The Careful Use of Compliments

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Now she stood at the cutting board and asked herself: Is this complete happiness? Am I happier now than I have ever been before? The answer, she thought, was yes, she was. There had been periods of unhappiness in her life—the John Liamor episode being one of those—but she thought of herself as having been, for the most part, reasonably happy. But since the beginning of her affair with Jamie she had been conscious of being in a state of heightened happiness, a state of…well, she had to resort to the concept of blessedness. I am blessed, and being blessed is something more than just having something; it is a state of mind in which the good of the world is illuminated, is understood. It is as if one is vouchsafed a vision of some sort, she thought, a vision of love, of agape, of the essential value of each and every living thing.

  For a moment, Isabel stood stock-still. There were vegetables on the board before her, ready for the knife, but she did not move; her hand was arrested in its movement, motionless. She was aware of a physical sensation, a sort of rushing within her and around her, a current, which seemed to fill her with warmth. She closed her eyes and, oddly, there was no darkness, just light; it was as if she were bathed in light both within and without.

  She opened her eyes again. The ordinary material world was there, the vegetables, the sink, the unopened bottle of wine, the recipe book lying open at the page to which she had turned, the pen-and-ink drawing on that page, everything. She breathed. The warmth, the feeling of suffusion had gone, and she felt that she was back in the same place. She moved her arm and felt the coldness of the granite worktop under her skin, all quite normal. But she felt different; she felt that the world had suddenly become infinitely more precious to her, and that there was more love within her. It was that simple, perhaps; there was just more love within her.

  Later, with Charlie asleep, she and Jamie sat at the kitchen table. She had prepared scallops for them, to be followed by a risotto, which she knew he liked. They had chilled white wine with the scallops, and he raised his glass to her. To Charlie’s mother. She had laughed, and replied, To his father. She looked down at her plate. She wanted to tell him what had happened, there in the kitchen, while he was attending to Charlie, but how could she put it? I had a mystical experience in the kitchen this evening? Hardly. I am not the sort who has mystical experiences in the kitchen, she said to herself; the world is divided between those who have mystical experiences in their kitchens and those who do not.

  He said, “You’re smiling to yourself about something.”

  “I suppose I am. Just a silly thought.”

  He took a sip of his wine. “About?”

  “About something that happened to me. I had a moment of…well, I suppose I might call it a moment of inspiration, while I was preparing dinner.”

  He did not seem surprised. “I had one of those the other day,” he said. “I was waiting for one of my pupils and I had a moment of inspiration. A musical idea. I wrote it down as quickly as I could but when I played it later on…A great disappointment.”

  She thought that they were not talking about the same thing. She had been wrong to call it a moment of inspiration; no ideas had come to her, rather an insight, and that was different. But it was difficult to define it, because language was not suited to describing such things; one ended up talking at great length about what seemed ultimately to be something very small, as happens in the writings of mystics, where a cloud of words surrounds the brief light about which they write.

  No, she did not want to appear foolish, and this was a subject on which she realised she knew very little about Jamie’s views. Did he believe in anything beyond the material? They had never talked about that, and she had no idea. But that was probably not unusual amongst couples—how many people these days, in her sort of society, talked to one another about that? She thought of her friends, and wondered which of them believed in the existence of God. She knew one or two of them went to church, and they, she assumed, either believed in God or wanted to believe. That was probably true of many people in any congregation, of course: they were there not because they believed but because they felt the need for religion, for something beyond themselves. So what did Jamie believe in, if anything? Did he think that he had a soul? She watched him pick up his glass. He was looking at her, his eyes smiling. Of course he had a soul, she said to herself; that gentle, kind, loving part of him. That was there, and she could see it.

  “We’ve had an invitation,” she said. And immediately she wondered why she had said this. She had not been thinking about it, and even if she had, she would not have thought about bringing it up right now. But it came out, unanticipated.

  “Oh?”

