do, then you’ll be taking over quite a bit of work in progress, so to speak.”

Dove nodded gravely. “Yes.”

“So shall we start with the next issue?” said Isabel.

Dove said that he thought this was a good idea, and Isabel extracted a thick folder from a pile of papers on her desk. She saw her visitor’s eyes go to the pile of papers, and she realised that he disapproved of the clutter.

“I do know where everything is,” she said quietly. “It may not look like it, but I do know.”

“Of course you do,” muttered Dove. “Creative clutter.”

She did not like the condescending tone of his comment, but she let it pass. She opened the folder and took out a messy-looking bit of paper on which she had noted the order in which she proposed to put the articles. There was also her editorial, printed out on cream-coloured paper and corrected here and there, in blue ink, by its author. This would be her last editorial, she reflected, and it was about the ethics of taxation. Dove would never write about anything quite so dull, she thought. He would write about . . . what? Cognitive science, perhaps; decision trees and ethics; the question of whether computers had minds, from which Isabel realised the further question might flow: Could one have good computers and bad computers? In the moral sense of course.

They began to work, and worked through until four thirty, when Isabel heard the front gate open. She looked up and saw a visitor coming down the path to the front door. It was 1 4 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Cat. Dove looked up too. He saw Cat and looked enquiringly at Isabel.

“My niece,” said Isabel, getting up from her desk. “I wasn’t expecting her.”

Dove stretched his arms back and yawned. “I could do with a break anyway.”

Isabel left him in the study and made her way to the front door. Cat had her finger poised before the bell when Isabel opened the door.

“I saw you.” Isabel smiled warmly. Cat’s visit could be a new beginning, and she would not let the memory of that disastrous evening at her flat stand in the way of a reconciliation. But if there was a thaw, it was a slight one, as Cat still seemed distant.

“You left your cardigan at the flat the other night,” said Cat.

“Here it is.”

Isabel took the cardigan, which Cat produced from a small carrier bag. “Come in for a quick cup of tea,” she said. “I was just about to make some. Christopher Dove is here.”

Cat looked interested. “Christopher Dove? Do I know him?”

“No. He’s on the board of the journal. In fact, he’s . . .”

She trailed off. She was about to say that he was taking over, but at that moment, at the door, she was not so sure. It was complicated.

“All right,” said Cat. “But I can’t stay long. I’ve left Eddie in charge and I think he wants to get away early. He’s doing a class in the yoga centre near Holy Corner.”

“That’s a good thing,” said Isabel. “Poor Eddie . . .”

Cat did not pursue the subject of Eddie. “Well, Eddie’s Eddie.”

“That,” said Isabel, “is undoubtedly true. And you can probably say the same about most of us, mutatis mutandis. ”

Cat looked at her sideways.

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“That is,” Isabel continued, “changing that which requires to be changed. In this case, the name.”

Cat said nothing. They had entered the hall, and Christopher Dove had appeared from the study. Isabel introduced them, and Christopher stepped forward to shake Cat’s hand.

Isabel watched and immediately noticed the change in Cat’s demeanour.

“We’ll have a cup of tea in the kitchen,” said Isabel.

Cat looked upstairs. “Where’s . . .”

“With Grace this afternoon,” said Isabel. She did not want to talk about Charlie in front of Dove. Grace had taken Charlie to the Botanic Gardens to walk him round and get some fresh air. Isabel had been happy for Charlie to be out of the way during her meeting with Dove and had not pointed out her belief that the air in Merchiston, her part of Edinburgh, was every bit as fresh as the air in Inverleith, where the Botanic Gardens were. In fact, the air was fresher in Merchiston and Morning-side, which were several hundred feet higher than Inverleith, and there was also that occasional miasmic mist which snaked into Inverleith from the shores of the Firth of Forth and which she would never describe as fresh.

They went into the kitchen.

“Such a large house,” said Dove. “In London we have to make do with—”

“You’re very crowded,” interjected Isabel. “It’s most unfortunate.”

Cat was watching Dove; a scene enacted in Isabel’s garden from time to time when the neighbour’s striped cat stalked birds. Isabel smiled at the thought, and turned away to put on the kettle and hide her amusement. But that amusement lasted for only a few seconds, for then she thought: She can’t!

Isabel went out of the room for a moment on the pretext of 1 4 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h fetching something. But she stopped in the hall and thought: I can’t bear it if she falls for him. Dove! She took a deep breath before going back into the kitchen. Cat and Dove were in animated conversation.

“Such a great city . . . Do you know London? . . . A delicatessen? I’ve got a great one near my place in Islington . . .

Hard work, I bet . . .”

And, “I’ve got a friend there . . . I should get down more often . . . I love it when I do . . . That buzz. Yes. There’s a buzz . . . Show you round? Are you staying?”

Isabel busied herself with the making of the tea. It was every bit as bad as she feared. But of course she should have anticipated it. Dove was older than Cat by a few years—eight maybe—but he looked youthful and he was exactly her physical type. She remembered Toby, to whom Cat had been briefly and disastrously engaged. He had looked just like Dove, now that she came to think of it, and so she should not be surprised, and now . . . she could hardly believe it: the invitation to dinner had been extended, and accepted. There would be plenty of time, Dove told Cat, as the sleeper did not leave until after eleven.

Isabel handed Cat her cup of tea with a look into which she tried to pour a wide range of emotions: surprise, pity, and the reproach that went with betrayal. But her efforts were in vain.

Cat did not see her. Nor did Dove.

CAT L E F T after half an hour, and Isabel and Dove returned to finish off their work in the study. They did not have much to do, which meant that Dove could leave in good time to meet Cat at the delicatessen and then go out for dinner.

“Cat has very kindly offered to show me a bit of the town this evening,” said Dove.

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“She’s very interested in . . .” Isabel wanted to say men, but ended up saying that sort of thing. She glanced at her watch.

Grace should be back soon, although sometimes she took Charlie to visit her cousin, who lived in Stockbridge, not far from the Botanic Gardens. And Jamie would be due any moment, as he had said that he would be back early in order to see Charlie before his bath time.

They were on the point of finishing when Jamie arrived. The study door was open and he came in, expecting to find only Isabel. “Oh,” he said. “Sorry to interrupt.”

“This is Christopher Dove,” said Isabel.

Jamie knew who Christopher Dove was and a shadow passed across his face, a clouding. “Oh.”

Christopher Dove stood up to shake hands with Jamie. He turned to Isabel.

“Your nephew?”

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

E

CHRISTOPHER DOVE left Edinburgh to return to London on the Monday of that week. That left three full days in Edinburgh before she and Jamie—and Charlie, of course—were due to leave for their four days on Jura. It would have been better to leave Edinburgh on the Friday, but they could not, as Jamie was playing in a concert in Perth that evening. So he managed to get the following Monday and Tuesday off, by shifting his pupils to later in the week, something he normally did not like to do but which was just possible, provided that it was not done too often.

The visit of the London philosopher had left Isabel shocked and angry. Her anger, which was more of a simmering resentment, perhaps, was focused on Dove himself and on his scheming ways, his sheer dishonesty. He had coveted her job and had pushed her out; that she could accept, to an extent, if only he had not been so duplicitous about it. Had he taken her job openly, then she might have muttered something about the fairness of all in love and war and left it at that. But he had unctu-ously congratulated her on her achievements and acted as if the discussions over the transfer were between willing predecessor and willing successor. They were not! thought Isabel. This was what businesspeople called an unfriendly takeover, and no 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

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amount of smooth talking and smiling would paper over that unavoidable fact.

The shock that Isabel felt was nothing to do with Dove, or only indirectly so; it had resulted from the sheer, naked concu-piscence of Cat’s flirting. For a while Isabel had wondered whether Cat knew about the reason for Dove’s presence and whether her immediate taking up with him had been intended to rub salt into Isabel’s wound, a form of fraternisation with the enemy in full view of General Headquarters. But then she realised that Cat did not know about the change in editorship and that whatever else she might have done in recent months to hurt or offend Isabel, she had not done this. But it was still shocking because Isabel believed that people should be circum-spect about picking up other people. One might like somebody and set out to make further acquaintance, but, other than in bars and clubs where everybody went for that precise purpose, one tried not to make one’s intentions too obvious. Was this hypocrisy, and an outdated form of hypocrisy at that? She did not think so. The whole point about conventions of this nature is that they affirmed the value of the person; she who advertised the fact of immediate availability—and in Cat’s case barely five minutes had passed before the date was made—was suggesting surely, that she was available even to one whom she barely knew. There was such a thing as appropriate reticence, thought Isabel; a reticence that might at least involve a short prelude before the implicit bargain was sealed.

She was shocked by the thought that her niece was—well, there was no other word for it—cheap. She knew that Cat had an eye for a certain sort of man—the wrong sort—and she knew that her boyfriends tended not to last very long, but she had not thought of her before as cheap. Or was there another word?

Fast? No, a fast woman might not be cheap. They were two dif-1 4 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h ferent things. Fast women could be stylish and really rather expensive; they might think long and hard before they decided with whom they were going to be fast.

She was distracted for a moment by the conjuring up of an image of a fast woman. She saw, quite vividly, a woman sporting a low neckline, a knee-length silk-jersey dress, close-fitting, expensively draped, an impossibly small bag made of supple green leather; one would smell the quality of the leather. Isabel smiled at the thought, but then her smile faded. Cat was not fast, but she did not want to conclude that she was cheap. What was she then? The answer came to her: confused. That was a third category of women: those who were simply confused.

They did not really know what sort of man they wanted, tried many, and found them all wanting.

She tried to put Cat’s involvement with Dove out of her mind and thought instead of the absent Charlie. Cat would come round—eventually; even if Isabel could not get through to her, in due course Charlie would. One cannot snub a baby for long, even if he is the product of one’s aunt’s dalliance with one’s ex-boyfriend. As for Dove, he had done nothing to redeem himself and she had decided on a course of action which would deal with him. That required a bit of thought, but Isabel did not want to dwell on it too long. These things, once decided, should be acted upon, as Lady Macbeth pointed out to her indecisive husband. Isabel had not thought that she could do this particular thing; she had not imagined that she had it within her. But now she decided she had, and that she would act.

In the first place it involved a telephone call in which instructions were given. That took rather longer than she had planned, but at the end of the call everything was arranged.

Then there was another call, this time to the small private bank, Adam & Company, where Isabel was put through to Gareth 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

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Howlett. That did not take long; liquidity, Gareth explained, was not a problem for Isabel.

“Sometimes people don’t quite understand just how substantial their resources are,” said Gareth. “You don’t really need to worry, you know.”

“I don’t like to think about these things,” said Isabel. She remembered what her friend Max had once said to her: Money is only a problem if one doesn’t have enough of it. It was one of those observations that seemed self-evident, but which had depths to it that became apparent only when one sat down to think about it. And could one say the same about other things?

Was food a problem only if one did not have enough of it? No, that, at least, was not true. Those who had enough food still had problems with it; hence the whole desperate business of dieting—the cures, the pills, the fat farms, the hopelessness of the scales.

That out of the way, Isabel turned to the luxury of spending a couple of days exactly as she pleased. Dove had taken the files on the next issue away with him, which meant that there was nothing pressing for Isabel to do. She could visit the bookshops, go to the galleries, see friends: she felt a heady sense of having choices in what to do with her time, that delicious feeling that there were simply no claims upon her. Apart from Charlie, of course, and Jamie, and the house, Grace, and occasionally, and in a subtle way, Brother Fox.

S H E D I D N OT T E L L JA M I E where she went the next day, which was to a house in the Stockbridge Colonies. The Colonies were rows of neat, late-nineteenth-century houses, stone-built and terraced, with one house below and one above, the upper front door being reached by an external stone staircase built 1 4 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h up against the wall of the house below. They were attractive houses, although somewhat cramped, built for the families of skilled tradesmen at the end of the Victorian era, like the mining cottages one saw in some of the villages of East Lothian, on the plain that stretched out to the cold blue-grey line of the North Sea. At the end of each row of houses, on the gable wall that fronted the street, there were carved representations of the trade of those who occupied the houses beyond: the miller’s wheel; the maltman’s rake; the calipers, chisel, and hammer of the stonemason. Of course the tradesmen had been replaced by young professionals and advertising people, but these houses were still not too expensive and some of them were occupied by older people who had paid very little for them thirty years ago.

She found Teviotdale Place halfway along the road that crossed over a small bridge. Edinburgh’s river, the Water of Leith, not a great river by the standards of many cities, looped its way through Stockbridge at this point. The end houses in the Colonies were all on the edge of the riverbank, a good place to be in summer, when the river was low, but an unsettling place to live when the Water of Leith became overambitious, as it did after heavy rains up in the Pentland Hills. It was a comfortable street, as all these Colonies streets were; proving, perhaps, the proposition that we are happiest when living in courtyards or, as in this case, in streets that face one another and are almost courtyards. Children could play here, in the street, and be watched from both sides; washing could be hung out on the lines that were strung from walls to the black-painted, cast-iron washing posts that emerged from tiny lawns; cats could prowl through lavender bushes and wisteria and along the tops of the pint-sized walls that separated garden from garden.

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Isabel had been given the address by Guy Peploe, whom she had seen the previous day, when she had dropped into the Scottish Gallery. There had been a conversation about McInnes—and a further look at the Jura painting which Guy still had—and then he had casually mentioned that he had seen McInnes’s widow a few days earlier, that she was still in Edinburgh and he ran into her from time to time.

“Did she marry the man she was having an affair with?”

asked Isabel.

Guy looked out of the window. They were sitting in his office in the gallery, and the sun was streaming down into the garden at the back.

“No,” he said. “She did not. He went off to London, I think.

He was an artist too, but he came into some money, I seem to remember, and he went off with somebody else. Pretty awful for her. She was pregnant when McInnes died, and she had a baby.”

“His? Or McInnes’s?”

Guy shrugged. “I have no idea. But she had a little boy, anyway. I see her with him from time to time. He must be eight or so, because that’s how long McInnes has been dead.”

