The Careful Use of Compliments

interest. “But why Jura?” He asked the question, and then he remembered; it was the painting that they had seen in the auction. That had been Jura.

Jamie raised an eyebrow. “It’s nothing to do with . . .”

Isabel shrugged. “I’ve been thinking about it,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about that painting. I suppose that it’s made me want to go there again. I have some friends there. I’d like to see them.”

“Who?” asked Jamie. He was suspicious. Isabel had a habit of doing things for very specific reasons, even if they appeared to be spontaneous or unplanned.

“Some people called Fletcher,” said Isabel. “The Fletchers have had Ardlussa estate up there for some time. I knew Charlie and Rose Fletcher slightly and I got to know their daughter a bit better. Lizzie Fletcher. She’s a great cook—she caters for hunting lodges and house parties in the Highlands, that sort of thing. Her brother’s taking over the house, but Lizzie still spends time up there when she isn’t cooking for people. You’ll like her.”

“Is that all?” asked Jamie. “Any other people?”

“Well, I went up there only two or three times,” said Isabel.

“I didn’t get to know many people. The manager of the distillery.

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

1 3 1

The women in the shop in Craighouse.” She had been drinking coffee, and now she drained the last few drops from her cup; mostly milk, a few flecks of foam—Isabel liked her coffee milky.

“And you do know about Orwell?” she asked.

Jamie did. “He wrote 1984 there, didn’t he?”

“Yes, at Barnhill, a house up at the top of the island. He finished it there in 1948.”

“And that’s how . . .”

Isabel wondered whether Jamie had read 1984; his reading was patchy, but there were surprises. He had read Anna Karen-ina and Cry, the Beloved Country, but did not know who Madame Bovary was—which was half his charm, she suddenly thought; that he should not know about such things. “Who’s Madame Bovary?” he had asked once, and Isabel, unprepared for the question, had almost said, I am, in jest, and then had stopped herself in time. But it was true, wasn’t it? Like Madame Bovary, she had fallen for a younger man, although in her case she had no husband and there was no Flaubert to punish her.

Women who fell desperately in love in defiance of convention were punished by their authors—Anna had been punished too; Isabel had smiled at the thought, and wondered whether she would be punished for loving Jamie. She had no author, though.

Isabel was real.

Orwell: he punished himself, she thought, by staring at nightmares, and then writing about them. “Yes,” she said. “He reversed the figures to get 1984, which must have seemed an awful long way away then.” She stood up. “And then when the real 1984 came along, it didn’t seem too bad after all. Certainly, it seems quite halcyon when compared with what’s going on today. All those cameras constantly trained on the streets and so on. All that suspicion.”

1 3 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Jamie rose to his feet too and glanced at his watch. He was due at the school in an hour or so, and he thought of the boy who awaited him in the music room, a boy who did not enjoy playing the bassoon and who endured his lessons with barely concealed boredom. They disliked one another with cordiality; Jamie disapproved of his attitude to the instrument and was vaguely repelled by the boy’s incipient sexuality, a sort of sultry, pent-up energy, just below the surface, manifesting itself in an outcrop of bad skin along the line of his chin and . . . It was hard being a boy of fourteen, and fifteen was just as bad. One knew everything, or thought one did, and it was frustrating that the rest of the world seemed unwilling to acknowledge this. And girls, who were equally uncomfortable, seemed so mocking, so near and yet so far, so out of reach because one was not quite tall enough or one’s skin was uncooperative. Jamie shuddered.

Had he been like that?

He thought of what Isabel had just said. Had things gone that badly wrong? And if they had, then why?

“Suspicion?” he asked. “Are we more suspicious?”

Isabel had no doubts. “Yes, of course we are. Look at airports—you’re a suspect the moment you set foot in one. And for obvious reasons. But we’re also more suspicious of everyone because we don’t know them anymore. Our societies have become societies of strangers—people with whom we share no common experience, who may not speak the same language as we do. They certainly won’t know the same poems and the same books. What can you expect in such circumstances? We’re strangers to one another.”

Jamie listened intently. Yes, Isabel could be right, but where did her observations take one? One could not turn the clock back to a world where we all grew up in the same village.

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

1 3 3

“What can we do?” he asked.

“Nothing,” said Isabel. She thought for a moment about her answer. It was defeatist, and it could not be right. We could seek to re-create community, we could bring about a shared world of cultural references and points of commonality. We had to do that, or we would drift off into a separateness, which was almost where we were now. But it would not be easy, this re-creation of civil society; it would not be easy taming the feral young, the gangs, the children deprived of language and moral compass by neglect and the absence of fathers. “I don’t really mean nothing,” she said. “But it’s complicated.”

Jamie looked at his watch again. “I have to . . .”

“Of course,” said Isabel. “It’s a major project and you have only ten minutes.”

He leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She smelled the shaving soap that he liked to use, the smell of sandalwood.