The Careful Use of Compliments (9 page)

Susie had said nothing about this; now she joined in. “But if that's the way he thought about it, then why would he have bid against Isabel at the auction? It must have been apparent then that she wanted it quite badly.”

“Perhaps altruism takes time to emerge,” said Isabel. “We often think differently about things some time after the event. I certainly find that—don't you?”

Susie was not convinced. “That may happen sometimes,” she said. “But I don't have that feeling about this. I think that there's something wrong.”

“Well, I don't,” said Peter. “Walter Buie is very straightforward. He's exactly the sort of person who would do this. He's…”

“A bit old-fashioned,” said Susie. “I don't mean to be unkind, but he's what some people would call old Edinburgh. Just a bit old-fashioned.”

Old Edinburgh: Isabel knew exactly what that meant. And she used to laugh at it, or feel irritated by it, but now that the world was so different she was not so sure. Old Edinburgh had been so sedate, prissy even—like a maiden aunt—and it had been an easy target. But had the correction gone too far? Old-fashioned manners, courtesies, had been swept away everywhere, it seemed, to be replaced by indifference, by coolness. And yet that had not made people any more free; in fact, the opposite, surely, had happened, as the public space became more frightening, more dangerous.

“It's kind of him,” she said. It was the charitable interpretation of his gesture and it made Peter nod his head in agreement.

“I think you're right,” he said. “And I also think that you need to accept—if you still want the painting. I think that it's very important to be able to accept things. People often know how to give, but they often don't know how to accept graciously.”

Isabel looked at him, and Peter blushed. “I didn't mean you, of course,” he said hurriedly. “I'm sure you know how to accept.”

Isabel was not so sure about that; now that she thought of what Peter said about accepting, she realised that she probably was not very good at it. She felt guilty when people gave her presents, because she did not like the thought that somebody had spent money on her. Where did that come from? She thought that perhaps it was a result of not wanting others to be put out on her behalf, which was ridiculous. And it made her remember the story of a Scottish government minister who had been so well-mannered that, when allocated a female driver, he had insisted on opening the car door for her. People had laughed, but it said a lot for the moral quality of the minister himself; it was the opposite of the sort of arrogance that one sometimes saw in people who had found themselves in positions of power.

She should accept Walter Buie's offer, but did she still want the painting? Peter noticed her hesitation.

“Don't take it if you don't want it,” he said. “People change their minds. You can change yours.”

“I don't know,” said Isabel. “I really don't know.”

“Do you want to look at it?” asked Peter. “Walter said that he'd be very happy for you to take a look at it. We could go round and see him now.”

“But it would be awkward if I wanted to say no.”

“Not at all. You can turn him down if you don't want it anymore. Just tell him that you've changed your mind.”

She was not certain, but Susie said that she would look after Charlie if they wanted to walk round to Walter's house. Isabel thought for a moment and then said yes. She was intrigued by Walter Buie and wanted to know a bit more about him; a guilty feeling, because she knew that she should not be so inquisitive. But I can't help it, she thought; I just can't.

 

IT WAS NOT
a long walk, and the road was quite empty. “We'll be at his gate in a moment,” said Peter, pointing down Hope Terrace. “That drive off to the right—that's him. Walter has an old Bentley—a really old one. Sometimes you see its nose sticking out of the driveway and then the whole car emerges—it's a wonderful sight. He goes on rallies, apparently. He tried to invite me along once but I didn't see the point. Why go and sit around in a field with lots of other people who happen to own old Bentleys?”

It was not something that appealed to Isabel either, but she understood why people would want to be with others who share their interest. “Presumably they talk about Bentleys,” she said, “which is fair enough. I go to conferences of philosophers. We sit around, not in fields, admittedly, but we do sit around together.”

“Very odd,” said Peter.