  She swallowed hard. She had just had a vision of love, or something to do with love, and she had to go on in that spirit. “Cat has asked us to dinner.”

  She watched him closely. Sometimes words can be seen, she thought; one sees them travelling through the air and reaching their target as if an invisible wave had moved through the room. Isabel remembered how, as a young woman, she had once gone to sit through a trial in the High Court. She had a friend who was a junior advocate in the trial and she wanted to see her in action. It had been dramatic; she had seen the jury return its verdict and the judge had shifted in his seat to face the accused. Then he simply said, “Six years,” and she saw the man in the dock reel backwards as if he had been hit by an unseen hand, pushing him back.

  Jamie put down his glass and looked at her. The light that had been in his eyes, the smile, was no longer there; it had been replaced by something flat, something guarded. “That’s kind of her,” he said. “When?”

  “She didn’t say. It was a message, actually. She left it with Grace.”

  “I see.”

  She toyed with her fork. “Do you want to go? We don’t have to.” She thought that Cat would understand; they had kept off the subject of Cat, by unspoken agreement, because they both knew it was a wound that should not be breathed into.

  He did not reply for a moment. “I’m over her,” he said, but he did not look at Isabel as he spoke, and she knew it could not be true. If Cat meant nothing to him anymore, then he would have looked at her; Jamie always engaged with people directly, looked them in the eye. But not now.

  Isabel stared at him. This hurt her. “I don’t think you are, Jamie. I really don’t think you are.”

  Now he looked up at her. “No. You’re right.”

  “So do you still love her?”

  His voice was low. “Maybe I do. Maybe. You know how it is.”

  “Of course. I was in love for years and years. Even after John had left me I still loved him, went on loving him, so foolishly, pointlessly. But we can’t help ourselves, can we?”

  He suddenly pushed his chair back and rose to his feet. Something—his glass of water—toppled and was spilled, and made a long dark stain down the leg of his jeans. He came round to her and crouched down. He put his arm about her. His voice sounded hoarse; that was from emotion, she thought. “Don’t you think that it’s possible that we can…that we can end up loving lots of people? People we used to love, still love. Them. But they’re just there in the background, and we get on with loving other people, people from our present rather than our past. Don’t you think that?”

  She reached for his hand and pressed it. Blessedness: she could not believe her state of blessedness; this young man, with all his beauty and gentleness, in her arms, hers. “Of course I believe that,” she said.

  “So do we go, or not?”

  “I think we should go. Cat and I are family. I don’t want her cut out of my life with you.”

  He kissed her on the brow, then on the lips. “All right.”

  THE MAIL THE NEXT DAY brought two manuscripts that Isabel knew were coming and which she had been looking forward to receiving, and she read these in preference to the items immediately below them in the pile, some of which looked like bills. The manuscripts were as interesting as she had hoped, and she started to write grateful letters to thei
r authors. Both were solicited contributions to a special issue on the philosophy of taxation, a subject that proved to be considerably more thought-provoking than Isabel had imagined. Why should the wealthy pay more tax than the poor? They did, or at least they did in most systems, but on what grounds was this defensible? Should taxation be used as a tool to redistribute wealth? She thought it should, and many others thought so as well, but it was not so clear that taxation was the most appropriate way to achieve that. Should governments perhaps be honest and say that they intended simply to confiscate assets over a certain level? She gave some thought to that, wondering how she would feel if the government started to take her capital away, beginning right now, appropriating her funds, turning them into military equipment and welfare payments and new roads, as governments tended to do. I don’t have a very strong right to have what I have, she thought. All of it comes to me simply because a member of my family had it, and then died. What sort of moral right did that give? Not a very convincing one, she felt. But so much of life turned out that way—things were gained and then handed on; not just physical things but tastes, qualities, insights. Would Mozart have written what he did had it not been for Leopold Mozart, who had placed his tiny son on the piano stool? Presumably not; the genius, the particular capacities of the brain might have been there but could well have remained locked away, had there been no musical father to bring them out. And Mr. Getty, a rich man—and a very generous one too—had received his oil fields from Mr. Getty before him; he might never have found oil by himself. She smiled at the thought; of course he might not have looked for oil—it does not occur to everybody to go looking for oil.

