The Careful Use of Compliments Read online

  She took an envelope off the top of the pile and slit it open. “Dear Ms. Dalhousie, The enclosed paper may be suitable for publication in the Review of Applied Ethics and I should be grateful if you would consider it. The title is ‘The Concept of Sexual Perversion as an Oppressive Weapon’ and in it I examine some ideas which Scruton advanced in his book Sexual Desire. As you know, the concept of perversion has been subjected to critical reassessment…”

  She sighed and laid the paper aside. She received numerous submissions on the subject of sex; indeed, some philosophers seemed to imagine that applied ethics was more or less exclusively concerned with sex. Often these papers were interesting, but on other occasions they were distinctly scatological and she wondered whether she should be reading them with gloves on. The absurdity of this struck her as quickly as the thought itself came to her, but it was amusing to think of editors handling such material with the protection of gloves, as if the grubbiness of the subject matter might rub off or infection might leap from the page.

  A few days previously she had received a paper entitled “On the Ethics of Pretending to Be Gay When You Are Not.” If she had been taken by surprise by this title, then that was clearly the author’s intention. We expect the issue to be the ethics of pretending to be straight when you are not, he wrote, but that assumes that there is something shameful about not being straight. The conventional question, then, connives in the marginalisation of the gay, and therefore any consideration of this form of passing should be from a viewpoint which recognises that some may wish to pass for gay rather than the other way round.

  She smiled at the recollection of that paper, which she had circulated to the members of the editorial board for their verdict. The board would recommend publication, Isabel thought, even if they were not impressed by the content. “That’s exactly the sort of paper we should encourage,” one member of the board had already written. “We need to show people that we are not, as some suggest, old-fashioned in our approach.” This comment had come from Professor Christopher Dove, a professor of philosophy at a minor English university, and a man with a reputation for radicalism. It had been a dig at Isabel, who was herself thought by Dove to be old-fashioned. And she had risen to the occasion in her reply. “Thank you for your support,” she had written. “I wondered whether members of the board were ready for this sort of thing. I’m glad to see they now are.”

  She picked up the next item, a bulky brown envelope which would contain, she thought, a catalogue of some sort. It did: Lyon & Turnbull, Forthcoming Sales. Lyon & Turnbull were a prominent Edinburgh auction house at whose sales Isabel had bought the occasional item, thus entitling her to their catalogues. This one was for a sale of furniture described as “good antique furniture” and paintings, neither of which Isabel actually needed—in fact the house had too much furniture and too many paintings. But she found auction catalogues irresistible, even if she had no intention of buying anything.

  She skipped through the pages of furniture, pausing only to study more closely a set of library steps in mahogany, with brass fittings. The estimate seemed discouragingly high, and she moved on to the paintings. That was where she stopped. Lot number 87 was a painting of a man standing on a shore, a stack of lobster creels just behind him, and behind the creels a mountain rising sharply. It was unmistakably the landscape of the Western Highlands of Scotland, with its grey rocks protruding from thin soil, the verdant green of the grass, the gentle, shifting light; and the man’s face, with its weather-beaten look, further proclaimed the place. She looked at the description underneath: Andrew McInnes, Scottish, b. 1958, Sea Livelihood. Below this, in smaller type, the auctioneers went on to explain: “McInnes was perhaps the most talented of the students to have passed through the Edinburgh College of Art in the last years of Robin Philipson’s tenure as principal. He rapidly acquired a substantial reputation, and this was reflected in the prices achieved by his paintings during the years immediately before his death.”

  Isabel studied the painting intently. It was the expression on the man’s face that interested her. This was a man who knew hardship, but was not bowed by it. And there was a kindness too, a gentleness that was sometimes squeezed out of those who wrested their living from a hard place—the sea or a windswept island.

  She reached for the telephone and dialled Jamie’s number. At the other end of the line, the phone rang for a long time and she was about to put the handset down when Jamie suddenly answered. He sounded breathless.

