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

his commitments.
    She pointed at the painting. “Are you…?” She paused. It was always awkward in the saleroom when one encountered a friend looking at the same item. One would not want to bid against a friend, but at the same time one hoped that the friend would feel the same compunction.
    Guy shook his head. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re not going to go for this. Are you?”
    Isabel looked at the painting again. She wanted it.
    â€œI think so.”
    Guy paged through his catalogue. “The estimate is a bit low,” he said. “But it’s difficult to tell. His works don’t come up very often these days. In fact, I can’t remember when I last saw one in the sales. It must have been years ago. Shortly after he died.”
    He moved forward to examine the painting more closely. “Interesting. I think this is Jura, which is where he died. It’s rather poignant to think of him sitting there painting that bit of sea over there and not knowing that it was more or less where he was going to drown. It’s rather like painting one’s deathbed.”
    Isabel thought about this for a moment. How many of us knew the bed in which we would die, or even wanted to know? Did it help to have that sort of knowledge? She stared at the painting. In the past she had never worried about her own death—whenever it would be—but now, with Charlie to think about, she felt rather differently about it. She wanted to be there for Charlie; she wanted at least to see him grow up. That must be the hardest thing about having children much later in life—as happened sometimes when a man remarried at, say, sixty-five and fathered a child by a younger wife. He might make it to eighty-five and see his child grow to adulthood, but the odds were rather against it.
    â€œHe was quite young when he died, wasn’t he?” she asked.
    â€œMcInnes? Yes. Forty, forty-one, I think.”
    Just about what I am now, thought Isabel. More or less my age, and then it was over.
    â€œWhy is it that it seems particularly tragic when an artist dies young?” Isabel mused. “Think of all those writers who went early. Wilfred Owen. Bruce Chatwin. Rupert Brooke. Byron. And musicians too. Look at Mozart.”
    â€œIt’s because of what we all lose when that happens,” said Guy. “Owen could have written so much more. He’d just started. Brooke, too, I suppose, although I was never wild about him.”
    â€œHe wrote for women,” said Isabel, firmly. “Women like poets who look like Brooke and who go and die on them. It breaks every female heart.” She paused. “But the biggest tragedy of all was Mozart. Think of what we didn’t get. All that beauty stopped in its tracks. Just like that. And the burial in the rain, wasn’t it? In a pauper’s grave?”
    Guy shrugged. “Everything comes to an end, Isabel. You. Me. The Roman Empire. But I’m sorry that McInnes didn’t get more time. I think that he might have developed into somebody really important. In the league of Cadell, perhaps. Everything was pointing that way. Until…well, until it all went wrong.”
    â€œAnd he drowned?”
    â€œNo,” said Guy. “Before that. Just before that. Everything collapsed for him before he went up to that island for the last time, to Jura. I can tell you, if you like.”
    Isabel was intrigued. “There’s a place round the corner,” she said. “We could have sandwiches. I’m hungry. It’s something to do with having a baby. One begins to need feeding at very particular times.”
    Guy smiled at the thought. “A good idea.” He leaned forward again and peered at the painting. “Odd,” he said. “Odd.”
    Isabel looked at him quizzically. “What’s odd?”
    â€œIt’s unvarnished,” Guy said, straightening up. “I seem to remember that McInnes