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

by Alexander McCall Smith

  No, Jamie would be sent on his peace mission and, with any luck, Grace would soon be back at work as normal. Charlie might ask where she was, but Isabel was prepared for that. She had resolved never to lie to her young son, and she would not start now. So if he asked where she was, Isabel thought that she might simply say that Grace was reviewing her position. She had no idea how that would sound to a three-year-old, perhaps rather as if Grace had gone off to watch a film. Then she realised that this was meretricious. She would say to Charlie that Grace had gone home because she was cross. She hoped that she would not be cross the next morning, but she could not be sure. That would be both truthful and comprehensible, and Charlie, she was sure, would accept it. Children understood that adults could become angry—curiously so, and for no apparent reason, just as the weather could change and a smiling day might suddenly frown.

  The contretemps with Grace left her feeling slightly raw, despite Jamie’s later assurances that she could likely be persuaded to withdraw her resignation. “And she won’t make a fuss about the mathematics,” he said. “You’ll see—she’ll have picked up your concerns about that and won’t make a fuss.”

  Isabel hoped that he was right, but as she made her way down to her meeting with Alex Munrowe, she decided that if Grace was determined to persevere with her mathematics teaching, then they would simply have to have another talk. She did not relish the prospect of specifically overruling Grace on the matter, but she had her duty as a mother to consider. And it was not unreasonable, she thought, to insist on something when it came to the education of her son; surely Grace would understand that and would see it from Isabel’s point of view. That was what she hoped, but there remained a nagging doubt. Grace could be stubborn, and it was just possible that this question of mathematics was going to be a battlefield that neither of them wanted but neither felt she could avoid.

  ALEX’S FLAT in Nelson Street was on the second floor of a four-storey tenement, built in the early years of the nineteenth century when the Edinburgh New Town spread confidently down the hill towards the Firth of Forth. Nelson Street was a short street by the standards of its neighbours, a brief, sloping link between two sets of elegant private gardens. Unlike most New Town streets, which ran in a straight line or, at most, followed a leisurely curve, Nelson Street had a zigzag where it was interrupted at a right angle by another street; Alex lived in the zag, just before it opened out on to the broad square of Drummond Place. Her flat was served by a common stair that ascended from behind a classical panelled door. This staircase, chilly in spite of its being summer, still retained its original heavy mahogany handrail and ornate ironwork banisters: craftsmanship that had been built to last, and had done just that. The stone stairs themselves were worn by centuries of feet, creating in the middle of each step a small curved indentation—not enough to make the stairs hazardous but deep enough to remind the visitor that he or she was not the first to walk that way.

  The door off the landing had two names on it, each separately engraved on a small brass plate. Isabel noticed that the screws holding these plates were countersunk so as not to protrude even by the smallest fraction of an inch above the surface; it was an odd detail for her to notice, and not, she decided, one loaded with meaning—except that, perhaps, it was because we were so used to cheapness in our surroundings, to sloppiness, that craftsmanlike standards stood out and reminded us of what had once been taken for granted.

  She tugged at another brass fitting—a lever with a small model of a human fist at the end—and heard the tinkling of a bell somewhere inside the flat. After a few seconds there came the sound of footsteps and then the turning of the latch. The door opened to a woman who looked about thirty, attractive in spite of an unusually high forehead—or because of it—and possessed of the same reserved look that she had noticed in Duncan Munrowe.

  They shook hands, and Isabel followed Alex into a drawing room at the end of a short corridor.

  “We can sit in here,” said Alex. “Facing west, we get a bit of afternoon light. In the morning, the kitchen gets it—it’s on the other side.”

  “My orientation too,” said Isabel.

  “Martha Drummond says you live near her. It’s rather nice up there, isn’t it?”

  Isabel nodded. “Do you know Martha well?”

  Alex hesitated. “I do. Yes, quite well.”

  There was something in her tone that suggested that Martha might have been a heart-sink friend for Alex, much as she was for Isabel.

  “There’s a Stirlingshire connection,” Alex went on. “Martha’s father was a close friend of my grandfather’s. The two families go back a long time—generations before that, they knew one another too. You know how Scotland is.”

  Isabel smiled. Of course she knew how Scotland was.

  Alex gestured to a sofa. “Please …”

  Isabel sat down and looked about her. The room was a typical drawing room of the sort that was to be found in virtually all the flats in that part of Edinburgh. Being Georgian, the proportions were almost perfect—if not actually perfect—with the length of each wall being more or less 1.6180339887 times the height of the ceiling: the golden section. Isabel had always thought that it was a tragedy that the Victorians had abandoned this ratio and favoured high ceilings. The result had been rooms that were rather like cubes; rooms that we could not feel fully comfortable in because we were intuitively predisposed to relate warmly to phi (1.61 etc.). She imagined, for a moment, going into a room one liked and exclaiming, “Phi!” People might say, “Don’t you mean phew?” and one would reply, “No, phi!” She smiled at the thought.

  Alex was staring at her. “What’s the joke?”

  Isabel shook her head. “Just a ridiculous notion about the golden section.” She could not retell it, but said instead, “I do love these Georgian rooms.”