  “You’ve just run up the stairs,” she said. “Do you want me to call back later?”

  “No, I’ll be all right. I heard it when I was on the way up and then I couldn’t get my key into the lock for some reason. But it’s all right now.”

  Isabel looked at her watch. It was eleven thirty. She could put Charlie into his baby sling and take him with her; he slept very contentedly in the sling because, she thought, he could hear her heartbeat and he imagined he was back in the womb, back to the simpler life that perhaps he remembered—just—and missed.

  “Would you like to see your son for lunch?” she asked.

  “Of course,” Jamie answered quickly. She knew he would say that, and it gave her satisfaction. He loved Charlie, which was what she wanted. It did not matter whether or not he loved her—and she did not know whether he did—the important thing was that he loved Charlie.

  “And we could drop into Lyon & Turnbull beforehand,” Isabel suggested. “There’s something I want to look at.”

  “I’ll meet you there,” said Jamie.

  She put the telephone down and smiled. I am very fortunate, she thought. I have a child, and I also have a lover who is the father of the child. I have a large house and a job that allows me to do philosophy. I am happy.

  She moved to the window and looked out into the garden. The summer profusion of shrubs made shadows on the ground below. There was a fuchsia, laden with red and purple flowers, and beside it a large rhododendron bush, popular with small birds. When they alighted on the foliage of the rhododendron, these birds made the topmost branches bend almost imperceptibly under their tiny weight. But now the lower branches, those right down by the ground, moved suddenly, and for another reason. And I have a fox, she whispered. I have a fox who watches over my life.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SO,” SAID JAMIE. “Which one is it?”

  He asked the question in a way which suggested that he was not really interested in the answer. And the reason for that was in his arms: Charlie, his son, looking up at his father’s face, struggling to focus.

  “Over there,” said Isabel, pointing to the other side of the saleroom. “I’ve already had a quick look at it.”

  Jamie hardly heard the answer. He had strapped Charlie’s sling onto his front now, and was gently tickling the child under the chin. “He likes that,” he said. “Look, he’s going all cross-eyed.”

  Isabel smiled indulgently. “Yes. He’s pleased to see you. That is, if he can see you properly, which I’m never really sure of. I suppose he can, even if colours are still a bit confusing at that age.”

  “He knows me,” said Jamie mock-defensively. “He knows exactly who I am. If he could say Daddy he would.”

  Isabel took Jamie by the arm and steered him gently across the room to stand in front of a large painting in a gilded frame. “What do you think of this?”

  Jamie looked at the painting, watched by Isabel. “I rather like it,” he said. “Look at that man’s face. Look at the expression.”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “It says rather a lot, doesn’t it?”

  Jamie glanced away for a moment; Charlie had seized the finger of his right hand and was attempting to put it in his mouth. “You mustn’t,” he said. “Unsanitary.”

  “Everything about children is unsanitary,” said Isabel. She turned back to the painting and pointed to its top right-hand corner. “Look over there. He’s really caught that west coast light.”

  Jamie leaned forward to peer at the canvas
. “The Inner Hebrides?” he said. “Skye?”

  “Probably Jura,” said Isabel. “He lived there for a while. Jura scenes became his trademark, rather like Iona and Mull were for Samuel Peploe.”

  “Who?” asked Jamie. “Who was he?”

  Isabel handed him the catalogue. “Andrew McInnes. There’s something about him here. Look.”

  Jamie took the catalogue and read the few lines of description. Then he handed it back to Isabel and looked at her enquiringly. She noticed his eyes, which were filled with light; that brightness which attracted her so strongly, which spoke of a lambent intelligence.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You must be wondering what I’m going on about.” As she spoke to Jamie, she reached out and touched Charlie, who was gazing intently at her. “Do you know that painting I have on the stairs, halfway up? On the landing? It’s by the same Andrew McInnes. It was one of his earliest works. My father bought it.”

  Jamie looked thoughtful. “Kind of,” he said hesitantly. “I think so. On the left as you go up?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “That’s it.”

