The Careful Use of Compliments

by Alexander McCall Smith

  But sweet as such thoughts were, they were not thoughts which a conscientious moral philosopher could entertain. Schadenfreude in any shape or form was, quite simply, wrong. The discomfort of others should never be delighted over, she reminded herself; it was wrong to gloat. But then she saw Lettuce’s face again, caught in a moment of shocked disbelief, and she allowed herself to smile at that. Charlie looked up at her from his supine position and smiled too.

  Isabel’s destination that morning, determined upon after the concert the previous evening at the Queen’s Hall, was Dundas Street and Guy Peploe. She had decided that with Charlie present it would be better to meet at Glass and Thompson, the café a few doors up from the gallery. Charlie could be fed there and would like the colours and bustle of a restaurant.

  She was there first, sitting on one of the bench seats at the back, watching the two young men making coffee and preparing bread and quiches for the lunchtime rush that would come in a couple of hours. Suddenly Guy was in front of her, looking down at Charlie with amusement.

  “Macpherson,” said Isabel. “My maternal grandmother was a Macpherson and we liked that tartan.”

  “That purple is very fine,” said Guy. “He’s quite the lad.”

  He sat down and fixed Isabel with an expectant look.

  “Yes,” she said. “McInnes.”

  Guy looked apologetic. “It’s been sold, I’m afraid,” he said. “A couple of days ago. The buyer I mentioned to you has taken it. It’s going abroad. I’m sorry—had I known that you were still interested…”

  He hesitated, seeing her dismayed expression. “I’m really very sorry, you know,” he said. “I thought that you had decided against it.”

  Isabel was lost in thought. The information that she had to give to Guy would be even less welcome now.

  Guy was solicitous. “Isabel? Are you really upset?”

  “No,” she began. “Not upset. And I wasn’t going to buy it. I came to have a word with you about…well, something that I think I’ve found out about that painting.”

  “I’d be most interested,” said Guy. “As I said to you, I think that it’s a very fine McInnes.”

  Isabel shook her head. “But it isn’t, Guy. It’s not a McInnes at all.”

  The proprietor of the restaurant had caught sight of Isabel and had come to greet her. She asked him for two coffees and then turned back to Guy. “I believe that that painting was painted by a forger by the name of Frank Anderson. I don’t know exactly who he is, or where he is. But that painting was painted by him and not by McInnes. I know that, Guy. How I came to know it is a bit complicated, but I do.”

  The coffees arrived. Guy flattened the milky top of his with a teaspoon, staring into his cup as if to find the solution there. Isabel watched him. “You’re asking me,” he said at last. “You’re asking me to distrust my own judgement on a painting’s authenticity. On what grounds? What are these complicated grounds?”

  She told him, describing the moment when she stood before the fake McInnes in Barnhill, and of how certain she was that it was by the same hand that did the larger painting he had just sold. “You say that you can tell just by looking,” she ended. “Well so can I. In this case, at least.”

  Neither said anything for a full minute. Then Guy sighed. “What do I do now?” He was thinking aloud, rather than asking Isabel. “I suppose I contact the purchaser and tell him that we have some doubts about the painting. And then?” He looked at Isabel, waiting for a suggestion.

  “It’s not just me,” she said. “If I thought I was the only one with reservations about these paintings, then I would feel a little less convinced. But I think that the person who bought the McInnes at auction thinks the same.”

  Guy looked sceptical. “So you’re suggesting that that’s a fake too?”

  “Walter Buie offered to sell it to me more or less immediately after he got hold of it,” said Isabel flatly. “I think he did that because he’d tumbled to the truth and wanted to get rid of it.”

  Guy shook his head. “Walter Buie? Nonsense, Isabel. Walter is…well, he’s just not that type. He simply wouldn’t…”

  “Why would he try to sell it, then?”

  Guy laughed. “I could tell you of numerous occasions when people have changed their minds—more or less immediately. They take the painting home and discover that it’s not right for the room. Somebody makes a remark about it and they decide that it’s not to their taste after all. There are a hundred and one reasons why people change their minds.”

  She listened to this. Of course people could change their minds, but in this case there were just too many factors suggesting otherwise. And Walter Buie might be a paragon of respectability in the eyes of the public, but such people often had a dark, private side which was very different. There were so many cases of that, and this was, after all, Edinburgh, which had spawned the creator of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  “Anyway,” said Guy, “I’ll do what’s necessary. I suspect you’re wrong about all this, but I’ll do my best to find out more—if there’s any more to find out. I’ll tell the purchaser. And I’ll make enquiries about this Frank Anderson.”

  “The name means nothing to you?” asked Isabel.

  Guy looked thoughtful. “It rang a distant bell,” he said. “But I can’t bring anything to mind. I’ll ask about, though, and I’ll let you know.” He paused. “Do you want me to speak to Walter Buie?”

  It was tempting. If Guy did that, then there would be no need for her to do anything further; she would have handed the whole matter over. But Isabel was not one to abandon responsibilities quickly, and so her answer was no; she would do that herself. She had become involved in this business, and she would see it through. It was a question of principle. And it was also, she decided, slightly exciting. Not very exciting; just slightly exciting, which, as she started to walk back up Dundas Street, past the elegant gardens that lay along the north side of Queen Street, was just right for Edinburgh. One did not want too much excitement in a place like Edinburgh. One could go to Glasgow for that, or even London, if one had the urge.

