The Careful Use of Compliments (17 page)

Perhaps, thought Isabel. But then she went on to think, Oh, Lettuce and Dove—you did ask for this, you really did.

 

ISABEL LEFT
the offices of Turcan Connell shortly before midday. Their building, a new one, was made of green and blue glass, like sheets of thinly sliced ice; looking up from the small square to its front, one could see through the upper storeys to the sky beyond. Around it, though, was the Edinburgh with which Isabel was more familiar—the stone tenement buildings, the predominant note of grey. She walked up Home Street, past the vegetable shops, the watchmaker, the sellers of cheap ornaments, the bars. She passed the King's Theatre and Bennet's Bar beside it, with its elaborate stained-glass windows, where singers and musicians would meet after rehearsals in the theatre, sitting on the long red benches, reflected in the large brewers' mirrors.

Farther up the road, she suddenly felt hungry as she approached Cat's delicatessen. She was in no hurry to get home; Charlie was off somewhere with Grace and they would not be returning until after lunch. There were things to be done in the house—correspondence and a long list of small chores—but she did not feel like doing anything yet. She felt awkward about going into the delicatessen now, with Cat in her current mood, but she knew that she had to persist: the ice would melt, as it always did.

Eddie was behind the counter and there was no sign of Cat. He was slicing Parma ham for a customer and he nodded to Isabel. She picked up a copy of a newspaper from the table—somebody had left that day's
Guardian,
and she would read that at one of the coffee tables until Eddie could serve her. Eddie made good focaccia and olive plates and she would have one of those when he was ready.

She was absorbed in a
Guardian
article when she became aware of Cat's presence. She lowered the paper and saw that her niece was smiling. The thaw, she thought.

Cat looked over her shoulder towards Eddie. A couple of customers were peering into the display case below the counter, pointing at cheeses. “It looks as if he's going to be busy for a while,” said Cat. “I'll look after you.”

“I was hoping for focaccia and olives,” said Isabel. “But there's no hurry. There's always
The Guardian.
”

Cat did not think it would be any trouble. “And how's Charlie?” she asked.

It was the first time that she had shown any real interest in her cousin, although Isabel suspected that the interest, or curiosity at least, had always been there but had been repressed. “Thriving,” she replied. “Sleeping. Eating. Doing all the things appropriate to being a baby.”

Cat smiled. “He's very sweet,” she said. “He looks a bit like…” Isabel held her breath. “Like Jamie.”

That, Isabel thought, was extraordinary progress. Isabel herself not did not think that Charlie looked remotely like Jamie, but that did not matter now: the air, she thought, was filled with the sound of shifting logjams.

“Yes, well, perhaps he does. In some lights.”

Cat went off to prepare Isabel's lunch, leaving her with
The Guardian.
She was reading an article on the Middle East and the prospects for peace, which were slim. What acres of newsprint, she thought, what lakes of ink, had been expended on that topic; and always it came back to the same thing, the sense of difference between people, the erection of barriers of religion, clothing, culture. And yet there were differences, and it was naïve to imagine that people were all the same—they weren't. And everybody needed space, physical space, to live their lives amongst those with whom they shared an outlook and values; which led to the depressing conclusion that the recipe for social peace was keeping people separate from one another, each in his own territory, each in the safety of fellows. She was not sure if she could accept that—and
The Guardian
certainly did not. The problem was that we could no longer have our own cultural spaces: everybody was now too mixed up for that and we had to share.

She was wrestling with these issues when Eddie came across to her, bearing the plate of focaccia and olives which Cat had prepared.

“She seems to be in a good mood today,” said Isabel, nodding in the direction of Cat, who was now dealing with a customer at the counter.

Eddie's lip curled in mock disdain. “Guess why,” he said. “Have three guesses. Or shall I just tell you? She's found a new man.”

Isabel had a feeling that she and Eddie had had this conversation before; and they had, she decided, some time ago, when the man was…she could not remember.

“Yes,” said Eddie. “He came in here not long ago. And he's coming up to see her again this weekend. That's why she's all smiles.”

It had not occurred to Isabel, for reasons of denial, perhaps. Or because she had thought of him as a flash in the pan—somebody temporary. Now the thought of it appalled her. She looked up at Eddie, who was grinning knowingly. “A tall man,” she said. “A tall man with blond hair slicked back like this.” She made the gesture.

