The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (9) (17 page)

“There’s something that particularly interests me about Poussin,” he said. “He was
a landscape painter as much as he was a figurative painter, you know.”

She did know that. “Yes. I saw that exhibition
Poussin and Nature
a few years back. He had a lot to say about the natural world.”

“Exactly,” said Duncan. “He may paint something dramatic, something fairly intense
in human terms, and yet there it is, shown in a natural setting.”

“And a calm one at that,” said Isabel.

“Yes. Classical landscapes always have that air of peacefulness about them. Do you
know the Poussin in the National Gallery in London? The one of the man killed by a
snake?”

She remembered being in a room full of Poussins in the National Gallery, but it had
been a long time ago.

“It’s a very powerful painting,” Duncan continued. “That
poor man lying on the ground with the snake coiled around him. And the man who has
discovered him running up the path to report the matter—too late.”

Suddenly she recalled it. “There’s a boat, isn’t there? Men fishing somewhere nearby.”

“Yes. Poussin makes the point, doesn’t he? Normal life goes on in spite of tragedies
occurring all around it.”

She smiled in recognition. Auden had said exactly that. “About suffering, they were
never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position …”

“That’s vaguely familiar,” he said.

“It’s Auden’s poem about Brueghel’s
Fall of Icarus
,” she said. “You may know the painting—there’s a ploughman tilling a field in the
foreground and a ship sailing out of the bay below. Icarus can be seen falling into
the water—his legs disappearing—but everybody gets on with their business in spite
of the tragedy. The ship has somewhere to sail, the man has his field to plough. If
they notice, they don’t pay much attention.”

Duncan was silent for a moment. “I suppose that’s true. I suppose that even as we
sit here talking, somebody, somewhere in the world, is facing imminent execution—about
to be shot or given a lethal injection—something brutal, some piece of licensed awfulness
like that. And we sit here and talk about art and its meaning and think of a dinner
that awaits us this evening, or a conversation with friends, or anything, really.”

Isabel looked at him, and he held her gaze for a few moments before looking down.
It was as if he had unwittingly shown to her something of himself that he would rather
not have revealed—for all his earlier talk of an appropriate reticence. She felt an
urge to reach out and touch him, to reassure him that he could be honest with her,
that there was no need for him to shelter
behind the identity that he otherwise presented to the world—that of the countryman,
the gentleman farmer. But she did not: there were limits to the intimacy that had
suddenly grown up between them, and she knew that if she infringed these limits, he
might retreat again. So she was silent, and looked at her watch. He nodded. “I understand,”
he said. “You must get back to Edinburgh.”

“Will you let me know when they get in touch?” she said.

“I will.” He hesitated before continuing. “I take it that you’re happy to come and
see the painting?”

“I want to do that,” she said.

“I’m glad. I’ll feel less exposed with you there.”

He saw her to her car.

“I’ll say it again, that really is a very good car. I love Swedish cars,” he said.
“In fact, I love everything Swedish.”

She knew what he meant. There were many in Scotland who felt that their country had
somehow been misplaced—that it should have been closer to Scandinavia.

“Perhaps one day,” she said.

He laughed. “Scotland will become more Swedish?”

She made a gesture of mock despair. That would never happen. We would have to change
everything, she mused—ourselves, the way we thought, our attitudes and our clothes.

JAMIE COOKED DINNER
that evening using a recipe for a vegetable paella that he had read in the
Scotsman
weekend magazine, cut out and then stuffed into a pocket of his jacket. He was an
enthusiastic cook but a sporadic one, and would often only announce to Isabel in the
late afternoon that he would cook that evening—if she wanted him to. By then she would
have made her plans for their meal, but would readily shelve them in order to have
the evening off. There would be Charlie’s supper to prepare, but that was simplicity
itself: his tastes ran to macaroni cheese, spaghetti and a curious mixture of cauliflower
and olives that he had named
cauliolives
and always devoured with gusto. Oddly, for a child, he seemed to have little interest
in sweet things, apart from ice cream: macaroons, irresistible to other children,
would be left untouched, and marzipan, if ever he encountered it, spat out in disgust.

