The Careful Use of Compliments id-4

by Alexander McCall Smith

  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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  “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 . . .”

&
nbsp; “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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  “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.

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  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.