The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (9) (13 page)

Each time the car started after a spell of disuse, Isabel vowed to treat it better
in the future and to give it the weekly
ten-mile run that Mr. Cooper recommended; but knew that she would not, and that one
day his predictions would come true. For now, though, the Swedish car sounded contented
enough, and smelled just right too: that odd odour it had—a mixture of old leather,
rubber and machine; a mustiness that would be dispelled by the winding down of a window
and the resulting rush of morning air.

It was shortly after eight o’clock when she left the house, which meant that she would
have an hour for the journey and an hour to talk to Duncan before the arrival at ten
of the lawyer—the thief’s lawyer, as she thought of him. That took some getting used
to—the notion that those who flouted the law could use the law, even through an intermediary,
to pursue their objectives. But lawyers did precisely that; that was the whole reason
for their existence: they put forward a point of view even if that position was manifestly
unworthy or perverse. Lawyers stood up in criminal courts everywhere, every day, and
argued on behalf of defendants who had hurt others in all those ways in which others
can be hurt. She understood that well enough: everybody had this right and at least
some of those accused were innocent. Yet this was something different: here a lawyer
seemed to be assisting somebody to benefit from a crime rather than defending somebody
who had already committed the crime. It somehow
felt
different …

The traffic was light. Isabel drove out by way of Colinton, past the Victorian military
barracks at Redford, and then on to the road that skirted the city and the lower slopes
of the Pentland Hills. The sky was empty to the south, over the soft folds of the
Pentlands, but to the north there was a bank of cirro-cumulus, a mackerel sky, or
Schaefchenwolken
—“sheep cloud”—as she
remembered her father calling it. For some reason he had used German when talking
about clouds and sea conditions; an odd habit that she had accepted as just being
one of the things he did. “The weather,” he had once said to her, smiling, “is German.
I don’t know why; it just is. Sorry.”

And there were those
Schaefchenwolken
, high above Fife and stretching out over the North Sea. That meant a depression was
on the way, and rain might arrive in a few hours, even if for the moment the weather
was fine. Isabel sat back in her seat and relaxed her grip on the wheel, allowing
her mind to wander. There was a lot to think about: the conversation that she knew
she would have to have with Grace about mathematics; the anxieties that poor Eddie
had revealed the day before and that would require what was bound to be an emotionally
trying trip to the doctor. She reflected on this and decided that Eddie had no reason
to worry: they must have talked to him about it when whatever had happened happened.
And then it occurred to her that he might not have reported it. That was always possible;
people were too ashamed, they suffered in silence. And if that were the case, then
Eddie would have received no help, no support at all. Did Cat know? Was she aware
of what he might have been going through all these years?

And then there was Cat herself to worry about. There had been no word of a boyfriend
for some time now, which might be good news, or might just as likely be bad. If there
were no boyfriend, then it could be a sign that Cat was taking a romantic sabbatical—a
nice notion, that, thought Isabel. “I’m sorry, I can’t get emotionally involved with
you—I’m on sabbatical from that sort of thing.” It would be like a strict diet: no
chocolates, no lovers. And people might speak with the same enthusiasm
about the benefits: “Do you know, I’ve felt so much better, so much lighter, since
I gave up men. I have so much more energy, and my clothes seem to fit me again.”

On the other hand, Cat’s silence on this topic might mean that there was an unsuitable
man in the background, concealed lest Isabel slip into disapproving-relative mode.
That had happened before, when Isabel had only found out about a boyfriend of Cat’s
by accident. That awful tightrope walker, for example: Cat had initially not been
open about him—understandably so. If I were going out with a diminutive tightrope
walker who wore elevator shoes, then I might be reticent too … Isabel stopped herself.
It was wrong to write him off because he was very short—that had no bearing on merit.
Gandhi had been very short, as had Beethoven. But Bruno, as the tightrope walker was
called, was unlike Gandhi or Beethoven: he had no merits at all—at least as far as
she could make out; he was domineering and, she suspected, violent too. She shuddered.
What would have happened if Cat had married him and she, Isabel, had had to welcome
him into the family? She would have done her best, but surely her true feelings would
have shown and Cat, sensing this, would have challenged her. “You don’t like him,
do you, Isabel? You don’t like him because he’s a tightrope walker.” “Listen, Cat,
that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s him; it’s what he is within himself that’s
the problem.”