  WHEN SHE RETURNED to the house, Grace whisked Charlie away. She wanted to take him out into the garden, she said, as the weather, which had been fine, could change at any moment.

  “That fox,” said Grace, “has dug up half the small rose bed. You know the one near the garden shed?”

  “The summerhouse?”

  “Whatever you call it. Yes, there. He’s dug a great big hole and put the soil all over the lawn.”

  Isabel peered out the window. The grass near the summerhouse certainly looked darker. “He must be thinking of a new burrow,” she said. “Even foxes must have their plans for the future. Presumably they face the same sort of dilemmas that we do: renovate, or dig a new burrow.”

  Grace stared at Isabel with a look that was half disbelief, half scorn. “They don’t think that way,” she said after a while.

  Isabel returned the stare, but did not say anything. The trouble with Grace, she thought, is that she is so literal. But that was the trouble with most people, when it came down to it; there were very few who enjoyed flights of fantasy, and to have that sort of mind—one which enjoyed dry wit and understood the absurd—left one in a shrinking minority. Isabel remembered being at a conference at Christ Church in Oxford and sitting next to a Japanese woman over breakfast in the Great Hall. The Japanese woman, who was accompanying her husband, a philosopher, to the conference—Kant for Our Times—had suddenly turned to her and said, “I am so old-fashioned. I am a dodo.”

  The heartfelt comment had been triggered by the hall and its table lights, by its paintings of past masters and benefactors of the college, by the presence of what seemed like a quieter past, and Isabel had felt a surge of sympathy for the other woman.

  “I am sure that there must be a club for dodos,” she said. “The dodos club. And it would meet in places like this.”

  The woman’s eyes had widened, and then she had burst out
laughing. “The dodos club! That’s so clever.”

  It was not very clever, thought Isabel, but for a moment there had been a sense of contact across cultures, of kindred spirits reaching out to one another. And that happened from time to time, when she met somebody who could look at the world in the same way and see the joke. But not now, in this conversation with Grace about Brother Fox and the mess that he had made of the small rose bed.

  “We’ll have to watch that fox when Charlie’s around,” said Grace.

  Isabel frowned. Was Grace suggesting that Brother Fox would harm Charlie in some way? Did foxes do such things?

  It was as if Grace had heard the unspoken question. “They carry off lambs,” she said darkly.

  The thought that anything should eat Charlie appalled Isabel; even the thought that a dangerous world should lie ahead of him, filled with creatures that might wish to harm him, was in itself bad enough, but eat…

  “Brother Fox would not harm him,” she said. “Foxes don’t bite unless you corner them. And nor for that matter do wolves.” Although at the back of her mind there was a vague memory of reading of a fox that did bite a child, in London. But that must have been a very stressed urban fox; Brother Fox was not like that.

  If Grace had been prepared to accept this defence of foxes, she was not prepared to do so with wolves. “Wolves do,” she said simply. “Wolves are very dangerous. I have a sister in Canada.”

  Isabel raised an eyebrow. The fact that one had a relative in Canada did not, she felt, automatically entitle one to pronounce on the subject of wolves, even if it gave one authority in some other areas.

  “Wolves,” said Isabel, “have never been recorded as attacking man. They keep well away.” She felt tempted to add that she had been in Canada herself and had never seen a wolf, which was true and would therefore add empirical strength to the claim that wolves avoided people, but the full truth might require her to add that she had only been in Toronto, which somewhat diminished the force of the observation.

  “Well, all I’m saying,” said Grace, picking up Charlie, “is that we would be better off without that fox. Particularly with Charlie. That’s all I’m saying.”

  The matter had been dropped, and Isabel had gone off to her study to deal with the mail. The fact that she had thought that she was soon to stop being the editor of the Review meant that she had let things slip, and the unopened correspondence had mounted up. Now she would have to think again in terms of future issues, have to deal with the unsolicited submissions, and would have to think, too, of the appointment of a new editorial board. She already had her list and was adding to it: Jim Childress in Charlottesville would be a great catch, and Julian Baggini, too, who already edited The Philosophers’ Magazine but who might be persuaded to join. They would all be her friends, which would make the task of consulting the board so much more pleasant—no Lettuce or Dove. Of Lettuce and Dove I am freed, she said to herself, savouring the words, which sounded so like a line—and title—of a sixteenth-century English madrigal in the Italian style. It could be sung, perhaps, by the Tallis Scholars:

  Of Lettuce and Dove I am freed

  And of their schemings no more shall be heard

  For they are gone with the morning dew

  Yea, Lettuce and Dove are both departed…

  There was a letter from Dove.

