The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (9) (19 page)

She tugged at another brass fitting—a lever with a small model of a human fist at
the end—and heard the tinkling of a bell somewhere inside the flat. After a few seconds
there came the sound of footsteps and then the turning of the latch. The door opened
to a woman who looked about thirty, attractive in spite of an unusually high forehead—or
because of it—and possessed of the same reserved look that she had noticed in Duncan
Munrowe.

They shook hands, and Isabel followed Alex into a drawing room at the end of a short
corridor.

“We can sit in here,” said Alex. “Facing west, we get a bit of
afternoon light. In the morning, the kitchen gets it—it’s on the other side.”

“My orientation too,” said Isabel.

“Martha Drummond says you live near her. It’s rather nice up there, isn’t it?”

Isabel nodded. “Do you know Martha well?”

Alex hesitated. “I do. Yes, quite well.”

There was something in her tone that suggested that Martha might have been a heart-sink
friend for Alex, much as she was for Isabel.

“There’s a Stirlingshire connection,” Alex went on. “Martha’s father was a close friend
of my grandfather’s. The two families go back a long time—generations before that,
they knew one another too. You know how Scotland is.”

Isabel smiled. Of course she knew how Scotland was.

Alex gestured to a sofa. “Please …”

Isabel sat down and looked about her. The room was a typical drawing room of the sort
that was to be found in virtually all the flats in that part of Edinburgh. Being Georgian,
the proportions were almost perfect—if not actually perfect—with the length of each
wall being more or less 1.6180339887 times the height of the ceiling: the golden section.
Isabel had always thought that it was a tragedy that the Victorians had abandoned
this ratio and favoured high ceilings. The result had been rooms that were rather
like cubes; rooms that we could not feel fully comfortable in because we were intuitively
predisposed to relate warmly to
phi
(1.61 etc.). She imagined, for a moment, going into a room one liked and exclaiming,
“
Phi!
” People might say, “Don’t you mean
phew
?” and one would reply, “No,
phi
!” She smiled at the thought.

Alex was staring at her. “What’s the joke?”

Isabel shook her head. “Just a ridiculous notion about the golden section.” She could
not retell it, but said instead, “I do love these Georgian rooms.”

Alex looked about her, as if noticing the decor for the first time.

“The curtains came from my father’s house,” she said. “He sent us off to university
with curtains. I thought it rather odd at the time. Most of the other students arrived
with stereos and laptops and so on. My brother and I arrived with curtains.”

Isabel laughed. “Well, I went off for my first year at Cambridge with one of those
machines that makes tea for you while you’re still lying in bed. I remember that people
laughed at me, but they saw the point in due course and one or two of them actually
asked me where I had got it.”

Her eyes wandered from the curtains to the mantelpiece, which was of old pine, with
an elaborate moulded frieze along its length. This frieze was dominated by the figure
of a woman leaning on an upright anchor; around her feet, and off to each side, were
shells stacked in profusion, with crabs and twists of rope. A pair of delicately painted
Chinese ginger jars,
famille rose
, stood on the mantelshelf, and on the wall above was a large painting in an elaborate
gilded frame.

Isabel drew in her breath. “That’s not another Poussin, is it?”

“Yes,” said Alex, and then, almost immediately, and smiling in response to Isabel’s
look of astonishment, she qualified her answer. “And no. Gaspard Poussin, or Gaspard
Dughet to give him his original name. He was Poussin’s brother-in-law—and his pupil.
He changed his name to Poussin after he married Poussin’s sister.”

Isabel got up from the sofa and examined the painting more closely.

Alex joined her. Isabel noticed that she had been eating garlic.

“It’s a beautiful painting,” Isabel said.

“I’m glad you like it,” said Alex. “He painted just like his master when it came to
the overall composition. You see that hill village there? Very typical of Poussin.
And that lake in the foreground—again, you see a lot of that in Poussin—Nicolas Poussin,
that is. And those trees: those aren’t bad at all—they could be the real thing, I
suppose. Except this painting is not immensely valuable. It was in the house, upstairs;
my father gave it to me as a housewarming present when I bought this place.”

