The Careful Use of Compliments

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Ailsa McInnes answered the door. She was a woman of about Isabel’s age, wearing jeans and a brightly coloured striped shirt. She was barefoot.

  “Ailsa?”

  The woman nodded and smiled. There was a friendliness about her which Isabel picked up immediately and warmed to.

  Isabel introduced herself. She hoped that she did not mind her calling round without warning, but Guy Peploe had passed on her name. That was true, thought Isabel; he had provided her name.

  “Guy? Oh yes.” The woman gestured for Isabel to go into the house. “It’s a mess, I’m afraid. My wee boy isn’t the tidiest child in the world.”

  “He’s at school?”

  “Yes. Stockbridge Primary, down the road. He’ll be back quite soon. We have a group of mothers here who take it in turns to walk the kids to school and back. We put them in a line of five and bring them back like that.”

  Isabel smiled. “They used to call those lines crocodiles. Walk in a crocodile,” she said. And she remembered the nursery school in Edinburgh that used to take the children for a walk all tied together with string; a sensible expedient, but not one, she imagined, of which the modern nanny state would approve—today the state would simply prohibit taking children for a walk on the grounds that it was too dangerous.

  “A crocodile. Yes.”

  They sat down in the living room. There were signs of the small boy everywhere; a construction set, the pieces spilled out across a corner of the floor; a football and a muddy pair of football boots; a couple of children’s comics—Korky the Cat, Desperate Dan and his cow pie: the world of a small boy who has not yet been enticed by electronics.

  “If you’re wondering about why I’ve come to see you,” Isabel began, “it’s to do with one of Andrew’s paintings.”

  “I see.” Ailsa’s voice was quite level, and Isabel thought, Yes, it was eight years ago.

  “I don’t know if you are aware of this,” said Isabel, “but a couple of paintings have recently come onto the market.”

  Ailsa shrugged. “They do, from time to time. I must say that I don’t keep a close eye on what’s going on. I have about ten of his paintings myself. I don’t keep them here—they’re mostly at my mother’s house. I might sell one or two later on—depending on whether we need the money.” She looked about the room. For all its untidiness, it was comfortable. “At the moment, things are all right. I have a part-time job, which is quite well paid, and I own this house.” She looked searchingly at Isabel. “Are you interested in buying one of my paintings? Is that it?”

  Isabel reassured her that she was not. “You must get a lot of approaches,” she said.

  “A few,” said Ailsa. “Especially now that Andy’s work is so popular. There was a collector from New York who came round the other day. A very glitzy character. He had three of Andy’s paintings and said that he would go for them in preference to a Cadell or an Eardley. He let slip that he hangs one of them next to his Wyeth.”

  “Good company,” said Isabel. “I have one, you know—a small one. I keep it on the stairs. Not next to anything grand, I’m afraid.”

  “So you don’t want to buy one of mine?”

  “No. But I have been offered one by somebody who bought it at auction. It’s one of the Jura pictures.” Isabel reached into her pocket and took out a folded page from the Lyon & Turnbull catalogue. “There’s a photograph of it here from the auction catalogue. I wondered if you knew the painting.”

  Ailsa took the paper and studied the photograph. “No. I don’t remember that one at all. But if it was painted on Jura, then it could have been one of…” Her voice faltered. “It could be one of his last ones. The ones that he did up there after he left.”

  The matter-of-fact tone that Ailsa had used before was now replaced by one which was touched with regret; remorse too, Isabel imagined.

  “Of course,” said Isabel. “But I thought that I might just check up to see whether you knew anything more about the painting.”

  “No, I don’t. But it’s his, you know. It’s definitely his. Just look at it.”

  Isabel took the piece of paper back from her and folded it up. At that moment, the front door was pushed open and a boy came in. He was halfway through peeling off a blue sweater, which he tossed down on the floor.

  “Not on the floor, Magnus,” scolded Ailsa. “We don’t throw our clothes on the floor.”

