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

by Alexander McCall Smith

  There came a growl from the front, as the engine started. The man holding the painting looked over his shoulder through a small window that gave on to the cab. Then he looked back and jerked his head. “That’s it,” he said. “Out.”

  He laid the Poussin down on the floor and reached forward to close the doors. Isabel backed off, but Duncan did not. She looked at him in alarm, concerned that he might try to snatch the painting.

  “My painting …,” he stuttered.

  The man pushed him out of the way, not roughly but firmly. “Sorry,” he said. “Show’s over.”

  The door slammed shut and the van pulled out sharply on to the road. They watched as it sped away; it barely slowed down to negotiate the difficult bend that would allow it access to the back lane behind the square.

  Isabel turned to Duncan. She saw that he was about to cry, and intuitively she reached out to embrace him, to comfort him.

  “I’m very sorry,” he said, struggling to compose himself. “I find this very upsetting.”

  “Of course it is. And there’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  She patted his shoulder, as she might pat Charlie when he hurt himself and ran to her for the embrace that could so miraculously relieve the pain. It was understandable that one might cry in the face of something like this, not only out of frustration at seeing a beloved object treated in this way, but for what the whole unpleasant little episode represented. So one might cry for everything that was wrong with the world, for all the injustice and crudity and cruelty, for all the things that are stolen from people.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  EDDIE CRIED, too, later that morning. It was in very different circumstances—not publicly, in Rutland Square, but in a small clinic room, with the antiseptic smell so characteristic of such places, the smell of cleanliness. On the wall behind Eddie’s head, tacked on to a noticeboard, was a poster with dietary recommendations: Five pieces of fruit and vegetables a day for a healthy life. Isabel, seated beside Eddie, wondered briefly: Do they mean five pieces of fruit and five pieces of vegetable, or five in total? It was five in total, she knew, because that was the message that had been drummed into people’s heads over the last few years—except for some heads, particularly in those Scottish cities where the diet tended to greasy food and no vegetables at all and, according to legend, deep-fried chocolate bars. Jamie confirmed that he had seen them served and had even tasted one after an evening at the Glasgow Concert Hall; not that they sold them there, he hastily added, but they had found somewhere nearby that did. “When in Rome,” he said, smiling. In Rome, of course, they did nothing so foolish as eating deep-fried chocolate bars, but courted disaster in their own ways, as all people do. We each have our own way of behaving self-destructively, thought Isabel; we each have our folly, and for the Italians it was … What was it? Their Mediterranean diet was famously healthy, with all its tomatoes and fish and olive oil, and although they liked wine, there was evidence, much proclaimed by topers, that two glasses of wine a day was positively beneficial. They took siestas—if they could—and that was also good for health. So what did they do that was self-destructive? They drove too fast; that was all she could think of.

  She held Eddie’s hand as the nurse behind the desk referred to the file in front of her.

  “Everything’s fine,” said the nurse. “All the tests are clear.”

  Isabel thought at first that Eddie had not understood. He gasped as the nurse spoke, and half turned to Isabel. Then he started to sob.

  “It’s fine, Eddie,” Isabel said. “Listen to what she said. It’s fine.”

  Eddie turned back to face the nurse.

  “Yes, it’s all right,” repeated the nurse. “Negative. Everything’s fine.”

  “It takes a little time to sink in,” said Isabel, pressing Eddie’s hand gently.

  “So …,” Eddie began, but stopped.

  “So, you’re fine.” Isabel pressed his hand again. She looked at the nurse, who nodded.

  The nurse began to say something about counselling and being careful; Isabel looked away, as she did not feel that it was appropriate for her to listen at that point. But it did not last long. Eddie said, “Yes, I know, I know,” and the nurse did not persist.

  They went outside, into the sun.

  “That’s that,” said Isabel. “Happier?”

  Eddie nodded. “Very,” he said.

  Isabel looked at the sky. On the same day, within little more than a few hours, she had seen two men cry, and had comforted both. She could not help but reflect on the differences between these men: Duncan, middle-aged and wealthy, the product of an expensive education and a family that was perfectly assured of its place in the world; Eddie, whose life had been far harder in every respect, whose horizons had been so much more limited, but who had a future before him. Would Duncan exchange lives with Eddie if, by some miracle, he were given the chance? It was a peculiar thought experiment that Isabel liked to engage in occasionally. Would one choose youth—and years—rather than comfort and the security of being oneself? Would the elderly millionaire change places with the indigent twenty-one-year-old?

  They decided to walk back to their side of town. Isabel had a book to collect from a bookshop on South Bridge and Eddie said that he would accompany her. “I just want to walk,” he said. “I don’t think I could focus on anything right now. I actually want to fly, you know, but I can’t, and so I’ll walk.”

  She smiled at him.

  Eddie continued: “I was worried for so long. I put things out of my mind and then every so often it would come back to me and I would go all cold.”

  “Anybody would,” said Isabel.

