The Careful Use of Compliments (7 page)

Guy said nothing for a moment. He could see the scene that she was describing, and there was nothing that he could add.

Isabel broke the silence. “Are you sure that this is a McInnes? Are you absolutely sure?”

He was. “I'm pretty certain, Isabel. We wouldn't offer it as a McInnes if we weren't. All my colleagues are sure. Robin. Everybody.”

Isabel wondered how anybody could be certain about anything in the art world. There were all those fake Dalí prints still in circulation—almost mass-produced fakes, like the reproduction paintings turned out to order from Russian studios. If they could do old masters for a couple hundred dollars, then surely with a bit more time they could do something considerably more convincing?

“I see you're still doubtful,” said Guy. “And yes, there are forgers who will do a very careful job. But one develops an eye for particular painters, you know, and one can just tell. It's like hearing somebody's voice. Little things that all add up to an overall impression that this is it.” He paused. “And provenance is pretty important. In this case, the person who brought this in knew him. Knew McInnes. We know that she did, and so it all makes sense.”

“All right,” said Isabel. “I was just thinking aloud.”

Guy said that this was reasonable enough. Then, “Do you know much about McInnes? Do you know about what went wrong at the end?”

“He drowned, didn't he?”

“Yes. Off Jura. But it was very sad, even before that. He had a big exhibition here in Edinburgh—two years' work. It went on just before the Festival and a whole group of London critics traipsed up for it. They decided to slaughter McInnes because he had given a lecture at the Tate in which he pointed out how the London critics had ignored Scottish artists. He did it quite politely, but he did accuse them of metropolitanism, and that's the one thing you mustn't accuse metropolitans of. So they decided to get their own back—in spades. They called him an overrated minor landscape painter. One of them headed his crit ‘Provincial Painting by Numbers.' They egged one another on.”

Isabel felt outraged. But her outrage had nothing to do with painting by numbers; it was the word
provincial.
“Provincial!”

“Yes. Exactly. And the effect on McInnes was pretty disastrous. I saw him the day after the first of these notices was published. He was sitting in the Arts Club all by himself, a drink in front of him. I went and had a word with him, but I don't think that he was taking much in. His hands were shaking. He looked awful.”

Isabel winced. “Poor man. I had a friend who made the mistake of being both an author and thin-skinned. Journalists toss off their cutting remarks without realising the effect they have on the people they're talking about.”

“There are plenty of people like that,” said Guy. “But it wasn't just the bad reviews in McInnes's case. It was the timing. On virtually the same day that things went wrong with the show, he found out that his wife was having an affair. It all came at once. He was devastated.”

Isabel suddenly thought of Cat. Sexual jealousy was powerful, and that's what Cat felt about Jamie; she must, even if she had got rid of him in the first place; it was still there, cutting and cutting away.

“So…the drowning…”

She left the question unfinished. Had it been a suicide? If one wanted to make a death appear like an accident, drowning was probably the best way of doing that. There were seldom any witnesses; it was easy to arrange, especially in a place like the west of Scotland with its tides and currents. But what a lonely death it must be; out in those cold waters, on the edge of the Atlantic, like a burial at sea.

“No,” said Guy. “I don't think that he killed himself. He went off to Jura after things came apart down here. He left his wife more or less immediately and hid away in a cottage he used to rent up there. Rather like Orwell, in a way, who went off to Jura to write
1984.
Anyway, he went up there and a month later it happened. He had a boat which he often took out. That's why I don't think it was suicide. It was consistent with the normal pattern of his life up there.”

Charlie was now quite awake and was staring up at Isabel with that intense, slightly puzzled stare that babies fix on their parents. “I'm going to have to feed him,” she said. “I've got his bottle here.”

“I'll get you a chair,” said Guy. “Then, if you don't mind, I'd better go and speak to those people upstairs again.”

“Of course.”

He fetched a chair and she sat down in a shaft of sunlight that came in from the back window. Like a woman in a Vermeer painting, she thought. Woman with child.

“One last observation,” said Guy. “McInnes's death wasn't suicide, as I said. In my view it was something worse. I think of it as murder.”

Isabel looked up sharply; an unfamiliar word in Edinburgh. “Murder?”

“Yes,” said Guy. “A form of murder. By the critics. They killed him.”

She was relieved; nothing nasty—there was real murder and metaphorical murder. The first of these was a sordid, banal business; the second was considerably more interesting.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

S
HE LET JAMIE
in the front door.

“I left my key at home,” he said. “Sorry.”

She had presented him with a key shortly after Charlie's birth, or slipped it into his hand; a presentation would have been more ceremonial. At first he had kept it on his main key ring, but then, for some reason, he had moved it onto another one, by itself. She had wondered about this—whether the separation of keys meant anything, but dismissed the thought; one could read too much into little things.

“You should keep all your…”

He bent down and kissed her, and her question trailed off. “Yes, of course. Of course. Where's Charlie?”

Charlie was lying on his back, on a blanket in the morning room, staring up at the ceiling. He appeared to be fascinated by the ornamental plaster rose in the centre and would gaze at it for long periods. “He must think that's the sky,” said Isabel. “And the plaster rose is a cloud.”