  Her train of thought was interrupted by a noise from within the house. Grace was not there that morning—she had a dental appointment and Isabel had told her not to bother coming in. That was more than just concern for Grace’s welfare on Isabel’s part; Grace was undergoing root canal treatment on a tooth, and Isabel knew from experience how miserable this made her feel. Grace did not like dental anaesthetics, and preferred to endure the pain rather than to experience the lingering numbness that went with the local anaesthetic, a bizarre preference, in Isabel’s view, but one which was firmly held. Isabel thought that this might be understandable, just, when it came to minor treatment, but root canal treatment, with its deliberate engagement with the nerve, could be an exquisite agony. She had found out that Grace loved to give a blow-by-blow account of her visits to the dentist and she did not feel in the mood to listen to a long story about root canals punctuated by the sort of grumpiness that Grace could, on occasion, muster. By tomorrow the memory of the pain might be less vivid, and Grace’s mood might be restored.

  So Isabel was now in sole charge of Charlie, and the sound from within the house was of Charlie waking up and crying. She put the papers on the philosophy of taxation to one side and went through to the room at the back of the house where Charlie had his afternoon naps. He stopped crying when he saw her and looked up with that strange expression of astonishment that makes parents feel that their child has forgotten them entirely and is seeing them now for the first time.

  She picked him up and cuddled him. He felt warm, his skin slightly damp. He started to niggle again.

  “You’re hungry, aren’t you?” she asked. And answered on his behalf, “Of course. Of course. Feeding time.”

  He took his formula hungrily, sucking strongly at the bottle. Then she winded him, holding him over her shoulder, patting his back gently. This usually comforted him and brought up the wind in an audible burp, but today he seemed to resist her ministrations, squirming in her hold, as if wanting to escape.

  “Not right?” she muttered. “You’re not feeling right?”

  Charlie answered with a wail, screwing up his features into an expression of minor rage, his face colouring from the exertion. He did not need changing, and Isabel felt a momentary twinge of alarm. She knew that she should not imagine things, that the flushed expression was not normally a sign of meningitis, that diarrhoea was not typhoid, but all parents had their anxieties and would think just that, even if only until reassured by somebody else. It’s normal, she thought. He’s been feeling a little hot—and that room was a bit warm when I went in—so he’s registering his displeasure. All quite normal.

  She took Charlie through to the kitchen. He liked it there, picking up, she thought, the bright colours—the red of the Aga stove, the glowing yellows of a large print of flowers framed above the refrigerator, the chequered blues of the tea towels; but now he continued to whine, ignoring the distractions of colour.

  “Come on, Charlie,” she said. “It’s not all that bad! Surely not.”

  But it was, and he began to cry again, at full lung. Once again she put him over her shoulder and patted his back, hoping to dislodge the wind that she suspected was causing his discomfort. This appeared only to add to his unhappiness and she stopped. Gripe water.

  She laid Charlie down on the floor of the small playpen that she kept in the corner of the kitchen. He protested, screaming at the outrage, and was unconsoled by Isabel’s placatory cooing. Then she went upstairs, momentarily leaving Charlie to his anger, and opened the door of the bathroom cabinet.

  The bottle of cough syrup was there, as was the tin of sticking plasters, the aspirin, and the thermometer, but there was no gripe water. Isabel was puzzled. She had put it there, behind the cough syrup; she was sure of that. But it was definitely not there, which meant that Grace had discovered it and moved it.

  Isabel felt angry. Grace must have searched for the gripe water and taken it upon herself to move it. She had no right to do that, she thought, no right. This was her cabinet, not Grace’s, and she and she alone would decide what it contained.

