The Careful Use of Compliments (20 page)

“You need the money?” It seemed unlikely to her. This was an expensive house and the furniture, the paintings, the rugs on the floor—none of these suggested financial need.

He stared at her. He had the look of one who has said enough and is reluctant to say more. But there was more.

“I need to raise slightly more than one hundred thousand pounds,” he said. “I didn't need to when I bought the painting. Then I did.”

Isabel waited, and he continued. “It's my own fault,” he said quietly. “I gave a personal guarantee for a friend who was involved in a management buyout of the company he worked for. It all seemed very solid when I agreed to back him, but an accountant somewhere along the line had deliberately misrepresented the liabilities. My friend goes under if I don't come up with the money. He loses his house—everything. And I'm godfather to his son.”

She was silent. It was utterly convincing, and it was while she was thinking of how unjust she had been in her assumptions that she heard Mrs. Buie behind her. She was standing in the doorway, holding a tray. She took a step forward and put the tray down on a side table. She looked at Isabel.

“That painting is not a forgery,” she said.

“Mother…”

Mrs. Buie raised a hand. Her eyes flashed angrily at her son, who was silenced in the face of her disapproval. “Do you imagine that we would attempt to sell a forgery? Is that what you think, Miss Dalhousie?”

Isabel felt the power of the older woman's disapproval. Her reply was conciliatory. “No. I'm sorry—I didn't suggest that. But it's quite possible, isn't it, that one might in good faith sell something which is not genuine? I could imagine that happening to me. I might sell something which I thought…”

Mrs. Buie shook her head vigorously. “With all due respect, Miss Dalhousie, that would happen only when one didn't know much about the artist. I've known Andrew McInnes for a long time. I'm very familiar with his work. There's probably nobody else who's as familiar with it.”

“Knew him,” said Walter Buie. “Knew him, Mother.”

This intervention was ignored. “And I assure you that the painting that Walter bought is absolutely genuine. It is the work of Andrew McInnes. There's just no question about it.” She paused. “And there's another thing. That particular painting of Walter's is really very good. It's far better than anything that he painted ten years ago. Far better.”

“It's unsigned,” said Isabel. “And it's unvarnished.”

“That's because he didn't have the time,” said Mrs. Buie. “There's nothing more to it than that.”

There was a silence. Isabel frowned. She was intrigued by something that Mrs. Buie had said. What did she mean when she expressed the view that the painting was better than anything painted ten years previously? She decided to press the point. “So you know when it was painted?” she asked.

The question took Mrs. Buie by surprise, and for a moment she seemed flustered. “I'm not sure…”

“But you said that he didn't have time to varnish it,” pressed Isabel. “Forgive my asking, but how do you know?”

Then it dawned on her. It was so obvious. Andrew McInnes was not dead.
I've known Andrew McInnes for a long time.
People like Mrs. Buie, with her precise speech, did not mix up their tenses.

“He's alive, isn't he?” Isabel spoke so softly that she barely heard her own voice, but Mrs. Buie heard it, as did Walter; he gave a start and spun round to stare at his mother.

“No,” said Mrs. Buie. “Andrew died. He was drowned off Jura.”

Isabel watched her as she spoke, and saw the lie. It was evident, exposed; a person of Mrs. Buie's nature, she thought, finds it hard to lie, impossible even.

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Buie,” she said quietly. “I know that it's rude of me, but you did seem to imply that you knew when the picture was painted. And then you said that you
know
Andrew McInnes, not
knew.
Forgive me for thinking that he is alive, and that you are finding it really rather difficult to continue to claim that he isn't.”

Mrs. Buie looked away. When she spoke, her voice was distant. “Yes. You're right.”

Walter glanced at Isabel. “Mother is perhaps not well,” he muttered.

Mrs. Buie turned to look first at Walter and then at Isabel. There was irritation in her voice. “I'm perfectly well,” she said. “And yes, Andrew is alive. You believe that you know a great deal, Miss Dalhousie, but I'm sorry to say that from my perspective you don't really know very much at all. If you had bothered to go to the library and read the papers, you would have seen the reports. And you would have read that the body of Andrew McInnes was never recovered. It was assumed that he had been devoured by that whirlpool, but he was not. He made it to the shore after his boat capsized and it was then that it occurred to him that he had the ideal opportunity to make a fresh start—as somebody else. And who can blame him?”

