The Careful Use of Compliments

by Alexander McCall Smith

  She finished the paper and wrote what she thought would be a quick note to the author.

  I shall pass your article on to the editorial board for a verdict. I am about to give up the editorship of this journal, and so you will probably be dealing, in due course, with the new editor, who will be Christopher Dove, whom you may know. I am sure that he will be very sympathetic to the argument that you put forward in this paper, as he has often expressed views similar to your own. I think he believes them, but, and forgive me if I am wrong, I get the feeling that your heart is not behind the arguments you present. Not your heart. You see, there are occasions when a theoretically defensible position, based, say, on an argument of individual rights and equality, goes completely against what we see about us in the world. And what we see about us in the world is that the conventional family, where there is a loving mother and a loving father, provides by far the best environment for the raising of children. That’s the way it has been for thousands of years. And should we not perhaps take into account what the wisdom of thousands of years teaches us? Or are we so clever that we can ignore it? That is not to say that there are all sorts of other homes in which children may grow up very secure and very happy. Very loved too. But the recognition of that should not lead us to condemn and thereby weaken the conventional family ideal, which is what you do here. Do you really mean that? Do you really think that we would be happier if we abandoned the conventional family? I’m sorry, but I don’t think that you do; you’re just saying that you do because it’s the position to take.

  She read what she had written, and then read it again. Did she herself believe this? What was she providing for Charlie? What did she want to provide for Charlie? She reached for her pen and crossed out the final sentence. But that made the letter useless; crossed-out words are still words. So she crumpled the letter up and tossed it into the bin. Then she reached for another sheet of letterhead and wrote: “Thank you. Interesting article. I’ll pass it on to the editorial board. You’ll hear from the new editor. I.D. ed.”

  Coward, she said to herself as she rose from her desk. Just like him.

  ISABEL TOOK THE BUS from Bruntsfield. Charlie slept contentedly in his sling; he had been fed and had shown no signs of colic or any other discomfort. Isabel had found the bottle of gripe water which had been purchased by Grace. She had moved the bottle to the bathroom cupboard; Grace might find it there if she looked, but Isabel’s act of reshelving it at least made her point. In fact, she thought Grace had picked up on her irritation at her taking Charlie over—that morning she had very pointedly asked Isabel if she minded if she took Charlie out into the garden to walk him round the flowers; previously she had done that without asking.

  Charlie slept through the bus journey and was still fast asleep when they entered the Scottish Gallery. Guy Peploe and Robin McClure were in consultation with a client when Isabel went in, but Guy detached himself from the group and came over to greet her.

  “It’s downstairs,” he said. “Come with me.” He reached forward and tickled Charlie under the chin. “My own are growing up so quickly. One forgets one used to carry them all the time.”

  “Did you use gripe water?” asked Isabel.

  Guy thought for a moment. “I think so,” he said. “Doesn’t everybody? It tastes rather nice, if I remember correctly. Very sweet.”

  Isabel smiled. “It used to contain gin.”

  “Mother’s ruin.”

  They made their way downstairs. The lower floor housed three rooms, one given over to jewellery and glass and the other used for overflow exhibitions from the main gallery above. When they went into the back room, Isabel saw the painting immediately. It was propped up against a wall, directly below a small Blackadder watercolour of a bunch of purple irises.

  “That’s it,” said Guy. “It’s a stunner, isn’t it?”

  Isabel agreed. The painting was not quite as large as the one in the auction sale, but it was clearly the finer picture, she felt, and Guy, she could tell, agreed.

  “It’s—” she began.

  “Even better,” he said. “Yes, it is.”

  She moved forward to look more closely at the painting. It was a picture of a boy in a small rowboat, on the edge of a shore. It was clearly Scotland—and somewhere familiar in Scotland, she thought; behind the shore there were buildings of the sort that one sees in the Western Highlands, or on the islands, low, white-painted houses. And then a hillside rising up into low clouds.

  “You can almost smell it,” she said. “The peat smoke, the kelp…”

  “And the whisky,” said Guy, pointing to a small cluster of buildings portrayed on the left of the painting. “This is Jura, you know, as the other painting was. And those are some of the distillery buildings. See them? And there are some of the kegs outside.”

  Isabel bent down again and peered at the passage that Guy had indicated. Yes, it was Jura, and that was why it seemed familiar. She had been there on a number of occasions to stay with friends at Ardlussa. That was towards the north of the island; this was to the south, near Craighouse, where the island’s only whisky distillery was.

  She stood back from the painting. “What makes this so special?” she asked.

  Guy stared at the painting. “Everything,” he said after a while. “Everything comes together in it. And it captures the spirit of the place, doesn’t it? I’ve been on Jura only once, but you know what those west coast islands are like. That light. That peaceful feeling. There’s nowhere like them.” He paused. “Not that one wants to romanticise…”

  Isabel agreed. “And yet, and yet…We do live in a rather romantic country, don’t we? For us, it’s just home, but it’s very dramatic, isn’t it? Rather like living on an opera set.”

