The Careful Use of Compliments by Alexander McCall Smith

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.”
    â€œI suppose I am. Just a silly thought.”
    He took a sip of his wine. “About?”
    â€œAbout 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