There was silence. “Well?” prompted Mrs. Buie. “Can you blame him?”

“No,” said Isabel. “I can understand.”

Mrs. Buie appeared pleased. “Well, that's something,” she said. She turned back to face her son. “That painting, Walter, which you so foolishly bought, was sent down to Lyon & Turnbull by me. Yes, by me.”

“You should have told me. You should have told me about that…and about Andrew.”

Her answer was snappy. “I couldn't. I couldn't tell you something that I had given my word not to reveal. Nobody was to know that Andrew survived.”

Walter was shaking his head in disbelief. “And you let me offer the painting to somebody else—to Miss Dalhousie here—although you knew full well that it was not what I thought it was. You let me carry on.”

“It is exactly what you said it was,” said Mrs. Buie. “You were deceiving nobody. And if you had told me that you were going to buy it, instead of going off by yourself, then you wouldn't have found yourself in this mess in the first place. Why did you suddenly get it into your head to buy a McInnes? Why didn't you discuss it with me? I would have told you then. I would have put you off.”

Isabel thought she knew the answer to this. Walter Buie was trying to lead his own life, which was difficult, she imagined, with Mrs. Buie still being in the house. She felt a momentary surge of sympathy for him; he did not seem a weak man, but he was still a boy as far as his mother was concerned. The pictures on the wall were his mother's, bought by her; perhaps he wanted something of his own.

That was Walter; his mother, though, was a different matter. Mrs. Buie was such an unlikely conspirator, and Isabel wondered how she had been drawn into this elaborate deception. “Why did Andrew McInnes get in touch with you?” she asked. “If he wanted to disappear totally—which he must have—then why…”

Mrs. Buie cut her short. “As you know, I was his…well, I suppose you might call me his patron. I bought his paintings before he disappeared, and I have been supporting Andrew for the last eight years or so, not in a big way, but supporting him nonetheless. He needs some money for an orthopaedic operation which he is having to wait a rather long time for on the national health service. He is in pain and can get it done privately more or less when he wants it. So I arranged for a couple of paintings to be sold.”

She glared at Isabel. “I had not imagined that somebody might make things difficult for us by concluding that the paintings were forgeries. They are not that.”

Walter Buie was staring at his mother, his lower lip quivering. “You could have told me,” he said reproachfully. “You could have told me that he was alive. You said nothing. Yet you saw the painting.”

Her voice was sharp when she replied. “As I've said, I have always respected Andrew's desire for privacy. And your trouble, Walter, is that you are rash. If you hadn't backed Freddy like that, you wouldn't be in this mess. John told you not to do it. Remember? He spelled out the danger.”

“Freddy was my friend.
Is
my friend.”

“Friendship and business are not always compatible,” she snapped back at him. Then, reaching up to finger a string of pearls around her neck, she turned to Isabel. “Is it too much to ask you to respect Andrew's wishes? If you spread this and he is outed, as they say these days, then I can tell you one thing: I am quite sure that he will do something foolish.”

“Disappearing in the first place was rather foolish, I would have thought,” said Isabel.

“Don't joke about it, Miss Dalhousie,” said Mrs. Buie. “Suicide is not a joke.”

 

WHEN ISABEL RETURNED
from the Buie house, she saw the light on the hall telephone blinking at her, signalling that a message had been left. There were two.

“May I come round for supper tonight?” asked Jamie. “I've got some fish that I could bring. Two pieces of halibut. They're quite small, but they'll taste really nice. I'll cook them.”

And then, in the next message, before which a recorded voice said it would take twenty-two seconds to deliver, Cat said: “Look, I'm sorry. I really am. I make a mess of everything and you're always so nice about it. But that's what you're like. You're kind and understanding and all the rest, and I'm just stupid. Will you forgive me? Again? One more time?”

