Isabel nodded. It was hot in Singapore. Yes, she had heard that.
“You’re not keen to go?” It was a direct question, but she wanted to get the conversation past its abysmal small-talk stage.
Christine threw a glance across the room to where her husband was standing, deep in conversation with Alex and another man. “I don’t mind,” she said flatly. “It’s what Harry wants. That’s the important thing.”
Isabel said nothing. It occurred to her now that the situation was not quite as simple as she had imagined. Harry wanted to go to Singapore because of the job. That was clear, but … but what if he wanted to go to Singapore because his wife, this rather dull woman, did not want to go there? If one wanted to get away from one’s wife, then it made perfect sense to go to a place to which she would be reluctant to follow one. So that ruled out places like Paris or Melbourne or Vancouver, where it was no great burden to live, and ruled in certain places were nobody would like to go. Singapore, of course, was not on that list, being a rather attractive place where people led comfortable, secure lives. But some people might not like the heat or the distance from home, and, like Christine, might not wish to follow.
Now, if Harry had decided to go somewhere far away to escape what must be a very dull home life, then he would obviously not wish Christine to accompany him. But he would have to be circumspect about it. If he made it clear that he did not want her to come with him, then that would only persuade her that she must at all costs accompany him in order to prevent his going off with somebody else.
Of course she could be dissembling. She might secretly be rather keen to live in Singapore but not wish to give that impression. It might suit her very well for her husband to go off to Singapore and leave her in Scotland … with her lover … The new young sports teacher, perhaps. Isabel stopped herself. This was absurd. The situation had no such complexities: this was a straightforward case of a man taking a job in a place where his wife did not wish to live because she was set in her ways and happy where she was. However, she would follow him, and life for them would go on very much as it went on back in Scotland. There was nothing under the surface here; what you saw was what there was. Nothing more than that.
Isabel, who had momentarily turned away, turned round again and saw that Christine was moving off towards other guests. She thinks I am boring, thought Isabel. But then she had every right to reach this conclusion after that conversation; every right. Isabel finished the last of her cold coffee and put the cup down on a table. Harry and Christine depressed her. There was no happiness there.
She looked at her watch. She was driving back to Edinburgh and she made a quick calculation. She had had one glass of wine before dinner and half a glass during the meal. That quantity, spread over three hours, made it quite safe for her to drive. If she left now, she would be home in not much more than an hour, and Jamie would not be much later. Grace was babysitting and would stay the night.
A few minutes later she was in her green Swedish car and heading back along the road to Edinburgh. The Border countryside could just be made out under a three-quarters moon: wide fields punctuated by dark woods; rolling hills, silhouetted against the night sky; crouching shapes like sleeping bears or humpback whales. This was the landscape of Walter Scott, and she imagined him at Abbotsford, looking out of his library window at the world he peopled with his characters; a world of desperate doings and heroic quests.
That was not what the world was like now, and she should not allow her imagination to suggest otherwise. There were no hidden dimensions to the world of Harry and Christine. They had nothing to do with the unresolved problem of that shortlist, and in that enquiry she was no further along than she had been before, except, perhaps, she now had the knowledge that Alex distrusted Tom Simpson and wrote him off as being intellectually inferior to the other two candidates. And a fraud, of course. That changed the picture—if it could be proved. And that should not be too difficult, despite Alex’s unsuccessful efforts: one either had the degree one claimed to have or one did not, and there must be some way of ascertaining that. She could try to find out, although she thought that it was probably a waste of time. It was just too unlikely a thing for a candidate to do. No, she would not bother. The real subject of the anonymous letter, she decided, was John Fraser. He was the one who had something serious to hide.
As she came into Edinburgh from the south and saw the lights of the city laid out below her, her thoughts turned to Jamie’s friend Prue. Down there, there were so many people she knew, or who knew about her. There were links and associations and relationships; there were all the tissue, the sinews, of human society. And one of these people whose light might still be burning at this hour was that unhappy, frightened girl whom she would have to see; whose heart was presumably already broken by the arbitrariness of her illness, and for whom only disappointment and sorrow lay ahead. Unless … the thought that came to her was unexpected, and outrageous. Unless she were to share Jamie—as an act of charity towards a girl who did not have long to live. She had everything, and that young woman had nothing; was it out of the question to allow Jamie to go to her and comfort her, to give her the experience of love before she died? Most women would be appalled by the idea—yes, appalled. But that was not how Isabel felt. She felt ashamed, embarrassed perhaps, but she did not feel appalled. And how would Jamie react if she made the suggestion? She saw him looking at her with that reproachful look that he sometimes adopted. “Isabel, are you serious? Or are you out of your mind? Perhaps you are. Completely. How could you? How could you?” Or, more likely, he would just stare at her in justified shock.
