“I suppose you have to be like that if you live up here,” said Jamie. “You wouldn’t last long otherwise.” He shifted in his seat; 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 6 5
the wind from Isabel’s open window was upon his face. “Could you live somewhere like this, Isabel?”
She thought for a moment. It seemed almost churlish to say that one could not, in the face of such beguiling natural beauty, but she could not. There would be so much that she would miss about the life of the city; the company, the conversation, the places to drink coffee. “I don’t think I could,” she said. “I’d moulder.”
“It might be quite nice to moulder,” said Jamie. “And I suspect that people have a very different sense of time here.”
“Do you think time slows down?”
He was sure that it did. He looked at his watch; he had no idea what time it was, and had not known all that morning.
In Edinburgh his day was sliced into half hours; thirty minutes for a pupil and then on to the next one: sarabandes, suites for bassoon and piano, arpeggios—so many notes, thousands and thousands of notes. “It’s different. When you’re doing something you really enjoy, it does pass more quickly. And it’s the same if people are rushing around you. Everything seems quicker.”
“Subjective time,” said Isabel. “When we’re ten, a week is an awfully long time. Now . . .”
“Yes, it’s very odd,” said Jamie. “I had plenty of time when I was at music college in Glasgow, and it passed very slowly. Now a week goes by in minutes.”
“There’s a reason for that,” said Isabel. “It’s to do with memories and how many you make. When you’re doing things for the first time, you lay down lots of memories. Later on, things become a bit routine . . .”
“And you don’t have anything to remember?” Jamie asked incredulously.
“Well, you do, but because your life is a bit more routine, 1 6 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h and there are few things which strike you as unusual, you don’t feel that you have to remember quite as much. And so it seems that time has passed more quickly.”
He said nothing for a while, thinking about a year at school when he had been bullied and he had thought that the time of his oppression would never end, and then, quite suddenly, the bully had not been there one day. Something had happened, and the other boy had simply gone, like a nightmare lifts when one wakes up and realises that it was never real.
She thought, Will I remember this, every moment of this, being here, in this beautiful place, with him—she glanced to her side—and him—she glanced over her shoulder. The green Swedish car swerved slightly, but only slightly, and recovered quickly enough to continue its journey along the side of the island, past startled Blackface sheep and dry-stane dykes, squat walls of stone dividing the fields, built many years ago by hard-working men, poor men, whose names were now long forgotten.
A R D L U S S A L OO K E D D OW N onto the bay of the same name, over lawns, then a field that ran gently down to a pier. Behind it, the River Lussa flowed down from the hills, to spread out, just a mile or so away, and join the sea at Inverlussa. The house had been built in the nineteenth century and added to in Edwardian times, a rambling country house half white, at the front, and half grey, at the back. It was at the centre of an estate that consisted of mountain and small forests, the habitat of the deer that provided a living for a handful of people—the family who lived in the big house and a couple of keepers and farm workers. The entrance was typical of that which one would find in any Scot-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 6 7
tish country house—a comfortable, lived-in hall, with walking sticks, cromachs (the Scottish crooks used by shepherds and hikers), and a bent and dusty green golfing umbrella that would have provided dubious protection against the elements even in its youth. If it rained here, it rained with conviction: shifting veils of water from clouds scudding in straight off the Atlantic; horizontal rain, vertical rain, rain swirling in all directions. Or on occasion the air was just wet: at such times there were no visible raindrops, just suspended moisture like the spray of a perfume atomiser that settled on clothing and skin. And with it came the midges, those tiny fruit fly–like creatures that spurn protective creams and lotions, and nip the skin of any human target in sight. Unfortunate hikers had been known to throw themselves into rivers to escape the clouds of stinging insects.
Lizzie met them at the entrance and took them into the kitchen. She had not met Jamie before and Isabel could see the surprise in her expression; surprise which was quickly and tactfully masked. When Jamie left the room to find the bathroom, Isabel said to Lizzie, “Yes. We are. And that’s our baby.”
Lizzie smiled conspiratorially. “I’m happy for you. But where . . .”
“Where did I find him?”
Lizzie blushed. She had not meant to ask that, but it had been what she was wondering. Isabel was an attractive person, and she could understand her being sought after by men, but by men like that . . . Well, somebody would have found him eventually, and if it was Isabel, then she deserved congratulation.
“He’s very . . . ,” she began, but again trailed off.
“He is,” said Isabel. “And he’s sweet.”
Jamie returned and Lizzie prepared tea for the three of them. A Dundee cake that she had baked was produced out of a 1 6 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h tin, and they carried that, and the tea tray, into the drawing room. There were pictures of island scenes on the walls, an old map, and piles of books on the tables. Isabel noticed Bernard Crick’s biography of Orwell, and she picked it up and paged through it.
“Do you want to visit Barnhill?” Lizzie asked. She looked at Jamie, unsure whether he would know the story. “It’s where Orwell stayed. You can see the room where he wrote
Jamie looked interested. “Can we?”
Lizzie nodded. “Yes. And he was in this house, too, you know. He was in this room. My grandfather lived in this