Isabel leaned forward to peer more closely at a figure that the artist had placed
under a tree. “A shepherd?”

“Probably. Dughet liked shepherds. But I suppose if you looked at any stretch of countryside
in the seventeenth century, it would have been well peopled by shepherds. Not today,
of course.”

“And beside the lake? Over there?”

“That’s somebody sleeping. I don’t think there’s anything untoward going on. If that
were Nicolas, then he might have had that figure constricted by a snake. He was fascinated
by snakes. You know that—”

“Painting in the National Gallery in London?
Man Killed by a Snake
. Yes. Your father talked to me about it.”

“Did he? Well, he taught me all about it when I was ten. He took me all the way to
London to visit the National Gallery and stand in front of the Poussins. And the Rembrandts.
I remember
wanting to go outside and feed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, but I couldn’t do
that for hours because we had a whole list of paintings to see.”

Isabel laughed. “It could have put you off for life.”

“Yes, but it didn’t. I think it had the opposite effect, actually. It made me love
art. I just love it.”

Duncan had not told Isabel what his daughter did, and Isabel had not found out. Alex
was seeing her on a weekday at four in the afternoon—this suggested that she did not
have to observe regular office hours. She said that she had bought the flat, and so
she must have had some money, presumably money from somewhere in the family. But what
about the other person who lived here? She recalled the other name on the brass plate:
A husband? A live-in boyfriend? Did she support him, or did he support her? She glanced
at Alex’s left hand; there was a small diamond ring on the fourth finger that caught
the light, now, as Isabel looked—a tiny spark of white fire.

Alex had noticed the direction of Isabel’s gaze and interpreted it accurately, but
if she resented the curiosity, she did not show it. “I live with my fiancé,” she said.
“He’s called Iain. Iain Douglas. He’s a doctor—an orthopaedic surgeon.”

Isabel looked away, feeling embarrassed at having been caught in the act of curiosity.
But of course people thought about these things—we summed up others all the time;
it was getting caught at it that was difficult. She remembered once having been in
a queue for tickets at the Festival Theatre, and she had seen a fashionably dressed
woman standing nearby looking at her cardigan with what seemed to be unambiguous pity.
Their eyes had met, and the other woman had looked away guiltily, pretending to interest
herself in a poster for a forthcoming performance of
Macbeth
in Turkish. Isabel had wanted to
go up to her and say, “Yes, I know, it’s a bit shabby, but honestly, don’t worry,
I’ve got better clothes at home.” She felt that they might then have coffee together,
drawn to one another by this sudden moment of fellow feeling and sympathy. And she
might have said to the woman that she should not worry about how she—or others—dressed,
and that there was liberation on offer for those who were trapped by fashion. But
that would be going too far, and could be hurtful, even if it were true. While the
full truth should sometimes be told, it should not
always
be told.

She returned to the sofa while Alex, saying that she was going to fetch the tea, left
the room. On her own, Isabel could not help but look at the spines of the books on
the bookshelf that took up half a wall. The lower shelves were filled with books too
large to be housed further up: most of them, she noticed, on art. There was a large
book on Vermeer and a three-volume set on Vuillard.
Netherlandish Art 1660 to 1700: From van Eyck to Dürer
. Her gaze moved upwards.
The Making of Classical Edinburgh. The Island of Jura. Cabinetmaking for Pleasure
and Profit …

Alex had re-entered the room, carrying a tray on which there was a teapot, a small
jug and two cups.

“Most of those are mine,” she said. “Iain has very little time for reading these days.”

Isabel blushed. It was the second exposure of her curiosity. But again she thought:
One’s
entitled
to look at the books on a person’s shelves. That’s what bookshelves are for: display.

“Did you study art?” she asked, as Alex put the tray down on a table behind the sofa.

“Yes. History of Art at St. Andrews.”

“And do anything with it?”

Alex gave her a look that struck Isabel as being slightly
defensive. “What can you do with a degree like that? Become a curator, I suppose,
if you’re lucky enough to get one of the tiny handful of jobs going. Work in a commercial
gallery carrying paintings up and down stairs?”

