The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (9) (28 page)

Isabel read and reread the reports. She found herself inclined to ignore Lettuce simply
because he was Lettuce, and she disliked him intensely, and with good reason. Allowing
her mind to wander, she thought of Lettuce as a small lettuce being transplanted from
a bed of lettuces into a bed of cabbages, and not flourishing at all because the cabbages
had thicker leaves and were more vigorous in their growth. She smiled. It was such
a childish thought, but so vivid, and so satisfying, and surely one could allow oneself
the occasional reverie, the occasional dream of revenge.

She reread the paper itself, and after doing so went to make herself a cup of coffee
in the kitchen. She returned with the cup and held the paper lightly in her hand,
as if weighing it. Its tone was assertive and there was an air of grievance in it.
That had clearly registered badly with the reviewers, but her job as editor was to
be dispassionate and also to ensure that the pages of the journal were open to unpopular
views. And if there was an air of grievance, it might be that grievance was understandable:
injustices had really occurred, even if an effort was now being made to make up for
them. Victimhood, however, should not last for ever; the Highland Clearances had been
a great wrong to Scotland and to Gaelic culture, but she was not sure that the Scots
should continue to regard themselves as victims, even if there were people whose purposes
it suited.

She looked at the author’s biographical details. He was affiliated to the University
of Manitoba and was a graduate of the University of Toronto. There was no further
clue to where he came from. He sounded as if he was writing from the perspective of
a Canadian aboriginal, or a member of a First Nations group—the terminology, Isabel
knew, was sensitive and she was never sure exactly what was considered appropriate
and what was not. But he did not
say
he was a member of such a group. And, anyway, did it make a difference to his argument?

She imagined what the author would say if she rejected the paper. “There! Proves it!
Bias. Prejudice. Silencing of the challenging view.” No, she would not allow herself
to think of that, because it was irrelevant to her decision, or should be. The real
test was whether this was a defensible, well-expressed view—and
it was both of those. And she was certainly not reaching that decision because she
wanted to overrule Professor Lettuce. That would be very satisfactory, but it was
a pleasure that should have no bearing on her editorial decision. What the paper presented
was uncomfortable, perhaps, and the author’s conclusions might seem harsh and unsympathetic,
but it was representative of a viewpoint that had found considerable support in Canadian
officialdom and could hardly be dismissed on the basis that it caused discomfort.
In
, she thought.
Publish
. Lettuce will be
green
with anger, but that is not why I’m doing it, she hurriedly told herself: the pleasure
of flouting Lettuce’s opinion was a collateral benefit, nothing more. No, she reminded
herself; I must not think that. I must rise above
Schadenfreude
and such pettiness. I must do the right thing because it is the right thing, and
for that reason alone. She got to her feet. The window of her study was half open,
and she could pick up the scent of summer—the smell of vegetation, of humidity in
the air, of a world of humming insects and mulch, of life.

She gazed out of the window. It was close to midday and was not a time when Brother
Fox usually showed himself. Foxes liked the watches of the night, or the early hours
of a summer morning when the human world was silent. But now he was there, poised
halfway between a tunnel of old lavender bushes and the sheltering panoply of a late-flowering
rhododendron. The rhododendron provided his heartland, the vulpine headquarters from
which he planned his raids. Now he was briefly out in the open and seemed, for a few
moments, to be enjoying the sun on his back. He lifted his head and sniffed, and then,
quite suddenly, dropped to the ground and rolled over on to his back. Isabel gasped,
thinking she had witnessed a death, but it was not that—it was a roll, a brief, hedonistic
revelling in the
sheer joy of being in the sun, of being warm and of being alive. Within a few seconds
he was back on his feet and had resumed his journey; the dappling shadows had him
now; he was gone. She felt disappointed. She wanted him to stay; she wanted him to
engage with her. But she knew that he would not. She was nothing to him, even if he
understood, as she hoped he did, that she was not an adversary. We are often nothing
to the things that fascinate us, or the things we love; she was well aware of that.
Charlie, though, did not know that; the world loved him, he believed, because he loved
it. Trains loved him, toy cars loved him, long-suffering stuffed toys loved him too,
just as he loved them. It was an example of perfect mutuality that would end soon
enough—when he discovered that the world did not centre upon him, that it was sometimes
cruel and that love given was not always reciprocated. When would that be? When he
was six? Eight? Or did that realisation come much later, in adult life, perhaps, when
the first big disappointments struck, when it first dawned upon us that we were not,
as we secretly believed in our youth, as deserving of love and success as we had previously
imagined? Charlie, dear Charlie, she whispered, may you be protected from that until
the last possible moment, and even then may it seem a small cloud on your horizon,
a tiny shadow on your landscape. May that be your fate, my darling, my darling boy.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
 

T
HE IDEA OCCURRED
to Isabel later that day, shortly after she had collected Charlie from nursery school.
It came as she was walking home—a short journey in her steps but an odyssey in Charlie’s—an
odyssey that was interrupted by stops to examine objects found or spotted: a piece
of paper lying in the gutter, a twig from one of the trees whose boughs overhung the
garden walls along the road, a feather from a seagull. The gulls, unwelcome guests
in the neighbourhood, occasionally conducted aerial battles, mewing and screeching
in outrage over some infringement of territory, some obscure gull slight. Charlie,
who for some reason could not manage the word
seagull
, called them
seagirls
, and Isabel now did too, in the way in which we take from our children their special
words, their mispronunciations, which strike us as such fitting, attractive neologisms.

“Seagirls cross,” said Charlie, looking skywards.

