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

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Alex digested this silently. Then she said, “But Martha said that you were somebody with a reputation for sorting out extremely difficult situations. She said that you had helped people find out all sorts of things.”

  Isabel shook her head. “Would that that were true. I suppose I’ve been able to help a few people who have found themselves in a bit of a mess, but nothing more than that. I have no qualifications for any of it.”

  “Perhaps being a philosopher is the best qualification of all,” suggested Alex.

  “For what? For tracking down art thieves? Surely not.”

  Alex persisted. “For understanding things that are difficult to understand.”

  “To an extent,” said Isabel. “But not this sort of thing.”

  “So you have no idea?” asked Alex, again.

  “No,” said Isabel. “Sorry.”

  Alex shifted in her seat. She leaned back, closed her eyes and then opened them again, to fix Isabel with a playful but still serious stare. “So what if I were to suggest to you that it’s my brother?” she asked.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  HOW EXACTLY DID SHE put it?” asked Jamie.

  They were sitting at the kitchen table, their evening meal over, the dishes stacked in the dishwasher, their two wine glasses, which Isabel preferred to wash by hand, now rinsed and standing inverted on the drying rack. It was half past nine, and at fifty-five degrees and fifty-six minutes’ latitude, where Edinburgh lay, the sky still had plenty of light in it; Isabel loved these white nights of summer.

  “How did she put it? Well, at first I thought it was a joke—but then I realised that it wasn’t quite that.”

  “Not quite?”

  “No. I think that she … well, she sort of meant it. I know that sounds pretty vague, but that’s how I felt.”

  Jamie looked puzzled. “I’m not sure what ‘sort of meaning’ something amounts to.”

  “It means that you mean it, but aren’t really sure.” Isabel paused; she was not sure Alex had meant it when she suggested that her brother might be behind the theft of the painting. Perhaps she had intended to raise it as a possibility—something that she thought might be true but for which she had no evidence. And, as it happened, Alex had initially not taken the matter further, but had merely shrugged and raised an eyebrow when Isabel had asked her why she thought her brother might have stolen the painting. After a while, though, she had said, “He’s greedy, my brother.”

  “Any more greedy than the rest of us?” asked Isabel.

  Alex laughed. “If you mean more than me, yes, much more. He likes money. He likes the way it smells. He likes the power it gives you.” She warmed to her theme. “He works in the pharmaceutical industry, you know. Oh, he likes to portray it as all being very high-minded, but it’s all about money and profits—just like any other industry.”

  Isabel found herself defending Patrick. “Don’t most people enjoy such things? Maybe those of us who feel ourselves free from all that—and I assume you, like me, are one—would have to admit that we’re still susceptible.”

  Alex had looked at her slightly askance. “Not many. My brother, you see, needs money because of his habits. They’re expensive—some of them very expensive. And I suspect that he’d do anything for money.”

  Isabel had expected her to continue on this theme, but she steered the conversation in another direction. About twenty minutes later, when Alex brought the visit to an end, Isabel felt that she had learned very little about the other woman, who had seemed more interested in finding out about her than revealing anything about herself. She had elicited at least some information, though: she had discovered that Alex was engaged; that she was interested in art; and that she had what seemed like an unusually strong dislike of her brother. Isabel already knew that there was a close relationship between Alex and her father, and she could imagine why this should be: Alex’s manner, her air of slight reserve, something that might easily be mistaken for shyness, mirrored that of Duncan Munrowe; he would see himself in her, no doubt, more so, perhaps, than he might in his son—if what Alex had said about Patrick’s venality were true.

  “It sounds to me,” Jamie said, “as if this is a classic case of sibling jealousy. And if it is, then I wouldn’t pay any attention to what they say about each other.” He leaned back in his chair. “Why would he steal one of his father’s paintings? Presumably he’ll get his share of everything when he and his sister eventually inherit. Why steal now?”

  “He may need the money now rather than later. She mentioned expensive habits.”

  Jamie shook his head. “Again, we don’t know whether that’s true or not. Other people’s habits are expensive—our own, never.” He paused. “And anyway, what are you going to do with the information, even if you decide to take it seriously? Are you going to tell the father that his son’s a thief? You want to be supportive towards him—I don’t think that telling him that will be all that helpful, frankly.”

  She agreed. “You’re right. It’s probably best for me to put it out of my mind.”

  “Good.”

  She hesitated. “Although it’s difficult, isn’t it, to forget something you’ve been told? Mud sticks. We used to say that as children.”

  Jamie smiled. “Yes. It does.” He looked at her affectionately. “What else did you say?”

  “As a child?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked out of the window. A branch from the tree that grew outside the kitchen moved against the sky, gently, almost imperceptibly. The things that we said as children stayed with us, like certain religious beliefs which we might have grown out of even if the faith that underlay them might still be there. One might stop believing in angels, for instance, and yet feel their presence, or think one does; one might stop believing in hell and still feel nagging concern over the possibility of punishment. As a child she had picked up the superstitious belief that one should never store shoes above one’s head—to do so resulted in headaches that could last for two weeks or more. Even now, her shoes were stored only at foot level.

  “Isabel?”

