The Careful Use of Compliments (6 page)

He shook his head.

“Go on,” she urged him.

He shook his head again. “Siren,” he said.

They kissed, and she watched him for a few moments as he walked down Broughton Street. He must have sensed her gaze, as he turned round and waved to her before continuing. She blew him a kiss, which he did not return.

Isabel turned away and began to walk along Queen Street. The late-morning air was bright, the air warm for the east of Scotland. She was worried that she had divulged something that she should have kept private. A few minutes earlier she had thought of the giving of hostages. Well, she said to herself, I've just given another one.

 

ISABEL ARRIVED HOME
to find that Grace had taken Charlie out into the garden in his pram, and was sitting under the sycamore tree at the back. Isabel peered down at Charlie, who was sleeping on his back, his head shaded by the pram's retractable hood. His mouth was slightly open and his right hand was holding the silk-lined edge of the blanket, the fingers where they were when he had fallen asleep.

“Something seemed to be bothering him this morning,” said Grace. “He was all niggly and he wouldn't settle. Girned a lot. Then he became a bit better. I gave him some gripe water.”

Isabel stayed where she was, bent over the pram, her face just above Charlie, but she looked sharply at Grace. “You gave him gripe water,” she said evenly. “And?”

“And it did the trick,” said Grace. “No more girning. Well, no more after about ten, fifteen minutes.”

Grace used the Scots word
girn,
which Isabel always thought so accurately described the sound of a child's crying. But it was gripe water that concerned her. “I didn't know we had any gripe water,” she said. And then, straightening up, she continued, “We don't, do we? We don't have it.”

“I bought some,” said Grace. “A few weeks ago.”

Isabel walked round the side of the pram. “And he's had it before?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Grace. “Quite a few times. It really is effective.”

Isabel took a breath. She rarely felt angry, but now she did, aware of the emotion welling up within her—a hot, raw feeling. “But gripe water contains gin, doesn't it? For God's sake. Gin!”

Grace looked at her in astonishment. “Not anymore! It used to, I believe. I had it when I was a child, my mother told me. She said that she would take a swig or two herself as well. But that's years ago. You know how fussy people are these days.”

“So what does it have in it now?” asked Isabel. “I like to know what medicines Charlie's taking, you know. As his mother I feel…” She knew that she sounded rude, but she could not help herself. And it did not help that Grace seemed so unapologetic.

“But it's not a medicine,” said Grace. “It's herbal. I think that the one I bought has fennel and ginger and some other things. It soothes the stomach, which is what they niggle about.” She looked up at Isabel. “You're not worried about it, are you?”

Isabel turned away. She struggled to control her voice, and when she spoke she felt that it sounded quite normal. “No, I'm not worried. It's just that I'd like to know if you give him anything unusual. I just feel that I should know.”

Grace said nothing, and Isabel did not look at her to gauge her reaction. She did not want to argue with Grace because she felt that it would be wrong for her to do so when Grace was her employee. That gave her an advantage over the other woman which she should not use; Grace could not fight back on equal terms, and that was unfair. But at the same time, it was not unreasonable of her, she felt, to insist on being asked before Charlie was given things like gripe water. Fennel! Ginger! Unnamed herbs!

She began to move away, but Grace had something to say, and she stopped.

“Cat telephoned.”

In the past, Cat had telephoned regularly. Then, with the breach in their relations, these calls had stopped; the significance of this was not lost on Grace, who said, “Yes. She actually telephoned.”

Isabel turned round. “What about?”

“An invitation. She wants you to go to dinner with her.” She paused, watching Isabel's reaction.

Isabel decided to be cool about this. “Oh? That's kind of her.”

“Jamie too,” said Grace. “She wants him to go too.”

Isabel's manner remained cool, although this was a very unexpected development. “And Charlie?” she asked.

Grace shook her head. “I don't think so,” she said. “She didn't mention him.”

Isabel went into the house, into her study. For a few minutes she just stood there, inwardly seething. Grace had no right to take over Charlie like that. She was acting almost as if he were her baby, not Isabel's. And it irritated her, too, that the other woman should behave as if she knew more about babies than Isabel did; there had been many instances of that, sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle. Isabel knew that Grace had always thought of her as somebody who was otherworldly, somebody who did not really know how things worked. Isabel had ignored this in the past, but she found it hard to do that now.

She sat down. Things were going wrong: the job, her failure of nerve in the auction, that odd exchange with Jamie over money, Grace giving Charlie gripe water, and now this odd invitation from Cat. Why would Cat invite Jamie? To interfere? To try to get him back?

