“That’s right, they do, darling,” said Isabel.
She squeezed the tiny hand that was holding on to hers, and the tiny hand squeezed back. She imagined what it must be like to have Charlie’s mind—to believe that red shoes are faster than other shoes; to believe, as he did, that ducks could drive fire engines and that pigs built houses of bricks and straw. There were plenty of people who weren’t three-and-three-quarters who believed equally implausible things … and went to war over them.
They made slow progress, as Charlie’s steps, in spite of his red shoes, were small. A few yards away from the house Isabel noticed a car that had been parked in one of the parking bays pull out into the road. She had not been paying particular attention to it, but she glimpsed the driver briefly before he made off. He was vaguely familiar; somebody from a neighbouring street whom she had seen walking in to Bruntsfield or in the delicatessen, perhaps? Or had she met him somewhere else? Her gaze followed the retreating car: she could just make out the back of the driver’s head now; nothing more than that. And then it dawned on her. It was Patrick, or somebody who looked very much like him.
She stopped in her tracks.
“Why we stopping?” asked Charlie.
“Because I’ve just seen something, Charlie. I’ve just seen something odd.”
They resumed the journey, but as they did so, Isabel went over in her mind the possible explanations for Patrick’s presence. Coincidence led the list. Patrick might have a friend in the area and might be visiting him; there was no law against visiting your friends first thing in the morning. Or he had spent the night at a friend’s house and was now going back to his flat. Or it was not Patrick at all.
Those were the innocent explanations. The less innocent included the possibility that Patrick was watching his father, or, and this made Isabel’s heart skip a beat, that he was watching her. If Patrick were in some way mixed up in the theft of the painting, then he could be expected to have a close interest in the outcome of today’s meeting. The thieves would be concerned about the police coming to the meeting, and so they would naturally want to be warned when Duncan came into town to pick up Isabel. That could explain Patrick’s presence—if, indeed, it was Patrick whom she had seen.
After she had dropped Charlie off at the nursery, Isabel returned to the house, where she found Duncan immersed in the crossword.
“It took my mind off things,” he said. “Not that I’ve made much progress with it—apart from this.” He passed her the newspaper and she looked at the clues he had filled in. Order of the Bath had helped him to get The sea sounds like a man (brine) and A plucked instrument says Italian yes to group of notes; it has a keyboard (harpsichord).
“Very clever,” she said.
“Not really.”
She looked at her watch. They could walk to Rutland Square if they had time—it was only twenty minutes from Isabel’s house to the west end of Princes Street, and Rutland Square was only minutes from there. But it was now nine o’clock and they could not afford to be late. Isabel telephoned for a taxi and suggested that they wait for it at the gate. “They don’t take long,” she said. Duncan nodded; he was still distracted, she noticed, and she thought that she could make out beads of sweat across his brow.
“It’s going to be all right,” she said, as she locked the front door behind him.
He swallowed. “Yes, thank you. Thank you.”
They stood under the large tree at the front of the house. Somewhere in the foliage a bird moved; that tree was popular with doves. Charlie was fascinated by them. “Doves got bedrooms?” he had asked.
She looked up the street, attentive now to any cars that were parked nearby. For the first time, she felt what she realised was fear. The people they were about to meet did not belong to her world; they came from a world in which the rights of others did not matter. She had assured Duncan that they would not be violent, but how did she know that? The answer was that she did not.
In the taxi, Duncan sat quietly, not attempting to make conversation but staring out of the window at the houses and at the cluster of shops at the top of the road that led down to the canal. They passed a church on which a large banner had been hung. We must love one another, it said. We must, she thought. And Auden came to mind, again, as he did in the most unexpected circumstances. It was “1st September 1939,” the poem that people in New York read and sent to one another after that fateful September day in 2001. They found comfort in it because it was about the ending of a world and the despair that this will bring. He had originally written: “We must love one another or die,” and had changed it to: “We must love one another and die.” Auden disowned the poem, considering it mendacious; but it had a grave beauty about it. Things that are not sincere can be as striking as those that are, and insincerity, thought Isabel, can—curiously—end up being sincere.
