The Careful Use of Compliments id-4 Read online

  And Isabel knew that he knew.

  “Charlie’s doing very well,” she said. “Getting bigger.”

  “That’s what happens,” said Guy. “My children did too.”

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  “And . . .” He searched for a name. He had seen him, that young man of hers; what was his name?

  “Jamie is busy,” Isabel said. “And Charlie is making him busier.”

  That settled that, thought Isabel. It was understandable that people should speculate as to whether Jamie had stood by her, but it still caused her minor irritation that they should. Of course, that was one of the uses of marriage; it made it clear that the father intended to honour his commitments.

  She pointed at the painting. “Are you . . . ?” She paused. It was always awkward in the saleroom when one encountered a friend looking at the same item. One would not want to bid against a friend, but at the same time one hoped that the friend would feel the same compunction.

  Guy shook his head. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re not going to go for this. Are you?”

  Isabel looked at the painting again. She wanted it.

  “I think so.”

  Guy paged through his catalogue. “The estimate is a bit low,” he said. “But it’s difficult to tell. His works don’t come up very often these days. In fact, I can’t remember when I last saw one in the sales. It must have been years ago. Shortly after he died.”

  He moved forward to examine the painting more closely.

  “Interesting. I think this is Jura, which is where he died. It’s rather poignant to think of him sitting there painting that bit of sea over there and not knowing that it was more or less where he was going to drown. It’s rather like painting one’s deathbed.”

  Isabel thought about this for a moment. How many of us knew the bed in which we would die, or even wanted to know?

  Did it help to have that sort of knowledge? She stared at the 4 6

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h painting. In the past she had never worried about her own death—whenever it would be—but now, with Charlie to think about, she felt rather differently about it. She wanted to be there for Charlie; she wanted at least to see him grow up. That must be the hardest thing about having children much later in life—as happened sometimes when a man remarried at, say, sixty-five and fathered a child by a younger wife. He might make it to eighty-five and see his child grow to adulthood, but the odds were rather against it.

  “He was quite young when he died, wasn’t he?” she asked.

  “McInnes? Yes. Forty, forty-one, I think.”

  Just about what I am now, thought Isabel. More or less my age, and then it was over.

  “Why is it that it seems particularly tragic when an artist dies young?” Isabel mused. “Think of all those writers who went early. Wilfred Owen. Bruce Chatwin. Rupert Brooke. Byron.

  And musicians too. Look at Mozart.”

  “It’s because of what we all lose when that happens,” said Guy. “Owen could have written so much more. He’d just started.

  Brooke, too, I suppose, although I was never wild about him.”

  “He wrote for women,” said Isabel, firmly. “Women like poets who look like Brooke and who go and die on them. It breaks every female heart.” She paused. “But the biggest tragedy of all was Mozart. Think of what we didn’t get. All that beauty stopped in its tracks. Just like that. And the burial in the rain, wasn’t it? In a pauper’s grave?”

  Guy shrugged. “Everything comes to an end, Isabel. You.

  Me. The Roman Empire. But I’m sorry that McInnes didn’t get more time. I think that he might have developed into somebody really important. In the league of Cadell, perhaps. Everything was pointing that way. Until . . . well, until it all went wrong.”

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  “And he drowned?”

  “No,” said Guy. “Before that. Just before that. Everything collapsed for him before he went up to that island for the last time, to Jura. I can tell you, if you like.”

  Isabel was intrigued. “There’s a place round the corner,” she said. “We could have sandwiches. I’m hungry. It’s something to do with having a baby. One begins to need feeding at very particular times.”

  Guy smiled at the thought. “A good idea.” He leaned forward again and peered at the painting. “Odd,” he said. “Odd.”

  Isabel looked at him quizzically. “What’s odd?”

  “It’s unvarnished,” Guy said, straightening up. “I seem to remember that McInnes always varnished his paintings. He was obsessive about things like that—framing, varnishing, signatures, and so on. This isn’t varnished at all.”

  Isabel frowned. “Does that mean that it might not be—”

  Guy cut her short. “No, certainly not. This is a McInnes all right. But it’s just a bit odd that he didn’t varnish this one.

  Maybe it’s a very late painting and he died before he got it back for varnishing. Some painters sell their work before they varnish it, you know, and of course they can’t varnish it until the paint is dry. That might mean six months, or even more, depending on how thickly the paint is applied. So they sell it to somebody and suggest that they bring it back for varnishing later on. Sometimes people don’t bother.”

  “So that’s all?” said Isabel.

  “That’s all,” said Guy. “Nothing very significant. Just a bit odd.”

  JA M I E CA M E to Isabel’s house most evenings, round about the time that Charlie was due to have his evening feed and bath.

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel was pleased that he did this, although she found that he tended to take over, leaving her little, if anything, to do; and what with Grace assuming so much responsibility for him during the day, Isabel sometimes wondered whether she would end up playing no more than a marginal role in the care of her own child. But she was generous about this, and stood back while Jamie performed his fatherly tasks.

