The Careful Use of Compliments

“And your day?” he enquired. Isabel hesitated for a moment, and Jamie noticed. Concern crept into his voice. “Something happened?”

Isabel looked blankly at the saucepan. She had started to make a roux and the butter had almost melted; only a tiny mountain showed in a yellow sea. “Fired,” she said. “Dismissed.” She stirred the molten butter briefly, causing the last part of the mountain to fall into the sea.

“I don’t understand.”

“From my post,” she said. And then she turned to him and 5 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h smiled. “You’re having dinner, you see, with the ex- editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. Or soon to be ex. My post is to be taken away and given to somebody else. To a certain Professor Christopher Dove, professor of philosophy at the University of . . .

someplace in London.” She felt immediately guilty about that description. Isabel did not approve of snobbery and it was rife in academic circles, where older and richer institutions looked down on their newer and poorer brethren; rife and pervasive—

with published lists which established the pecking order: Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, Cambridge, jostling one another in rivalry, while below them, almost beneath their notice, the struggling local universities with their overworked staffs and their earnest students. She should not have said someplace in London because that was precisely what some people would say from higher up the tree. “I mean the University of—”

Jamie interrupted her. He had been staring at her, open-mouthed. Now he said, “They can’t.”

“They can, and they have.” She told him about Professor Lettuce and his letter. She mentioned the inept attempt at the friendly postscript; Jamie winced. She tried to remain even-voiced—she did not want him to know how much she had been hurt—but he could tell. He rose to his feet and came to her, putting his arm about her shoulder.

“Isabel . . .”

She put a finger to his lips. “I’m all right. I really am. I don’t mind.”

“You’re playing the glad game.”

She looked at him and shook her head. “The best of all possible worlds . . .”

“Yes. Pretending that everything is fine, when it isn’t.” He paused. “How dare they? You work and work for that stupid journal of theirs . . .”

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

5 3

“Not stupid.”

“For that stupid journal of theirs. For nothing, or almost nothing. And this is the thanks you get.”

She returned to her roux, moving the saucepan slightly off the heat and beginning to sift flour into the mixture. “But that’s the way of the world, Jamie. It happens to just about everybody.

You work all your life for some company and at the end of the day you find somebody breathing down your neck, itching to get into your office and sit at your desk. And any thanks that you get are not really meant. Not really.”

Jamie sat down again. He was thinking of a brass player of his acquaintance whose lip had gone with the onset of middle age. The world of music could be cruel too; one either reached the high notes or one did not. “So you’re not going to fight back?

You’re not going to write to . . . to whoever it is who owns it?

Didn’t you say that there was a publishing company somewhere? Surely you could write to them, to the managing director or whatever?”

Isabel stirred the roux. There were people who never got lumps in their roux; she was not one of them. “The publishers have very little interest in the Review, ” she said. “They acquired it with a building. They tried to sell it once and would probably do the same again, if somebody came along with a large enough offer. No, they’ve got no desire to interfere.”

“So they don’t care?”

Isabel thought about this. It would not be correct to say that they did not care—they would care if the journal started to make a loss. But as long as it ticked over and made even a minuscule profit, they were content to let the board get on with it. She explained this to Jamie.

For a few minutes after that, neither spoke. Isabel stirred her roux, which was coming together well now; Jamie fiddled 5 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h with The Scotsman, folding and unfolding a corner, the obituary page. “He had a profound knowledge of aviation,” he read. “And his sense of the dramatic was legendary. Once, while speaking at a dinner, he announced that he proposed to buy an airline that . . .” There were such colourful lives in obituaries that the lives of the living seemed so much tamer, as did their names.

Who would announce the intention of buying an airline? Presumably somebody did. People—individuals—owned airlines, just as they owned ships and tall buildings and vast tracts of land; or nothing at all, as Gandhi had done at his death. As a boy, Jamie had been given a book about Gandhi by an idealistic aunt, who had shown him the picture of Gandhi’s possessions at his death: a pair of spectacles, a white dhoti, a modest pair of sandals . . . But when you leave this world you don’t even take that, Jamie, she had said; remember that. And he had stared at the picture, and stared at it, and had wanted, for some reason, to cry, because he felt sorry for Gandhi, who had owned only those few things and was now dead.

“Why don’t you sue them?” he asked.

Isabel was about to sample a small quantity of roux. She paused, the spoon halfway to her mouth. “Sue them for what?