The Careful Use of Compliments

by Alexander McCall Smith

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  GRACE WOULD SNATCH any chance of time with Charlie, so she did not hesitate to agree to continue to look after him that afternoon while Isabel attended to what she described as “urgent business.” She needed to go out of town, she explained, up to Perthshire, and might not be back until very late. Would Grace mind staying overnight?

  The prospect of having unfettered possession of Charlie over so long a period clearly appealed. “Don’t you worry,” she said. “You go ahead. Take as long as you like. Charlie and I will go and see my friend Maggie. She’s been ill—nothing infectious, don’t worry—a gallstone, actually, and a visit will cheer her up. She hasn’t met Charlie yet, and she’ll love him. We might even have our dinner down there.”

  Isabel tried to place her. Grace had many friends, whose exploits and affairs she occasionally narrated in detail to Isabel. Now, who was Maggie?

  “You remember Maggie, of course,” Grace went on. “I told you about her. She was a medium once, but she had a terrible fright and gave it up. She saw something unpleasant.”

  “Like Ada Doom,” said Isabel. “Who saw something nasty in the woodshed and never quite recovered. Cold Comfort Farm.” It was very funny, but she did not think that Grace would find it so.

  “No,” said Grace. “Not that. It’s nothing to do with woodsheds. But a very disturbing thing nonetheless. She doesn’t talk about it, but I know she thinks about it from time to time.”

  “That’s the problem with mediums,” Isabel ventured. “The future may be unpleasant, for all we know, and I wonder if that knowledge is really…”

  She did not finish; the message conveyed by Grace’s look was unambiguous. She did not like to discuss her spiritualist beliefs: this was a matter of faith.

  “Oh well,” said Isabel, cheerily. “I hope that Maggie feels better. A gallstone can be very uncomfortable.”

  She had a late lunch and fed Charlie. Then, when he dozed off—he was to have a sleep before the visit to Maggie—she went out to the garage at the side of the house. It was dark inside the small, windowless building, and she had to feel for the switch. But once she had turned it on, the light revealed the mysterious shapes for what they were: the curves of her green Swedish car, the upside-down bunches of last year’s lavender that she had hung to dry from the exposed roof beams and had then forgotten, the neatly rolled coils of hose pipe, the bicycle that she never used now.

  She slipped into the car and savoured, for a moment, the smell of the leather seats. It was a reassuring smell—the smell of something individual, and therefore rare in an age of moulded plastic. Somebody, some Swedish hand, had stitched that leather to make these seats; and it had been done with the same care that had been lavished on the engine, which never let her down, and started now, obediently, making the chassis of the car tremble slightly, as if in anticipation of the trip.

  The traffic was light as she drove up Colinton Road and out onto the Stirling road. To her right, stretching down towards the Firth of Forth, the fields were full of ripening oilseed, patches of extravagant yellow. And beyond them, over the Forth and to the west too, were the hills of Fife and Stirlingshire, blue-green, indistinct in the warm afternoon light. She opened the window on her side of the car and savoured the rush of the wind, heavy with the scent of the country—mown hay, water, the soil itself. The sky, she noticed, had some cloud in it, but this cloud was thin and wispy, travelling fast in some high, invisible airstream; beyond that there was nothing—just an inverted bowl of blue over Scotland.

  She did not rush. It would take her an hour and a half to reach Comrie by the back road past Braco, and she decided that she would enjoy the journey. There was enough to think about, of course, but she knew that if she dwelled too much on what she was doing she would think only of complications and reasons she should not do it at all. She was going in search of Frank Anderson, not because she was in any doubt that he was McInnes, but because she had come this far. She had taken it upon herself to look behind the paintings, and she had found out a closely guarded secret about the artist’s survival. It was not clear to her what it was that had been achieved—other than satisfying the curiosity that had been raised in her when she had first begun to question the paintings’ authenticity. One result was that the paintings had been shown to be completely authentic. When Guy Peploe had looked at them and pronounced them to be by McInnes, he had been absolutely right. His eye had not failed him; he had seen McInnes in the paintings, and indeed McInnes had been there.

  In one sense, Andrew McInnes and his friend Mrs. Buie had not deceived anybody. McInnes had painted a McInnes—he could do nothing other than that, whatever he did—and Mrs. Buie had offered a McInnes for sale, both to the gallery and to the auction house. The only deception—on the part of Mrs. Buie—lay in the fact that the paintings were offered as the work of an artist thought to be dead. She was uncertain what to make of that, but at least she was sure that it would not be repeated; Walter Buie himself had made that clear enough as he saw Isabel out of the house.

  “My mother has never apologised about anything,” he had said, looking back over his shoulder. “I’m ashamed of her. Really ashamed. I know that she’s getting on, but…”

  Isabel looked at him. Peter Stevenson had been right; Walter Buie was an upright man. People might be rude about old-fashioned Edinburgh, but it was upright. Reserved, proud, perhaps; but upright.

