The Careful Use of Compliments

He bent down and kissed her, and her question trailed off.

“Yes, of course. Of course. Where’s Charlie?”

Charlie was lying on his back, on a blanket in the morning room, staring up at the ceiling. He appeared to be fascinated by the ornamental plaster rose in the centre and would gaze at it for long periods. “He must think that’s the sky,” said Isabel.

“And the plaster rose is a cloud.”

Jamie laughed and went down on his hands and knees beside Charlie, who lifted his arms up and gurgled with pleasure. Isabel left them playing with one another and went 8 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h through to the kitchen to prepare dinner. Charlie would be attended to and put to bed by Jamie while she cooked. Jamie liked to sing to him when he put him down, and Charlie seemed to like this, staring wide-eyed at his father, watching his lips, calmed by the sound of the voice.

Dreams to sell, fine dreams to sell, Angus is here with dreams to sell.

Hush now wee bairnie and sleep without fear, For Angus will bring you a dream, my dear.

She had stood transfixed when she first heard him singing that to Charlie, and had even found herself weeping. “Why?” he had said, turning round and seeing her. “Why are you crying?”

And she had shaken her head and muttered something rambling, something about lullabies being the saddest of songs, for some reason. “They always do this to me. The lullaby in Hansel and Gretel—you must know it: ‘When at night I go to sleep, Fourteen angels watch do keep. Two my head are guarding, Two my feet are guiding . . .’ ” He had put his arms around her and said, “Yes. Why not? All those angels. And Dream Angus too, with his dreams.”

Now she stood at the cutting board and asked herself: Is this complete happiness? Am I happier now than I have ever been before? The answer, she thought, was yes, she was. There had been periods of unhappiness in her life—the John Liamor episode being one of those—but she thought of herself as having been, for the most part, reasonably happy. But since the beginning of her affair with Jamie she had been conscious of being in a state of heightened happiness, a state of . . . well, she had to resort to the concept of blessedness. I am blessed, and being blessed is something more than just having something; it is a state of mind in which the good of the world is illuminated, 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

8 3

is understood. It is as if one is vouchsafed a vision of some sort, she thought, a vision of love, of agape, of the essential value of each and every living thing.

For a moment, Isabel stood stock-still. There were vegetables on the board before her, ready for the knife, but she did not move; her hand was arrested in its movement, motionless. She was aware of a physical sensation, a sort of rushing within her and around her, a current, which seemed to fill her with warmth. She closed her eyes and, oddly, there was no darkness, just light; it was as if she were bathed in light both within and without.

She opened her eyes again. The ordinary material world was there, the vegetables, the sink, the unopened bottle of wine, the recipe book lying open at the page to which she had turned, the pen-and-ink drawing on that page, everything. She breathed.

The warmth, the feeling of suffusion had gone, and she felt that she was back in the same place. She moved her arm and felt the coldness of the granite worktop under her skin, all quite normal.

But she felt different; she felt that the world had suddenly become infinitely more precious to her, and that there was more love within her. It was that simple, perhaps; there was just more love within her.

Later, with Charlie asleep, she and Jamie sat at the kitchen table. She had prepared scallops for them, to be followed by a risotto, which she knew he liked. They had chilled white wine with the scallops, and he raised his glass to her. To Charlie’s mother. She had laughed, and replied, To his father. She looked down at her plate. She wanted to tell him what had happened, there in the kitchen, while he was attending to Charlie, but how could she put it? I had a mystical experience in the kitchen this evening? Hardly. I am not the sort who has mystical experiences in the kitchen, she said to herself; the world is divided between 8 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h those who have mystical experiences in their kitchens and those who do not.

He said, “You’re smiling to yourself about something.”

“I suppose I am. Just a silly thought.”

He took a sip of his wine. “About?”

“About something that happened to me. I had a moment of . . . well, I suppose I might call it a moment of inspiration, while I was preparing dinner.”

He did not seem surprised. “I had one of those the other day,” he said. “I was waiting for one of my pupils and I had a moment of inspiration. A musical idea. I wrote it down as quickly as I could but when I played it later on . . . A great disappointment.”

She thought that they were not talking about the same thing. She had been wrong to call it a moment of inspiration; no ideas had come to her, rather an insight, and that was different.

But it was difficult to define it, because language was not suited to describing such things; one ended up talking at great length about what seemed ultimately to be something very small, as happens in the writings of mystics, where a cloud of words surrounds the brief light about which they write.

No, she did not want to appear foolish, and this was a subject on which she realised she knew very little about Jamie’s views. Did he believe in anything beyond the material? They had never talked about that, and she had no idea. But that was probably not unusual amongst couples—how many people these days, in her sort of society, talked to one another about that? She thought of her friends, and wondered which of them believed in the existence of God. She knew one or two of them went to church, and they, she assumed, either