The Careful Use of Compliments (11 page)

But then Cat suddenly turned to Jamie and said, “My, you're looking fit, Jamie!”

Isabel breathed a sigh of relief; they were not in for the long haul after all. But then Cat added, “Somebody's obviously keeping you rather well.”

The significance of this remark took a moment or two to sink in. Isabel, prepared for the worst, immediately saw the concealed meaning: Jamie was accused of being a kept man. The sheer effrontery of this was astonishing, but Jamie, unprepared, appeared not to notice the choice of words, at least not to begin with. As they moved through to the sitting room from the bedroom, he suddenly stiffened and half turned to Isabel. Their eyes met, and she gave a discreet shake of the head, a turning up of the eyes, as if to say,
Don't bother. Rise above it.

Claudia passed a glass of wine to Isabel and then one to Jamie. Isabel raised her glass to Cat, who responded halfheartedly.

“We had to bring Charlie,” Isabel said. “Grace had one of her migraines. She doesn't get them very often but…”

“Charlie sleeps through things,” said Jamie. “He's very good.”

Both Cat and Claudia turned to look at Jamie as he spoke. Then Claudia turned to Cat and said, “Who had that awful baby? The people who came to dinner, and it screamed and screamed?”

“Oh them,” said Cat. “Yes. It was heading for Scottish Opera, that one.”

Jamie frowned. “I'm sure it wasn't their fault. You can't stop a baby screaming when it gets going. What can you do?”

He looked at Cat, as if awaiting an answer. She met his gaze, but only for a moment. How does one look upon somebody whom one used to like? Like that, Isabel thought, watching Cat's expression; quick glances, expressing self-reproach, or surprise, perhaps, at the fact that one could have liked the other. And in the case of an ex-lover who had left one, it could be resentment that prevailed—resentment that the other was leading a life in which one played no part, the ultimate slap in the face. Cat, though, had got rid of Jamie, not the other way round, and she could hardly resent his finding somebody else. Perhaps not, but if that somebody was one's
aunt…

Isabel saw that Jamie still appeared to be waiting for Cat to answer his question. A change of subject, she decided, would help.

“Speaking of Scottish Opera,” she said, “Did you see their
Rosenkavalier,
Cat?”

Cat's answer was abrupt. “No.” And then she added, “No, I didn't.”

This, thought Isabel, is going to be difficult; perhaps they should have turned round on the stairway after all.

“
Rosenkavalier
has its moments,” said Jamie suddenly.

“Yes…,” Isabel began. “I agree. I think…”

“I saw
Carmen
in London,” interjected Claudia. “English National Opera did it.”

For a few moments there was silence. Isabel smiled encouragingly. “
Carmen
is always fun,” she said. “Everybody loves it.”

Jamie shot her a glance. “Maybe,” he muttered.

Isabel persisted. “It's like all the established repertoire,” she said. “People like the familiar in opera.
Carmen
fills the house.”

For a moment Jamie said nothing. Isabel noticed that his hands were clasped together tightly and that his knuckles showed white. When he spoke, his voice was strained. “Yes, but that's the problem, isn't it? All the old stuff leaves no space for anything new.”

“New operas,” said Isabel mildly, “can scare people away. It's a fact of life.”

“So we shouldn't perform them?” Jamie snapped. “Just the same old stuff?
La Bohème, La Traviata?
”

Isabel glanced at Cat, who was staring up at the ceiling, perhaps to avoid looking at Jamie. She did not want to prolong the discussion that she had started and that had suddenly turned into an argument, but at the same time she found herself resenting Jamie's deliberately provocative stance. She did not disapprove of new opera—he knew that—and it was unfair of him to portray her as a traditionalist. She was not.

“I didn't say that there was no place for new operas,” she said firmly. “I didn't. All that I'd say is that opera companies have to live in the real world. They have to sell tickets, and this means doing the things that people come to see. Not all the time, of course. But they do have to do them.”

“And that means no new works?” retorted Jamie.

“No,” she said. “No.”

Isabel felt ill at ease. It was unlike Jamie to be argumentative, but it occurred to her that the tension of the evening was the explanation for his snippiness. She could understand that, but it still hurt her that he should pick a public fight with her, and she was reflecting on this when they heard Charlie begin to cry.

Jamie leapt to his feet. “He's awake,” he said.

Cat looked annoyed. “Can't you leave him to settle?” she said. “Won't he drop off again?”

“No,” said Jamie, abruptly. “You can't neglect a baby.”

Cat's eyes flashed. “I didn't say neglect, for heaven's sake. I said—”

“I'm going to go and get him,” said Jamie.

They watched him leave the room. Cat looked at Isabel and smiled conspiratorially. Isabel did not return the smile. In her view, Cat wanted her to be complicit in the judgement that Jamie was overreacting, that he would not really know how to deal with a niggling baby. But she was not prepared to do that.

“He's very good,” she said.