Jamie laughed and went down on his hands and knees beside Charlie, who lifted his arms up and gurgled with pleasure. Isabel left them playing with one another and went through to the kitchen to prepare dinner. Charlie would be attended to and put to bed by Jamie while she cooked. Jamie liked to sing to him when he put him down, and Charlie seemed to like this, staring wide-eyed at his father, watching his lips, calmed by the sound of the voice.

 

Dreams to sell, fine dreams to sell,

Angus is here with dreams to sell.

Hush now wee bairnie and sleep without fear,

For Angus will bring you a dream, my dear.

 

She had stood transfixed when she first heard him singing that to Charlie, and had even found herself weeping. “Why?” he had said, turning round and seeing her. “Why are you crying?” And she had shaken her head and muttered something rambling, something about lullabies being the saddest of songs, for some reason. “They always do this to me. The lullaby in
Hansel and Gretel
—you must know it: ‘When at night I go to sleep, Fourteen angels watch do keep. Two my head are guarding, Two my feet are guiding…'” He had put his arms around her and said, “Yes. Why not? All those angels. And Dream Angus too, with his dreams.”

Now she stood at the cutting board and asked herself: Is this complete happiness? Am I happier now than I have ever been before? The answer, she thought, was yes, she was. There had been periods of unhappiness in her life—the John Liamor episode being one of those—but she thought of herself as having been, for the most part, reasonably happy. But since the beginning of her affair with Jamie she had been conscious of being in a state of heightened happiness, a state of…well, she had to resort to the concept of blessedness. I am blessed, and being blessed is something more than just having something; it is a state of mind in which the good of the world is illuminated, is understood. It is as if one is vouchsafed a vision of some sort, she thought, a vision of love, of agape, of the essential value of each and every living thing.

For a moment, Isabel stood stock-still. There were vegetables on the board before her, ready for the knife, but she did not move; her hand was arrested in its movement, motionless. She was aware of a physical sensation, a sort of rushing within her and around her, a current, which seemed to fill her with warmth. She closed her eyes and, oddly, there was no darkness, just light; it was as if she were bathed in light both within and without.

She opened her eyes again. The ordinary material world was there, the vegetables, the sink, the unopened bottle of wine, the recipe book lying open at the page to which she had turned, the pen-and-ink drawing on that page, everything. She breathed. The warmth, the feeling of suffusion had gone, and she felt that she was back in the same place. She moved her arm and felt the coldness of the granite worktop under her skin, all quite normal. But she felt different; she felt that the world had suddenly become infinitely more precious to her, and that there was more love within her. It was that simple, perhaps; there was just more love within her.

Later, with Charlie asleep, she and Jamie sat at the kitchen table. She had prepared scallops for them, to be followed by a risotto, which she knew he liked. They had chilled white wine with the scallops, and he raised his glass to her.
To Charlie's mother.
She had laughed, and replied,
To his father.
She looked down at her plate. She wanted to tell him what had happened, there in the kitchen, while he was attending to Charlie, but how could she put it?
I had a mystical experience in the kitchen this evening
? Hardly. I am not the sort who has mystical experiences in the kitchen, she said to herself; the world is divided between those who have mystical experiences in their kitchens and those who do not.

He said, “You're smiling to yourself about something.”

“I suppose I am. Just a silly thought.”

He took a sip of his wine. “About?”

“About something that happened to me. I had a moment of…well, I suppose I might call it a moment of inspiration, while I was preparing dinner.”

He did not seem surprised. “I had one of those the other day,” he said. “I was waiting for one of my pupils and I had a moment of inspiration. A musical idea. I wrote it down as quickly as I could but when I played it later on…A great disappointment.”

She thought that they were not talking about the same thing. She had been wrong to call it a moment of inspiration; no ideas had come to her, rather an insight, and that was different. But it was difficult to define it, because language was not suited to describing such things; one ended up talking at great length about what seemed ultimately to be something very small, as happens in the writings of mystics, where a cloud of words surrounds the brief light about which they write.

No, she did not want to appear foolish, and this was a subject on which she realised she knew very little about Jamie's views. Did he believe in anything beyond the material? They had never talked about that, and she had no idea. But that was probably not unusual amongst couples—how many people these days, in her sort of society, talked to one another about
that
? She thought of her friends, and wondered which of them believed in the existence of God. She knew one or two of them went to church, and they, she assumed, either believed in God or wanted to believe. That was probably true of many people in any congregation, of course: they were there not because they believed but because they felt the need for religion, for something beyond themselves. So what did Jamie believe in, if anything? Did he think that he had a soul? She watched him pick up his glass. He was looking at her, his eyes smiling. Of course he had a soul, she said to herself; that gentle, kind, loving part of him. That was there, and she could see it.

“We've had an invitation,” she said. And immediately she wondered why she had said this. She had not been thinking about it, and even if she had, she would not have thought about bringing it up right now. But it came out, unanticipated.

“Oh?”