By the time Isabel drew level with Stirling, the mackerel sky had drifted away. She
glanced at the shape of Stirling Castle against its backdrop of green hills, with
the Wallace Monument rising spikily behind it. Isabel smiled. Scottish rugby crowds
still sang about William Wallace, seven hundred years after he had defeated the English
army of cruel Edward, “and sent him packing,” as the song had it, “tae think again.”
Well, he had,
she supposed, but why did we still need to sing about it? She automatically answered
her own question:
Because we may not have very much else, apart from our past
. It was not the answer she had expected to arrive at, and she thought it was probably
wrong, and defeatist. We did have a great deal else. We had this land that was unfolding
before her now as she turned off towards Doune; these fields and these soft hills
and this sky and this light and these rivers that were pure and fresh, and this music
that could send shivers of pleasure up the spine and make one so proud of Scotland
and of belonging. We had all that.

DUNCAN MUNROWE CAME OUT
of his front door to greet her.

“Your car,” he said, “is lovely.”

“It doesn’t always start.”

He smiled, and touched the roof of the car as if to confirm that it was real. “The
best cars don’t,” he said. “I’d never want a car that had so little personality that
it always started.”

This brief exchange confirmed what she had felt over that lunch in Edinburgh. Her
host was slightly eccentric. Out of touch with the modern world. His own man.

She looked up at the front of the house. It was fairly modest in its proportions—a
comfortable country house of the sort that in the very early eighteenth century, when
she suspected it was built, would have housed a minor country gentleman—one who did
not actually have to farm, but had the farming done for him. And it still housed exactly
such a man, she thought, as she glanced discreetly at Duncan and took in his outfit:
the moleskin trousers, the waistcoat, the Harris tweed jacket. One would not drive
a tractor or unload bales of hay in those clothes. One
might watch other people do it instead. And that, she thought, was a good enough definition
of the
rentier
class as any. And of me too, she found herself thinking, guiltily. The land and gas
company in Louisiana that enabled her to live as she did was based on the physical
work of others—people whom she did not know. Her maternal great-grandfather had been
responsible for that, and the trickle-down effect had seen to the rest. He would never
have imagined that she, his descendant, living in twenty-first-century Scotland, and
editing a philosophical review, of all things, would be reaping the benefits of the
financial plotting and scheming at which family history held him to have been such
a master. At least it was not plantation money—or slave money, to give it the name
that more accurately reflected its origins. They had not been involved in that, as
far as Isabel knew, for had they been, she could never have accepted the legacy, even
generations later. Or at least she hoped she would not have accepted it, although
there was plenty of slave money in Britain. There had been the great plantations in
the West Indies, and the descendants of the people who benefited from those—the sugar
families and others—must still be there, still enjoying, although attenuated by the
years that had passed, their sticky, suffering-based fortunes. She hoped she would
never have accepted it, or its equivalent, although honesty required one to remind
oneself that when there were bills to be paid, an offer of money was harder to reject
than when there were no such bills. Other people’s money, we tell ourselves, is always
less deserved than our own.