He would be right: how could she? It might have seemed an act of generosity, of sharing, but it was also an act of insouciance, an implicit statement that she did not care enough to bother if the man to whom she was about to be married had an affair with another woman. Of course she cared; of course she wanted Jamie to the exclusion of all others—what were the precise words of the marriage service, before linguistic meddling had destroyed its poetry? Forsaking all others? What a powerful, resonant word was forsake. The phrase forsaking all others meant so much more, made its point so much more emphatically than its weaker alternatives. And yet the thought had occurred to her. It did not come from nowhere. It had occurred to her, and the things that come into our mind are ours. If they are outrageous, then it is because somewhere within ourselves we have an outrageous part; a dark twin in whose mind thoughts of infidelity, carnal excess, selfishness dwell with ease and naturalness.
CHAPTER TWELVE
OF COURSE SHE SAID NOTHING about it to Jamie. The following morning, over the breakfast table, as Jamie fed Charlie his boiled-egg-and-Marmite soldiers, the thought crossed her mind again, but she quickly dismissed it by deliberately thinking of something else. This, she understood, was the technique adopted by the saints, actual and aspiring, for whom impure thoughts were temptations to be put out of mind; they thought of heavenly subjects, choirs of angels and the like, and the unsettling thoughts were elbowed out. Or they flagellated themselves, which was another way of dealing with the errant mind, though not a practice one could easily adopt at the breakfast table. In Isabel’s case, she thought of Christopher Dove, and imagined him sitting over breakfast, frowning at his bowl of muesli, plotting his next move. To this picture she added Professor Lettuce, sitting on the other side of the table, glancing with admiration at his younger colleague. The thought made her smile, and it worked: I have stopped dwelling on that dreadful idea of mine.
Jamie, unaware of Isabel’s mental struggle, discussed the day ahead. He was entirely free and wanted to take Charlie to the Botanical Gardens. Jamie had recently discovered the fish that swam languidly in one of the hothouse pools; they would visit them, he said, and look at a few of the more exotic plants. Charlie wanted desperately to touch a cactus, it seemed, and Jamie wondered whether he should be allowed to discover about thorns and spikes for himself. “That’s how they learn, isn’t it?” he asked. “H
ow else?”
Isabel looked fondly at Charlie. There was so much that she wanted to protect him from in life—as every parent does. Cactuses were on that list somewhere, she supposed.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “There’ll be time enough to find out about cactuses in the future. Cactuses, alcohol, the breaking of the heart: lots of time to learn about all that.”
She had her own plans for the day. The previous day, before going down to Abbotsford, she had telephoned Charlie Maclean with a request to meet the father of the man who had been lost on Everest. Charlie had mentioned that he knew him, and she wondered whether she could have a word with him. Charlie was obliging, and came up with a telephone number. “He’s retired now,” he said. “He actually lives not far away from us. He still does some nosing for one or two of the distilleries. He was very good.” He paused. “Apparently he never really recovered from what happened. He was an only son—the climber. There’s a daughter, but she’s not quite right, I believe. Unfortunately she’s a bit glaikit.” He used the Scots word for mental handicap. It was not a word that many used any more, preferring learning difficulties, the modern euphemism. But there was nothing unkind about glaikit, which survived because the policing of language had not extended to the Scots lexicon.
She had telephoned the father and he had said that he was prepared to see her. He asked her what it was about and she explained. “I want to know more about what happened on that expedition,” she said.
He sounded weary. “You’re writing something?”
“Not exactly.”
“You really want to talk to me?” he asked. “I wasn’t there, you know.”
“If you don’t mind.”
There was a short silence. He does mind, she thought, and understandably so. But this is not what he said. “Very well. If it’s important to you.”
He spoke with resignation, but it was not his tone of voice that struck her: it was the phrase If it’s important to you. That phrase, she observed, was the foundation of so much of our moral dealing with others. We recognise what is important to them; we take it into account. And if we did that, then so much else followed: recognition of rights, the practice of courtesy—everything, really, that made for peaceable relations between people. Gay marriage, she thought: some people might not like the idea, but if they thought If it’s important to you, the case for their recognising it became so much stronger, so much more obvious. Unless, of course, one applied the same question to the objectors, in which case one was back where one started—trying to reconcile two mutually antipathetic positions, which was about as easy as ensuring that olive oil and balsamic vinegar remain mixed after shaking.
Isabel closed her eyes; one could not construct a moral position based on analogies of balsamic vinegar.
“Are you there?”
The voice on the line brought her back from her philosophical wandering.
“I am. Sorry. I was thinking about something else.” She apologised again and then made the arrangement. He would see her at his house at ten-thirty. He gave her the address, which was just outside Edinburgh, near Roslin Chapel, on the edge of the Pentland Hills. He lived off a road that ran between Roslin and the village of Temple; a strange slice of landscape, caught between narrow, twisting glens and the more rolling terrain that became the Border hills.
“You can’t miss our house,” he said. “It’s ochre. You won’t see any other ochre houses. You can’t go wrong.”
As he had anticipated, she found the house easily. It was larger than she had imagined: somewhere between a functional farmhouse and a house that would in the past have been called a laird’s house—a house that at the time of its building would not have been grand enough for a family with real aspirations, but which would have been perfect for one that wanted to be comfortable.
