The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (9)

by Alexander McCall Smith

  She stopped. There was a young man standing in front of her. He had just finished talking to a woman in a purple dress, a large woman who was a regular attendee at Edinburgh concerts and who was considered vividly eccentric by many; an enthusiastic exponent of a wide range of subjects, on which she entertained strong and unconventional opinions. The young man looked bemused, which often happened when people spoke to that particular woman for the first time. She was now making off towards her husband, who was standing near the door; a rather insignificant-looking man who had the appearance of being permanently overwhelmed; shell-shocked, perhaps, after years of marriage to that woman. The Scots expression hauden doon—held down—was made for people like him, thought Isabel.

  Isabel caught the young man’s eye. She had the feeling he wanted to speak to her.

  “Enjoyed the concert?” she asked.

  He looked at her gratefully; in a room full of people talking, we do not wish to be by ourselves. “Yes. A lot. I love early music and we don’t get enough of it, I think.”

  “I like it too.”

  He transferred his glass from right hand to left to be able to shake hands. “I’m Patrick Munrowe.”

  It took a moment for the name to register. But then, in an instant, she saw the resemblance. Of course he was Patrick Munrowe; there was Duncan’s forehead, and the same eyes; the same presence.

  The coincidence struck her sharply. “Your father’s Duncan Munrowe?”

  He nodded, somewhat surprised. She looked at him appraisingly. He was slightly taller than his father with the same good looks, but had an air of vulnerability about him; the air that some men have of being slightly lost.

  “I had lunch with him yesterday, you see.”

  He looked thoughtful. “Here? In Edinburgh?”

  “Yes, he was in town.”

  “I see. I didn’t know.”

  There was nothing in his tone to suggest that he was aggrieved to hear that his father had been in Edinburgh and had not told him, and yet Duncan had made a point of saying that he always saw his daughter when he came to town. If the daughter, then why not the son?

  “I think it was a pretty brief visit,” she said hurriedly. “It was business.”

  He started to enquire. “You’re a …?” He did not finish the sentence.

  “It was about the loss of the painting.”

  “So you’re with the insurance company?”

  “No.” She was not sure how to proceed, being uncertain as to whether the approach from Duncan was meant to be confidential. She had already given it away, if it was. “No. I’ve got nothing to do with that side of it. I was asked by Martha Drummond to speak to him about it.”

  The mention of Martha’s name had an immediate effect: he looked incredulous. “Her?”

  “Yes. I believe that she’s a friend of your father’s.”

  “I suppose so. It’s just that, well, frankly, I find that woman rather difficult to take. Sorry.”

  “She may not be everybody’s cup of tea.”

  He took a sip of his wine. “Has he asked you to help him?”

  Isabel felt that she could hardly decline to talk about it now. “He has. I’m not sure what I can do—if anything. But I think your father needed a sounding board, so to speak.”

  He nodded. “Fair enough. He was very upset by it, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “And it wasn’t because of the money side of it. Pop is very unworldly. He’s one of the least materialistic people I know.”

  Isabel said that she had formed the impression that it was the painting that counted rather than its monetary value.

  “Dead right,” said Patrick. “With him, it’s a question of … well, there’s no other word for it but honour. It’s a question of honour that he promised the painting to the Scottish National Gallery. That’s what’s really hurt him—the possibility that the painting might never be recovered or could be damaged.”

  “I can understand that.”

  He looked at her with interest. “May I ask what you do? Are you a psychologist?”

  “No. I’m a philosopher.”

  He seemed impressed. “There aren’t many people who can answer that question that way. That’s what you actually do—philosophy?”

  She explained about the Review and about the sort of articles she published. And then she turned the question back on him. “And you?”

  His reply was delivered in a tone of self-deprecation. “Nothing nearly as interesting, I’m afraid. I work for a company that advises on investment in pharmaceutical companies. I’ve been doing it for the grand total of six years so far.”

