The Careful Use of Compliments

They were on the point of finishing when Jamie arrived. The study door was open and he came in, expecting to find only Isabel. “Oh,” he said. “Sorry to interrupt.”

“This is Christopher Dove,” said Isabel.

Jamie knew who Christopher Dove was and a shadow passed across his face, a clouding. “Oh.”

Christopher Dove stood up to shake hands with Jamie. He turned to Isabel.

“Your nephew?”

C H A P T E R E L E V E N

E

CHRISTOPHER DOVE left Edinburgh to return to London on the Monday of that week. That left three full days in Edinburgh before she and Jamie—and Charlie, of course—were due to leave for their four days on Jura. It would have been better to leave Edinburgh on the Friday, but they could not, as Jamie was playing in a concert in Perth that evening. So he managed to get the following Monday and Tuesday off, by shifting his pupils to later in the week, something he normally did not like to do but which was just possible, provided that it was not done too often.

The visit of the London philosopher had left Isabel shocked and angry. Her anger, which was more of a simmering resentment, perhaps, was focused on Dove himself and on his scheming ways, his sheer dishonesty. He had coveted her job and had pushed her out; that she could accept, to an extent, if only he had not been so duplicitous about it. Had he taken her job openly, then she might have muttered something about the fairness of all in love and war and left it at that. But he had unctu-ously congratulated her on her achievements and acted as if the discussions over the transfer were between willing predecessor and willing successor. They were not! thought Isabel. This was what businesspeople called an unfriendly takeover, and no 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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amount of smooth talking and smiling would paper over that unavoidable fact.

The shock that Isabel felt was nothing to do with Dove, or only indirectly so; it had resulted from the sheer, naked concu-piscence of Cat’s flirting. For a while Isabel had wondered whether Cat knew about the reason for Dove’s presence and whether her immediate taking up with him had been intended to rub salt into Isabel’s wound, a form of fraternisation with the enemy in full view of General Headquarters. But then she realised that Cat did not know about the change in editorship and that whatever else she might have done in recent months to hurt or offend Isabel, she had not done this. But it was still shocking because Isabel believed that people should be circum-spect about picking up other people. One might like somebody and set out to make further acquaintance, but, other than in bars and clubs where everybody went for that precise purpose, one tried not to make one’s intentions too obvious. Was this hypocrisy, and an outdated form of hypocrisy at that? She did not think so. The whole point about conventions of this nature is that they affirmed the value of the person; she who advertised the fact of immediate availability—and in Cat’s case barely five minutes had passed before the date was made—was suggesting surely, that she was available even to one whom she barely knew. There was such a thing as appropriate reticence, thought Isabel; a reticence that might at least involve a short prelude before the implicit bargain was sealed.

She was shocked by the thought that her niece was—well, there was no other word for it—cheap. She knew that Cat had an eye for a certain sort of man—the wrong sort—and she knew that her boyfriends tended not to last very long, but she had not thought of her before as cheap. Or was there another word?

Fast? No, a fast woman might not be cheap. They were two dif-1 4 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h ferent things. Fast women could be stylish and really rather expensive; they might think long and hard before they decided with whom they were going to be fast.

She was distracted for a moment by the conjuring up of an image of a fast woman. She saw, quite vividly, a woman sporting a low neckline, a knee-length silk-jersey dress, close-fitting, expensively draped, an impossibly small bag made of supple green leather; one would smell the quality of the leather. Isabel smiled at the thought, but then her smile faded. Cat was not fast, but she did not want to conclude that she was cheap. What was she then? The answer came to her: confused. That was a third category of women: those who were simply confused.

They did not really know what sort of man they wanted, tried many, and found them all wanting.

She tried to put Cat’s involvement with Dove out of her mind and thought instead of the absent Charlie. Cat would come round—eventually; even if Isabel could not get through to her, in due course Charlie would. One cannot snub a baby for long, even if he is the product of one’s aunt’s dalliance with one’s ex-boyfriend. As for Dove, he had done nothing to redeem himself and she had decided on a course of action which would deal with him. That required a bit of thought, but Isabel did not want to dwell on it too long. These things, once decided, should be acted upon, as Lady Macbeth pointed out to her indecisive husband. Isabel had not thought that she could do this particular thing; she had not imagined that she had it within her. But now she decided she had, and that she would act.

In the first place it involved a telephone call in which instructions were given. That took rather longer than she had planned, but at the end of the call everything was arranged.

Then there was another call, this time to the small private bank, Adam & Company, where Isabel was put through to Gareth 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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Howlett. That did not take long; liquidity, Gareth explained, was not a problem for Isabel.

“Sometimes people don’t quite understand just how substantial their resources are,” said Gareth. “You don’t really need to worry, you know.”

“I don’t like to think about these things,” said Isabel. She remembered what her friend Max had once said to her: Money is only a problem if one doesn’t have enough of it. It was one of those observations that seemed self-evident, but which had depths to it that became apparent only when one sat down to think about it. And could one say the same about other things?

Was food a problem only if one did not have enough of it? No, that, at least, was not true. Those who had enough food still had problems with it; hence the whole desperate business of dieting—the cures, the pills, the fat farms, the hopelessness of the scales.

That out of the way, Isabel turned to the luxury of spending a couple of days exactly as she pleased. Dove had taken the files on the next issue away with him, which meant that there was nothing pressing for Isabel to do. She