The Careful Use of Compliments

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Dove suddenly seemed conciliatory. “Never mind,” he said. “I understand your feelings about mounds of paper. It really does accumulate, doesn’t it?”

  They sat down at the desk, Isabel on her side and Dove on the other.

  “I thought that we should go over plans for the next three issues,” said Isabel. “Things are fairly far advanced with them, and if the current issue is going to be the last one I do, then you’ll be taking over quite a bit of work in progress, so to speak.”

  Dove nodded gravely. “Yes.”

  “So shall we start with the next issue?” said Isabel.

  Dove said that he thought this was a good idea, and Isabel extracted a thick folder from a pile of papers on her desk. She saw her visitor’s eyes go to the pile of papers, and she realised that he disapproved of the clutter.

  “I do know where everything is,” she said quietly. “It may not look like it, but I do know.”

  “Of course you do,” muttered Dove. “Creative clutter.”

  She did not like the condescending tone of his comment, but she let it pass. She opened the folder and took out a messy-looking bit of paper on which she had noted the order in which she proposed to put the articles. There was also her editorial, printed out on cream-coloured paper and corrected here and there, in blue ink, by its author. This would be her last editorial, she reflected, and it was about the ethics of taxation. Dove would never write about anything quite so dull, she thought. He would write about…what? Cognitive science, perhaps; decision trees and ethics; the question of whether computers had minds, from which Isabel realised the further question might flow: Could one have good computers and bad computers? In the moral sense of course.

  They began to work, and worked through until four thirty, when Isabel heard the front gate open. She looked up and saw a visitor coming down the path to the front door. It was Cat. Dove looked up too. He saw Cat and looked enquiringly at Isabel.

  “My niece,” said Isabel, getting up from her desk. “I wasn’t expecting her.”

  Dove stretched his arms back and yawned. “I could do with a break anyway.”

  Isabel left him in the study and made her way to the front door. Cat had her finger poised before the bell when Isabel opened the door.

  “I saw you.” Isabel smiled warmly. Cat’s visit could be a new beginning, and she would not let the memory of that disastrous evening at her flat stand in the way of a reconciliation. But if there was a thaw, it was a slight one, as Cat still seemed distant.

  “You left your cardigan at the flat the other night,” said Cat. “Here it is.”

  Isabel took the cardigan, which Cat produced from a small carrier bag. “Come in for a quick cup of tea,” she said. “I was just about to make some. Christopher Dove is here.”

  Cat looked interested. “Christopher Dove? Do I know him?”

  “No. He’s on the board of the journal. In fact, he’s…” She trailed off. She was about to say that he was taking over, but at that moment, at the door, she was not so sure. It was complicated.

  “All right,” said Cat. “But I can’t stay long. I’ve left Eddie in charge and I think he wants to get away early. He’s doing a class in the yoga centre near Holy Corner.”

  “That’s a good thing,” said Isabel. “Poor Eddie…”

  Cat did not pursue the subject of Eddie. “Well, Eddie’s Eddie.”

  “That,” said Isabel, “is undoubtedly true. And you can probably say the same about most of us, mutatis mutandis.”

  Cat looked at her sideways.

  “That is,” Isabel continued, “changing that which requires to be changed. In this case, the name.”

  Cat said nothing. They had entered the hall, and Christopher Dove had appeared from the study. Isabel introduced them, and Christopher stepped forward to shake Cat’s hand. Isabel watched and immediately noticed the change in Cat’s demeanour.

  “We’ll have a cup of tea in the kitchen,” said Isabel.

  Cat looked upstairs. “Where’s…”

  “With Grace this afternoon,” said Isabel. She did not want to talk about Charlie in front of Dove. Grace had taken Charlie to the Botanic Gardens to walk him round and get some fresh air. Isabel had been happy for Charlie to be out of the way during her meeting with Dove and had not pointed out her belief that the air in Merchiston, her part of Edinburgh, was every bit as fresh as the air in Inverleith, where the Botanic Gardens were. In fact, the air was fresher in Merchiston and Morningside, which were several hundred feet higher than Inverleith, and there was also that occasional miasmic mist which snaked into Inverleith from the shores of the Firth of Forth and which she would never describe as fresh.