She turned to Duncan. The taxi had stopped at the lights outside the King’s Theatre; the traffic was moving slowly. “Your son,” she said. “Your son, Patrick. I thought I saw him.”
He looked puzzled. “You met him?”
“I did. At a concert. I thought I’d told you that when I came out to Doune.”
“Did you? Perhaps you did. I can’t remember, I’m afraid.”
“I thought I saw him,” she said.
He frowned.
“I mean, I thought I saw him this morning. In a car. On my street.”
He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed at his brow. “You probably did.”
Now it was Isabel’s turn to look puzzled.
“He drove me to your place,” said Duncan. “I called on him this morning. I wanted to leave my car near his flat. You can park up there. Your area has these regulations.”
Isabel felt relieved. The innocent explanation meant that she had not been imagining things—it had been him—and at the same time served to defuse the awkward possibility that Patrick was somehow involved in the theft of the painting.
“He knows what’s happening this morning?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Duncan. “I told him.” He looked down at his hands. “My son and I are, regrettably, not close.”
She said that she was sorry to hear that.
“Thank you. I’m afraid that he’s something of a disappointment to me.”
He looked at her as he spoke, and she felt that he was asking something of her. Did he want reassurance? Did he want some sort of comfort?
“I suspected that,” she said.
“Why?” There was a note of surprise in his voice.
She chose her words carefully. “I formed the impression that you might …” She faltered. What did she want to say? That he and Patrick inhabited different worlds?
“Go on,” he said. “Please go on. Tell me what you think.”
She had not imagined that she would discuss it with him, but now he was asking. “I can understand how it’s sometimes difficult,” she said.
“It is,” he said. “It is difficult.”
“I have a friend whose son is gay,” said Isabel. “She found it hard at first, but she realised that what really counted was his happiness, and he was happy. She …” She trailed off. Duncan was staring at her in incomprehension.
“I really don’t know what you mean,” he said.
She struggled to find words. It had suddenly dawned on her that either he did not know or that she had been mistaken in her conclusion that Patrick was gay. Perhaps the assumption was misplaced—one cannot read the lives of others on a cursory meeting.
Duncan now looked confused. “My son …,” he began, and then, looking down at the floor of the cab, he lapsed into silence.
“I’m sorry,” said Isabel. “I really don’t know your son.”
He did not meet her eyes. “There is a political difference between us,” he said. “My own views are liberal—middle-of-the-roadish. I’m not particularly political, I suppose. But he … he’s an extremist, I’m sorry to say. He’s in with a very leftish bunc
h—not the Labour Party or any of the other mainstream options of the left, but the real hard left—a small outfit in Glasgow. He gives them money. Castro is his hero, as far as I can make out. I try to point out to him that Castro took many prisoners of conscience over the years, but he won’t hear any of it. He even laments the passing of the Soviet Union. He forgets about the Gulag, the KGB, the millions who perished under Stalin.”
Isabel listened. Had the traffic not been so slow, they would have been at their destination by now; as it was, they were stuck in a line of cars outside the Usher Hall. “People change,” she said. “The scales may fall from his eyes. And …” She hesitated, unsure whether to broaden the discussion, but decided to do so. “And if you look behind the party allegiance, you may find some fine sentiments. The left generally want people to have good lives, don’t you think? They want people to have their material needs satisfied, to be lifted out of poverty. Perhaps your son—”
He interrupted her. “We all want that.” He sounded vehement. “Who doesn’t want hospitals and schools and all the rest? It’s how we achieve the material satisfaction that’s the issue. He thinks you can have it by taking everybody’s property away from them and having state ownership of everything. He really thinks that.”
“No,” said Isabel. “That wouldn’t work.”