While Jamie cooked, Isabel read Charlie his bedtime story. He had discovered A. A.
Milne—or that writer had been discovered for him—and loved to hear the poems in
Now We Are Six
, especially the lines about King John, who was not a good man—who was not spoken
to for days and days and days, but was miraculously given the present he so yearned
for. “Good boys get presents,” said Charlie, looking up at his mother with a mixture
of challenge and hope.

“They do, Charlie,” said Isabel. “And give them too.”

He had nodded wisely; he understood, she suspected, about reciprocity—or at least
had some glimpse of what it meant, but probably only in the crudest, most elementary
terms. Plenty of people gave gifts to get gifts back, and Charlie at present was among
them. That would change, of course—unless he remained one of those who never grew
into altruism. And they existed. Her mother’s cousin, Mimi McKnight in Dallas, had
told her once about one of the Mobile aunts, an ancient Southern lady, all powder
and eau de cologne, who had been famous for being incapable of giving anybody anything
at all, not even on important birthdays, when a homemade card was all that she would
rise to. On her death, a sealed will was discovered in
a drawer, stating that there was nothing to leave and therefore there would be no
legacies. It was not true; she was comfortably off, but could not bring herself to
acknowledge that fact, nor the claims that any of her family might have on her.

“What lies behind an attitude like that?” Isabel had asked.

Mimi had thought for a moment and then said, “Ask Dr. Freud.”

“Fear?” suggested Isabel. “Fear of having nothing left?”

“Possibly,” said Mimi. “Or a stony heart.”

Now, with the last of the Milne recited—for a second time—she switched out Charlie’s
light and kissed him goodnight. He was drowsy and already half asleep, but he puckered
his lips slightly as she planted the kiss on his forehead. She could have wept; she
could have wept for the love of him, as any mother might while watching over her child.
There was no human emotion stronger than this, she felt; biology dictated it and the
heart willingly became party to the bond. That was what Renaissance artists meant
when they painted those beautiful, entrancing madonnas: their work was commissioned
by religious piety, but the spirit that moved the artist was nothing to do with that
but everything to do with maternal tenderness and love, with what she felt now …

Jamie had laid the table in the kitchen and poured Isabel a glass of New Zealand white
wine; the chilled glass was covered in a mist of condensation, small rivulets beginning
to move down towards the stem. She took the glass in her hand and held it up to the
evening light from the window. Outside, viewed through the wine, Scotland was blurred
and made golden-yellow. Up above, there were clouds, and beyond them was a slice of
blue that made her think again of Poussin and of his skies; it was
the same shade of blue that the artist had habitually used in his paintings, a blue
that spoke of the cold that was there in any real sky, at that altitude.

Jamie was busying himself with the chopping of parsley.

“I’m using curly parsley rather than the flat-leaf sort,” he said. “Do you think it
matters?”

“That’s fine,” said Isabel. “Flat-leaf parsley has a stronger flavour. Curly will
probably go more easily with the other things you’re using.”

Jamie finished chopping the parsley and moved on to garlic. “Double quantities,” he
said, smiling at Isabel. “To protect us against any vampires that may be lurking around
Edinburgh.” He held up a half-chopped bulb of garlic and then crossed the room towards
her, holding it out in front of him for her to sniff.

She took the hand in which he held the garlic. She steadied it and then sniffed at
the half-sliced bulb. It bled—the garlic bled—a clear liquid.

“Lovely,” she said. “Sinful.”

He stood before her. She looked into his eyes.

“I love it,” he said. “It goes with everything, doesn’t it?”

“Except kisses,” she said.

He lowered his hand. “No? So one should kiss people
before
eating garlic?”

“If that’s what one wants to do,” she said. And I do, she thought. I want to kiss
you. I want to kiss you.

He leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. Then again. And once more.

“I have to cook,” he said, drawing back.

