The Careful Use of Compliments

S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

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was sitting beside the vehicle and it got to its feet and raised its head to bark when it spotted them approaching.

“There’s no electricity here,” said Lizzie. “No phones. Nothing. They cook on gas and heat the water with one of those coal-fired ranges. And it’s really about as isolated as you can get. You could be here for ages and nobody would know. Lovely, isn’t it?”

She drew the Land Rover to a halt and they climbed out.

Jamie stood still and breathed in deeply; the scent of gorse, like coconut, the sea not far away, salt and iodine.

“Yes,” said Isabel, standing beside him. “The air.”

She looked at the hills and at the sea a few hundred yards away. Apart from the farmhouse, there was nothing to be seen of the works of man.

A figure appeared from the house and waved. They walked up the gently sloping grass field to meet the young man whom Lizzie introduced as her cousin Rob. There was a modesty about him which Isabel found immediately attractive, and she could see that Jamie warmed to him too. He was about the same age as, or very slightly younger than, Jamie.

They went inside, into a simple, functional kitchen of the sort which was to be found everywhere in rural Scotland—

a room for eating in, sitting about in, doing farming business in—the heart of the house. Rob made them a cup of coffee, boiling the water on the hissing gas ring. He and Jamie established immediately and easily, as happens in Scotland, the mutual friends, the points of contact, while Isabel and Lizzie entertained Charlie, who had discovered a button on his romper suit and was fascinated by the discovery. Then, when they had finished, Rob offered to show them round the house.

“I’ll show you the room where he wrote 1984, ” he said.

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“There’s not much to see, I’m afraid. And you can see the bath, if you like.”

“The bath that Orwell bathed in,” Jamie murmured.

“He led a pretty simple life,” said Isabel. “A good man, leading a simple life.”

“Orwell believed very strongly in social justice, didn’t he?”

said Rob.

“Everybody does,” said Isabel. “These days, at least. Do you know anybody who would say, I don’t think much of social justice? I don’t.”

“It depends on how you interpret social justice,” said Jamie, peering at a print on the wall. “One person’s social justice is another person’s social injustice.” He tapped the glass that framed the print and Charlie’s eyes followed the noise. “He’s going to love art.”

They moved through the house. “Orwell’s bedroom,” said Rob, simply, and they looked in on the small room, with its plain bed, like the room of an everyday bed-and-breakfast. “He did most of his writing in there. And in a tent outside. He had TB

and the fresh air was thought to be better for him.”

They peered into the small room above the kitchen, with its typewriter set neatly on the table and, beyond the clear glass of the window, the day, now sparkling under a sky that again had miraculously cleared. It is so green, thought Isabel; the soft grass, the bracken, the dark viridian of the trees.

She gazed out of the window of the little room while the others moved back into the corridor. She thought about the seeing of what others had seen; this was the view that Orwell had while he wrote that dark novel, with its all-seeing eye, Big Brother, providing the very contrast to the privacy and peace of this place. That was the explanation; the constricting prison of 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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Winston Smith’s world in the novel was so much more of a nightmare when one saw, there, in that place, what had been lost.

She remembered being in Freud’s house in Vienna and looking out of the window in his consulting room, seeing the small mirror hanging on the shutter, the only item remaining in that stripped-bare room, and thinking he had looked at that, the great doctor himself; he had looked out onto that particular stretch of sky, that courtyard. And then she remembered seeing James VI’s cradle in the bedroom at Traquair, and the thoughts that it triggered; and the bed at Falkland Palace in which James V had died, turning his face to the wall, bemoaning what he saw as the imminent end of a Scottish dynasty— It began with a lass and it will end with a lass, the king was reported to have said. Such beds seemed remarkable when we saw them today, although typically what we more often thought was How small they are, as if great and important things could happen only in large, imposing beds. Winston Churchill’s bed, the bed from which he dictated letters to generals and prime ministers; that had been a small bed. And finally, as she tore herself away from the view, and the room, the thought crossed her mind that a bed was really a very strange thing—a human nest, really, where our human fragility made its nightly demands for comfort and cosseting.

The others had descended the stairs to return to the kitchen. Isabel lingered by a window in the corridor, with another view, similar to that from the small bedroom. She turned away and it was then that she saw it. For a moment she stood quite still, her breath caught. There could be no mistaking it.

She leaned forward and looked at the picture. It was an oil, 1 7 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h a rough one, eight inches by ten, perhaps slightly