Isabel reflected on the sadness of this, when Guy said, “She lives down in the Colonies. Above that man who plays the fiddle at ceilidhs. You might know him—everybody seems to. He’s recorded a lot.”

“I do know him,” said Isabel. “He sometimes plays with David Todd. He’s quite a character.”

“Above his house,” said Guy. “That’s where she ended up,”

He paused. “And if things had worked out otherwise, and with the prices his paintings command now, they could have been living . . . oh, in the south of France, if they wanted to.”

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“And that little boy would have had a father,” said Isabel.

“Yes,” said Guy. “That too.”

N OW , standing outside the house in Teviotdale Place, Isabel looked down at her hands. She did that when she was nervous—she looked at her hands—and it somehow gave her courage. She thought, I have no excuse to go and see this person. I don’t know her, and she owes me nothing. I am calling upon a complete stranger.

But if that had not stopped her before, it did not stop her now, and she pushed open the small, ironwork gate and began walking up the path to the open staircase to the upper flat. The door was painted blue and there was a small black plaque: mcinnes. She pushed the doorbell, a round, highly polished brass doorbell that was obviously well loved.

Ailsa McInnes answered the door. She was a woman of about Isabel’s age, wearing jeans and a brightly coloured striped shirt. She was barefoot.

“Ailsa?”

The woman nodded and smiled. There was a friendliness about her which Isabel picked up immediately and warmed to.

Isabel introduced herself. She hoped that she did not mind her calling round without warning, but Guy Peploe had passed on her name. That was true, thought Isabel; he had provided her name.

“Guy? Oh yes.” The woman gestured for Isabel to go into the house. “It’s a mess, I’m afraid. My wee boy isn’t the tidiest child in the world.”

“He’s at school?”

“Yes. Stockbridge Primary, down the road. He’ll be back 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

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quite soon. We have a group of mothers here who take it in turns to walk the kids to school and back. We put them in a line of five and bring them back like that.”

Isabel smiled. “They used to call those lines crocodiles.

Walk in a crocodile,” she said. And she remembered the nursery school in Edinburgh that used to take the children for a walk all tied together with string; a sensible expedient, but not one, she imagined, of which the modern nanny state would approve—

today the state would simply prohibit taking children for a walk on the grounds that it was too dangerous.

“A crocodile. Yes.”

They sat down in the living room. There were signs of the small boy everywhere; a construction set, the pieces spilled out across a corner of the floor; a football and a muddy pair of football boots; a couple of children’s comics—Korky the Cat, Desperate Dan and his cow pie: the world of a small boy who has not yet been enticed by electronics.

“If you’re wondering about why I’ve come to see you,” Isabel began, “it’s to do with one of Andrew’s paintings.”

“I see.” Ailsa’s voice was quite level, and Isabel thought, Yes, it was eight years ago.

“I don’t know if you are aware of this,” said Isabel, “but a couple of paintings have recently come onto the market.”

Ailsa shrugged. “They do, from time to time. I must say that I don’t keep a close eye on what’s going on. I have about ten of his paintings myself. I don’t keep them here—they’re mostly at my mother’s house. I might sell one or two later on—depending on whether we need the money.” She looked about the room.

For all its untidiness, it was comfortable. “At the moment, things are all right. I have a part-time job, which is quite well paid, and I own this house.” She looked searchingly at 1 5 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel. “Are you interested in buying one of my paintings? Is that it?”

Isabel reassured her that she was not. “You must get a lot of approaches,” she said.

“A few,” said Ailsa. “Especially now that Andy’s work is so popular. There was a collector from New York who came round the other day. A very glitzy character. He had three of Andy’s paintings and said that he would go for them in preference to a Cadell or an Eardley. He let slip that he hangs one of them next to his Wyeth.”

“Good company,” said Isabel. “I have one, you know—

a small one. I keep it on the stairs. Not next to anything grand, I’m afraid.”

“So you don’t want to buy one of mine?”

“No. But I have been offered one by somebody who bought it at auction. It’s one of the Jura pictures.” Isabel reached into her pocket and took out a folded page from the Lyon & Turnbull catalogue. “There’s a photograph of it here from the auction catalogue. I wondered if you knew the painting.”

Ailsa took the paper and studied the photograph. “No. I don’t remember that one at all. But if it was painted on Jura, then it could have been one of . . .” Her voice faltered. “It could be one of his last ones. The ones that he did up there after he left.”

The matter-of-fact tone that Ailsa had used before was now replaced by one which was touched with regret; remorse too, Isabel imagined.

“Of course,” said Isabel. “But I thought that I might just check up to see whether you knew anything more about the painting.”

“No, I don’t. But it’s his, you know. It’s definitely his. Just look at it.”

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Isabel took the piece of paper back from her and folded it up. At that moment, the front door was pushed open and a boy came in. He was halfway through peeling off a blue sweater, which he tossed down on the floor.

“Not on the floor, Magnus,” scolded Ailsa. “We don’t throw our clothes on the floor.”

But we do, thought Isabel. Charlie will do just that, no doubt.

Magnus was looking at Isabel with that undisguised curiosity that children can show. “This is somebody who likes Dad’s paintings,” said Ailsa. “She’s come to talk to me about them.

And you can go into the kitchen and have a chocolate biscuit.

One chocolate biscuit.”

As Magnus dashed into the kitchen, Isabel found herself thinking: Dad— that answers that, at least. Whatever the boy’s real parentage was, he had been raised to believe that he was the son of Andrew McInnes, whom he never knew, a father who was just a name, an idea, somebody of whom he might even have been brought up to feel proud; but what a poor substitute for the real thing, the flesh-and-blood father who would have helped the little boy with his construction kit and his football, helped him to grow up.

C H A P T E R T W E L V E

E

ISABEL DALHOUSIE’S green Swedish car, laden almost to the point of discomfort with the impedimenta that a baby requires, nosed its way gingerly down the ramp onto the deck of the Port Askaig ferry. Charlie was awake, but lying still in his reclining car seat, staring at the ceiling of the car with intense fascina-tion. He had seemed to enjoy the earlier sea journey, which had taken them from the Mull of Kintyre to the island of Islay, and which was now to be followed by the five-minute crossing over to Jura. The rocking movement of the ferry and the noise of the engines made him wave his arms with pleasure. “It reminds him of the womb,” said Isabel. “The movement, the noise.”

Jamie looked through the window of the car to the hills of Jura on the other side of the sound. They rose steep from the shore, without the normal decency of a cultivable plain, and then became stretches of heather and scree, sweeping up to a feminine curve of skyline at the top. The heather was that characteristically Scottish mixture of soft greens and purples, colours washed and washed again in Atlantic squalls of salt and rain.

Against a growling of engines and a churning of water, 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

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small ferry docked at the other side to let the three or four cars which it had borne across now drive up the ramp onto Jura.

There was a single road, and it led in only one direction.

“That’s our road,” said Jamie, adding, “I think.”

Isabel smiled. “One road,” she said. “One hotel. One distillery.”

“One hundred and eighty people,” said Jamie. “And how many sheep and deer?”

“Numerous,” said Isabel. “Thousands of deer. Look.”

The road had turned a corner and a stag was gazing down from a bank a few hundred yards away, his legs obscured by bracken, antlers branching upwards sharp and naked, like a tree that has lost its leaves for the winter. They slowed down and he looked at them briefly with that tense mixture of alertness, defiance, and fear. Then slowly he turned away and trotted off into the bracken.

“We’ll see him again,” said Isabel. “Him or one of his brothers.”

“I love this place,” said Jamie suddenly, turning to Isabel.

“Already. I love it.”

She glanced at him and saw the light in his eyes; the car swerved briefly.

“I fell in love with it too,” she said. “When I first came here, I fell in love with it as well.”

“Why?” asked Jamie. “Why do places like this have this effect on people?”

Isabel mused for a moment. “There must be all sorts of reasons. The hills, the sea, everything really. The dramatic scenery.”

“But you find that elsewhere,” said Jamie. “The Grand Canyon’s dramatic. And yet I don’t think that I’d fall in love with it. I’d be impressed. But it would remain platonic.”

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“I’ve actually seen the Grand Canyon,” said Isabel. “Years ago. And, no, I didn’t fall in love with it. I suspect it’s rather hard to fall in love with a canyon.” Oddly, she thought of lines which said the exact opposite. She did not turn to Jamie, but mouthed, half whispered them anyway: “Love requires an object, But this varies so much, Almost anything will do, When I was a child I loved a pumping engine, thought it every bit as beautiful as you.”

Jamie frowned. “ ‘Pumping engine’?”

“That’s Auden’s point,” said Isabel. “We all need to love something. Anybody can fall in love with anything, or anyone: love requires an object, that’s all. Even an island will do.”

They were silent for a while. They passed a set of stone gates and a high stone wall, the garden of one of the handful of large houses on the island, houses which stood at the centre of the huge landed estates into which Scotland had been carved.

Such places were largely innocuous now, Isabel thought; not much more than outsize farms which were trying to make a living on the sale of sporting rights and various agricultural enter-prises. Many had passed into distant hands, so that the lairds, the local gentry, had effectively disappeared, to be replaced by owners who flew in and out for brief periods, or did not even bother to come. There was so much wrong with Scotland; such unfairnesses, pockets of such poverty and desperation, that were so hard to eradicate, no matter what the politicians in Edinburgh might try to do; it was as if they ran with the land, were written into the deeds that gave Scotland to human ownership. And there had been such injury to the soul, too, leaving scars that went down from generation to generation.

They were now close to Craighouse, the only village on the island, and fields of ripening hay, yellow in the afternoon sun, 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

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fell away to the east, to the cliffs’ edges. Isabel noticed a ruined croft not far away, one of the small stone-built houses that were at the centre of a smallholding. The lichen-covered walls were still standing, but there was no roof, and the window spaces were dark gaps.

She pointed to the croft. “If you love this place so much, you could restore somewhere like that and live here. You could write music, maybe give bassoon lessons to the islanders.”

“I just might,” said Jamie. “I’m sure that I could be quite self-sufficient. Doing a bit of fishing. Catching rabbits for the pot.”

And Isabel thought, Well, if he did that then there would be no place for me, nor for Charlie, but she did not say anything.

They were now coming into Craighouse, and she saw the small hotel on the right, opposite the distillery, with its friendly white-washed buildings and its row of bonded warehouses immediately behind.

“That’s us,” said Isabel, as they came to a halt outside the hotel.

Jamie wound down his window; there was light rain now and the sky had suddenly clouded over, as it could do, so rapidly.

The air was warm and smelled of seaweed. The hotel looked out over the bay, which, having a low-lying island at its mouth, was a safe haven for boats; several sailboats bobbed at anchor and a small fishing boat, the sort used for inshore work, sat at its mooring, nets hung up over the boom. There was quiet, that quiet which settles in places where nothing is urgent, nothing is hurried.

They made their way into the hotel. Charlie had begun to niggle, and was taken immediately into the bedroom, where he was changed and fed. From the room, as she was administer-ing Charlie’s bottle, Isabel watched Jamie walk down to the 1 5 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h pier, where he stood, looking out towards the boats in the bay. As she watched him, she felt a tug of possession that surprised her by its intensity; and she experienced, too, a sense of vulnerability—the feeling that people get when they see that which they love and know that they might lose it. In the back of her mind, there were lines of song, half remembered, their memory triggered by the island scenery, something she had heard sung a long time ago, but which had lodged: I’m afraid the scorching suns will shine and spoil his beauty. That was it, but there was more, and it came to her, the melody of it too, not just the words:

My love’s gone across those fields with his cheeks like roses My love’s gone across those fields gathering sweet posies I fear the scorching suns will shine and spoil his beauty And if I was with my love I would do my duty.

She rose from the bed, where she had been sitting, and stood before the window, holding Charlie across her shoulder to bring up his wind. She looked across to where Jamie was standing in the distance, on the pier, and she waved. He turned round. She waved again, and he raised a hand in salute, and she whispered, I love you so much. I love you more than you will ever know, Jamie. More.

T H E Y H A D A R R I V E D in the late afternoon, so there was little time to do much before dinner, which was served at seven. After he came back from the pier, Jamie relieved Isabel of Charlie while she went for a walk along the road that led north past the distillery and the village hall. The sky had cleared again and was now mostly blue, with patches of high white cloud moving in from the Atlantic. At one point, beyond the village school, 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

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saw a flock of Greenland white-fronted geese, coming in off the sound, heading back to Islay; the beating of their wings was like muffled drums. She walked onto the beach, a strand of peb-bles interspersed with washed-up bladder wrack and whitened wood.

She knew when she had reached the point she was searching for. If she looked directly behind her she could see the roof of the distillery through the treetops, and behind that the fold of the hills. She took a few steps backwards and looked again, this time from a half-crouching position, as an artist would presumably have had a stool. This meant that he would not have seen the distillery roof, nor the cottage on the lower slopes beside the trees. Yes, it was exactly right.

Back at the hotel, Jamie put a finger to his lips when Isabel came into the room. Charlie was asleep, stretched out in his travel cot. “You’ve been gone for ages,” he whispered. “Where were you?”

Isabel took off her jacket and shook it. She peered down at Charlie and blew him a kiss. “Along the way,” she said.

“And?”

She smiled. “Nothing much. I saw some Greenland geese on their way back to Islay.”

Jamie looked at his watch. “I’m famished.”

Over dinner, when the conversation lagged, she said, “The painting that I almost bought . . .”

Jamie reached for his wineglass. “I knew that you had a reason for coming here. It’s something to do with that picture.”

Isabel searched his face to see if he was angry, but she saw only the triumph of one whose suspicions have been borne out.

“No,” she said. “I wanted to come here anyway—sometime. But I thought that . . .”

He grinned. “But you thought that you would interfere in 1 6 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h something or other . . . What is there to interfere with, by the way?”

She thought for a moment. There was nothing, really; and she did not interfere, as Jamie put it. He criticised her for helping, which was another matter altogether. “I don’t interfere,” she began.

He cut her short. “You do, Isabel. You can’t help yourself.”

