The Careful Use of Compliments id-4

by Alexander McCall Smith

  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.”

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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 asl
eep, 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

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  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.