  She gave a start. “What did we say? Well, we said something about where you put your shoes.”

  “I didn’t,” said Jamie. “But I did say something about frogs giving you warts.”

  “But of course they do,” said Isabel. She smiled; there is a particular delight in discovering that those whom one loves share similar memories of childhood. “You should never pick up a frog. And then there was something about bread.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “We said that if you cut bread crooked, you’ve told a lie.”

  He laughed. “But I always do. You’ve seen my toast.”

  “There must be exceptions,” said Isabel. “Every rule has its exceptions.”

  Jamie remembered something. “And what about getting a cut in the skin between one’s thumb and forefinger—in that bit of webbed skin? What about that?”

  “Oh, that,” said Isabel. “Everybody knows the consequences of that: lockjaw.”

  “Yes,” said Jamie. “And you died, just as you were likely to die of blood poisoning if somebody stabbed you with the nib of a pen.”

  “We ignore these things at our peril,” said Isabel gravely.

  Jamie thought of Charlie. He cast his eyes up at the ceiling; it was how they referred to their child when they were in the kitchen and he was in his room directly above. “Do you think he’ll pick these things up?”

  “I’m sure he will,” said Isabel. “But I hope that he doesn’t have the fears we had—the real fears. Remember your boyhood. You must have been frightened of some things.”

  He had been. He had been frightened that his father would die; he had been frightened that a boy called James MacArthur would punch him and break his nose, as he had threatened to do on a number of occasions; he had been frightened that somebody would come into his room at night when he was asleep and put a pillow over his head—a fear that came from hearing of what the wic
ked uncle did to the Princes in the Tower. Much later, as a teenager, he had been frightened that he would never find a girlfriend, and that he would die without ever discovering sex.

  “All of those things?” said Isabel sympathetically.

  “Yes. And what about you?”

  She thought. “As a very small girl I was frightened that the cat we had would be run over. I was frightened that my pants would fall off in gym.”

  Jamie let out a hoot of laughter. “What a terrific fear! That your pants will fall off!”

  “It was very real,” said Isabel. “And it happened to a girl in my class. Toffee Macleod. Her pants fell off. I wouldn’t be surprised if she never fully recovered.”

  “Toffee Macleod? What a name. What happened to her?”

  “She went to Australia and married a pilot. That’s as much as I know.”

  “Nobody in Australia would have known,” said Jamie. “She left her shame behind in Scotland.”

  Isabel was about to say something more about Toffee—to tell the story of how she was the first girl in the class to be asked to the cinema by a boy (not a boy and his parents, but a boy acting under his own auspices). But then the telephone rang and she knew, by some inexplicable sixth sense, that it would be Duncan. It was. Contact had been made, he said, and they should go to Rutland Square the following morning at nine-thirty. They should be on foot, and they should walk round the square until they were contacted further.

  Jamie, who had been able to overhear this conversation, said nothing, but looked disapproving. Once Isabel had put down the phone, he said quietly, “Rutland Square?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “Apparently so.”

  “Why there?”

  She had no idea. “The picture won’t be there. We’ll get instructions.”

  “Promise me one thing,” said Jamie. “Promise me you’ll phone and let me know where they’ve told you to go.”

  “I promise.”

  She suddenly remembered the cucumber sandwiches. “She promised cucumber sandwiches,” she said. “But they never appeared.”

  “She must have forgotten.”

  Isabel had to concede that was possible. “It’s a ridiculous thing to resent something like that,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t, and so I shan’t.” There were so many bigger moral problems connected with food—our duty to help the hungry, the implications of genetic manipulation of crops and so on; these dwarfed all those smaller food issues that were really not much more than questions of etiquette. And that reminded her—“Jamie?”

  “Yes?”

  “What do you think of this? Somebody told me the other day that they had invited friends round to dinner and they had agreed that the couple who had been invited would bring a course. It was that sort of casual, kitchen-supper arrangement in which everybody contributes.”

  “So?”

  “Well, the guests—a husband and wife—brought a casserole dish of stew. The hosts provided the starter and the pudding.”

  “All right.”

  “Everything went very well,” Isabel continued. “The guests, though, had brought too much stew. There were only four people at the table and their stew would have fed six. So there were two portions left over. The hostess noticed and thought, Good, that’ll do for our dinner tomorrow. I won’t have to cook.”

  Jamie listened. “Stew improves, doesn’t it? I think it tastes better the next day.”

  “So do I,” said Isabel. “Perhaps one should always eat leftovers. One would cook everything a day in advance and not touch it until the next day. But that’s not the point of this story. The point is this: at the end of the meal the guests took the leftovers away with them.”

  Jamie looked pensive. “It was their casserole dish. That’s reasonable enough.”

  Isabel had thought of that. “Yes, they had to take it back. But the stew had been taken from their casserole dish before the dinner and put into the host’s serving dish.”

  Jamie frowned. “So they put it back into their casserole?”

  “Yes. At the end. They all cleared up and she—the guest—spooned the stew back into its original casserole, which she then took away with her.”

  Jamie did not hesitate to condemn that. “Way out of line,” he said. “The stew belonged to the hostess from when it was transferred to her serving dish.” He paused. “But it was also mean.”

