The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (9) (12 page)

There was a knocking sound from outside. The customer
who had been browsing was now standing at the counter knocking peremptorily on the
glass, demanding service.

“I’m tempted to make her wait,” said Isabel under her breath. “Impatient woman.”

Eddie gave a wry smile. “She’s a real cow, that woman. She comes in quite regularly.
She thinks she owns the place.”

Isabel touched him lightly on the shoulder. “Everything fine now?”

He nodded.

WHEN ISABEL RETURNED HOME
that evening, exhausted by what had turned into a busy early evening in the delicatessen,
Jamie had already bathed Charlie and dressed him in his pyjamas. The small boy, beaming
with pleasure at the return of his mother, launched himself into Isabel’s arms, burying
his face in her hair.

“Clever Mummy,” he said.

She looked at him with delight. “How very kind, Charlie. But I’m not all that clever,
darling. Just average.”

Jamie smiled. “Yes, you are. Not average, I mean. Yes, you’re clever.”

Isabel ruffled Charlie’s hair. “
You’re
the clever one, I think. You’re the one who can tell me what two and three make.”

“Five,” said Charlie immediately.

Isabel looked at Jamie, who made an “I told you so” gesture.

“That’s absolutely right,” she said. “Two and three do indeed make five.”

“Olive,” said Charlie. That had been his first word, and he still referred to it frequently.

“Olive?”

“More olives,” said Charlie. “More olives now.”

Isabel looked at Jamie. “Have you been giving him olives?” she asked. She had been
trying to cut down on the number of olives Charlie ate because there was too much
salt in the brine in which they were stored. She did not think that too much salt
would do him any good.

Jamie shook his head. “No,” he said. “Grace …”

“Grace!” shouted Charlie. “Grace got olives.”

Isabel sighed. It would be another thing they would have to discuss with Grace: olives
and mathematics—both, in their way, problematic.

Jamie looked at his watch. He had a rehearsal that evening and would have to leave
shortly if he were to be on time.

“Oh,” he said, “that man you were talking about—Duncan Munrowe—called this afternoon.
He said could you phone him back this evening. He asked me not to forget to pass on
the message. He asked me twice. I got the message … about the message.”

He handed her a slip of paper on which a telephone number had been pencilled.

“Did he say anything else?” asked Isabel.

Jamie thought for a moment. “He said something about there having been a development.”
He looked at her almost reproachfully. “Yes, that’s what he said. He said there had
been a development.”

Isabel waited until Jamie had gone off to his rehearsal and she had settled Charlie
before she telephoned Duncan Munrowe. Charlie was clingy—he often was when she had
spent an entire day out of the house—and she allowed him a small extension on his
day, sitting on the edge of his bed, his tiny hand
now moving, now restful in hers, as she told him a story of her own making. She had
turned out the light, but in spite of the curtains the room was not completely dark.
At midsummer, in Scotland, the night is never truly dark, and Charlie’s bedtime came
well before sunset. Even later, approaching midnight, the sky only dims, fades into
something between the clarity of day and the opacity of night, a long-drawn-out crepuscule.

A week or two earlier she had started to tell Charlie a story that had immediately
thrilled him and that he had insisted on hearing again. It had become a serial, the
episodic life of a man made out of mud, who loved the rain but at the same time had
to avoid it—for obvious reasons. “He’d melt, you see,” she said. And Charlie had nodded
wisely; he knew that from sand-play at the nursery.

“Some of his friends had melted,” said Isabel. “And he missed them.”

She did not know why she had said that; it was the wrong note to introduce into a
bedtime story; an adult note of loss that would only sadden a child. And yet every
child had to confront the notion of loss at some time, and perhaps this moment came
earlier than we liked to imagine.

“He could make his friends again,” she added. “He could find some mud and make his
friends again.”

“No,” said Charlie. “Friends all gone.”

