The Careful Use of Compliments

sinister than Lettuce. Ecuttel and his lackey, Evod. The thought made her feel slightly better, but only slightly; engaging in such childish fantasies is merely a way of protecting ourselves from the sense of hurt that comes from betrayal or injustice. But it works only for a moment or two.

G R AC E WA S I N T H E K I T C H E N , sitting in front of Charlie, who was strapped into a reclining baby chair placed on top of the table. She was holding a knitted figure of what looked like a policeman and moving it up and down to get Charlie’s attention.

She looked up when Isabel came into the room but then trans-ferred her gaze back to the baby.

“Fed up already?” Grace said. “Look at this. He loves this little policeman. I think it must be the dark blue. He thinks it very funny.”

Isabel nodded. She looked at Charlie, and then looked back at Grace. She wanted to say to her, “I’ve been sacked. I’m the victim of . . .” But what was she the victim of? A palace coup was perhaps the best way of describing it. Or maybe she should call it a putsch, which had a more strongly pejorative air to it, a hint of violent overthrow. That was perhaps overstating matters a bit . . .

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“I’ve been—”

Grace interrupted her. “I think he’s tired,” she said. “Look, his eyes are shutting. There he goes.”

No, thought Isabel. I’m not going to tell her. I shall keep this humiliation private. Then, later this year, I shall simply announce that I have given up the editorship of the Review, which will be true, and if anybody should ask the reason I shall tell them. But until then I shall continue as before.

Grace now turned to Isabel. “Sorry, you’ve been what?”

“I’ve been thinking of going into town,” said Isabel. “If you’re happy enough looking after Charlie.”

Grace reassured her that this would be fine.

“Thank you,” said Isabel, and left the kitchen, lest Grace should see the tears that had come into her eyes. She had never been dismissed before and was unused to the particular form of pain it entailed. It was as bad as being left by a lover, or almost as bad, she thought, and in her case she did not even depend on the tiny salary she drew as editor, an honorarium really. What, she wondered, would it be like to lose the job that brought food to the family table, as happened to people all the time? That was a sobering thought, sufficient to forestall the self-pity of one in her position—and it did.

C H A P T E R F O U R

E

SHE WALKED INTO TOWN. Isabel very rarely took her green Swedish car into the city because of parking problems. She suspected, though, that she would use it more now that Charlie had arrived; babies required such a quantity of paraphernalia that the car, she thought, would become more and more tempting. She believed in public transport, and acted accordingly, but she was not one to become obsessed with the issue of her carbon footprints, or to lecture others on theirs. And the green Swedish car, she reminded herself, was green in another sense—unlike those intimidating machines which some people drove; those monsters with their tanklike bulk from which small, urban people stared down. Isabel had read of a man who had entered on a private crusade against these vehicles, attach-ing notes to their windscreens telling their owners just how irre-sponsible their choice of car was. She could understand that, even if she could never do it herself: it was one thing to think such things, another to tell other people what one thought.

But concern for the environment was not the only reason she chose to go by foot that morning; she wanted to put her thoughts in order, and it would be easier to do that while walking, making her way across the Meadows, the large park that 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

4 1

divided the Old Town of Edinburgh from its southern suburbs.

She had taken that path so many times before, and in so many moods. She remembered once, after a concert in the Queen’s Hall, she had walked home fighting back tears and had been stopped by a young woman and asked if she was all right. Those tears had been for the impossibility of her relationship with Jamie, whom she had seen during the concert intermission with a young woman she had assumed to be his girlfriend. It had never occurred to her then that not all that long afterwards they would become lovers and she would have his son. She would not have believed it; would have considered it utterly impossible. And now . . .

Nor would she have dreamed, she thought, that she would be walking across the Meadows, brooding with bitterness over her dismissal from the job to which she had devoted so much.

This would not have occurred to her because she would never have imagined that anybody else would actually want to be the editor of the Review. Nor would she have imagined that anybody would have thought that she had done the job badly. She had not. She had made a success of it, and had taken very little for her efforts.

Well, now it had happened and she wondered whether she should simply accept her dismissal as a fait accompli, or whether she should fight back. One thing she could do was write to Professor Lettuce, asking him to explain exactly why he thought a change of editor would be a good thing. Would Christopher Dove adopt a different editorial policy, and if so, how would that policy differ from her own? Of course he would find the words to deal with that by talking about something else and not answering her questions—he was very skilled at that—

so perhaps it would simply be a waste of time.

She reached the start of Jawbone Walk, at the entrance to 4 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h which giant inverted whale jaws served as an arch. Many Scots had been whalers, and these bones had been presented to the city by Shetland and Fair Isle knitters who had used them in an exhibition in the nineteenth century. Isabel thought that knitting and whaling did not sit together well; she did not like this reminder of something that she would have preferred to forget—our relentless pursuit of those gentle creatures, almost to the point of extinction. But the city was full of uncomfortable reminders of how things in the past were otherwise than one might wish they had been: memorials to wars which should never have been fought, statues of men who presided over so many remote cruelties—that was what came of having an imperial past. And Scotland had been an active participant in all that, supplying many of the soldiers, the engineers, and the officials who kept that vast imperial conceit going; nor did one have to look far to see the reminders. Old battles . . .