The Careful Use of Compliments

by Alexander McCall Smith

  And there the letter had ended, with Lettuce’s signature underneath and a pencilled postscript asking Isabel whether she had read the “wonderfully perceptive” obituary of the reviewer who had died before getting round to reviewing Virtues in a Time of Trial. “An excellent piece,” wrote Lettuce. “Did you know he was an accomplished violinist and a glider pilot in his earlier years?”

  Isabel’s emotions were complex. She was shocked by the unexpectedness of the news, by the sheer surprise of being told that what she had taken for granted, her job, was being taken from her. Then there was a sense of disgust at the obvious plotting that must have been going on. Dove—he was the one, she decided. It had occurred to her before this that Dove probably coveted her post as editor; he was ambitious and the editorship of an established journal would help him on his climb up the pole of academic success. He was currently at an obscure university, one so low in the pecking order that it appeared in no tables at all. She had been told by a friend who knew him that he really would like to be elsewhere altogether, at Magdalen College, Oxford, of which he was a graduate. That involved an ascent on an Alpine scale, and the editorship of the Review would help. He would have been in touch with other members and poured poison in their ears, dangling some sort of carrot perhaps, cajoling, and enough of them had been craven enough to go along with this. Not one, she thought, not one had contacted her to discuss the issue; that was almost the most difficult thing to bear.

  And as for Lettuce himself, he might have telephoned to break the news personally, he might even have bothered to travel to Edinburgh to discuss it with her. Instead, he had written this relatively impersonal letter—a document which amounted to a letter of dismissal. It had been made worse by the fact that he had appended a chatty postscript. That is a hallmark of guilt, she thought; he who feels acutely guilty attempts to establish that all is actually well by resorting to the quotidian remark that has nothing to do with the real business. That is exactly what Lettuce had done.

  Isabel let the letter drop to the floor. It fell facedown, but the ink from the signature had seeped through the cheap paper to provide faint mirror-writing on the back. Ecuttel. That was a far better name for him, far more sinister than Lettuce. Ecuttel and his lackey, Evod. The thought made her feel slightly better, but only slightly; engaging in such childish fantasies is merely a way of protecting ourselves from the sense of hurt that comes from betrayal or injustice. But it works only for a moment or two.

  GRACE WAS IN THE KITCHEN , sitting in front of Charlie, who was strapped into a reclining baby chair placed on top of the table. She was holding a knitted figure of what looked like a policeman and moving it up and down to get Charlie’s attention. She looked up when Isabel came into the room but then transferred her gaze back to the baby.

  “Fed up already?” Grace said. “Look at this. He loves this little policeman. I think it must be the dark blue. He thinks it very funny.”

  Isabel nodded. She looked at Charlie, and then looked back at Grace. She wanted to say to her, “I’ve been sacked. I’m the victim of…” But what was she the victim of? A palace coup was perhaps the best way of describing it. Or maybe she should call it a putsch, which had a more strongly pejorative air to it, a hint of violent overthrow. That was perhaps overstating matters a bit…

  “I’ve been—”

  Grace interrupted her. “I think he’s tired,” she said. “Look, his eyes are shutting. There he goes.”

  No, thought Isabel. I’m not going to tell her. I shall keep this humiliation private. Then, later this year, I shall simply announce that I have given up the editorship of the Review, which will be true, and if anybody should ask the reason I shall tell them. But until then I shall continue as before.

  Grace now turned to Isabel. “Sorry, you’ve been what?”

  “I’ve been thinking of going into town,” said Isabel. “If you’re happy enough looking after Charlie.”

  Grace reassured her that this would be fine.

  “Thank you,” said Isabel, and left the kitchen, lest Grace should see the tears that had come into her eyes. She had never been dismissed before and was unused to the particular form of pain it entailed. It was as bad as being left by a lover, or almost as bad, she thought, and in her case she did not even depend on the tiny salary she drew as editor, an honorarium really. What, she wondered, would it be like to lose the job that brought food to the family table, as happened to people all the time? That was a sobering thought, sufficient to forestall the self-pity of one in her position—and it did.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SHE WALKED INTO TOWN . Isabel very rarely took her green Swedish car into the city because of parking problems. She suspected, though, that she would use it more now that Charlie had arrived; babies required such a quantity of paraphernalia that the car, she thought, would become more and more tempting. She believed in public transport, and acted accordingly, but she was not one to become obsessed with the issue of her carbon footprints, or to lecture others on theirs. And the green Swedish car, she reminded herself, was green in another sense—unlike those intimidating machines which some people drove; those monsters with their tanklike bulk from which small, urban people stared down. Isabel had read of a man who had entered on a private crusade against these vehicles, attaching notes to their windscreens telling their owners just how irresponsible their choice of car was. She could understand that, even if she could never do it herself: it was one thing to think such things, another to tell other people what one thought.

