The Careful Use of Compliments id-4 Read online

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h She sighed. “Work,” she said. She had never sighed over the prospect of work before; but now there was Charlie.

  As Grace took Charlie from the room, Isabel sat down at her pile of mail. It had grown that morning by five letters, pushed through the letter box by the postman on his morning round, all of them concerned with Review affairs. She disposed of the top two quickly. One was a request for a further supply of offprints of her article by an author who had lost her carefully husbanded supply which the Review gave on publication. The offprints had been mislaid in the course of a move following the breakup of a relationship. Isabel had stumbled over this. Why was it necessary for her to be told that the move had been prompted by this? Was it an attempt to engage her sympathy so that the offprints would be given free, or was it an excuse for the loss itself—a life thrown into disarray by the bad behaviour of another? Isabel looked up at the ceiling and pondered this; if one was to err, then it was better to err on the side of generosity.

  The offprints would be free, and she wrote a note to that effect.

  The second letter asked why a book review of Virtues in a Time of Trial had not yet appeared; that, too, was easily dealt with.

  The reviewer had died, of old age as it happened, before writing the review. A new reviewer had been approached and the review would appear in due course.

  Ten minutes: that was all it took to read and reply to these letters. At this rate, Isabel thought, she would be finished in an hour, possibly even earlier. But then came an innocent-looking envelope, addressed in handwriting, and postmarked London.

  She slit open the envelope and began to read the letter. The letterhead, once exposed, told her who the sender was—the oddly named Professor Lettuce, professor of moral philosophy at one of the smaller universities in London, and chairman of T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

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  the Review’s editorial board. In general, Robert Lettuce played a small role in the affairs of the Review, being content to allow Isabel to run everything. She reported to him and the board from time to time and he, in due course, reported to the Review’s owners, a small academic publishing firm. This firm published textbooks in veterinary science and biology; the Review of Applied Ethics came into its possession almost by accident when it bought the building occupied by the private trust that owned the Review. In the trustees’ relief at selling a building that had been a drain on finances, the Review had been thrown into the sale as a gesture of goodwill. The new owners were lukewarm about their ownership and had occasionally mentioned their willingness to sell the Review, should a suitable purchaser be found. But no purchaser had ever expressed more than a passing interest in a concern that made very little profit, if any at all. So there had been no change in ownership.

  She read halfway through the letter, put it down for a few moments, and then picked it up to read the remainder.

  Dear Isabel,

  As you know, I’ve enjoyed working with you over the last five years. [He’s going to resign, she thought as she read this.] We have had very few disagreements, and I must say that I have always been very impressed with your editing of the Review. Under your editorship, the circulation has increased considerably—some would say dramatically—and the journal has been redesigned.

  Remember how awfully dull it looked when we first started, with that curious mauve cover? [Actually, thought Isabel, you were against the change. I had to 3 6

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h persuade you; you liked mauve, as I recall.] And I have always appreciated the single theme idea, which was your brainchild and which has been, in my view, a great success.

  But, Isabel, as I am sure that you appreciate, there is always a case for change, as well as for variety, and at the prompting of a couple of members of the board I carried out a sounding of the others to see whether people felt that it was time for a fresh incumbent of the editorial chair. I did not imagine that there would be much support for this, but unfortunately I was proved to be quite wrong on this. The view, I’m afraid, was pretty much unanimous: it’s time for a change.

  I know that you will be both surprised and upset by this: both of these reactions were mine too. But I know, too, that you will understand that in voting for a change the members of the board are in no sense passing ad-verse judgement on your considerable achievements at the helm of the Review.

  There was some enthusiasm for an immediate change of editor, but I took the view that the best thing to do would be for you to remain in the post for the rest of the year (if you are willing) and then we can start the next calendar year with the new person. That will give you time to look for something else, and also will provide continuity, which is so important.

  As to your successor, Christopher Dove has offered his services and this choice is broadly acceptable to the rest of the board. No doubt you and he will be able to get together at some point to discuss the technicalities of the changeover.

  T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

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  And there the letter had ended, with Lettuce’s signature underneath and a pencilled postscript asking Isabel whether she had read the “wonderfully perceptive” obituary of the reviewer who had died before getting round to reviewing Virtues in a Time of Trial. “An excellent piece,” wrote Lettuce. “Did you know he was an accomplished violinist and a glider pilot in his earlier years?”

  Isabel’s emotions were complex. She was shocked by the unexpectedness of the news, by the sheer surprise of being told that what she had taken for granted, her job, was being taken from her. Then there was a sense of disgust at the obvious plotting that must have been going on. Dove—he was the one, she decided. It had occurred to her before this that Dove probably coveted her post as editor; he was ambitious and the editorship of an established journal would help him on his climb up the pole of academic success. He was currently at an obscure university, one so low in the pecking order that it appeared in no tables at all. She had been told by a friend who knew him that he really would like to be elsewhere altogether, at Magdalen College, Oxford, of which he was a graduate. That involved an ascent on an Alpine scale, and the editorship of the Review would help. He would have been in touch with other members and poured poison in their ears, dangling some sort of carrot perhaps, cajoling, and enough of them had been craven enough to go along with this. Not one, she thought, not one had contacted her to discuss the issue; that was almost the most difficult thing to bear.