But now the man made out of mud was happy, as he had discovered a pond where mud ducks
lived and he was throwing bread made out of mud to these mud ducks. Not a sophisticated
story line, thought Isabel, but Charlie was rapt; this was social realism to him because
he knew a real pond where there were real ducks to which he threw bread with his father.

The story over, and Charlie on the verge of sleep, Isabel
leaned forward and planted a kiss on his brow. She felt a wisp of his hair against
her lips; it was so fine, and smelled of soap and the fresh linen of his pillow, and
something else that she could only label love, or happiness, or something like that.
Then she crept out of the room and made her way into her study where she had placed
Jamie’s note on her desk.

She dialled the number. It took a long time for the telephone to be answered, but
Isabel was prepared for this; people who lived in the country often seemed to take
much longer to answer than those in towns. Their houses were bigger. She had never
seen Munrowe House but she could imagine that it had lengthy corridors and inconveniently
placed telephones. She imagined a bell ringing in one of those corridors, and Duncan
looking up from what he was doing and trudging off to answer it.

“Munrowe House,” he announced politely.

It sounded quite appropriate to Isabel, but she could not help but wonder: At what
point should one give the name of one’s house on the telephone? It would sound ridiculous
to answer 36 Oak Avenue, or Flat 28, or something of that sort.

“Munrowe House,” Duncan repeated.

She thought:
The house speaks
, and smiled. “It’s Isabel Dalhousie.”

He thanked her for calling back. “I didn’t want to burden your …”

“Husband. It was my husband.”

“Yes, I didn’t want to burden your husband with the details, but the other side has
been in touch again.”

She found the expression rather strange. “The other side” was how lawyers spoke in
litigation. Or spies, she imagined. But the thieves really were the other side, she
thought. Criminals of any sort put themselves on the other side from the rest of
us who were not criminals, or were only occasionally criminal. Isabel had received
a parking ticket recently and had reflected on the fact that she was required to pay
a fine. Did that make her a criminal, even if only briefly and in a very attenuated
way? Surely not. Yet it was still an offence that she had committed—the wording of
the penalty notice made that quite clear.

“What did they say?” she asked.

“They want a meeting. They’ve given me a time.”

“I see.”

She could hear Duncan’s breathing at the other end of the line. She could sense his
anxiety.

“Have you spoken to the insurance people?”

He said that he had. “They wanted to come but I told them that the other side said
that they wanted to see only me.” He paused. “And I’m going to interpret that as meaning
you and me. They’ll just have to accept that.”

She wanted to repeat what she had said before—that she did not see what she could
possibly bring to such a meeting, but she had agreed to be there and she would not
renege on it.

“They haven’t given me much warning,” Duncan went on. “They want to meet tomorrow.
Do you think you could possibly make it?”

Cat would be back and Isabel would not be needed at the delicatessen. But there were
those journal proofs, which even now stared reproachfully at her from their position
at the top of her in-tray. She sighed, and failed, through sheer tiredness, to mask
the sound.

“I know it’s no notice at all,” said Duncan apologetically. “It’s not my idea …”

Isabel reassured him. “No, don’t apologise. I’ll be all right. Where is the meeting
going to be?”

She was not prepared for his answer.

“Here. At the house.”

He detected her surprise. “I know,” he said. “It sounds very brazen, but I gather
this is not the thieves themselves we’ll be meeting, but a lawyer acting for them,
or for an intermediary.”

“Their lawyer!”

Duncan explained that the insurers had told him at the outset that anybody who did
get in touch would probably not be the original thief, or even the people in possession
of the painting. “They said that it could be lawyers,” he said. “And they were right.”

“Do lawyers write anonymous letters? You said the original letter was anonymous.”
She imagined an anonymous letter from a firm of lawyers. It would be signed
Anon
or
From a Friend
, as anonymous letters tended to be, but it would then say:
For and on behalf of Messrs …
and give the name of a firm.

“No, it’s not anonymous,” said Duncan. “It’s not from the person who wrote the original
letter. This one is on headed notepaper.”

