The Careful Use of Compliments

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Isabel looked at him wryly. “And you’re saying that men don’t do that?”

  “They don’t,” said Jamie. “I worked in Jenners once when I was a student. Everybody knew that men didn’t bring things back. In fact, we were taught that in a training course. Somebody from the store had the figures. Men never brought clothes back.”

  Isabel thought that he was probably right. “So what you’re saying is that Walter Buie, as a man, would never take it back to the auction house, but he might try to sell it on?”

  “Yes,” said Jamie. “But you can’t take things back to an auction house anyway. It’s not like a clothes store.”

  “I don’t know where this is leading,” said Isabel.

  “All I’m suggesting is that there could be other reasons he offered it to you. You can’t conclude that it’s a fake, just because he wants to get rid of it.”

  She had to admit that this was true. But there was something else. “Guy was surprised that the painting wasn’t varnished,” she said. “He said that McInnes usually varnished his paintings.”

  “But he still didn’t think it was a fake, did he? So he can’t have thought that the fact that it wasn’t varnished was all that important.”

  She had to admit this too. And now, with the two elements of her case reduced by Jamie’s scrutiny, she was thrown back on her conviction that something about the painting just did not feel right. She had no idea why coming to Jura should strengthen that conviction, but on her walk today, when she had looked at the very view which appeared in the painting, she had felt it strongly. The painting was faithful to the view from the beach; there was nothing more, nor less, in it than there was in the real scene. But for some reason she was sure that it just did not add up; how she would prove that, she had no idea, and she did not want to talk about it anymore. She picked up her wineglass. “Enough of all that,” she said. “I shall keep my suspicions to myself. Let’s just enjoy this place.”

  Jamie raised his glass to hers. “To the next three days,” he said. He looked at her, almost reproachfully. “And, Isabel…don’t. Just don’t.”

  “I’ll try not to.” She meant it, but somehow she knew at the same time that she did not. Can one want to do something and yet not want to do it? Of course you can, she told herself. Of course.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  TELL ME ABOUT LIZZIE ,” said Jamie.

  They were driving up the island, on the narrow road that hugged the coast. Off to their left, now shrouded by cloud, now exposed to shafts of late-morning sunlight, the Paps of Jura towered, crouching lions guarding Scotland against the Atlantic. To their right, across the Sound of Jura, was the Scottish mainland with its mountains in layers, blue beyond blue. The sea was calm, glassy flat, silver in the sun.

  “Lizzie?” said Isabel. “Well, I got to know her when I came up here four years ago. I stayed with friends who had rented Ardlussa, where we’re going. Her parents were away but she stayed behind to cook. She was in her very early twenties then. She’s a genius when it comes to lobsters and crayfish. She caught them herself; she had her own pots. And she knew some men who dived for scallops.

  “Then we met again when I was a weekend guest in Glen Lyon. Lizzie had been hired as cook—that’s what she does. I’ve seen her a few times in Edinburgh too. She’s great company. Good sense of humour. She’ll tackle anything.”

  “I suppose you have to be like that if you live up here,” said Jamie. “You wouldn’t last long otherwise.” He shifted in his seat; the wind from Isabel’s open window was upon his face. “Could you live somewhere like this, Isabel?”

  She thought for a moment. It seemed almost churlish to say that one could not, in the face of such beguiling natural beauty, but she could not. There would be so much that she would miss about the life of the city; the company, the conversation, the places to drink coffee. “I don’t think I could,” she said. “I’d moulder.”

  “It might be quite nice to moulder,” said Jamie. “And I suspect that people have a very different sense of time here.”

  “Do you think time slows down?”

  He was sure that it did. He looked at his watch; he had no idea what time it was, and had not known all that morning. In Edinburgh his day was sliced into half hours; thirty minutes for a pupil and then on to the next one: sarabandes, suites for bassoon and piano, arpeggios—so many notes, thousands and thousands of notes. “It’s different. When you’re doing something you really enjoy, it does pass more quickly. And it’s the same if people are rushing around you. Everything seems quicker.”