Isabel smiled at this. She had expected it, of course, but had not known exactly when, and how, it would come. She put down the handset and walked into the morning room, her head light with relief. It was late morning now and the sun was shining in through the skylight overhead, making a square of strong, buttery light on the faded red of the Turkish carpet, or Turkey carpet, as her father had called it. It was warm.

She went over in her mind what she had heard that morning; there would be a great deal to tell Jamie that evening, over their two pieces, small pieces, of halibut. So Andrew McInnes was alive; well, his body had never been found—she had been told that—and so she should have thought of the possibility that he was still alive. But she had not, however obvious it appeared with the judgement of hindsight. But then she thought: I have only Mrs. Buie's word for that, and I barely know her. It could be that…She stopped and looked up through the skylight, into the empty blue. It was perfectly possible that Mrs. Buie and Walter had made up the whole story in order to conceal their being party to forgery or to the attempted sale of a painting they had decided was forged. It would be a neat solution for them. Walter might have suspected that Isabel had stumbled across the real reason for his try at a hasty sale. He might then have discussed it with his mother, who might have helped him concoct the story of the failed management buyout and his friend's desperate need for money. It was all too pat, all too neat. And she had swallowed it—even accepting Mrs. Buie's melodramatic warning of a suicide attempt by McInnes. That was a crude threat: the notion that somebody might take his life if we proceed with some course of action is a guaranteed way of stopping things in their tracks. And I fell for it, thought Isabel. I fell for it so very easily.

 

CHAPTER NINETEEN

G
RACE WOULD SNATCH
any chance of time with Charlie, so she did not hesitate to agree to continue to look after him that afternoon while Isabel attended to what she described as “urgent business.” She needed to go out of town, she explained, up to Perthshire, and might not be back until very late. Would Grace mind staying overnight?

The prospect of having unfettered possession of Charlie over so long a period clearly appealed. “Don't you worry,” she said. “You go ahead. Take as long as you like. Charlie and I will go and see my friend Maggie. She's been ill—nothing infectious, don't worry—a gallstone, actually, and a visit will cheer her up. She hasn't met Charlie yet, and she'll love him. We might even have our dinner down there.”

Isabel tried to place her. Grace had many friends, whose exploits and affairs she occasionally narrated in detail to Isabel. Now, who was Maggie?

“You remember Maggie, of course,” Grace went on. “I told you about her. She was a medium once, but she had a terrible fright and gave it up. She saw something unpleasant.”

“Like Ada Doom,” said Isabel. “Who saw something nasty in the woodshed and never quite recovered.
Cold Comfort Farm.
” It was very funny, but she did not think that Grace would find it so.

“No,” said Grace. “Not that. It's nothing to do with woodsheds. But a very disturbing thing nonetheless. She doesn't talk about it, but I know she thinks about it from time to time.”

“That's the problem with mediums,” Isabel ventured. “The future may be unpleasant, for all we know, and I wonder if that knowledge is really…”

She did not finish; the message conveyed by Grace's look was unambiguous. She did not like to discuss her spiritualist beliefs: this was a matter of faith.

“Oh well,” said Isabel, cheerily. “I hope that Maggie feels better. A gallstone can be very uncomfortable.”

She had a late lunch and fed Charlie. Then, when he dozed off—he was to have a sleep before the visit to Maggie—she went out to the garage at the side of the house. It was dark inside the small, windowless building, and she had to feel for the switch. But once she had turned it on, the light revealed the mysterious shapes for what they were: the curves of her green Swedish car, the upside-down bunches of last year's lavender that she had hung to dry from the exposed roof beams and had then forgotten, the neatly rolled coils of hose pipe, the bicycle that she never used now.

She slipped into the car and savoured, for a moment, the smell of the leather seats. It was a reassuring smell—the smell of something individual, and therefore rare in an age of moulded plastic. Somebody, some Swedish hand, had stitched that leather to make these seats; and it had been done with the same care that had been lavished on the engine, which never let her down, and started now, obediently, making the chassis of the car tremble slightly, as if in anticipation of the trip.