The house was served by a short drive, on which gravel had been freshly laid, making a satisfactory crunching noise under the tyres of her car; a noise like the crashing of waves on the shore; a good sound, she thought. She parked, and then, getting out of the car, looked at the house before her. It was a fortunate house, she decided, as it must have been built just before Georgian became Victorian. The shadow of Victoria was there, but had not quite fallen on this building, which still had the scale and pleasing proportions of Georgian architecture. An easy house. A house that was comfortable in its skin, or mortar perhaps.
The ochre came from the harling, that roughcast coating of tiny pebbles and lime that was applied to the outside of Scottish houses. This had been painted in the warm shade that one found occasionally in eastern Scotland, brought from somewhere else, from the Netherlands, perhaps, in the days of trade between the Scottish ports and their Dutch neighbours over the North Sea.
He had seen her and opened the front door as she stood before the house, looking up at its façade. “Miss Dalhousie?”
Iain Alexander looked somewhere in his early seventies, perhaps, but well groomed and with the clear, slightly ruddy skin of the Scottish countryman. Wind and rain were the foundations of that complexion; wind and rain and the cloud-scudded skies.
They shook hands. She gestured to the front wall of the house. “You’re very lucky living here,” she said.
“I know that. Yes, we are fortunate. Ochre is such a warm colour.” He spoke simply, with an accent that was redolent of old-fashioned Edinburgh. “My late wife was particularly fond of this place.” He pointed vaguely at the grounds. “She created a marvellous garden, which I’m afraid I’ve rather let run to seed. But one can’t do everything—or anything, sometimes.”
He invited her in, leading her down a book-lined corridor into a large drawing room that faced, unusually, the rear garden. There were paintings on the walls, all of them conventional: landscapes, a study of birds in flight, a small classical study, an old framed map of the county of Midlothian. And there, above the white marble fireplace, was her Raeburn, the one that she had examined with Guy Peploe and that she thought he would be bidding for on her behalf next month. She stood still for a moment, wondering whether she was mistaken. Was it a copy? Or was it another painting altogether, one that looked uncannily like the real Raeburn?
“Is that …” She broke off. It was her painting; it had to be.
“Raeburn,” said Iain. “My pride and joy. Or it is at the moment …” He, too, trailed off, before adding, “It has to be consigned to the auction house soon. I shall miss it.”
Isabel moved forward to examine the painting more closely. At the bottom of the frame there was a small gilt lozenge on which she now read the inscription: Sir Henry Raeburn: Mrs. Alexander and Her Granddaughter.
Mine, she thought. My painting of my four-times great-grandmother. She turned to him. “Why are you selling it?” It was a tactless question, and she realised this immediately after asking it. People sold things because they did not like them or because they needed the money. There were hardly any other explanations. And he liked this painting.
“Needs must,” he said. “I’m reluctant to part with something that has family associations, but …” He shrugged. “Financial necessity.” He spoke with an air of embarrassment, and she understood: he belonged to a generation that viewed any discussion of money as in bad taste. Indigence was borne with fortitude; solvency with modesty.
She blushed, and thought: I have made him admit to poverty. She looked again at the picture. “I know about this portrait,” she said.
He did not seem surprised. “Raeburn is well known.”
She turned to look at him again. “I know who this woman is.”
“It’s on the frame,” he said simply. “Mrs. Alexander. A distant relative of mine.”
“And of mine,” said Isabel softly. “Except not-so-distant, in my case. My four-times great-grandmother.”
For a few moments he said nothing. They looked at one another rather sheepishly, both aware that the nature of their encounter had suddenly and subtly changed. They had begun as strangers; now they were relative
s, even if distant ones.
He looked out of the window momentarily and then back into the room. “Is this really why you’ve come to speak to me? Is it to do with this painting?”
She shook her head. “No, not at all. I had no idea that you and I were connected.” She paused. “And I must say I’m delighted to discover a new distant cousin.”
He seemed to relax. “Extraordinary. But then we’re not a large population in Scotland, are we? I read somewhere that the DNA people say that an awful lot of us are related. More than we think.”
“The Alexander connection should have occurred to me when I saw your name. I wasn’t thinking.”
Iain gestured to a chair, inviting her to sit down. “I have a family tree somewhere,” he said. “We had a cousin from New Zealand who turned up and burrowed away in Register House for months. He came up with this great long chart that he unravelled on the kitchen table. Rather like the book of Genesis: so-and-so begat so-and-so, unto the nth generation. A lot of pretty boring detail.”
She knew what he meant. She understood why people did such things, but she could herself never summon up interest in the details of who had married whom and who had which children; unless of course, there was an interesting historical anecdote. She was related, through her mother, to the first man to land an aircraft in Mobile, Alabama, and to a woman who became a nun after being cleared of murdering her lover, the owner of a disreputable nightclub in New Orleans. That was interesting, but only mildly so. The fact that one had landed an early aircraft in Mobile meant that one had an aircraft in a day when very few people did; it also meant that one was brave, perhaps, or foolhardy. And as for the nun … She must have done it, thought Isabel, and the jury must have reckoned that the man deserved it; juries regularly acquitted the flagrantly guilty as long as they thought the victim was sufficiently deserving of his fate. All owners of nightclubs were disreputable, she thought; it was not a profession that attracted fine, upstanding people. Not generally.
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