The Careful Use of Compliments id-4

by Alexander McCall Smith

  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.

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  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.