She looked down at her plate, and he realised that he had offended her. He was about to tell her that the only reason he had said this was that her interfering just did not make sense to him. But he did not get round to this, as she had started her explanation.

“All I’m doing is looking,” she said. “It occurred to me that the picture which I was offered by Walter Buie, the picture which was in the auction, was not by McInnes. I wanted to come to Jura anyway, and I thought I would kill two birds with one stone.”

Jamie looked at her in astonishment. “A fake? You think it’s a fake?”

He had raised his voice, and a woman at the next table looked at him. Her eyes moved to Isabel and then back to Jamie. Isabel noticed the brooch she was wearing, a Celtic whorl design of some sort of sea creature, a kelpie perhaps.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “It could be. That’s what I thought.”

Jamie toyed with the stem of his wineglass. Isabel, he thought, had an overactive imagination. He did not disapprove of this; in fact, it was part of her charm—her imagination and her unexpected, drily witty remarks. He knew no other woman who talked like that, and he was proud of her.

“But why would you think that?” he asked. “Guy Peploe seems happy with it—and he’s an expert. And presumably 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

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auction house people must think it genuine—they would never offer anything for sale if they had any doubts about it. So why do you think . . .” He was going to say, “when you really don’t know anything much about art,” but decided not to. It was implied, though, and he did not need to say it.

“I know it may sound odd to you,” said Isabel. “But I just have a feeling that something’s not quite right about that painting.”

Jamie sighed. “But why? You have to have grounds for thinking something like that. It’s not enough to have a feeling. ” He paused, watching Isabel. She had spoken to him before about intuition, and about how it worked; inarticulate knowledge, she had called it. But he had been unable to understand how it was possible to know something but not know how you knew it.

That just did not make sense to him. Even with music, he had said, you know why you like something; you can analyse it in terms of musical structure and see why things sound good or not; you know, and you can always work out why you know.

Isabel had decided that there were reasons for her suspicions. “Why would Walter Buie want to pass the painting on so quickly?” she asked. “Would you do that? Would you buy a painting and then the next moment try to sell it?” She waited for Jamie to answer, but he was silent, and so she answered for him.

“You wouldn’t. Unless you had found out something about the painting—something that you didn’t know when you bought it.”

“Or you had acted on impulse,” said Jamie. “Look at how many people take things back to shops after a day or so. Women, mostly. They buy an outfit and then decide that they don’t like it. So it goes back.”

Isabel looked at him wryly. “And you’re saying that men don’t do that?”

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“They don’t,” said Jamie. “I worked in Jenners once when I was a student. Everybody knew that men didn’t bring things back. In fact, we were taught that in a training course. Somebody from the store had the figures. Men never brought clothes back.”

Isabel thought that he was probably right. “So what you’re saying is that Walter Buie, as a man, would never take it back to the auction house, but he might try to sell it on?”

“Yes,” said Jamie. “But you can’t take things back to an auction house anyway. It’s not like a clothes store.”

“I don’t know where this is leading,” said Isabel.

“All I’m suggesting is that there could be other reasons he offered it to you. You can’t conclude that it’s a fake, just because he wants to get rid of it.”

She had to admit that this was true. But there was something else. “Guy was surprised that the painting wasn’t varnished,” she said. “He said that McInnes usually varnished his paintings.”

“But he still didn’t think it was a fake, did he? So he can’t have thought that the fact that it wasn’t varnished was all that important.”

She had to admit this too. And now, with the two elements of her case reduced by Jamie’s scrutiny, she was thrown back on her conviction that something about the painting just did not feel right. She had no idea why coming to Jura should strengthen that conviction, but on her walk today, when she had looked at the very view which appeared in the painting, she had felt it strongly. The painting was faithful to the view from the beach; there was nothing more, nor less, in it than there was in the real scene. But for some reason she was sure that it just did not add up; how she would prove that, she had no idea, and 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

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she did not want to talk about it anymore. She picked up her wineglass. “Enough of all that,” she said. “I shall keep my suspicions to myself. Let’s just enjoy this place.”

Jamie raised his glass to hers. “To the next three days,” he said. He looked at her, almost reproachfully. “And, Isabel . . .

don’t. Just don’t.”

“I’ll try not to.” She meant it, but somehow she knew at the same time that she did not. Can one want to do something and yet not want to do it? Of course you can, she told herself. Of course.

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

E

TELL ME ABOUT LIZZIE,” said Jamie.

They were driving up the island, on the narrow road that hugged the coast. Off to their left, now shrouded by cloud, now exposed to shafts of late-morning sunlight, the Paps of Jura tow-ered, crouching lions guarding Scotland against the Atlantic. To their right, across the Sound of Jura, was the Scottish mainland with its mountains in layers, blue beyond blue. The sea was calm, glassy flat, silver in the sun.

“Lizzie?” said Isabel. “Well, I got to know her when I came up here four years ago. I stayed with friends who had rented Ardlussa, where we’re going. Her parents were away but she stayed behind to cook. She was in her very early twenties then.

She’s a genius when it comes to lobsters and crayfish. She caught them herself; she had her own pots. And she knew some men who dived for scallops.

“Then we met again when I was a weekend guest in Glen Lyon. Lizzie had been hired as cook—that’s what she does. I’ve seen her a few times in Edinburgh too. She’s great company.

Good sense of humour. She’ll tackle anything.”

“I suppose you have to be like that if you live up here,” said Jamie. “You wouldn’t last long otherwise.” He shifted in his seat; 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

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the wind from Isabel’s open window was upon his face. “Could you live somewhere like this, Isabel?”

She thought for a moment. It seemed almost churlish to say that one could not, in the face of such beguiling natural beauty, but she could not. There would be so much that she would miss about the life of the city; the company, the conversation, the places to drink coffee. “I don’t think I could,” she said. “I’d moulder.”

“It might be quite nice to moulder,” said Jamie. “And I suspect that people have a very different sense of time here.”

“Do you think time slows down?”

He was sure that it did. He looked at his watch; he had no idea what time it was, and had not known all that morning.

In Edinburgh his day was sliced into half hours; thirty minutes for a pupil and then on to the next one: sarabandes, suites for bassoon and piano, arpeggios—so many notes, thousands and thousands of notes. “It’s different. When you’re doing something you really enjoy, it does pass more quickly. And it’s the same if people are rushing around you. Everything seems quicker.”

“Subjective time,” said Isabel. “When we’re ten, a week is an awfully long time. Now . . .”

“Yes, it’s very odd,” said Jamie. “I had plenty of time when I was at music college in Glasgow, and it passed very slowly. Now a week goes by in minutes.”

“There’s a reason for that,” said Isabel. “It’s to do with memories and how many you make. When you’re doing things for the first time, you lay down lots of memories. Later on, things become a bit routine . . .”

“And you don’t have anything to remember?” Jamie asked incredulously.

“Well, you do, but because your life is a bit more routine, 1 6 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h and there are few things which strike you as unusual, you don’t feel that you have to remember quite as much. And so it seems that time has passed more quickly.”

He said nothing for a while, thinking about a year at school when he had been bullied and he had thought that the time of his oppression would never end, and then, quite suddenly, the bully had not been there one day. Something had happened, and the other boy had simply gone, like a nightmare lifts when one wakes up and realises that it was never real.

She thought, Will I remember this, every moment of this, being here, in this beautiful place, with him—she glanced to her side—and him—she glanced over her shoulder. The green Swedish car swerved slightly, but only slightly, and recovered quickly enough to continue its journey along the side of the island, past startled Blackface sheep and dry-stane dykes, squat walls of stone dividing the fields, built many years ago by hard-working men, poor men, whose names were now long forgotten.

A R D L U S S A L OO K E D D OW N onto the bay of the same name, over lawns, then a field that ran gently down to a pier. Behind it, the River Lussa flowed down from the hills, to spread out, just a mile or so away, and join the sea at Inverlussa. The house had been built in the nineteenth century and added to in Edwardian times, a rambling country house half white, at the front, and half grey, at the back. It was at the centre of an estate that consisted of mountain and small forests, the habitat of the deer that provided a living for a handful of people—the family who lived in the big house and a couple of keepers and farm workers. The entrance was typical of that which one would find in any Scot-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

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tish country house—a comfortable, lived-in hall, with walking sticks, cromachs (the Scottish crooks used by shepherds and hikers), and a bent and dusty green golfing umbrella that would have provided dubious protection against the elements even in its youth. If it rained here, it rained with conviction: shifting veils of water from clouds scudding in straight off the Atlantic; horizontal rain, vertical rain, rain swirling in all directions. Or on occasion the air was just wet: at such times there were no visible raindrops, just suspended moisture like the spray of a perfume atomiser that settled on clothing and skin. And with it came the midges, those tiny fruit fly–like creatures that spurn protective creams and lotions, and nip the skin of any human target in sight. Unfortunate hikers had been known to throw themselves into rivers to escape the clouds of stinging insects.

Lizzie met them at the entrance and took them into the kitchen. She had not met Jamie before and Isabel could see the surprise in her expression; surprise which was quickly and tactfully masked. When Jamie left the room to find the bathroom, Isabel said to Lizzie, “Yes. We are. And that’s our baby.”

Lizzie smiled conspiratorially. “I’m happy for you. But where . . .”

“Where did I find him?”

Lizzie blushed. She had not meant to ask that, but it had been what she was wondering. Isabel was an attractive person, and she could understand her being sought after by men, but by men like that . . . Well, somebody would have found him eventually, and if it was Isabel, then she deserved congratulation.

“He’s very . . . ,” she began, but again trailed off.

“He is,” said Isabel. “And he’s sweet.”

Jamie returned and Lizzie prepared tea for the three of them. A Dundee cake that she had baked was produced out of a 1 6 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h tin, and they carried that, and the tea tray, into the drawing room. There were pictures of island scenes on the walls, an old map, and piles of books on the tables. Isabel noticed Bernard Crick’s biography of Orwell, and she picked it up and paged through it.

“Do you want to visit Barnhill?” Lizzie asked. She looked at Jamie, unsure whether he would know the story. “It’s where Orwell stayed. You can see the room where he wrote 1984. ”

Jamie looked interested. “Can we?”

Lizzie nodded. “Yes. And he was in this house, too, you know. He was in this room. My grandfather lived in this house in those days, and Orwell used to talk to him about being a Japanese prisoner of war. Some people think that that’s where Orwell got the idea of those awful tortures—the Room 101 part of 1984. Robin Fletcher, my grandfather, told him about what had happened in the camp. The Japanese were terribly cruel to their prisoners.”

“I’d like to see the place,” said Jamie. He looked at Isabel, who said that she wanted to go too.

“I can arrange it,” said Lizzie. “That part of Ardlussa, and the house up there, the Orwell place, belongs to my uncle now. My cousin Rob’s up there at the moment. He could come and fetch us—there are about seven miles of rough track to get to it. You need a four-wheel-drive.” She looked at Isabel, with something of the mocking air of a countrywoman addressing a hopeless urbanite. “That car of yours . . .”

“My green Swedish car is very strong,” said Isabel. “But no, I agree, it’s a bit low-slung for this part of the world.”

“I’ll get in touch with Rob,” said Lizzie. “How about tomorrow? Should we go up there tomorrow?”

They agreed. After they had had tea, Jamie went out for 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

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walk to the pier, while Isabel and Lizzie stayed in to chat and to feed Charlie, who had woken up and was looking about the room with interest. Lizzie had him on her knee and was entertaining him, rocking him gently backwards and forwards. Isabel watched Jamie through the window; watched as he slapped at his face and ears, under aerial onslaught by unseen attackers. Then he began to run headlong towards the end of the lawn and the pier.

“You can’t outrun midges,” said Lizzie, laughing.

“But we do outlive them, don’t we?” said Isabel.

Lizzie looked at her quizzically.

“Remember drosophila from biology classes?” Isabel said.

“The fruit fly? They had two or three weeks, didn’t they? Two or three weeks to pack everything in. I assume that the Highland midge has much the same. Not much of a lifespan.”

“That doesn’t make me feel sorry for them,” said Lizzie.

“There are limits, you know.”

Isabel knew. It was her biggest problem, after all: how to draw limits to the extent of one’s sympathy. In the past, she had become involved in all sorts of difficulties by taking upon herself the problems of others; now she had resolved to be more practical about that, and was trying not to get involved in matters that she had no real moral obligation to do anything about.

She was trying.

T H E Y R E T U R N E D to the hotel in the early afternoon. Lizzie had offered them lunch, but Isabel had not wanted to impose, especially as Lizzie had cleared the following day to take them up to Barnhill. They stayed in the hotel while Charlie slept, and then, in the early evening, they went into the hotel bar before dinner.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Jamie ordered a dram of Jura whisky, which he held up to the window and, through the amber liquid, looked at the distillery over the road. The whisky fragmented the lines of the building, making for blocks of white, for impossible angles.

The hotel barman was friendly. “Edinburgh?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Isabel. “Sorry.”

The barman appreciated this. “There are worse places,” he said.

“I’m sure there are. But I don’t think that one should name them. Even the worst of places may be liked by the people who actually live there.”

It was while the barman was reflecting on this that Isabel said, “It’s a long shot, but how long have you been here?”

“I came over from Arran eleven years ago,” said the barman.

“I married a Jura girl and we moved over here.”

Isabel, who had ordered a glass of white wine, raised the glass to her lips. She was aware that Jamie was watching her intently, but she did not look at him. He would not have asked the barman how long he had been there; that was his business, and why, anyway, would one want to know?

“Do you remember an artist who came here? He was a regular visitor until about eight years ago . . .”

The barman, who was drying a glass with a pristine white cloth, held up the glass to examine his handiwork.

“McInnes?”

Isabel stole a glance at Jamie, who was frowning at her. Let him frown, she thought.

“Yes. Andrew McInnes.”

The barman put down the glass and fished another one out of the sink. “Aye, I remember him all right. I knew him quite well. He drowned—you know about that?”

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“I do,” said Isabel. “Or I remember reading about it. What exactly happened?”

The barman began work on the second glass. “The Corryvreckan got him. You know about the Corryvreckan?”

