The Careful Use of Compliments id-4

by Alexander McCall Smith

  But it does seem rather unfair, don’t you think?”

  “Very,” said Grace. “Mind you, root canal treatment—”

  The telephone went, and Isabel rose to her feet to answer.

  “Isabel?”

  “Peter.”

  “I know that you sit there doing the crossword,” said Peter Stevenson, “and I would not want to disturb that. But I have some interesting news for you. Are you in a mood for interesting news?”

  Isabel, who had kept the copy of The Scotsman in her hand, now put it down on one of the kitchen work surfaces. It was not a difficult crossword that day, and it could keep until later. “I’m always ready for interesting news.” She was intrigued. Peter was not one for idle gossip, and interesting news from him would probably be worth listening to.

  “Your painting,” he said. “The one that I saw you trying to buy at Lyon & Turnbull—that painting of the island, somewhere over in the west. Remember that?”

  She wondered whether he had found out something more 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

  9 9

  about the painting; would that really be all that interesting, or even interesting enough to warrant a telephone call? “Of course.

  The McInnes.”

  “Yes,” said Peter. “Well, do you want it?”

  She was puzzled. Of course she had wanted it—that was why she had tried to buy it. “Well, I did want it. I bid for it, as you may remember.”

  “Of course I remember that,” said Peter quickly. “But the point is this: Do you still want it? Because if you do, then it’s yours. For the price the purchaser paid for it. Not a penny more.”

  She was not sure what to say. Did she still want it, or had her enthusiasm for the picture waned after she had seen it go to somebody else?

  “I know that you’ll probably want to think about it,” said Peter. “So why don’t you do so and then come over this afternoon for tea with Susie and me? We can talk more about it, and Susie wants to see you anyway. She says that she hasn’t seen you since . . . since Charlie, and she’d like to see him, and you of course.”

  She accepted the invitation. She would drive round in her green Swedish car, or they would walk, which would be more responsible. Talk of global warming had made her feel guilty about her green Swedish car, although for many people the possession of a Swedish car was almost a statement about the world. Swedish cars came with no baggage; they had never been used as staff cars by the officers of invading forces, they were built by well-paid labour that enjoyed full social welfare benefits, they were neither ostentatious nor greedy in their fuel con-sumption. But they were still cars, and it was cars that were ruining our planet. So that afternoon she would push Charlie 1 0 0

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h round to the Stevenson house in his baby buggy and push him back afterwards, leaving little or no carbon footprint behind them.

  P E T E R M E T H E R at the door of West Grange House.

  “I didn’t hear you arriving,” he said. “Did you drive?”

  “Yes, I drove,” said Isabel, pointing to the road, where she had parked her car. “I didn’t intend to, but I drove.”

  “I see,” said Peter, smiling. “The road to our house is paved with good intentions.”

  “And copies of unsold romantic novels,” said Isabel, as they went in. “Did you know that unsold paperback novels make an ideal base for roads? Apparently they chop them up and com-press them and there you have it—a very good material for putting under tarmac.”

  Peter had not heard this. “But why just romantic novels?” he asked. “Why not copies of . . . I don’t know, literary novels perhaps. Proust even . . .”

  Isabel thought for a moment. There were some literary novels that would have been good candidates for such treatment, and the work of one author in particular, now that she came to think of it. There was something about his prose, she thought, that made him ideal for such a purpose. But she did not feel that she should reveal this to Peter, who was a fair-minded man who might feel her comment less than kind. And he would have been right; the thought had not been a charitable one and she made an effort to put it out of her mind—easier said than done, as the image came to her of quantities of that author’s latest novel being spread before an advancing steamroller. “Anything will do,” she said. “Even copies of the Review of Applied Ethics, I suppose. People could then drive roughshod over my editori-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

  1 0 1

  als, as I expect they have wanted to do for a long time.” But then she wondered: How many people actually read her editorials?

  Fifty? One hundred?

  “I wouldn’t,” said Peter. “I would feel very bad about driving over you.”

  They went into the hall, to meet Susie coming down the stairs. Susie smiled warmly and held out a finger for Charlie to grip. He accepted firmly and, cross-eyed, stared at the new person.

  “He likes you,” said Isabel. “Look, he’s smiling.”

  “A secret joke,” said Susie.

  “Which he probably won’t share with us for a few years yet,”

  added Peter.

  They went into the kitchen, a comfortable, long room at the back of the house. It was a warm day, and the windows were all open, letting in the smell of newly mown grass from outside.

  The usual faded green tea cups and plates were laid out on the kitchen table, the surface of which was marked with numerous dents and scratches from years of children’s homework. Susie took Charlie and perched him, supported, on her knee, while Peter attended to the tea.

  “You’re so lucky,” said Susie.

  Isabel wondered what aspect of her luck was being singled out, and realised that it was Charlie, the sheer fact of Charlie.

  Yes, she was lucky, doubly so. She had been blessed with Jamie, and following upon that she had been blessed with Charlie.

  “I am,” she said simply. “And I know it.”