  She wondered about his age. Duncan had told her, but she had forgotten. Twenty-something—twenty-seven? So he must have gone straight from university into the job. And that left another forty years to do it. Forty years of working on drug companies. Forty years.

  “I’m not sure that I’d say that was uninteresting. Drugs don’t strike me as boring. And isn’t what you do a form of intelligence gathering?”

  He smiled. “I suppose you could look at it that way. We look at pharmaceutical companies with a view to putting the investors’ money in them. I suppose that’s intelligence gathering. I look at smaller companies—the ones who think they might just invent the cure for something big.”

  “And do they?”

  “Sometimes, but very rarely. I’ve recently been looking at one that is trying to find an Alzheimer’s drug. There have been one or two possibilities, but at the end of the day they’ve fizzled out. Then somebody comes up with something that makes everybody’s efforts look a bit expensive. Such as eating oily fish. Apparently that stops your brain shrinking and protects you against Alzheimer’s. But there’s no profit in that.”

  Isabel laughed. “Sardines? A tin of sardines a day?”

  “Exactly. And if you’re worried about strokes, then …”

  They were interrupted by Jamie, who had left the group of musicians. He took Isabel’s hand and squeezed it lightly.

  “Lovely concert,” said Isabel. And to Patrick, “This is Jamie.”

  Patrick smiled at Jamie. “Yes,” he said. “You played the bassoon, didn’t you?”

  “I did.”

  “I played a curtal once,” said Patrick. “At school. We had a music teacher who loved old instruments. He arranged for us to play sackbuts and sordunes and whatever.”

  Isabel asked what the curtal was.

  “The precursor of the bassoon,” Jamie told her.

  “And the racket,” prompted Patrick. “Don’t forget the racket.”

  “That’s another early instrument,” said Jamie. “It looks like a little pot. You blow down a crook into the little pot and a deep sound comes out. It’s a sort of bassoon for people who were waiting for the bassoon to be invented.”

  Patrick laughed. She saw that his eyes had lit up during this conversation. “Imagine people wanting to play instruments that haven’t yet been invented. One might say, ‘I really want to play the saxophone, but Adolf Sax hasn’t invented it yet.’ ”

  Isabel smiled. She liked a conversation that went in odd directions; she liked the idea of playfulness in speech. People could be so depressingly literal.

  Jamie now turned to her. “I think perhaps we should go home. Grace doesn’t want to stay over tonight, she wants to get home.”

  Isabel explained to Patrick, “Grace is our babysitter.”

  She saw Patrick’s eyes move quickly to Jamie and then back to her. It was quick, but she noticed. There was a look of disappointment on his face; it was unmistakable.

  “I must be on my way too,” Patrick said quietly.

  Isabel felt a sudden sympathy for him. “Where do you live?”

  “I live in the New Town,” he said. “St. Bernard’s Crescent.”

  “I like it there,” said Isabel.

  “Yes,” he said flatly. “So …”

  “Well, I’m sure we’ll meet again,” said Isabel. “Your father has
invited me to the house.”

  “You’ll like it there too.”

  He smiled and began to turn away. Isabel took Jamie’s arm and led him through the crowd, towards the door. Outside, in the darkness, she looked up at the towering stone buildings that lined the narrow thoroughfare of the Cowgate. A soft rain was falling, a spitting.

  “Your bassoon?” she asked. “You’ve left your bassoon behind.”

  “They’re looking after all our instruments. They have a van that will bring everything back tomorrow.”

  They began to make their way back towards the Grassmarket, undecided as to whether to walk home or catch a taxi.

  “That was Patrick Munrowe,” said Isabel. “His father is the man whose painting was stolen.”

  Jamie seemed distracted by something. “That second piece we played,” he said. “I’m not sure it was a success. The flute—”

  “What did you think of him?” pressed Isabel.

  “Of Patrick?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was interested to hear that he had played the curtal. He knew what he was talking about.”