  But we do, thought Isabel. Charlie will do just that, no doubt.

  Magnus was looking at Isabel with that undisguised curiosity that children can show. “This is somebody who likes Dad’s paintings,” said Ailsa. “She’s come to talk to me about them. And you can go into the kitchen and have a chocolate biscuit. One chocolate biscuit.”

  As Magnus dashed into the kitchen, Isabel found herself thinking: Dad—that answers that, at least. Whatever the boy’s real parentage was, he had been raised to believe that he was the son of Andrew McInnes, whom he never knew, a father who was just a name, an idea, somebody of whom he might even have been brought up to feel proud; but what a poor substitute for the real thing, the flesh-and-blood father who would have helped the little boy with his construction kit and his football, helped him to grow up.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ISABEL DALHOUSIE’S green Swedish car, laden almost to the point of discomfort with the impedimenta that a baby requires, nosed its way gingerly down the ramp onto the deck of the Port Askaig ferry. Charlie was awake, but lying still in his reclining car seat, staring at the ceiling of the car with intense fascination. He had seemed to enjoy the earlier sea journey, which had taken them from the Mull of Kintyre to the island of Islay, and which was now to be followed by the five-minute crossing over to Jura. The rocking movement of the ferry and the noise of the engines made him wave his arms with pleasure. “It reminds him of the womb,” said Isabel. “The movement, the noise.”

  Jamie looked through the window of the car to the hills of Jura on the other side of the sound. They rose steep from the shore, without the normal decency of a cultivable plain, and then became stretches of heather and scree, sweeping up to a feminine curve of skyline at the top. The heather was that characteristically Scottish mixture of soft greens and purples, colours washed and washed again in Atlantic squalls of salt and rain.

  Against a growling of engines and a churning of water, the small ferry docked at the other side to let the three or four cars which it had borne across now drive up the ramp onto Jura. There was a single road, and it led in only one direction.

  “That’s our road,” said Jamie, adding, “I think.”

  Isabel smiled. “One road,” she said. “One hotel. One distillery.”

  “One hundred and eighty people,” said Jamie. “And how many sheep and deer?”

  “Numerous,” said Isabel. “Thousands of deer. Look.”

  The road had turned a corner and a stag was gazing down from a bank a few hundred yards away, his legs obscured by bracken, antlers branching upwards sharp and naked, like a tree that has lost its leaves for the winter. They slowed down and he looked at them briefly with that tense mixture of alertness, defiance, and fear. Then slowly he turned away and trotted off into the bracken.

  “We’ll see him again,” said Isabel. “Him or one of his brothers.”

  “I love this place,” said Jamie suddenly, turning to Isabel. “Already. I love it.”

  She glanced at him and saw the light in his eyes; the car swerved briefly.

  “I fell in love with it too,” she said. “When I first came here, I fell in love with it as well.”

  “Why?” asked Jamie. “Why do places like this have this effect on people?”

  Isabel mused for a moment. “There must be all sorts of reasons. The hills, the sea, everything really. The dramatic scenery.”

  “But you find that elsewhere,” said Jamie. “The Grand Canyon’s dramatic. And yet I don’t think that I’d fall in love with it. I’d be impressed. But it would remain platonic.”

  “I’ve actually
seen the Grand Canyon,” said Isabel. “Years ago. And, no, I didn’t fall in love with it. I suspect it’s rather hard to fall in love with a canyon.” Oddly, she thought of lines which said the exact opposite. She did not turn to Jamie, but mouthed, half whispered them anyway: “Love requires an object, But this varies so much, Almost anything will do, When I was a child I loved a pumping engine, thought it every bit as beautiful as you.”

  Jamie frowned. “‘Pumping engine’?”

  “That’s Auden’s point,” said Isabel. “We all need to love something. Anybody can fall in love with anything, or anyone: love requires an object, that’s all. Even an island will do.”