She swallowed hard. She had just had a vision of love, or something to do with love, and she had to go on in that spirit. “Cat has asked us to dinner.”

She watched him closely. Sometimes words can be seen, she thought; one sees them travelling through the air and reaching their target as if an invisible wave had moved through the room. Isabel remembered how, as a young woman, she had once gone to sit through a trial in the High Court. She had a friend who was a junior advocate in the trial and she wanted to see her in action. It had been dramatic; she had seen the jury return its verdict and the judge had shifted in his seat to face the accused. Then he simply said, “Six years,” and she saw the man in the dock reel backwards as if he had been hit by an unseen hand, pushing him back.

Jamie put down his glass and looked at her. The light that had been in his eyes, the smile, was no longer there; it had been replaced by something flat, something guarded. “That's kind of her,” he said. “When?”

“She didn't say. It was a message, actually. She left it with Grace.”

“I see.”

She toyed with her fork. “Do you want to go? We don't have to.” She thought that Cat would understand; they had kept off the subject of Cat, by unspoken agreement, because they both knew it was a wound that should not be breathed into.

He did not reply for a moment. “I'm over her,” he said, but he did not look at Isabel as he spoke, and she knew it could not be true. If Cat meant nothing to him anymore, then he would have looked at her; Jamie always engaged with people directly, looked them in the eye. But not now.

Isabel stared at him. This hurt her. “I don't think you are, Jamie. I really don't think you are.”

Now he looked up at her. “No. You're right.”

“So do you still love her?”

His voice was low. “Maybe I do. Maybe. You know how it is.”

“Of course. I was in love for years and years. Even after John had left me I still loved him, went on loving him, so foolishly, pointlessly. But we can't help ourselves, can we?”

He suddenly pushed his chair back and rose to his feet. Something—his glass of water—toppled and was spilled, and made a long dark stain down the leg of his jeans. He came round to her and crouched down. He put his arm about her. His voice sounded hoarse; that was from emotion, she thought. “Don't you think that it's possible that we can…that we can end up loving lots of people? People we used to love, still love. Them. But they're just there in the background, and we get on with loving other people, people from our present rather than our past. Don't you think that?”

She reached for his hand and pressed it. Blessedness: she could not believe her state of blessedness; this young man, with all his beauty and gentleness, in her arms, hers. “Of course I believe that,” she said.

“So do we go, or not?”

“I think we should go. Cat and I are family. I don't want her cut out of my life with you.”

He kissed her on the brow, then on the lips. “All right.”

 

THE MAIL THE NEXT DAY
brought two manuscripts that Isabel knew were coming and which she had been looking forward to receiving, and she read these in preference to the items immediately below them in the pile, some of which looked like bills. The manuscripts were as interesting as she had hoped, and she started to write grateful letters to their authors. Both were solicited contributions to a special issue on the philosophy of taxation, a subject that proved to be considerably more thought-provoking than Isabel had imagined. Why should the wealthy pay more tax than the poor? They did, or at least they did in most systems, but on what grounds was this defensible? Should taxation be used as a tool to redistribute wealth? She thought it should, and many others thought so as well, but it was not so clear that taxation was the most appropriate way to achieve that. Should governments perhaps be honest and say that they intended simply to confiscate assets over a certain level? She gave some thought to that, wondering how she would feel if the government started to take her capital away, beginning right now, appropriating her funds, turning them into military equipment and welfare payments and new roads, as governments tended to do. I don't have a very strong right to have what I have, she thought. All of it comes to me simply because a member of my family had it, and then died. What sort of moral right did that give? Not a very convincing one, she felt. But so much of life turned out that way—things were gained and then handed on; not just physical things but tastes, qualities, insights. Would Mozart have written what he did had it not been for Leopold Mozart, who had placed his tiny son on the piano stool? Presumably not; the genius, the particular capacities of the brain might have been there but could well have remained locked away, had there been no musical father to bring them out. And Mr. Getty, a rich man—and a very generous one too—had received his oil fields from Mr. Getty before him; he might never have found oil by himself. She smiled at the thought; of course he might not have
looked
for oil—it does not occur to everybody to go looking for oil.

Her train of thought was interrupted by a noise from within the house. Grace was not there that morning—she had a dental appointment and Isabel had told her not to bother coming in. That was more than just concern for Grace's welfare on Isabel's part; Grace was undergoing root canal treatment on a tooth, and Isabel knew from experience how miserable this made her feel. Grace did not like dental anaesthetics, and preferred to endure the pain rather than to experience the lingering numbness that went with the local anaesthetic, a bizarre preference, in Isabel's view, but one which was firmly held. Isabel thought that this might be understandable, just, when it came to minor treatment, but root canal treatment, with its deliberate engagement with the nerve, could be an exquisite agony. She had found out that Grace loved to give a blow-by-blow account of her visits to the dentist and she did not feel in the mood to listen to a long story about root canals punctuated by the sort of grumpiness that Grace could, on occasion, muster. By tomorrow the memory of the pain might be less vivid, and Grace's mood might be restored.