The Careful Use of Compliments

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “I like coming here,” said Jamie, as they sat down at their table. “When I was a boy, I used to be brought here to see the pictures of the kings and queens of Scotland. I was interested in seeing Macbeth, but of course we haven’t a clue what he looked like.”

  “A much maligned king,” said Isabel as she loosened Charlie’s sling. “Shakespeare cast him as a weak man, a murderer, but in fact he had quite a successful reign. Scotland prospered under Macbeth.”

  “She was the problem,” said Jamie.

  Isabel doubted this. It was only too easy to blame women, she thought, although she had to admit, if pressed, that there were some women who deserved any blame that came their way. Mrs. Ceausescu was such a case, as she pointed out.

  “She was shot, wasn’t she?” said Jamie.

  “I’m afraid so,” said Isabel. “And nobody deserves that. Not even the most appalling tyrant, or tyrant’s wife. She pleaded for her life, we are told, as did her husband, in his long winter coat, standing there in front of those young soldiers. He said that they should not shoot his wife, as she was a great scientist. At least he tried to do something gentlemanly at the very end.”

  They were silent for a moment; Romania and firing squads seemed a world away from the atmosphere of the Portrait Gallery. Jamie looked at Charlie. The cruelties of the world, its viciousness, seemed so dissonant with the innocence of the child. He returned to kings.

  “George IV,” he said. “That was another favourite picture of mine. Ever since I heard that the artist who painted the picture of his arrival in Edinburgh showed him in his kilt but without the pink tights that apparently he wore when he arrived in Scotland.”

  Isabel laughed. “That sounds almost as bad as those Soviet portraits. I saw one in the State Gallery in Moscow years ago. It was a collective portrait of the politburo or some such group. The ones who had been discredited or executed were simply painted out and replaced with large flower arrangements. But the contours of the paint showed that something had been done. Such a bad sign—the appearance of flowers in official portraits.”

  Jamie looked at her quizzically. He was not quite sure how to take remarks like that from Isabel. It was, he said, her Dorothy Parker streak. “But I’d never take a streak from another woman,” Isabel had protested.

  “There you go,” said Jamie.

  But now there was this odd remark about flowers. “Why flowers?” he asked.

  “Well,” said Isabel, “look at political broadcasts by presidents and prime ministers. The shaky ones, those one thinks are lying, or at least being economical with the truth—they bedeck the tables behind them with large floral arrangements. I take that as a sure sign that there’s something fishy going on. Flags and flowers. They’re stage props. And soldiers. Being seen talking to the troops is very good for votes.”

  The waitress arrived and they gave their order. Jamie reached across the table and touched Charlie’s arm.

  “So small,” he said. “Like a little doll.”

  Isabel smiled and let her hand touch Jamie’s. He curled his fingers round hers, briefly.

  “Thank you,” she said quietly.

  “Thank you for what?”

  “For not going away.”

  He gave a start. “Why should I go away?”

  She nodded in the direction of Charlie. “Not every man stays,” she said. “You might easily have preferred…preferred your freedom.”

  He stared at her. Had she misjudged him that badly? He felt an irritation, a crossness, that she should think that of him. And Isabel, watching him, immediately sensed that.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve offended you. I didn’t mean to. It’s just that…well, you’re younger than I am. You need your freedom. You don’t need to be tied down.”

  Jamie swallowed. He looked about him briefly; the restaurant was busy, as it always was at lunchtime, but in the general hubbub it did not look as if anybody might overhear their conversation. “Of course I wouldn’t make myself scarce,” he said. “I told you that—right at the beginning. I told you when Charlie arrived. I was there, wasn’t I?”

  “Of course you were,” said Isabel soothingly. “Please don’t be angry with me. Please.” And she thought, I’m making a mess of this. It’s exactly the same as my relationship with Cat. I make a mess of things by saying things that I don’t need to say.

  Jamie was staring at the table, tracing on its surface an imaginary pattern with a forefinger. He looked up, and Isabel saw that he was flushed. “Jamie,” she said. “Please…”

  He shook his head. “No. I want to say something. I should have said it before. Now I’m going to say it.”

  She held her breath. I shouldn’t have imagined that this would last, she thought; now I’ll find out what I always feared. To have had him, now to lose him; it was inevitable.

  “Isabel,” he said. “I’d like you to marry me.” He paused. “I think we should get married.”

  For a moment she thought that she had misheard him. But then he repeated it. She was surprised, but not surprised. She had wondered whether he might say this, ever since she announced to him that she was pregnant. She had been unable to stop herself from entertaining the possibility, and had considered, at length, what her response would be. And now that the moment had come, she found herself hesitating. What if she said yes right there and then?

  Instead she said, “It’s a rather public proposal, isn’t it, Jamie?” She gestured about her.

  Jamie blushed. “I’m sorry. But it’s just that you brought up the whole issue of my being around. I felt that I had to say something.”

  She reassured him. “Yes, I understand.”

  “And?”

