The Careful Use of Compliments

“I see you’re still doubtful,” said Guy. “And yes, there are forgers who will do a very careful job. But one develops an eye for particular painters, you know, and one can just tell. It’s like hearing somebody’s voice. Little things that all add up to an overall impression that this is it.” He paused. “And provenance 7 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h is pretty important. In this case, the person who brought this in knew him. Knew McInnes. We know that she did, and so it all makes sense.”

“All right,” said Isabel. “I was just thinking aloud.”

Guy said that this was reasonable enough. Then, “Do you know much about McInnes? Do you know about what went wrong at the end?”

“He drowned, didn’t he?”

“Yes. Off Jura. But it was very sad, even before that. He had a big exhibition here in Edinburgh—two years’ work. It went on just before the Festival and a whole group of London critics traipsed up for it. They decided to slaughter McInnes because he had given a lecture at the Tate in which he pointed out how the London critics had ignored Scottish artists. He did it quite politely, but he did accuse them of metropolitanism, and that’s the one thing you mustn’t accuse metropolitans of. So they decided to get their own back—in spades. They called him an overrated minor landscape painter. One of them headed his crit

‘Provincial Painting by Numbers.’ They egged one another on.”

Isabel felt outraged. But her outrage had nothing to do with painting by numbers; it was the word provincial. “Provincial!”

“Yes. Exactly. And the effect on McInnes was pretty disastrous. I saw him the day after the first of these notices was published. He was sitting in the Arts Club all by himself, a drink in front of him. I went and had a word with him, but I don’t think that he was taking much in. His hands were shaking. He looked awful.”

Isabel winced. “Poor man. I had a friend who made the mistake of being both an author and thin-skinned. Journalists toss off their cutting remarks without realising the effect they have on the people they’re talking about.”

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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“There are plenty of people like that,” said Guy. “But it wasn’t just the bad reviews in McInnes’s case. It was the timing.

On virtually the same day that things went wrong with the show, he found out that his wife was having an affair. It all came at once. He was devastated.”

Isabel suddenly thought of Cat. Sexual jealousy was powerful, and that’s what Cat felt about Jamie; she must, even if she had got rid of him in the first place; it was still there, cutting and cutting away.

“So . . . the drowning . . .”

She left the question unfinished. Had it been a suicide? If one wanted to make a death appear like an accident, drowning was probably the best way of doing that. There were seldom any witnesses; it was easy to arrange, especially in a place like the west of Scotland with its tides and currents. But what a lonely death it must be; out in those cold waters, on the edge of the Atlantic, like a burial at sea.

“No,” said Guy. “I don’t think that he killed himself. He went off to Jura after things came apart down here. He left his wife more or less immediately and hid away in a cottage he used to rent up there. Rather like Orwell, in a way, who went off to Jura to write 1984. Anyway, he went up there and a month later it happened. He had a boat which he often took out. That’s why I don’t think it was suicide. It was consistent with the normal pattern of his life up there.”

Charlie was now quite awake and was staring up at Isabel with that intense, slightly puzzled stare that babies fix on their parents. “I’m going to have to feed him,” she said. “I’ve got his bottle here.”

“I’ll get you a chair,” said Guy. “Then, if you don’t mind, I’d better go and speak to those people upstairs again.”

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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.”

He fetched a chair and she sat down in a shaft of sunlight that came in from the back window. Like a woman in a Vermeer painting, she thought. Woman with child.

“One last observation,” said Guy. “McInnes’s death wasn’t suicide, as I said. In my view it was something worse. I think of it as murder.”

Isabel looked up sharply; an unfamiliar word in Edinburgh.

“Murder?”

“Yes,” said Guy. “A form of murder. By the critics. They killed him.”

She was relieved; nothing nasty—there was real murder and metaphorical murder. The first of these was a sordid, banal business; the second was considerably more interesting.

C H A P T E R S E V E N

E

SHE LET JAMIE in the front door.

“I left my key at home,” he said. “Sorry.”

She had presented him with a key shortly after Charlie’s birth, or slipped it into his hand; a presentation would have been more ceremonial. At first he had kept it on his main key ring, but then, for some reason, he had moved it onto another one, by itself. She had wondered about this—whether the separation of keys meant anything, but dismissed the thought; one could read too much into little things.

“You should keep all your . . .”