The Careful Use of Compliments

For the rest of that day, Isabel did very little work. She made several telephone calls, though: to the ferry company in the west, to book the car passage on it to Islay and back; to Lizzie Fletcher, to see if she would be on Jura the following weekend, when they planned to arrive; and to the island’s only hotel, the hotel at Craighouse, to arrange a room, one that would be large enough for the two of them and Charlie. Then somewhat reluctantly, when it was almost time for lunch, she faced up to the thing that she had been putting out of her mind but which now abruptly claimed her attention. Christopher Dove was coming that afternoon. He was booked on a train from London that would arrive at Waverley Station at three o’clock. He had announced this on the telephone and then had waited, as if expecting Isabel to offer to meet him. That’s what people used 1 3 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h to do at Oxford; they would meet people at the station and then walk to their college with them. Isabel endured a brief moment of internal struggle. Her natural goodness dictated that she should offer to be there; but her humanity, which, after all, was not restricted to kindness and sympathy—qualities of humanity surely can be bad, because that is what humanity is like—that same humanity now prompted her to be unhelpful. Professor Christopher Dove, after all, was the man who had engineered the coup which had toppled her from her editorial post. He was a ruthless, ambitious man, a plotter, who should have been a politician rather than a philosopher, thought Isabel. And I shall not meet him at the station. He can take a taxi and come to me.

Of course, she relented. Shortly before nine o’clock that morning she telephoned his home to offer to collect him at Waverley. As the telephone rang, she imagined the desk on which it rang, in his house in Islington, where was where she was sure that he lived. There was no reply; he had left for King’s Cross and she had no mobile number for him. She rang off.

That was a lesson which she should not need to learn at this stage of her life. Do not act meanly, do not be unkind, because the time for setting things right may pass before your heart changes course.

A TA X I H A D D R AW N U P in front of the house. From her study window on the ground floor, Isabel looked out, beyond the rhododendron bushes and the small birch tree to the front gate; a figure in the back of the cab was leaning forward to pay the driver. Well at least he got that right, thought Isabel; in Edinburgh one paid the driver before getting out of the cab—which was the sensible thing to do, the Enlightenment way—whereas 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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in London people got out and paid through the front window, which the driver had to lower. Isabel could not see the point of this, but it was one of those things, like driving on the left side of the road rather than the right, which just was. And these things, particularly the side of the road on which a nation drove, was not something that could easily be changed, although Isabel remembered that there had been at least one autocrat somewhere—it was in Burma, she thought, with its odd, unhappy history—who had capriciously insisted that people should abruptly change from driving on the left to driving on the right, with the result that they were confused and had numerous accidents. Rulers should not impose too much on their long-suffering people. Had not the King of Tonga, an extremely large man, insisted that the whole nation should go on a diet when he decided to embark on one? That would surely test the bonds between monarch and people.

She watched as Christopher Dove stepped out of the taxi, holding a small overnight bag and briefcase. He looked towards the front door, to check the number, which was prominently displayed in brass Roman numerals screwed onto the wood.

Then his gaze moved to the study window, and Isabel drew back sharply into the shadows. Dove must not, under any circumstances, feel that his visit made her anxious. Isabel had decided that she would remain dignified with Dove and treat him as she would treat any other colleague. That, after all, was the only thing she could do. Anything else—any pettiness or irritation on her part—would compound Dove’s victory over her, make it all the more glorious.

She had met him before, of course, and so his appearance was no surprise; the haughty good looks, the high cheekbones and brow; the thick, carefully groomed blond hair like that of 1 3 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h one of those men in the perfume advertisements, the men who stood there, shirtless for some reason (the heat, perhaps), looking in such a steely way into the middle distance. That was Dove.

“Isabel!” He had put his bags down on the doorstep and was standing there when she answered the bell, his arms extended as if to embrace her. And he did, leaning forward and putting his arms around Isabel’s shoulders, kissing her on each cheek. She struggled with her natural inclination to draw back, but even if she mastered that, he must have felt her tenseness.

“It’s so good of you to see me,” he enthused. “And at short notice too!”

She thought: It’s not at all good of me to see you; I had to see you. It would have been ridiculous not to see you. “It’s no trouble,” she said. “We have to get the handover right. After all, there are a lot of readers now. A lot. We wouldn’t want to lose them.”

It was a charged remark. She had not intended to fire off a shot quite so early, but she had. The fact that there were so many readers was attributable almost entirely to her editorship; when she had come to the job, the readership had been per-ilously small.

“Of course,” he said, smiling. “And that’s thanks to your efforts, of course. You’ve built the readership up marvellously.

You really have.”

Isabel thought, Well, why change editors in those circumstances? Should she say that? She decided not to, and instead invited Christopher Dove in. “Perhaps we should go through to my study,” she said. “You can leave your bags in the hall.” She looked pointedly at the overnight bag. “You have a hotel?”

She knew that this was a dangerous question. If his answer 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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was no, then she would be obliged to offer him a bed for the night, and she was unwilling to do that. I was hungry and you took me in. Yes, but that was in respect of somebody poor, not somebody nasty.

“No,” he said, and her heart sank. But then he went on, “I’m going back on the sleeper train. Do you ever use it? I like it.”

“Norman MacCaig didn’t,” said Isabel. “He wrote a poem about it. I think there’s a line, ‘I do not like this being