The Careful Use of Compliments id-4

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “And you do know about Orwell?” she asked.

  Jamie did. “He wrote 1984 there, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, at Barnhill, a house up at the top of the island. He finished it there in 1948.”

  “And that’s how . . .”

  Isabel wondered whether Jamie had read 1984; his reading was patchy, but there were surprises. He had read Anna Karen-ina and Cry, the Beloved Country, but did not know who Madame Bovary was—which was half his charm, she suddenly thought; that he should not know about such things. “Who’s Madame Bovary?” he had asked once, and Isabel, unprepared for the question, had almost said, I am, in jest, and then had stopped herself in time. But it was true, wasn’t it? Like Madame Bovary, she had fallen for a younger man, although in her case she had no husband and there was no Flaubert to punish her.

  Women who fell desperately in love in defiance of convention were punished by their authors—Anna had been punished too; Isabel had smiled at the thought, and wondered whether she would be punished for loving Jamie. She had no author, though.

  Isabel was real.

  Orwell: he punished himself, she thought, by staring at nightmares, and then writing about them. “Yes,” she said. “He reversed the figures to get 1984, which must have seemed an awful long way away then.” She stood up. “And then when the real 1984 came along, it didn’t seem too bad after all. Certainly, it seems quite halcyon when compared with what’s going on today. All those cameras constantly trained on the streets and so on. All that suspicion.”

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Jamie rose to his feet too and glanced at his watch. He was due at the school in an hour or so, and he thought of the boy who awaited him in the music room, a boy who did not enjoy playing the bassoon and who endured his lessons with barely concealed boredom. They disliked one another with cordiality; Jamie disapproved of his attitude to the instrument and was vaguely repelled by the boy’s incipient sexuality, a sort of sultry, pent-up energy, just below the surface, manifesting itself in an outcrop of bad skin along the line of his chin and . . . It was hard being a boy of fourteen, and fifteen was just as bad. One knew everything, or thought one did, and it was frustrating that the rest of the world seemed unwilling to acknowledge this. And girls, who were equally uncomfortable, seemed so mocking, so near and yet so far, so out of reach because one was not quite tall enough or one’s skin was uncooperative. Jamie shuddered.

  Had he been like that?

  He thought of what Isabel had just said. Had things gone that badly wrong? And if they had, then why?

  “Suspicion?” he asked. “Are we more suspicious?”

  Isabel had no doubts. “Yes, of course we are. Look at airports—you’re a suspect the moment you set foot in one. And for obvious reasons. But we’re also more suspicious of everyone because we don’t know them anymore. Our societies have become societies of strangers—people with whom we share no common experience, who may not speak the same language as we do. They certainly won’t know the same poems and the same books. What can you expect in such circumstances? We’re strangers to one another.”

  Jamie listened intently. Yes, Isabel could be right, but where did her observations take one? One could not turn the clock back to a world where we all grew up in the same village.

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  “What can we do?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” said Isabel. She thought for a moment about her answer. It was defeatist, and it could not be right. We could seek to re-create community, we could bring about a shared world of cultural references and points of commonality. We had to do that, or we would drift off into a separateness, which was almost where we were now. But it would not be easy, this re-creation of civil society; it would not be easy taming the feral young, the gangs, the children deprived of language and moral compass by neglect and the absence of fathers. “I don’t really mean nothing,” she said. “But it’s complicated.”

  Jamie looked at his watch again. “I have to . . .”

  “Of course,” said Isabel. “It’s a major project and you have only ten minutes.”

  He leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She smelled the shaving soap that he liked to use, the smell of sandalwood.

  For the rest of that day, Isabel did very little work. She made several telephone calls, though: to the ferry company in the west, to book the car passage on it to Islay and back; to Lizzie Fletcher, to see if she would be on Jura the following weekend, when they planned to arrive; and to the island’s only hotel, the hotel at Craighouse, to arrange a room, one that would be large enough for the two of them and Charlie. Then somewhat reluctantly, when it was almost time for lunch, she faced up to the thing that she had been putting out of her mind but which now abruptly claimed her attention. Christopher Dove was coming that afternoon. He was booked on a train from London that would arrive at Waverley Station at three o’clock. He had announced this on the telephone and then had waited, as if expecting Isabel to offer to meet him. That’s what people used 1 3 4

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h to do at Oxford; they would meet people at the station and then walk to their college with them. Isabel endured a brief moment of internal struggle. Her natural goodness dictated that she should offer to be there; but her humanity, which, after all, was not restricted to kindness and sympathy—qualities of humanity surely can be bad, because that is what humanity is like—that same humanity now prompted her to be unhelpful. Professor Christopher Dove, after all, was the man who had engineered the coup which had toppled her from her editorial post. He was a ruthless, ambitious man, a plotter, who should have been a politician rather than a philosopher, thought Isabel. And I shall not meet him at the station. He can take a taxi and come to me.