  They made their way along Hanover Street and then up the Playfair Steps at the back of the National Gallery. Below them, the railway lines caught the afternoon sun until they were swallowed by the tunnel under the Gallery.

  “When I was very young,” said Isabel, “I thought that the tunnel down there was Glasgow. I was told that the trains went to Glasgow and I saw them disappear into that tunnel. I thought that it must be Glasgow.”

  Eddie laughed. “When I was seven, something like that, I used to go through to Glasgow to see an uncle,” he said. “But he was never in. We went several times, but I don’t think he was ever there.”

  “What do they say? It’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive?”

  “Do they?”

  “Yes,” she said. “They do.”

  They climbed the remaining steps in silence. Isabel thought about Eddie’s saying that he wanted to fly. We all did. Who had not imagined themselves flying; who had not dreamed that they could fly? The dream interpreters spoiled those dreams of flying, which they said were not about flying at all. But they were; that, or freedom, perhaps, but not about sex, as they insisted. Everything, they said, was about sex except … perhaps sex itself. Isabel smiled: a dream about sex was really about flying—what would they say to that?

  They paused at the top of the steps and looked back over the New Town, now lying below them. Isabel noticed that although neither of them was breathless from the exertion of climbing the steps, Eddie’s face had coloured. She wondered about exercise: he came to the delicatessen each morning by bus; perhaps he should be encouraged to walk to work. But that was none of her business. You did not tell your friends to get fit or lose weight. They made that decision themselves and then you complimented them on the effort.

  After collecting the book, Isabel treated Eddie to a cup of coffee in the bookshop coffee bar. Eddie had cream on the top of his, and she found herself pointing to the topping—rich, white, fatal—and saying, “You can’t, Eddie!”

  He looked at her in surprise. “What’s wrong with cream?”

  “Everything,” she replied, then thought again. “Well, no, not everything, but you see, we have these things called arteries and …”

  He was grinning at her. “Yes?”

  “Another time. I don’t want you to think that I’m trying to
run your life.”

  His grin widened. “Unless I wanted you to.”

  She toyed with the small packet of sugar—destined to be unused—that had come with her coffee. “Which, of course, you don’t want.”

  “Who says?”

  The conversation had started lightly but there was now a tinge of seriousness. Isabel frowned as she wondered where it was leading. He was Eddie, the young man who worked in the delicatessen; she was his employer’s aunt; he was in his early twenties and she was in her early forties. There were not quite twenty years between them, but the gap was almost that large. He was damaged, and was hesitantly feeling his way towards recovery; she would help in that—of course she would—but it would not be a good idea for him to replace whatever had been missing in his relationship with his parents with some form of substitute provided by her.

  He answered his own question quickly. “I say …”

  She looked away.

  “I mean,” he continued, “that there’s something I really want you to do for me, Isabel. Will you do it?”

  She looked back at him. His expression was imploring. Whatever he had in mind was important to him, and she could not simply brush him off.

  “It depends, Eddie. Obviously it depends. You know that I’m happy to help you but I can’t do everything.”

  “I know that. And this isn’t everything. It’s dead simple.”

  “What is it?”

  He sniffed.

  “Do you need a hanky?”

  “No. I’m all right. Sometimes there are things that make me sniff. Something in the air. Pollen maybe. But not here, I suppose.”

  “You were telling me about this thing you want me to do.”

  He sniffed again. “You know I’ve got this girlfriend?”

  “Yes, Diane. I met her the other day at the deli, remember?” She paused. “Is everything still all right there?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Fine. No problems with that.”

  She said that she was glad to hear it. And then he went on, “Her parents are the problem. They hate me.”

  Perhaps it was an exaggeration to say that they hated him, but Diane had told Isabel herself that her parents disapproved of him, considered him beneath them. And for Eddie, the difference between hate and disapproval in such circumstances surely seemed slight.

  She tried to reassure him. “Hate is a very strong word, as we know, Eddie. Parents often don’t see things the way their children do. They have their own ideas about who are suitable boyfriends or girlfriends for their sons and daughters. They may have ambitions for them—”

  He cut her short, his anger now surfacing. “They think I’m no good.”

  She wondered how to respond to that. He evidently understood exactly how they felt.

  “I’m sure they don’t think you’re …” She searched for the right word. “Bad. I’m sure they don’t think that. You’re not involved in drugs or anything like that.”

  “I could be, the way they talk about me … So, if it’s not that, then what is it? Because I’m not from their group or whatever? Is that it?”

  She nodded. “To be frank, yes. People are like that.”

  He shook his head in frustration. “So what do they expect me to do?”

  She considered his question. It was, she thought, exactly the right question to ask, as it exposed the moral flaw in Diane’s parents’ position. You can only blame people for that which they have chosen to do—Aristotle spelled that out clearly enough. And that meant that you should not hold it against somebody for being what he is. A person’s background, then, was the classic example of something for which he can never be judged adversely.