  “I know you feel you have to ask me,” she said. “But I think we should wait. I really do. Let’s wait some time and see how things go. That makes more sense, you know.”

  He did not say anything for a minute or two, and she imagined that he was wrestling with himself. If he really wanted to marry her, she thought, he would press her again. But if he had merely proposed out of a sense of duty, then he would probably accept her suggestion with some relief.

  “All right,” he said at last. “Let’s see.”

  She realised how tense she had been; now she relaxed. But she felt a certain sadness that he had gone along with her suggestion, even though she knew that this was the right thing to do, and that quite the wrong thing for her to do would be to allow him to marry her. And that, in a way, was the burden of being a philosopher: one knew what one had to do, but it was so often the opposite of what one really wanted to do.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BY THE TIME Grace arrived at the house the next morning, Isabel had bathed Charlie, given him his breakfast bottle, and was standing in front of the drawing-room window, encouraging him to look out over the garden. She was not sure how much he saw, but she was convinced that he was interested and was gazing fixedly at one of the rhododendrons. As she held Charlie before the window and rocked him gently, Isabel saw Grace walking up the front path, although Grace did not spot her. Grace had a newspaper tucked under her arm and was carrying the white canvas tote bag that accompanied her to work each day. This bag was often empty, and hung flaccid from Grace’s arm, but on occasion it bulged with tantalizing shapes that intrigued Isabel and that she wished she could ask Grace about. She knew, though, that there was usually at least a book in the bag, as Grace was a keen reader and had a sacrosanct lunch hour during which she would sit in the kitchen, immersed in a novel from the Central Library, a cup of tea getting steadily colder in front of her.

  Since Charlie’s arrival, the nature of Grace’s job had changed. This change had required no negotiation, with Grace assuming that Isabel would need help with the baby and that naturally this would take priority over her normal, more mundane duties of cleaning and ironing.

  “I’ll look after him while you’re working,” Grace had announced. “And also when you want to go out. I like babies. So that’s fine.”
The tone of her voice indicated that there needed to be no further discussion.

  Isabel was happy with the new understanding, but even had she not been, she would have hesitated to contradict Grace. Although Isabel was nominally Grace’s employer, Grace regarded herself as still working for Isabel’s father, who had died years before and in whose service as housekeeper she had spent all her working life. Either that, or she thought of herself as being employed in some strange way by the house itself; which meant that her loyalty, and source of instructions, was really some authority separate from and higher than Isabel.

  The practical consequences of this were that Grace occasionally announced that something would be done because “that’s what the house needs.” Isabel thought this a curious expression, which made her home sound rather like a casino or an old-fashioned merchant bank—in both of which one might hear the staff talking about the house. But for all its peculiarity, the arrangement worked very well and indeed was welcomed by Isabel as a means of putting the relationship between herself and Grace on a more equal, and therefore easier, footing. Isabel did not like the idea of being an employer, with all that this entailed in terms of authority and power. If Grace regarded herself as being employed by some vague metaphysical body known as the house, then that at least enabled Isabel to treat her as a mixture of friend and colleague, which is precisely how she viewed her anyway.

  Of course the circumstances in which the two women found themselves were different, and no amount of linguistic sleight of hand could conceal that. Isabel had enjoyed every advantage in education and upbringing; there had been money, travel, and, ultimately, freedom from the constraints of an office job or its equivalents. Grace, by contrast, had come from a home in which there had been no spare money, little free time, and, in the background, the knowledge that unemployment might at any time remove whatever small measure of prosperity people might have attained.

  Grace went into the kitchen, put the tote bag down on a chair, and made her way into the morning room.

  “I’m here,” Isabel called out. “In the study.”

  Grace entered the room and beamed at Charlie. “He’s looking very bright and breezy,” she said, coming up to tickle Charlie under the chin. Charlie grinned and waved his arms in the air.

  “I think he wants to go to you,” said Isabel.

  Grace took Charlie in her arms. “Of course he does,” she said.

  It was not the words themselves, Isabel realised—it was more the inflection. Did Grace mean that it was no surprise that Charlie should want to go to her rather than stay with his mother? That was how it sounded, even if Grace had not meant it that way.

  “He actually quite likes me too,” said Isabel softly.

  Grace looked at her in astonishment. “But of course he does,” she said. “You’re his mother. All boys like their mothers.”

  “No,” said Isabel. “I don’t think they do. Some mothers suffocate their sons, emotionally. They don’t mean to, but it happens.” She looked out of the window. She had seen it in her family, in a cousin whose ambitious mother had nagged him until he had cut himself free and had as little as possible to do with her. He had been civil, of course, but everybody had seen it—the stiff posture, the formal politeness, the looking away when she spoke to him. But had he loved her, in spite of this? She remembered him at his mother’s funeral when he had wept, quietly but voluminously, and Isabel, sitting in the row behind him, had put her hand on his shoulder and whispered to him in comfort. We leave it too late, she had thought; we always do, and then these salutary lessons are learned at the graveside.