  “I feel that I should apologise for her,” Walter went on. “And I promise you this: there’ll be no more McInnes paintings coming from her. I promise you that.”

  “You shouldn’t reproach yourself,” said Isabel. “She did it only to help him. He’s the one who chose to deceive everybody with that disappearance of his. Your mother was only trying to help.”

  Walter thought about this for a moment. “There are times when one shouldn’t help,” he said. Yes, thought Isabel. And perhaps one of those was when your friends ask for major financial guarantees. But then she thought, Of course I would do exactly as he did. I am not one to lecture him on that; I would not turn a friend away either.

  Now, as she turned onto the road that led from the village of Braco across the hills to Comrie, her anticipation over her meeting with McInnes increased—if there was to be a meeting, she reminded herself. She did not know exactly where he lived or whether he would be in when she arrived. It was ridiculous, travelling all that way up into Perthshire without any certainty that the person she was hoping to see would be there; ridiculous, she thought, but that’s what I choose to do because…because I am a free agent and doing something like this is exhilarating and underlines my freedom.

  The road crossed a moor; on either side, rising up gently, dotted with grazing sheep, were the slopes of heather-covered hills. There were no houses, no sheep byres, nothing to show the hand of man but a few fences marching off into the distance. It was a lonely place, but a gentle one, not desolate, as some northern places can be. And then the road began to dip down towards Glenartney and the River Earn, and Comrie was before her, grey-slate roofs among trees, small white-gabled houses, a village typical of that part of Scotland—well ordered, quiet, a place where nothing much may happen, but where that suited the inhabitants well enough.

  She drove into the High Street, the road which ran directly through the village from one end to another, and parked the green Swedish car near the Royal Hotel. On the other side of the road was a newsagent’s shop, its front window filled with local notices stuck to the inside of the glass with pieces of tape. Isabel could never resist these for their social detail. In Bruntsfield the equivalents gave news of vacancies in shared flats, suitable for those with a good sense of humour, nonsmokers, the easygoing; news of virtually new computers being sacrificed; of kittens requiring dog-free homes. Here there were offers of grazing for ponies, of jam-making pans now surplus to requirements, of fishing tackle. The Royal Hotel needed waiters and waitresses and invited applications from “hard-working applicants only” a plaintive
advertisement asked for news of Smoky, “a grey cat with half a tail” who had absented himself from home ten days ago and whose disappearance had led to “heartbreak, regret, tears.” Isabel gazed at that final notice; that a cat should leave such things behind him.

  She went inside. A woman in late middle age, hair tied back, emerged from behind a curtained door. In the background somewhere, music played softly. Mahler, guessed Isabel.

  “Yes? What can I do for you?” The woman’s voice was soft, the accent of somewhere farther west, Oban perhaps.

  Isabel explained that she was looking for Frank Anderson. He lived somewhere nearby, she said, but she was not sure where. Did she know him, by any chance?

  “Not exactly know,” said the woman. “He hardly ever comes into town. But of course I know where he lives. It’s a house along the road, out beyond Cultybraggen. You know the old training camp with all those funny wartime Nissan huts? Out beyond that about two miles. There’s a track up to the left—you don’t see the house from the road. But it’s up there.”

  Isabel thanked her and left. She had asked the woman whether she thought that he would be in and she had replied that it was highly likely. Frank Anderson, she said, appeared never to go anywhere, although she had seen him in Perth once or twice. “He hirples a bit,” she said, using the Scots word for limping. Isabel nodded; the hirple would be why he needed the orthopaedic operation that Mrs. Buie had mentioned—the operation that the state was failing to provide. We care for one another, thought Isabel, but we still don’t care quite enough.

  She drove out of Comrie, back along the road by which she had entered the village and away in the direction of Glenartney. The road was empty, a snake of black tarmac heading up the glen, and without any difficulty she found the turnoff to which the woman in the newsagent’s had referred. The surface of this road—which was really little more than a track—had been neglected, and in one or two places the grass growing in the middle, between the two tyre tracks, brushed against the bottom of the car, making it sound as if Isabel was driving through water.

  The house was unexpected, or at least unexpected in that place. It suddenly appeared from behind a rise, a small white-painted house that would have been a farmhouse or, more likely, a shepherd’s house. In front of the house a wooden high-backed bench had been placed, and beside this a peony was in full flower, a flourish of pale red against the white wall of the building. Isabel noticed that at the side of the house, half obscured by a small trailer, was an old, dusty-looking car.

  She parked and went up to the front door. It was open. There were voices within—a discussion on the radio.

  “Mr. Anderson?”

  Inside the house, the radio was switched off abruptly. A bird called behind her, the clicking sound of an alarmed grouse. She half turned round. The sun was in her eyes.

  “Yes?”

  He was standing before her in the door, and she knew immediately it was McInnes. The face had changed, in a way that she would have found difficult to describe, but behind the beard were the eyes that she recognised from the pictures.