  Alex looked about her, as if noticing the decor for the first time.

  “The curtains came from my father’s house,” she said. “He sent us off to university with curtains. I thought it rather odd at the time. Most of the other students arrived with stereos and laptops and so on. My brother and I arrived with curtains.”

  Isabel laughed. “Well, I went off for my first year at Cambridge with one of those machines that makes tea for you while you’re still lying in bed. I remember that people laughed at me, but they saw the point in due course and one or two of them actually asked me where I had got it.”

  Her eyes wandered from the curtains to the mantelpiece, which was of old pine, with an elaborate moulded frieze along its length. This frieze was dominated by the figure of a woman leaning on an upright anchor; around her feet, and off to each side, were shells stacked in profusion, with crabs and twists of rope. A pair of delicately painted Chinese ginger jars, famille rose, stood on the mantelshelf, and on the wall above was a large painting in an elaborate gilded frame.

  Isabel drew in her breath. “That’s not another Poussin, is it?”

  “Yes,” said Alex, and then, almost immediately, and smiling in response to Isabel’s look of astonishment, she qualified her answer. “And no. Gaspard Poussin, or Gaspard Dughet to give him his original name. He was Poussin’s brother-in-law—and his pupil. He changed his name to Poussin after he married Poussin’s sister.”

  Isabel got up from the sofa and examined the painting more closely.

  Alex joined her. Isabel noticed that she had been eating garlic.

  “It’s a beautiful painting,” Isabel said.

  “I’m glad you like it,” said Alex. “He painted just like his master when it came to the overall composition. You see that hill village there? Very typical of Poussin. And that lake in the foreground—again, you see a lot of that in Poussin—Nicolas Poussin, that is. And those trees: those aren’t bad at all—they could be the real thing, I suppose. Except this painting is not immensely valuable. It was in the house, upstairs; my father gave it to me as a housewarming present when I bought this place.”

  Isabel leaned forward to p
eer more closely at a figure that the artist had placed under a tree. “A shepherd?”

  “Probably. Dughet liked shepherds. But I suppose if you looked at any stretch of countryside in the seventeenth century, it would have been well peopled by shepherds. Not today, of course.”

  “And beside the lake? Over there?”

  “That’s somebody sleeping. I don’t think there’s anything untoward going on. If that were Nicolas, then he might have had that figure constricted by a snake. He was fascinated by snakes. You know that—”

  “Painting in the National Gallery in London? Man Killed by a Snake. Yes. Your father talked to me about it.”

  “Did he? Well, he taught me all about it when I was ten. He took me all the way to London to visit the National Gallery and stand in front of the Poussins. And the Rembrandts. I remember wanting to go outside and feed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, but I couldn’t do that for hours because we had a whole list of paintings to see.”

  Isabel laughed. “It could have put you off for life.”

  “Yes, but it didn’t. I think it had the opposite effect, actually. It made me love art. I just love it.”

  Duncan had not told Isabel what his daughter did, and Isabel had not found out. Alex was seeing her on a weekday at four in the afternoon—this suggested that she did not have to observe regular office hours. She said that she had bought the flat, and so she must have had some money, presumably money from somewhere in the family. But what about the other person who lived here? She recalled the other name on the brass plate: A husband? A live-in boyfriend? Did she support him, or did he support her? She glanced at Alex’s left hand; there was a small diamond ring on the fourth finger that caught the light, now, as Isabel looked—a tiny spark of white fire.

  Alex had noticed the direction of Isabel’s gaze and interpreted it accurately, but if she resented the curiosity, she did not show it. “I live with my fiancé,” she said. “He’s called Iain. Iain Douglas. He’s a doctor—an orthopaedic surgeon.”

  Isabel looked away, feeling embarrassed at having been caught in the act of curiosity. But of course people thought about these things—we summed up others all the time; it was getting caught at it that was difficult. She remembered once having been in a queue for tickets at the Festival Theatre, and she had seen a fashionably dressed woman standing nearby looking at her cardigan with what seemed to be unambiguous pity. Their eyes had met, and the other woman had looked away guiltily, pretending to interest herself in a poster for a forthcoming performance of Macbeth in Turkish. Isabel had wanted to go up to her and say, “Yes, I know, it’s a bit shabby, but honestly, don’t worry, I’ve got better clothes at home.” She felt that they might then have coffee together, drawn to one another by this sudden moment of fellow feeling and sympathy. And she might have said to the woman that she should not worry about how she—or others—dressed, and that there was liberation on offer for those who were trapped by fashion. But that would be going too far, and could be hurtful, even if it were true. While the full truth should sometimes be told, it should not always be told.

  She returned to the sofa while Alex, saying that she was going to fetch the tea, left the room. On her own, Isabel could not help but look at the spines of the books on the bookshelf that took up half a wall. The lower shelves were filled with books too large to be housed further up: most of them, she noticed, on art. There was a large book on Vermeer and a three-volume set on Vuillard. Netherlandish Art 1660 to 1700: From van Eyck to Dürer. Her gaze moved upwards. The Making of Classical Edinburgh. The Island of Jura. Cabinetmaking for Pleasure and Profit …

  Alex had re-entered the room, carrying a tray on which there was a teapot, a small jug and two cups.