Isabel said that she did. She had never seen it, she explained, but she knew.

“You don’t want to see it,” said the barman. “Or rather, if you do see it, you want to be looking at it from dry land. It’s a muckle great whirlpool. The tide comes in, you see, and it sweeps past the top of Jura and Scarba. It creates quite a current, as you can imagine. It’s when that current hits the undersea mountain up there—that’s called the Hag—that you get those great eddies. And a whirlpool in certain conditions. That’s it. That’s the Corryvreckan.”

Jamie had stopped glaring at Isabel and was listening in fascination. “Would it suck a boat down—even a large one?”

The barman shrugged. “The Royal Navy used to describe the Gulf of Corryvreckan as unnavigable—the only stretch of water in Britain that they wouldn’t sail into. Now they say that it can be approached only with great caution and with local knowledge. In other words, people who don’t know what they’re doing should keep well away. So, yes, boats can go down. People have died. Including McInnes.”

They digested this in silence. Then Jamie asked, “I read somewhere—I forget where—about divers going down. Can you actually dive there?”

The barman looked at Jamie. “Just,” he said. “You have a window at slack tide. Five or ten minutes at the most. There’s a boat that will take you—if you’re experienced enough. They drop a ball and line down and you follow the line down to the top of the pinnacle. You watch your bubbles. If they start to go 1 7 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h down instead of up, you know it’s time to get out pretty smartly.

Otherwise you’re sucked down six hundred feet.” He paused.

“You’re not a diver, are you?”

Jamie shuddered. “No, thank you.”

The barman smiled grimly. “Good. If you were, I was going to suggest that you settle your bill before you tried diving on the Corryvreckan.”

“What happened to McInnes?” Isabel asked.

“He used to stay up near Inverlussa,” said the barman. “He had an arrangement with somebody up there and they let him a couple of rooms whenever he came to the island. He painted Jura a lot, you know. I hear he was quite famous in places like Edinburgh and London.”

Isabel wondered if the barman knew what a McInnes would fetch today. “He’s popular,” she said. “Very.”

“Well, he wasn’t doing too well that last time he came up,”

said the barman. “He’d had wife trouble and he was pretty low about that. But he also told me that his paintings had been slated in the papers. Torn to shreds, he said. He was very cut up.”

“The London critics,” said Isabel. “They went for him.”

The barman shook his head. “Poor Andy. Well, they did him in all right. I think he knew fine well what he was doing when he took that boat of his round the corner to the Corryvreckan. He knew. Everybody round here knows, even the bairns. You go and ask one of those wee bairns outside the shop about the Corryvreckan and how you need to keep well away. It’s the first thing anybody tells you about the water round here.”

For a while Isabel said nothing. Then, “Suicide?”

“Nobody likes to reach that conclusion,” said the barman.

“But sometimes what else are you to think?”

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Jamie took a sip of his whisky. The conversation had depressed him. McInnes was dead. Why go on about it? “This is a lovely light whisky. But they make a peated one too, don’t they?” he suddenly asked the barman.

The barman glanced over the road at the distillery building.

“Yes,” he said. “In fact, Jimmy over there tells me that they’re about to put one in the cask right now. So come back in eight years and you can try it.”

Isabel was not paying any attention to this discussion of whisky. She was thinking about what the barman had told her and wondering whether McInnes had had life insurance. If he had, then the money would have gone to his wife. Sometimes people change the beneficiary of their life insurance as soon as they leave their spouse; sometimes they forget to do this. A lot of men live to regret not making the change, she thought; or rather, they die not to regret it.

But why, she went on to ask herself, why choose to commit suicide in a whirlpool?

C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N

E

LIZZIE HAD PURLOINED one of the estate Land Rovers for the trip to Barnhill. It was normally used for taking deer stalkers up the hill and was equipped with gun and telescope racks. A particularly fine wicker hamper, used for lunches for the sporting clients, was fixed to the floor of the vehicle with leather straps.

With Lizzie at the wheel they made their way along the winding estate road that led to Barnhill. Now there was nothing; no houses, no telephone wires, and the road became little more than a track. Here and there, rain had created deep potholes in the surface, and Isabel put her hand protectively over Charlie’s head as the Land Rover bucked and lurched. They made slow progress, but eventually they saw in the distance a white-washed stone farmhouse, with a wooden porch protruding from the front and low slate-roofed sheds on either side. To one side of the house, across a rough field, a thicket of trees stood, and beyond that a hillside of half-exposed granite outcrops. From the angle of the trees and the shape of the gorse bushes, it was evidently a windy place. A battered green Land Rover was parked in front of the house, its tailgate down. A black Labrador 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

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was sitting beside the vehicle and it got to its feet and raised its head to bark when it spotted them approaching.

“There’s no electricity here,” said Lizzie. “No phones. Nothing. They cook on gas and heat the water with one of those coal-fired ranges. And it’s really about as isolated as you can get. You could be here for ages and nobody would know. Lovely, isn’t it?”

She drew the Land Rover to a halt and they climbed out.

Jamie stood still and breathed in deeply; the scent of gorse, like coconut, the sea not far away, salt and iodine.

“Yes,” said Isabel, standing beside him. “The air.”

She looked at the hills and at the sea a few hundred yards away. Apart from the farmhouse, there was nothing to be seen of the works of man.

A figure appeared from the house and waved. They walked up the gently sloping grass field to meet the young man whom Lizzie introduced as her cousin Rob. There was a modesty about him which Isabel found immediately attractive, and she could see that Jamie warmed to him too. He was about the same age as, or very slightly younger than, Jamie.

They went inside, into a simple, functional kitchen of the sort which was to be found everywhere in rural Scotland—

a room for eating in, sitting about in, doing farming business in—the heart of the house. Rob made them a cup of coffee, boiling the water on the hissing gas ring. He and Jamie established immediately and easily, as happens in Scotland, the mutual friends, the points of contact, while Isabel and Lizzie entertained Charlie, who had discovered a button on his romper suit and was fascinated by the discovery. Then, when they had finished, Rob offered to show them round the house.

“I’ll show you the room where he wrote 1984, ” he said.

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

“There’s not much to see, I’m afraid. And you can see the bath, if you like.”

“The bath that Orwell bathed in,” Jamie murmured.

“He led a pretty simple life,” said Isabel. “A good man, leading a simple life.”

“Orwell believed very strongly in social justice, didn’t he?”

said Rob.

“Everybody does,” said Isabel. “These days, at least. Do you know anybody who would say, I don’t think much of social justice? I don’t.”

“It depends on how you interpret social justice,” said Jamie, peering at a print on the wall. “One person’s social justice is another person’s social injustice.” He tapped the glass that framed the print and Charlie’s eyes followed the noise. “He’s going to love art.”

They moved through the house. “Orwell’s bedroom,” said Rob, simply, and they looked in on the small room, with its plain bed, like the room of an everyday bed-and-breakfast. “He did most of his writing in there. And in a tent outside. He had TB

and the fresh air was thought to be better for him.”

They peered into the small room above the kitchen, with its typewriter set neatly on the table and, beyond the clear glass of the window, the day, now sparkling under a sky that again had miraculously cleared. It is so green, thought Isabel; the soft grass, the bracken, the dark viridian of the trees.

She gazed out of the window of the little room while the others moved back into the corridor. She thought about the seeing of what others had seen; this was the view that Orwell had while he wrote that dark novel, with its all-seeing eye, Big Brother, providing the very contrast to the privacy and peace of this place. That was the explanation; the constricting prison 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

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Winston Smith’s world in the novel was so much more of a nightmare when one saw, there, in that place, what had been lost.

She remembered being in Freud’s house in Vienna and looking out of the window in his consulting room, seeing the small mirror hanging on the shutter, the only item remaining in that stripped-bare room, and thinking he had looked at that, the great doctor himself; he had looked out onto that particular stretch of sky, that courtyard. And then she remembered seeing James VI’s cradle in the bedroom at Traquair, and the thoughts that it triggered; and the bed at Falkland Palace in which James V had died, turning his face to the wall, bemoaning what he saw as the imminent end of a Scottish dynasty— It began with a lass and it will end with a lass, the king was reported to have said. Such beds seemed remarkable when we saw them today, although typically what we more often thought was How small they are, as if great and important things could happen only in large, imposing beds. Winston Churchill’s bed, the bed from which he dictated letters to generals and prime ministers; that had been a small bed. And finally, as she tore herself away from the view, and the room, the thought crossed her mind that a bed was really a very strange thing—a human nest, really, where our human fragility made its nightly demands for comfort and cosseting.

The others had descended the stairs to return to the kitchen. Isabel lingered by a window in the corridor, with another view, similar to that from the small bedroom. She turned away and it was then that she saw it. For a moment she stood quite still, her breath caught. There could be no mistaking it.

She leaned forward and looked at the picture. It was an oil, 1 7 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h a rough one, eight inches by ten, perhaps slightly smaller, but even at this reduced scale, there was no mistaking the study for the painting that she had been shown by Guy Peploe. This was Jura, through the eyes of Andrew McInnes.

DOWNSTAIRS, the party had made its way back into the kitchen.

When Isabel came in, Rob looked up from the chart that he was showing Jamie, a naval chart, it appeared, with depths, reefs, rocks. They were looking at the Gulf of Corryvreckan.

“I don’t like to pry,” said Isabel, not looking at Jamie as she said this, “but that picture up there in the corridor, the little oil painting in the grey frame: Do you know who it’s by?” She answered her own question. “Andrew McInnes, who often painted on Jura. It’s a McInnes oil.”

At first Rob looked puzzled, as if trying to work out which painting it was that Isabel was talking about. Then he shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. That’s by a man who stayed here. We let this place out, you see. People come up for a week or two. That man was a painter, I think, and when he went he left a rubbish bag full of sketches and stuff that he didn’t want. I found that little painting tucked away in it.”

Jamie looked at Isabel. “Here,” he said, handing Charlie over to Lizzie. Then he turned to Isabel in astonishment.

“Isabel?”

She returned his gaze. “You see,” she muttered. “A fake.”

Rob was puzzled. “That painting?”

Isabel lowered herself onto one of the kitchen chairs. She was thinking. It all made sense now: the forger, whoever he was, had come up to Jura to do some McInnes paintings. He had found the most remote spot available, a place where he would 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

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never be disturbed, and he had produced the new, posthumous McInnes paintings. Her intuitions had been right.

“Who was this man?” asked Isabel.

“I didn’t meet him,” said Rob. He turned to Lizzie. “Did you, Lizzie? Were you around when he was here?”

“When was it?” she asked. “I don’t remember a painter anyway.”

Rob crossed the room to fetch a small brown file. He flicked through some papers and eventually found one which he took out. It was the list of lettings.

“Last September,” he said. “Quite a late let. A Mr. Anderson. Frank Anderson.”

“Where was he from?” asked Isabel.

Rob looked through the papers again. “No idea,” he said.

“We would have known at the time, but we weed out the old letters. We don’t keep them.”

“A pity,” muttered Isabel. She thought of her conversation with Christopher Dove: it was exactly what she had done with the old correspondence of the Review of Applied Ethics. She was one to talk.

“Oh well,” said Jamie.

“Why are you interested?” asked Rob.

“Because I think that this Frank Anderson, whoever he is, has been responsible for some, well, what shall we call them, some fine posthumous works by McInnes.”

Rob looked interested. “Done here? Well . . .”

“Did you meet McInnes?” asked Isabel.

“No,” said Rob. “I didn’t. But I do know who he is. And I do know that he’s considered a great painter.”

“That often happens after somebody’s dead and buried,”

said Isabel.

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

“He shouldn’t have gone out,” said Lizzie suddenly. “People who don’t know these waters should be more careful.”

Isabel thought: What whirlpools take—they don’t give back.

Where had she heard that? That was the trouble; there was so much in her mind: philosophy, poetry, odd facts; and they kept surfacing, these odd remembered lines, like corks unexpectedly popping up out of the water.

How would it be to be lost at sea, to sink down into those green depths and deeper, into the dark? Was there a moment of calm when the lungs had filled with water and there was just a heaviness, a moment of clarity, or remembrance, as people said there was, or even that progress towards a light, a gentleness, that was sworn to by those who had near-death experiences?

If they were to be believed—those people who had clinically died and then been brought back—the experience was one of great calm, of resolution. And many of them spoke of some form of reunion, a feeling of being in the presence of those they had known, and of being forgiven and made to understand, but gently; not scolded. Nobody was scolded.

T H E Y D I D N OT D I S CU S S the matter as they travelled back with Lizzie in the Land Rover, but once they had set off from Ardlussa in the green Swedish car, they talked about little else.

“I hope that you’re going to have the good grace to admit that I was right,” Isabel said to Jamie as they drove over the Ardlussa bridge and set off on the narrow public road that would take them back to Craighouse.

“Of course. Of course I will.” He paused. “But I don’t know what we can do next—if anything.”

“What do you mean, if anything?” asked Isabel. “We can 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

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hardly keep this to ourselves. And why should this man, this Frank Anderson, get away with it?”

Jamie sighed. Isabel was incorrigible; she could not resist setting things right, solving things. It was almost as if she felt that life was a chess game in which the end game had to be played out. “We’re not the police,” he said simply. “We’re private citizens. We can report it, of course, to those concerned. So you can tell Guy Peploe that you think that that painting may not be all it looks to be; that’s fine. And you do have some evidence, after all. You can tell him about the painting you saw today.”

“But what will Guy be able to do?” objected Isabel. “He’ll be able to raise it with the person whose painting it is. He’ll hand it back, I suppose. And he’ll probably ask questions, but he won’t be able to do much more than that.”

“So you’re going to try to find this man?”

For a few moments she was silent. She had been wondering how she would proceed, and had not had any ideas. And yet she knew that she had to do something; her inaction in the face of wrongdoing was hardly an option, provided, of course, that wrongdoing had entered the circle of one’s moral recognition, and this, she thought, had done just that.

“Frank Anderson must be a talented painter,” she said at last. “You can’t do fakes unless you really know what you’re doing. Look at that Dutchman, the one who did the Vermeers, what was he called—van Meegeren. He was a real expert. He knew everything there was to know about painting techniques.