“Yes,” said Eddie. “But they all look like that, don't they? All of her men are the same. Except for…” He looked embarrassed.

Isabel stared down at her plate. Christopher Dove. She had imagined that the dalliance between him and Cat had been limited to the evening in Edinburgh; she had not contemplated that anything further would come of it.

“Anyway,” said Eddie, “long may it last.”

Isabel shook her head. “I doubt if he's right for her.”

Eddie sniggered. “They get along.” He took a step backwards. “I've got to go.”

Isabel ate her meal in silence. Dove would know by tomorrow that the
Review
had changed hands, and he would realise immediately, even if it weren't for the wording of the letter to Professor Lettuce, that he would never become editor. He would be angry, of course, and his anger would be directed at her. And if Cat heard about it—as she would—then she would assume that Isabel had fired Dove to spite her. Cat was quite capable of believing that, thought Isabel, and of course there might be people who would do such a thing, even if she was not one of them.

She knew, of course, that she should not allow herself to be governed by thoughts of what her niece would think—particularly a niece who was growing into such an unpredictable person as Cat was. And yet she was not sure that she could face more of Cat's moods or hostility. It would be like living with Schopenhauer, not an easy task for anybody, and certainly not for Schopenhauer's mother, to whom the philosopher refused to talk for the last twenty-three years of her life.

She stood up and crossed the room to pay for her lunch. At the till, Cat waved her aside. “No need,” she said.

“But I must,” said Isabel.

Cat shook a finger. “No, it's a thank-you.”

Isabel's heart sank. “For what?”

“For introducing me to such a gorgeous man the other day!”

 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

T
HE QUEEN'S HALL
that evening was packed, and although Jamie had tried to get Isabel a good seat, she ended up in the gallery, on one of the benches in which one could never quite relax. And there had been a purpose behind that discomfort; the Queen's Hall had been a church, and the Church of Scotland had never been one for excessive comfort, lest it lead to somnolence during sermons. Jamie was playing in the orchestra, as he sometimes did, and he was keen that Isabel should hear this particular programme.

“It's a very adventurous mix,” he explained. “Fauré's
Requiem
in the first half, and then new or newish pieces in the second. Various offerings from Peter Maxwell Davies, Stephen Deazley, and Max Richter. It'll be interesting, to say the least.”

Jamie had given Isabel a recording of Max Richter's
Blue Notebooks,
and she had played it time and time again, absorbed by the haunting, enigmatic music. And then in Mellis's cheese shop one day, she and her friend Rosalind Marshall had seen the composer himself, who lived in Edinburgh; he had come in to buy a piece of Dunsyre Blue, and, recognising him from the sleeve of
The Blue Notebooks,
Isabel had said, “You don't know me, but
The Blue Notebooks…
” She was not sure that he had heard her, in fact she thought that he had not, as the cheese-monger had started to speak, extolling the virtues of a particular cheese, and then somebody else had come in and it was too late.

“I'll talk to him some other time,” Isabel said to Rosalind.

“Yes, perhaps,” said Rosalind. “I almost had a conversation with the prime minister once. He was paying a visit to the Portrait Gallery and I said something to him about one of the pictures, but he was distracted by somebody else and so I'm not sure he heard me.”

Isabel smiled. “There are probably many of us in Edinburgh who have almost conversed with prominent people, but not quite.” She paused, remembering something that had been said to her some time ago. “I was in Ireland, once, staying at a place called Gurthalougha House, near Shannon. And the woman who ran the hotel had an aunt, or so she told me, who had been walking in the Black Forest in the nineteen thirties when she met a small walking party coming along the path towards her. And she recognised the man in front—it was Adolf Hitler. So apparently she said, ‘Good morning, Mr. Hitler,' and he just nodded and continued on his way.”

Rosalind shook her head. “What a strange story. I'm not sure what we can take from that, but it certainly is rather strange.”

“Had her aunt been armed,” mused Isabel, “she could have changed the course of history, for the better.”

“By murdering Hitler?”