  Peter poured the tea. “Now, the painting,” he said, as he handed Isabel her cup. “It was bought by Walter Buie—I did tell you that, didn’t I? I was standing near him during the auction.”

  “Yes, you did tell me,” she replied. “I had forgotten the 1 0 2

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h name, but you did tell me something about him. He’s a lawyer, isn’t he?”

  Peter nodded. “Yes he is. He lives just round the corner in Hope Terrace. He has a rather nice house which belonged to his parents before him. Walter is one of those people who’s destined to die in the house in which he was born. Or that’s what he says.”

  “Not a bad idea,” said Isabel. The thought occurred to her that she was one of them too. She had been away, of course, but she had come back to the house in which she had lived as a child. Would Charlie do the same? It seemed unlikely, now that the world was so fluid, so open. She glanced at her son and thought, For the first time in my life it matters to me, really matters, that the world should not change too much.

  Peter smiled at Charlie, who was throwing his hands about enthusiastically. “Anyway,” he continued, “I met Walter Buie in the street yesterday. I was taking our dog, Murphy, for a walk when I saw him coming along on the other side of the road.

  Walter has a horrible dog, a scruffy brown creature that has a criminal record with the local cats. I’ve always kept Murphy away from him but, surprisingly, Murphy and Basil, this dog of Walter’s, started wagging their tails as if they were old friends.

  So I could stop and have a word with Walter while the dogs exchanged news with each other. I told him that I had seen him at Lyon & Turnbull and asked him how he was enjoying his new picture.

  “Walter made some remark about not having put it up yet, and I then happened to mention that you had been after it too.

  I told him that I thought it interesting that there were two people I knew who were going so strongly for the same thing.”

  Peter paused as Susie handed Charlie back
to Isabel so that she could refill the teapot.

  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

  1 0 3

  “A happy baby,” said Peter, looking at Charlie. “You must be thrilled.”

  Isabel settled Charlie on her lap. “Thank you. He is. And I am.”

  “But back to Walter,” said Peter. “When I told him that you had been after that painting, he went quiet for a moment. He was obviously going over something in his mind and it took him a minute or so before he came up with his response. And what he said was this: ‘She can have it, if she wants it. She can have it for what I paid, which is not very much above her last bid.’

  That’s what he said. So I told him that I would pass on his offer.”

  Isabel frowned. What intrigued her about this was the question of why Walter Buie should want to get rid of something which he had just made some effort to obtain. That seemed strange, and again the thought occurred to her that there might be something wrong with the painting. Or could it be that once he saw it in his house, he decided that he didn’t like it for some reason, possibly because it clashed with something else, the wallpaper perhaps?

  “I can see what you’re thinking,” said Peter. “I also wondered why he should want to get rid of it so quickly. So I asked him whether he had gone off it, and he simply shook his head and said no, not really. But he had realised that he didn’t have the great passion for it that he had felt at the auction. That’s what he said, anyway. ”

  “In other words, altruism,” said Isabel.

  “Precisely,” said Peter.

  Susie had said nothing about this; now she joined in. “But if that’s the way he thought about it, then why would he have bid against Isabel at the auction? It must have been apparent then that she wanted it quite badly.”

  “Perhaps altruism takes time to emerge,” said Isabel. “We 1 0 4

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h often think differently about things some time after the event. I certainly find that—don’t you?”

  Susie was not convinced. “That may happen sometimes,”

  she said. “But I don’t have that feeling about this. I think that there’s something wrong.”

  “Well, I don’t,” said Peter. “Walter Buie is very straight-forward. He’s exactly the sort of person who would do this.

  He’s . . .”

  “A bit old-fashioned,” said Susie. “I don’t mean to be unkind, but he’s what some people would call old Edinburgh.

  Just a bit old-fashioned.”

  Old Edinburgh: Isabel knew exactly what that meant. And she used to laugh at it, or feel irritated by it, but now that the world was so different she was not so sure. Old Edinburgh had been so sedate, prissy even—like a maiden aunt—and it had been an easy target. But had the correction gone too far? Old-fashioned manners, courtesies, had been swept away everywhere, it seemed, to be replaced by indifference, by coolness.

  And yet that had not made people any more free; in fact, the opposite, surely, had happened, as the public space became more frightening, more dangerous.

  “It’s kind of him,” she said. It was the charitable interpreta-tion of his gesture and it made Peter nod his head in agreement.

  “I think you’re right,” he said. “And I also think that you need to accept—if you still want the painting. I think that it’s very important to be able to accept things. People often know how to give, but they often don’t know how to accept graciously.”

  Isabel looked at him, and Peter blushed. “I didn’t mean you, of course,” he said hurriedly. “I’m sure you know how to accept.”

  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

  1 0 5

  Isabel was not so sure about that; now that she thought of what Peter said about accepting, she realised that she probably was not very good at it. She felt guilty when people gave her presents, because she did not like the thought that somebody had spent money on her. Where did that come from? She thought that perhaps it was a result of not wanting others to be put out on her behalf, which was ridiculous. And it made her remember the story of a Scottish government minister who had been so well-mannered that, when allocated a female driver, he had insisted on opening the car door for her. People had laughed, but it said a lot for the moral quality of the minister himself; it was the opposite of the sort of arrogance that one sometimes saw in people who had found themselves in positions of power.