  “He’ll be ready for solid food any day now,” said Jamie that evening. “Look. If I put this spoon there he seems to want to take it into his mouth.”

  “If you put anything there, he’d do that,” said Isabel. “He latched onto the tip of my nose the other day. It was very disconcerting.”

  Jamie took the spoon away. “I’ve been reading a book,” he said. “All about feeding babies.”

  Isabel said nothing.

  “It says, of course, that breast-feeding is by far the best thing to do,” Jamie continued. “Apparently the immune system needs . . .” He stopped himself and looked up.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was tactless. I just wasn’t thinking.”

  Isabel tried to smile. “Don’t worry. I know that you didn’t mean . . . didn’t mean to criticise.”

  Unlike some, she thought. She had been a member—

  briefly—of a mother and baby group in Bruntsfield and she had been given looks of disapproval by one or two of the mothers when she had revealed that she was not feeding Charlie herself.

  Those women knew, she thought; they knew that there could be a very good reason for it, but they could not help their zeal. And she had felt guilty, although she knew that it was irrational to feel guilt for something that one could not help. Somebody had 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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  once said to her that people with physical handicaps could feel guilty, as if the failure of a limb to work was the result of some fault of theirs. It had been a salutary experience for her, because she had never before experienced social opprobrium. She had never been a smoker and been frowned at disapprovingly by nonsmokers; she had never been in a minority of colour, and made to feel different, looked down upon unjustly. She had, of course, tried to imagine it, how it felt to be disliked for something one could not help, and had succeeded to an extent; now, in that petty moment of judgement, she ha
d actually felt it.

  She stole a glance at Jamie; stole: she did not like him to see her staring at him. There was something particularly appealing in the sight of this young man engaged in the tasks of father-hood. He held Charlie so gently, as if he were cosseting something infinitely fragile, and when he looked down at his son his face broke into a look of tenderness that became, after a second or two, an involuntary smile. It was difficult to explain precisely why this quality of male gentleness—a juxtaposition of strength and tenderness—was so appealing; yet every so often it was caught by a painter or a poet and laid bare.

  After Jamie had finished feeding Charlie, they carried him to the bathroom, where his tiny bath had been placed on a table. The infant loved the water and waved his arms in excitement, kicked his legs.

  “He’s so long,” said Jamie. “Look how his legs stretch out.

  And his little body, with its tummy.” He reached out and placed a finger gently against Charlie’s abdomen, and when he took it away again there was a tiny white mark, which faded quickly.

  “And here’s his heart,” he said, placing his finger where he might feel the beating within. “Little ticker. Like a little Swiss watch.”

  Isabel laughed. “The naming of parts.”

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

  “Naming of parts?”

  “A poem,” she said. “I remember reading it at school. We did war poetry for a few weeks and read an awful lot. There was a poem called ‘Naming of Parts.’ A group of recruits are being told the names of the various bits of the rifle. But what the poet sees is the japonica blossoming in neighbouring gardens, two lovers embracing in the distance, and so on. I thought it a very sad poem.”

  Jamie listened. And Isabel thought of Auden, too, or WHA, as she called him, her poet. He had written “Musée des Beaux Arts” about much the same thing; how human suffering always took place against a background of the ordinary—the torturer’s horse scratching itself against a tree, a ship carrying on with its journey, all happening while Icarus plunged into the sea.

  Isabel unfolded a towel, ready to wrap around Charlie. “So ordinary life continues,” she said, “while remarkable things happen. Such as angels appearing in the sky.”

  Jamie reached carefully under Charlie and lifted him out of the shallow water. “Angels?”

  “Yes. There’s a poet called Alvarez who wrote a lovely poem about angels appearing overhead. The angels suddenly appear in the sky and are unnoticed by a man cutting wood with a buzz saw. But then it was in Tuscany, where one might expect to see angels at any time.”

  “Poetry,” said Jamie. “Even at bath time.”

  He handed Charlie over to Isabel, and the baby was embraced in a voluminous towel. Jamie dried his hands and rolled his sleeves back down. Isabel noticed that his forearms were tanned brown, as if he had been out in the open. If I took him to Italy, she thought, he would be as brown as a nut.

  Charlie settled quickly, and the two of them returned to the 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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  kitchen. Isabel poured Jamie a glass of wine and began to cook their dinner. This had become a comfortable domestic ritual, which both appreciated, and it occurred to her that it would be simpler, and more satisfactory, if Jamie moved in altogether. As it was, he stayed some nights, and not others, and on the nights that he was not there she had begun to feel alone, even with Charlie snuffling and occasionally crying in his cot. But they had decided, each separately and without discussing it with the other, that it would be best to keep their own places. It was something to do with independence, Isabel thought, but neither of them used that word.

  “Your day?” she asked as she took a saucepan out of the cupboard.

  “Uneventful.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “A rehearsal for Richard Neville-Towle’s concert. Ludus Baroque. I told you about it. At the Canongate Kirk. Are you going to come?”