The pigments, the canvas, the way old paint cracks. Everything.

You can’t get the exact effect unless you’re really good.”

“So he knows what he’s doing. Where does that get us?”

Isabel was thinking aloud. “Well,” she said, “imagine if you had been in the Netherlands at the time and you had wanted to 1 8 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h find an artist called van Meegeren. Would it have been all that difficult? Even if he wasn’t very well known? You would have asked around and people would have known. Somebody would remember him from art college.”

Jamie saw where Isabel’s comments were going. “So this man, Frank Anderson, is likely to have been trained?”

“Highly likely. Which means that somebody will remember him from their four years at art college. Somebody will know him—as long as he’s in Scotland. If he’s in England, then we’re on more difficult ground.”

Jamie agreed that it might be possible to find Frank Anderson, but he was more worried about what would happen after that. Finding somebody was one thing; unmasking him as a forger was an altogether different matter.

“All right,” he said. “Find him. But don’t do anything stupid.

Frank Anderson will be facing criminal charges if he’s found.

He’s not exactly going to cooperate with you.”

Isabel guided her car into a passing place, one of the small bulges in the road that allowed vehicles to pass one another on the narrow strip of tar. A postal van was approaching from the south, and when it passed her, the driver waved in thanks and smiled. That was how it is here, she thought, where there are no strangers.

C H A P T E R F I F T E E N

E

IT SEEMED TO ISABEL that they had been away for weeks.

The world of Jura, that self-contained island world, seemed so far from Edinburgh, and yet it was only a drive of half a day or so, and it was the same country. As she stood in her garden on the day after their return, she closed her eyes for a moment and saw the hills, and the burns tumbling down, and the veils of fine rain. And she thought, One can love a country until it hurts.

But one could not stand in one’s garden thinking about Scotland. The whole point about being in Scotland was that one was in Scotland, and being in Scotland, for Isabel, meant that she had to get on with those things that required attention, and these were many. Charlie, who might normally have headed the list of those in need of attention, did not do so that morning; Grace had taken him for a walk to Blackford Pond, a pond on the south side of the town popular with dogs, ducks, and children. The resident ducks were overfed by everybody and sailed low in the water as a result, or so Isabel thought. “It’s dangerous to feed birds overenthusiastically, ” she had once said to Jamie, when they had taken Charlie on one of his first visits to the pond. “And it’s also dangerous to overinvest birds with symbolism. These national eagles that people make such a fuss about 1 8 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h must find it difficult to take off under the weight of all that symbolism.”

Jamie had looked at her and said, “That’s a very strange remark, Isabel. You talk complete nonsense sometimes. Flights of fancy.”

She had not minded. “I like to think about things,” she said airily. “I like to let my mind wander. Our minds can come up with the most entertaining possibilities, if we let them. But most of the time, we keep them under far too close a check.”

Jamie thought about this for a moment. He was trying to recall something rather funny that Isabel had started to say a few days earlier but had been cut off midstream by some protest from Charlie.

“What were you saying about cars the other day? Something about older drivers? Then Charlie started creating a fuss.”

Isabel frowned. “Drivers? Oh yes, somebody had mentioned a driver of ninety-three, which I thought was a little bit late to be in control of a car. I’m sure that one must be very wise at the age of ninety-three, but I’m not so sure about one’s reactions at that stage. I think I suggested that one’s car should become more and more grey as one gets older, which would warn people that one’s reactions might be a little slow. They would be like learner plates when one’s learning to drive—those are a warning too. So cars would be seen to turn grey, perhaps a little bit slowly, just as people’s hair greys.”

“And young men would be required to drive red cars?”

Isabel nodded her agreement. “Yes. Red cars would be a warning of the presence of testosterone. We need warning, you see.”

“And at intersections the red cars would yield to the grey ones?”

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“Of course,” said Isabel. “Or that would be the rule in a well-ordered society. Do you know that in Japan, young drivers have to give way to older ones? It can get quite complicated if one can’t see the other driver too well and one can’t work out whether he’s older than you. I believe a certain number of accidents result from this confusion.”

Jamie laughed. “Absurd. And completely untrue.”

“Perhaps,” said Isabel. “Absurd. But fun nonetheless.”

“Tell me another absurd story.”

“About what?”

They were standing at the edge of the pond, looking at the ducks. Charlie, tucked up in his baby buggy, had dropped off to sleep. Jamie glanced about him. A man farther along the pond side had been helping his young son toss crumbs to the ducks; now he moved away. Jamie had seen that his forearms were covered with tattoos. “Tell me about a tattooed man,” he said to Isabel.

“Some other time,” said Isabel, looking at her watch.

Now, standing in her garden, her thoughts returned to the day ahead. The discovery that she had made on Jura would need to be dealt with, but there would be time enough for that. Some of Jamie’s caution had begun to have an effect on her, and she wondered whether she should hold back before taking any action. All she really needed to do was tell somebody—Guy Peploe perhaps—of her suspicions and then leave it to him, or somebody else, to make further enquiries. For a moment she considered the attractions of disengagement, of a policy of not worrying about the world. Many people lived like that and were perfectly happy. They did not worry about the destruction of our world, about the drift into medieval religious war, about all the cruelties and hypocrisies; they did not think of these things. But 1 8 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h what did they think about, these disengaged people? If one looked hard enough, perhaps one would see that the big issues that they ignored had merely been replaced by small concerns that could be every bit as pressing. The successes of a football team—or, more pertinently, its failures—could be the cause of a great deal of anguish; arguments with neighbours, worries over money—all of these could weigh as heavily as the greater matters. So being disengaged was more of an apparent solution than a real one, Isabel decided, although she was still going to put this matter off for a day or two.

There were twelve telephone messages awaiting Isabel on her return the previous evening, and she had delayed dealing with them until the morning. Three were from the same person, a distant acquaintance with whom she had promised to have lunch and who was now wanting to make an arrangement.

Isabel slightly regretted the original promise; she had not really intended it but it had been taken seriously by the other person.

This was a cultural misunderstanding. The acquaintance was a New Zealander living in Scotland, and New Zealanders meant what they said, much to their credit, and thought that everybody else did too. As a general rule, Isabel certainly meant what she said, but she was as guilty as everybody else of using language which was really intended to be no more than an expression of general goodwill. Suggesting a meeting for lunch might be a real invitation or it might not, depending on the tone of voice used, and the context. She remembered the late Professor Glanville Williams, whom she had met at Cambridge, once saying to an Italian visitor that they should meet for lunch. Whereupon the Italian had fished in his pocket for his diary, opened it, and said,

“When?” Glanville Williams had been quite shocked, in the same way in which those who automatically wished one to have 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

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a nice day would be shocked if they were asked in what way they thought this might be achieved.

Isabel returned the telephone call, arranged the lunch, and then went through the remaining messages, skipping over several until she found the one she was waiting for, the voice of her lawyer, Simon Mackintosh. “You asked me to act quickly, Isabel, and I have. And a good result too, I’m happy to say. Could you please get in touch when you get back?”

She played the message and then replayed it. The news made her feel elated but concerned at the same time. She had acted impulsively before she had left for Jura, and she had not really expected a result so quickly. But now, when she reflected on the instructions she had given Simon, she experienced that curious feeling, that mixture of elation and dread, that comes from having done something very significant.

She replaced the telephone handset and said to herself, I own it; it’s mine. And that thought occurred to her again when she found herself in the waiting room at Turcan Connell, in their offices at Tollcross, waiting for Simon to appear and lead her into the small conference room which the firm used for clients and lawyers to talk. Tea was served, and shortbread biscuits, and Isabel had already poured herself a cup by the time that Simon arrived.

They exchanged small items of news. Simon’s wife, Catri-ona, an artist, had just finished a successful show, and there was news of that, and Isabel reported on Charlie’s sleeping habits.

Then Simon opened a blue cardboard folder and took out a page of notes he had made on a sheet of paper.

“Now then, Isabel, those instructions of yours.” She wondered whether he was reproaching her, but it was not reproach—just surprise. “What you asked me to do was, how 1 8 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h shall I put it? Fairly unusual. At least it’s unusual to do something like this so quickly. In fact, the whole thing . . . well, I suppose it’s just a case of doing something in record time.”

She shrugged. “Sometimes . . .”

He smiled. “Yes, sometimes there are things that one feels one has to do. And lawyers should always assume that their clients know what they want, even if sometimes, on rare occasions, it may not seem that way. But I’ve never thought that of you.”

Isabel laughed. “I did think about this, you know. It didn’t come totally out of the blue. I thought about it for at least”—she blushed—“an hour or so.”

Simon wagged a finger playfully. “Well, I did what you asked me. And thank heavens we were dealing with a small private company. They proved very easy to negotiate with. And very quick. Of course we still have to do various things before the contract is finally signed—warranties, indemnities, that sort of thing—but we’ve got agreement in principle.”

“They’re nice people.”

Simon agreed. His conversation with the chairman had been brisk and to the point, and there had certainly been an air of civility about it. “When I asked them what sum they had in mind, I must say that I was pleasantly surprised. It was considerably less than the limit you had suggested. Sixty thousand pounds for the title and the goodwill.” He paused and consulted a printed sheet in the file. “And I suppose we have to accept that, even if last year the Review made a profit of a grand total of four hundred pounds . . . and eight pence.”

“They wanted rid of it,” said Isabel. “I thought they might hold out for more.”

“Not when they knew I was offering on your behalf,”

said Simon. “They think very highly of you. And so there we 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

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are, you’re the new owner of the Review of Applied Ethics.

Congratulations!”

Isabel looked at her teacup. She had shamelessly used her superior financial position to deal with Christopher Dove and his machinations. Did she deserve congratulations for that? She thought she did not, but if she were to try to explain her feelings to Simon, she was not sure whether she would be able to convey to him the guilt that she felt. She had done nothing wrong.

Things were for sale or they were not, and the Review, as she had suspected, was for sale if one were to pay enough. Money, she realised, was an instrument of crude power; a conclusion that she had always sought to avoid, but which was demonstra-bly and uncomfortably true.

Simon was studying her with a slightly bemused expression.

“I know you can well afford this, Isabel,” he began. “But do you mind my asking, why do you want to own it? Wasn’t it enough just to be the editor?”

For a moment, Isabel did not reply. Now she looked up and met Simon’s gaze. “To set right an injustice,” she said simply.

Simon slipped the piece of paper back into the file. “Ah,” he said. He thought for a moment, fingering the edge of the blue file. “That’s a very good reason for doing anything. Well done.”

She reached forward and poured him a fresh cup of tea.

Nothing more needed to be said about the transaction and so they spent a few minutes discussing the weather, which was perfect, and the world, which was not quite.

Just before she rose to leave, though, it occurred to her that it might be easier for Simon to write a letter that needed to be written. “There’s one thing more,” she said. “There’s a letter that needs to be written to the chairman of the editorial board.

Could you do that for me? As my lawyer?”

“Of course.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h She explained that the letter needed to go to Professor Lettuce. “A ridiculous name, I know, but that is his burden in life.

I’ll write down the address here. Please tell him that you are acting for the new owner of the Review of Applied Ethics and that she—and please remember the she—is very grateful to him for all his services to the Review. However, it will be necessary to appoint a new editorial board, and this will be done shortly.”

Simon made a few notes and then looked at Isabel. “Should I mention your name at this stage?”

Isabel hesitated. One part of her wanted the satisfaction of letting them work it out; she could imagine their anxious discussions. But another saw the pettiness of this, the wrong-ness. Plato’s white horse and dark horse. She closed her eyes.

Revenge was sweet, but it was wrong, and she should not repay them in the coin they had used on her. No, she should not.

“Tell them who I am right at the beginning,” she said. “That would be better.”

Simon, who sensed that he had just witnessed a great moral struggle, nodded his assent. “I’m sure that you’ve made the right decision,” he said.

Perhaps, thought Isabel. But then she went on to think, Oh, Lettuce and Dove—you did ask for this, you really did.

I S A B E L L E F T the offices of Turcan Connell shortly before mid-day. Their building, a new one, was made of green and blue glass, like sheets of thinly sliced ice; looking up from the small square to its front, one could see through the upper storeys to the sky beyond. Around it, though, was the Edinburgh with which Isabel was more familiar—the stone tenement buildings, the predominant note of grey. She walked up Home Street, past 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

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the vegetable shops, the watchmaker, the sellers of cheap orna-ments, the bars. She passed the King’s Theatre and Bennet’s Bar beside it, with its elaborate stained-glass windows, where singers and musicians would meet after rehearsals in the theatre, sitting on the long red benches, reflected in the large brew-ers’ mirrors.

Farther up the road, she suddenly felt hungry as she approached Cat’s delicatessen. She was in no hurry to get home; Charlie was off somewhere with Grace and they would not be returning until after lunch. There were things to be done in the house—correspondence and a long list of small chores—but she did not feel like doing anything yet. She felt awkward about going into the delicatessen now, with Cat in her current mood, but she knew that she had to persist: the ice would melt, as it always did.

Eddie was behind the counter and there was no sign of Cat.

He was slicing Parma ham for a customer and he nodded to Isabel. She picked up a copy of a newspaper from the table—

somebody had left that day’s Guardian, and she would read that at one of the coffee tables until Eddie could serve her. Eddie made good focaccia and olive plates and she would have one of those when he was ready.

She was absorbed in a Guardian article when she became aware of Cat’s presence. She lowered the paper and saw that her niece was smiling. The thaw, she thought.

Cat looked over her shoulder towards Eddie. A couple of customers were peering into the display case below the counter, pointing at cheeses. “It looks as if he’s going to be busy for a while,” said Cat. “I’ll look after you.”

“I was hoping for focaccia and olives,” said Isabel. “But there’s no hurry. There’s always The Guardian. ”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Cat did not think it would be any trouble. “And how’s Charlie?” she asked.

It was the first time that she had shown any real interest in her cousin, although Isabel suspected that the interest, or curiosity at least, had always been there but had been repressed.