  “That’s what I think,” said Isabel. “The whole case becomes complicated because of the casserole dish. It would be simpler if it had been breakfast they were having and the guests had brought, say, eight croissants—two each—and people didn’t finish them.”

  “Four left?” suggested Jamie.

  “Yes. Four. Let’s say they’ll be sitting on a table still in their brown-paper packet.”

  “That’s where they should remain,” said Jamie firmly.

  “I agree,” said Isabel. “It’s a gift, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, of course. And you don’t take gifts back, do you?”

  Jamie wondered whether that was an absolute rule. Could there not be circumstances in which it became apparent that a gift was not appreciated or not being used? Surely you could ask for it back in such a case? Isabel thought you could not. “You have to put up with it,” she said. “You might hint. You might say something like: ‘Remember that china tea service we gave you for your wedding? We love that pattern, and it’s such a pity they’re not making it any more. I’d do anything—anything!—to get my hands on more like it.’ ” She smiled. “And then you might add: ‘You’re so wise, keeping it in a cupboard, unused.’ ”

  “Not very subtle,” said Jamie.

  “No. Perhaps not. But there are times when subtlety just won’t work, don’t you think?”

  “Perhaps you should have been less subtle yourself,” he said. “Perhaps you should have mentioned cucumbers.”

  “Just dropped them into the conversation? Perhaps as an expletive. Oh, cucumber! Expletives don’t have to have a meaning. ‘Cucumber’ would do fine—like that marvellous Italian expression, caspita! It doesn’t mean anything at all. It’s the equivalent of saying ‘heavens.’ ”

  “But ‘heavens’ does mean something,” Jamie objected.

  Isabel said nothing.

  “And ‘cucumber’ means something too,” Jamie continued.

  Isabel rose to her feet and crossed the room to the fridge in the corner. “I know we’ve just had dinner,” she said. “But all this talk of cucumber is just too much. I’m going to make myself a cucumber sandwich.” She turned and looked over her shoulder at Jamie. “Want one?”

  He did, and a minute or two later they were seated at the table again, a small plate of thinly cut cucumber sandwiches in front of them. “Heaven,” said Isabel, as she began to eat. “Singular. Heaven.”

  AS ISABEL LET DUNCAN into the house the following morning, she could see that he was nervous.

  “I’m sorry that I’m so early,” he said. “I was worried what would happen if there was a delay on the roads.”

  She reassured him that it made no difference to her, as long as he would not mind entertaining himself for half an hour or so. “I have to take my son to nursery school.”

  He made an apologetic gesture. “Of course, of course. I’ll be fine.”

  She left him in the sitting room with a copy of that morning’s newspaper. She had started the crossword over her breakfast cup of coffee and had not got very far. She enquired whether he did crosswords. He did. “Eight down,” she said. “ ‘A dirty child will not like this command.’ Four words. It begins with an o.”

  He took the paper from her. His hand, she saw, was shaking. He glanced at the crossword and then looked up. “Order of the Bath,” he said.

  Isabel laughed. “Yes! Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “I’m sure that you would have,” he said.

  “It’s such an odd name for a chivalric order,” mused Isabel. “I gather it was something to do with the fact that medieval knights were w
ashed to purify them. Rather like baptism.”

  Duncan made a polite expression of interest, but she could tell that his mind was elsewhere.

  “Not that people bathed very much in those days,” said Isabel. “Do you know that a Venetian ambassador expressed surprise that Queen Elizabeth I took a bath every month—even when she didn’t need one.”

  He did not laugh.

  “You’re nervous,” she said.

  He looked down at his feet. “Very.”

  “I don’t think there’s any danger,” she said. “All these people want is money. I don’t think they’re violent criminals or anything like that.”

  “It’s not that I’m worried about,” Duncan said. “It’s my painting I’m worried about. It could get damaged if they’re carting it around. These people will know nothing about how to treat a painting.” As he spoke, his anxiety gave way to anger. “It means nothing to them. It’s just a way of extorting money. They don’t care about anything else.”

  Isabel put a hand on his forearm. “There’s every chance we’ll get this back,” she said. “They have no interest in damaging it.”

  She wondered why she was trying to persuade him out of his anger. People had a right to be angry when they were the victims of ill-treatment. We automatically tended to calm them down, but perhaps we should let anger run its course. It had its function, she imagined, which was … What exactly was the role of anger? Self-protection? Did anger serve the purpose of encouraging us to avoid harmful situations in the future? Did it show us who our enemies were?

  She looked at her watch. Jamie had been dressing Charlie upstairs and she needed to relieve him: he had to be at the Academy in forty minutes for his pupils, and he was planning to call on Grace later. She left Duncan with the newspaper, inviting him to tackle the crossword if he wished. Upstairs, Charlie was now ready. “Tiffin box,” he said. “Don’t forget tiffin box.”

  She led him downstairs, collected the tiffin box from the kitchen and made her way out of the front door, Charlie walking beside her, his hand in hers. He was wearing a pair of red shoes of which he was inordinately proud. “Red shoes go fast,” he announced.