  They were silent for a while. They passed a set of stone gates and a high stone wall, the garden of one of the handful of large houses on the island, houses which stood at the centre of the huge landed estates into which Scotland had been carved. Such places were largely innocuous now, Isabel thought; not much more than outsize farms which were trying to make a living on the sale of sporting rights and various agricultural enterprises. Many had passed into distant hands, so that the lairds, the local gentry, had effectively disappeared, to be replaced by owners who flew in and out for brief periods, or did not even bother to come. There was so much wrong with Scotland; such unfairnesses, pockets of such poverty and desperation, that were so hard to eradicate, no matter what the politicians in Edinburgh might try to do; it was as if they ran with the land, were written into the deeds that gave Scotland to human ownership. And there had been such injury to the soul, too, leaving scars that went down from generation to generation.

  They were now close to Craighouse, the only village on the island, and fields of ripening hay, yellow in the afternoon sun, fell away to the east, to the cliffs’ edges. Isabel noticed a ruined croft not far away, one of the small stone-built houses that were at the centre of a smallholding. The lichen-covered walls were still standing, but there was no roof, and the window spaces were dark gaps.

  She pointed to the croft. “If you love this place so much, you could restore somewhere like that and live here. You could write music, maybe give bassoon lessons to the islanders.”

  “I just might,” said Jamie. “I’m sure that I could be quite self-sufficient. Doing a bit of fishing. Catching rabbits for the pot.”

  And Isabel thought, Well, if he did that then there would be no place for me, nor for Charlie, but she did not say anything. They were now coming into Craighouse, and she saw the small hotel on the right, opposite the distillery, with its friendly whitewashed buildings and its row of bonded warehouses immediately behind.

  “That’s us,” said Isabel, as they came to a halt outside the hotel.

  Jamie wound down his window; there was light rain now and the sky had suddenly clouded over, as it could do, so rapidly. The air was warm and smelled of seaweed. The hotel looked out over the bay, which, having a low-lying island at its mouth, was a safe haven for boats; several sailboats bobbed at anchor and a small fishing boat, the sort used for inshore work, sat at its mooring, nets hung up over the boom. There was quiet, that quiet which settles in places where nothing is urgent, nothing is hurried.

  They made their way into the hotel. Charlie had begun to niggle, and was taken immediately into the bedroom, where he was changed and fed. From the room, as she was administering Charlie’s bottle, Isabel watched Jamie walk down to the pier, where he stood, looking out towards the boats in the bay. As she watched him, she felt a tug of possession that surprised her by its intensity; and she experienced, too, a sense of vulnerability—the feeling that people get when they see that which they love and know that they might lose it. In the back of her mind, there were lines of song, half remembered, their memory triggered by the island scenery, something she had heard sung a long time ago, but which had lodged: I’m afraid the scorching suns will shine and spoil his beauty. That was it, but there was more, and it came to her, the melody of it too, not just the words:

  My love’s gone across those fields with his cheeks like roses

  My love’s gone across those fields gathering sweet posies

  I fear the scorching suns will shine and spoil his beauty

  And if I was with my love I would do my duty.

  She rose from the bed, where she had been sitting, and stood before the window, holding Charlie across her shoulder to bring up his wind. She looked across to where Jamie was standing in the distance, on the pier, and she waved. He turned round. She waved again, and he raised a hand in salute, and she whispered, I love you so much. I love you more than you will ever know, Jamie. More.

  THEY HAD ARRIVED in the late afternoon, so there was little time to do much before dinner, which was served at seven. After he came back from the pier, Jamie relieved Isabel of Charlie while she went for a walk along the road that led north past the distillery and the village hall. The sky had cleared again and was now mostly blue, with patches of high white cloud moving in from the Atlantic. At one point, beyond the village school, she saw a flock of Greenland white-fronted geese, coming in off the sound, heading back to Islay; the beating of their wings was like muffled drums. She walked onto the beach, a strand of pebbles interspersed with washed-up bladder wrack and whitened wood.