  “Subjective time,” said Isabel. “When we’re ten, a week is an awfully long time. Now…”

  “Yes, it’s very odd,” said Jamie. “I had plenty of time when I was at music college in Glasgow, and it passed very slowly. Now a week goes by in minutes.”

  “There’s a reason for that,” said Isabel. “It’s to do with memories and how many you make. When you’re doing things for the first time, you lay down lots of memories. Later on, things become a bit routine…”

  “And you don’t have anything to remember?” Jamie asked incredulously.

  “Well, you do, but because your life is a bit more routine, and there are few things which strike you as unusual, you don’t feel that you have to remember quite as much. And so it seems that time has passed more quickly.”

  He said nothing for a while, thinking about a year at school when he had been bullied and he had thought that the time of his oppression would never end, and then, quite suddenly, the bully had not been there one day. Something had happened, and the other boy had simply gone, like a nightmare lifts when one wakes up and realises that it was never real.

  She thought, Will I remember this, every moment of this, being here, in this beautiful place, with him—she glanced to her side—and him—she glanced over her shoulder. The green Swedish car swerved slightly, but only slightly, and recovered quickly enough to continue its journey along the side of the island, past startled Blackface sheep and dry-stane dykes, squat walls of stone dividing the fields, built many years ago by hard-working men, poor men, whose names were now long forgotten.

  ARDLUSSA LOOKED DOWN onto the bay of the same name, over lawns, then a field that ran gently down to a pier. Behind it, the River Lussa flowed down from the hills, to spread out, just a mile or so away, and join the sea at Inverlussa. The house had been built in the nineteenth century and added to in Edwardian times, a rambling country house half white, at the front, and half grey, at the back. It was at the centre of an estate that consisted of mountain and small forests, the habitat of the deer that provided a living for a handful of people—the family who lived in the big house and a couple of keepers and farm workers. The entrance was typical of that which one would find in any Scottish country house—a comfortable, lived-in hall, with walking sticks, cromachs (the Scottish crooks used by shepherds and hikers), and a bent and dusty green golfing umbrella that would have provided dubious protection against the elements even in its youth. If it rained here, it rained with conviction: shifting veils of water from clouds scudding in straight off the Atlantic; horizontal rain, vertical rain, rain swirling in all directions. Or on occasion the air was just wet: at such times there were no visible raindrops, just suspended moisture like the spray of a perfume atomiser that settled on clothing and skin. And with it came the midges, those tiny fruit fly–like creatures that spurn protective creams and lotions, and nip the skin of any human target in sight. Unfortunate hikers had been known to throw themselves into rivers to escape the clouds of stinging insects.

  Lizzie met them at the entrance and took them into the kitchen. She had not met Jamie before and Isabel could see the surprise in her expression; surprise which was quickly and tactfully masked. When Jamie left the room to find the bathroom, Isabel said to Lizzie, “Yes. We are. And that’s our baby.”

  Lizzie smiled conspiratorially. “I’m happy for you. But where…”

  “Where did I find him?”

 
Lizzie blushed. She had not meant to ask that, but it had been what she was wondering. Isabel was an attractive person, and she could understand her being sought after by men, but by men like that…Well, somebody would have found him eventually, and if it was Isabel, then she deserved congratulation. “He’s very…,” she began, but again trailed off.

  “He is,” said Isabel. “And he’s sweet.”

  Jamie returned and Lizzie prepared tea for the three of them. A Dundee cake that she had baked was produced out of a tin, and they carried that, and the tea tray, into the drawing room. There were pictures of island scenes on the walls, an old map, and piles of books on the tables. Isabel noticed Bernard Crick’s biography of Orwell, and she picked it up and paged through it.

  “Do you want to visit Barnhill?” Lizzie asked. She looked at Jamie, unsure whether he would know the story. “It’s where Orwell stayed. You can see the room where he wrote 1984.”

  Jamie looked interested. “Can we?”

