The Careful Use of Compliments (22 page)

He came back to the bed. “He sticks to the shadows,” he said. “But that was him, all right. Praying to the moon.”

He held her hand lightly. “You promised something, you know. You promised that you would tell me a story about a tattooed man. Remember?”

“Did I?” She was beginning to feel drowsy.

“Yes, you did,” he whispered.

“All right. A story about a tattooed man.”

She put a hand on his shoulder. She felt the movement of his breathing; so gentle.

She whispered the lines, close to his ear. “
The tattooed man / Who loved his wife, the tattooed lady / And was proud of his son, the tattooed baby.”

She stopped, and she heard him breathing.

“Is that all?” he asked.

“There are some stories that are very short,” she said quietly, “because they say everything that there is to be said.”

In the silence of the room he thought about this. She was right.

“Thanks for that story,” he said. “I liked it very much.”

Isabel closed her eyes. There is a sea of love, she thought. And we are in it.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the international phenomenons The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, the Isabel Dalhousie series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, and the 44 Scotland Street series. He is professor emeritus of medical law at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and has served on many national and international bodies concerned with bioethics.

 

BOOKS BY ALEXANDER M
C
CALL SMITH

IN THE ISABEL DALHOUSIE SERIES

The Sunday Philosophy Club

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

The Right Attitude to Rain

The Careful Use of Compliments

IN THE NO. 1 LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY SERIES

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

Tears of the Giraffe

Morality for Beautiful Girls

The Kalahari Typing School for Men

The Full Cupboard of Life

In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

Blue Shoes and Happiness

The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

IN THE PORTUGUESE IRREGULAR VERBS SERIES

Portuguese Irregular Verbs

The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs

At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances

IN THE 44 SCOTLAND STREET SERIES

44 Scotland Street

Espresso Tales

Love over Scotland

 

The Girl Who Married a Lion and Other Tales from Africa

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

Copyright © 2007 Alexander McCall Smith

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2007 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, and simultaneously in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, Inc., and to Edward Mendelson, Executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden, for permission to reprint excerpts from “Heavy Date,” copyright © 1945 by W. H. Auden, and “Refugee Blues,” copyright © 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden, from
Collected Poems
by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc., and the Estate of W. H. Auden.

www.randomhouse.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948–
The careful use of compliments / Alexander McCall Smith.
(The Isabel Dalhousie series)
eISBN: 978-0-307-37171-3
I. Title. II. Series : McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948–.
Isabel Dalhousie series.
PR6063.C326C37 2007     823'.914     C2007-902476-9

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