The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (9) (15 page)

That, she realised, was a statement of friendship. “So did I,” she said.

She gazed thoughtfully at the place where the Poussin had been. Sir Anthony Blunt
had been gay.

She dropped the question into the conversation without really considering it; it seemed
to be the next place for their discussion to go. “Do you think that people need to
state their sexuality? Do they need to tell people?”

He did not answer immediately, and she glanced at him. He had folded his arms across
his chest, a gesture that Isabel always interpreted as protective. Had she unthinkingly
presumed too much by asking the question? Had she strayed into the very territory
of the private they had been discussing?

His tone now was distant. “No,” he said. “It’s their own business.
What does it matter to the rest of us if somebody is … that way? I don’t see it as
any business of mine, frankly.”

She noted his use of the term
that way
. It was old-fashioned, but she felt that it also disclosed a certain distaste. Not
to use an accepted term raised the distinct possibility that one did not like that
expression, or did not share the assumptions that went with it.
Gay
was a word that gay people themselves had endorsed and was different, therefore,
from the mean-spirited language that others had used in the past.

The topic was obviously not one he wanted to discuss, and so she moved away from it,
not wishing to intrude further.

“So you say Blunt accepted the painting?” she asked.

Duncan seemed relieved that they had come back to art. “Yes. I was in my late teens
then and not all that interested in the paintings. I knew what they were, but I had
yet to develop much knowledge of art. That came a bit later.”

“Were you here when Blunt came?”

“No, I was away at boarding school. I heard about it from my father.”

“You heard about the icy look?”

“Yes, although I wouldn’t want to make too much of that—as I’ve said. I was more interested
in the fact that he came up after he had been revealed as a Soviet spy. I’d read about
all that in the newspapers, of course. They had a field day, as you can imagine.”

“Indeed they did,” said Isabel. “After all, who could invent a better story for them?
Soviet agents. The rarefied world of art connoisseurship. The fact that he was some
sort of cousin of the Queen’s. There was something for everybody in it.” She had been
about to add sex to the list, but stopped herself in time.

“They loved it. They bayed for his blood, but, as you know, he had been given immunity
by the government in return for spilling the beans. They couldn’t prosecute him or
no government immunity would be worth the paper it’s written on in the future.”

Isabel agreed.
Pacta sunt servanda
—agreements should be honoured. It was one of the most basic of the rules we needed
to function as a society.
Keep your promises
.

“He was a broken man afterwards,” said Duncan. “I read a biography a few years ago
that described it rather well. He continued to live in London but was careful about
going out. He went to the cinema in Notting Hill once and was recognised. The audience
slow-handclapped him until he left. Can you imagine it?”

Isabel was busy doing just that. She saw the cinema and Blunt coming in—that tall,
aesthetically distinguished figure who must have found it very difficult to appear
anonymous. She saw him sitting down in his seat, perhaps with a friend or two—some
people, at least, stuck by him—some of his old friends and students from the Courtauld
who either forgave him or thought there was nothing to forgive. She saw another member
of the audience a few rows forward turn his neck and stare and then whisper to those
around him. And then she saw more heads craning to see whether it really was him,
and then, perhaps more as a joke than anything else, or an act of bravado, a man somewhere
started to clap slowly. And then the psychology of the crowd took over, and people
felt the bravery of the group. The slow-handclapping swelled—a crowd will always pick
up a stone—and Blunt, at first confused, begins to realise it is him they want to
leave. Me? A glance exchanged with his companions, and then a retreat that not even
a proud and unrepentant
man—if he really was like that—could find anything but humiliating.
Their bad manners
, a companion whispers, but Blunt, too shocked, is unable to speak.

“He never apologised,” said Isabel. “Or did he?”

“He said that he regretted it,” said Duncan. “That’s not the same thing as saying
sorry.”

“But perhaps he didn’t feel sorry,” said Isabel. “He was recruited in the nineteen
thirties, wasn’t he? A lot of people believed then that communism—and the Soviet Union—were
the only forces really standing up to fascism. So maybe he felt that what he did was
right.”

Duncan did not disagree. “Yes, it was ideological—to begin with. Then when Stalin
came along it was too late. Blunt wanted out, but it was difficult.”

“So he thought he had done the right thing?”

“Undoubtedly.”

Isabel gave this some thought. “But he was wrong, wasn’t he? And the whole point of
his offence was that he betrayed his country.”

Duncan’s smile was challenging. “Is that always wrong?”

She thought that if he were expecting a simple answer, she was not going to give him
one. “That depends on what one’s country is up to, doesn’t it? We don’t think that
people who betray their own country when it happens to be a tyranny are doing wrong,
do we? Russians who betrayed the Soviet Union were welcomed here with open arms, I
seem to remember.”

“So no real betrayal?” he said. “Because they were acting in the real interests of
their country anyway—those interests being obscured by the tyranny in power?”

“Something like that. There’s a difference between loyalty to a government and loyalty
to a country.”

He pressed further. “Which would cover Blunt? And Philby? And Maclean and Burgess?”

“We didn’t have a tyranny in power. That’s the difference.”

She could see that he was not prepared to make that distinction. “I’m not happy about
that,” he said. “Let’s say that there was a coup in this country—in Britain—and we
had an unelected government. We could still owe a duty of loyalty to our fellow citizens
not to betray the state of which we were all members.”

Isabel looked up at the ceiling. There was a crack in the plaster, stretching from
one side to the other, a zigzag, a San Andreas fault. “Tribal feeling?”

