The Careful Use of Compliments

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assuming that Isabel would need help with the baby and that naturally this would take priority over her normal, more mundane duties of cleaning and ironing.

“I’ll look after him while you’re working,” Grace had announced. “And also when you want to go out. I like babies. So that’s fine.” The tone of her voice indicated that there needed to be no further discussion.

Isabel was happy with the new understanding, but even had she not been, she would have hesitated to contradict Grace. Although Isabel was nominally Grace’s employer, Grace regarded herself as still working for Isabel’s father, who had died years before and in whose service as housekeeper she had spent all her working life. Either that, or she thought of herself as being employed in some strange way by the house itself; which meant that her loyalty, and source of instructions, was really some authority separate from and higher than Isabel.

The practical consequences of this were that Grace occasionally announced that something would be done because

“that’s what the house needs.” Isabel thought this a curious expression, which made her home sound rather like a casino or an old-fashioned merchant bank—in both of which one might hear the staff talking about the house. But for all its peculiarity, the arrangement worked very well and indeed was welcomed by Isabel as a means of putting the relationship between herself and Grace on a more equal, and therefore easier, footing. Isabel did not like the idea of being an employer, with all that this entailed in terms of authority and power. If Grace regarded herself as being employed by some vague metaphysical body known as the house, then that at least enabled Isabel to treat her as a mixture of friend and colleague, which is precisely how she viewed her anyway.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Of course the circumstances in which the two women found themselves were different, and no amount of linguistic sleight of hand could conceal that. Isabel had enjoyed every advantage in education and upbringing; there had been money, travel, and, ultimately, freedom from the constraints of an office job or its equivalents. Grace, by contrast, had come from a home in which there had been no spare money, little free time, and, in the background, the knowledge that unemployment might at any time remove whatever small measure of prosperity people might have attained.

Grace went into the kitchen, put the tote bag down on a chair, and made her way into the morning room.

“I’m here,” Isabel called out. “In the study.”

Grace entered the room and beamed at Charlie. “He’s looking very bright and breezy,” she said, coming up to tickle Charlie under the chin. Charlie grinned and waved his arms in the air.

“I think he wants to go to you,” said Isabel.

Grace took Charlie in her arms. “Of course he does,” she said.

It was not the words themselves, Isabel realised—it was more the inflection. Did Grace mean that it was no surprise that Charlie should want to go to her rather than stay with his mother? That was how it sounded, even if Grace had not meant it that way.

“He actually quite likes me too,” said Isabel softly.

Grace looked at her in astonishment. “But of course he does,” she said. “You’re his mother. All boys like their mothers.”

“No,” said Isabel. “I don’t think they do. Some mothers suf-focate their sons, emotionally. They don’t mean to, but it happens.” She looked out of the window. She had seen it in her family, in a cousin whose ambitious mother had nagged him until he had cut himself free and had as little as possible to do T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

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with her. He had been civil, of course, but everybody had seen it—the stiff posture, the formal politeness, the looking away when she spoke to him. But had he loved her, in spite of this? She remembered him at his mother’s funeral when he had wept, quietly but voluminously, and Isabel, sitting in the row behind him, had put her hand on his shoulder and whispered to him in comfort. We leave it too late, she had thought; we always do, and then these salutary lessons are learned at the graveside.

“Mothers always mean well,” said Grace. “As long as they don’t try to choose their son’s wife. That’s a mistake.”

Charlie looked up at Grace and smiled. I have enough, thought Isabel; I have so much that surely I can share him.

Grace turned towards Isabel. Her face, Isabel noticed, seemed transformed by the close presence of the baby, her look at that moment one of near pride. “Do you want to work this morning?” she said, looking in the direction of Isabel’s over-crowded desk. “There’s not much to do in the house. I could look after Charlie.”

Isabel felt a wrench. Part of her wanted to answer that she would decide for herself, in good time, whether she wanted to work or whether she wished simply to be with Charlie; but another part of her, the responsible part, felt she should deal with the pile of correspondence that she had started to tackle the previous day but that she had abandoned in favour of the auctioneer’s catalogue. There were two horses in the soul, she thought, as Socrates had said in Phaedrus—the one, unruly, governed by passions, pulling in the direction of self-indulgence; the other, restrained, dutiful, governed by a sense of shame. And Auden had felt the same, she thought; he was a dualist who knew the struggle between the dark and the light sides of the self, the struggle that all of us know to a greater or lesser extent.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h She sighed. “Work,” she said. She had never sighed over the prospect of work before; but now there was Charlie.

As Grace took Charlie from the room, Isabel sat down at her pile of mail. It had grown that morning by five letters, pushed through the letter box by the postman on his morning round, all of them concerned with Review affairs. She disposed of the top two quickly. One was a request for a further supply of offprints of her article by an author who had lost her carefully husbanded supply which the Review gave on publication. The offprints had been mislaid in the course of a move following the breakup of a relationship. Isabel had stumbled over this. Why was it necessary for her to be told that the move had been prompted by this? Was it an attempt to engage her sympathy so that the offprints would be given free, or was it an excuse for the loss itself—a life thrown into disarray by the bad behaviour of another? Isabel looked up at the ceiling and pondered this; if one was to err, then it was better to err on the side of generosity.