A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h of moral right did that give? Not a very convincing one, she felt.
But so much of life turned out that way—things were gained and then handed on; not just physical things but tastes, qualities, insights. Would Mozart have written what he did had it not been for Leopold Mozart, who had placed his tiny son on the piano stool? Presumably not; the genius, the particular capacities of the brain might have been there but could well have remained locked away, had there been no musical father to bring them out. And Mr. Getty, a rich man—and a very generous one too—had received his oil fields from Mr. Getty before him; he might never have found oil by himself. She smiled at the thought; of course he might not have looked for oil—it does not occur to everybody to go looking for oil.
Her train of thought was interrupted by a noise from within the house. Grace was not there that morning—she had a dental appointment and Isabel had told her not to bother coming in. That was more than just concern for Grace’s welfare on Isabel’s part; Grace was undergoing root canal treatment on a tooth, and Isabel knew from experience how miserable this made her feel. Grace did not like dental anaesthetics, and preferred to endure the pain rather than to experience the lingering numbness that went with the local anaesthetic, a bizarre preference, in Isabel’s view, but one which was firmly held. Isabel thought that this might be understandable, just, when it came to minor treatment, but root canal treatment, with its deliberate engagement with the nerve, could be an exquisite agony.
She had found out that Grace loved to give a blow-by-blow account of her visits to the dentist and she did not feel in the mood to listen to a long story about root canals punctuated by the sort of grumpi-ness that Grace could, on occasion, muster. By tomorrow the memory of the pain might be less vivid, and Grace’s mood might be restored.
So Isabel was now in sole charge of Charlie, and the sound T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S
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from within the house was of Charlie waking up and crying. She put the papers on the philosophy of taxation to one side and went through to the room at the back of the house where Charlie had his afternoon naps. He stopped crying when he saw her and looked up with that strange expression of astonishment that makes parents feel that their child has forgotten them entirely and is seeing them now for the first time.
She picked him up and cuddled him. He felt warm, his skin slightly damp. He started to niggle again.
“You’re hungry, aren’t you?” she asked. And answered on his behalf, “Of course. Of course. Feeding time.”
He took his formula hungrily, sucking strongly at the bottle.
Then she winded him, holding him over her shoulder, patting his back gently. This usually comforted him and brought up the wind in an audible burp, but today he seemed to resist her min-istrations, squirming in her hold, as if wanting to escape.
“Not right?” she muttered. “You’re not feeling right?”
Charlie answered with a wail, screwing up his features into an expression of minor rage, his face colouring from the exer-tion. He did not need changing, and Isabel felt a momentary twinge of alarm. She knew that she should not imagine things, that the flushed expression was not normally a sign of meningi-tis, that diarrhoea was not typhoid, but all parents had their anxieties and would think just that, even if only until reassured by somebody else. It’s normal, she thought. He’s been feeling a little hot—and that room was a bit warm when I went in—so he’s registering his displeasure. All quite normal.
She took Charlie through to the kitchen. He liked it there, picking up, she thought, the bright colours—the red of the Aga stove, the glowing yellows of a large print of flowers framed above the refrigerator, the chequered blues of the tea towels; but now he continued to whine, ignoring the distractions of colour.
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h
“Come on, Charlie,” she said. “It’s not all that bad! Surely not.”
But it was, and he began to cry again, at full lung. Once again she put him over her shoulder and patted his back, hoping to dislodge the wind that she suspected was causing his discomfort. This appeared only to add to his unhappiness and she stopped. Gripe water.
She laid Charlie down on the floor of the small playpen that she kept in the corner of the kitchen. He protested, screaming at the outrage, and was unconsoled by Isabel’s placatory cooing.
Then she went upstairs, momentarily leaving Charlie to his anger, and opened the door of the bathroom cabinet.
The bottle of cough syrup was there, as was the tin of sticking plasters, the aspirin, and the thermometer, but there was no gripe water. Isabel was puzzled. She had put it there, behind the cough syrup; she was sure of that. But it was definitely not there, which meant that Grace had discovered it and moved it.
Isabel felt angry. Grace must have searched for the gripe water and taken it upon herself to move it. She had no right to do that, she thought, no right. This was her cabinet, not Grace’s, and she and she alone would decide what it contained.
She went downstairs. Charlie was still protesting, his wail drifting up from the kitchen. “I’m coming, Charlie,” she called out as she made her way down the stairs. “I’m coming.”
The sound of her voice seemed to calm Charlie, and he fell silent. Or had he choked? Isabel asked herself, and began to run, taking the steps two at a time. He had not, and when she reached the kitchen he started crying again, waving his arms in impotent fury, his face flushed red with the force of his tears.
He calmed down a bit when she picked him up but was still obviously uncomfortable.
“What’s wrong, my darling? What’s wrong?”
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Charlie seemed to listen to her, paused briefly, and then continued with his sobbing. There was so much wrong, he seemed to be saying; and it is all your fault, all of it.