He looked at her now. “I’m a farmer, and I know that if you take land out of the hands of individual farmers and collectivise it, you destroy agriculture. Every single historical example has shown that to be the case. Yet Patrick, my own son, told me that I had no right to the five hundred acres I farm. He said that if I leave the farm to him, he’ll treat it as a collective.” He snorted. “Collective agriculture? How long would that work? A month?”
The traffic had started to move again and they were approaching the end of Lothian Road. To their left was the Caledonian Hotel, a great edifice of red sandstone, while on the other side of the road St. John’s Church marked the end of Princes Street Gardens. The church was displaying a line of flags on its forecourt: the Scottish flag, the Saltire, fluttered above flags of the various European countries and a flag on which the word Peace was sewn in great black letters. We must love one another and die, thought Isabel.
The taxi turned and began to make its way down the short road that led to Rutland Square. “You could drop us right here,” Isabel called out to the driver.
Duncan reached for his coat. “We can talk about Patrick some other time,” he said; he spoke in the tone of one wanting to shelve an awkward topic.
ISABEL KNEW RUTLAND SQUARE for two reasons. Her friend Lesley Kerr had her legal office in one corner of the square, and she had occasionally called there to collect her for lunch. And on the other side, in a three-storeyed Georgian building looking out over the gardens that made up the centre of the square, was the Scottish Arts Club. Isabel went to dinners there from time to time, and parties too—the club had long had a reputation as the most hospitable of Edinburgh clubs, with its talks on the arts, its Sheeps Heid dinners, its Burns Nights. Isabel sometimes had lunch there with another friend, Lucy Mackay, an artist known for her portraits and wispy, whimsical water-colours. That was her Rutland Square, a place with predominantly positive associations but which Isabel was now visiting in a very different context.
Duncan paid off the taxi and the cab shot off to its next assignment. His nervousness had now returned, and he looked about him uneasily. “What now? We walk around?”
Isabel took his arm. “Yes. To all intents and purposes we are just two people out for a walk.” She pointed to a man walking two black Labradors on their leashes. “Like him.”
They began to walk round the square. Isabel glanced discreetly at her watch; in spite of the traffic delays, they were still at least ten minutes early.
“They could be watching us,” said Duncan.
“They probably are,” said Isabel.
They continued their walk in silence. There was not a great deal happening in the square, which was tucked away from the busy thoroughfares of Princes Street and Lothian Road. Now, in midsummer, the trees made an island of green, their leaves sibilant in the warm morning breeze. “The winds must come from somewhere when they blow” … it was among the most beautiful of lines. WHA again, even here, she thought, when I’m about to enter the murky, unpleasant world of theft.
They reached the western end of the square and began to make their way in the direction of the Scottish Arts Club. The lights were on in the drawing room; somebody was reading a paper, enjoying a cup of coffee. And on the other side of the club, in a house now converted to offices, she saw a man and a woman talking in front of a window—the ordinary world of legitimate business: a world in which people did not hold one another to ransom; a world in which rules, like hidden, powerful electrical fields, governed the affairs of men.
She was suddenly aware of Duncan’s hand on her arm. He was whispering something that she found it hard to catch.
She whispered back, although there was nobody about to hear them. “Yes? What is it?”
“There’s somebody parked up ahead. He’s looking at us.”
She switched her gaze to the vehicles parked up against the garden railings. She saw a large grey car that had been carelessly parked and was protruding into the road; an old Morgan, lovingly tended, its silver trimmings worn almost to the base metal below from the rubbing of generations of polishing cloth; both were empty. But then, behind the Morgan, parked hard up against it so that the bumpers must almost have been touching, was a black van with a long crack in the windscreen. There was a man at the wheel.
“I think that must be them,” said Duncan out of the side of his mouth.
“We’ll find out soon enough,” said Isabel. She was not sure; there were building works going on in one of the buildings in the square and the man could have had something to do with those—there were other builders’ vans in the square, disgorging planks of wood and other mysteries of their craft.
