The Careful Use of Compliments by Alexander McCall Smith Read Free Book Online

only reason she chose to go by foot that morning; she wanted to put her thoughts in order, and it would be easier to do that while walking, making her way across the Meadows, the large park that divided the Old Town of Edinburgh from its southern suburbs. She had taken that path so many times before, and in so many moods. She remembered once, after a concert in the Queen’s Hall, she had walked home fighting back tears and had been stopped by a young woman and asked if she was all right. Those tears had been for the impossibility of her relationship with Jamie, whom she had seen during the concert intermission with a young woman she had assumed to be his girlfriend. It had never occurred to her then that not all that long afterwards they would become lovers and she would have his son. She would not have believed it; would have considered it utterly impossible. And now…
    Nor would she have dreamed, she thought, that she would be walking across the Meadows, brooding with bitterness over her dismissal from the job to which she had devoted so much. This would not have occurred to her because she would never have imagined that anybody else would actually want to be the editor of the Review. Nor would she have imagined that anybody would have thought that she had done the job badly. She had not. She had made a success of it, and had taken very little for her efforts.
    Well, now it had happened and she wondered whether she should simply accept her dismissal as a fait accompli, or whether she should fight back. One thing she could do was write to Professor Lettuce, asking him to explain exactly why he thought a change of editor would be a good thing. Would Christopher Dove adopt a different editorial policy, and if so, how would that policy differ from her own? Of course he would find the words to deal with that by talking about something else and not answering her questions—he was very skilled at that—so perhaps it would simply be a waste of time.
    She reached the start of Jawbone Walk, at the entrance to which giant inverted whale jaws served as an arch. Many Scots had been whalers, and these bones had been presented to the city by Shetland and Fair Isle knitters who had used them in an exhibition in the nineteenth century. Isabel thought that knitting and whaling did not sit together well; she did not like this reminder of something that she would have preferred to forget—our relentless pursuit of those gentle creatures, almost to the point of extinction. But the city was full of uncomfortable reminders of how things in the past were otherwise than one might wish they had been: memorials to wars which should never have been fought, statues of men who presided over so many remote cruelties—that was what came of having an imperial past. And Scotland had been an active participant in all that, supplying many of the soldiers, the engineers, and the officials who kept that vast imperial conceit going; nor did one have to look far to see the reminders. Old battles…
    I’ll fight back, she thought. I’ll write to the publishing company and tell them that I’m being unfairly dismissed. There are industrial tribunals, are there not, and these could order my reinstatement; but are they intended to protect people like me? Somehow I think not.
    By the time she reached the High Street and had begun her descent of the Mound, Isabel’s mood had changed and she had resolved that she would do nothing. If Christopher Dove wanted the editorship, then she would let him have it. She needed neither the money—pitiful though the salary was—nor the work itself. There were other, more rewarding things to do, she had decided, than to sit in her study and read the manuscripts of obscure philosophers at remote universities. There was Charlie to be looked after; there were friendships to be cultivated; there were trips to be made to places that she had long wanted to visit. She could take