“Thriving,” she replied. “Sleeping. Eating. Doing all the things appropriate to being a baby.”

Cat smiled. “He’s very sweet,” she said. “He looks a bit like . . .” Isabel held her breath. “Like Jamie.”

That, Isabel thought, was extraordinary progress. Isabel herself not did not think that Charlie looked remotely like Jamie, but that did not matter now: the air, she thought, was filled with the sound of shifting logjams.

“Yes, well, perhaps he does. In some lights.”

Cat went off to prepare Isabel’s lunch, leaving her with The Guardian. She was reading an article on the Middle East and the prospects for peace, which were slim. What acres of newsprint, she thought, what lakes of ink, had been expended on that topic; and always it came back to the same thing, the sense of difference between people, the erection of barriers of religion, clothing, culture. And yet there were differences, and it was naïve to imagine that people were all the same—they weren’t. And everybody needed space, physical space, to live their lives amongst those with whom they shared an outlook and values; which led to the depressing conclusion that the recipe for social peace was keeping people separate from one another, each in his own territory, each in the safety of fellows. She was not sure if she could accept that—and The Guardian certainly did not. The problem was that we could no longer have our own cultural spaces: everybody was now too mixed up for that and we had to share.

She was wrestling with these issues when Eddie came 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

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across to her, bearing the plate of focaccia and olives which Cat had prepared.

“She seems to be in a good mood today,” said Isabel, nodding in the direction of Cat, who was now dealing with a customer at the counter.

Eddie’s lip curled in mock disdain. “Guess why,” he said.

“Have three guesses. Or shall I just tell you? She’s found a new man.”

Isabel had a feeling that she and Eddie had had this conversation before; and they had, she decided, some time ago, when the man was . . . she could not remember.

“Yes,” said Eddie. “He came in here not long ago. And he’s coming up to see her again this weekend. That’s why she’s all smiles.”

It had not occurred to Isabel, for reasons of denial, perhaps.

Or because she had thought of him as a flash in the pan—

somebody temporary. Now the thought of it appalled her. She looked up at Eddie, who was grinning knowingly. “A tall man,”

she said. “A tall man with blond hair slicked back like this.” She made the gesture.

“Yes,” said Eddie. “But they all look like that, don’t they?

All of her men are the same. Except for . . .” He looked embarrassed.

Isabel stared down at her plate. Christopher Dove. She had imagined that the dalliance between him and Cat had been limited to the evening in Edinburgh; she had not contemplated that anything further would come of it.

“Anyway,” said Eddie, “long may it last.”

Isabel shook her head. “I doubt if he’s right for her.”

Eddie sniggered. “They get along.” He took a step backwards. “I’ve got to go.”

Isabel ate her meal in silence. Dove would know by tomor-1 9 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h row that the Review had changed hands, and he would realise immediately, even if it weren’t for the wording of the letter to Professor Lettuce, that he would never become editor. He would be angry, of course, and his anger would be directed at her. And if Cat heard about it—as she would—then she would assume that Isabel had fired Dove to spite her. Cat was quite capable of believing that, thought Isabel, and of course there might be people who would do such a thing, even if she was not one of them.

She knew, of course, that she should not allow herself to be governed by thoughts of what her niece would think—

particularly a niece who was growing into such an unpredictable person as Cat was. And yet she was not sure that she could face more of Cat’s moods or hostility. It would be like living with Schopenhauer, not an easy task for anybody, and certainly not for Schopenhauer’s mother, to whom the philosopher refused to talk for the last twenty-three years of her life.

She stood up and crossed the room to pay for her lunch. At the till, Cat waved her aside. “No need,” she said.

“But I must,” said Isabel.

Cat shook a finger. “No, it’s a thank-you.”

Isabel’s heart sank. “For what?”

“For introducing me to such a gorgeous man the other day!”

C H A P T E R S I X T E E N

E

THE QUEEN’S HALL that evening was packed, and although Jamie had tried to get Isabel a good seat, she ended up in the gallery, on one of the benches in which one could never quite relax. And there had been a purpose behind that discomfort; the Queen’s Hall had been a church, and the Church of Scotland had never been one for excessive comfort, lest it lead to somno-lence during sermons. Jamie was playing in the orchestra, as he sometimes did, and he was keen that Isabel should hear this particular programme.

“It’s a very adventurous mix,” he explained. “Fauré’s Requiem in the first half, and then new or newish pieces in the second.

Various offerings from Peter Maxwell Davies, Stephen Deazley, and Max Richter. It’ll be interesting, to say the least.”

Jamie had given Isabel a recording of Max Richter’s Blue Notebooks, and she had played it time and time again, absorbed by the haunting, enigmatic music. And then in Mellis’s cheese shop one day, she and her friend Rosalind Marshall had seen the composer himself, who lived in Edinburgh; he had come in to buy a piece of Dunsyre Blue, and, recognising him from the sleeve of The Blue Notebooks, Isabel had said, “You don’t know 1 9 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h me, but The Blue Notebooks . . . ” She was not sure that he had heard her, in fact she thought that he had not, as the cheese-monger had started to speak, extolling the virtues of a particular cheese, and then somebody else had come in and it was too late.

“I’ll talk to him some other time,” Isabel said to Rosalind.

“Yes, perhaps,” said Rosalind. “I almost had a conversation with the prime minister once. He was paying a visit to the Portrait Gallery and I said something to him about one of the pictures, but he was distracted by somebody else and so I’m not sure he heard me.”

Isabel smiled. “There are probably many of us in Edinburgh who have almost conversed with prominent people, but not quite.” She paused, remembering something that had been said to her some time ago. “I was in Ireland, once, staying at a place called Gurthalougha House, near Shannon. And the woman who ran the hotel had an aunt, or so she told me, who had been walking in the Black Forest in the nineteen thirties when she met a small walking party coming along the path towards her.

And she recognised the man in front—it was Adolf Hitler. So apparently she said, ‘Good morning, Mr. Hitler,’ and he just nodded and continued on his way.”

Rosalind shook her head. “What a strange story. I’m not sure what we can take from that, but it certainly is rather strange.”

“Had her aunt been armed,” mused Isabel, “she could have changed the course of history, for the better.”

“By murdering Hitler?”

Isabel hesitated, but only briefly. “Yes. Although I’m not sure that I would use the word murder there. Murder is intrinsi-cally wrong, isn’t it? The word carries a lot of moral baggage.”

“So what should we call it? Execution? Assassination?”

“We could just call it killing, ” said Isabel. “That’s neutral. 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

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person defending himself from an attacker kills the aggressor, and that’s morally justifiable. We don’t say that he murders the person attacking him. Murder is one of those words with strong moral associations.”

Rosalind frowned. “So nobody could ever be said to have murdered a tyrant—is that what you’re saying? Even if somebody had ever succeeded in removing him?”

“Not unless somebody killed him for the wrong reasons,”

said Isabel. “Take Stalin, for instance, or Chairman Mao. Let’s say that a rival, an even bigger monster, had disposed of Mao or Stalin in order to become leader himself, then that could be described as murder, I suppose. But if a relative of one of his victims took a shot at him, then I’m not so sure that I would call it murder. Assassination, perhaps, and even a justifiable one, if it saved lives.”

Their attention reverted to their purchases. Rosalind was inspecting a very small square of cheese. “I wonder,” she said,

“whether this comes from that cheese maker I met in Orkney who has only one cow. She can’t produce very much, you know.”

Now, remembering their conversation about Stalin and the rest, Isabel thought: Yes, people should condemn the crimes of tyrants equally. The problem was that people were selective in their moral outrage or simply did not know.

She sighed. Moral evenhandedness was rare, but that was another issue, and she had often been troubled by it. Moral evenhandedness suggested that one should treat one’s friends and strangers equally, and that was very counterintuitive. You are outside a burning building. At two adjacent windows appear two people, both calling for help. One of these is your friend, the other a stranger. You have enough time to use your ladder to rescue only one of them. Some would say that both have an 1 9 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h equal claim on you, and that you should toss a coin to decide who should be saved. But who amongst us would do that? Isabel asked herself.

But back to homicide, which she and her friend had started to discuss. An image was forming in Isabel’s mind of the contents page of a special issue of the Review of Applied Ethics, which she would title “Good Killing .” She would ask Professor John Harris to contribute because his writing was so lively, and he had once titled a chapter of one of his books “Killing: A Caring Thing to Do?” That had not been as provocative as it sounded; John was a kind man—and a very subtle philosopher—and he was talking there of mercy killing, which might be carried out precisely because one cared about the suffering of another; to acknowledge this was not so much to con-done it as to recognise why people did it. She liked John, whom she knew quite well, and had enjoyed several intense debates with him in the past. If he was at a window in a burning building, she would be very much inclined to rescue him. But would a moral impartialist—a hypothetical moral impartialist, not John—do the same and rescue her? He would surely have to make a random choice, toss a coin perhaps, which might mean that he could rescue the stranger, if the stranger won the toss.

But he would be apologetic about it, of course, and would shout up from below, “Isabel, I would have loved to have rescued you rather than this stranger, but your needs, you see, are equal, and I must not prefer you simply because I know you. I’m so sorry.”

During the first half of the concert, while the chorus sang the Fauré Requiem, Isabel’s mind wandered. Jamie was not due to play until the second half of the concert, and she imagined him in the large green room behind the stage. Before the performance he often said that he read to divert himself—

something unconnected with music. She saw him sitting there 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

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with a book that he had picked up in the small bookshop at the corner of Buccleuch Place, a book of tiger-hunting memoirs.

She had looked at him sideways when he had produced it, but he had explained, “All of them were man-eaters. Those are the only tigers he shot. He went round villages in the north of India back in the twenties and thirties and shot the man-eaters who were terrorising the villagers.” But it had still puzzled her that Jamie would read about that; no woman would read a book like that, and then she thought, He’s not a woman .

With the “Pie Jesu,” which was sung by Nicola Wood, whom Isabel knew slightly, her mind came back to the music.

Dona eis requiem; grant them rest. It was not complex music, with its cautiously developed melody and its utter resolution; it was a lullaby really, and that, she thought, was what a requiem really was. If one were to be taken up to heaven, then it would be Fauré who might accompany one. Again her mind wandered to the death of McInnes, his watery death; if it had been suicide, then would he have welcomed that death, abandoned the body’s natural struggle for life, and embraced what lay ahead? Grant them rest, rest everlasting; they were such kind words, even in their finality, and the music that accompanied them, as in this requiem, should be gentle.

They reached “In Paradisum.” Behind the words, the organ’s question and answer provided a tapestry of sound that was almost mesmeric, weaving delicately about the words. But it was the words themselves which engaged Isabel: May the angels lead you into paradise / May the martyrs receive you / In your coming / And may they guide you / Into the holy city, Jerusalem.

There was really no consolation for death, she thought, just the various anodynes. But even if one could not believe in Paradise, or in angels, this was music which might, for a few sublime moments, nudge one towards belief in just that.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h The last notes died away, and there was applause. Isabel sat quietly for a moment while members of the audience filed out for the intermission. A woman sitting beside her caught her eye for a moment and said, “Sublime.”

Isabel nodded. “Yes, it was. Yes.”

When the rush for the bar had subsided, she got up from her seat and made her way downstairs. In the lobby below, the wide double doors had been thrown open to the street, to allow the cool night air into the hall. Her feet always felt sore at concerts for a reason that she had never quite worked out; perhaps it was the heat, or the fact of sitting motionless for a long period.

Whatever it was, she always yearned to be barefoot, or to have, as now, fresh air about her ankles.

She stood immediately outside the hall, watching the traffic go by. A small group of students, engaged in earnest conversation, walked past on the pavement, and one of them, a boy with glasses and a small goatee, was holding forth in an animated way. He must have said something to amuse his companions, as they laughed raucously.

Then a poor man walked past. Isabel knew that he was a poor man because he had a regular beat, selling a magazine that homeless people sold in the streets. From time to time she bought a copy from him, not because there was anything in it that she wanted to read, but in order to support him.

“Lazarus,” she muttered.

She had intended to think the word rather than utter it, but it had slipped out. She froze. Had he heard? If he had, he would wonder, surely, why she should call him Lazarus.

He had. He stopped and stared at Isabel, separated only by the low stone wall between the forecourt of the theatre and the pavement on which he had been walking.

“Lazarus?” he said in a thick, nasal voice. “I’m not Lazarus.”

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

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Isabel felt flustered. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was thinking aloud.”

The man frowned. “Well, I’m not him,” he reiterated. “I’m not Lazarus.”

“Of course not.”

He swore, not quite silently, under his breath. Isabel began to edge away, imperceptibly, but it was unnecessary, as he had turned and started to walk away. Isabel thought: What does he think of me? And all I was doing was thinking of Lazarus at the end of the Fauré: et cum Lazaro quondam paupere / Aeternam habeas requiem. (And with Lazarus, once poor, may you have eternal rest.) Lazarus once poor, led off to Paradise by angels, as in the parable.

Somebody tapped her on the shoulder. Peter and Susie Stevenson had come out to join her. Susie was holding a small glass of iced water in which a twist of lemon was submerged.

She passed this to Isabel. “I saw you from down below,” she said. “I thought you might like this.”

Isabel thanked them. “Why are concerts so hot?”

“All those people,” said Peter. “And a general lack of air-conditioning. Which is maybe no bad thing. The more we air-condition, the hotter the world gets—or so we’re told.”

They discussed the Fauré and the pieces that were to come; Isabel only half followed the conversation because she was thinking of the embarrassing encounter with the homeless man.

Don’t think aloud, she muttered to herself.

“What was that?” asked Peter.

She said, quickly, “I was going to come to see you. There’s been something on my mind.” She took a sip of the water. “It’s about that painting.”

“Ah,” said Peter. “You’re still tempted? You know, I think that you’re going to buy it. And why not? It won’t break the bank, I imagine.”

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

“I’m not going to buy it,” said Isabel, “because it’s a fake.”

“Hold on!” said Peter. “Have you any evidence?”

He had not expected her to reply so firmly, but she did.