  They both stood and gazed at the painting for a while. Then Isabel shook her head. “I don’t know, Guy. Or maybe I do. Maybe not.” He was putting her under no pressure to buy the painting, but she felt that she should explain to him. “It’s just that the other painting had that particular significance for me. I hope you understand.”

  Guy reassured her. The other prospective purchaser would almost certainly take the painting. It would leave Scotland, of course, but it was a good thing to share…“But again it’s odd,” he finished. “And getting a little bit odder.”

  Isabel frowned. “This one isn’t varnished either?” She bent down again and peered at the painting at close quarters. Charlie, feeling himself being tilted, let out a little murmur, something that sounded like a mew.

  “No, it isn’t,” said Guy. “There’s that. But the other thing that puzzles me is that the two paintings should come onto the market one after the other, and within the space of a few days. That’s a bit surprising, especially when the market has been starved of McInneses for a long time. People tend to hang on to them.”

  “Somebody has obviously decided to sell,” said Isabel. “Or they’ve died and their family are disposing of them. You can imagine the scene. Young relatives with no interest in painting. Highland scenes. Sea. Hills. Not what we need. Let’s sell and take the money.”

  “That happens,” said Guy. “But these would appear to be from different sources.”

  “Who?”

  Guy sighed. “I can’t tell you, I’m afraid. I hope you don’t think I’m being unhelpful, but I can’t really disclose who is offering this one. These things are confidential, you see—clients like it that way.”

  Isabel understood. People might not like others to know that they were having to raise money. “Of course.” But how would Guy know that this painting came from a different source if he didn’t know—and the same principle of confidentiality would preclude it—who had consigned the other painting to Lyon & Turnbull?

  He saw the question coming. “You’ll be wondering how I know they’re from different places? Well, our client told us that he”—he corrected himself—“that she hadn’t heard about the painting at Lyon & Turnbull. Unless she’s misleading us, which I don’t think she is. In
fact, it’s impossible. She’s not the type.”

  “I wonder where she got it from?” asked Isabel.

  “In this case, I believe she bought it from the artist himself. Shortly before his death, I think. Sometimes there’s a gallery label,” said Guy. He reached forward and tilted the painting away from the wall. “Look—nothing on the back, apart from that writing over there.” He pointed to where somebody had written, in pencil, JURA, WITH MOUNTAINS. There was another handwritten line underneath: The boy’s called James.

  “That’s McInnes’s writing all right,” said Guy. “I’ve seen our own labels that he scribbled on. Or sometimes he wrote instructions about where the painting was to be delivered. Or where he was staying when he painted it. Sometimes lines of poetry—he liked to put MacDiarmid in. Odd things.”

  “MacDiarmid liked that part of Scotland,” said Isabel. “‘Island Funeral.’ That was one of his better efforts, in spite of the flannel. He was a bit of a shocker, you know.”

  “But he could…”

  “Yes, he could,” said Isabel. “He could stop us in our tracks. That poem about the island funeral makes the hairs on the back of one’s neck stand up.” She paused and remembered. “I went to one once, you know. An island funeral. An aged cousin of my father’s who had married into a family on South Uist. They were Free Presbyterians and there were no prayers. All those dark-suited men standing in a huddle, and the coffin left outside. They sang psalms, those strange Gaelic psalms, and then they went and buried her in silence with rain coming in from the Atlantic, nothing heavy, just soft rain. And that light. The same light that’s in that painting over there.”

  Guy said nothing for a moment. He could see the scene that she was describing, and there was nothing that he could add.

  Isabel broke the silence. “Are you sure that this is a McInnes? Are you absolutely sure?”

  He was. “I’m pretty certain, Isabel. We wouldn’t offer it as a McInnes if we weren’t. All my colleagues are sure. Robin. Everybody.”

  Isabel wondered how anybody could be certain about anything in the art world. There were all those fake Dalí prints still in circulation—almost mass-produced fakes, like the reproduction paintings turned out to order from Russian studios. If they could do old masters for a couple hundred dollars, then surely with a bit more time they could do something considerably more convincing?

  “I see you’re still doubtful,” said Guy. “And yes, there are forgers who will do a very careful job. But one develops an eye for particular painters, you know, and one can just tell. It’s like hearing somebody’s voice. Little things that all add up to an overall impression that this is it.” He paused. “And provenance is pretty important. In this case, the person who brought this in knew him. Knew McInnes. We know that she did, and so it all makes sense.”

  “All right,” said Isabel. “I was just thinking aloud.”

  Guy said that this was reasonable enough. Then, “Do you know much about McInnes? Do you know about what went wrong at the end?”