  Of course, she relented. Shortly before nine o’clock that morning she telephoned his home to offer to collect him at Waverley. As the telephone rang, she imagined the desk on which it rang, in his house in Islington, where was where she was sure that he lived. There was no reply; he had left for King’s Cross and she had no mobile number for him. She rang off.

  That was a lesson which she should not need to learn at this stage of her life. Do not act meanly, do not be unkind, because the time for setting things right may pass before your heart changes course.

  A TA X I H A D D R AW N U P in front of the house. From her study window on the ground floor, Isabel looked out, beyond the rhododendron bushes and the small birch tree to the front gate; a figure in the back of the cab was leaning forward to pay the driver. Well at least he got that right, thought Isabel; in Edinburgh one paid the driver before getting out of the cab—which was the sensible thing to do, the Enlightenment way—whereas 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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  in London people got out and paid through the front window, which the driver had to lower. Isabel could not see the point of this, but it was one of those things, like driving on the left side of the road rather than the right, which just was. And these things, particularly the side of the road on which a nation drove, was not something that could easily be changed, although Isabel remembered that there had been at least one autocrat somewhere—it was in Burma, she thought, with its odd, unhappy history—who had capriciously insisted that people should abruptly change from driving on the left to driving on the right, with the result that they were confused and had numerous accidents. Rulers should not impose too much on their long-suffering people. Had not the King of Tonga, an extremely large man, insisted that the whole nation should go on a diet when he decided to embark on one? That would surely test the bonds between monarch and people.

  She watched as Christopher Dove stepped out of the taxi, holding a small overnight bag and briefcase. He looked towards the front door, to check the number, which was prominently displayed in brass Roman numerals screwed onto the wood.

  Then his gaze moved to the study window, and Isabel drew back shar
ply into the shadows. Dove must not, under any circumstances, feel that his visit made her anxious. Isabel had decided that she would remain dignified with Dove and treat him as she would treat any other colleague. That, after all, was the only thing she could do. Anything else—any pettiness or irritation on her part—would compound Dove’s victory over her, make it all the more glorious.

  She had met him before, of course, and so his appearance was no surprise; the haughty good looks, the high cheekbones and brow; the thick, carefully groomed blond hair like that of 1 3 6

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h one of those men in the perfume advertisements, the men who stood there, shirtless for some reason (the heat, perhaps), looking in such a steely way into the middle distance. That was Dove.

  “Isabel!” He had put his bags down on the doorstep and was standing there when she answered the bell, his arms extended as if to embrace her. And he did, leaning forward and putting his arms around Isabel’s shoulders, kissing her on each cheek. She struggled with her natural inclination to draw back, but even if she mastered that, he must have felt her tenseness.

  “It’s so good of you to see me,” he enthused. “And at short notice too!”

  She thought: It’s not at all good of me to see you; I had to see you. It would have been ridiculous not to see you. “It’s no trouble,” she said. “We have to get the handover right. After all, there are a lot of readers now. A lot. We wouldn’t want to lose them.”

  It was a charged remark. She had not intended to fire off a shot quite so early, but she had. The fact that there were so many readers was attributable almost entirely to her editorship; when she had come to the job, the readership had been per-ilously small.

  “Of course,” he said, smiling. “And that’s thanks to your efforts, of course. You’ve built the readership up marvellously.

  You really have.”

  Isabel thought, Well, why change editors in those circumstances? Should she say that? She decided not to, and instead invited Christopher Dove in. “Perhaps we should go through to my study,” she said. “You can leave your bags in the hall.” She looked pointedly at the overnight bag. “You have a hotel?”

  She knew that this was a dangerous question. If his answer 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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  was no, then she would be obliged to offer him a bed for the night, and she was unwilling to do that. I was hungry and you took me in. Yes, but that was in respect of somebody poor, not somebody nasty.

  “No,” he said, and her heart sank. But then he went on, “I’m going back on the sleeper train. Do you ever use it? I like it.”

  “Norman MacCaig didn’t,” said Isabel. “He wrote a poem about it. I think there’s a line, ‘I do not like this being carried sideways through the night.’ ”

  Dove grinned. “Poets get crotchety,” he said. “We philosophers are more sanguine, more stoic.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Isabel. “Hume was even-tempered, I suppose, but there have been plenty of unpleasant philosophers.” Such as you, she thought.

  “I have never fully appreciated Hume,” said Dove, not too discreetly inspecting Isabel’s shelves. “I understand the appeal, but I take the view that there’s so much more to be learned about our emotions from contemporary cognitive science. Hume wouldn’t have exactly understood a magnetic resonance scan.”

  Isabel stared at him incredulously. This was pure nonsense.

  But she decided that she did not have the energy to engage with Christopher Dove on the point, and she moved over towards the filing cabinet behind her desk. “When I took over the editorship,” she said, “I threw out a lot of old files. There were boxes and boxes of papers which my predecessor had done nothing about sorting out. There were all sorts of things which would have been of no interest to anybody. Letters from the printers, and so on. I cleared it all out. There was even an ancient letter from Bertrand Russell about a claim for a train fare to a sympo-sium that the Review had organised.”