They reached the driveway. A large pair of wooden gates, set in a high stone wall, prevented any access from the road, but there was a small door to the side which Peter pushed open. Inside was a walled garden, with a greenhouse and, at the far end, an attractive Georgian house in the style of that part of town. It was built of honey-coloured stone which had weathered dark in uneven patches, giving it a not unpleasing mottled appearance. The windows at the front, with their white-painted astragals, had that pleasant, harmonious feeling of Georgian design, and the sun was on the glass, making it flash silver and gold.

Isabel took to the house immediately—at least to that part of it she could see. “It's beautiful,” she said. “One to one point six one eight.”

Peter looked at her sideways.

“The golden mean,” Isabel said. “If we measured the height of those windows and then their width, the ratio between the two would be that: one to one point six one eight, or near enough.”

“Ah,” said Peter. “Of course.”

“Most of classical Edinburgh observes that ratio,” Isabel said. “And then the Victorians came along and got all Gothic.”

“But your house is pretty,” said Peter. “And it's Victorian.”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “I'm not being disloyal to my house. It was a child of its time. But the ceilings are just a little bit too high for the width of the rooms. Not that I sit there and fret about it, but it's true.”

They walked up the drive. Peter had telephoned Walter, so they knew that he was in. They stood at the front door; Peter pressed the small white button in the middle of a brass fitting to the right;
PLEASE PUSH
was written on the porcelain; old Edinburgh—modern buttons just said
PUSH
, the simple imperative, not the polite cousin.

Walter Buie answered the door. He was younger than Isabel had thought he would be; she had imagined a man in his fifties or sixties, whereas the person who stood before them looked to be in his late thirties at the most. He was a tall man, with a thick head of sand-coloured curly hair. He had a strong face and piercing blue eyes; Nordic, thought Isabel, a type that one still encountered in the north and west of Scotland.

Walter held out a hand to Isabel. “We've almost met in the past,” he said, and named a mutual friend.

They shook hands and Walter gestured for them to come in. There was a formality about the way he spoke, and in his movements—old Edinburgh, as Peter had described it. And he was right, thought Isabel, as they went into a large, airy hall. But there was something contemporary about Walter too: a freshness, an athleticism, which seemed at odds with the formal manner. It was difficult to see him as a lawyer who had dropped out of private practice, even if one could see him behind the wheel of a vintage Bentley.

Walter led them through to the drawing room, a perfectly proportioned room at the end of which three windows descended from the ceiling almost to floor level. On one wall there was a large, white marble mantelpiece on which a matching pair of famille rose vases stood on either side of a Tang horse. In front of a further expanse of marble, serving as a hearth, there was a low gilt table on which there stood piles of books and magazines. Isabel's eye ran discreetly to the magazine titles—
The Burlington Magazine, Art Quarterly,
and one she could not make out.

She glanced at the walls. Opposite the fireplace a very large Philipson nude gazed out of a wide black frame; to either side of it were what looked like two Ferguson portraits of women in extravagant, ostrich-feathered hats. And then, on another wall, above a long, white-painted bookcase, were two medium-sized paintings which Isabel immediately recognised.

Walter saw her eyes move to them. “Yes,” he said. “Those are McInnes, too. They're quite early ones, actually. I think that he did those when he first started going to Jura. That was before he married. He was fresh out of art college, but already he had that very mature style. That's what got him noticed.”

Now that he had drawn attention to them, Isabel felt that she could move over and look more closely at the paintings. Other people's possessions were an awkward thing, she thought; one should not snoop too obviously when one went into a room—a close examination of one's host's books always seemed to be too much like an attempt to judge their tastes—but pictures were different. The reason for hanging them on the wall was for people to see them—and that included guests. Indeed, many collectors
wanted
one to see their paintings, which was why well-known painters fetched higher prices. They gave no greater enjoyment, necessarily, than others; but they were evidence of wealth. There were people for whom the whole point of having a Hockney was that those who did not have Hockneys could reflect on the fact that you had one and they did not. Isabel did not care for this; she had no desire that others should see what she had.