  Isabel put the saucepan on the stove. “Yes. It’s in my diary.”

  Jamie picked up that day’s Scotsman newspaper and folded it neatly. He noticed that the crossword had been completed.

  “And your day?” he enquired. Isabel hesitated for a moment, and Jamie noticed. Concern crept into his voice. “Something happened?”

  Isabel looked blankly at the saucepan. She had started to make a roux and the butter had almost melted; only a tiny mountain showed in a yellow sea. “Fired,” she said. “Dismissed.” She stirred the molten butter briefly, causing the last part of the mountain to fall into the sea.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “From my post,” she said. And then she turned to him and 5 2

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h smiled. “You’re having dinner, you see, with the ex- editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. Or soon to be ex. My post is to be taken away and given to somebody else. To a certain Professor Christopher Dove, professor of philosophy at the University of . . .

  someplace in London.” She felt immediately guilty about that description. Isabel did not approve of snobbery and it was rife in academic circles, where older and richer institutions looked down on their newer and poorer brethren; rife and pervasive—

  with published lists which established the pecking order: Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, Cambridge, jostling one another in rivalry, while below them, almost beneath their notice, the struggling local universities with their overworked staffs and their earnest students. She should not have said someplace in London because that was precisely what some people would say from higher up the tree. “I mean the University of—”

  Jamie interrupted her. He had been staring at her, open-mouthed. Now he said, “They can’t.”

  “They can, and they have.” She told him about Professor Lettuce and his letter. She mentioned the inept attempt at the friendly postscript; Jamie winced. She tried to remain even-voiced—she did not want him to know how much she had been hurt—but he could tell. He rose to his feet and came to her, putting his arm about her shoulder.

  “Isabel . . .”

  She put a finger to his lips. “I’m all right. I really am. I don’t mind.”

  “You’re playing the glad game.”

  She looked at him and shook her head. “The best of all possible worlds . . .”

  “Yes. Pretending that everything is fine, when it isn’t.” He paused. “How dare they? You work and work for that stupid journal of theirs . . .”

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  “Not stupid.”

  “For that stupid journal of theirs. For nothing, or almost nothing. And this is the thanks you get.”

  She returned to her roux, moving the saucepan slightly off the heat and beginning to sift flour into the mixture. “But that’s the way of the world, Jamie. It happens to just about everybody.

  You work all your life for some company and at the end of the day you find somebody breathing down your neck, itching to get into your office and sit at your desk. And any thanks that you get are not really meant. Not really.”

  Jamie sat down again. He was thinking of a brass player of his acquaintance whose lip had gone with the onset of middle age. The world of music could be cruel too; one either reached the high notes or one did not. “So you’re not going to fight back?

  You’re not going to write to . . . to whoever it is who owns it?

  Didn’t you say that there was a publishing company somewhere? Surely you could write to them, to the managing director or whatever?”

  Isabel stirred the roux. There were people who never got lumps in their roux; she was not one of them. “The publishers have very little interest in the Review, ” she said. “They acquired it with a building. They tried to sell it once and would probably do the same again, if somebody came along with a large enough offer. No, they’ve got no desire to interfere.”

  “So they don’t care?”

  Isabel thought about t
his. It would not be correct to say that they did not care—they would care if the journal started to make a loss. But as long as it ticked over and made even a minuscule profit, they were content to let the board get on with it. She explained this to Jamie.

  For a few minutes after that, neither spoke. Isabel stirred her roux, which was coming together well now; Jamie fiddled 5 4

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h with The Scotsman, folding and unfolding a corner, the obituary page. “He had a profound knowledge of aviation,” he read. “And his sense of the dramatic was legendary. Once, while speaking at a dinner, he announced that he proposed to buy an airline that . . .” There were such colourful lives in obituaries that the lives of the living seemed so much tamer, as did their names.

  Who would announce the intention of buying an airline? Presumably somebody did. People—individuals—owned airlines, just as they owned ships and tall buildings and vast tracts of land; or nothing at all, as Gandhi had done at his death. As a boy, Jamie had been given a book about Gandhi by an idealistic aunt, who had shown him the picture of Gandhi’s possessions at his death: a pair of spectacles, a white dhoti, a modest pair of sandals . . . But when you leave this world you don’t even take that, Jamie, she had said; remember that. And he had stared at the picture, and stared at it, and had wanted, for some reason, to cry, because he felt sorry for Gandhi, who had owned only those few things and was now dead.

  “Why don’t you sue them?” he asked.

  Isabel was about to sample a small quantity of roux. She paused, the spoon halfway to her mouth. “Sue them for what?

  For unfair dismissal?”

  “Yes,” said Jamie. “Make them pay for getting rid of you.

  Make them pay for it.”

  “It’s not all that simple,” said Isabel. “And I’m not even sure whether I’m a proper employee. It’s very much a part-time job.”

  Jamie was not convinced. “You could try at least.”

  Isabel shook her head. “It would be demeaning. And I don’t like the thought of litigation. I just don’t.”