The Careful Use of Compliments

“Not unless somebody killed him for the wrong reasons,”

said Isabel. “Take Stalin, for instance, or Chairman Mao. Let’s say that a rival, an even bigger monster, had disposed of Mao or Stalin in order to become leader himself, then that could be described as murder, I suppose. But if a relative of one of his victims took a shot at him, then I’m not so sure that I would call it murder. Assassination, perhaps, and even a justifiable one, if it saved lives.”

Their attention reverted to their purchases. Rosalind was inspecting a very small square of cheese. “I wonder,” she said,

“whether this comes from that cheese maker I met in Orkney who has only one cow. She can’t produce very much, you know.”

Now, remembering their conversation about Stalin and the rest, Isabel thought: Yes, people should condemn the crimes of tyrants equally. The problem was that people were selective in their moral outrage or simply did not know.

She sighed. Moral evenhandedness was rare, but that was another issue, and she had often been troubled by it. Moral evenhandedness suggested that one should treat one’s friends and strangers equally, and that was very counterintuitive. You are outside a burning building. At two adjacent windows appear two people, both calling for help. One of these is your friend, the other a stranger. You have enough time to use your ladder to rescue only one of them. Some would say that both have an 1 9 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h equal claim on you, and that you should toss a coin to decide who should be saved. But who amongst us would do that? Isabel asked herself.

But back to homicide, which she and her friend had started to discuss. An image was forming in Isabel’s mind of the contents page of a special issue of the Review of Applied Ethics, which she would title “Good Killing .” She would ask Professor John Harris to contribute because his writing was so lively, and he had once titled a chapter of one of his books “Killing: A Caring Thing to Do?” That had not been as provocative as it sounded; John was a kind man—and a very subtle philosopher—and he was talking there of mercy killing, which might be carried out precisely because one cared about the suffering of another; to acknowledge this was not so much to con-done it as to recognise why people did it. She liked John, whom she knew quite well, and had enjoyed several intense debates with him in the past. If he was at a window in a burning building, she would be very much inclined to rescue him. But would a moral impartialist—a hypothetical moral impartialist, not John—do the same and rescue her? He would surely have to make a random choice, toss a coin perhaps, which might mean that he could rescue the stranger, if the stranger won the toss.

But he would be apologetic about it, of course, and would shout up from below, “Isabel, I would have loved to have rescued you rather than this stranger, but your needs, you see, are equal, and I must not prefer you simply because I know you. I’m so sorry.”

During the first half of the concert, while the chorus sang the Faure Requiem, Isabel’s mind wandered. Jamie was not due to play until the second half of the concert, and she imagined him in the large green room behind the stage. Before the performance he often said that he read to divert himself—

something unconnected with music. She saw him sitting there 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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with a book that he had picked up in the small bookshop at the corner of Buccleuch Place, a book of tiger- hunting memoirs.

She had looked at him sideways when he had produced it, but he had explained, “All of them were man-eaters. Those are the only tigers he shot. He went round villages in the north of India back in the twenties and thirties and shot the man-eaters who were terrorising the villagers.” But it had still puzzled her that Jamie would read about that; no woman would read a book like that, and then she thought, He’s not a woman .

With the “Pie Jesu,” which was sung by Nicola Wood, whom Isabel knew slightly, her mind came back to the music.

Dona eis requiem; grant them rest. It was not complex music, with its cautiously developed melody and its utter resolution; it was a lullaby really, and that, she thought, was what a requiem really was. If one were to be taken up to heaven, then it would be Faure who might accompany one. Again her mind wandered to the death of McInnes, his watery death; if it had been suicide, then would he have welcomed that death, abandoned the body’s natural struggle for life, and embraced what lay ahead? Grant them rest, rest everlasting; they were such kind words, even in their finality, and the music that accompanied them, as in this requiem, should be gentle.

They reached “In Paradisum.” Behind the words, the organ’s question and answer provided a tapestry of sound that was almost mesmeric, weaving delicately about the words. But it was the words themselves which engaged Isabel: May the angels lead you into paradise / May the martyrs receive you / In your coming / And may they guide you / Into the holy city, Jerusalem.

There was really no consolation for death, she thought, just the various anodynes. But even if one could not believe in Paradise, or in angels, this was music which might, for a few sublime moments, nudge one towards belief in just that.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h The last notes died away, and there was applause. Isabel sat quietly for a moment while members of the audience filed out for the intermission. A woman sitting beside her caught her eye for a moment and said, “Sublime.”

Isabel nodded. “Yes, it was. Yes.”

When the rush for the bar had subsided, she got up from her seat and made her way downstairs. In the lobby below, the wide double doors had been thrown open to the street, to allow the cool night air into the hall. Her feet always felt sore at concerts for a reason that she had never quite worked out; perhaps it was the heat, or the fact of sitting motionless for a long period.

Whatever it was, she always yearned to be barefoot, or to have, as now, fresh air about her ankles.

She stood immediately outside the hall, watching the traffic go by. A small group of students, engaged in earnest conversation, walked past on the pavement, and one of them, a boy with glasses and a small goatee, was holding forth in an animated way. He must have said something to amuse his companions, as they laughed raucously.