  They went into the kitchen.

  “Such a large house,” said Dove. “In London we have to make do with—”

  “You’re very crowded,” interjected Isabel. “It’s most unfortunate.”

  Cat was watching Dove; a scene enacted in Isabel’s garden from time to time when the neighbour’s striped cat stalked birds. Isabel smiled at the thought, and turned away to put on the kettle and hide her amusement. But that amusement lasted for only a few seconds, for then she thought: She can’t!

  Isabel went out of the room for a moment on the pretext of fetching something. But she stopped in the hall and thought: I can’t bear it if she falls for him. Dove! She took a deep breath before going back into the kitchen. Cat and Dove were in animated conversation.

  “Such a great city…Do you know London?…A delicatessen? I’ve got a great one near my place in Islington…Hard work, I bet…”

  And, “I’ve got a friend there…I should get down more often…I love it when I do…That buzz. Yes. There’s a buzz…Show you round? Are you staying?”

  Isabel busied herself with the making of the tea. It was every bit as bad as she feared. But of course she should have anticipated it. Dove was older than Cat by a few years—eight maybe—but he looked youthful and he was exactly her physical type. She remembered Toby, to whom Cat had been briefly and disastrously engaged. He had looked just like Dove, now that she came to think of it, and so she should not be surprised, and now…she could hardly believe it: the invitation to dinner had been extended, and accepted. There would be plenty of time, Dove told Cat, as the sleeper did not leave until after eleven.

  Isabel handed Cat her cup of tea with a look into which she tried to pour a wide range of emotions: surprise, pity, and the reproach that went with betrayal. But her efforts were in vain. Cat did not see her. Nor did Dove.

  CAT LEFT after half an hour, and Isabel and Dove returned to finish off their work in the study. They did not have much to do, which meant that Dove could leave in good time to meet Cat at the delicatessen and then go out for dinner.

  “Cat has very kindly offered to show me a bit of the town this evening,” said Dove.

  “She’s very interested in…” Isabel wanted to say men, but ended up saying that sort of thing. She glanced at her watch. Grace should be back soon, although sometimes she took Charlie to visit her cousin, who lived in Stockbridge, not far from the Botanic Gardens. And Jamie would be due any moment, as he had said that he would be back early in order to see Charlie before his bath time.

  They were on the point of finishing when Jamie arrived. The study door was open and he came in, expecting to find only Isabel. “Oh,” he said. “Sorry to interrupt.”

  “This is Christopher Dove,” said Isabel.

  Jamie knew who Christopher Dove was and a shadow passed across his face, a clouding. “Oh.”

  Christopher Dove stood up to shake hands with Jamie. He turned to Isabel.

  “Your nephew?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHRISTOPHER DOVE left Edinburgh to return to London on the Monday of that week. That left three full days in Edinburgh before she and Jamie—and Charlie, of course—were due to leave for their four days on Jura. It would have been better to leave Edinburgh on the Friday, but they could not, as Jamie was playing in a concert in Perth that eve
ning. So he managed to get the following Monday and Tuesday off, by shifting his pupils to later in the week, something he normally did not like to do but which was just possible, provided that it was not done too often.

  The visit of the London philosopher had left Isabel shocked and angry. Her anger, which was more of a simmering resentment, perhaps, was focused on Dove himself and on his scheming ways, his sheer dishonesty. He had coveted her job and had pushed her out; that she could accept, to an extent, if only he had not been so duplicitous about it. Had he taken her job openly, then she might have muttered something about the fairness of all in love and war and left it at that. But he had unctuously congratulated her on her achievements and acted as if the discussions over the transfer were between willing predecessor and willing successor. They were not! thought Isabel. This was what businesspeople called an unfriendly takeover, and no amount of smooth talking and smiling would paper over that unavoidable fact.