Isabel slowed her pace. She found it hard to pretend to be casual in the face of observation, particularly from somebody who was probably either a builder or a thief. Some builders took it as their right to watch women with an appraising look that was frequently nakedly intrusive; they still wolf-whistled and called out—as Italian men used to do before they suddenly grew up. Why did men think they could behave that way? What satisfaction did they get from wolf-whistling? It was about power, thought Isabel. It was about being able to assert themselves publicly and to objectify women. It was a direct denial of the idea that men and women should treat one another with courtesy and consideration; it was a nod to the days of strutting men and meek, passive women.
Thinking of builders helped to take her mind off being watched, with the result that when the window of the van was suddenly—and noisily—wound down, she was not paying full attention to it.
“Over here.”
The tone of the voice was peremptory; the vowels were those of the east of Scotland. Isabel looked. He was staring at them through the open window of the van: a man in his early thirties, or thereabouts, with lank, mousy hair and a chin that was covered in heavy stubble.
She stepped off the pavement and began to cross the road towards the van with Duncan following behind. “Quick,” the man called out. “Get a move on.”
Isabel, offended by his rudeness, regarded him with disdain as they approached the van. She saw that there were two earrings in his right ear—two small studs, one of which was red. It was a code, she imagined. What had Eddie once said to her about men and earrings? Left: right; right: wrong.
He stared at them through the open window. “Get in the back,” he said. “The door’s open.”
She smelled something on the man’s breath: stale alcohol. She saw that his eyes were bloodshot and that the skin around them seemed to be puffed-up. He was not sober, she thought, but then some men like this never were.
“Why?” she asked.
“Do you want to see the thing?�
�� His voice had become a sneer.
She felt her heart beating within her. She would remain calm; she was determined to deny him the satisfaction of seeing her riled.
Isabel kept her voice level as she replied, “Yes. That’s why we’re here.”
Duncan now stepped forward. “Is my painting in the back?” he asked.
The driver stared at him for a moment or two before answering. “No, it isn’t, Pop. I’m taking you to see it. But only if youses shift yoursels and get in.” He used the demotic plural of you, a common feature of speech in Scotland. Isabel had always rather liked it, just as she liked the complimentary Texan plural you-all that her mother had told her about. “It assumes that nobody would be unfortunate enough to be on their own,” she used to explain. “Hence you-all.”
There was something in the driver’s answer that made Duncan start. She looked at him and he shook his head, as if to put her off saying anything now.
“I think we should probably do this,” Duncan said to her. “Do you mind?”
Isabel weighed the possibilities. It was no small step to get into the back of a strange van, especially one driven by so patently unpleasant a person as this; but what was the alternative? If they declined, then the whole arrangement for the recovery of the Poussin—and the painting—could be in jeopardy.
She nodded to Duncan, and they walked round to the back of the van. Duncan opened the doors hesitantly.
“I’m not sure,” he said. He stopped. A man dressed entirely in black, his face half covered by a football scarf, his eyes obscured by sunglasses, was crouching on the floor of the van. Gripped on either side by his gloved hands was the Poussin.
Isabel gasped. Her hand went to her mouth.
“See this,” said the man, jerking the painting towards them but still keeping his tight grip on it. “See?”
Isabel noticed the sky, saw the intense Poussin blue, saw the clouds; that was her abiding impression—the clouds. Absurdly, she wanted to say something about the painting, even now, in this threatening, tense situation—she wanted to say something about the beauty of the painting. We don’t react in the right way, she thought; we think the wrong things, as I am doing now. She had read of people who found themselves facing death and who subsequently survived and of how they had spent what could have been their last precious seconds thinking about some matter of no real consequence—whether they had paid the newsagent’s bill or licensed the car or something like that. It was the same with last words, which were no doubt mostly banal and often inappropriate, although some, at least, managed a memorable final statement, as did Charles II. He had apologised for taking so long to go: You must pardon me, gentlemen, for being a most unconscionable time a-dying.
The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (9) Page 16