  And as for Lettuce himself, he might have telephoned to break the news personally, he might even have bothered to travel to Edinburgh to discuss it with her. Instead, he had written this relatively impersonal letter—a document which 3 8

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h amounted to a letter of dismissal. It had been made worse by the fact that he had appended a chatty postscript. That is a hall-mark of guilt, she thought; he who feels acutely guilty attempts to establish that all is actually well by resorting to the quotidian remark that has nothing to do with the real business. That is exactly what Lettuce had done.

  Isabel let the letter drop to the floor. It fell facedown, but the ink from the signature had seeped through the cheap paper to provide faint mirror-writing on the back. Ecuttel. That was a far better name for him, far more sinister than Lettuce. Ecuttel and his lackey, Evod. The thought made her feel slightly better, but only slightly; engaging in such childish fantasies is merely a way of protecting ourselves from the sense of hurt that comes from betrayal or injustice. But it works only for a moment or two.

  G R AC E WA S I N T H E K I T C H E N , sitting in front of Charlie, who was strapped into a reclining baby chair placed on top of the table. She was holding a knitted figure of what looked like a policeman and moving it up and down to get Charlie’s attention.

  She looked up when Isabel came into the room but then trans-ferred her gaze back to the baby.

  “Fed up already?” Gra
ce said. “Look at this. He loves this little policeman. I think it must be the dark blue. He thinks it very funny.”

  Isabel nodded. She looked at Charlie, and then looked back at Grace. She wanted to say to her, “I’ve been sacked. I’m the victim of . . .” But what was she the victim of? A palace coup was perhaps the best way of describing it. Or maybe she should call it a putsch, which had a more strongly pejorative air to it, a hint of violent overthrow. That was perhaps overstating matters a bit . . .

  T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

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  “I’ve been—”

  Grace interrupted her. “I think he’s tired,” she said. “Look, his eyes are shutting. There he goes.”

  No, thought Isabel. I’m not going to tell her. I shall keep this humiliation private. Then, later this year, I shall simply announce that I have given up the editorship of the Review, which will be true, and if anybody should ask the reason I shall tell them. But until then I shall continue as before.

  Grace now turned to Isabel. “Sorry, you’ve been what?”

  “I’ve been thinking of going into town,” said Isabel. “If you’re happy enough looking after Charlie.”

  Grace reassured her that this would be fine.

  “Thank you,” said Isabel, and left the kitchen, lest Grace should see the tears that had come into her eyes. She had never been dismissed before and was unused to the particular form of pain it entailed. It was as bad as being left by a lover, or almost as bad, she thought, and in her case she did not even depend on the tiny salary she drew as editor, an honorarium really. What, she wondered, would it be like to lose the job that brought food to the family table, as happened to people all the time? That was a sobering thought, sufficient to forestall the self-pity of one in her position—and it did.

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  SHE WALKED INTO TOWN. Isabel very rarely took her green Swedish car into the city because of parking problems. She suspected, though, that she would use it more now that Charlie had arrived; babies required such a quantity of paraphernalia that the car, she thought, would become more and more tempting. She believed in public transport, and acted accordingly, but she was not one to become obsessed with the issue of her carbon footprints, or to lecture others on theirs. And the green Swedish car, she reminded herself, was green in another sense—unlike those intimidating machines which some people drove; those monsters with their tanklike bulk from which small, urban people stared down. Isabel had read of a man who had entered on a private crusade against these vehicles, attach-ing notes to their windscreens telling their owners just how irre-sponsible their choice of car was. She could understand that, even if she could never do it herself: it was one thing to think such things, another to tell other people what one thought.

  But concern for the environment was not the only reason she chose to go by foot that morning; she wanted to put her thoughts in order, and it would be easier to do that while walking, making her way across the Meadows, the large park that T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

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  divided the Old Town of Edinburgh from its southern suburbs.

  She had taken that path so many times before, and in so many moods. She remembered once, after a concert in the Queen’s Hall, she had walked home fighting back tears and had been stopped by a young woman and asked if she was all right. Those tears had been for the impossibility of her relationship with Jamie, whom she had seen during the concert intermission with a young woman she had assumed to be his girlfriend. It had never occurred to her then that not all that long afterwards they would become lovers and she would have his son. She would not have believed it; would have considered it utterly impossible. And now . . .

  Nor would she have dreamed, she thought, that she would be walking across the Meadows, brooding with bitterness over her dismissal from the job to which she had devoted so much.

