The Careful Use of Compliments (15 page)

Jamie shuddered. “No, thank you.”

The barman smiled grimly. “Good. If you were, I was going to suggest that you settle your bill before you tried diving on the Corryvreckan.”

“What happened to McInnes?” Isabel asked.

“He used to stay up near Inverlussa,” said the barman. “He had an arrangement with somebody up there and they let him a couple of rooms whenever he came to the island. He painted Jura a lot, you know. I hear he was quite famous in places like Edinburgh and London.”

Isabel wondered if the barman knew what a McInnes would fetch today. “He's popular,” she said. “Very.”

“Well, he wasn't doing too well that last time he came up,” said the barman. “He'd had wife trouble and he was pretty low about that. But he also told me that his paintings had been slated in the papers. Torn to shreds, he said. He was very cut up.”

“The London critics,” said Isabel. “They went for him.”

The barman shook his head. “Poor Andy. Well, they did him in all right. I think he knew fine well what he was doing when he took that boat of his round the corner to the Corryvreckan. He knew. Everybody round here knows, even the bairns. You go and ask one of those wee bairns outside the shop about the Corryvreckan and how you need to keep well away. It's the first thing anybody tells you about the water round here.”

For a while Isabel said nothing. Then, “Suicide?”

“Nobody likes to reach that conclusion,” said the barman. “But sometimes what else are you to think?”

Jamie took a sip of his whisky. The conversation had depressed him. McInnes was dead. Why go on about it? “This is a lovely light whisky. But they make a peated one too, don't they?” he suddenly asked the barman.

The barman glanced over the road at the distillery building. “Yes,” he said. “In fact, Jimmy over there tells me that they're about to put one in the cask right now. So come back in eight years and you can try it.”

Isabel was not paying any attention to this discussion of whisky. She was thinking about what the barman had told her and wondering whether McInnes had had life insurance. If he had, then the money would have gone to his wife. Sometimes people change the beneficiary of their life insurance as soon as they leave their spouse; sometimes they forget to do this. A lot of men live to regret not making the change, she thought; or rather, they die not to regret it.

But why, she went on to ask herself, why choose to commit suicide in a
whirlpool
?

 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

L
IZZIE HAD PURLOINED
one of the estate Land Rovers for the trip to Barnhill. It was normally used for taking deer stalkers up the hill and was equipped with gun and telescope racks. A particularly fine wicker hamper, used for lunches for the sporting clients, was fixed to the floor of the vehicle with leather straps.

With Lizzie at the wheel they made their way along the winding estate road that led to Barnhill. Now there was nothing; no houses, no telephone wires, and the road became little more than a track. Here and there, rain had created deep potholes in the surface, and Isabel put her hand protectively over Charlie's head as the Land Rover bucked and lurched. They made slow progress, but eventually they saw in the distance a whitewashed stone farmhouse, with a wooden porch protruding from the front and low slate-roofed sheds on either side. To one side of the house, across a rough field, a thicket of trees stood, and beyond that a hillside of half-exposed granite outcrops. From the angle of the trees and the shape of the gorse bushes, it was evidently a windy place. A battered green Land Rover was parked in front of the house, its tailgate down. A black Labrador was sitting beside the vehicle and it got to its feet and raised its head to bark when it spotted them approaching.

“There's no electricity here,” said Lizzie. “No phones. Nothing. They cook on gas and heat the water with one of those coal-fired ranges. And it's really about as isolated as you can get. You could be here for ages and nobody would know. Lovely, isn't it?”

She drew the Land Rover to a halt and they climbed out. Jamie stood still and breathed in deeply; the scent of gorse, like coconut, the sea not far away, salt and iodine.

“Yes,” said Isabel, standing beside him. “The air.”

She looked at the hills and at the sea a few hundred yards away. Apart from the farmhouse, there was nothing to be seen of the works of man.

A figure appeared from the house and waved. They walked up the gently sloping grass field to meet the young man whom Lizzie introduced as her cousin Rob. There was a modesty about him which Isabel found immediately attractive, and she could see that Jamie warmed to him too. He was about the same age as, or very slightly younger than, Jamie.