The traffic was light as she drove up Colinton Road and out onto the Stirling road. To her right, stretching down towards the Firth of Forth, the fields were full of ripening oilseed, patches of extravagant yellow. And beyond them, over the Forth and to the west too, were the hills of Fife and Stirlingshire, blue-green, indistinct in the warm afternoon light. She opened the window on her side of the car and savoured the rush of the wind, heavy with the scent of the country—mown hay, water, the soil itself. The sky, she noticed, had some cloud in it, but this cloud was thin and wispy, travelling fast in some high, invisible airstream; beyond that there was nothing—just an inverted bowl of blue over Scotland.

She did not rush. It would take her an hour and a half to reach Comrie by the back road past Braco, and she decided that she would enjoy the journey. There was enough to think about, of course, but she knew that if she dwelled too much on what she was doing she would think only of complications and reasons she should not do it at all. She was going in search of Frank Anderson, not because she was in any doubt that he was McInnes, but because she had come this far. She had taken it upon herself to look behind the paintings, and she had found out a closely guarded secret about the artist's survival. It was not clear to her what it was that had been achieved—other than satisfying the curiosity that had been raised in her when she had first begun to question the paintings' authenticity. One result was that the paintings had been shown to be completely authentic. When Guy Peploe had looked at them and pronounced them to be by McInnes, he had been absolutely right. His eye had not failed him; he had seen McInnes in the paintings, and indeed McInnes had been there.

In one sense, Andrew McInnes and his friend Mrs. Buie had not deceived anybody. McInnes had painted a McInnes—he could do nothing other than that, whatever he did—and Mrs. Buie had offered a McInnes for sale, both to the gallery and to the auction house. The only deception—on the part of Mrs. Buie—lay in the fact that the paintings were offered as the work of an artist thought to be dead. She was uncertain what to make of that, but at least she was sure that it would not be repeated; Walter Buie himself had made that clear enough as he saw Isabel out of the house.

“My mother has never apologised about anything,” he had said, looking back over his shoulder. “I'm ashamed of her. Really ashamed. I know that she's getting on, but…”

Isabel looked at him. Peter Stevenson had been right; Walter Buie was an upright man. People might be rude about old-fashioned Edinburgh, but it was upright. Reserved, proud, perhaps; but upright.

“I feel that I should apologise for her,” Walter went on. “And I promise you this: there'll be no more McInnes paintings coming from her. I promise you that.”

“You shouldn't reproach yourself,” said Isabel. “She did it only to help him. He's the one who chose to deceive everybody with that disappearance of his. Your mother was only trying to help.”

Walter thought about this for a moment. “There are times when one shouldn't help,” he said. Yes, thought Isabel. And perhaps one of those was when your friends ask for major financial guarantees. But then she thought, Of course I would do exactly as he did. I am not one to lecture him on that; I would not turn a friend away either.

Now, as she turned onto the road that led from the village of Braco across the hills to Comrie, her anticipation over her meeting with McInnes increased—if there was to be a meeting, she reminded herself. She did not know exactly where he lived or whether he would be in when she arrived. It was ridiculous, travelling all that way up into Perthshire without any certainty that the person she was hoping to see would be there; ridiculous, she thought, but that's what I choose to do because…because I am a free agent and doing something like this is exhilarating and underlines my freedom.

The road crossed a moor; on either side, rising up gently, dotted with grazing sheep, were the slopes of heather-covered hills. There were no houses, no sheep byres, nothing to show the hand of man but a few fences marching off into the distance. It was a lonely place, but a gentle one, not desolate, as some northern places can be. And then the road began to dip down towards Glenartney and the River Earn, and Comrie was before her, grey-slate roofs among trees, small white-gabled houses, a village typical of that part of Scotland—well ordered, quiet, a place where nothing much may happen, but where that suited the inhabitants well enough.

She drove into the High Street, the road which ran directly through the village from one end to another, and parked the green Swedish car near the Royal Hotel. On the other side of the road was a newsagent's shop, its front window filled with local notices stuck to the inside of the glass with pieces of tape. Isabel could never resist these for their social detail. In Bruntsfield the equivalents gave news of vacancies in shared flats, suitable for those with a good sense of humour, nonsmokers, the easygoing; news of virtually new computers being sacrificed; of kittens requiring dog-free homes. Here there were offers of grazing for ponies, of jam-making pans now surplus to requirements, of fishing tackle. The Royal Hotel needed waiters and waitresses and invited applications from “hard-working applicants only” a plaintive advertisement asked for news of Smoky, “a grey cat with half a tail” who had absented himself from home ten days ago and whose disappearance had led to “heartbreak, regret, tears.” Isabel gazed at that final notice; that a cat should leave such things behind him.