  “I haven’t really studied it,” said Jamie. “I suppose it’s just one of those things one walks past.”

  Isabel gestured towards the painting. “It’s much smaller than this, of course. About one quarter the size. But it’s exactly the same subject. Almost identical. That man and those hills. The lobster creels. Everything.”

  Jamie shrugged. “Artists paint the same thing over and over again, don’t they? The same models. The same scenes. They can be creatures of habit, can’t they?”

  Isabel agreed. There was nothing surprising in finding paintings that were very much the same as one another, particularly if one was smaller. Her small painting was evidently a recurrent image in the artist’s mind, and that was nothing unusual. What she wanted from Jamie, though, was encouragement to bid for the larger version. Should she?

  “It’s up to you,” said Jamie. “But…look at the estimate. Twenty-five thousand. Isn’t that rather a lot?”

  “They know what they’re talking about,” said Isabel. “He’s sought after. He’s not cheap.”

  Jamie frowned. “But twenty-five thousand…” He was trying to recall what he made each year as a part-time teacher of bassoon and an occasional performer. It was not much more than that, if it was any more at all; of course there was the small legacy he had received from his aunt, and the flat, which had come from her too, but even then he had to watch his money carefully, as most people did. He knew that Isabel was not hard up, but to be able to spend twenty-five thousand pounds on a painting astonished him. People paid that, of course; some considerably more. But these were not people he knew; that was the difference. He glanced at her, as if with new eyes; she did not look wealthy, and there was none of that irritating self-assuredness that sometimes hung about the rich, an air of power, of being able to take things for granted. Jamie had noticed that in the parents of some of his pupils. They were often well-heeled for the simple reason that the bassoon was an expensive instrument and there were many parents who could not afford to buy one. Most of these people were modest in their manner, but some condescended to him or showed a general arrogance in the way they expected everyone to fit in with their whims. The mothers in the expensive four-wheel-drive vehicles were the worst, he had decided. Why did they need these fuel-hungry contraptions in their urban lives? To barge their way past other, smaller cars, or to make a statement about who they were and what they had?

  One of these mothers was interested in him. He had noticed it because she had made it so obvious, arriving early to collect her son from his lesson in the flat—the boy could easily have gone downstairs to meet his mother on the street, as the others did, but she came up, rang the bell, and waited in the kitchen until her son’s lesson was finished. Then she engaged Jamie in conversation, quizzing him about her child’s progress, while the boy himself lurked in the background, clearly embarrassed, eager to leave.

  She stood close to Jamie while she spoke to him; the sort of invasion of the unspoken limits of bodily space that can be so disconcerting. He moved away slightly, but she followed him, inching nearer. He glanced at his pupil, as if for rescue from that quarter, but the boy looked away, his embarrassment compounded by the complicity that had now arisen between them.

  Jamie’s deliberate distance seemed only to spur this woman on, and she had invited him to join her for coffee after the lesson. He had replied that he could not, as there was another pupil, and then he added, “And I don’t think it would be a good idea anyway.” She had looked at him mischievously, and then, as if oblivious to the presence of her son on the other side of the room, had said, “It may not be a good idea, but it’s always fun.” After that, he had asked her not to come up to fetch her son, but to wait for him downstairs.

  She had been outraged. “Who exactly do you think you are?” she had hissed.

  “Your son’s bassoon teacher,” he said.

  “Ex–bassoon teacher,” she said, and she had withdrawn her son from further lessons.

  Isabel had laughed when she heard of this. “I can see her,” she said. “I can just see her saying that.”

  “But I haven’t told you who she was,” Jamie protested.

  “But of course I know,” said Isabel. “Remember that this is Edinburgh. I can work it out. It’s…” And she had named the name, and got it right, to Jamie’s astonishment.

  “Too much money,” Isabel went on. “She’s incapable of handling it. She thinks that it buys bassoon lessons—and the bassoon teacher.”