They went inside, into a simple, functional kitchen of the sort which was to be found everywhere in rural Scotland—a room for eating in, sitting about in, doing farming business in—the heart of the house. Rob made them a cup of coffee, boiling the water on the hissing gas ring. He and Jamie established immediately and easily, as happens in Scotland, the mutual friends, the points of contact, while Isabel and Lizzie entertained Charlie, who had discovered a button on his romper suit and was fascinated by the discovery. Then, when they had finished, Rob offered to show them round the house.

“I'll show you the room where he wrote
1984,
” he said. “There's not much to see, I'm afraid. And you can see the bath, if you like.”

“The bath that Orwell bathed in,” Jamie murmured.

“He led a pretty simple life,” said Isabel. “A good man, leading a simple life.”

“Orwell believed very strongly in social justice, didn't he?” said Rob.

“Everybody does,” said Isabel. “These days, at least. Do you know anybody who would say,
I don't think much of social justice
? I don't.”

“It depends on how you interpret social justice,” said Jamie, peering at a print on the wall. “One person's social justice is another person's social injustice.” He tapped the glass that framed the print and Charlie's eyes followed the noise. “He's going to love art.”

They moved through the house. “Orwell's bedroom,” said Rob, simply, and they looked in on the small room, with its plain bed, like the room of an everyday bed-and-breakfast. “He did most of his writing in there. And in a tent outside. He had TB and the fresh air was thought to be better for him.”

They peered into the small room above the kitchen, with its typewriter set neatly on the table and, beyond the clear glass of the window, the day, now sparkling under a sky that again had miraculously cleared. It is so green, thought Isabel; the soft grass, the bracken, the dark viridian of the trees.

She gazed out of the window of the little room while the others moved back into the corridor. She thought about the seeing of what others had seen; this was the view that Orwell had while he wrote that dark novel, with its all-seeing eye, Big Brother, providing the very contrast to the privacy and peace of this place. That was the explanation; the constricting prison of Winston Smith's world in the novel was so much more of a nightmare when one saw, there, in that place, what had been lost.

She remembered being in Freud's house in Vienna and looking out of the window in his consulting room, seeing the small mirror hanging on the shutter, the only item remaining in that stripped-bare room, and thinking he had looked at that, the great doctor himself; he had looked out onto that particular stretch of sky, that courtyard. And then she remembered seeing James VI's cradle in the bedroom at Traquair, and the thoughts that it triggered; and the bed at Falkland Palace in which James V had died, turning his face to the wall, bemoaning what he saw as the imminent end of a Scottish dynasty—
It began with a lass and it will end with a lass,
the king was reported to have said. Such beds seemed remarkable when we saw them today, although typically what we more often thought was
How small they are,
as if great and important things could happen only in large, imposing beds. Winston Churchill's bed, the bed from which he dictated letters to generals and prime ministers; that had been a small bed. And finally, as she tore herself away from the view, and the room, the thought crossed her mind that a bed was really a very strange thing—a human nest, really, where our human fragility made its nightly demands for comfort and cosseting.

The others had descended the stairs to return to the kitchen. Isabel lingered by a window in the corridor, with another view, similar to that from the small bedroom. She turned away and it was then that she saw it. For a moment she stood quite still, her breath caught. There could be no mistaking it.

She leaned forward and looked at the picture. It was an oil, a rough one, eight inches by ten, perhaps slightly smaller, but even at this reduced scale, there was no mistaking the study for the painting that she had been shown by Guy Peploe. This was Jura, through the eyes of Andrew McInnes.

 

DOWNSTAIRS
, the party had made its way back into the kitchen. When Isabel came in, Rob looked up from the chart that he was showing Jamie, a naval chart, it appeared, with depths, reefs, rocks. They were looking at the Gulf of Corryvreckan.

“I don't like to pry,” said Isabel, not looking at Jamie as she said this, “but that picture up there in the corridor, the little oil painting in the grey frame: Do you know who it's by?” She answered her own question. “Andrew McInnes, who often painted on Jura. It's a McInnes oil.”

At first Rob looked puzzled, as if trying to work out which painting it was that Isabel was talking about. Then he shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don't think so. That's by a man who stayed here. We let this place out, you see. People come up for a week or two. That man was a painter, I think, and when he went he left a rubbish bag full of sketches and stuff that he didn't want. I found that little painting tucked away in it.”

Jamie looked at Isabel. “Here,” he said, handing Charlie over to Lizzie. Then he turned to Isabel in astonishment. “Isabel?”