At school she had known a girl who came from a family that had done very well out
of coal mining two generations earlier. They had been good people, and charitably
inclined, but Isabel had once said to this girl, with all the thoughtlessness
of her sixteen years, “Think of all the miners who got sick and died.” And the girl
had stared at her mutely, and turned white, and then cried. Something had been said
by the girl’s father to Isabel’s father—they knew one another through membership of
a golf club—and Isabel’s father, who never spoke harshly, had said to her, “Don’t
blame other people for things that happened before they were born. And don’t blame
them for things that seemed right at the time, even if we come to see that they aren’t
right any more. And finally, remember that our people—that’s your mother’s people
and my people—were probably not angels, because
nobody
was an angel in those days, except those people at the bottom of everything, who
had no alternative.” He had held her gaze, and she had shrivelled inside with embarrassment
and guilt. It had been so easy to strike a position of moral superiority—it always
is—but she had not intended to hurt her friend. Her father had paused for a moment,
and judged the lesson to have been learned. “Remember that, darling, and say sorry
for what you said. That’s all you have to do.”

Was Duncan speaking to her? She had been thinking about unearned money and her father
and coal mining, and as often happened when she was thinking, time became slightly
distorted and seemed to pass without her realising it.

“Sorry, what was that?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I didn’t say anything.”

She looked again at the front of the house. “Early eighteenth century?”

He smiled. “Very close. 1698. There’s a date carved into one of the lintels on the
other side.” He gestured towards the door. “Do come in. I’ll show you round, if you
like. My wife, I’m afraid, is in London. We have a small flat down there, and she
likes going to the opera.”

“So do I,” said Isabel. “If I lived in London, I’d live at the ENO and Covent Garden.
Or New York. Imagine living in Manhattan and being able to walk—to walk!—to the Met.”

“I’m told you’re half American,” he said.

They were entering the hall—a comfortable, simply furnished room from which a stone
staircase ascended at the far end.

“Yes,” said Isabel. “On my mother’s side.” And then she wondered: Who told him? Did
Martha know about her mother? Possibly. Or had he been asking people about her? She
looked up at the ceiling, which had a surprisingly elaborate cornice: plaster thistles,
twined about one another, were interspersed with roses. It was in good condition,
and although it was predominantly white, here and there were traces of other colours:
the thistles green in their foliage and receptacles, with faded purple just to be
made out on some of the flower heads. The roses, though, were untouched, and were
the white of the surrounding plaster, which was significant.

“Roses,” she said.

Duncan followed her glance. “Yes. Roses.” He paused and said, “Long before our time.
My grandfather bought this place in the nineteen twenties. The roses, we think, date
back to the early seventeen hundreds. And, yes, they are—”

“Jacobite.”

He nodded. “The family who lived here then were fairly strongly of that persuasion.”
He looked up at the cornice. “The Jacobite white rose. We believe that one of them
helped Prince Charlie on his way to Edinburgh. Fed his troops or something like that.
Probably gave him money.”

“And suffered the consequences when Charlie came unstuck?”

He looked down again. There was sympathy in his eyes. “They lost the place, but stayed
alive. Others were less lucky.”

She reflected on how human sympathy could be felt for ancient misfortune. The Jacobite
uprising—that lost cause that almost succeeded—had been in 1745; over two hundred
and fifty years separated us from them, and Duncan felt sympathy for those amongst
the ranks of the losers who had occupied his house. One could feel sorry for any suffering,
Isabel supposed, even if it was a long time ago, but surely there were limits—a point
at which hearing of suffering no longer engaged our emotions. The Christians facing
the lions in Rome? The victims of the Assyrians who enjoyed massacring the inhabitants
of besieged towns? The distance in time was too great; suffering, to move us, must
be warmer than that.

Suddenly she said, “It helps if you know the name.”

He looked at her in puzzlement. “I’m sorry … I’m not quite with you.”

She explained. “I was thinking about suffering and the passage of time. We can feel
more sympathy for the victims whose names we know.”

He looked at her with interest. “Yes, I suppose that’s right.”

“Aberdeen man lost at sea,” she muttered.

“What? Aberdeen …”

“It’s how an Aberdeen newspaper was said to have reported the sinking of the
Titanic
. I suspect it’s apocryphal, but it makes the point, doesn’t it?”

He laughed. “Local papers always see the world in that way. That’s what they’re about.”
He gestured for her to follow him and led the way into a room off the back of the
hall. “The library,” he said. “Rather a lot of unread books.”