She approached the paintings to look at them more closely. One was of a group of people cutting and stacking peats: a man and a woman worked with the stacks of dark blocks, while behind them, seated on the edge of the cutting, a young woman unwrapped a packet of sandwiches. It was a compelling picture, with a certain sadness about it, although she could not understand why it should be sad. That, perhaps, was why McInnes was considered such a good painter: he captured the moment, in the way in which a great painter must; a moment when it feels that something is about to happen, but has not yet. And what was about to happen in this painting was sad, inexpressibly so.

She turned to the other painting. This was a landscape, with the unmistakeable mammary hills, the Paps of Jura in the background. There was nothing in the subject matter which made it exceptional—so many artists had painted the western isles—but again there was that quality of attenuation of light, of sadness, that made the painting stand out.

She became aware that Walter was standing directly behind her. She heard his breathing and she straightened up. His physical presence was powerful in a way which she would not have been able to define; but it was there.

“That one of the peat cutters is one of my favourites,” he said. “The tones are almost sepia, don't you think? Like an old photograph.”

Isabel agreed. “When I look at old photographs,” she said, “I often think of how the people in them are all dead and gone. It's a thought, isn't it? There they are in the photographs, going about their business without much thought to their mortality, but of course it was there all the time.”

Walter was intrigued. “Yes, of course,” he said. “There's a photograph which really affected me, you know, when I was sixteen or seventeen. We had a book of poetry of the First World War—Owen, Sassoon, people like that—and there was a photograph in it of five or six men in the uniform of a Highland regiment—kilts—standing in a circle in front of the local minister. They were about to leave the Highlands to go off to the war.” He paused, and his eyes met Isabel's. “When I first saw it, I stared at it for quite some time. Half an hour or so. I just stared and wondered which of those men, if any, came back to Scotland. It was an infantry regiment, as the Highland regiments were, and their chances must have been pretty slim. They were slaughtered, those men. I remember looking at the faces, looking at the detail, thinking,
You? Did you come back? Did you?
”

They were both silent for a moment. Then Isabel said, “Rather like those pictures of the young men sitting on the grass around their Spitfires, waiting to be scrambled. How many of them lasted more than a few weeks?”

“Not many,” he said. “No. Awful. But have you noticed how those young pilots seemed to be smiling in so many of the photographs? Whereas those Highlanders just looked sad, uncomprehending, I suppose. It seems somehow different.”

Walter took a step back and looked at Peter. “You've explained to…”

“Isabel.”

“Yes, of course. Well, perhaps you'd like to have another look at the painting. It's in the dining room.”

They followed him into the adjoining room. The painting was propped against a wall, half in shadow, and Walter moved it out, leaning it against the back of a chair. “It's lovely, isn't it?”

Isabel looked at the painting. “I can understand why people were so sorry about his death,” she said. “He would have been a very great painter. When did it happen, by the way?”

“About eight years ago,” said Walter. “It was all over the papers at the time. It made the front page of
The Scotsman;
even
The Times
deigned to notice it. He fell foul of the Corryvreckan. It's a bad bit of sea off Jura. People call it a whirlpool, but it's more than that.”

There was silence. Walter pointed to the painting. “Just round the corner from that point. He'd taken to putting out lobster pots and so he had a small boat which he took out in the wrong conditions. Exactly what happened to Orwell, or just about. Orwell survived, and finished
1984.
McInnes didn't.”

Peter, who had been staring at the painting, looked up. “I've seen it. We were up on Islay once and went for a cruise round Jura. We stopped some way away from the Corryvreckan itself, but we could hear it. It was like a jet—a roaring sound. And there were amazing high waves rising and falling.”

“If you get the tides right,” said Walter, “you can sail right through it. It's like a millpond at slack water. Then, when the tide turns, it hits a submerged mountain of some sort under the surface and all hell breaks loose. That creates the whirlpool effect.”