  Lizzie nodded. “Yes. And he was in this house, too, you know. He was in this room. My grandfather lived in this house in those days, and Orwell used to talk to him about being a Japanese prisoner of war. Some people think that that’s where Orwell got the idea of those awful tortures—the Room 101 part of 1984. Robin Fletcher, my grandfather, told him about what had happened in the camp. The Japanese were terribly cruel to their prisoners.”

  “I’d like to see the place,” said Jamie. He looked at Isabel, who said that she wanted to go too.

  “I can arrange it,” said Lizzie. “That part of Ardlussa, and the house up there, the Orwell place, belongs to my uncle now. My cousin Rob’s up there at the moment. He could come and fetch us—there are about seven miles of rough track to get to it. You need a four-wheel-drive.” She looked at Isabel, with something of the mocking air of a countrywoman addressing a hopeless urbanite. “That car of yours…”

  “My green Swedish car is very strong,” said Isabel. “But no, I agree, it’s a bit low-slung for this part of the world.”

  “I’ll get in touch with Rob,” said Lizzie. “How about tomorrow? Should we go up there tomorrow?”

  They agreed. After they had had tea, Jamie went out for a walk to the pier, while Isabel and Lizzie stayed in to chat and to feed Charlie, who had woken up and was looking about the room with interest. Lizzie had him on her knee and was entertaining him, rocking him gently backwards and forwards. Isabel watched Jamie through the window; watched as he slapped at his face and ears, under aerial onslaught by unseen attackers. Then he began to run headlong towards the end of the lawn and the pier.

  “You can’t outrun midges,” said Lizzie, laughing.

  “But we do outlive them, don’t we?” said Isabel.

  Lizzie looked at her quizzically.

  “Remember drosophila from biology classes?” Isabel said. “The fruit fly? They had two or three weeks, didn’t they? Two or three weeks to pack everything in. I assume that the Highland midge has much the same. Not much of a lifespan.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel sorry for them,” said Lizzie. “There are limits, you know.”

  Isabel knew. It was her biggest problem, after all: how to draw limits to the extent of one’s sympathy. In the past, she had become involved in all sorts of difficulties by taking upon herself the problems of others; now she had resolved to be more practical about that, and was trying not to get involved in matters that she had no real moral obligation to do anything about. She was trying.

  THEY RETURNED to the hotel in the early afternoon. Lizzie had offered them lunch, but Isabel had not wanted to impose, especially as Lizzie had cleared the following day to take them up to Barnhill. They stayed in the hotel while Charlie slept, and then, in the early evening, they went into the hotel bar before dinner. Jamie ordered a dram of Jura whisky, which he held up to the window and, through the amber liquid, looked at the distillery over the road. The whisky fragmented the lines of the building, making for blocks of white, for impossible angles.

  The hotel barman was friendly. “Edinburgh?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “Sorry.”

  The barman appreciated this. “There are worse places,” he said.

  “I’m sure there are. But I don’t think that one should name them. Even the worst of places may be liked by the people who actually live there.”

  It was while the barman was reflecting on this that Isabel said, “It’s a long shot, but how long have you been here?”

  “I came over from Arran eleven years ago,” said the barman. “I married a Jura girl and we moved over here.”

  Isabel, who had ordered a glass of white wine, raised the glass to her lips. She was aware that Jamie was watching her intently, but she did not look at him. He would not have asked the barman how long he had been there; that was his business, and why, anyway, would one want to know?

  “Do you remember an artist who came here? He was a regular visitor until about eight years ago…”

  The barman, who was drying a glass with a pristine white cloth, held up the glass to examine his handiwork. “McInnes?”

  Isabel stole a glance at Jamie, who was frowning at her. Let him frown, she thought.

  “Yes. Andrew McInnes.”

  The barman put down the glass and fished another one out of the sink. “Aye, I remember him all right. I knew him quite well. He drowned—you know about that?”

  “I do,” said Isabel. “Or I remember reading about it. What exactly happened?”