  The shock that Isabel felt was nothing to do with Dove, or only indirectly so; it had resulted from the sheer, naked concupiscence of Cat’s flirting. For a while Isabel had wondered whether Cat knew about the reason for Dove’s presence and whether her immediate taking up with him had been intended to rub salt into Isabel’s wound, a form of fraternisation with the enemy in full view of General Headquarters. But then she realised that Cat did not know about the change in editorship and that whatever else she might have done in recent months to hurt or offend Isabel, she had not done this. But it was still shocking because Isabel believed that people should be circumspect about picking up other people. One might like somebody and set out to make further acquaintance, but, other than in bars and clubs where everybody went for that precise purpose, one tried not to make one’s intentions too obvious. Was this hypocrisy, and an outdated form of hypocrisy at that? She did not think so. The whole point about conventions of this nature is that they affirmed the value of the person; she who advertised the fact of immediate availability—and in Cat’s case barely five minutes had passed before the date was made—was suggesting surely, that she was available even to one whom she barely knew. There was such a thing as appropriate reticence, thought Isabel; a reticence that might at least involve a short prelude before the implicit bargain was sealed.

  She was shocked by the thought that her niece was—well, there was no other word for it—cheap. She knew that Cat had an eye for a certain sort of man—the wrong sort—and she knew that her boyfriends tended not to last very long, but she had not thought of her before as cheap. Or was there another word? Fast? No, a fast woman might not be cheap. They were two different things. Fast women could be stylish and really rather expensive; they might think long and hard before they decided with whom they were going to be fast.

  She was distracted for a moment by the conjuring up of an image of a fast woman. She saw, quite vividly, a woman sporting a low neckline, a knee-length silk-jersey dress, close-fitting, expensively draped, an impossibly small bag made of supple green leather; one would smell the quality of the leather. Isabel smiled at the thought, but then her smile faded. Cat was not fast, but she did not want to conclude that she was cheap. What was she then? The answer came to her: confused. That was a third category of women: those who were simply confused. They did not really know what sort of man they wanted, tried many, and found them all wanting.

  She tried to put Cat’s involvement with Dove out of her mind and thought instead of the absent Charlie. Cat would come round—eventually; even if Isabel could not get through to her, in due course Charlie would. One cannot snub a baby for long, even if he is the product of one’s aunt’s dalliance with one’s ex-boyfriend. As for Dove, he had done nothing to redeem himself and she had decided on a course of action which would deal with him. That required a bit of thought, but Isabel did not want to dwell on it too long. These things, once decided, should be acted upon, as Lady Macbeth pointed out to her indecisive husband. Isabel had not thought that she could do this particular thing; she had not imagined that she had it within her. But now she decided she had, and that she would act.

  In the first place it involved a telephone call in which instructions were given. That took rather longer than she had planned, but at the end of the call everything was arranged. Then there was another call, this time to the small private bank, Adam & Company, where Isabel was put through to Gareth Howlett. That did not take long; liquidity, Gareth explained, was not a problem for Isabel.

  “Sometimes people don’t quite understand just how substantial their resources are,” said Gareth. “You don’t really need to worry, you know.”

  “I don’t like to think about these things,” said Isabel. She remembered what her friend Max had once said to her: Money is only a problem if one doesn’t have enough of it. It was one of those observations that seemed self-evident, but which had depths to it that became apparent only when one sat down to think about it. And could one say the same about other things? Was food a problem only if one did not have enough of it? No, that, at least, was not true. Those who had enough food still had problems with it; hence the whole desperate business of dieting—the cures, the pills, the fat farms, the hopelessness of the scales.

  That out of the way, Isabel turned to the luxury of spending a couple of days exactly as she pleased. Dove had taken the files on the next issue away with him, which meant that there was nothing pressing for Isabel to do. She could visit the bookshops, go to the galleries, see friends: she felt a heady sense of having choices in what to do with her time, that delicious feeling that there were simply no claims upon her. Apart from Charlie, of course, and Jamie, and the house, Grace, and occasionally, and in a subtle way, Brother Fox.