She went inside. A woman in late middle age, hair tied back, emerged from behind a curtained door. In the background somewhere, music played softly. Mahler, guessed Isabel.

“Yes? What can I do for you?” The woman's voice was soft, the accent of somewhere farther west, Oban perhaps.

Isabel explained that she was looking for Frank Anderson. He lived somewhere nearby, she said, but she was not sure where. Did she know him, by any chance?

“Not exactly know,” said the woman. “He hardly ever comes into town. But of course I know where he lives. It's a house along the road, out beyond Cultybraggen. You know the old training camp with all those funny wartime Nissan huts? Out beyond that about two miles. There's a track up to the left—you don't see the house from the road. But it's up there.”

Isabel thanked her and left. She had asked the woman whether she thought that he would be in and she had replied that it was highly likely. Frank Anderson, she said, appeared never to go anywhere, although she had seen him in Perth once or twice. “He hirples a bit,” she said, using the Scots word for limping. Isabel nodded; the hirple would be why he needed the orthopaedic operation that Mrs. Buie had mentioned—the operation that the state was failing to provide. We care for one another, thought Isabel, but we still don't care quite enough.

She drove out of Comrie, back along the road by which she had entered the village and away in the direction of Glenartney. The road was empty, a snake of black tarmac heading up the glen, and without any difficulty she found the turnoff to which the woman in the newsagent's had referred. The surface of this road—which was really little more than a track—had been neglected, and in one or two places the grass growing in the middle, between the two tyre tracks, brushed against the bottom of the car, making it sound as if Isabel was driving through water.

The house was unexpected, or at least unexpected in that place. It suddenly appeared from behind a rise, a small white-painted house that would have been a farmhouse or, more likely, a shepherd's house. In front of the house a wooden high-backed bench had been placed, and beside this a peony was in full flower, a flourish of pale red against the white wall of the building. Isabel noticed that at the side of the house, half obscured by a small trailer, was an old, dusty-looking car.

She parked and went up to the front door. It was open. There were voices within—a discussion on the radio.

“Mr. Anderson?”

Inside the house, the radio was switched off abruptly. A bird called behind her, the clicking sound of an alarmed grouse. She half turned round. The sun was in her eyes.

“Yes?”

He was standing before her in the door, and she knew immediately it was McInnes. The face had changed, in a way that she would have found difficult to describe, but behind the beard were the eyes that she recognised from the pictures.

Isabel stared at him. “Mr. McInnes?”

McInnes said nothing, but she saw the effect of her words. He seemed to take a step back, but then corrected himself. He closed his eyes.

“Are you from…a newspaper?” His voice was strange, mellifluous even—the rich voice of a classical actor.

She shook her head. “No, I'm not from a newspaper. Certainly not.”

Some of the tension seemed to go from him, but his voice when he spoke was still strained. “Do you want to come in?”

“Only if you don't mind,” said Isabel. “I haven't come to…to be difficult. Believe me, I haven't.”

McInnes gestured for her to follow him into the sitting room at the front of the house. It was not a large room, but it had been made to be comfortable. Against one wall was a sofa bed, strewn with cushions; on the walls, Isabel immediately saw, there were paintings by McInnes and others; a paint-bespattered easel was propped up against a wall. It was an artist's room.

“I can make you some tea, if you like,” he said. “But please sit down. Anywhere where's there's a space.”

“Thank you.”

He stood and watched her as she moved a couple of the cushions on the sofa bed. “Why have you come?” he asked.

She detected a note of fear in his voice. And that was understandable, she thought; I have broken in upon his privacy—the privacy that must have cost him so much to create. And why? Can I even begin to answer that question in a way which will not make me sound intrusive?

“I saw one of your paintings,” she said. “A recent one. My curiosity was aroused.”