Isabel decided that what was needed was a dose of infant aspirin. She had a bottle of the suspension in one of the kitchen cupboards, where Charlie’s formula and spare bottles were kept, and she cradled the baby gently as she opened the door with her free hand. There, beside the bottles, was the gripe water, with its characteristic old-fashioned label. Isabel smiled grimly. So it was Grace’s doing after all, just as she had suspected; she had been right.
She reached for the bottle of aspirin suspension and then stopped and took out the bottle of gripe water instead. Twisting off the cap, she sniffed at the colourless, slightly viscous liquid within; it had a sweet smell, exaggeratedly floral, like an overstated, cheap perfume. It was not unpleasant, she decided, and on impulse she held the open bottle under Charlie’s nose.
The effect was immediate and dramatic, as if she had applied smelling salts of the sort resorted to by Victorian ladies for their swooning. The crying stopped immediately, and Charlie made an inept attempt to seize the bottle.
Isabel extracted a teaspoon from a kitchen drawer and set it down on a surface at the side of the sink. It was difficult to pour the gripe water using only one hand—Charlie was still cradled in the other—and she spilled a bit of the liquid in the process.
But she succeeded by dint of a steady hand, then picked up the spoon without spilling any more and manoeuvred it into Charlie’s mouth. His expression of contentment was immediate; the crying stopped.
“Darling addict,” she whispered.
She looked again at the bottle. The contents were listed.
Common herbs, she read: ginger, fennel, and dill, all of which one 9 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h might see on the open shelves of a supermarket. She searched for the offending word, sugar, but she did not see it. Nor did she see any reference to alcohol. It was perfectly harmless.
Charlie settled, and after some time in the garden with Isabel, he dropped off to sleep again. Isabel put him in his cradle and returned to her study to deal with the rest of the morning�
�s mail. She had been distracted by the arrival of the papers on the philosophy of taxation, and then by Charlie, and so she had not seen the letter from Professor Christopher Dove. Now she opened it, knowing immediately from the printed letterhead within that it had come from him. You write to me, Dove, she thought. Not content with displacing me, you write to me .
She sat down to read the letter.
Dear Ms. Dalhousie [I have a doctorate, Dove, not that I use the title, but you might at least have shown the courtesy],
I believe that you may have heard from Professor Lettuce about changes that have been proposed at the Review. [You proposed them, Dove.] I have been asked by the board to assume the editorship, and although I am hesitant to take over a post which has been so admirably filled by another [Pass the gripe water!], I have nonetheless indicated that I am prepared to do this.
I am aware of the fact that we have a number of special issues planned, including one on the philosophy of taxation. I would not like to interfere prematurely, but I am a bit doubtful about the value of our doing too many of these, especially in areas as specialised as the philosophy of taxation. My own view is that we should not lose sight of the fact [ In other words, I think, muttered Isabel] that we are primarily a generalist journal.
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There are, as you know, numerous more specialised journals, including several that deal with business ethics, and I think that the philosophy of taxation would be more appropriately covered by them, rather than by us.
[Come to the point, Dove.] For this reason, I think we should revisit our plans for that issue.
I think that this is just one of the matters which would be much better discussed in a meeting between the two of us. I believe that you now have a baby—
Congratulations!—and therefore it would be easier for me to come to Edinburgh than for you to come to London. If you would let me know what dates you are free, I shall come up for a meeting. We can then sort out the details of the handover, and I can look at the editorial archive. We will need to make arrangements for that to be sent down at some stage. I have quite a bit of stor-age space in my department—we do have empty cupboards, believe it or not, not that I advertise the fact, in case the university authorities convert them into offices (for junior academics!). [That was a joke.]
The letter ended with a few additional pleasantries. After she had finished reading it, Isabel stared at it for a moment and then rolled it up into a ball and tossed it towards her wastepaper basket. She had not expected it to go in, but it did just that, like a skilfully placed basketball. But then, almost immediately, she felt guilty and walked over to the bin, retrieved the ball of paper, and uncrumpled it. I shall not descend to the level of Dove, she said to herself. I shall not.
She sat down at her desk and took out a fresh piece of writing paper.
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Dear Professor Dove,
It was good to hear from you. Of course I shall be happy to see you in Edinburgh, and here is a list of dates on which I am free and on which we could certainly have a meeting. I must warn you that the editorial archives are quite large and need considerable space to be stored.
She paused and looked out the window. Should she? She resumed her writing.
And perhaps I should also warn you that I do not consider these archives to be anybody’s property but my own.
She read over what she had written. What she had said about the ownership of the archive was probably wrong. Some of it belonged to her—the letters written to her as editor were often of a personal nature and the copies of the letters which she had written, on paper which she had provided—those, she thought, were surely hers. But it was a warning shot, which she felt was worth firing.