  SHE DID NOT TELL JAMIE where she went the next day, which was to a house in the Stockbridge Colonies. The Colonies were rows of neat, late-nineteenth-century houses, stone-built and terraced, with one house below and one above, the upper front door being reached by an external stone staircase built up against the wall of the house below. They were attractive houses, although somewhat cramped, built for the families of skilled tradesmen at the end of the Victorian era, like the mining cottages one saw in some of the villages of East Lothian, on the plain that stretched out to the cold blue-grey line of the North Sea. At the end of each row of houses, on the gable wall that fronted the street, there were carved representations of the trade of those who occupied the houses beyond: the miller’s wheel; the maltman’s rake; the calipers, chisel, and hammer of the stonemason. Of course the tradesmen had been replaced by young professionals and advertising people, but these houses were still not too expensive and some of them were occupied by older people who had paid very little for them thirty years ago.

  She found Teviotdale Place halfway along the road that crossed over a small bridge. Edinburgh’s river, the Water of Leith, not a great river by the standards of many cities, looped its way through Stockbridge at this point. The end houses in the Colonies were all on the edge of the riverbank, a good place to be in summer, when the river was low, but an unsettling place to live when the Water of Leith became overambitious, as it did after heavy rains up in the Pentland Hills. It was a comfortable street, as all these Colonies streets were; proving, perhaps, the proposition that we are happiest when living in courtyards or, as in this case, in streets that face one another and are almost courtyards. Children could play here, in the street, and be watched from both sides; washing could be hung out on the lines that were strung from walls to the black-painted, cast-iron washing posts that emerged from tiny lawns; cats could prowl through lavender bushes and wisteria and along the tops of the pint-sized walls that separated garden from garden.

  Isabel had been given the address by Guy Peploe, whom she had seen the previous day, when she had dropped into the Scottish Gallery. There had been a conversation about McInnes—and a further look at the Jura painting which Guy still had—and then he had casually mentioned that he had seen McInnes’s widow a few days earlier, that she was still in Edinburgh and he ran into her f
rom time to time.

  “Did she marry the man she was having an affair with?” asked Isabel.

  Guy looked out of the window. They were sitting in his office in the gallery, and the sun was streaming down into the garden at the back.

  “No,” he said. “She did not. He went off to London, I think. He was an artist too, but he came into some money, I seem to remember, and he went off with somebody else. Pretty awful for her. She was pregnant when McInnes died, and she had a baby.”

  “His? Or McInnes’s?”

  Guy shrugged. “I have no idea. But she had a little boy, anyway. I see her with him from time to time. He must be eight or so, because that’s how long McInnes has been dead.”

  Isabel reflected on the sadness of this, when Guy said, “She lives down in the Colonies. Above that man who plays the fiddle at ceilidhs. You might know him—everybody seems to. He’s recorded a lot.”

  “I do know him,” said Isabel. “He sometimes plays with David Todd. He’s quite a character.”

  “Above his house,” said Guy. “That’s where she ended up,” He paused. “And if things had worked out otherwise, and with the prices his paintings command now, they could have been living…oh, in the south of France, if they wanted to.”

  “And that little boy would have had a father,” said Isabel.

  “Yes,” said Guy. “That too.”

  NOW , standing outside the house in Teviotdale Place, Isabel looked down at her hands. She did that when she was nervous—she looked at her hands—and it somehow gave her courage. She thought, I have no excuse to go and see this person. I don’t know her, and she owes me nothing. I am calling upon a complete stranger.

  But if that had not stopped her before, it did not stop her now, and she pushed open the small, ironwork gate and began walking up the path to the open staircase to the upper flat. The door was painted blue and there was a small black plaque: McINNES. She pushed the doorbell, a round, highly polished brass doorbell that was obviously well loved.