  “He drowned, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. Off Jura. But it was very sad, even before that. He had a big exhibition here in Edinburgh—two years’ work. It went on just before the Festival and a whole group of London critics traipsed up for it. They decided to slaughter McInnes because he had given a lecture at the Tate in which he pointed out how the London critics had ignored Scottish artists. He did it quite politely, but he did accuse them of metropolitanism, and that’s the one thing you mustn’t accuse metropolitans of. So they decided to get their own back—in spades. They called him an overrated minor landscape painter. One of them headed his crit ‘Provincial Painting by Numbers.’ They egged one another on.”

  Isabel felt outraged. But her outrage had nothing to do with painting by numbers; it was the word provincial. “Provincial!”

  “Yes. Exactly. And the effect on McInnes was pretty disastrous. I saw him the day after the first of these notices was published. He was sitting in the Arts Club all by himself, a drink in front of him. I went and had a word with him, but I don’t think that he was taking much in. His hands were shaking. He looked awful.”

  Isabel winced. “Poor man. I had a friend who made the mistake of being both an author and thin-skinned. Journalists toss off their cutting remarks without realising the effect they have on the people they’re talking about.”

  “There are plenty of people like that,” said Guy. “But it wasn’t just the bad reviews in McInnes’s case. It was the timing. On virtually the same day that things went wrong with the show, he found out that his wife was having an affair. It all came at once. He was devastated.”

  Isabel suddenly thought of Cat. Sexual jealousy was powerful, and that’s what Cat felt about Jamie; she must, even if she had got rid of him in the first place; it was still there, cutting and cutting away.

  “So…the drowning…”

  She left the question unfinished. Had it been a suicide? If one wanted to make a death appear like an accident, drowning was probably the best way of doing that. There were seldom any witnesses; it was easy to arrange, especially in a place like the west of Scotland with its tides and currents. But what a lonely death it must be; out in those cold waters, on the edge of the Atlantic, like a burial at sea.

  “No,” said Guy. “I don’t think that he killed himself. He went off to Jura after things came apart down here. He left his wife more or less immediately and hid away in a cottage he used to rent up there. Rather like Orwell, in a way, who went off to Jura to write 1984. Anyway, he went up there and a month later it happened. He had a boat which he often took out. That’s why I don’t think it was suicide. It was consistent with the normal pattern of his life up there.”

  Charlie was now quite awake and was staring up at Isabel with that intense, slightly puzzled stare that babies fix on their parents. “I’m going to have to feed him,” she said. “I’ve got his bottle here.”

  “I’ll get you a chair,” said Guy. “Then, if you don’t mind, I’d better go and speak to those people upstairs again.”

  “Of course.”

  He fetched a chair and she sat down in a shaft of sunlight that came in from the back window. Like a woman in a Vermeer painting, she thought. Woman with child.

  “One last observation,” said Guy. “McInnes’s death wasn’t suicide, as I said. In my view it was something worse. I think of it as murder.”

  Isabel looked up sharply; an unfamiliar word in Edinburgh. “Murder?”

  “Yes,” said Guy. “A form of murder. By the critics. They killed him.”

  She was relieved; nothing nasty—there was real murder and metaphorical murder. The first of these was a sordid, banal business; the second was considerably more interesting.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SHE LET JAMIE in the front door.

  “I left my key at home,” he said. “Sorry.”

  She had presented him with a key shortly after Charlie’s birth, or slipped it into his hand; a presentation would have been more ceremonial. At first he had kept it on his main key ring, but then, for some reason, he had moved it onto another one, by itself. She had wondered about this—whether the separation of keys meant anything, but dismissed the thought; one could read too much into little things.

  “You should keep all your…”

  He bent down and kissed her, and her question trailed off. “Yes, of course. Of course. Where’s Charlie?”

  Charlie was lying on his back, on a blanket in the morning room, staring up at the ceiling. He appeared to be fascinated by the ornamental plaster rose in the centre and would gaze at it for long periods. “He must think that’s the sky,” said Isabel. “And the plaster rose is a cloud.”

  Jamie laughed and went down on his hands and knees beside Charlie, who lifted his arms up and gurgled with pleasure. Isabel left them playing with one another and went through to the kitchen to prepare dinner. Charlie would be attended to and put to bed by Jamie while she cooked. Jamie liked to sing to him when he put
him down, and Charlie seemed to like this, staring wide-eyed at his father, watching his lips, calmed by the sound of the voice.

  Dreams to sell, fine dreams to sell,

  Angus is here with dreams to sell.

  Hush now wee bairnie and sleep without fear,

  For Angus will bring you a dream, my dear.

  She had stood transfixed when she first heard him singing that to Charlie, and had even found herself weeping. “Why?” he had said, turning round and seeing her. “Why are you crying?” And she had shaken her head and muttered something rambling, something about lullabies being the saddest of songs, for some reason. “They always do this to me. The lullaby in Hansel and Gretel—you must know it: ‘When at night I go to sleep, Fourteen angels watch do keep. Two my head are guarding, Two my feet are guiding…’” He had put his arms around her and said, “Yes. Why not? All those angels. And Dream Angus too, with his dreams.”