Isabel hesitated, but only briefly. “Yes. Although I'm not sure that I would use the word
murder
there. Murder is intrinsically wrong, isn't it? The word carries a lot of moral baggage.”

“So what should we call it? Execution? Assassination?”

“We could just call it
killing,
” said Isabel. “That's neutral. A person defending himself from an attacker kills the aggressor, and that's morally justifiable. We don't say that he murders the person attacking him. Murder is one of those words with strong moral associations.”

Rosalind frowned. “So nobody could ever be said to have
murdered
a tyrant—is that what you're saying? Even if somebody had ever succeeded in removing him?”

“Not unless somebody killed him for the wrong reasons,” said Isabel. “Take Stalin, for instance, or Chairman Mao. Let's say that a rival, an even bigger monster, had disposed of Mao or Stalin in order to become leader himself, then that could be described as murder, I suppose. But if a relative of one of his victims took a shot at him, then I'm not so sure that I would call it murder. Assassination, perhaps, and even a justifiable one, if it saved lives.”

Their attention reverted to their purchases. Rosalind was inspecting a very small square of cheese. “I wonder,” she said, “whether this comes from that cheese maker I met in Orkney who has only one cow. She can't produce very much, you know.”

Now, remembering their conversation about Stalin and the rest, Isabel thought: Yes, people should condemn the crimes of tyrants equally. The problem was that people were selective in their moral outrage or simply did not know.

She sighed. Moral evenhandedness was rare, but that was another issue, and she had often been troubled by it. Moral evenhandedness suggested that one should treat one's friends and strangers equally, and that was very counterintuitive. You are outside a burning building. At two adjacent windows appear two people, both calling for help. One of these is your friend, the other a stranger. You have enough time to use your ladder to rescue only one of them. Some would say that both have an equal claim on you, and that you should toss a coin to decide who should be saved. But who amongst us would do that? Isabel asked herself.

But back to homicide, which she and her friend had started to discuss. An image was forming in Isabel's mind of the contents page of a special issue of the
Review of Applied Ethics,
which she would title “Good Killing.” She would ask Professor John Harris to contribute because his writing was so lively, and he had once titled a chapter of one of his books “Killing: A Caring Thing to Do?” That had not been as provocative as it sounded; John was a kind man—and a very subtle philosopher—and he was talking there of mercy killing, which might be carried out precisely because one cared about the suffering of another; to acknowledge this was not so much to condone it as to recognise why people did it. She liked John, whom she knew quite well, and had enjoyed several intense debates with him in the past. If he was at a window in a burning building, she would be very much inclined to rescue him. But would a moral impartialist—a hypothetical moral impartialist, not John—do the same and rescue her? He would surely have to make a random choice, toss a coin perhaps, which might mean that he could rescue the stranger, if the stranger won the toss. But he would be apologetic about it, of course, and would shout up from below, “Isabel, I would have loved to have rescued you rather than this stranger, but your needs, you see, are equal, and I must not prefer you simply because I know you. I'm so sorry.”

During the first half of the concert, while the chorus sang the Fauré
Requiem,
Isabel's mind wandered. Jamie was not due to play until the second half of the concert, and she imagined him in the large green room behind the stage. Before the performance he often said that he read to divert himself—something unconnected with music. She saw him sitting there with a book that he had picked up in the small bookshop at the corner of Buccleuch Place, a book of tiger-hunting memoirs. She had looked at him sideways when he had produced it, but he had explained, “All of them were man-eaters. Those are the only tigers he shot. He went round villages in the north of India back in the twenties and thirties and shot the man-eaters who were terrorising the villagers.” But it had still puzzled her that Jamie would read about that; no woman would read a book like that, and then she thought, He's not a woman.

With the “Pie Jesu,” which was sung by Nicola Wood, whom Isabel knew slightly, her mind came back to the music.
Dona eis requiem;
grant them rest. It was not complex music, with its cautiously developed melody and its utter resolution; it was a lullaby really, and that, she thought, was what a requiem really was. If one were to be taken up to heaven, then it would be Fauré who might accompany one. Again her mind wandered to the death of McInnes, his watery death; if it had been suicide, then would he have welcomed that death, abandoned the body's natural struggle for life, and embraced what lay ahead?
Grant them rest, rest everlasting;
they were such kind words, even in their finality, and the music that accompanied them, as in this requiem, should be gentle.