“I have,” she said. “And what’s more, I know who did it. A man called Frank Anderson.”

She had spoken with some conviction, and, as she uttered the forger’s name, with some anger. The strangeness of that struck her; why should she feel that way about something which, as Jamie would be quick to point out, had very little to do with her? But it is to do with me, she told herself; I was almost a victim, in that I would have bought it had it not been for Walter Buie. He is the victim and . . . and he sought, in turn, to make me his victim.

Susie broke her train of thought. “Frank Anderson?”

Isabel looked at her keenly. “Do you know him? An artist?”

In the distance, the sound of a wailing ambulance siren seemed to be drawing closer. Peter looked at his watch anxiously; the intermission had five minutes to run.

Isabel had to raise her voice now against the sound of the ambulance. “Do you?” she pressed. “Do you know that name?”

Susie looked at the passersby. The light from the door was behind her, and her shadow fell upon the low wall. Somewhere in her mind there was a memory of Frank Anderson. But she could not say who he was or why she should remember the name. The ambulance went past, dodging a car which had stopped awkwardly in the middle of the junction, its driver paralysed by the emergency of the moment.

“It’s not an uncommon name,” said Peter. “There must be lots of Frank Andersons in Scotland.” He looked again at his watch. “But the point is this, Isabel: How do you know?”

She wondered how convincing her explanation would 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

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sound; probably not very, she decided. “We’ve been on Jura,”

she said. “You know that these two paintings are of Jura? Well, a man called Frank Anderson stayed in a house there and left behind a painting that he’d done. It was pure McInnes. I saw it, Peter. I’m absolutely certain. It’s the same scene as that painting which Walter Buie has.” She shrugged. She had made her case.

Peter was watching her, but she could not tell whether he believed her.

“Right,” he said. “That’s evidence of a sort, or at least it’s a reason to be suspicious, I suppose.”

A bell rang within, warning of the end of the interval. They turned round and went back into the vestibule.

“I don’t like this,” said Susie. “This is a criminal offence you’ve stumbled upon, Isabel. I’m not sure if you should get involved, you know. These things . . .”

“What Susie’s saying is that it’s dangerous,” said Peter. “And I think she’s right. So I think you should go and talk to Guy Peploe. Hand the matter over to him. He’ll know what to do.”

She did not take much persuading. “All right.”

“And you’ll definitely do this?” asked Peter. “I know about your tendency to . . .”

“Interfere?” asked Isabel, playfully.

“You said it rather than I,” said Peter.

L AT E R T H AT N I G H T , well after the concert, when Isabel lay sleepless, Jamie turned to her. He took her hand, stroking it gently. The room was in darkness apart from a sliver of moonlight that penetrated the chink in the curtains, like a searchlight in the night sky.

“You played so beautifully,” said Isabel. “Particularly in the Maxwell Davies.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Jamie pressed her hand to his chest. His skin, she thought, was so smooth—like satin.

“Every note was perfect,” she went on. “It was.”

He moved her hand across his chest. She felt the beating of his heart, somewhere below her fingers, and that felt the most intimate of all. She might possess him, but she might not touch his heart.

“You shouldn’t say that,” he whispered. “Flatterer.”

“No, I mean it. I don’t give compliments I don’t mean.” She paused. They were whispering, though for no reason; but in the dark it seemed right to whisper, so as not to disturb the silence.

“When I was a boy I used to think that talking in the dark was what it would be like talking to God,” said Jamie. “Odd. I thought that he could hear us in the dark.”

Isabel was not sure about this. “The difference is that we can hear ourselves,” said Isabel. “That’s the difference.” It was that, she thought; that, and something to do with the accentua-tion of the hearing in the absence of other stimuli for the senses.

He turned and kissed her on the forehead. The back of his hand was upon her cheek.

“Tell me a story of a tattooed man,” he whispered. “You promised that you would.”

“Did I?”

“Yes, you did.”

She shifted slightly, so that his hand fell from the side of her cheek. She thought of a tattooed man, the sort of man one saw in Edwardian photographs, those photographs of side show exhibits of the past, every square inch of the body covered with inked designs, the sacred, the demoniacal, the confessional.

What could she say about this tattooed man? That he loved his 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

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wife, the tattooed lady, and was proud of his son, the tattooed baby? It sounded like a couple of lines from a poem, but it was not; it was from nowhere. And such a story would be trite, she thought; trite and tragic at the same time.

“Your tattooed man, Jamie,” she began. “Let me see, now.

All right, the tattooed man.”

He sounded drowsy. “I’m listening.”

His drowsiness communicated itself to her, as a yawn will pass like an infection, from one to another. She felt a wave of tiredness coming over her. She wanted only to lie there with him, close to him in the darkness, and drift off to sleep. It was hard to speak, she was so tired, and anyway she thought that he was now asleep, with his breathing getting deeper, more regular.

She let her eyelids close, so that even the sliver of moonlight was blocked out. Before sleep claimed her she thought: We forget so many stories in our lifetime, some told, some that remained untold; some that we did not really know in the first place. The tattooed man / Who loved his wife, the tattooed lady /

And was proud of his son, the tattooed baby.

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

E

HE’S WEARING his Macpherson tartan rompers, I see,” said Grace, bending down to tickle Charlie under the chin. “Have you bought him his first kilt yet?”

Isabel had not, but would do so, she thought, when he was about three.

“To wear a kilt one must first be able to walk,” she said.

“And his little legs would get rather cold, I think.”

“What a figure he’ll cut,” said Grace, admiringly. “Charlie Dalhousie, apple of every eye at the school dances . . .” She broke off. Would Charlie be Charlie Dalhousie, taking Isabel’s name, or would he . . . She smiled nervously, in the awkwardness of the moment. There were few things that embarrassed Grace, but illegitimacy was one of them, even if the word had been more or less retired. Nobody spoke of illegitimacy anymore, and there were, fortunately, no legal consequences of any significance. But corners of shame remained in some parts of Scotland, even if so many children now were born out of wed-lock. And Grace belonged to a section of society where these things were still felt.

Isabel immediately understood and put Grace at her ease.

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“Yes, Charlie Dalhousie will be quite the young man about town, won’t you, Charlie?”

“Good,” said Grace, and went on to the business of the day.

Isabel was taking Charlie out, into town, she said, and she would stay in the house and tackle the upstairs bathroom, which she thought had been allowed to become a mess. There was a line of mould tracking its sinister way along the line of grout at the bottom of the shower—Jamie’s fault, Grace suspected—as he showered far too much in her opinion and left the cubicle too damp. Grace did not believe in showers, except for when a bath was for some reason unavailable: then one might have a shower, a quick one, remembering to wipe down the tiles after use to prevent the formation of mould.

“I’ve bought something for that shower,” said Grace. “It’s—”

“I know,” said Isabel quickly. “Mould.”

For a few moments there was silence; Isabel called such interludes Grace’s moment of censure, and this was one. But the point had been made, and she wheeled Charlie out under a smiling farewell from her housekeeper. As Isabel walked up the road, she thought about mould. Grace had made her feel responsible for it because Jamie used the shower and Grace considered Isabel to be responsible for Jamie. Grace wanted her employer to feel guilty about the presence of mould, but she felt that she could not add mould to her burden of guilt. She already felt guilty about the use of her money to buy the Review, and she felt guilty about the sheer pleasure she had taken in the thought of Lettuce’s face when he read the letter from Simon.

She could just see him, opening the letter dismissively—having seen the Edinburgh postmark and assuming that it was some inconsequential communication from herself, but no! There it was, in Lettuce’s now trembling hands, a letter from none other 2 0 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h than Simon Mackintosh, WS, partner in the large law firm of Turcan Connell. Lettuce would not know what WS stood for, but she would be delighted to tell him, if asked: it was Writer to the Signet, which meant that Simon was a member of that august legal society with its splendid library overlooking St.

Giles Cathedral in the very heart of Edinburgh. Let Lettuce contemplate that for a moment in his London fastness. So might the Hanoverian have quaked at the news that Bonnie Prince Charlie had put his generals to flight.

But sweet as such thoughts were, they were not thoughts which a conscientious moral philosopher could entertain. Scha-denfreude in any shape or form was, quite simply, wrong. The discomfort of others should never be delighted over, she reminded herself; it was wrong to gloat. But then she saw Lettuce’s face again, caught in a moment of shocked disbelief, and she allowed herself to smile at that. Charlie looked up at her from his supine position and smiled too.

Isabel’s destination that morning, determined upon after the concert the previous evening at the Queen’s Hall, was Dundas Street and Guy Peploe. She had decided that with Charlie present it would be better to meet at Glass and Thompson, the café a few doors up from the gallery. Charlie could be fed there and would like the colours and bustle of a restaurant.

She was there first, sitting on one of the bench seats at the back, watching the two young men making coffee and preparing bread and quiches for the lunchtime rush that would come in a couple of hours. Suddenly Guy was in front of her, looking down at Charlie with amusement.

“Macpherson,” said Isabel. “My maternal grandmother was a Macpherson and we liked that tartan.”

“That purple is very fine,” said Guy. “He’s quite the lad.”

He sat down and fixed Isabel with an expectant look.

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“Yes,” she said. “McInnes.”

Guy looked apologetic. “It’s been sold, I’m afraid,” he said.

“A couple of days ago. The buyer I mentioned to you has taken it. It’s going abroad. I’m sorry—had I known that you were still interested . . .”

He hesitated, seeing her dismayed expression. “I’m really very sorry, you know,” he said. “I thought that you had decided against it.”

Isabel was lost in thought. The information that she had to give to Guy would be even less welcome now.

Guy was solicitous. “Isabel? Are you really upset?”

“No,” she began. “Not upset. And I wasn’t going to buy it. I came to have a word with you about . . . well, something that I think I’ve found out about that painting.”

“I’d be most interested,” said Guy. “As I said to you, I think that it’s a very fine McInnes.”

Isabel shook her head. “But it isn’t, Guy. It’s not a McInnes at all.”

The proprietor of the restaurant had caught sight of Isabel and had come to greet her. She asked him for two coffees and then turned back to Guy. “I believe that that painting was painted by a forger by the name of Frank Anderson. I don’t know exactly who he is, or where he is. But that painting was painted by him and not by McInnes. I know that, Guy. How I came to know it is a bit complicated, but I do.”

The coffees arrived. Guy flattened the milky top of his with a teaspoon, staring into his cup as if to find the solution there.

Isabel watched him. “You’re asking me,” he said at last. “You’re asking me to distrust my own judgement on a painting’s authenticity. On what grounds? What are these complicated grounds?”

She told him, describing the moment when she stood before the fake McInnes in Barnhill, and of how certain she was 2 1 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h that it was by the same hand that did the larger painting he had just sold. “You say that you can tell just by looking,” she ended.

“Well so can I. In this case, at least.”

Neither said anything for a full minute. Then Guy sighed.

“What do I do now?” He was thinking aloud, rather than asking Isabel. “I suppose I contact the purchaser and tell him that we have some doubts about the painting. And then?” He looked at Isabel, waiting for a suggestion.

“It’s not just me,” she said. “If I thought I was the only one with reservations about these paintings, then I would feel a little less convinced. But I think that the person who bought the McInnes at auction thinks the same.”

Guy looked sceptical. “So you’re suggesting that that’s a fake too?”

“Walter Buie offered to sell it to me more or less immediately after he got hold of it,” said Isabel flatly. “I think he did that because he’d tumbled to the truth and wanted to get rid of it.”

Guy shook his head. “Walter Buie? Nonsense, Isabel. Walter is . . . well, he’s just not that type. He simply wouldn’t . . .”

“Why would he try to sell it, then?”

Guy laughed. “I could tell you of numerous occasions when people have changed their minds—more or less immediately.

They take the painting home and discover that it’s not right for the room. Somebody makes a remark about it and they decide that it’s not to their taste after all. There are a hundred and one reasons why people change their minds.”

She listened to this. Of course people could change their minds, but in this case there were just too many factors suggesting otherwise. And Walter Buie might be a paragon of respectability in the eyes of the public, but such people often had a dark, private side which was very different. There were so 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

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many cases of that, and this was, after all, Edinburgh, which had spawned the creator of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

“Anyway,” said Guy, “I’ll do what’s necessary. I suspect you’re wrong about all this, but I’ll do my best to find out more—if there’s any more to find out. I’ll tell the purchaser. And I’ll make enquiries about this Frank Anderson.”

“The name means nothing to you?” asked Isabel.

Guy looked thoughtful. “It rang a distant bell,” he said. “But I can’t bring anything to mind. I’ll ask about, though, and I’ll let you know.” He paused. “Do you want me to speak to Walter Buie?”

It was tempting. If Guy did that, then there would be no need for her to do anything further; she would have handed the whole matter over. But Isabel was not one to abandon responsibilities quickly, and so her answer was no; she would do that herself. She had become involved in this business, and she would see it through. It was a question of principle. And it was also, she decided, slightly exciting. Not very exciting; just slightly exciting, which, as she started to walk back up Dundas Street, past the elegant gardens that lay along the north side of Queen Street, was just right for Edinburgh. One did not want too much excitement in a place like Edinburgh. One could go to Glasgow for that, or even London, if one had the urge.

W H E N S H E R E T U R N E D to the house, Grace whisked Charlie away. She wanted to take him out into the garden, she said, as the weather, which had been fine, could change at any moment.

“That fox,” said Grace, “has dug up half the small rose bed.

You know the one near the garden shed?”

“The summerhouse?”

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

“Whatever you call it. Yes, there. He’s dug a great big hole and put the soil all over the lawn.”

Isabel peered out the window. The grass near the summerhouse certainly looked darker. “He must be thinking of a new burrow,” she said. “Even foxes must have their plans for the future. Presumably they face the same sort of dilemmas that we do: renovate, or dig a new burrow.”

Grace stared at Isabel with a look that was half disbelief, half scorn. “They don’t think that way,” she said after a while.