  Dear Miss Dalhousie,

  I have heard from Professor Lettuce that you have persuaded the owners of the Review to sell it to you. I have heard, too, that you will be appointing a new editorial board and that it is unlikely to include current members. I am, of course, sorry that you are seeing fit to dispose of the services of those who have given so much time to the Review over the years and who have always had its best interests at heart. I suppose that this is the prerogative of those who have the economic power to acquire assets which should, in a better-ordered world, be owned and operated for the common weal. However, I must say that I am surprised that a moral philosopher, which you claim to be (although I note that you have no academic position in that field), should act in a way which is more befitting of the petulant proprietor of a chain of newspapers. But that, I regretfully conclude, is how business is conducted today. I wish you, nonetheless, a successful further tenure of the editorial chair to which you have, it seems, become stuck.

  Yours sincerely, Christopher Dove

  She read the letter, and then reread it. It was, she had to admit, a small masterpiece of venom. To anybody who was unaware of the background, and who therefore did not know that the letter was from the pen of an arch-schemer, it might even have seemed poignant. But to Isabel, who knew what lay behind it, it was pure cant. Cant for Our Times, she thought.

  She laid the letter to one side and picked up the envelope. Dove, she remembered, was famously keen on recycling and reused envelopes, sticking new address labels on them and sealing the flap with adhesive tape. Sure enough, this envelope had been used before and had a small label with her name and address stuck on the front. Idly she held the envelope up to the light and saw the writing underneath. The envelope in its first incarnation had been addressed to Dove at his home address. “Professor and Mrs. C. Dove” read the original.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THERE WERE two difficult tasks now. One was to speak to Cat—not an easy thing to do in her niece’s current mood, but rendered doubly difficult by the Dove problem—and the other was to visit Walter Buie. She had spent the previous evening in a state of anxious anticipation, trying to concentrate on reading, then work, then a television adaptation of a novel she liked, but had failed in all three, as her mind kept returning to the difficult encounters that would take place the next morning. She had telephoned Jamie, who had been working late in rehearsal and had been unable to be present for Charlie’s bath time. She had decided that she would tell him about Dove and Cat and seek his advice, but then had changed her mind. And then she decided that she could not broach the subject of her impending meeting with Walter Buie, but again had changed her mind. Jamie would tell her to avoid further involvement with that matter now that she had passed on her misgivings to Guy Peploe. She had found no comfort there, and had been reduced to saying to Charlie, as she picked him up to change him, “What am I to do, Charlie? What do you think?” But Charlie had simply gurgled in a noncommittal fashion, which provided at least some reassurance. It would be many years yet, she thought, before Charlie started to disagree with her.

  Cat was first on the list, because it was potentially the most painful encounter, and it would be best, she thought, to get it over and done with. In spite of Cat’s recent jauntiness, Isabel felt that their underlying relationship seemed so bad now that any further deterioration was unlikely. They still spoke to one another, but Isabel could never gauge in advance what Cat’s mood would be. Sometimes it was as if nothing had happened, but for the most part there was a simmering unforgiveness. If she had thought that this would last forever, Isabel would have felt despondent; but she knew that Cat would come out of this, as she had done before. There would eventually be a reconciliation following a gesture of some sort from her niece. Last time, it had been a basket of provisions from the delicatessen, left on the doorstep as a peace offering, and largely consumed by Brother Fox, who had found it before Isabel had. She thought that for him it must have been akin to the cargo awaited by the members of a Pacific island cargo cult, unasked for, delivered by an unseen hand.

  Charlie remained behind with Grace—one did not take babies into a war zone—and Isabel walked, sunk in thought, along Merchiston Crescent to the delicatessen in Bruntsfield Place. Cat was behind the counter when she entered; there was no sign of Eddie or of any customers.

  She received a reasonably warm welcome—the Dove effect, Isabel thought—and Cat offered to make her a cup of coffee. “Eddie’s gone to the dentist,” she said. “I asked him when he had last been and he said two years ago. I made the appointment myself.”

  “You shouldn’t have to,” said Isabel. �
��One’s own teeth are enough to look after. One should not have to worry about the teeth of others.”

  Cat smiled. “But we do, don’t we? I can imagine that you worry about others’ teeth. It’s exactly the sort of thing you worry about.”

  “‘The loss of one tooth diminishes me,’” mused Isabel. “‘For I am involved in mankind.’”

  “John Donne,” said Cat, looking triumphant. “You think that I don’t know anything. But I do know about John Donne.”

  “Well done. But I have never thought of you as one who knows nothing about Donne.”

  “Good.”

  They looked at one another for a moment and Isabel saw in Cat’s eyes a yearning that they should return to their previous, easy ways with each other; when jokes like this, absurd, silly, could be made without thinking. For there was love there—of course there was—and it was a canker of resentment that had obscured it, a canker that could so easily be put out of the way, altogether excised. But now she had to risk provoking it again, by deliberately rubbing in salt, and she had no alternative, she thought. She had to warn Cat about Dove. She had warned her before about a man; now she had to do it again.

  She looked down at the counter. There was a fragment of cheese that had been caught at the edge, a tiny bit of blue cheese, a miniature colony of organisms detached from its polis. She reached forward and wiped it away. “Christopher Dove,” she said.

  Cat smiled at her. “Christopher. Yes.”

  Isabel was not sure what to make of that. But now she had to say it. She could not put it off. “You know he’s married?”