  The barman began work on the second glass. “The Corryvreckan got him. You know about the Corryvreckan?”

  Isabel said that she did. She had never seen it, she explained, but she knew.

  “You don’t want to see it,” said the barman. “Or rather, if you do see it, you want to be looking at it from dry land. It’s a muckle great whirlpool. The tide comes in, you see, and it sweeps past the top of Jura and Scarba. It creates quite a current, as you can imagine. It’s when that current hits the undersea mountain up there—that’s called the Hag—that you get those great eddies. And a whirlpool in certain conditions. That’s it. That’s the Corryvreckan.”

  Jamie had stopped glaring at Isabel and was listening in fascination. “Would it suck a boat down—even a large one?”

  The barman shrugged. “The Royal Navy used to describe the Gulf of Corryvreckan as unnavigable—the only stretch of water in Britain that they wouldn’t sail into. Now they say that it can be approached only with great caution and with local knowledge. In other words, people who don’t know what they’re doing should keep well away. So, yes, boats can go down. People have died. Including McInnes.”

  They digested this in silence. Then Jamie asked, “I read somewhere—I forget where—about divers going down. Can you actually dive there?”

  The barman looked at Jamie. “Just,” he said. “You have a window at slack tide. Five or ten minutes at the most. There’s a boat that will take you—if you’re experienced enough. They drop a ball and line down and you follow the line down to the top of the pinnacle. You watch your bubbles. If they start to go down instead of up, you know it’s time to get out pretty smartly. Otherwise you’re sucked down six hundred feet.” He paused. “You’re not a diver, are you?”

  Jamie shuddered. “No, thank you.”

  The barman smiled grimly. “Good. If you were, I was going to suggest that you settle your bill before you tried diving on the Corryvreckan.”

  “What happened to McInnes?” Isabel asked.

  “He used to stay up near Inverlussa,” said the barman. “He had an arrangement with somebody up there and they let him a couple of rooms whenever he came to the island. He painted Jura a lot, you know. I hear he was quite famous in places like Edinburgh and London.”

  Isabel wondered if the barman knew what a McInnes would fetch today. “He’s popular,” she said. “Very.”

  “Well, he wasn’t doing too well that last time he came up,” said the barman. “He’d had wife trouble and he was pretty low
about that. But he also told me that his paintings had been slated in the papers. Torn to shreds, he said. He was very cut up.”

  “The London critics,” said Isabel. “They went for him.”

  The barman shook his head. “Poor Andy. Well, they did him in all right. I think he knew fine well what he was doing when he took that boat of his round the corner to the Corryvreckan. He knew. Everybody round here knows, even the bairns. You go and ask one of those wee bairns outside the shop about the Corryvreckan and how you need to keep well away. It’s the first thing anybody tells you about the water round here.”

  For a while Isabel said nothing. Then, “Suicide?”

  “Nobody likes to reach that conclusion,” said the barman. “But sometimes what else are you to think?”

  Jamie took a sip of his whisky. The conversation had depressed him. McInnes was dead. Why go on about it? “This is a lovely light whisky. But they make a peated one too, don’t they?” he suddenly asked the barman.

  The barman glanced over the road at the distillery building. “Yes,” he said. “In fact, Jimmy over there tells me that they’re about to put one in the cask right now. So come back in eight years and you can try it.”

  Isabel was not paying any attention to this discussion of whisky. She was thinking about what the barman had told her and wondering whether McInnes had had life insurance. If he had, then the money would have gone to his wife. Sometimes people change the beneficiary of their life insurance as soon as they leave their spouse; sometimes they forget to do this. A lot of men live to regret not making the change, she thought; or rather, they die not to regret it.

  But why, she went on to ask herself, why choose to commit suicide in a whirlpool?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  LIZZIE HAD PURLOINED one of the estate Land Rovers for the trip to Barnhill. It was normally used for taking deer stalkers up the hill and was equipped with gun and telescope racks. A particularly fine wicker hamper, used for lunches for the sporting clients, was fixed to the floor of the vehicle with leather straps.