The Careful Use of Compliments

by Alexander McCall Smith

  I think that this is just one of the matters which would be much better discussed in a meeting between the two of us. I believe that you now have a baby—Congratulations!—and therefore it would be easier for me to come to Edinburgh than for you to come to London. If you would let me know what dates you are free, I shall come up for a meeting. We can then sort out the details of the handover, and I can look at the editorial archive. We will need to make arrangements for that to be sent down at some stage. I have quite a bit of storage space in my department—we do have empty cupboards, believe it or not, not that I advertise the fact, in case the university authorities convert them into offices (for junior academics!). [That was a joke.]

  The letter ended with a few additional pleasantries. After she had finished reading it, Isabel stared at it for a moment and then rolled it up into a ball and tossed it towards her wastepaper basket. She had not expected it to go in, but it did just that, like a skilfully placed basketball. But then, almost immediately, she felt guilty and walked over to the bin, retrieved the ball of paper, and uncrumpled it. I shall not descend to the level of Dove, she said to herself. I shall not.

  She sat down at her desk and took out a fresh piece of writing paper.

  Dear Professor Dove,

  It was good to hear from you. Of course I shall be happy to see you in Edinburgh, and here is a list of dates on which I am free and on which we could certainly have a meeting. I must warn you that the editorial archives are quite large and need considerable space to be stored.

  She paused and looked out the window. Should she? She resumed her writing.

  And perhaps I should also warn you that I do not consider these archives to be anybody’s property but my own.

  She read over what she had written. What she had said about the ownership of the archive was probably wrong. Some of it belonged to her—the letters written to her as editor were often of a personal nature and the copies of the letters which she had written, on paper which she had provided—those, she thought, were surely hers. But it was a warning shot, which she felt was worth firing.

  She signed the letter, slipped it into an envelope, and stuck a stamp on the top right-hand corner. The stamp was simple in its design, almost stark, and bore, as always, the monarch’s head. To what correspondence, she thought, has Your Majesty been made an unwilling party, with your head, and all its gentle authority, attached to all sorts of unhappy and shameful letters—letters of rejection, threatening letters, letters from lawyers, anonymous letters…She stopped the list there. Her letter was to the point and dignified, the sort of letter which the Queen herself would undoubtedly write to a prime minister attempting to usurp her authority. No, the letter needed no further justification: it would be posted, received by Dove himself in his obscure headquarters, and, she hoped, duly digested.

  Be very careful, Dove, she thought. You may take one step too far. Be very careful when you come to Edinburgh.

  She stood up and crossed to the window. She looked outside, at the large rhododendron bush, which was quite still; there were no birds, or so it seemed, no fox lurking below. What if Dove came to Edinburgh and something happened to him? What then?

  Within each of us, she thought, there is evil. It lurks in the deep recesses of the mind, those depths in which the atavistic clutter of our distant past still lodges. We should not delude ourselves that it is not there; it is there, but it is covered, thank heavens, by the veneer of civilisation, of morality. First came the early I, red in tooth and claw, then came Mozart, David Hume, Auden.

  With a shock she remembered something—something that she did not like to think about. Auden had once almost killed somebody; had put his hands around the neck of his lover and had been on the point of strangling him, driven to this shocking extreme by jealousy. And then he had written about it, had confessed that he had almost become a murderer. If that could happen to him, to that great, humane intelligence, then how easily could it happen to the rest of us, who are weak, and subject to all the passions of our weakness.

  No, Professor Dove; you are in no danger from me. By the time you arrive in Edinburgh I shall have mastered my anger. I shall love you, Professor Dove, as I am commanded to do. Or that is what I hope, most fervently hope.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DON’T TALK TO ME about it,” said Grace the next morning. “Just don’t talk to me about it!”

  Isabel was on the point of agreeing. She did not wish to discuss dentists and would be quite happy not to go into the details of Grace’s dental trauma of the previous day. But then she realised that although Grace said that she did not want to discuss the matter, that is exactly what she intended to do.

  “Yes,” said Grace, removing the headscarf she had worn on the journey to work. “The least said about yesterday the better.”

  Isabel looked up from The Scotsman crossword. She had been constructing her own clue. Three words: four, five, and nine letters. A plant’s base beside a waterway precedes intervention. Root canal treatment.

  “Uncomfortable?”

  “Extremely,” said Grace. “He tried to persuade me to have one of those injections, but I said no. He told me that it would be very painful, but I stuck to my guns. I can’t stand that stuff, that…”

  “Novocaine,” said Isabel. How might one express that in a crossword? Sounds like a new rod with which to beat another until numb? Not a very good clue, but it would have to do.

  “Yes, that stuff,” said Grace. “I can’t bear it, you know. That awful feeling of being all puffed up, as if somebody had just hit you in the jaw. No thank you!”

  “But if you don’t—”

  Grace cut Isabel off. “I can take pain. I’ve never been one to dodge that. But this was really, really sore. He had to guddle about inside the tooth and it felt as if somebody was putting an electric wire down there. It was terrible.”

  They were both silent for a moment, Grace remembering the pain, Isabel thinking about how much pain there was, that life itself floated in a vast sea of pain, numbed here and there for brief moments, but coming back in great waves.

  “You see what he had to do,” Grace went on, “was to take out the nerve from the root of the tooth. Can you imagine that? I kept thinking of it as a long piece of elastic being dragged out of me. Do you remember knicker elastic? Like that.”

  “I don’t think nerves are like that,” said Isabel. “I don’t think that you can actually see them. They don’t look like elastic, or wires for that matter.”

  Grace stared at her. “Well, what do they look like?” she asked.

  “I think they must be tissue of some sort,” said Isabel. “A bit like…”

  She shrugged. She had never seen a nerve.

  “Well, whatever it looked like,” said Grace, “I felt it all right. But now…nothing! I can chew on that side and I feel nothing.”

  “They are a very great boon to mankind, dentists,” said Isabel. “And I’m not sure that we are grateful enough to them. I’m not sure that we even bother to thank them.” She paused. Were there any statues of dentists? She thought not. And yet there should be. We had so many statues of generals and politicians and the like, who made wars and took life, and none of dentists, who battled pain. It was all wrong.

  And yet, would anybody be able to take a statue of a dentist seriously? What if one were to go into some small town somewhere and find a bronze equestrian statue of a great dentist? Would one be able to do anything but laugh? Of course there was St. Apollonia, the patron saint of toothache, and she had read somewhere that the British Dental Association had a small statue of her in their headquarters.

  “Why are you smiling?” asked Grace.

  “Just thinking of something odd. It suddenly occurred to me that there are no statues of dentists—anywhere in Scotland, as far as I know. Maybe they have them elsewhere—I don’t know. 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 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 consumption. But they were still cars, and it was cars that were ruining our planet. So that afternoon she would push Charlie round to the Stevenson house in his baby buggy and push him back afterwards, leaving little or no carbon footprint behind them.

  PETER MET HER 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 compress 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 editorials, 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 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.

  “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 hi
m 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 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 straightforward. 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.