“Let me get this straight,” Isabel said. “This is a lawyer acting for somebody who
isn’t the thief but who knows the thief? Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“So we’re two links away from the thief? There’s the thief, then there’s a second
person, and then there’s the lawyer, who’s acting on behalf of the second person.”

Duncan was patient. “Yes, that’s more or less it. The insurers said that this is the
way it often happens. The second person—the intermediary—goes to a lawyer and says,
‘I hear there’s a reward for the return of such a painting. Well, I know where it
is and will you arrange for me to get the reward if I tell you where
the painting is?’ That’s one of the ways it can happen. There are, of course, others.”

She asked about these other ways.

“If there’s no reward, the intermediary can just ask for money from the owner—which
means ultimately from the insurer, as the insurer may already have paid up. Or he
can go straight to the insurer and ask for money for the safe return of the painting.”

Isabel thought about this. “That sounds like paying ransom,” she said.

Duncan agreed. “And nobody likes to do that.”

“Well, we can talk further about it,” said Isabel. “Shall I come up a bit before the
meeting?”

“Yes. Could you make it before ten in the morning?”

She thought of her car. She had not used it for weeks and she hoped that it would
start. Jamie had been pressing her to get a new one, but she was attached to her green
Swedish car and was unwilling to replace it. Swedish cars were under threat and might
disappear—overtaken by a torrent of anodyne cars from somewhere on the other side
of the world, produced in great numbers in factories run and staffed by robots; those
strange, impersonal factories in which there appeared to be no people, just machines
with extended mechanical arms that moved according to some pre-programmed choreography.
She did not want that. She wanted a car with idiosyncratic lines; a car that looked
at home on winding Scottish roads, that could complement a backdrop of granite and
heather. As long as it started. That was important too.

She paused. Was there anything wrong in wanting to have things about you that were
made in places you knew, or liked? Was it a form of nationalism—a jingoistic position
that was
prepared to expect other people to import one’s goods but not to buy theirs? For a
long time—since the Industrial Revolution really—the West had expected the East to
buy the things we made, but now the tables had been turned and they were making things
more quickly and cheaply than we were. Was it unfair, then, to turn round and decline
their goods in favour of our own? Or could one prefer one’s own goods because they
were made by people for whom one had, by virtue of shared citizenship, some form of
responsibility?
Charity begins at home
. Was that a narrow, selfish adage or was it simply an inescapable, bedrock fact of
life in human society? Does the one in need on your doorstep have a greater claim
than the one in need in a distant country—if the level of need in each case is exactly
the same? It was an old, old problem—the sort of thing that students of philosophy
discussed over endless cups of coffee in their first year of study, little imagining
that they would still be pondering the very same question twenty years later. And
twenty years later, were the answers any clearer? Isabel thought they probably were
not. But then one thing you did learn with the passage of time was not to ask too
many questions. That was the difference, she decided, between being twenty and being
forty. That, and other things, of course.

CHAPTER EIGHT
 

T
HE CAR STARTED UNCOMPLAININGLY
, only protesting slightly as it moved the first few inches of the forty-mile journey
to Munrowe House. It was the brakes, Isabel realised: two weeks without movement in
the damp climate of Scotland meant that tiny filaments of rust would have built up
between the brake pads and brake drum, the beginning of a slow bonding that could
turn into a more permanent embrace if the car was unused for six months—or so her
mechanic, the obliging Mr. Cooper at the small garage on the canal, had told her.
“Cars are like people,” he had said. “We rust up if we don’t exercise; well, so do
they.” He had gone on to warn her of the consequences of fluids being left in an engine
that was idle for months on end; of how they would eventually eat away at the pipes
in which they were trapped, making irreparable holes in cooling systems, causing radiators
to fall from their mounts. All of that could happen so easily, he said, and he had
then fixed her with a baleful stare, as might a doctor who knew that his advice on
diet or exercise would go unheeded.