The Careful Use of Compliments

carried sideways through the night.’ ”

Dove grinned. “Poets get crotchety,” he said. “We philosophers are more sanguine, more stoic.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Isabel. “Hume was even-tempered, I suppose, but there have been plenty of unpleasant philosophers.” Such as you, she thought.

“I have never fully appreciated Hume,” said Dove, not too discreetly inspecting Isabel’s shelves. “I understand the appeal, but I take the view that there’s so much more to be learned about our emotions from contemporary cognitive science. Hume wouldn’t have exactly understood a magnetic resonance scan.”

Isabel stared at him incredulously. This was pure nonsense.

But she decided that she did not have the energy to engage with Christopher Dove on the point, and she moved over towards the filing cabinet behind her desk. “When I took over the editorship,” she said, “I threw out a lot of old files. There were boxes and boxes of papers which my predecessor had done nothing about sorting out. There were all sorts of things which would have been of no interest to anybody. Letters from the printers, and so on. I cleared it all out. There was even an ancient letter from Bertrand Russell about a claim for a train fare to a sympo-sium that the Review had organised.”

Dove, who had been facing the window while Isabel spoke, 1 3 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h now spun round. “Russell? But what about his biographers?

What if they had wanted it?”

Dove’s tone was one of subdued outrage, and Isabel bristled defensively. “Would his biographers be interested in a claim for a train fare? Surely not, unless Russell questioned the reality of the train journey, or something like that. I think that I boarded a train at Paddington, but can I be sure? ” She laughed, but Dove did not; he was concerned with posterity, and could not laugh at such things. Isabel wondered what conclusion biographers might draw from such a letter: that Russell was always one to claim expenses? Or that his finances were not in a good state and that he needed to watch even very minor outlays?

“What else?” asked Dove peevishly. “What else did you throw out?”

“I can assure you that I got rid of nothing significant,” said Isabel. “It was all what would be called ephemera.”

Dove’s irritation seemed to mount. Isabel noticed that he was flushed, and that this showed very clearly, given his complexion. And she thought, too, that he was a very good-looking man and that he carried no extra weight. He would be a squash player, perhaps, or a cricketer; he had that look about him.

“Ephemera can be valuable,” he said. “Very valuable. The signatures of well-known people on even the most mundane of letters can go for a great deal of money.”

Isabel realised that this was true. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Perhaps I should have been more careful. It’s just that there was so much paper, and I really thought that . . .”

Dove suddenly seemed conciliatory. “Never mind,” he said.

“I understand your feelings about mounds of paper. It really does accumulate, doesn’t it?”

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 9

They sat down at the desk, Isabel on her side and Dove on the other.

“I thought that we should go over plans for the next three issues,” said Isabel. “Things are fairly far advanced with them, and if the current issue is going to be the last one I do, then you’ll be taking over quite a bit of work in progress, so to speak.”

Dove nodded gravely. “Yes.”

“So shall we start with the next issue?” said Isabel.

Dove said that he thought this was a good idea, and Isabel extracted a thick folder from a pile of papers on her desk. She saw her visitor’s eyes go to the pile of papers, and she realised that he disapproved of the clutter.

“I do know where everything is,” she said quietly. “It may not look like it, but I do know.”

“Of course you do,” muttered Dove. “Creative clutter.”

She did not like the condescending tone of his comment, but she let it pass. She opened the folder and took out a messy-looking bit of paper on which she had noted the order in which she proposed to put the articles. There was also her editorial, printed out on cream-coloured paper and corrected here and there, in blue ink, by its author. This would be her last editorial, she reflected, and it was about the ethics of taxation. Dove would never write about anything quite so dull, she thought. He would write about . . . what? Cognitive science, perhaps; decision trees and ethics; the question of whether computers had minds, from which Isabel realised the further question might flow: Could one have good computers and bad computers? In the moral sense of course.

They began to work, and worked through until four thirty, when Isabel heard the front gate open. She looked up and saw a visitor coming down the path to the front door. It was 1 4 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Cat. Dove looked up too. He saw Cat and looked enquiringly at Isabel.

“My niece,” said Isabel, getting up from her desk. “I wasn’t expecting her.”

Dove stretched his arms back and yawned. “I could do with a break anyway.”

Isabel left him in the study and made her way to the front door. Cat had her finger poised before the bell when Isabel opened the door.

“I saw you.” Isabel smiled warmly. Cat’s visit could be a new beginning, and she would not let the memory of that disastrous evening at her flat stand in the way of a reconciliation. But if there was a thaw, it was a slight one, as Cat still seemed distant.