She had not intended to sound flippant, and she was not ready for the look of sheer
anger that passed across his face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make light
of it.”

He clearly felt guilty for showing his anger. According to the code by which he lived,
a gentleman did not do that. That’s what he was thinking, she decided; that’s why
he was reproaching himself.

He made a reassuring gesture. “I know that.” He paused. “You know, it’s very stimulating
for me to have this conversation. Living out here, I don’t get enough of that sort
of thing. My neighbours …” He sighed. “They don’t talk about these things—their interests
are mostly horses and cattle. I couldn’t discuss loyalty with them—not at all: they’d
find it too awkward.”

“That’s understandable,” said Isabel. “Most people don’t question themselves about
such matters.”

“Maybe they should,” Duncan mused. “Maybe we’re all too used to spending our time
in a state of …” He frowned as he tried to find the right term. “In a state of deadened
acceptance
rather than …” Again he struggled. “Engagement. Yes, that’s it—engagement.”

“Maybe.”

He brushed some imaginary lint off his trousers; we clean things that are already
clean. His shoes, Isabel noticed, were highly polished—so highly so that they caught
the light from the window, as a mirror might. Why, she wondered, would one spend so
much time—and it must have taken a lot of time to get that shine—in buffing leather?
People dressed for certain things, of course, for a special meeting or task—what had
Michael Longley written about Emily Dickinson? She dressed each morning with care
for the act of poetry …

They were interrupted by a car drawing up outside the house, the sound of crunching
gravel drifting in from outside; it was like a wave breaking on the shore, thought
Isabel—it had the same quality. Duncan rose to his feet quickly.

“We can finish our conversation later,” he said. “We’ve touched on things that we
need to talk about a bit more.”

She said that she agreed. Loyalty, Anthony Blunt, Poussin, living with passion rather
than with dull acceptance—there was a lot to be said about all of these subjects.
Whole books had been written on them; whole libraries—or sections of libraries in
the case of two of them. And nobody ever claimed to reach a definitive conclusion,
nor felt they had put the matter to bed. “You could talk about these things for ever,
don’t you think …,” she began, but was cut off. Duncan was moving towards the door,
distracted to the point of ignoring her; he suddenly appeared rude, which was most
unusual for him, she thought, but he did not mean it. He’s afraid … That explained
it. He was afraid of this lawyer and what she represented, or
rather the person she represented, the thief, he who had come into this room and taken
the beloved painting, disregarding the consequences of his action, the distress caused
by the act of misappropriation. She returned to her earlier thoughts on the shocking
attitude of the criminal towards his victim—it was the moral primal scene, to borrow
the language of Freudians: the realisation that people could treat others as if they
did not matter. And yet they did—they behaved exactly like that—all the time, and
with conviction. Whole nations said it to other whole nations.
You do not matter. You do not count
.

CHAPTER TEN
 

I
SABEL WAS NOT PREPARED
. After Duncan had left the room to meet the lawyer, she had risen from the settee
to stretch her legs. Moving to one of the windows, she was looking out of it, over
a box hedge and lawn to trees beyond: sycamores, with some birch. The branches of
the birch, silver and green, swayed against the sky, brushing it, but only just, as
the breeze was a slight one. She thought of Poussin and his skies; that blue, that
bright blue that was none the less cold, framed, as it so often was in his paintings,
by clouds. He had understood clouds—appreciated them, and now …

“We can talk in here.”

She turned round. Duncan was showing a woman into the room, and he was looking in
Isabel’s direction. The first thing that Isabel noticed was that Heather Darnt, a
woman she judged to be in her early forties, was wearing jeans. The denim was dark,
but it was definitely denim, and it was tight, disappearing into high black boots.
Above the jeans was a white cotton formal shirt and an inappropriately large Orthodox
cross necklace. But when Isabel’s eyes went to the face, she saw a spreading port-wine
birthmark across the lawyer’s left temple. It was not
small, but no attempt had been made to conceal it—indeed, as she approached to shake
hands, Isabel saw that her choice of lipstick, liberally applied, was in an exactly
matching shade of port wine.

They shook hands. Isabel found, to her surprise, that she was trembling. She tried
to smile, but it was hard; she did not feel like smiling.

“Miss Darnt has driven over from Perth,” said Duncan.

It was insignificant information, but it was something to say. “Oh yes,” said Isabel.
“Perth … that’s where you practise?”

It was small talk, and she felt foolish making it, but she was distracted by everything:
by the jeans—unexpected of a lawyer making a business call; by the birthmark to which
one could not be indifferent; by the Orthodox cross; by the fact that this woman was
acting for figures from the shadowy world of art theft.

Duncan gestured for them to sit down.

“Yes,” said the lawyer, in answer to Isabel’s question, “I practise in Perth.”

Isabel wanted to say:
And do you always do this sort of thing?
Instead, she said, “I’ve been told about the theft.” She found herself emphasising
the word
theft
, as if to shame the other woman.

Her eyes drifted up to the birthmark. She found it hard to look away, but when she
did, and glanced at Duncan, sitting at the other end of the sofa from Heather Darnt,
she saw that he was staring at it too.

The lawyer had brought a small bag with her, a cross between a briefcase and a handbag,
and she now leaned forward to extract a manila file from this. As she did so, she
said, “These are present from birth. They result from dilated capillaries.”

Isabel drew in her breath inadvertently. “I’m sorry.” She felt ashamed and embarrassed.
Duncan, she noticed, was blushing.

The lawyer did not look at either of them, but concentrated on the file before her.
“It’s all right. No harm done.”