The Careful Use of Compliments

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “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 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 had 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 fatherhood. 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.”

  “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 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 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, openmouthed. 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…”

  “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 this. 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 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.”

  “Go on, Isabel,” he said. “Do it. Don’t just let yourself be walked over. Do it. Stick up for yourself.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  Jamie shrugged. “Well, think about it. Please just think about it.”

  “All right,” she said. “I will.”

  And she did, later that night, with Jamie beside her in her darkened room, she thought about it; and watched him, his arm across the pillow, so beautiful, she felt. If she did what he suggested, she could engage the most expensive, eloquent advocates to act for her, the cream of the Scottish bar. She could pay to have a spectacular day in court, in which her expensive lawyers would run rings around an inadequately represented Review. But she put the thought out of her mind because it was not her intention that she should ever, not even once, misuse the financial power which she had acquired through the laws of inheritance. If she had been wealthy through her own efforts it might be different; but she was not, and she would not depart from the code she had set for herself. It was hard, very hard sometimes; like the rule that a mountaineer makes that he should climb a certain distance each day, although the air is so thin and it is hard, so hard, to make the muscles do what one wants them to do.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DO YOU KNOW , I’ve never been to one of these before? My first time. I feel a bit like a schoolboy going into a bar.”

  Jamie, seated beside Isabel, looked about the saleroom. A large number of people had turned up, thanks in part to the publicity attached to the sale of a private collection of Scots Colourists. This collection had been put together by a businessman who had done well with a small oil company and who had attracted attention by his colourful—and tactless—remarks. The oil wells were on the shores of the Caspian, in one of those republics that people are not quite sure about—where it is and who runs it—and had suddenly dried up. There had been mutterings about geological reports and their manipulation at the other end, and the share price had plummeted. The sale of the Colourists was the result, along with the sale of a Highland sporting estate and a small fleet of expensive vintage cars. Of course people were sympathetic, but secretly delighted, as they are whenever those who boast of their wealth take a tumble.

  The Colourists were prominently illustrated in the first few pages of the catalogue—landscapes, still lifes, a portrait of a woman with an elaborate feathered hat—and there they were, in the expensive flesh, hanging on either side of the auctioneer’s podium. For the handful of saleroom voyeurs who came to auctions for the excitement of the high prices, this was the highlight of the day; these were the people who had taken the front row of seats although they had no intention of bidding for anything. They liked to watch the saleroom staff take telephone bids, connected to distant purchasers in exotic places, nodding to the auctioneer as the bidding went higher.

  “Don’t wave to friends,” said Isabel. “Unless you want a painting.”

  Jamie folded his hands on his lap. “Surely not?”

  “It’s happened,” said Isabel, adding, “I think.”

  The auction started. Isabel noticed Guy Peploe seated a few rows behind them; she smiled at him, and Guy made a thumbs-up sign for good luck. Now the Colourists started to fall: three hundred and twenty thousand pounds, two hundred and eighty thousand…Jamie let out a little whistle and nudged Isabel.

  “Who’s got that sort of money?” he asked. “Galleries?”

  “Even if it’s a gallery it will be for a private individual in the long run,” Isabel whispered. “Rich collectors.”

  “Honest?”

  “Probably. People with dishonest money tend to go for different things, don’t they?” She realised, as she spoke, that she did not really know what happened to dishonest money. She was a philosopher, who thought about what we should do and what we should not do, and yet what personal experience enabled her to speak with authority on these matters? She led a very sheltered life in Edinburgh. How many wicked people did she actually know? Professor Christopher Dove? Professor Lettuce? She smiled at the thought. If Dove was wicked, and she really should give him the benefit of the doubt on that, then his wickedness was surely of a very tame nature, confined to academic machinations, jockeying for position on committees and the like. And yet wickedness like that appeared mild only because it occurred in a rarefied context; Trollope’s scheming clergymen may not have resorted to guns and knives—those were not the weapons of their milieu—yet, as people, they were probably just as bad as any Sicilian mafioso for whom the gun, rather than the snide remark, was the immediate weapon to hand.

  After the Colourists had all been sold, a number of people rose and made their way out of the saleroom. That was the
end of the excitement for them; there would be no more sums like that bandied about. Isabel and Jamie watched the paintings disposed of, and there were one or two highlights. An unflattering portrait of a dancer, painted in the style of Botero by a Russian artist, went for forty-five pounds to a small man in an overcoat; a picture of a stag in the Scottish Highlands, by an unknown nineteenth-century hand, made the auctioneer wince—a momentary lapse which drew laughter from the crowd. It was an unfortunate slip, even if entirely understandable, but it did nothing to inhibit two telephone bidders who of course had not seen the wince and who bid against each other to drive the price up well above the estimate.

  Then the McInnes came up, and Jamie reached over and touched Isabel lightly on the arm. She took his hand and gave it a squeeze. Her palm was slightly moist. But if I were bidding, I would be shaking, he thought.

  “Nervous?” he whispered.

  “No,” she said. And then a moment later, “Yes, of course.”

  The bidding started low. The house had a bid in hand which had been put in for a client, and then it climbed. Isabel came in after the fourth bid, with a bid of ten thousand pounds, but that was immediately raised by a telephone bidder. Then somebody from the back of the hall put in a bid and the price went up another thousand. Jamie turned in his seat to see who it was, but there were heads in the way. Isabel now raised her card again and a thousand pounds was added. There were consultations on the telephone and a nod—another thousand.

  At twenty thousand, Isabel was the highest bidder. The auctioneer looked up from his desk and surveyed the room.

  “It’s going to be you,” whispered Jamie. “You’re going to win.”

  “I’m not sure…” she began.

  Jamie was alarmed. “Not sure you want it?”

  The auctioneer glanced at Isabel and then looked over her head towards the back. He nodded at the bidder. “Twenty-one thousand pounds.”

  “No,” said Isabel, slipping her numbered bidding card into her pocket.