  She knew when she had reached the point she was searching for. If she looked directly behind her she could see the roof of the distillery through the treetops, and behind that the fold of the hills. She took a few steps backwards and looked again, this time from a half-crouching position, as an artist would presumably have had a stool. This meant that he would not have seen the distillery roof, nor the cottage on the lower slopes beside the trees. Yes, it was exactly right.

  Back at the hotel, Jamie put a finger to his lips when Isabel came into the room. Charlie was asleep, stretched out in his travel cot. “You’ve been gone for ages,” he whispered. “Where were you?”

  Isabel took off her jacket and shook it. She peered down at Charlie and blew him a kiss. “Along the way,” she said.

  “And?”

  She smiled. “Nothing much. I saw some Greenland geese on their way back to Islay.”

  Jamie looked at his watch. “I’m famished.”

  Over dinner, when the conversation lagged, she said, “The painting that I almost bought…”

  Jamie reached for his wineglass. “I knew that you had a reason for coming here. It’s something to do with that picture.”

  Isabel searched his face to see if he was angry, but she saw only the triumph of one whose suspicions have been borne out. “No,” she said. “I wanted to come here anyway—sometime. But I thought that…”

  He grinned. “But you thought that you would interfere in something or other…What is there to interfere with, by the way?”

  She thought for a moment. There was nothing, really; and she did not interfere, as Jamie put it. He criticised her for helping, which was another matter altogether. “I don’t interfere,” she began.

  He cut her short. “You do, Isabel. You can’t help yourself.”

  She looked down at her plate, and he realised that he had offended her. He was about to tell her that the only reason he had said this was that her interfering just did not make sense to him. But he did not get round to this, as she had started her explanation.

  “All I’m doing is looking,” she said. “It occurred to me that the picture which I was offered by Walter Buie, the picture which was in the auction, was not by McInnes. I wanted to come to Jura anyway, and I thought I would kill two birds with one stone.”

  Jamie looked at her in astonishment. “A fake? You think it’s a fake?”

  He had raised his voice, and a woman at the next table looked at him. Her eyes moved to Isabel and then back to Jamie. Isabel noticed the brooch she was wearing, a Celtic whorl design of some sort of sea creature, a kelpie perhaps.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “It could be. That’s what I thought.”

  Jamie toyed with the stem of his wineglass. Isabel, he thought, had an overactive imagination. He did
not disapprove of this; in fact, it was part of her charm—her imagination and her unexpected, drily witty remarks. He knew no other woman who talked like that, and he was proud of her.

  “But why would you think that?” he asked. “Guy Peploe seems happy with it—and he’s an expert. And presumably the auction house people must think it genuine—they would never offer anything for sale if they had any doubts about it. So why do you think…” He was going to say, “when you really don’t know anything much about art,” but decided not to. It was implied, though, and he did not need to say it.

  “I know it may sound odd to you,” said Isabel. “But I just have a feeling that something’s not quite right about that painting.”

  Jamie sighed. “But why? You have to have grounds for thinking something like that. It’s not enough to have a feeling.” He paused, watching Isabel. She had spoken to him before about intuition, and about how it worked; inarticulate knowledge, she had called it. But he had been unable to understand how it was possible to know something but not know how you knew it. That just did not make sense to him. Even with music, he had said, you know why you like something; you can analyse it in terms of musical structure and see why things sound good or not; you know, and you can always work out why you know.

  Isabel had decided that there were reasons for her suspicions. “Why would Walter Buie want to pass the painting on so quickly?” she asked. “Would you do that? Would you buy a painting and then the next moment try to sell it?” She waited for Jamie to answer, but he was silent, and so she answered for him. “You wouldn’t. Unless you had found out something about the painting—something that you didn’t know when you bought it.”

  “Or you had acted on impulse,” said Jamie. “Look at how many people take things back to shops after a day or so. Women, mostly. They buy an outfit and then decide that they don’t like it. So it goes back.”