  But concern for the environment was not the only reason she chose to go by foot that morning; she wanted to put her thoughts in order, and it would be easier to do that while walking, making her way across the Meadows, the large park that divided the Old Town of Edinburgh from its southern suburbs. She had taken that path so many times before, and in so many moods. She remembered once, after a concert in the Queen’s Hall, she had walked home fighting back tears and had been stopped by a young woman and asked if she was all right. Those tears had been for the impossibility of her relationship with Jamie, whom she had seen during the concert intermission with a young woman she had assumed to be his girlfriend. It had never occurred to her then that not all that long afterwards they would become lovers and she would have his son. She would not have believed it; would have considered it utterly impossible. And now…

  Nor would she have dreamed, she thought, that she would be walking across the Meadows, brooding with bitterness over her dismissal from the job to which she had devoted so much. This would not have occurred to her because she would never have imagined that anybody else would actually want to be the editor of the Review. Nor would she have imagined that anybody would have thought that she had done the job badly. She had not. She had made a success of it, and had taken very little for her efforts.

  Well, now it had happened and she wondered whether she should simply accept her dismissal as a fait accompli, or whether she should fight back. One thing she could do was write to Professor Lettuce, asking him to explain exactly why he thought a change of editor would be a good thing. Would Christopher Dove adopt a different editorial policy, and if so, how would that policy differ from her own? Of course he would find the words to deal with that by talking about something else and not answering her questions—he was very skilled at that—so perhaps it would simply be a waste of time.

  She reached the start of Jawbone Walk, at the entrance to which giant inverted whale jaws served as an arch. Many Scots had been whalers, and these bones had been presented to the city by Shetland and Fair Isle knitters who had used them in an exhibition in the nineteenth century. Isabel thought that knitting and whaling did not sit together well; she did not like this reminder of something that she would have preferred to forget—our relentless pursuit of those gentle creatures, almost to the point of extinction. But the city was full of uncomfortable reminders of how things in the past were otherwise than one might wish they had been: memorials to wars which should never have been foug
ht, statues of men who presided over so many remote cruelties—that was what came of having an imperial past. And Scotland had been an active participant in all that, supplying many of the soldiers, the engineers, and the officials who kept that vast imperial conceit going; nor did one have to look far to see the reminders. Old battles…

  I’ll fight back, she thought. I’ll write to the publishing company and tell them that I’m being unfairly dismissed. There are industrial tribunals, are there not, and these could order my reinstatement; but are they intended to protect people like me? Somehow I think not.

  By the time she reached the High Street and had begun her descent of the Mound, Isabel’s mood had changed and she had resolved that she would do nothing. If Christopher Dove wanted the editorship, then she would let him have it. She needed neither the money—pitiful though the salary was—nor the work itself. There were other, more rewarding things to do, she had decided, than to sit in her study and read the manuscripts of obscure philosophers at remote universities. There was Charlie to be looked after; there were friendships to be cultivated; there were trips to be made to places that she had long wanted to visit. She could take Charlie—small babies were easy to travel with, she had been told, by comparison with older children. She could make that long-awaited trip to her cousin Mimi McKnight in Dallas. It had been years since she had been to Texas, and when Mimi had come to Scotland the previous year she had pressed an invitation on her, as she always did.

  These thoughts occupied her all the way down the Mound and over the brow of George Street. Then, after a brisk walk down Queen Street, during which she thought of quite other matters, she found herself outside the auction rooms of Lyon & Turnbull. The rooms were busier than they had been the previous day, and now, on the final day of viewing, were crowded with those who had left it to the last minute. There would be more tomorrow—people who decided on the morning of the sale that they would go for something after all, who might just have stumbled across the catalogue and seen an item they wanted. Then there would be the impulse buyers, who decided to bid without even inspecting in advance the item under the hammer, and who would crane their necks to get a better view of the lot from over the heads of the seated bidders.

  The McInnes picture had been moved, and for a moment Isabel wondered whether it had been withdrawn. That sometimes happened; impulsive sellers had their regrets as much as impulsive buyers did. But then she saw it, in the more prominent place that had been found for it, alongside a large William Gillies landscape, a picture of lowland hills in the attenuated colours of late summer. Scotland was a country of just those shades, thought Isabel, looking at the Gillies; faded blues, patches of red and purple where the heather grew, the grey of scree on exposed hillsides.

  She looked at the McInnes and knew immediately that she had to bid for it. It might have been different if she had not owned the smaller painting, the inspiration, perhaps, for this one. But now this picture spoke to her directly and she would bid for it. She swallowed hard. Isabel was used to giving large sums of money away, but not to spending them on herself. Now she was going to spend a considerable sum which could do so much good elsewhere. Scottish Opera had written to her recently about money, and the Meningitis Research Trust, and the University of Edinburgh…There were so many good causes, and she was about to spend money on a painting.

  “Very interesting. Very nice.”

  She turned round sharply.

  “Guy!”

  The man standing behind Isabel bowed his head in greeting, a rather old-fashioned gesture, she thought, but exactly right. Guy Peploe ran the Scottish Gallery in Dundas Street together with Robin McClure, and Isabel knew them both. Both were the sons of painters, and Isabel had examples of both fathers’ work in the house.