  She should accept Walter Buie’s offer, but did she still want the painting? Peter noticed her hesitation.

  “Don’t take it if you don’t want it,” he said. “People change their minds. You can change yours.”

  “I don’t know,” said Isabel. “I really don’t know.”

  “Do you want to look at it?” asked Peter. “Walter said that he’d be very happy for you to take a look at it. We could go round and see him now.”

  “But it would be awkward if I wanted to say no.”

  “Not at all. You can turn him down if you don’t want it anymore. Just tell him that you’ve changed your mind.”

  She was not certain, but Susie said that she would look after Charlie if they wanted to walk round to Walter’s house. Isabel thought for a moment and then said yes. She was intrigued by Walter Buie and wanted to know a bit more about him; a guilty feeling, because she knew that she should not be so inquisitive.

  But I can’t help it, she thought; I just can’t.

  1 0 6

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h I T WA S N OT a long walk, and the road was quite empty. “We’ll be at his gate in a moment,” said Peter, pointing down Hope Terrace. “That drive off to the right—that’s him. Walter has an old Bentley—a really old one. Sometimes you see its nose sticking out of the driveway and then the whole car emerges—it’s a wonderful sight. He goes on rallies, apparently. He tried to invite me along once but I didn’t see the point. Why go and sit around in a field with lots of other people who happen to own old Bentleys?”

  It was not something that appealed to Isabel either, but she understood why people would want to be with others who share their interest. “Presumably they talk about Bentleys,” she said,

  “which is fair enough. I go to conferences of philosophers.

  We sit around, not in fields, admittedly, but we do sit around together.”

  “Very odd,” said Peter.

  They reached the driveway. A large pair of wooden gates, set in a high stone wall, prevented any access from the road, but there was a small door to the side which Peter pushed open.

  Inside was a walled garden, with a greenhouse and, at the far end, an attractive Georgian house in the style of that part of town. It was built of honey-coloured stone which had weathered dark in uneven patches, giving it a not unpleasing mottled appearance. The windows at the front, with their white-painted astragals, had that pleasant, harmonious feeling of Georgian design, and the sun was on the glass, making it flash silver and gold.

  Isabel took to the house immediately—at least to that part of it she could see. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “One to one point six one eight.”

  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

  1 0 7

  Peter looked at her sideways.

  “The golden mean,” Isabel said. “If we measured the height of those windows and then their width, the ratio between the two would be that: one to one point six one eight, or near enough.”

  “Ah,” said Peter. “Of course.”

  “Most of classical Edinburgh observes that ratio,” Isabel said. “And then the Victorians came along and got all Gothic.”

  “But your house is pretty,” said Peter. “And it’s Victorian.”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “I’m not being disloyal to my house. It was a child of its time. But the ceilings are just a little bit too high for the width of the rooms. Not that I sit there and fret about it, but it’s true.”

  They walked up the drive. Peter had telephoned Walter, so they knew tha
t he was in. They stood at the front door; Peter pressed the small white button in the middle of a brass fitting to the right; please push was written on the porcelain; old Edinburgh—modern buttons just said push, the simple impera-tive, not the polite cousin.

  Walter Buie answered the door. He was younger than Isabel had thought he would be; she had imagined a man in his fifties or sixties, whereas the person who stood before them looked to be in his late thirties at the most. He was a tall man, with a thick head of sand-coloured curly hair. He had a strong face and piercing blue eyes; Nordic, thought Isabel, a type that one still encountered in the north and west of Scotland.

  Walter held out a hand to Isabel. “We’ve almost met in the past,” he said, and named a mutual friend.

  They shook hands and Walter gestured for them to come in. There was a formality about the way he spoke, and in his movements—old Edinburgh, as Peter had described it. And he 1 0 8

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h was right, thought Isabel, as they went into a large, airy hall. But there was something contemporary about Walter too: a fresh-ness, an athleticism, which seemed at odds with the formal manner. It was difficult to see him as a lawyer who had dropped out of private practice, even if one could see him behind the wheel of a vintage Bentley.

  Walter led them through to the drawing room, a perfectly proportioned room at the end of which three windows descended from the ceiling almost to floor level. On one wall there was a large, white marble mantelpiece on which a match-ing pair of famille rose vases stood on either side of a Tang horse. In front of a further expanse of marble, serving as a hearth, there was a low gilt table on which there stood piles of books and magazines. Isabel’s eye ran discreetly to the magazine titles— The Burlington Magazine, Art Quarterly, and one she could not make out.

  She glanced at the walls. Opposite the fireplace a very large Philipson nude gazed out of a wide black frame; to either side of it were what looked like two Ferguson portraits of women in extravagant, ostrich-feathered hats. And then, on another wall, above a long, white-painted bookcase, were two medium-sized paintings which Isabel immediately recognised.