She signed the letter, slipped it into an envelope, and stuck a stamp on the top right-hand corner. The stamp was simple in its design, almost stark, and bore, as always, the monarch’s head. To what correspondence, she thought, has Your Majesty been made an unwilling party, with your head, and all its gentle authority, attached to all sorts of unhappy and shameful letters—letters of rejection, threatening letters, letters from lawyers, anonymous letters . . . She stopped the list there. Her letter was to the point and dignified, the sort of letter which the Queen herself would undoubtedly write to a prime minister T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S
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attempting to usurp her authority. No, the letter needed no further justification: it would be posted, received by Dove himself in his obscure headquarters, and, she hoped, duly digested.
Be very careful, Dove, she thought. You may take one step too far. Be very careful when you come to Edinburgh.
She stood up and crossed to the window. She looked outside, at the large rhododendron bush, which was quite still; there were no birds, or so it seemed, no fox lurking below. What if Dove came to Edinburgh and something happened to him?
What then?
Within each of us, she thought, there is evil. It lurks in the deep recesses of the mind, those depths in which the atavistic clutter of our distant past still lodges. We should not delude ourselves that it is not there; it is there, but it is covered, thank heavens, by the veneer of civilisation, of morality. First came the early I, red in tooth and claw, then came Mozart, David Hume, Auden.
With a shock she remembered something—something that she did not like to think about. Auden had once almost killed somebody; had put his hands around the neck of his lover and had been on the point of strangling him, driven to this shocking extreme by jealousy. And then he had written about it, had confessed that he had almost become a murderer. If that could happen to him, to that great, humane intelligence, then how easily could it happen to the rest of us, who are weak, and subject to all the passions of our weakness.
No, Professor Dove; you are in no danger from me. By the time you arrive in Edinburgh I shall have mastered my anger. I shall love you, Professor Dove, as I am commanded to do. Or that is what I hope, most fervently hope.
C H A P T E R E I G H T
E
DON’T TALK TO ME about it,” said Grace the next morning.
“Just don’t talk to me about it!”
Isabel was on the point of agreeing. She did not wish to discuss dentists and would be quite happy not to go into the details of Grace’s dental trauma of the previous day. But then she realised that although Grace said that she did not want to discuss the matter, that is exactly what she intended to do.
“Yes,” said Grace, removing the headscarf she had worn on the journey to work. “The least said about yesterday the better.”
Isabel looked up from The Scotsman crossword. She had been constructing her own clue. Three words: four, five, and nine letters. A plant’s base beside a waterway precedes intervention. Root canal treatment.
“Uncomfortable?”
“Extremely,” said Grace. “He tried to persuade me to have one of those injections, but I said no. He told me that it would be very painful, but I stuck to my guns. I can’t stand that stuff, that . . .”
“Novocaine,” said Isabel. How might one express that in a crossword? Sounds like a new rod with which to beat another until numb? Not a very good clue, but it would have to do.
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“Yes, that stuff,” said Grace. “I can’t bear it, you know. That awful feeling of being all puffed up, as if somebody had just hit you in the jaw. No thank you!”
“But if you don’t—”
Grace cut Isabel off. “I can take pain. I’ve never been one to dodge that. But this was really, really sore. He had to guddle about inside the tooth and it felt as if somebody was putting an electric wire down there. It was terrible.”
They were both silent for a moment, Grace remembering the pain, Isabel thinking about how much pain there was, that life itself floated in a vast sea of pain, numbed here and the
re for brief moments, but coming back in great waves.
“You see what he had to do,” Grace went on, “was to take out the nerve from the root of the tooth. Can you imagine that?
I kept thinking of it as a long piece of elastic being dragged out of me. Do you remember knicker elastic? Like that.”
“I don’t think nerves are like that,” said Isabel. “I don’t think that you can actually see them. They don’t look like elastic, or wires for that matter.”
Grace stared at her. “Well, what do they look like?” she asked.
“I think they must be tissue of some sort,” said Isabel. “A bit like . . .”
She shrugged. She had never seen a nerve.
“Well, whatever it looked like,” said Grace, “I felt it all right. But now . . . nothing! I can chew on that side and I feel nothing.”
“They are a very great boon to mankind, dentists,” said Isabel. “And I’m not sure that we are grateful enough to them.
I’m not sure that we even bother to thank them.” She paused.
Were there any statues of dentists? She thought not. And yet there should be. We had so many statues of generals and politi-9 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h cians and the like, who made wars and took life, and none of dentists, who battled pain. It was all wrong.
And yet, would anybody be able to take a statue of a dentist seriously? What if one were to go into some small town somewhere and find a bronze equestrian statue of a great dentist?
Would one be able to do anything but laugh? Of course there was St. Apollonia, the patron saint of toothache, and she had read somewhere that the British Dental Association had a small statue of her in their headquarters.
“Why are you smiling?” asked Grace.
“Just thinking of something odd. It suddenly occurred to me that there are no statues of dentists—anywhere in Scotland, as far as I know. Maybe they have them elsewhere—I don’t know.
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