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

unapologetic.
    â€œBut it’s not a medicine,” said Grace. “It’s herbal. I think that the one I bought has fennel and ginger and some other things. It soothes the stomach, which is what they niggle about.” She looked up at Isabel. “You’re not worried about it, are you?”
    Isabel turned away. She struggled to control her voice, and when she spoke she felt that it sounded quite normal. “No, I’m not worried. It’s just that I’d like to know if you give him anything unusual. I just feel that I should know.”
    Grace said nothing, and Isabel did not look at her to gauge her reaction. She did not want to argue with Grace because she felt that it would be wrong for her to do so when Grace was her employee. That gave her an advantage over the other woman which she should not use; Grace could not fight back on equal terms, and that was unfair. But at the same time, it was not unreasonable of her, she felt, to insist on being asked before Charlie was given things like gripe water. Fennel! Ginger! Unnamed herbs!
    She began to move away, but Grace had something to say, and she stopped.
    â€œCat telephoned.”
    In the past, Cat had telephoned regularly. Then, with the breach in their relations, these calls had stopped; the significance of this was not lost on Grace, who said, “Yes. She actually telephoned.”
    Isabel turned round. “What about?”
    â€œAn invitation. She wants you to go to dinner with her.” She paused, watching Isabel’s reaction.
    Isabel decided to be cool about this. “Oh? That’s kind of her.”
    â€œJamie too,” said Grace. “She wants him to go too.”
    Isabel’s manner remained cool, although this was a very unexpected development. “And Charlie?” she asked.
    Grace shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “She didn’t mention him.”
    Isabel went into the house, into her study. For a few minutes she just stood there, inwardly seething. Grace had no right to take over Charlie like that. She was acting almost as if he were her baby, not Isabel’s. And it irritated her, too, that the other woman should behave as if she knew more about babies than Isabel did; there had been many instances of that, sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle. Isabel knew that Grace had always thought of her as somebody who was otherworldly, somebody who did not really know how things worked. Isabel had ignored this in the past, but she found it hard to do that now.
    She sat down. Things were going wrong: the job, her failure of nerve in the auction, that odd exchange with Jamie over money, Grace giving Charlie gripe water, and now this odd invitation from Cat. Why would Cat invite Jamie? To interfere? To try to get him back?
    Isabel looked down at the floor. The carpet in her study was an old red Belouchi that had been in the house for as long as she could remember. She and her brother had played on it as a child. He had used it to make a tent from which he had shot rubber-tipped arrows in her direction. One had hit her in the eye and he had been punished by their father. He had blamed her for his punishment, for telling on him. I’ll hate you forever, he had hissed at her. Wait and see. I’ll hate you forever. And now, after all those years, she hardly ever saw him, and he never wrote. It was not the Belouchi, of course; it was something else, something private and nothing to do with Isabel herself. Children hated for a very short time; they forgot, sometimes after a few minutes, while adults could keep hatreds going indefinitely, across generations.
    She thought of Jamie. It would have been so much simpler if he had been her own age and she could have accepted his proposal of marriage there and then. It was bad luck, just bad luck to fall in love with the wrong person. People did that all the time; they fell in love with somebody who for one reason or another could