  “And?”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “Gay?” asked Isabel.

  “Maybe,” said Jamie. “Did you think so?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He was very disappointed when we mentioned Grace and getting back for the babysitter. Did you notice it?”

  Jamie had not. “That second piece,” he said. “We sounded much better at rehearsal.”

  “It was because he hadn’t realised that you and I were together. That was why.”

  Jamie was silent. Isabel’s deduction embarrassed him. “You mean … Well, how can you tell? And anyway, what does it matter?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter at all. But I think there’s an issue between him and his father. It may have nothing to do with that, or it may. I can’t tell.”

  “Gaydar can be misleading, you know,” said Jamie. “It needs to be calibrated.”

  “Like sympathy,” said Isabel. “And all our emotions and feelings. Shame. Anger. Love. Pain. Calibration is required if we are to use them sensitively.”

  “How do you calibrate pain?” asked Jamie.

  “By cutting out the background pain of the world,” answered Isabel. “By cutting all that out, not registering it, and responding only to those painful things that we can do something about. Because otherwise …”

  Jamie had seen a taxi approaching; the thin band of yellow light above the vehicle’s windscreen weaving its way towards them. He stepped out into the road and raised an arm.

  “Because otherwise what?”

  “Because otherwise we couldn’t get on with our day-to-day lives. The pain of the world would burden us too much.”

  “True,” said Jamie.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THERE WAS an unspoken understanding between Isabel and her niece Cat that when Cat went away on holiday or was otherwise unable to get in to the delicatessen, then Isabel would take over, even with very little notice. It would have been more sensible for Eddie to do this, but Eddie, for all his willingness to embark on a long tour of North America with his uncle—and uncle’s girlfriend—and to follow this with a spell working at a ski resort in Alberta, still lacked the confidence to be left in sole charge of the delicatessen. Isabel wondered whether this might be changed by his having reached the milestone of his twenty-first birthday and having met his new girlfriend Diane—or the Huntress, as she had unfortunately become lodged in Isabel’s mind, though not a reference to any man-hunting on her part (Eddie was not the most obvious prey for a dedicated man-hunter), but to the occupation of the Greek goddess of that name. Eddie was still unwilling to accept full responsibility and had shown signs of alarm when Cat telephoned the following Monday morning to inform him that she had come down with a norovirus and would be off work for at least three days, possibly more. Cat had reassured him that Isabel would help out and that he would not be left to manage by himself; she had then phoned Isabel and broken the news to her.

  “I hate asking you,” she said. “But I really can’t go in. I don’t want to go into details—”

  “Then don’t,” said Isabel quickly.

  “But I’m bringing up the most amazing amount of fluid,” Cat persisted. “I have no idea where it’s all coming from. And the diarrhoea, I’m not exaggerating, I promise you—”

  “I’ll be there,” Isabel interjected. “How many days?”

  When Cat warned her that it could be the whole week, Isabel’s heart sank. There were spells in her life—often as long as a month—when the affairs of the Review of Applied Ethics could safely be put to one side, or benignly neglected as Isabel put it, but this was not one of them. The proofs of the next issue had arrived, and an entire article was being withdrawn on the grounds that the author had placed it elsewhere without telling Isabel. He had been keen, she believed, to have a back-up home for it if another possibility of publication—in a rather more prestigious journal—came to nothing. The prestigious journal had accepted the paper and the author had either forgotten to inform Isabel timeously or had become too embarrassed to do so, eventually leaving it to a secretary in his department to let her know what was happening. Isabel had mentally composed a stinging rebuke, and had gone so far as to type it out as an email, but had eventually decided not to send it. The delete button, that saviour of how many relationships, had again done its work: the swingeing censure had been replaced by a mild, rather sad reproach: It would have been helpful to know about this before I sent everything off to the printer; but no matter, I’m very pleased that you’ve found such a good home for your very fine piece. And their circulation is admittedly so much larger than ours, and looks as if it will remain so, no matter how hard we try. The “no matter how hard we try” was later removed; reproach should not too quickly become self-pity.