Isabel looked down at the floor. The carpet in her study was an old red Belouchi that had been in the house for as long as she could remember. She and her brother had played on it as a child. He had used it to make a tent from which he had shot rubber-tipped arrows in her direction. One had hit her in the eye and he had been punished by their father. He had blamed her for his punishment, for telling on him.
I'll hate you forever,
he had hissed at her.
Wait and see. I'll hate you forever.
And now, after all those years, she hardly ever saw him, and he never wrote. It was not the Belouchi, of course; it was something else, something private and nothing to do with Isabel herself. Children hated for a very short time; they forgot, sometimes after a few minutes, while adults could keep hatreds going indefinitely, across generations.

She thought of Jamie. It would have been so much simpler if he had been her own age and she could have accepted his proposal of marriage there and then. It was bad luck, just bad luck to fall in love with the wrong person. People did that all the time; they fell in love with somebody who for one reason or another could never be theirs. And then they served their sentence, the sentence of unrequited, impossible love, which could go on for years and years, with no remission for good behaviour, none at all.

She looked up at the white expanse of ceiling. In her mind the most worrying thing about Cat's invitation was this: Jamie had recovered from Cat—Isabel thought of it as a recovery—but if he were to spend any time in her company his feelings for her might be reignited. It could happen. So should she conveniently forget to mention the invitation to him? Or should she go further and tell Cat that he did not want to come? For a short time the dilemma which this posed made Isabel forget her worries. If she simply did not pass on the invitation, she was merely omitting to do something; if she went further and told Cat that he did not want to come then she was actually telling a lie. As to the omission, she was not sure what duty one had to pass on information to another. If A says to B please tell C something or other, does B have any obligation to do so? It would depend, thought Isabel, on whether B had agreed to take on the duty of passing on the message. If he had not, then a liberal individualistic philosopher would probably say that he did not have to exert himself. That was liberal individualism, of course, with which Isabel did not always agree. Don't go swimming with a liberal individualist, she told herself; he might not save you if you started to drown. No, liberal individualism was not an attractive philosophy. Except now. Now it offered a very attractive solution to her problem.

I'll discuss the question with Jamie, she decided. And then she thought: How can I be so stupid? Oh, Christopher Dove, if only you could hear this interior monologue. If only. And you too, Professor Lettuce, you great slug!

She felt much better.

 

CHAPTER SIX

T
WO DAYS AFTER THE AUCTION
, Isabel was seated at her desk, halfheartedly paging through a submission for the journal—
not
a good one, she thought, but she always read to the end, no matter how tedious. She had not done anything about Cat's invitation, and was still uncertain just what she would do about it; so when the telephone rang she looked at it for a few moments, uncertain whether to answer. It could be Cat, in which case she would be put in an immediate spot for having ignored the invitation.

She picked up the receiver and gave her number. Cat always interrupted her if she did that. “I know your number,” she would say. “I've just dialled it.” But, rather to her relief, it was not her niece, but Guy Peploe.

“I'm sorry that you didn't get your picture,” he said. “I was crossing my fingers for you.”

“That's what happens at auctions,” Isabel said. “And there'll be another chance some day, no doubt.”

Guy laughed. “True words,” he said. “In fact, there's a chance right now, if you're interested. Not that picture, of course, but another McInnes. Interested?”

Isabel said that she was. But was it at auction?

“No,” said Guy. “Somebody has brought it in to the gallery and wants us to sell it on commission.”

Isabel thought for a moment. She was interested in seeing it, but she wondered whether she would want to buy it. The picture she had missed at auction had been a special one, as far as she was concerned, because of its link with the small study that she already owned; she had no particular desire to own a McInnes just because it was a McInnes.

“All right,” she said. “I'll take a look at it some time over the next few days”

Guy hesitated at the other end of the line. “Sorry to press you,” he said, “but I think that you should come down more or less immediately. I've got somebody coming in later this afternoon to look at a number of other things who may well go for this one too. He buys for a collector in Palm Beach. This is exactly the sort of thing that his man in Florida likes.”

Isabel looked at her watch and then glanced down at the manuscript she was reading. “Look, Guy, I'm in the middle of something really tedious. It'll take me about forty minutes to finish and then I can come. And can I bring Charlie?”