They reached “In Paradisum.” Behind the words, the organ's question and answer provided a tapestry of sound that was almost mesmeric, weaving delicately about the words. But it was the words themselves which engaged Isabel:
May the angels lead you into paradise / May the martyrs receive you / In your coming / And may they guide you / Into the holy city, Jerusalem.
There was really no consolation for death, she thought, just the various anodynes. But even if one could not believe in Paradise, or in angels, this was music which might, for a few sublime moments, nudge one towards belief in just that.

The last notes died away, and there was applause. Isabel sat quietly for a moment while members of the audience filed out for the intermission. A woman sitting beside her caught her eye for a moment and said, “Sublime.”

Isabel nodded. “Yes, it was. Yes.”

When the rush for the bar had subsided, she got up from her seat and made her way downstairs. In the lobby below, the wide double doors had been thrown open to the street, to allow the cool night air into the hall. Her feet always felt sore at concerts for a reason that she had never quite worked out; perhaps it was the heat, or the fact of sitting motionless for a long period. Whatever it was, she always yearned to be barefoot, or to have, as now, fresh air about her ankles.

She stood immediately outside the hall, watching the traffic go by. A small group of students, engaged in earnest conversation, walked past on the pavement, and one of them, a boy with glasses and a small goatee, was holding forth in an animated way. He must have said something to amuse his companions, as they laughed raucously.

Then a poor man walked past. Isabel knew that he was a poor man because he had a regular beat, selling a magazine that homeless people sold in the streets. From time to time she bought a copy from him, not because there was anything in it that she wanted to read, but in order to support him.

“Lazarus,” she muttered.

She had intended to think the word rather than utter it, but it had slipped out. She froze. Had he heard? If he had, he would wonder, surely, why she should call him Lazarus.

He had. He stopped and stared at Isabel, separated only by the low stone wall between the forecourt of the theatre and the pavement on which he had been walking.

“Lazarus?” he said in a thick, nasal voice. “I'm not Lazarus.”

Isabel felt flustered. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I was thinking aloud.”

The man frowned. “Well, I'm not him,” he reiterated. “I'm not Lazarus.”

“Of course not.”

He swore, not quite silently, under his breath. Isabel began to edge away, imperceptibly, but it was unnecessary, as he had turned and started to walk away. Isabel thought: What does he think of me? And all I was doing was thinking of Lazarus at the end of the Fauré:
et cum Lazaro quondam paupere / Aeternam habeas requiem. (And with Lazarus, once poor, may you have eternal rest.)
Lazarus once poor, led off to Paradise by angels, as in the parable.

Somebody tapped her on the shoulder. Peter and Susie Stevenson had come out to join her. Susie was holding a small glass of iced water in which a twist of lemon was submerged. She passed this to Isabel. “I saw you from down below,” she said. “I thought you might like this.”

Isabel thanked them. “Why are concerts so hot?”

“All those people,” said Peter. “And a general lack of air-conditioning. Which is maybe no bad thing. The more we air-condition, the hotter the world gets—or so we're told.”

They discussed the Fauré and the pieces that were to come; Isabel only half followed the conversation because she was thinking of the embarrassing encounter with the homeless man. Don't think aloud, she muttered to herself.

“What was that?” asked Peter.

She said, quickly, “I was going to come to see you. There's been something on my mind.” She took a sip of the water. “It's about that painting.”

“Ah,” said Peter. “You're still tempted? You know, I think that you're going to buy it. And why not? It won't break the bank, I imagine.”

“I'm not going to buy it,” said Isabel, “because it's a fake.”

“Hold on!” said Peter. “Have you any evidence?”

He had not expected her to reply so firmly, but she did.

“I have,” she said. “And what's more, I know who did it. A man called Frank Anderson.”

She had spoken with some conviction, and, as she uttered the forger's name, with some anger. The strangeness of that struck her; why should she feel that way about something which, as Jamie would be quick to point out, had very little to do with her? But it is to do with me, she told herself; I was
almost
a victim, in that I would have bought it had it not been for Walter Buie. He is the victim and…and he sought, in turn, to make me his victim.

Susie broke her train of thought. “Frank Anderson?”