The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (9) (4 page)

“What was it?”

“A Poussin. One of the relatively few in private hands in this country. And a rather
nice one. It was worth about three million, they thought. Possibly more.”

Isabel asked what the subject was, and Martha explained. It was a painting known as
Time Reconsidered
and bore some relationship to the artist’s great
A Dance to the Music of Time
. Martha began to describe that painting, but Isabel told her that she had visited
the Wallace Collection in London and knew the picture well.

“It was insured, of course,” Martha said.

Isabel said that she was relieved to hear that. An insurance payment was not always
full compensation for loss, but it undoubtedly dulled the pain. “I assume that what
he really wants is to get the painting back.”

“Yes. He does. They picked the one thing he didn’t want to lose.”

Eddie appeared at the table to collect their empty cups. He took Martha’s wordlessly,
but at the same time gave Isabel a look of gentle reproach. Isabel mentally sent him
a message:
Yes, I know what she’s like, but we can’t …

“Anything else?” he asked Isabel.

Isabel shook her head, and Eddie went back to the counter.

“There’s something lost about that boy,” Martha said. “Odd.”

Isabel did not engage. “Duncan Munrowe?”

“Oh yes, Duncan. It’s the reward, you see.”

Isabel looked puzzled. “The reward?”

“I gather that many of these art thefts are really ransom attempts,” Martha explained.
“They can’t sell these very well-known paintings—or at least not on the ordinary market—and
so they use them to extort money from the insurance companies.”

Isabel had read about this. “That must be difficult,” she said. “If you pay the Dane
to go away, he always comes back. So perhaps you should make a point of never paying
ransom.”

Martha frowned at the mention of Danes.

“Danegeld,” said Isabel. “It’s what people used to pay the Vikings to stop them destroying
things. You paid your Danegeld and the Vikings went away. Until next time.”

Martha shrugged. “I suppose there is a general issue about paying ransom. But that’s
not the problem here—or at least it’s not the problem that’s worrying Duncan. His
difficulty is the attitude of the insurers. They’ve suggested one thing and he’s
wanted to do the other. They’ve argued about figures too. The insurers say that the
market is depressed at the moment and this means they need to pay less. They also
don’t want to pay a ransom until it’s clear that the painting won’t be recovered.”

“Insurers are like that,” remarked Isabel. “As a general rule, if they can avoid paying,
that’s what they’ll do.”

“And yet we can’t be late with our premiums,” said Martha sharply.

Isabel agreed. People were always very keen to have their bills paid promptly but
were not so willing to reciprocate.

“So that’s where you come in,” Martha announced.

Isabel frowned. “I don’t see …”

“Duncan wondered whether you might help him deal with this. In particular, he wants
help in dealing with any approach from the people who have the painting. They’ll be
in touch, he thinks. They might even have already contacted him—I’m not sure about
that.”

Isabel’s surprise was immediately apparent. “But what possible assistance can I give?
I know nothing about this sort of thing. Nothing at all.”

Martha laid a hand on Isabel’s forearm. “But everybody knows how helpful you are.
That’s why I recommended you when he asked me about you.”

“You recommended me?”

“Yes. Poor Duncan: he so wanted somebody to talk to about it—to advise him. Somebody
had mentioned your name. I said that you had quite a reputation for helping people
in a tight spot and that he could talk to you. I hope you don’t mind.”

Of course Isabel minded; it was very easy, she thought, to offer the services of others.
But then she remembered her sainted American mother and asked herself how she would
have
reacted to such a request. She knew the answer. “Never turn your back on another,”
her mother had said to her when she was a girl. “The person you’re turning your back
on might die that night.” It was not, Isabel realised, the sort of thing one should
say to children, who could feel unreasonably anxious about death anyway. And if somebody
died, the child could well blame himself or herself; children often did that, the
psychologists told us; they felt guilty about things that happened, even if they had
nothing at all to do with them.
I turned my back on her, and she went and died!
But it was advice that had stuck, and came back to Isabel now, years later, in this
difficult encounter. She stared at Martha. “I will, if you want me to,” she said.
She almost added, “Though I can’t say I’m overly enthusiastic,” but decided against
it. There was no need to be churlish.

Martha looked at her gratefully. “Even if you just talk to him,” she said. “Listen
to his tale of woe. Even that would help.”

“I’ll try,” said Isabel.

“Tomorrow?” asked Martha. “Duncan’s coming into town. Could you see him then? Lunch—just
the three of us. Unless you’d rather I didn’t come.”

Isabel hesitated. There were times when one had to act self-defensively, even if it
caused disappointment. It went against the grain, but one had to.

“Just him and me, I think,” she said. She tried to speak gently, but even then felt
she had to explain. “It’s sometimes easier for people to talk if there’s nobody else
there.”

“Do you think so?” said Martha.

“I do,” said Isabel.

Martha shrugged. “Odd,” she said.

It was true, thought Isabel, that none of us ever imagined that people might
not
wish to be in our company. We assumed
that people found us good company, would like to be with us. But they might not. They
might find us opinionated or dull or irritating—as poor Martha undoubtedly was; all
of which qualities we would be the last to discern in ourselves.

Isabel swallowed. It was so easy to forget the needs of others, and to allow irritation,
boredom or sheer indifference to get the better of us. She would not do that; she
would make an effort. It was very easy to build people up, to make them feel better
about themselves: a few words of praise, an appreciative comment or two, and people
felt better. Martha clearly took pains to look her best; perhaps a remark about that
would help the situation.

“I must say,” Isabel began, and then searched desperately for a suitable comment.
“I must say that you’re looking really … really attractive. That top suits you, I
think. Your colour.”

She drew in her breath. The top was beige: she had just suggested that Martha’s colour
was beige.

“Beige?”

“No,” said Isabel quickly. “I wouldn’t call it beige. I’d say
oatmeal
. I’ve got a carpet that colour in the upstairs bedroom and …” She trailed off as
it struck her that she had now compared Martha’s top to a carpet.

Martha stared at her for a moment before smiling wryly. “It’s kind of you to say that,
Isabel, but I’m sure you don’t really mean it.”

“I did mean it,” Isabel lied. And she thought, more than a little ashamedly: Kant
would never,
never
have given that answer. He would never have paid an insincere compliment in the first
place. Kant would not have noticed the way a woman was dressed; Hume might have, and
Voltaire certainly would.
What the Great Philosophers Would Say About Your Wardrobe:
that would be an amusing book to write—and it might even prove rather popular, as
Robert Pirsig’s
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
had become.

She became aware that Martha was shaking an admonitory finger at her. “Not really,
but thanks anyway. It’s good to be told nice things, even if they aren’t true.” She
paused. “And it’s very kind of you to say it, especially when you’re so … Well, you’re
much more glamorous than I am. And your life … your whole life is so much more—how
shall I put it? Intense? And …”

“Please,” said Isabel, reaching out to touch her gently. “That’s a generous thing
to say, but you’re wrong, you know. My life isn’t really any different from anybody
else’s.”

Martha shook her head. “But it is! You’ve got money. You live in that fantastic house.
You’ve got that man of yours. Everything. You’ve got everything.”

Isabel looked down at the floor. It made her feel uncomfortable to hear her blessings
enumerated—nobody welcomed that, least of all those who, like Isabel, were aware enough
to know that all the good things that we have in life are on temporary loan, at best,
and can be taken away from us in an instant. The borderline between good fortune and
disaster, between plenitude and paucity, between the warm hearth of love and the cold
chamber of loneliness, was a narrow one. We could cross over from one to the other
at any moment, as when we stumbled or fell, or simply walked over to the other side
because we were paying insufficient attention to where we were. It was well to remember
one’s good luck, but it was not always helpful to be reminded of it by one who was
not equally blessed. Or to be reminded of it in public, when Nemesis, whose radar
is said never to be switched off, picks up the echo and begins to take an interest.

CHAPTER THREE
 

M
ARTHA LEFT THE DELICATESSEN
, telling Isabel that she had other shops to visit before returning home to her lunch
of onion tart. Isabel said goodbye to her but remained at the table; she had decided
that she would read the newspaper, even if the only paper she could see on the rack
was what looked like a three-day-old copy of the
Corriere della Sera
. Cat had the Italian newspapers passed on to her by a friend who bought them religiously
to keep her language up to scratch. Isabel was the only beneficiary of this generosity;
she had never seen anyone else reading the papers, although she had observed some
customers examining them in puzzlement, trying to stretch their restaurant Italian
or to make sense of the reports from the pictures. But their presence seemed just
right: it went so well with the smell of coffee and the sight of the salamis that
Cat hung above the counter, almost over the heads of customers; the salami of Damocles,
she thought …

The
Corriere
would give her half an hour in the opaque realms of Italian politics; a world of
Byzantine intrigues and endless feuds, operatic in its intensity. She scanned the
front page and noticed a trailer for an interview on an inside page. A well-known
politician, now disgraced, was speaking about his fall from power. It was a bad decision,
he said, to replace him; the country needed him more than ever, and the attempts to
prosecute him were symptomatic of the ingratitude for which the country was becoming
so famous. Isabel smiled. She never ceased to be amazed by the antics of politicians.
It was as if politics were all about
them
, and not about ordinary members of the public who were, after all, the people whom
politicians were meant to serve. People like me, she thought—sitting here drinking
coffee, waiting to be served by politicians … She closed her eyes and imagined the
Prime Minister, in a waiter’s apron, serving coffee. Martha, curiously, came into
the picture, shaking her head and saying disapprovingly, “They’ll do
anything
for votes, won’t they?”

She opened her eyes a few seconds later to see Eddie standing in front of her holding
a replacement cup of coffee.

“I assumed you wanted a refill,” he said. He spoke normally now, the attempt to affect
an American accent being abandoned.

Isabel smiled at him and took the proffered cup. Eddie hesitated, glancing around
the shop to see if there was anybody needing attention. But, seeing that there was
nobody waiting to be served, he sat down on the chair recently vacated by Martha.
“That woman you were with looks familiar. Who is she?” he asked, nodding his head
in the direction of the door.

“She’s called Martha Drummond.”

Eddie made a face. “I didn’t like her. Sorry, I know she’s your friend, but she behaved
like a real cow just now.”

“That’s possibly a bit unfair,” Isabel said. “She’s not all that bad.”

“I can tell you don’t think that,” said Eddie. “Your eyes looked different when you
said it.”

I’m a bad liar, thought Isabel. That was twice in the last few
minutes that she had been accused of insincerity. “All right,” she confessed. “I’ll
admit it: she gets on my nerves a bit. A lot, sometimes. I feel guilty about my attitude
towards her. I’m not proud of it. But you know how it is? We all have people in our
lives we don’t really choose as friends but with whom we’re, well, lumbered, I suppose.
Heart-sink friends. Have you heard that expression?”

Eddie had, and yes, he knew a few people like that. There had been a boy in his year
at school, he said, who smelled of fish but who always wanted to sit next to him in
class. “He had this condition, you see. It wasn’t that he didn’t wash—he did—it’s
just that he smelled of fish. It was a medical condition, see.”