She returned his gaze. “You see,” she muttered. “A fake.”

Rob was puzzled. “That painting?”

Isabel lowered herself onto one of the kitchen chairs. She was thinking. It all made sense now: the forger, whoever he was, had come up to Jura to do some McInnes paintings. He had found the most remote spot available, a place where he would never be disturbed, and he had produced the new, posthumous McInnes paintings. Her intuitions had been right.

“Who was this man?” asked Isabel.

“I didn't meet him,” said Rob. He turned to Lizzie. “Did you, Lizzie? Were you around when he was here?”

“When was it?” she asked. “I don't remember a painter anyway.”

Rob crossed the room to fetch a small brown file. He flicked through some papers and eventually found one which he took out. It was the list of lettings.

“Last September,” he said. “Quite a late let. A Mr. Anderson. Frank Anderson.”

“Where was he from?” asked Isabel.

Rob looked through the papers again. “No idea,” he said. “We would have known at the time, but we weed out the old letters. We don't keep them.”

“A pity,” muttered Isabel. She thought of her conversation with Christopher Dove: it was exactly what she had done with the old correspondence of the
Review of Applied Ethics.
She was one to talk.

“Oh well,” said Jamie.

“Why are you interested?” asked Rob.

“Because I think that this Frank Anderson, whoever he is, has been responsible for some, well, what shall we call them, some fine
posthumous
works by McInnes.”

Rob looked interested. “Done here? Well…”

“Did you meet McInnes?” asked Isabel.

“No,” said Rob. “I didn't. But I do know who he is. And I do know that he's considered a great painter.”

“That often happens after somebody's dead and buried,” said Isabel.

“He shouldn't have gone out,” said Lizzie suddenly. “People who don't know these waters should be more careful.”

Isabel thought: What whirlpools take—they don't give back. Where had she heard that? That was the trouble; there was so much in her mind: philosophy, poetry, odd facts; and they kept surfacing, these odd remembered lines, like corks unexpectedly popping up out of the water.

How would it be to be lost at sea, to sink down into those green depths and deeper, into the dark? Was there a moment of calm when the lungs had filled with water and there was just a heaviness, a moment of clarity, or remembrance, as people said there was, or even that progress towards a light, a gentleness, that was sworn to by those who had near-death experiences? If they were to be believed—those people who had clinically died and then been brought back—the experience was one of great calm, of resolution. And many of them spoke of some form of reunion, a feeling of being in the presence of those they had known, and of being forgiven and made to understand, but gently; not scolded. Nobody was scolded.

 

THEY DID NOT DISCUSS
the matter as they travelled back with Lizzie in the Land Rover, but once they had set off from Ardlussa in the green Swedish car, they talked about little else.

“I hope that you're going to have the good grace to admit that I was right,” Isabel said to Jamie as they drove over the Ardlussa bridge and set off on the narrow public road that would take them back to Craighouse.

“Of course. Of course I will.” He paused. “But I don't know what we can do next—if anything.”

“What do you mean,
if anything
?” asked Isabel. “We can hardly keep this to ourselves. And why should this man, this Frank Anderson, get away with it?”

Jamie sighed. Isabel was incorrigible; she could not resist setting things right,
solving
things. It was almost as if she felt that life was a chess game in which the end game had to be played out. “We're not the police,” he said simply. “We're private citizens. We can report it, of course, to those concerned. So you can tell Guy Peploe that you think that that painting may not be all it looks to be; that's fine. And you do have some evidence, after all. You can tell him about the painting you saw today.”

“But what will Guy be able to do?” objected Isabel. “He'll be able to raise it with the person whose painting it is. He'll hand it back, I suppose. And he'll probably ask questions, but he won't be able to do much more than that.”

“So you're going to try to find this man?”

For a few moments she was silent. She had been wondering how she would proceed, and had not had any ideas. And yet she knew that she had to do something; her inaction in the face of wrongdoing was hardly an option, provided, of course, that wrongdoing had entered the circle of one's moral recognition, and this, she thought, had done just that.

“Frank Anderson must be a talented painter,” she said at last. “You can't do fakes unless you really know what you're doing. Look at that Dutchman, the one who did the Vermeers, what was he called—van Meegeren. He was a real expert. He knew everything there was to know about painting techniques. The pigments, the canvas, the way old paint cracks. Everything. You can't get the exact effect unless you're really good.”