Cat turned to Claudia and mouthed something. Isabel caught her breath. It was difficult to tell, and perhaps she had imagined it—surely she had imagined it—but it seemed to her that the words that Cat had mouthed to her flatmate were these:
in bed.

 

“
THAT WAS A DISASTER
.”

Jamie nodded. “You can say that again.”

They were travelling home in a taxi. Going up the Mound, the lights of the Castle above them and the dark valley of Princes Street Garden to their right, they watched the late-night life of the streets—the groups of students, boisterous, heading for clubs and pubs, the couples arm in arm, the clusters of people under bus-stop shelters. Charlie had niggled and cried from the moment he had woken up at that early stage, and the atmosphere at the table had been tense and uncomfortable. They had left the moment the meal was over and had gone down the stairs in silence. Jamie was cross with her, Isabel thought, but she did not know what she had to apologise for. For disagreeing with him over new operas? For accepting the invitation in the first place?

“I'm sorry,” she said as the taxi crested the brow of the High Street and began to make its way towards George IV Bridge. “I'm sorry for whatever I'm meant to have done.”

“You didn't do anything,” muttered Jamie. “It's just that I hated the whole thing. I hated the way Cat behaved. I hated her attitude towards Charlie.”

Isabel sighed. “It's very complicated,” said Isabel.

“Everything's too complicated,” said Jamie. “The whole lot's too complicated.”

“Why don't we go away then?” said Isabel. She said this without thinking, but after she had said it she realised that it was a good idea. They needed to get away, with Charlie, to be by themselves. A few days would make all the difference.

Jamie did not reject the possibility out of hand.

“Go away where?” he asked.

Again Isabel did not think before she spoke. “Jura,” she said.

“All right,” said Jamie. He still seemed low, and she reached out and took his hand in hers. She sensed his tension, but he did not draw his hand away, and by the time they reached Bruntsfield Place and were travelling past the darkened windows of Cat's delicatessen, he was stroking her wrist with his fingers, gently, tentatively, with the touch of a lover who has found out again that he is in awe of the person he loves.

Isabel thought of the outrageous thing that she had imagined Cat to have mouthed. True, she thought, and smiled to herself.

 

CHAPTER TEN

H
ER SUGGESTION
that they should go to Jura for a few days did not look as impulsive in the cold light of morning as she had thought it might. Jamie had been slightly taken aback by the idea—they had not planned to go away together, but now that the idea had been floated, he decided that he rather liked it. “The Hebrides are ideal,” he said. “I was on Harris a few years ago—do you know it? I love it there. And we went down to South Uist as well. There's this wonderful feeling that one is right on the edge.”

“And one is,” said Isabel. “The very edge of Scotland. Of Europe too.”

Jamie looked out the window—they were in the kitchen, having breakfast—and the morning sun was streaming in through the large Victorian window, illuminating floating specks of dust that were drifting like minute planets in space. “Isn't it odd,” he said, reaching out and creating a whirlwind in the air before him, “how we think of air as being empty, but it's full of things. Bits of dust. Viruses too, I suppose.”

Isabel was thinking of the Hebrides. “And Jura?” she asked. “Have you been there?”

Jamie shook his head. “I get the Inner Hebrides mixed up,” he said. “Jura is the one which is next to Islay, isn't it? Off the Mull of Kintyre?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “Islay's much bigger. It makes more whisky—it has six or seven whisky distilleries, I think. Then there's Jura. The Island of Deer—that's what it means in Norse.”

“Ah,” said Jamie. “I've seen it from Islay but I've never been on it.” He paused, and looked at Isabel with interest. “But why Jura?” He asked the question, and then he remembered; it was the painting that they had seen in the auction. That had been Jura.

Jamie raised an eyebrow. “It's nothing to do with…”

Isabel shrugged. “I've been thinking about it,” she said. “I've been thinking about that painting. I suppose that it's made me want to go there again. I have some friends there. I'd like to see them.”

“Who?” asked Jamie. He was suspicious. Isabel had a habit of doing things for very specific reasons, even if they appeared to be spontaneous or unplanned.

“Some people called Fletcher,” said Isabel. “The Fletchers have had Ardlussa estate up there for some time. I knew Charlie and Rose Fletcher slightly and I got to know their daughter a bit better. Lizzie Fletcher. She's a great cook—she caters for hunting lodges and house parties in the Highlands, that sort of thing. Her brother's taking over the house, but Lizzie still spends time up there when she isn't cooking for people. You'll like her.”

“Is that all?” asked Jamie. “Any other people?”

“Well, I went up there only two or three times,” said Isabel. “I didn't get to know many people. The manager of the distillery. The women in the shop in Craighouse.” She had been drinking coffee, and now she drained the last few drops from her cup; mostly milk, a few flecks of foam—Isabel liked her coffee milky. “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 Karenina
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.”

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.

“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 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 TAXI HAD DRAWN UP
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 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 sharply 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 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 perilously 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?”