Charlie, she was told, would be very welcome: one could never start them on art too young. Isabel then returned to the paper she was reading. She had lost the thread of the argument, which was all about individual autonomy within the family, and had to go back several paragraphs to regain it. There was something wrong with this paper, she thought; something odd that she could not quite put her finger on. Then it occurred to her: the author did not believe what he was writing. He was making all the right arguments, saying all the right things, but he simply did not believe it. She looked at the title page, where his name and institution were typed. Yes. It was just as she thought. That particular department of philosophy was known for its ideological position; one could not even get an interview for a job, let alone a job, unless one adopted a radical position. This poor man was uttering the shibboleths, but his heart was obviously not in them: he was a secret conservative! In this paper he had argued against the family, calling it a threat to individual autonomy, a repressive institution. That was the party line, but he probably loved his family and believed that the best way of growing up adjusted and happy was to have a mother and a father. But that was heresy in certain circles, and
very
unfashionable.

She finished the paper and wrote what she thought would be a quick note to the author.

 

I shall pass your article on to the editorial board for a verdict. I am about to give up the editorship of this journal, and so you will probably be dealing, in due course, with the new editor, who will be Christopher Dove, whom you may know. I am sure that he will be very sympathetic to the argument that you put forward in this paper, as he has often expressed views similar to your own. I think he believes them, but, and forgive me if I am wrong, I get the feeling that your heart is not behind the arguments you present. Not your heart. You see, there are occasions when a theoretically defensible position, based, say, on an argument of individual rights and equality, goes completely against what we see about us in the world. And what we see about us in the world is that the conventional family, where there is a loving mother and a loving father, provides by far the best environment for the raising of children. That's the way it has been for thousands of years. And should we not perhaps take into account what the wisdom of thousands of years teaches us? Or are we so clever that we can ignore it? That is not to say that there are all sorts of other homes in which children may grow up very secure and very happy. Very loved too. But the recognition of that should not lead us to condemn and thereby weaken the conventional family ideal, which is what you do here. Do you really mean that? Do you really think that we would be happier if we abandoned the conventional family? I'm sorry, but I don't think that you do; you're just saying that you do because it's the position to take.

 

She read what she had written, and then read it again. Did she herself believe this? What was she providing for Charlie? What did she
want
to provide for Charlie? She reached for her pen and crossed out the final sentence. But that made the letter useless; crossed-out words are still words. So she crumpled the letter up and tossed it into the bin. Then she reached for another sheet of letterhead and wrote: “Thank you. Interesting article. I'll pass it on to the editorial board. You'll hear from the new editor. I.D. ed.”

Coward, she said to herself as she rose from her desk. Just like him.

 

ISABEL TOOK THE BUS
from Bruntsfield. Charlie slept contentedly in his sling; he had been fed and had shown no signs of colic or any other discomfort. Isabel had found the bottle of gripe water which had been purchased by Grace. She had moved the bottle to the bathroom cupboard; Grace might find it there if she looked, but Isabel's act of reshelving it at least made her point. In fact, she thought Grace had picked up on her irritation at her taking Charlie over—that morning she had very pointedly asked Isabel if she minded if she took Charlie out into the garden to walk him round the flowers; previously she had done that without asking.

Charlie slept through the bus journey and was still fast asleep when they entered the Scottish Gallery. Guy Peploe and Robin McClure were in consultation with a client when Isabel went in, but Guy detached himself from the group and came over to greet her.

“It's downstairs,” he said. “Come with me.” He reached forward and tickled Charlie under the chin. “My own are growing up so quickly. One forgets one used to carry them all the time.”

“Did you use gripe water?” asked Isabel.

Guy thought for a moment. “I think so,” he said. “Doesn't everybody? It tastes rather nice, if I remember correctly. Very sweet.”

Isabel smiled. “It used to contain gin.”

“Mother's ruin.”

They made their way downstairs. The lower floor housed three rooms, one given over to jewellery and glass and the other used for overflow exhibitions from the main gallery above. When they went into the back room, Isabel saw the painting immediately. It was propped up against a wall, directly below a small Blackadder watercolour of a bunch of purple irises.

“That's it,” said Guy. “It's a stunner, isn't it?”

Isabel agreed. The painting was not quite as large as the one in the auction sale, but it was clearly the finer picture, she felt, and Guy, she could tell, agreed.

“It's—” she began.

“Even better,” he said. “Yes, it is.”

She moved forward to look more closely at the painting. It was a picture of a boy in a small rowboat, on the edge of a shore. It was clearly Scotland—and somewhere familiar in Scotland, she thought; behind the shore there were buildings of the sort that one sees in the Western Highlands, or on the islands, low, white-painted houses. And then a hillside rising up into low clouds.