“Yes, indeed.” She took a sip of her wine. “I had an uncomfortable meeting today,”
she said.

“Oh? Tell me about it.”

She answered his invitation with a question. “Do you know that feeling when you meet
somebody who’s ill-disposed to you—right from the beginning, before you’ve even had
the chance to offend them?”

Jamie had encountered that. “Yes, I know it. There’s a conductor who hates me. I could
tell straightaway. The moment he lifted his baton at the first rehearsal, he hated
me.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Maybe he doesn’t like bassoons,” he said.

Isabel thought: No, it was not that. It would have been something quite different;
something to do with the way that Jamie looked, something to do with who he was. Envy?
Jamie was young, and older people can hate the young just because they are young and
because they are going to have the world for a long time yet.

Jamie tipped a pile of chopped vegetables into a large cast-iron frying pan and moved
it on to the plate of the cooker. The oil in the pan sizzled. “Who was this person
anyway?” he asked.

“She’s a lawyer from Perth,” said Isabel. “A woman called Heather Darnt.”

“Never heard of her,” said Jamie. “But I don’t like her either.”

Isabel smiled. “Thanks for the solidarity. She’s horrible.” She realised that to describe
somebody as horrible sounded very childish. She had a friend—someone she had known
at school—who used expressions like that, who spoke the same way as she did when they
were both fifteen. People could be
horrible
, or
horrid
, or, by contrast,
fab
, or
cool
. These adjectives were interspersed with Scots terms, words that were vividly expressive,
as Scots can so often be. The overall effect was one of decisive partisanship.

“Or maybe not exactly horrible,” she continued. “Just rude. Cold. Rather sinister.”

Jamie nodded. “The sort of person you can picture commanding a firing squad? There
are more people like that than you imagine.”

“I know.”

“And so what did she say?”

Isabel told him about their conversation and the promise that the painting would be
available for inspection. He listened intently, stirring the vegetables in the frying
pan as Isabel spoke. When she had finished, he turned and fixed her with a stare.

“You’re not going to go?” he asked. “You aren’t going to go and meet these people,
are you?”

“Duncan wants me to,” Isabel replied. “And I’ve agreed.”

For a moment Jamie said nothing, and turned back to his cooking. “I know I can never
persuade you not to do things,” he said over his shoulder. “So I won’t try. But just
be careful with this one.”

“It’ll be in full public view, I imagine,” said Isabel. “They won’t want to give us
an actual address to go to.”

“Why not?”

“Because we could pass that on to the authorities, and they could turn up and recover
the painting.”

“So how will you do it?”

She did not know the answer to that. “I imagine that it will be in a bar or a café,
or somewhere like that. We’ll be told to meet them somewhere at the last moment.”

Jamie looked doubtful. “Why somewhere public? But won’t it look very odd if you start
examining a painting in the middle of a bar?”

“I imagine they won’t want somewhere private because
they’ll want to be able to melt away into a crowd, or into the traffic perhaps. So
it’s likely to be somewhere public, but where …” She looked at him helplessly. “I
don’t know exactly. In fact, I don’t know at all. I’m not very good at these things.”

He smiled at her. “I could say, then, that perhaps you shouldn’t take them on. But
I won’t say that. I really won’t.”

“What will you say instead?”

He hesitated for a moment. “That I’m really happy that you’re the way you are. That
I’m glad that you’re not somebody who can ignore the troubles of others. That you’re
the most perfect woman I’ve ever met in my life and that I love you more than the … more
than the Atlantic Ocean.”

She put down her glass. “What you’ve said is more than enough for any woman,” she
said. “To be loved more than the Atlantic Ocean …”

“It’s true,” said Jamie. “I know it sounds odd …”

The Atlantic stood for so much—for breadth and openness and empty, watery wastes—and
was not the most obvious metaphor for love; but she knew why he should have thought
of the sea in trying to say what he wanted to say: Burns had talked of the duration
of his love, which would last, he said,
Till a’ the seas gang dry
, and so she said, “I understand. It doesn’t sound odd at all—not to me.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN