The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (9) (22 page)

He interrupted her. “We all want that.” He sounded vehement. “Who doesn’t want hospitals
and schools and all the rest? It’s how we achieve the material satisfaction that’s
the issue. He thinks you can have it by taking everybody’s property away from them
and having state ownership of everything. He really thinks that.”

“No,” said Isabel. “That wouldn’t work.”

He looked at her now. “I’m a farmer, and I know that if you take land out of the hands
of individual farmers and collectivise it, you destroy agriculture. Every single historical
example has shown that to be the case. Yet Patrick, my own son, told me that I had
no right to the five hundred acres I farm. He said that if I leave the farm to him,
he’ll treat it as a collective.” He snorted. “Collective agriculture? How long would
that work? A month?”

The traffic had started to move again and they were approaching the end of Lothian
Road. To their left was the Caledonian Hotel, a great edifice of red sandstone, while
on the other side of the road St. John’s Church marked the end of Princes Street Gardens.
The church was displaying a line of flags on its forecourt: the Scottish flag, the
Saltire, fluttered above flags of the various European countries and a flag on which
the word
Peace
was sewn in great black letters.
We must love one another and die
, thought Isabel.

The taxi turned and began to make its way down the short road that led to Rutland
Square. “You could drop us right here,” Isabel called out to the driver.

Duncan reached for his coat. “We can talk about Patrick
some other time,” he said; he spoke in the tone of one wanting to shelve an awkward
topic.

ISABEL KNEW RUTLAND SQUARE
for two reasons. Her friend Lesley Kerr had her legal office in one corner of the
square, and she had occasionally called there to collect her for lunch. And on the
other side, in a three-storeyed Georgian building looking out over the gardens that
made up the centre of the square, was the Scottish Arts Club. Isabel went to dinners
there from time to time, and parties too—the club had long had a reputation as the
most hospitable of Edinburgh clubs, with its talks on the arts, its Sheeps Heid dinners,
its Burns Nights. Isabel sometimes had lunch there with another friend, Lucy Mackay,
an artist known for her portraits and wispy, whimsical water-colours. That was her
Rutland Square, a place with predominantly positive associations but which Isabel
was now visiting in a very different context.

Duncan paid off the taxi and the cab shot off to its next assignment. His nervousness
had now returned, and he looked about him uneasily. “What now? We walk around?”

Isabel took his arm. “Yes. To all intents and purposes we are just two people out
for a walk.” She pointed to a man walking two black Labradors on their leashes. “Like
him.”

They began to walk round the square. Isabel glanced discreetly at her watch; in spite
of the traffic delays, they were still at least ten minutes early.

“They could be watching us,” said Duncan.

“They probably are,” said Isabel.

They continued their walk in silence. There was not a great
deal happening in the square, which was tucked away from the busy thoroughfares of
Princes Street and Lothian Road. Now, in midsummer, the trees made an island of green,
their leaves sibilant in the warm morning breeze. “The winds must come from somewhere
when they blow” … it was among the most beautiful of lines. WHA again, even here,
she thought, when I’m about to enter the murky, unpleasant world of theft.

They reached the western end of the square and began to make their way in the direction
of the Scottish Arts Club. The lights were on in the drawing room; somebody was reading
a paper, enjoying a cup of coffee. And on the other side of the club, in a house now
converted to offices, she saw a man and a woman talking in front of a window—the ordinary
world of legitimate business: a world in which people did not hold one another to
ransom; a world in which rules, like hidden, powerful electrical fields, governed
the affairs of men.

She was suddenly aware of Duncan’s hand on her arm. He was whispering something that
she found it hard to catch.

She whispered back, although there was nobody about to hear them. “Yes? What is it?”

“There’s somebody parked up ahead. He’s looking at us.”

She switched her gaze to the vehicles parked up against the garden railings. She saw
a large grey car that had been carelessly parked and was protruding into the road;
an old Morgan, lovingly tended, its silver trimmings worn almost to the base metal
below from the rubbing of generations of polishing cloth; both were empty. But then,
behind the Morgan, parked hard up against it so that the bumpers must almost have
been touching, was a black van with a long crack in the windscreen. There was a man
at the wheel.

“I think that must be them,” said Duncan out of the side of his mouth.

“We’ll find out soon enough,” said Isabel. She was not sure; there were building works
going on in one of the buildings in the square and the man could have had something
to do with those—there were other builders’ vans in the square, disgorging planks
of wood and other mysteries of their craft.

Isabel slowed her pace. She found it hard to pretend to be casual in the face of observation,
particularly from somebody who was probably either a builder or a thief. Some builders
took it as their right to watch women with an appraising look that was frequently
nakedly intrusive; they still wolf-whistled and called out—as Italian men used to
do before they suddenly grew up. Why did men think they could behave that way? What
satisfaction did they get from wolf-whistling? It was about power, thought Isabel.
It was about being able to assert themselves publicly and to objectify women. It was
a direct denial of the idea that men and women should treat one another with courtesy
and consideration; it was a nod to the days of strutting men and meek, passive women.

Thinking of builders helped to take her mind off being watched, with the result that
when the window of the van was suddenly—and noisily—wound down, she was not paying
full attention to it.

“Over here.”

The tone of the voice was peremptory; the vowels were those of the east of Scotland.
Isabel looked. He was staring at them through the open window of the van: a man in
his early thirties, or thereabouts, with lank, mousy hair and a chin that was covered
in heavy stubble.

She stepped off the pavement and began to cross the road towards the van with Duncan
following behind. “Quick,” the man called out. “Get a move on.”

Isabel, offended by his rudeness, regarded him with disdain as they approached the
van. She saw that there were two earrings in his right ear—two small studs, one of
which was red. It was a code, she imagined. What had Eddie once said to her about
men and earrings? Left: right; right: wrong.

He stared at them through the open window. “Get in the back,” he said. “The door’s
open.”

She smelled something on the man’s breath: stale alcohol. She saw that his eyes were
bloodshot and that the skin around them seemed to be puffed-up. He was not sober,
she thought, but then some men like this never were.

“Why?” she asked.

“Do you want to see the thing?” His voice had become a sneer.

She felt her heart beating within her. She would remain calm; she was determined to
deny him the satisfaction of seeing her riled.

Isabel kept her voice level as she replied, “Yes. That’s why we’re here.”

Duncan now stepped forward. “Is my painting in the back?” he asked.

The driver stared at him for a moment or two before answering. “No, it isn’t, Pop.
I’m taking you to see it. But only if youses shift yoursels and get in.” He used the
demotic plural of
you
, a common feature of speech in Scotland. Isabel had always rather liked it, just
as she liked the complimentary Texan plural
you-all
that her mother had told her about. “It assumes that nobody
would be unfortunate enough to be on their own,” she used to explain. “Hence
you-all
.”

There was something in the driver’s answer that made Duncan start. She looked at him
and he shook his head, as if to put her off saying anything now.

“I think we should probably do this,” Duncan said to her. “Do you mind?”

Isabel weighed the possibilities. It was no small step to get into the back of a strange
van, especially one driven by so patently unpleasant a person as this; but what was
the alternative? If they declined, then the whole arrangement for the recovery of
the Poussin—and the painting—could be in jeopardy.

She nodded to Duncan, and they walked round to the back of the van. Duncan opened
the doors hesitantly.

“I’m not sure,” he said. He stopped. A man dressed entirely in black, his face half
covered by a football scarf, his eyes obscured by sunglasses, was crouching on the
floor of the van. Gripped on either side by his gloved hands was the Poussin.

Isabel gasped. Her hand went to her mouth.

“See this,” said the man, jerking the painting towards them but still keeping his
tight grip on it. “See?”

Isabel noticed the sky, saw the intense Poussin blue, saw the clouds; that was her
abiding impression—the clouds. Absurdly, she wanted to say something about the painting,
even now, in this threatening, tense situation—she wanted to say something about the
beauty of the painting.
We don’t react in the right way
, she thought;
we think the wrong things, as I am doing now
. She had read of people who found themselves facing death and who subsequently survived
and of how they had spent what could
have been their last precious seconds thinking about some matter of no real consequence—whether
they had paid the newsagent’s bill or licensed the car or something like that. It
was the same with last words, which were no doubt mostly banal and often inappropriate,
although some, at least, managed a memorable final statement, as did Charles II. He
had apologised for taking so long to go:
You must pardon me, gentlemen, for being a most unconscionable time a-dying
.

There came a growl from the front, as the engine started. The man holding the painting
looked over his shoulder through a small window that gave on to the cab. Then he looked
back and jerked his head. “That’s it,” he said. “Out.”

He laid the Poussin down on the floor and reached forward to close the doors. Isabel
backed off, but Duncan did not. She looked at him in alarm, concerned that he might
try to snatch the painting.

“My painting …,” he stuttered.

The man pushed him out of the way, not roughly but firmly. “Sorry,” he said. “Show’s
over.”

The door slammed shut and the van pulled out sharply on to the road. They watched
as it sped away; it barely slowed down to negotiate the difficult bend that would
allow it access to the back lane behind the square.

Isabel turned to Duncan. She saw that he was about to cry, and intuitively she reached
out to embrace him, to comfort him.

“I’m very sorry,” he said, struggling to compose himself. “I find this very upsetting.”

“Of course it is. And there’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

She patted his shoulder, as she might pat Charlie when he hurt himself and ran to
her for the embrace that could so
miraculously relieve the pain. It was understandable that one might cry in the face
of something like this, not only out of frustration at seeing a beloved object treated
in this way, but for what the whole unpleasant little episode represented. So one
might cry for everything that was wrong with the world, for all the injustice and
crudity and cruelty, for all the things that are stolen from people.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
 

E
DDIE CRIED
, too, later that morning. It was in very different circumstances—not publicly, in
Rutland Square, but in a small clinic room, with the antiseptic smell so characteristic
of such places, the smell of cleanliness. On the wall behind Eddie’s head, tacked
on to a noticeboard, was a poster with dietary recommendations:
Five pieces of fruit and vegetables a day for a healthy life
. Isabel, seated beside Eddie, wondered briefly: Do they mean five pieces of fruit
and five pieces of vegetable, or five in total? It was five in total, she knew, because
that was the message that had been drummed into people’s heads over the last few years—except
for some heads, particularly in those Scottish cities where the diet tended to greasy
food and no vegetables at all and, according to legend, deep-fried chocolate bars.
Jamie confirmed that he had seen them served and had even tasted one after an evening
at the Glasgow Concert Hall; not that they sold them there, he hastily added, but
they had found somewhere nearby that did. “When in Rome,” he said, smiling. In Rome,
of course, they did nothing so foolish as eating deep-fried chocolate bars, but courted
disaster in their own ways, as all people do. We each have our own way of behaving
self-destructively,
thought Isabel; we each have our folly, and for the Italians it was … What was it?
Their Mediterranean diet was famously healthy, with all its tomatoes and fish and
olive oil, and although they liked wine, there was evidence, much proclaimed by topers,
that two glasses of wine a day was positively beneficial. They took siestas—if they
could—and that was also good for health. So what did they do that was self-destructive?
They drove too fast; that was all she could think of.