“You can almost smell it,” she said. “The peat smoke, the kelp…”

“And the whisky,” said Guy, pointing to a small cluster of buildings portrayed on the left of the painting. “This is Jura, you know, as the other painting was. And those are some of the distillery buildings. See them? And there are some of the kegs outside.”

Isabel bent down again and peered at the passage that Guy had indicated. Yes, it was Jura, and that was why it seemed familiar. She had been there on a number of occasions to stay with friends at Ardlussa. That was towards the north of the island; this was to the south, near Craighouse, where the island's only whisky distillery was.

She stood back from the painting. “What makes this so special?” she asked.

Guy stared at the painting. “Everything,” he said after a while. “Everything comes together in it. And it captures the spirit of the place, doesn't it? I've been on Jura only once, but you know what those west coast islands are like. That light. That peaceful feeling. There's nowhere like them.” He paused. “Not that one wants to romanticise…”

Isabel agreed. “And yet, and yet…We do live in a rather romantic country, don't we? For us, it's just home, but it's very dramatic, isn't it? Rather like living on an opera set.”

They both stood and gazed at the painting for a while. Then Isabel shook her head. “I don't know, Guy. Or maybe I do. Maybe not.” He was putting her under no pressure to buy the painting, but she felt that she should explain to him. “It's just that the other painting had that particular significance for me. I hope you understand.”

Guy reassured her. The other prospective purchaser would almost certainly take the painting. It would leave Scotland, of course, but it was a good thing to share…“But again it's odd,” he finished. “And getting a little bit odder.”

Isabel frowned. “This one isn't varnished either?” She bent down again and peered at the painting at close quarters. Charlie, feeling himself being tilted, let out a little murmur, something that sounded like a mew.

“No, it isn't,” said Guy. “There's that. But the other thing that puzzles me is that the two paintings should come onto the market one after the other, and within the space of a few days. That's a bit surprising, especially when the market has been starved of McInneses for a long time. People tend to hang on to them.”

“Somebody has obviously decided to sell,” said Isabel. “Or they've died and their family are disposing of them. You can imagine the scene. Young relatives with no interest in painting. Highland scenes. Sea. Hills. Not what we need. Let's sell and take the money.”

“That happens,” said Guy. “But these would appear to be from different sources.”

“Who?”

Guy sighed. “I can't tell you, I'm afraid. I hope you don't think I'm being unhelpful, but I can't really disclose who is offering this one. These things are confidential, you see—clients like it that way.”

Isabel understood. People might not like others to know that they were having to raise money. “Of course.” But how would Guy know that this painting came from a different source if he didn't know—and the same principle of confidentiality would preclude it—who had consigned the other painting to Lyon & Turnbull?

He saw the question coming. “You'll be wondering how I know they're from different places? Well, our client told us that he”—he corrected himself—“that she hadn't heard about the painting at Lyon & Turnbull. Unless she's misleading us, which I don't think she is. In fact, it's impossible. She's not the type.”

“I wonder where she got it from?” asked Isabel.

“In this case, I believe she bought it from the artist himself. Shortly before his death, I think. Sometimes there's a gallery label,” said Guy. He reached forward and tilted the painting away from the wall. “Look—nothing on the back, apart from that writing over there.” He pointed to where somebody had written, in pencil,
JURA, WITH MOUNTAINS.
There was another handwritten line underneath:
The boy's called James.

“That's McInnes's writing all right,” said Guy. “I've seen our own labels that he scribbled on. Or sometimes he wrote instructions about where the painting was to be delivered. Or where he was staying when he painted it. Sometimes lines of poetry—he liked to put MacDiarmid in. Odd things.”

“MacDiarmid liked that part of Scotland,” said Isabel. “‘Island Funeral.' That was one of his better efforts, in spite of the flannel. He was a bit of a shocker, you know.”

“But he could…”

“Yes, he could,” said Isabel. “He could stop us in our tracks. That poem about the island funeral makes the hairs on the back of one's neck stand up.” She paused and remembered. “I went to one once, you know. An island funeral. An aged cousin of my father's who had married into a family on South Uist. They were Free Presbyterians and there were no prayers. All those dark-suited men standing in a huddle, and the coffin left outside. They sang psalms, those strange Gaelic psalms, and then they went and buried her in silence with rain coming in from the Atlantic, nothing heavy, just soft rain. And that light. The same light that's in that painting over there.”