  “Mothers always mean well,” said Grace. “As long as they don’t try to choose their son’s wife. That’s a mistake.”

  Charlie looked up at Grace and smiled. I have enough, thought Isabel; I have so much that surely I can share him.

  Grace turned towards Isabel. Her face, Isabel noticed, seemed transformed by the close presence of the baby, her look at that moment one of near pride. “Do you want to work this morning?” she said, looking in the direction of Isabel’s overcrowded desk. “There’s not much to do in the house. I could look after Charlie.”

  Isabel felt a wrench. Part of her wanted to answer that she would decide for herself, in good time, whether she wanted to work or whether she wished simply to be with Charlie; but another part of her, the responsible part, felt she should deal with the pile of correspondence that she had started to tackle the previous day but that she had abandoned in favour of the auctioneer’s catalogue. There were two horses in the soul, she thought, as Socrates had said in Phaedrus—the one, unruly, governed by passions, pulling in the direction of self-indulgence; the other, restrained, dutiful, governed by a sense of shame. And Auden had felt the same, she thought; he was a dualist who knew the struggle between the dark and the light sides of the self, the struggle that all of us know to a greater or lesser extent.

  She sighed. “Work,” she said. She had never sighed over the prospect of work before; but now there was Charlie.

  As Grace took Charlie from the room, Isabel sat down at her pile of mail. It had grown that morning by five letters, pushed through the letter box by the postman on his morning round, all of them concerned with Review affairs. She disposed of the top two quickly. One was a request for a further supply of offprints of her article by an author who had lost her carefully husbanded supply which the Review gave on publication. The offprints had been mislaid in the course of a move following the breakup of a relationship. Isabel had stumbled over this. Why was it necessary for her to be told that the move had been prompted by this? Was it an attempt to engage her sympathy so that the offprints would be given free, or was it an excuse for the loss itself—a life thrown into disarray by the bad behaviour of another? Isabel looked up at the ceiling and pondered this; if one was to err, then it was better to err on the side of generosity. The offprints would be free, and she wrote a note to that effect. The second letter asked why a book review of Virtues in a Time of Trial had not yet appeared; that, too, was easily dealt with. The reviewer had died, of old age as it happened, before writing the review. A new reviewer had been approached and the review would appear in due course.

  Ten minutes: that was all it took to read and reply to these letters. At this rate, Isabel thought, she would be finished in an hour, possibly even earlier. But then came an innocent-looking envelope, addressed in handwriting, and postmarked London.

  She slit open the envelope and began to read the letter. The letterhead, once exposed, told her who the sender was—the oddly named Professor Lettuce, professor of moral philosophy at one of the smaller universities in London, and chairman of the Review’s editorial board. In general, Robert Lettuce played a small role in the affairs of the Review, being content to allow Isabel to run everything. She reported to him and the board from time to time and he, in due course, reported to the Review’s owners, a small academic publishing firm. This firm published textbooks in veterinary science and biology; the Review of Applied Ethics came into its possession almost by accident when it bought the building occupied by the private trust that owned the Review. In the trustees’ relief at selling a building that had been a drain on finances, the Review had been thrown into the sale as a gesture of goodwill. The new owners were lukewarm about their ownership and had occasionally mentioned their willingness to sell the Review, should a suitable purchaser be found. But no purchaser had ever expressed more than a passing interest in a concern that made very little profit, if any at all. So there had been no change in ownership.

  She read halfway through the letter, put it down for a few moments, and then picked it up to read the remainder.

  Dear Isabel,

  As you know, I’ve enjoyed working with you over the last five years. [He’s going to resign, she thought as she read this.] We have had very few disagreements, and I must say that I have always been very impressed with your editing of the Review. Under your editorship, the circulation has increased considerably—some woul
d say dramatically—and the journal has been redesigned. Remember how awfully dull it looked when we first started, with that curious mauve cover? [Actually, thought Isabel, you were against the change. I had to persuade you; you liked mauve, as I recall.] And I have always appreciated the single theme idea, which was your brainchild and which has been, in my view, a great success.

  But, Isabel, as I am sure that you appreciate, there is always a case for change, as well as for variety, and at the prompting of a couple of members of the board I carried out a sounding of the others to see whether people felt that it was time for a fresh incumbent of the editorial chair. I did not imagine that there would be much support for this, but unfortunately I was proved to be quite wrong on this. The view, I’m afraid, was pretty much unanimous: it’s time for a change.

  I know that you will be both surprised and upset by this: both of these reactions were mine too. But I know, too, that you will understand that in voting for a change the members of the board are in no sense passing adverse judgement on your considerable achievements at the helm of the Review.

  There was some enthusiasm for an immediate change of editor, but I took the view that the best thing to do would be for you to remain in the post for the rest of the year (if you are willing) and then we can start the next calendar year with the new person. That will give you time to look for something else, and also will provide continuity, which is so important.

  As to your successor, Christopher Dove has offered his services and this choice is broadly acceptable to the rest of the board. No doubt you and he will be able to get together at some point to discuss the technicalities of the changeover.