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h now spun round. “Russell? But what about his biographers?

  What if they had wanted it?”

  Dove’s tone was one of subdued outrage, and Isabel bristled defensively. “Would his biographers be interested in a claim for a train fare? Surely not, unless Russell questioned the reality of the train journey, or something like that. I think that I boarded a train at Paddington, but can I be sure? ” She laughed, but Dove did not; he was concerned with posterity, and could not laugh at such things. Isabel wondered what conclusion biographers might draw from such a letter: that Russell was always one to claim expenses? Or that his finances were not in a good state and that he needed to watch even very minor outlays?

  “What else?” asked Dove peevishly. “What else did you throw out?”

  “I can assure you that I got rid of nothing significant,” said Isabel. “It was all what would be called ephemera.”

  Dove’s irritation seemed to mount. Isabel noticed that he was flushed, and that this showed very clearly, given his complexion. And she thought, too, that he was a very good-looking man and that he carried no extra weight. He would be a squash player, perhaps, or a cricketer; he had that look about him.

  “Ephemera can be valuable,” he said. “Very valuable. The signatures of well-known people on even the most mundane of letters can go for a great deal of money.”

  Isabel realised that this was true. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Perhaps I should have been more careful. It’s just that there was so much paper, and I really thought that . . .”

  Dove suddenly seemed conciliatory. “Never mind,” he said.

  “I understand your feelings about mounds of paper. It really does accumulate, doesn’t it?”

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  They sat down at the desk, Isabel on her side and Dove on the other.

  “I thought that we should go over plans for the next three issues,” said Isabel. “Things are fairly far advanced with them, and if the current issue is going to be the last one I do, then you’ll be taking over quite a bit of work in progress, so to speak.”

  Dove nodded gravely. “Yes.”

  “So shall we start with the next issue?” said Isabel.

  Dove said that he thought this was a good idea, and Isabel extracted a thick folder from a pile of papers on her desk. She saw her visitor’s eyes go to the pile of papers, and she realised that he disapproved of the clutter.

  “I do know where everything is,” she said quietly. “It may not look like it, but I do know.”

  “Of course you do,” muttered Dove. “Creative clutter.”

  She did not like the condescending tone of his comment, but she let it pass. She opened the folder and took out a messy-looking bit of paper on which she had noted the order in which she proposed to put the articles. There was also her editorial, printed out on cream-coloured paper and corrected here and there, in blue ink, by its author. This would be her last editorial, she reflected, and it was about the ethics of taxation. Dove would never write about anything quite so dull, she thought. He would write about . . . what? Cognitive science, perhaps; decision trees and ethics; the question of whether computers had minds, from which Isabel realised the further question might flow: Could one have good computers and bad computers? In the moral sense of course.

  They began to work, and worked through until four thirty, when Isabel heard the front gate open. She looked up and saw a visitor coming down the path to the front door. It was 1 4 0

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Cat. Dove looked up too. He saw Cat and looked enquiringly at Isabel.

  “My niece,” said Isabel, getting up from her desk. “I wasn’t expecting her.”

  Dove stretched his arms back and yawned. “I could do with a break anyway.”

  Isabel left him in the study and made her way to
the front door. Cat had her finger poised before the bell when Isabel opened the door.

  “I saw you.” Isabel smiled warmly. Cat’s visit could be a new beginning, and she would not let the memory of that disastrous evening at her flat stand in the way of a reconciliation. But if there was a thaw, it was a slight one, as Cat still seemed distant.

  “You left your cardigan at the flat the other night,” said Cat.

  “Here it is.”

  Isabel took the cardigan, which Cat produced from a small carrier bag. “Come in for a quick cup of tea,” she said. “I was just about to make some. Christopher Dove is here.”

  Cat looked interested. “Christopher Dove? Do I know him?”

  “No. He’s on the board of the journal. In fact, he’s . . .”

  She trailed off. She was about to say that he was taking over, but at that moment, at the door, she was not so sure. It was complicated.

  “All right,” said Cat. “But I can’t stay long. I’ve left Eddie in charge and I think he wants to get away early. He’s doing a class in the yoga centre near Holy Corner.”

  “That’s a good thing,” said Isabel. “Poor Eddie . . .”

  Cat did not pursue the subject of Eddie. “Well, Eddie’s Eddie.”

  “That,” said Isabel, “is undoubtedly true. And you can probably say the same about most of us, mutatis mutandis. ”

  Cat looked at her sideways.

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  “That is,” Isabel continued, “changing that which requires to be changed. In this case, the name.”

  Cat said nothing. They had entered the hall, and Christopher Dove had appeared from the study. Isabel introduced them, and Christopher stepped forward to shake Cat’s hand.

  Isabel watched and immediately noticed the change in Cat’s demeanour.

  “We’ll have a cup of tea in the kitchen,” said Isabel.