The Careful Use of Compliments Read Online Free

intelligence.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she said. “You must be wondering what I’m going on about.” As she spoke to Jamie, she reached out and touched Charlie, who was gazing intently at her. “Do you know that painting I have on the stairs, halfway up? On the landing? It’s by the same Andrew McInnes. It was one of his earliest works. My father bought it.”
    Jamie looked thoughtful. “Kind of,” he said hesitantly. “I think so. On the left as you go up?”
    â€œYes,” said Isabel. “That’s it.”
    â€œI haven’t really studied it,” said Jamie. “I suppose it’s just one of those things one walks past.”
    Isabel gestured towards the painting. “It’s much smaller than this, of course. About one quarter the size. But it’s exactly the same subject. Almost identical. That man and those hills. The lobster creels. Everything.”
    Jamie shrugged. “Artists paint the same thing over and over again, don’t they? The same models. The same scenes. They can be creatures of habit, can’t they?”
    Isabel agreed. There was nothing surprising in finding paintings that were very much the same as one another, particularly if one was smaller. Her small painting was evidently a recurrent image in the artist’s mind, and that was nothing unusual. What she wanted from Jamie, though, was encouragement to bid for the larger version. Should she?
    â€œIt’s up to you,” said Jamie. “But…look at the estimate. Twenty-five thousand. Isn’t that rather a lot?”
    â€œThey know what they’re talking about,” said Isabel. “He’s sought after. He’s not cheap.”
    Jamie frowned. “But twenty-five thousand…” He was trying to recall what he made each year as a part-time teacher of bassoon and an occasional performer. It was not much more than that, if it was any more at all; of course there was the small legacy he had received from his aunt, and the flat, which had come from her too, but even then he had to watch his money carefully, as most people did. He knew that Isabel was not hard up, but to be able to spend twenty-five thousand pounds on a painting astonished him. People paid that, of course; some considerably more. But these were not people he knew; that was the difference. He glanced at her, as if with new eyes; she did not look wealthy, and there was none of that irritating self-assuredness that sometimes hung about the rich, an air of power, of being able to take things for granted. Jamie had noticed that in the parents of some of his pupils. They were often well-heeled for the simple reason that the bassoon was an expensive instrument and there were many parents who could not afford to buy one. Most of these people were modest in their manner, but some condescended to him or showed a general arrogance in the way they expected everyone to fit in with their whims. The mothers in the expensive four-wheel-drive vehicles were the worst, he had decided. Why did they need these fuel-hungry contraptions in their urban lives? To barge their way past other, smaller cars, or to make a statement about who they were and what they had?
    One of these mothers was interested in him. He had noticed it because she had made it so obvious, arriving early to collect her son from his lesson in the flat—the boy could easily have gone downstairs to meet his mother on the street, as the others did, but she came up, rang the bell, and waited in the kitchen until her son’s lesson was finished. Then she engaged Jamie in conversation, quizzing him about her child’s progress, while the boy himself lurked in the background, clearly embarrassed, eager to leave.
    She stood close to Jamie while she spoke to him; the sort of invasion of the unspoken limits of bodily space that can be so disconcerting. He moved away slightly, but she followed him, inching nearer. He glanced at his