  Isabel stared at him. “Mr. McInnes?”

  McInnes said nothing, but she saw the effect of her words. He seemed to take a step back, but then corrected himself. He closed his eyes.

  “Are you from…a newspaper?” His voice was strange, mellifluous even—the rich voice of a classical actor.

  She shook her head. “No, I’m not from a newspaper. Certainly not.”

  Some of the tension seemed to go from him, but his voice when he spoke was still strained. “Do you want to come in?”

  “Only if you don’t mind,” said Isabel. “I haven’t come to…to be difficult. Believe me, I haven’t.”

  McInnes gestured for her to follow him into the sitting room at the front of the house. It was not a large room, but it had been made to be comfortable. Against one wall was a sofa bed, strewn with cushions; on the walls, Isabel immediately saw, there were paintings by McInnes and others; a paint-bespattered easel was propped up against a wall. It was an artist’s room.

  “I can make you some tea, if you like,” he said. “But please sit down. Anywhere where’s there’s a space.”

  “Thank you.”

  He stood and watched her as she moved a couple of the cushions on the sofa bed. “Why have you come?” he asked.

  She detected a note of fear in his voice. And that was understandable, she thought; I have broken in upon his privacy—the privacy that must have cost him so much to create. And why? Can I even begin to answer that question in a way which will not make me sound intrusive?

  “I saw one of your paintings,” she said. “A recent one. My curiosity was aroused.”

  For a moment he said nothing. “So it’s just curiosity?”

  Isabel nodded. But in what light did that show her?

  McInnes sighed. “I should not have agreed to their being sold,” he said. “I have sold nothing by…by McInnes since he died.”

  “He died?”

  He turned away. “Yes. He did. The man who was McInnes died.”

  Isabel was about to say something, but McInnes continued: “It may sound odd to you, but that’s what it felt like to me. Everything seemed hopeless, tainted. I decided to make a fresh start.” He paused and looked at Isabel as if to challenge her to refute what he had to say. “And I’ve been perfectly happy, you know? Living here as Frank Anderson. Doing a bit of painting. And I’ve even managed to earn a living looking after sheep and driving a tractor for two of the farmers up here.”

  Isabel waited for him to say something more, but he became silent. “I can understand,” she said. “I can understand why people might want to reinvent themselves.”

  “Understand, but not approve?”

  “That depends,” said Isabel.

  “You disapprove of what I did? Misleading everybody into thinking that I had drowned?”

  Isabel shook her head. “Not really.”

  “There was no insurance, or anything like that,” said McInnes. “I did no wrong.”

  “You were presumably mourned,” said Isabel. “Somebody must have suffered.”

  “No,” said McInnes flatly. “I had no close family. My parents were dead. I was an only child.”

  Isabel spoke gently. “But you had a wife.”

  “Had,” said McInnes. “She…she went off with somebody else. And anyway, she hurt me more than I hurt her.”

  There was silence for a moment. Isabel wondered whether McInnes knew that his wife had herself been left by her lover. And if he did know, would it make any difference?

  She looked at him. He was standing in front of the window, his crop of unruly hair outlined in the afternoon light. There was something about him that was indisputably the artist; however hard he sought to change his identity, she thought, that part would remain—that hair, and those eyes. It was the eyes of the artist that could be so very powerful, as they were with Picasso. She had read about one of Picasso’s friends telling the painter not to read a book lest his eyes burn a hole in the paper.

  For a moment she said nothing. Then, very quietly, “And a son too.”

  “A son.” It was not a question; just a statement.

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “Magnus.”

  “That’s the child she had by him,” McInnes said. “Not my son.”

  Isabel was surprised by his response. “You knew about him?”

  When he answered, McInnes’s voice was full of disdain. “She came to see me,” he said. “When her boy was quite small. I told her that I did not wish to change my mind.”

  It took a few moments for Isabel to digest this. So Ailsa knew all along that her husband was still alive; that surprised her. That made at least two people who knew his secret: his wife and Mrs. Buie. And now her.

  McInnes seemed eager to change the subject. “It was Flora Buie who persuaded me to sell those two paintings. I didn’t want to. She went on at me. I have some medical expenses, you see…”

&nbs
p; “I know about that,” said Isabel. “But I suspect that everything will be taken care of.”

  He looked at her quizzically.

  “You see,” explained Isabel, “Walter Buie bought one of the paintings and another collector bought another. Walter Buie knows that the painting is by you…in your posthumous period.” She could not resist the joke, and she was pleased to notice that McInnes smiled. “And he knows that you are still alive. I propose to buy that painting from him, and I know very well that you are still with us. So the money from that transaction is quite untainted. Nobody has been deceived. And the same applies for the collector who bought the other painting. The gallery is going to get in touch with him and tell him what we’ve found out. But at least you’ll get money for the one that was sold at auction.”