  She smiled at Guy. He reminded her in a way of Jamie, of whom he could have been an older version; the same dark hair, kept short, the same strong features, the same good looks unconscious of themselves. And did he know? she wondered. Word had got round Edinburgh quickly enough about her pregnancy and Charlie, but there were still people who had not heard, who would be taken aback even if they did not disapprove.

  “I take it that you…that everybody’s well?” enquired Guy. And Isabel knew that he knew.

  “Charlie’s doing very well,” she said. “Getting bigger.”

  “That’s what happens,” said Guy. “My children did too.”

  “And…” He searched for a name. He had seen him, that young man of hers; what was his name?

  “Jamie is busy,” Isabel said. “And Charlie is making him busier.”

  That settled that, thought Isabel. It was understandable that people should speculate as to whether Jamie had stood by her, but it still caused her minor irritation that they should. Of course, that was one of the uses of marriage; it made it clear that the father intended to honour his commitments.

  She pointed at the painting. “Are you…?” She paused. It was always awkward in the saleroom when one encountered a friend looking at the same item. One would not want to bid against a friend, but at the same time one hoped that the friend would feel the same compunction.

  Guy shook his head. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re not going to go for this. Are you?”

  Isabel looked at the painting again. She wanted it.

  “I think so.”

  Guy paged through his catalogue. “The estimate is a bit low,” he said. “But it’s difficult to tell. His works don’t come up very often these days. In fact, I can’t remember when I last saw one in the sales. It must have been years ago. Shortly after he died.”

  He moved forward to examine the painting more closely. “Interesting. I think this is Jura, which is where he died. It’s rather poignant to think of him sitting there painting that bit of sea over there and not knowing that it was more or less where he was going to drown. It’s rather like painting one’s deathbed.”

  Isabel thought about this for a moment. How many of us knew the bed in which we would die, or even wanted to know? Did it help to have that sort of knowledge? She stared at the painting. In the past she had never worried about her own death—whenever it would be—but now, with Charlie to think about, she felt rather differently about it. She wanted to be there for Charlie; she wanted at least to see him grow up. That must be the hardest thing about having children much later in life—as happened sometimes when a man remarried at, say, sixty-five and fathered a child by a younger wife. He might make it to eighty-five and see his child grow to adulthood, but the odds were rather against it.

  “He was quite young when he died, wasn’t he?” she asked.

  “McInnes? Yes. Forty, forty-one, I think.”

  Just about what I am now, thought Isabel. More or less my age, and then it was over.

  “Why is it that it seems particularly tragic when an artist dies young?” Isabel mused. “Think of all those writers who went early. Wilfred Owen. Bruce Chatwin. Rupert Brooke. Byron. And musicians too. Look at Mozart.”

  “It’s because of what we all lose when that happens,” said Guy. “Owen could have written so much more. He’d just started. Brooke, too, I suppose, although I was never wild about him.”

  “He wrote for women,” said Isabel, firmly. “Women like poets who look like Brooke and who go and die on them. It breaks every female heart.” She paused. “But the biggest tragedy of all was Mozart. Think of what we didn’t get. All that beauty stopped in its tracks. Just like that. And the burial in the rain, wasn’t it? In a pauper’s grave?”

  Guy shrugged. “Everything comes to an end, Isabel. You. Me. The Roman Empire. But I’m sorry that McInnes didn’t get more time. I think that he might have developed into somebody really important. In the league of Cadell, perhaps. Everything was pointing that way. Until…well, until it all went wrong.”

  “And he drowned?”

  “No,” said Guy. “Before that. Just before that. Everything collapsed for him before he went up to that island for the last time, to Jura. I can tell
you, if you like.”

  Isabel was intrigued. “There’s a place round the corner,” she said. “We could have sandwiches. I’m hungry. It’s something to do with having a baby. One begins to need feeding at very particular times.”

  Guy smiled at the thought. “A good idea.” He leaned forward again and peered at the painting. “Odd,” he said. “Odd.”

  Isabel looked at him quizzically. “What’s odd?”

  “It’s unvarnished,” Guy said, straightening up. “I seem to remember that McInnes always varnished his paintings. He was obsessive about things like that—framing, varnishing, signatures, and so on. This isn’t varnished at all.”

  Isabel frowned. “Does that mean that it might not be—”

  Guy cut her short. “No, certainly not. This is a McInnes all right. But it’s just a bit odd that he didn’t varnish this one. Maybe it’s a very late painting and he died before he got it back for varnishing. Some painters sell their work before they varnish it, you know, and of course they can’t varnish it until the paint is dry. That might mean six months, or even more, depending on how thickly the paint is applied. So they sell it to somebody and suggest that they bring it back for varnishing later on. Sometimes people don’t bother.”

  “So that’s all?” said Isabel.

  “That’s all,” said Guy. “Nothing very significant. Just a bit odd.”

  JAMIE CAME to Isabel’s house most evenings, round about the time that Charlie was due to have his evening feed and bath. Isabel was pleased that he did this, although she found that he tended to take over, leaving her little, if anything, to do; and what with Grace assuming so much responsibility for him during the day, Isabel sometimes wondered whether she would end up playing no more than a marginal role in the care of her own child. But she was generous about this, and stood back while Jamie performed his fatherly tasks.