Isabel, however, did not hear this comment, as the idea had dawned on her and it seemed
to her that this was the obvious thing to do. It was an unlikely thing to do, of course,
and it might not survive close examination, but she could try it.

Why not?

“The seagirls …,” Charlie repeated, looking at his mother for support.

“Yes,” said Isabel. “The seagirls.” But she did not expand. “Come on, Charlie. Let’s
hurry.”

He tugged at her hand. “The seagirls …”

She picked him up. “Let’s just go home, Charlie. The seagirls will be all right. I
don’t think they need us.” She paused. “Chocolate pudding.”

It never failed: the ultimate, fool-proof bribe. Even so, Charlie sought confirmation.
“Chocolate pudding?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “When we get back.”

He was silent for the rest of the journey, thinking, perhaps, of the treat that lay
ahead. And when Isabel arrived back at the house, she found that Grace was only too
happy to take Charlie into the kitchen and prepare the treat for him. Grace indulged
Charlie, and would have willingly provided chocolate pudding in vast quantities, had
Isabel permitted it.

She went into her study and took three pieces of writing paper from the stationery
drawer. Sitting down at her desk, she pushed aside the small pile of papers on which
she had been working that morning—the papers on the ethics of adoption—and began the
first of the letters. The wording, she had decided, would be identical: the only difference
being the name in the salutation. She wrote first to Duncan:
Dear Duncan, I have found out what has happened. Obviously, I need to talk to you
privately about this, as the last thing, I imagine, that you would want would be for
it to become a public matter, with all that it would entail for the family. I assure
you I shall be discreet. With kind regards, Isabel Dalhousie
.

She looked at the handwritten letter and reached for another sheet of notepaper.
Kind regards
was wrong. Not only
did it sound slightly contrived, but she was not sure that regards could be kind:
they could be warm regards, they could be best regards, but kindness, surely, was
something that would be in the heart of the person sending the regards and it would
be unduly self-congratulatory to impute kindness to oneself. Perhaps it would be better
to write
With all best wishes
, but then she thought: Does this letter really come with all best wishes? It did
not.
Yours aye
was an appropriately Scottish ending to a letter, but it meant
Yours ever
, and it implied long and loyal sentiments. These were not there.
Yours
was best, then—the simple contraction of
Yours sincerely
or, indeed, of
Yours faithfully
or
Yours truly
. What had she been taught at school? Isabel remembered those lessons in that stuffy
classroom where Miss … what was her name? … McLaren or Maclaurin had taught them the
etiquette of correspondence. “Don’t forget, girls,” she had said, “you will be judged
by your competence to write a letter. So remember the rules. Never, ever write
Yours sincerely
in a formal or business letter. We are not sincere in such letters, girls; we are,
by contrast, faithful.” At which Amanda … what
was
her name, the first girl in the class to report on experience with a boy? (
experience
being the term used darkly by the teachers to warn of the consequences of such things)—she,
that Amanda, had sniggered and whispered, “Speak for yourself!” Amanda … Amanda …
Isabel looked up at the ceiling. Amanda Weir—that was her name. She was two divorces
down the line now, Isabel had heard, both because she had gone off with somebody else,
and that was presumably because faithfulness had meant so little to her. Amanda Weir
had grown into unhappiness because she did not realise that happiness came from sticking
at things—things that often seemed mundane, prosaic, boring, unglamorous.

Isabel rewrote the letter in exactly the same terms as her first attempt, inserting
only the deliberately perfunctory
Yours, Isabel
. She reread the letter, and then wrote an identical one addressed to Alex and one
to Patrick. Next, she addressed the envelopes, wrote
Strictly Personal
on the top left-hand corner of each, and went into the kitchen to inform Grace that
she was going out briefly to the postbox. A scene of chocolate chaos greeted her:
chocolate smeared around Charlie’s mouth, chocolate on his hands and across the front
of his shirt. Grace smiled guiltily. “I tried,” she said. “I’ll put him in the bath
afterwards.”

Isabel returned the smile. “Such happiness,” she muttered.

AFTER SHE HAD POSTED
the letters in the small postbox on the corner, Isabel stood for a moment and considered
what she had done. She often did this after consigning something important to the
post; she stood and reflected. Posting something was a simple act, but it could be
the first of a sequence of important events that changed one’s world, or somebody
else’s. The letter of application for a job that might take one far from home; that
might result in one’s meeting the person with whom one would spend one’s life … A
letter could change so much, could create just as much as it might destroy.

Isabel imagined what the effect might be of the letters she had just put through the
mouth of the postbox. What if she changed her mind? Could one ever recall a letter
after posting it? It would surely be impossible. Letters lay in the postbox until
the next collection—which she noticed was barely an hour away—and then they were removed
by the postman when he passed by in his van. One might stand by the postbox and ask
him for the letter back, but surely he could never accede to
such a request. How would he know that the letter was yours? And once a letter was
handed over to the postal authorities they were, she presumed, the legal custodian
of that letter until it was handed over to the intended recipient. But they did not
own
it, she thought, because the letter and its contents remained your property until
it was given to the person named on the envelope. So surely you could ask for the
return of your own property? No, she decided, you could not; it was not that simple.

For a few moments Isabel wondered whether she had made a bad mistake. She had claimed
that she had found out what happened, but it was simply not true, and if she were
to be asked to expand on it, she would have nothing to say. But that was the whole
point, she decided: she hoped that
two
of the three would ask her what had happened, while the third would not. And the
reason for that was that the third would know and would not need to enquire. Unless,
of course, all three asked, which would suggest that all were innocent. Yet the guilty
could affect ignorance; there was that to consider, and sometimes the guilty were
adept at it—more adept than the innocent might be in the assertion of their innocence.