  This would not have occurred to her because she would never have imagined that anybody else would actually want to be the editor of the Review. Nor would she have imagined that anybody would have thought that she had done the job badly. She had not. She had made a success of it, and had taken very little for her efforts.

  Well, now it had happened and she wondered whether she should simply accept her dismissal as a fait accompli, or whether she should fight back. One thing she could do was write to Professor Lettuce, asking him to explain exactly why he thought a change of editor would be a good thing. Would Christopher Dove adopt a different editorial policy, and if so, how would that policy differ from her own? Of course he would find the words to deal with that by talking about something else and not answering her questions—he was very skilled at that—

  so perhaps it would simply be a waste of time.

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h which giant inverted whale jaws served as an arch. Many Scots had been whalers, and these bones had been presented to the city by Shetland and Fair Isle knitters who had used them in an exhibition in the nineteenth century. Isabel thought that knitting and whaling did not sit together well; she did not like this reminder of something that she would have preferred to forget—our relentless pursuit of those gentle creatures, almost to the point of extinction. But the city was full of uncomfortable reminders of how things in the past were otherwise than one might wish they had been: memorials to wars which should never have been fought, statues of men who presided over so many remote cruelties—that was what came of having an imperial past. And Scotland had been an active participant in all that, supplying many of the soldiers, the engineers, and the officials who kept that vast imperial conceit going; nor did one have to look far to see the reminders. Old battles . . .

  I’ll fight back, she thought. I’ll write to the publishing company and tell them that I’m being unfairly dismissed. There are industrial tribunals, are there not, and these could order my reinstatement; but are they intended to protect people like me?

  Somehow I think not.

  By the time she reached the High Street and had begun her descent of the Mound, Isabel’s mood had changed and she had resolved that she would do nothing. If Christopher Dove wanted the editorship, then she would let him have it. She needed neither the money—pitiful though the salary was—nor the work itself. There were other, more rewarding things to do, she had decided, than to sit in her study and read the manuscripts of obscure philosophers at remote universities. There was Charlie to be looked after; there were friendships to be cultivated; there were trips to be made to places that she had long T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

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  wanted to visit. She could take Charlie—small babies were easy to travel with, she had been told, by comparison with older children. She could make that long-awaited trip to her cousin Mimi McKnight in Dallas. It had been years since she had been to Texas, and when Mimi had come to Scotland the previous year she had pressed an invitation on her, as she always did.

  These thoughts occupied her all the way down the Mound and over the brow of George Street. Then, after a brisk walk down Queen Street, during which she thought of quite other matters, she found herself outside the auction rooms of Lyon & Turnbull. The rooms were busier than they had been the previous day, and now, on the final day of viewing, were crowded with those who had left it to the last minute. There would be more tomorrow—people who decided on the morning of the sale that they would go for something after all, who might just have stumbled across the catalogue and seen an item they wanted. Then there would be the impulse buyers, who decided to bid without even inspecting in advance the item under the hammer, and who would crane their necks to get a better view of the lot from over the heads of the seated bidders.

  The McInnes picture had been moved, and for a moment Isabel wondered whether it had been withdrawn. That sometimes happened; impulsive sellers had their regrets as much as impulsive buyers did. But th
en she saw it, in the more prominent place that had been found for it, alongside a large William Gillies landscape, a picture of lowland hills in the attenuated colours of late summer. Scotland was a country of just those shades, thought Isabel, looking at the Gillies; faded blues, patches of red and purple where the heather grew, the grey of scree on exposed hillsides.

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h had to bid for it. It might have been different if she had not owned the smaller painting, the inspiration, perhaps, for this one. But now this picture spoke to her directly and she would bid for it. She swallowed hard. Isabel was used to giving large sums of money away, but not to spending them on herself. Now she was going to spend a considerable sum which could do so much good elsewhere. Scottish Opera had written to her recently about money, and the Meningitis Research Trust, and the University of Edinburgh . . . There were so many good causes, and she was about to spend money on a painting.

  “Very interesting. Very nice.”

  She turned round sharply.

  “Guy!”

  The man standing behind Isabel bowed his head in greet-ing, a rather old-fashioned gesture, she thought, but exactly right. Guy Peploe ran the Scottish Gallery in Dundas Street together with Robin McClure, and Isabel knew them both.

  Both were the sons of painters, and Isabel had examples of both fathers’ work in the house.

  She smiled at Guy. He reminded her in a way of Jamie, of whom he could have been an older version; the same dark hair, kept short, the same strong features, the same good looks unconscious of themselves. And did he know? she wondered.

  Word had got round Edinburgh quickly enough about her pregnancy and Charlie, but there were still people who had not heard, who would be taken aback even if they did not disapprove.

  “I take it that you . . . that everybody’s well?” enquired Guy.