Isabel returned the stare, but did not say anything. The trouble with Grace, she thought, is that she is so literal. But that was the trouble with most people, when it came down to it; there were very few who enjoyed flights of fantasy, and to have that sort of mind—one which enjoyed dry wit and understood the absurd—left one in a shrinking minority. Isabel remembered being at a conference at Christ Church in Oxford and sitting next to a Japanese woman over breakfast in the Great Hall. The Japanese woman, who was accompanying her husband, a philosopher, to the conference— Kant for Our Times—had suddenly turned to her and said, “I am so old-fashioned. I am a dodo.”

The heartfelt comment had been triggered by the hall and its table lights, by its paintings of past masters and benefactors of the college, by the presence of what seemed like a quieter past, and Isabel had felt a surge of sympathy for the other woman.

“I am sure that there must be a club for dodos,” she said.

“The dodos club. And it would meet in places like this.”

The woman’s eyes had widened, and then she had burst out laughing. “The dodos club! That’s so clever.”

It was not very clever, thought Isabel, but for a moment there had been a sense of contact across cultures, of kindred spirits reaching out to one another. And that happened from time to time, when she met somebody who could look at 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

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world in the same way and see the joke. But not now, in this conversation with Grace about Brother Fox and the mess that he had made of the small rose bed.

“We’ll have to watch that fox when Charlie’s around,” said Grace.

Isabel frowned. Was Grace suggesting that Brother Fox would harm Charlie in some way? Did foxes do such things?

It was as if Grace had heard the unspoken question. “They carry off lambs,” she said darkly.

The thought that anything should eat Charlie appalled Isabel; even the thought that a dangerous world should lie ahead of him, filled with creatures that might wish to harm him, was in itself bad enough, but eat . . .

“Brother Fox would not harm him,” she said. “Foxes don’t bite unless you corner them. And nor for that matter do wolves.”

Although at the back of her mind there was a vague memory of reading of a fox that did bite a child, in London. But that must have been a very stressed urban fox; Brother Fox was not like that.

If Grace had been prepared to accept this defence of foxes, she was not prepared to do so with wolves. “Wolves do,” she said simply. “Wolves are very dangerous. I have a sister in Canada.”

Isabel raised an eyebrow. The fact that one had a relative in Canada did not, she felt, automatically entitle one to pronounce on the subject of wolves, even if it gave one authority in some other areas.

“Wolves,” said Isabel, “have never been recorded as attacking man. They keep well away.” She felt tempted to add that she had been in Canada herself and had never seen a wolf, which was true and would therefore add empirical strength to the claim that wolves avoided people, but the full truth might require her to add that she had only been in Toronto, which somewhat diminished the force of the observation.

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

“Well, all I’m saying,” said Grace, picking up Charlie, “is that we would be better off without that fox. Particularly with Charlie. That’s all I’m saying.”

The matter had been dropped, and Isabel had gone off to her study to deal with the mail. The fact that she had thought that she was soon to stop being the editor of the Review meant that she had let things slip, and the unopened correspondence had mounted up. Now she would have to think again in terms of future issues, have to deal with the unsolicited submissions, and would have to think, too, of the appointment of a new editorial board. She already had her list and was adding to it: Jim Childress in Charlottesville would be a great catch, and Julian Baggini, too, who already edited The Philosophers’ Magazine but who might be persuaded to join. They would all be her friends, which would make the task of consulting the board so much more pleasant—no Lettuce or Dove. Of Lettuce and Dove I am freed, she said to herself, savouring the words, which sounded so like a line—and title—of a sixteenth-century English madrigal in the Italian style. It could be sung, perhaps, by the Tallis Scholars: Of Lettuce and Dove I am freed

And of their schemings no more shall be heard For they are gone with the morning dew Yea, Lettuce and Dove are both departed . . .

There was a letter from Dove.

Dear Miss Dalhousie,

I have heard from Professor Lettuce that you have persuaded the owners of the Review to sell it to you. I have heard, too, that you will be appointing a new editorial board and that it is unlikely to include current members. I am, of course, sorry that you are seeing fit to 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

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dispose of the services of those who have given so much time to the Review over the years and who have always had its best interests at heart. I suppose that this is the prerogative of those who have the economic power to acquire assets which should, in a better-ordered world, be owned and operated for the common weal. However, I must say that I am surprised that a moral philosopher, which you claim to be (although I note that you have no academic position in that field), should act in a way which is more befitting of the petulant proprietor of a chain of newspapers. But that, I regretfully conclude, is how business is conducted today. I wish you, nonetheless, a successful further tenure of the editorial chair to which you have, it seems, become stuck.

Yours sincerely, Christopher Dove

She read the letter, and then reread it. It was, she had to admit, a small masterpiece of venom. To anybody who was unaware of the background, and who therefore did not know that the letter was from the pen of an arch-schemer, it might even have seemed poignant. But to Isabel, who knew what lay behind it, it was pure cant. Cant for Our Times, she thought.

She laid the letter to one side and picked up the envelope.

Dove, she remembered, was famously keen on recycling and reused envelopes, sticking new address labels on them and seal-ing the flap with adhesive tape. Sure enough, this envelope had been used before and had a small label with her name and address stuck on the front. Idly she held the envelope up to the light and saw the writing underneath. The envelope in its first incarnation had been addressed to Dove at his home address.

“Professor and Mrs. C. Dove” read the original.

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

E

THERE WERE two difficult tasks now. One was to speak to Cat—not an easy thing to do in her niece’s current mood, but rendered doubly difficult by the Dove problem—and the other was to visit Walter Buie. She had spent the previous evening in a state of anxious anticipation, trying to concentrate on reading, then work, then a television adaptation of a novel she liked, but had failed in all three, as her mind kept returning to the difficult encounters that would take place the next morning. She had telephoned Jamie, who had been working late in rehearsal and had been unable to be present for Charlie’s bath time. She had decided that she would tell him about Dove and Cat and seek his advice, but then had changed her mind. And then she decided that she could not broach the subject of her impend-ing meeting with Walter Buie, but again had changed her mind. Jamie would tell her to avoid further involvement with that matter now that she had passed on her misgivings to Guy Peploe. She had found no comfort there, and had been reduced to saying to Charlie, as she picked him up to change him, “What am I to do, Charlie? What do you think?”

But Charlie had simply gurgled in a noncommittal fashion, 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

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which provided at least some reassurance. It would be many years yet, she thought, before Charlie started to disagree with her.

Cat was first on the list, because it was potentially the most painful encounter, and it would be best, she thought, to get it over and done with. In spite of Cat’s recent jauntiness, Isabel felt that their underlying relationship seemed so bad now that any further deterioration was unlikely. They still spoke to one another, but Isabel could never gauge in advance what Cat’s mood would be. Sometimes it was as if nothing had happened, but for the most part there was a simmering unforgiveness. If she had thought that this would last forever, Isabel would have felt despondent; but she knew that Cat would come out of this, as she had done before. There would eventually be a reconciliation following a gesture of some sort from her niece. Last time, it had been a basket of provisions from the delicatessen, left on the doorstep as a peace offering, and largely consumed by Brother Fox, who had found it before Isabel had. She thought that for him it must have been akin to the cargo awaited by the members of a Pacific island cargo cult, unasked for, delivered by an unseen hand.

Charlie remained behind with Grace—one did not take babies into a war zone—and Isabel walked, sunk in thought, along Merchiston Crescent to the delicatessen in Bruntsfield Place. Cat was behind the counter when she entered; there was no sign of Eddie or of any customers.

She received a reasonably warm welcome—the Dove effect, Isabel thought—and Cat offered to make her a cup of coffee. “Eddie’s gone to the dentist,” she said. “I asked him when he had last been and he said two years ago. I made the appointment myself.”

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

“You shouldn’t have to,” said Isabel. “One’s own teeth are enough to look after. One should not have to worry about the teeth of others.”

Cat smiled. “But we do, don’t we? I can imagine that you worry about others’ teeth. It’s exactly the sort of thing you worry about.”

“ ‘The loss of one tooth diminishes me,’ ” mused Isabel.

“ ‘For I am involved in mankind.’ ”

“John Donne,” said Cat, looking triumphant. “You think that I don’t know anything. But I do know about John Donne.”

“Well done. But I have never thought of you as one who knows nothing about Donne.”

“Good.”

They looked at one another for a moment and Isabel saw in Cat’s eyes a yearning that they should return to their previous, easy ways with each other; when jokes like this, absurd, silly, could be made without thinking. For there was love there—of course there was—and it was a canker of resentment that had obscured it, a canker that could so easily be put out of the way, altogether excised. But now she had to risk provoking it again, by deliberately rubbing in salt, and she had no alternative, she thought. She had to warn Cat about Dove. She had warned her before about a man; now she had to do it again.

She looked down at the counter. There was a fragment of cheese that had been caught at the edge, a tiny bit of blue cheese, a miniature colony of organisms detached from its polis. She reached forward and wiped it away. “Christopher Dove,” she said.

Cat smiled at her. “Christopher. Yes.”

Isabel was not sure what to make of that. But now she had to say it. She could not put it off. “You know he’s married?”

Cat stood quite still, her eyes fixed on Isabel, who looked away; she could not bear this. Oh Cat, she thought. Oh Cat.

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“Married?” Cat’s voice was small, and Isabel’s heart went out to her.

“Yes. There’s a Mrs. Dove, I’m afraid.”

Cat closed her eyes. “Why are you telling me this?”

Isabel reached out across the counter. She wanted to take Cat’s hand; if her voice could not show how she felt, her touch would. But Cat withdrew her arm.

“I’m telling you this because you ought to know it. You’d tell a friend, wouldn’t you? You’d tell her if you knew that some man—some married man—was going to deceive her.”

Cat opened her eyes again. “You think he’s deceiving me?”

It had not occurred to Isabel that Cat might know that Dove was married. She had assumed that Cat would not get involved with a married man, but that assumption she now realised—

and it was a sudden, shocking realisation—was perhaps unjustified. Cat belonged to a generation that did not feel particularly strongly about marriage, in that many of them did not bother about getting married, and so perhaps they did not regard married people as being off-limits. I have been so naïve, she thought; so naïve.

She struggled to find the words. “Well . . . I thought that . . .

I thought that you might have believed that he was single. It’s difficult sometimes if . . .”

Cat interrupted her. “It’s just fine for you,” she said. “You come here and tell me this . . . You’re not content with taking Jamie from me; now you come along and . . . and spoil this. Why can’t you just . . .”

Isabel couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Took Jamie from her? She drew in her breath; there was so much to be said, as there always is in the face of an outrageous accusation. “I did not take Jamie from you. You can’t say that. You got rid of Jamie.

You got rid of him. He wanted you to take him back for ages, 2 2 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h ages, and you wouldn’t hear of it. Then you stand there and tell me that I took him from you. ”

“No,” said Cat. “It wasn’t like that.”

Isabel reached out again, but Cat turned away. “Cat!”

“Just leave me. Please, just leave me.”

The door of the delicatessen opened. Isabel looked round and saw that it was Eddie. He came over to the counter and smiled at her. Then he started to address Cat, whose back was turned. “My teeth are fine,” he said. “The dentist didn’t have to do anything, except polish them. Look.”

He opened his mouth in a wide grin. Isabel made a gesture towards Cat. “I’m going,” she said. “Look after Cat, please.”

She left the delicatessen and began to walk down the street in the direction of Chamberlain Road. The brow of Church-hill rose gently in front of her, and at the end, beyond the rise, were the Pentlands, blue at this distance, with a mantle of low cloud. She had once read a poem somewhere, by an Irish poet she seemed to recall, which suggested that we could all be saved by keeping our eye on the hill at the end of the road. What he meant by being saved was not clear. We could not be saved, she thought, from anything just by looking at a hill; certainly not from the raw pain that came from divi-sions between people, between brother and brother, sister and sister, aunt and niece. Then it occurred to her: one might be saved from taking one’s petty concerns—and one’s petty feuds—too seriously if one looked up at the hills. That must have been it.

WA LT E R B U I E ’ S D O G , a Staffordshire terrier, mesomorphic, muscle-bound in the way of a small pugilist, growled at IsaT 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

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bel, baring stumpy, discoloured teeth. Such was his halitosis that even from where she stood, a good three feet from the unfriendly animal, she could smell him.

“Now then, Basil,” said Walter, reaching down to pull at the dog’s collar. “We must not be unfriendly.”

He pulled the dog away and it slunk off, with the air of a small-time thug whose plans for a fight have been defeated, but only temporarily.

“Such a nice dog,” said Isabel. “Staffordshires have such character.”

The compliment pleased Walter Buie, who beamed back at her. “How kind of you to say that. Some people find Basil a bit . . . a bit difficult to get to know. But he’s got a good heart, you know.”

Isabel raised an eyebrow involuntarily. “Every dog has something to offer,” she said. She was going to say something more, but could not.

“Exactly,” said Walter. “But look, do come in. I didn’t mean to keep you on the doorstep.”

They made their way into the drawing room.

“My mother,” said Walter. “I don’t believe you’ve met her.”

Isabel had not expected to find anybody else in the room and was momentarily taken aback. She recovered quickly, though, and moved over to the window where the elderly woman was standing. Walter’s mother had half turned round and extended a hand to Isabel. Taking it, Isabel felt the dry skin, the roughness. She looked at Mrs. Buie and saw the recessed eyes, the folds dotted with liver spots.

“I was going to make tea,” said the older woman. “Walter, let me do that. You stay and talk to . . .”

“Isabel.”

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“Of course.” The eyes were fixed on Isabel, but they were still. There was little light in them. “I knew your mother, you know. We played bridge now and then.”

Isabel caught her breath. Her mother; her sainted American mother.

“She was such an attractive woman,” said Mrs. Buie. “And amusing.”

Isabel thought: Yes, she was. So many people said that—

that she made people laugh.

“And your poor father,” Mrs. Buie added.

Isabel said nothing. She wondered what would follow. Did Mrs. Buie know about her mother’s affair—the affair that Isabel herself had found out about only when her cousin had revealed it to her, on being pressed to do so by Isabel herself? Perhaps she did, but it seemed strange that she would mention it on a first meeting, unless, of course, she had become disinhibited.