  “Most of those are mine,” she said. “Iain has very little time for reading these days.”

  Isabel blushed. It was the second exposure of her curiosity. But again she thought: One’s entitled to look at the books on a person’s shelves. That’s what bookshelves are for: display.

  “Did you study art?” she asked, as Alex put the tray down on a table behind the sofa.

  “Yes. History of Art at St. Andrews.”

  “And do anything with it?”

  Alex gave her a look that struck Isabel as being slightly defensive. “What can you do with a degree like that? Become a curator, I suppose, if you’re lucky enough to get one of the tiny handful of jobs going. Work in a commercial gallery carrying paintings up and down stairs?”

  Isabel knew what she meant. It was the same with a degree in philosophy. A tiny number of those who studied philosophy managed to earn their living teaching or writing about the subject, or even thinking about it; the rest had to turn to something else. She had been extremely lucky in that respect, and, even then, that she was still running the Review of Applied Ethics was entirely owing to the fact that she had been in a position to buy it. Had she not been able to do that, the Review would be in the hands of Professor Lettuce by now, ably assisted by his partner-in-crime, Professor Christopher Dove.

  It was pure privilege that determined where so many of us ended up in life, Isabel reflected; it was nothing to do with merit, it was privilege. Or, putting it another way, it was a matter of accident, or luck. To be born in circumstances where one had enough to eat was the first resounding piece of luck, and good luck could be piled upon you from that point onwards. To be given a good education, not to be struck down by debilitating illness, not to have, like Heather Darnt, a disfiguring birthmark that must, with all the courage in the world, make one’s teenage years an agony of embarrassment and exclusion—all of that was pure luck and nothing to do with desert. That was so, unless one believed in karma or some other notion of the acquisition of merit in a previous life. There were plenty of people who believed that—millions upon millions of adherents of Hinduism did—and it was not luck in their eyes. In such a view, Professor Lettuce had something to worry about; he may have got sufficiently far in the cycle of reincarnation as to be a professor of philosophy, but he was certainly going no further in the next life. He would be descending rather than ascending, Isabel thought, and was surely in danger of coming back as a toad or some other lowly creature. Or perhaps bad professors came back as research assistants, stuck on the lowest rung of the academic ladder and obliged to endure the humiliations of that uncertain and unrewarding position. Or as a lettuce, if it was possible to come back as a vegetable …

  Alex was looking at her.

  “I’m sorry,” said Isabel. “I have a tendency to drift off a bit.”

  “I asked you what you thought of that woman.”

  “Which woman?”

  “The lawyer.”

  Isabel did not hesitate. “I’m afraid I didn’t like her. I think she’s in league with the thieves.”

  She was aware of the fact that she should not have said that; it was a direct imputation of criminality, and she had no evidence to substantiate the allegation.

  Alex laughed. “Oh, come now! She’s a lawyer. Lawyers represent people—even thieves—but that doesn’t mean they’re in league with them.”

  Isabel looked sheepish. “Yes, you’re right. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Alex had now poured Isabel a cup of tea and was handing it to her. Isabel noticed that there were no cucumber sandwiches on the tray. She felt a momentary disappointment; sandwiches had definitely been mentioned on the telephone. Indeed, there had been an undertaking to serve cucumber sandwiches and, once again, pacta sunt servanda … She was never sure about the positioning of the sunt: she was inclined to put it at the end, as in Carthago delenda est!, which Cato was said to have proclaimed; but it was also possible to leave the sunt out altogether and say, more succinctly and equally gerundively, pacta servanda. Could one say, she wondered, cucumis ministranda est—cucumber must be served?

  Alex sat down. “So what’s going to happen?” she asked.

  “I gather that the insurance company has offered a reward. That’s what usually happens.”


  Alex nodded. “I heard that.” She paused. “And that’ll be paid to the lawyer?”

  “Yes. And she will pass it on once the painting has been recovered.”

  “So she acts as the holder, so to speak?”

  Isabel said that she would. “I suppose they just have to trust her not to disappear with the money. Lawyers tend not to disappear.”

  Alex raised an eyebrow. “There must be crooked lawyers. Every profession has its rotten apples.” She took a sip of her tea. Her eyes were on Isabel, who felt that she had to say something; the silence that had descended was slightly uncomfortable.

  “With your interest in art,” Isabel began, “you must have been particularly upset by all this.”

  “Absolutely,” said Alex. “I was. I loved that painting, you know. I adored it. So the really important thing is to get it back.”

  “Especially since it’s going to go to the nation eventually,” said Isabel. “That makes it even more important.”

  Alex was about to say something, but seemed to check herself. She looked at Isabel’s cup and offered her more tea. “Tell me,” she said as she began to pour. “Tell me: Have you got any idea who’s behind this?”

  Isabel sighed. “None at all. You see, I know absolutely nothing about the world of art theft.”