  All this, though, meant that she had to find an article to take its place, contact the author and have all the editing done within the next three days. That was feasible, even if she were to be busy in the delicatessen, but it would mean that she would have to work in the evenings as well as all day—something she did not particularly enjoy. She was, after all, a mother with an affectionate and demanding three-and-three-quarter-year-old to look after. She wanted to spend as much time with Charlie as she could, and now she would be unable to get away from the delicatessen until six-thirty every evening, by which time the bath would be over and the bedtime story would be about to begin.

  But she could not let Cat down, and, after a quick consultation with Grace, who had just come in at the door, and a rushed telephone conversation with Jamie, who was on his way down to the Academy to start one of his teaching days, she finished her breakfast quickly and started out of the house.

  Eddie greeted her warmly. He always arrived at the delicatessen early and he had coped perfectly well with the rush of people who called in on their way to work. That rush had now abated, and there were only one or two customers browsing the shelves when Isabel arrived.

  “It’s been all go,” said Eddie, wiping his hands on his apron. “I’ve taken over two hundred and fifty pounds in …” He looked up at the clock above the refrigerated display. “In forty minutes. How about that?”

  “Very good,” said Isabel, reaching for a fresh apron from the hook on the wall. “You spoke to Cat, I take it?”

  “I did,” said Eddie. “She’s got projectile vomiting, you know.”

  Isabel looked away. Any sort of vomiting was bad enough, but projectile vomiting …

  “I’ve never had projectile vomiting,” Eddie went on. “I was really sick for a day or two on the trip, though. We were in a place in Idaho and I was really hungry. We’d booked into a motel just outside town, and my uncle and his girlfriend had gone to a bar. I stayed in the motel. Then I found that I got really hungry, and so I went to this hot-dog place and ordered a really big hot dog. You should have seen it, Isabel, it was humungous. And it tasted really good.
”

  Isabel busied herself with sweeping excess grounds off the work surface around the coffee machine. “But it wasn’t?”

  “No,” said Eddie. “I think it had E. coli in it. Or something like that. I was seriously sick. Not projectile vomiting, but I felt really bad. The man in the motel said it was E. coli. He said that there was a lot of E. coli about and some of those hot-dog places make their hot dogs out of dead horse meat. Yuck. That’s what he told me. He said the horses die, and if they go like that, rather than being sent to the slaughterhouse, they shouldn’t be eaten. But apparently the mafia have a racket in horse meat, and they sell it to these hot-dog places and pretend that it comes from cows.”

  “Well, you survived,” said Isabel. “And I’m sure Cat will too. So let’s get things organised.”

  Eddie worked calmly and efficiently, and yet Isabel suspected that if she were not there, he would be jittery and anxious. “Could you manage by yourself, do you think?” she asked him during a lull at the counter.

  He looked at her with alarm. “Why?”

  “I just wondered.”

  “Do you have to do something else?” His voice was taut with anxiety.

  “It’s all right, Eddie,” she said calmly. “I’ll stay. I’m not going anywhere.”

  He visibly relaxed. “Good,” he said. “I know I should be able to handle things by myself, but I get this tight feeling—right here …” He pointed to his chest. “And it makes it hard for me to do anything. I know it’s stupid, really stupid. But …”

  She put a hand on his shoulder. “Eddie, you’re doing just fine. You’re fine.”

  He looked down for a moment, and then raised his eyes to meet hers. Something passed between them—a moment of understanding, she thought. He had never told her what had happened to him—she had an idea—but now it seemed to her that he had somehow acknowledged that she knew, and that fact made it much easier for him. He was getting better, she was sure of it; time’s healing effect—the old saw, the folk wisdom—was absolutely true. It was something to do with memory: things forgotten lost their power.