Isabel knew what she meant. It was the same with a degree in philosophy. A tiny number
of those who studied philosophy managed to earn their living teaching or writing about
the subject, or even thinking about it; the rest had to turn to something else. She
had been extremely lucky in that respect, and, even then, that she was still running
the
Review of Applied Ethics
was entirely owing to the fact that she had been in a position to buy it. Had she
not been able to do that, the
Review
would be in the hands of Professor Lettuce by now, ably assisted by his partner-in-crime,
Professor Christopher Dove.

It was pure privilege that determined where so many of us ended up in life, Isabel
reflected; it was nothing to do with merit, it was privilege. Or, putting it another
way, it was a matter of accident, or luck. To be born in circumstances where one had
enough to eat was the first resounding piece of luck, and good luck could be piled
upon you from that point onwards. To be given a good education, not to be struck down
by debilitating illness, not to have, like Heather Darnt, a disfiguring birthmark
that must, with all the courage in the world, make one’s teenage years an agony of
embarrassment and exclusion—all of that was pure luck and nothing to do with desert.
That was so, unless one believed in karma or some other notion of the acquisition
of merit in a previous life. There were plenty of people who believed that—millions
upon millions of adherents of Hinduism did—and it was not luck in their eyes. In such
a view, Professor Lettuce had something to worry about; he may have got sufficiently
far in the cycle of reincarnation as to be a
professor of philosophy, but he was certainly going no further in the next life. He
would be descending rather than ascending, Isabel thought, and was surely in danger
of coming back as a toad or some other lowly creature. Or perhaps bad professors came
back as research assistants, stuck on the lowest rung of the academic ladder and obliged
to endure the humiliations of that uncertain and unrewarding position. Or as a lettuce,
if it was possible to come back as a vegetable …

Alex was looking at her.

“I’m sorry,” said Isabel. “I have a tendency to drift off a bit.”

“I asked you what you thought of that woman.”

“Which woman?”

“The lawyer.”

Isabel did not hesitate. “I’m afraid I didn’t like her. I think she’s in league with
the thieves.”

She was aware of the fact that she should not have said that; it was a direct imputation
of criminality, and she had no evidence to substantiate the allegation.

Alex laughed. “Oh, come now! She’s a lawyer. Lawyers represent people—even thieves—but
that doesn’t mean they’re in league with them.”

Isabel looked sheepish. “Yes, you’re right. I shouldn’t have said that.”

Alex had now poured Isabel a cup of tea and was handing it to her. Isabel noticed
that there were no cucumber sandwiches on the tray. She felt a momentary disappointment;
sandwiches had definitely been mentioned on the telephone. Indeed, there had been
an undertaking to serve cucumber sandwiches and, once again,
pacta sunt servanda …
She was never sure about the positioning of the
sunt
: she was inclined to put it at the end, as in
Carthago delenda est!
, which Cato was said to have
proclaimed; but it was also possible to leave the
sunt
out altogether and say, more succinctly and equally gerundively,
pacta servanda
. Could one say, she wondered,
cucumis ministranda est
—cucumber must be served?

Alex sat down. “So what’s going to happen?” she asked.

“I gather that the insurance company has offered a reward. That’s what usually happens.”

Alex nodded. “I heard that.” She paused. “And that’ll be paid to the lawyer?”

“Yes. And she will pass it on once the painting has been recovered.”

“So she acts as the holder, so to speak?”

Isabel said that she would. “I suppose they just have to trust her not to disappear
with the money. Lawyers tend not to disappear.”

Alex raised an eyebrow. “There must be crooked lawyers. Every profession has its rotten
apples.” She took a sip of her tea. Her eyes were on Isabel, who felt that she had
to say something; the silence that had descended was slightly uncomfortable.

“With your interest in art,” Isabel began, “you must have been particularly upset
by all this.”

“Absolutely,” said Alex. “I was. I loved that painting, you know. I adored it. So
the really important thing is to get it back.”

“Especially since it’s going to go to the nation eventually,” said Isabel. “That makes
it even more important.”