  Isabel was not like that at all. But now this talk of spending twenty-five thousand pounds on a painting made Jamie feel vaguely uneasy.

  “Should you spend that much?” he asked, but he went on to answer his own question immediately. “Of course, if you can afford it, then that’s your business.”

  Isabel detected a note of disapproval in his tone; she had not expected this reaction. They had never discussed money; the subject simply had not arisen between them. And if there was a yawning disparity between their respective financial positions—which there was—it seemed to her that it was quite irrelevant. Isabel had never judged people by their means; it simply was not an issue with her. But at the same time, she realised that it could be difficult for Jamie. Money gave power over people, no matter how tactful one was about it. With money you could get the attention of others; you could ask them to do things.

  “I can afford it,” she said quietly. “If I want it. But the problem is…well, I feel guilty.” She paused. “And you’re not helping much.”

  He frowned. “Not helping? I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You disapprove of the fact that I can buy that,” said Isabel. “You’re making it rather obvious.”

  Jamie’s surprise was unfeigned. “Why should I disapprove? It’s your money. What you do with it—”

  “Is my business,” Isabel interjected. “If only that were the case. But it isn’t, you know. People watch what other people do with their money. They watch very closely.”

  Jamie shrugged his shoulders. “Not me,” he said. “I don’t. If you think that I do, then you’re wrong. You really are.”

  Isabel watched his expression as she spoke. She had misjudged him; what he said was true—he had no interest in what she did with her money; there was no envy there.

  “Let’s not argue,” she said. “Especially in front of Charlie.”

  Jamie smiled. “No. Of course.” The discussion had made him feel uncomfortable, as it had raised something which had not been present in their relationship before: a financial dimension. As they left the auction house, with Charlie returned to his sling on Isabel’s front, Jamie thought about what had been said. And there was something else worrying him, something else that had not been spoken about but that had to be discussed at some point. Who was financially responsible for Charlie? He had not thought about this, in the drama of Isabel’s pregnancy, but a few d
ays previously it had occurred to him that now there would be bills. He had seen an article in the paper about the cost of a child until it reached the age of independence, and the figure had been daunting. Tens—scores—of thousands of pounds were needed to feed, clothe, and educate a child, and the age of independence itself seemed to be getting higher and higher. Twenty-five-year-olds still lived with, and on, their parents, and the paper cited one case of a daughter of thirty-two, still in full-time education, still being supported by her father. Was Charlie going to be that expensive? And if he was, would he be able to pay his share?

  They were going for lunch in the restaurant at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, which was on Queen Street, a short walk from the auction house. Outside, in spite of the fact that it was June, the wind had a note of chill in it, a wind from the east, off the North Sea. Isabel looked up at the sky, which was clear but for a few scudding clouds, wispy, high-level streaks of white. “It’s so bright,” she said, shivering as a gust of wind swept up Broughton Street and penetrated the thin layer of her jersey. “Look at that sky. Look up there.”

  Jamie stared up into the blue. He saw a vapour trail, higher than the clouds, on the very edge of space, it seemed, heading westwards towards America or Canada. He thought of the shiny thin tube suspended, against gravity, in that cold near-void; he thought of the people inside. “What do you think of when you see those jets?” he asked Isabel, pointing up at the tiny glint of metal with its white wisp of cotton wool trailing behind it.

  Isabel glanced up. “Trust,” she said. “I think of trust.”

  Jamie looked puzzled. “Why would you think of that?” Then he started to smile; he knew the answer, and Isabel was right. “Yes, I see.”

  They turned the corner onto Queen Street. On the other side of the street, a block away, rose the red sandstone edifice of the Portrait Gallery, an ambitious neo-Gothic building which Isabel had always liked in spite of what she called its “Caledonian spikiness.” The gallery restaurant, tucked away and old-fashioned, was popular with people who wanted to sit, four to a table, in high-backed chairs reminiscent of suburban dining rooms. Isabel liked it because of its welcoming atmosphere and the overflow paintings from the main gallery hanging on its walls.