  She went downstairs. Charlie was still protesting, his wail drifting up from the kitchen. “I’m coming, Charlie,” she called out as she made her way down the stairs. “I’m coming.”

  The sound of her voice seemed to calm Charlie, and he fell silent. Or had he choked? Isabel asked herself, and began to run, taking the steps two at a time. He had not, and when she reached the kitchen he started crying again, waving his arms in impotent fury, his face flushed red with the force of his tears. He calmed down a bit when she picked him up but was still obviously uncomfortable.

  “What’s wrong, my darling? What’s wrong?”

  Charlie seemed to listen to her, paused briefly, and then continued with his sobbing. There was so much wrong, he seemed to be saying; and it is all your fault, all of it.

  Isabel decided that what was needed was a dose of infant aspirin. She had a bottle of the suspension in one of the kitchen cupboards, where Charlie’s formula and spare bottles were kept, and she cradled the baby gently as she opened the door with her free hand. There, beside the bottles, was the gripe water, with its characteristic old-fashioned label. Isabel smiled grimly. So it was Grace’s doing after all, just as she had suspected; she had been right.

  She reached for the bottle of aspirin suspension and then stopped and took out the bottle of gripe water instead. Twisting off the cap, she sniffed at the colourless, slightly viscous liquid within; it had a sweet smell, exaggeratedly floral, like an overstated, cheap perfume. It was not unpleasant, she decided, and on impulse she held the open bottle under Charlie’s nose. The effect was immediate and dramatic, as if she had applied smelling salts of the sort resorted to by Victorian ladies for their swooning. The crying stopped immediately, and Charlie made an inept attempt to seize the bottle.

  Isabel extracted a teaspoon from a kitchen drawer and set it down on a surface at the side of the sink. It was difficult to pour the gripe water using only one hand—Charlie was still cradled in the other—and she spilled a bit of the liquid in the process. But she succeeded by dint of a steady hand, then picked up the spoon without spilling any more and manoeuvred it into Charlie’s mouth. His expression of contentment was immediate; the crying stopped.

  “Darling addict,” she whispered.

  She l
ooked again at the bottle. The contents were listed. Common herbs, she read: ginger, fennel, and dill, all of which one might see on the open shelves of a supermarket. She searched for the offending word, sugar, but she did not see it. Nor did she see any reference to alcohol. It was perfectly harmless.

  Charlie settled, and after some time in the garden with Isabel, he dropped off to sleep again. Isabel put him in his cradle and returned to her study to deal with the rest of the morning’s mail. She had been distracted by the arrival of the papers on the philosophy of taxation, and then by Charlie, and so she had not seen the letter from Professor Christopher Dove. Now she opened it, knowing immediately from the printed letterhead within that it had come from him. You write to me, Dove, she thought. Not content with displacing me, you write to me.

  She sat down to read the letter.

  Dear Ms. Dalhousie [I have a doctorate, Dove, not that I use the title, but you might at least have shown the courtesy],

  I believe that you may have heard from Professor Lettuce about changes that have been proposed at the Review. [You proposed them, Dove.] I have been asked by the board to assume the editorship, and although I am hesitant to take over a post which has been so admirably filled by another [Pass the gripe water!], I have nonetheless indicated that I am prepared to do this.

  I am aware of the fact that we have a number of special issues planned, including one on the philosophy of taxation. I would not like to interfere prematurely, but I am a bit doubtful about the value of our doing too many of these, especially in areas as specialised as the philosophy of taxation. My own view is that we should not lose sight of the fact [In other words, I think, muttered Isabel] that we are primarily a generalist journal. There are, as you know, numerous more specialised journals, including several that deal with business ethics, and I think that the philosophy of taxation would be more appropriately covered by them, rather than by us. [Come to the point, Dove.] For this reason, I think we should revisit our plans for that issue.