  “They shouldn’t expect anything of you, Eddie. There’s nothing wrong with being who you are and you have nothing to be ashamed of or to reproach yourself about. Nothing.”

  “So why do they hate me?”

  They wished him to be something different, she said, and that was impossible, and wrong. If they knew him properly, then they would surely realise that there was nothing wrong with him; that he was a perfectly good choice for Diane.

  He was alerted by what she said. “If they knew me properly?”

  “Yes. I’m sure that if they knew you better they’d see your merits. You’re kind to Diane, aren’t you? You treat her well?”

  “Of course.”

  “And the two of you are happy together?”

  “Yes. Really happy. That’s why we want to live together, which they don’t want.” He paused. “But listen, you said that if they knew more about me, they might not be so hostile. That’s just what I want you to do for me. I want you to talk to them.”

  “Diane’s parents?”

  “Yes. Talk to them. Tell them that I’m OK. Tell them that there’s no reason why we shouldn’t get this flat. Tell them—”

  She stopped him. “I’m not sure, Eddie. I don’t think I should interfere.”

  He looked incredulous. “But Cat says that you’re always interfering. She says that you get mixed up in all sorts of things and that you help people. She told me. And everybody knows it. They know that if they need something sorted, they can go to you.”

  Isabel looked at her watch. “You have to get back to work,” she said. “Cat’s expecting you.”

  “But you haven’t answered me.”

  She picked up her coffee cup. The coffee was almost too cold to drink. “Give me some time to think,” she said briskly. “I need to think about it.”

  “Do you think you can? Do you think you can speak to them?”

  She put down her cup. “I don’t know them,” she said. “How can I go and speak to people I don’t know?”

  “You do that for other people,” he muttered.

  She knew that what he said was true. She spoke to people for other people. But she also knew Diane’s difficulties over setting up home with Eddie were not simply to do with parental opposition.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said, picking up the plastic bag that contained her book. It was a book she had ordered a week ago, Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other. She needed it for an editorial she was writing on contractualism in moral philosophy and … she smiled; she needed it for her life.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Eddie nervously.

  She wanted to cheer him up. Half an hour previously he had been talking about wanting to fly; now he seemed morose. “What’s so funny? Life,” said Isabel. “Come on, Eddie. Let’s get going.”

  SHE WAS BACK at the house in time to collect Charlie from nursery. Jamie was at home, practising, in case Isabel should be late and he would need to do the Charlie collection. Her return liberated him; he had promised to see a friend about a recital they were planning and he needed to get away. He was anxious, though, to hear about Isabel’s morning.

  “You saw the painting?”

  She nodded. “Yes. Can we talk about it later, though? I’ll have to go for Charlie.”

  He looked relieved. “Did you see them—the thieves?”

  “Yes.” She stopped. Were those men the thieves or the intermediaries? Did it make much difference? “I saw the people who had the painting. I didn’t see very much of them, though …”

  Jamie’s eyes widened. “They were masked?”

  “Nothing so melodramatic. It all happened rather quickly—and they were wearing scarves. I couldn’t really give you a description of them. Thirty-ish? One had earrings. There was a certain amount of tension and aggression, but we weren’t hurt.” She turned. Talking about what had happened made her feel somehow queasy. Was this how people felt after a traumatic experience? Weak at the knees, sick, fearful perhaps? Or even dirtied? She had heard about how people who were the victims of assault could sometimes blame themselves for what happened. Was that happening to her?

  To change the subject, Isabel asked about Grace. “Will you tell me about the peace mission? Later?”

  Jamie’s face fell. “Some messages of peace fall on stony ground.”

  “Oh.”<
br />
  He nodded. “I’ll try again.”

  She wanted him to do that. The house seemed empty without Grace. And it would be dustier too and Jamie’s shirts would be unironed and she would miss hearing about the latest goings-on with the local council and their iniquities, and the failings of the bus service, and the spiritualist meetings … There was so much that Grace brought to her life, as any friend or colleague does. That, Isabel thought, was what made the texture of our lives: the doings, the little ways of those about us. We defined ourselves socially as much as we did individually, perhaps even more so, and that, or course, meant duties to others … including to people like Eddie. But I can’t, she said to herself; I can’t go out and interfere in the lives of people I’ve never met, who would not thank me for giving them my opinion on a matter that is no affair of mine. No, I can’t. And yet Eddie has asked me to do this and if he has no claim on me, then who does?

  CHARLIE WAS BREWING a cold and would not settle to any activity that afternoon. By the time that Jamie came home at seven in the evening, Isabel was ready for a glass of wine. Charlie had been put to bed and had dozed off quickly in spite of his runny nose and incipient cough.

  “Should I be worried?” she said to Jamie. “I really want a glass of wine, and that makes me wonder whether I should be concerned.”

  “Anybody can want a glass of wine,” Jamie reassured her. “I’d be worried if you wanted a whole bottle.”