The Careful Use of Compliments

I’m not sure that we even bother to thank them.” She paused.

Were there any statues of dentists? She thought not. And yet there should be. We had so many statues of generals and politi-9 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h cians and the like, who made wars and took life, and none of dentists, who battled pain. It was all wrong.

And yet, would anybody be able to take a statue of a dentist seriously? What if one were to go into some small town somewhere and find a bronze equestrian statue of a great dentist?

Would one be able to do anything but laugh? Of course there was St. Apollonia, the patron saint of toothache, and she had read somewhere that the British Dental Association had a small statue of her in their headquarters.

“Why are you smiling?” asked Grace.

“Just thinking of something odd. It suddenly occurred to me that there are no statues of dentists—anywhere in Scotland, as far as I know. Maybe they have them elsewhere—I don’t know.

But it does seem rather unfair, don’t you think?”

“Very,” said Grace. “Mind you, root canal treatment—”

The telephone went, and Isabel rose to her feet to answer.

“Isabel?”

“Peter.”

“I know that you sit there doing the crossword,” said Peter Stevenson, “and I would not want to disturb that. But I have some interesting news for you. Are you in a mood for interesting news?”

Isabel, who had kept the copy of The Scotsman in her hand, now put it down on one of the kitchen work surfaces. It was not a difficult crossword that day, and it could keep until later. “I’m always ready for interesting news.” She was intrigued. Peter was not one for idle gossip, and interesting news from him would probably be worth listening to.

“Your painting,” he said. “The one that I saw you trying to buy at Lyon & Turnbull—that painting of the island, somewhere over in the west. Remember that?”

She wondered whether he had found out something more 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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about the painting; would that really be all that interesting, or even interesting enough to warrant a telephone call? “Of course.

The McInnes.”

“Yes,” said Peter. “Well, do you want it?”

She was puzzled. Of course she had wanted it—that was why she had tried to buy it. “Well, I did want it. I bid for it, as you may remember.”

“Of course I remember that,” said Peter quickly. “But the point is this: Do you still want it? Because if you do, then it’s yours. For the price the purchaser paid for it. Not a penny more.”

She was not sure what to say. Did she still want it, or had her enthusiasm for the picture waned after she had seen it go to somebody else?

“I know that you’ll probably want to think about it,” said Peter. “So why don’t you do so and then come over this afternoon for tea with Susie and me? We can talk more about it, and Susie wants to see you anyway. She says that she hasn’t seen you since . . . since Charlie, and she’d like to see him, and you of course.”

She accepted the invitation. She would drive round in her green Swedish car, or they would walk, which would be more responsible. Talk of global warming had made her feel guilty about her green Swedish car, although for many people the possession of a Swedish car was almost a statement about the world. Swedish cars came with no baggage; they had never been used as staff cars by the officers of invading forces, they were built by well-paid labour that enjoyed full social welfare benefits, they were neither ostentatious nor greedy in their fuel con- sumption. But they were still cars, and it was cars that were ruining our planet. So that afternoon she would push Charlie 1 0 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h round to the Stevenson house in his baby buggy and push him back afterwards, leaving little or no carbon footprint behind them.

P E T E R M E T H E R at the door of West Grange House.

“I didn’t hear you arriving,” he said. “Did you drive?”

“Yes, I drove,” said Isabel, pointing to the road, where she had parked her car. “I didn’t intend to, but I drove.”

“I see,” said Peter, smiling. “The road to our house is paved with good intentions.”

“And copies of unsold romantic novels,” said Isabel, as they went in. “Did you know that unsold paperback novels make an ideal base for roads? Apparently they chop them up and com-press them and there you have it—a very good material for putting under tarmac.”

Peter had not heard this. “But why just romantic novels?” he asked. “Why not copies of . . . I don’t know, literary novels perhaps. Proust even . . .”

Isabel thought for a moment. There were some literary novels that would have been good candidates for such treatment, and the work of one author in particular, now that she came to think of it. There was something about his prose, she thought, that made him ideal for such a purpose. But she did not feel that she should reveal this to Peter, who was a fair-minded man who might feel her comment less than kind. And he would have been right; the thought had not been a charitable one and she made an effort to put it out of her mind—easier said than done, as