The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (9) (5 page)

Isabel said she had heard of it.

“One of the teachers told us about it,” Eddie went on. “Apparently people who have
it can’t break down some sort of chemical and that’s what makes them smell. It’s not
their fault.”

He looked at Isabel as if to challenge her to refute the proposition that smell has
nothing to do with fault. And that was right, she thought, though only in respect
of smells we could not help; those we could help were our responsibility; soap was
readily available, and water too. A paper in the
Review
, perhaps? Responsibility for the body? Do we have a moral obligation to look—and
smell—as good as we can manage? In one view, this could be a Kantian duty to the self,
but in another it could be part of our duty not to offend those around us—one of those
items of good social manners that strayed into the scope of morality proper. Of course,
that had all sorts of ramifications. What about wearing clothes that offended other
people—clothes that revealed bad colour coordination, for example? Was that wrong?
Surely not, although wearing scanty clothing in sensitive settings was another matter.
When important women went to see the
Pope, they dressed conservatively out of respect for … for what? Now it became even
more complicated: the following of a dress code that treated women as potential temptresses
revealed an acceptance of a whole attitude towards women that some did not condone.
So had the Pope any
right
, Isabel wondered, to expect women to dress in a particular way when they called on
him? That raised the question of whether the hosts could dictate the dress of their
guests—and they could, Isabel considered, because people were always telling their
invitees what to wear:
black tie, casual-smart
and all the rest of the signals were everyday examples of precisely that. So the
Pope had the right, if he wished, to expect a certain sort of dress on the part of
his visitors. And so did everybody else, it seemed. She smiled; that sorted
that
out.

Eddie could tell that Isabel’s mind was elsewhere. It was chronic, he thought. She’s
always thinking about all sorts of really
stupid
things. He continued, “The teacher said that we needed to know about it because she
didn’t want people saying anything to him. He was called Julian, which was bad luck
too, because that’s not a name that many people have where I come from.”

“I’m sure you were kind to him,” Isabel said. “It must be a pretty difficult condition.”

Eddie hesitated. “Some people tried to be kind,” he said. “Not everybody, though.
There was this boy called Derek who was a real thug. People hated him. He used to
call out ‘Look out, rotten fish!’ whenever Julian came near.”

“Children are like that,” Isabel said. “We were tremendously cruel. All of us.” She
took a sip of her coffee. “What happened to Julian?”

Eddie stared at her. It seemed that he had not been prepared for the question or had
not understood it.

“I mean, what did he go on to do after he left school? Do you ever see him these days?”

Eddie frowned, and looked away. Isabel waited.

“He topped himself,” he said quietly.

Isabel sat quite still. Perhaps she had misunderstood. “You mean he—”

Eddie interrupted her. “Yes. He put himself in the bath and then he got one of those
electric fires and dropped it in. That was it.”

Isabel said nothing.

“I felt bad.”

“I’m sure you’d done your best. You said he liked you. That must have been because
you’d been good to him.”

“Not good enough,” muttered Eddie.

She decided not to argue with him. “I’m really sorry to hear that story,” she said.

“He had an older brother,” said Eddie. “He’s a DJ in a club on Lothian Road, I still
see him now and then. He’s got long greasy hair. It’s quite disgusting, actually.
He’s called Daniel. He doesn’t really know who I am, but we still say hello to one
another in the street. He has a girlfriend who rides a big Harley-Davidson.”

Isabel listened to these almost random facts. They were the ordinary details of life,
all of them quite unexceptional: the disgusting greasy hair, the club on Lothian Road—except
perhaps for the Harley-Davidson-riding girlfriend—and yet it was these same mundane
facts that were the background for the poignant story of Julian.

For a few moments they were both silent. Then Eddie shrugged. “These things happen,”
he said.

Isabel inclined her head.

“And we shouldn’t think about them too much, should we?” Eddie went on.

No, agreed Isabel, we should not; and Eddie, she thought, had had enough difficulty
in his life without dwelling on additional tragedies. She made an effort to brighten
up. “I’ve been reading about an Italian politician,” she said, pointing to the newspaper.

Eddie glanced at the photograph accompanying the interview. “Oh, him. He’s the one
who liked parties.”

“He was very outgoing,” Isabel agreed.

Eddie looked more closely at the picture. “Has he had cosmetic surgery?” he asked
inconsequentially. “By the way, I’ve got some photographs I want to show you some
time. I took them in Alaska—on the trip. You wouldn’t believe it. The mountains. They
make ours look tiny.”

Our tiny mountains
, thought Isabel. We are a small country with tiny mountains.

“I’d love to see them, Eddie. Maybe you could bring them round some time. Jamie would
like to see them too. Have supper with us.”

Eddie liked Jamie, she knew, because Jamie had always been kind to him. Eddie was
used to being looked through—a shy young man behind the counter. Jamie smiled at him.

“All right. I’ll bring them round. And …”

He looked at Isabel hesitantly.

“Yes?”

“Could I bring somebody with me?”

Isabel nodded. “Of course you can. Who is it?”

Eddie blushed. “There’s a girl I’ve met.”

Isabel waited for him to continue.

“She’s called Diane. I’ve been seeing her for six weeks now.” He moved his right hand
to rest it on the table. She saw that his nails were dirty. Cat had spoken to him
about washing his hands thoroughly before handling food and had equipped the small
washroom at the back of the shop with a stiff nailbrush, which Eddie had evidently
not used, or used to inadequate effect.

“It’s serious, Isabel. We’re going to live together now.”

Isabel caught her breath. In her mind, Eddie was still very young, even if he was
twenty-one.

“That’s quite an important step,” she said.

“I know that,” said Eddie. “But it’s what we want to do. If it works out, we’re going
to get engaged.”

Isabel’s smile was very tentative. “That’s … well, that’s also a big step, isn’t it,
at your age?”

Eddie looked at her searchingly. “What age were you when you first fell in love?”

She had to think. Most of us first experienced love in our teenage years, sometimes
when we were barely into our teens. The passionate friendships of those years were
really love affairs even if they remained innocent. And they often focused on friends
of the same sex—a rite of passage to heterosexuality, for some people, not all, of
course. If people were honest with themselves, they would remember such friendships,
but then people were far from honest when it came to things like that.

She had fallen in love with a boy when she was sixteen. That had been her eye-opener.
She had felt elated, excited and miserable in roughly equal measure. She had never
dreamed that love could be painful, but it was. She had loved him so much that it
hurt, and when it ended, as was inevitable, the pain had been even more intense—for
three weeks. Then she had suddenly woken up one morning and realised that he was
just a boy and that she no longer wanted to spend the entire day thinking about him.
That was her cure.

“I loved somebody when I was sixteen, seventeen,” she said. “And then again a few
years later I fell badly for somebody whom I eventually married. It was a bad mistake
on my part. I think I told you once, didn’t I?”

Eddie remembered. “Yes. What was he called again?”

Isabel had to make an effort: the uttering of names can be potent—and painful. “John
Liamor. He was not a good man, I’m afraid to say.”

“Then you’re best off without him,” said Eddie. “He’s history. Forget him.”

“I did,” said Isabel, and felt, as she uttered the words, a pang of regret. “I had
to teach myself not to think about him. It wasn’t easy.”

“Then let’s talk about something else: Diane.”

Isabel smiled at him. “You’re obviously head over heels in love with her. You’re lucky.”
She paused. Eddie’s face had broken into a grin of sheer pleasure.

“Yes,” Isabel continued. “You’re really lucky, Eddie. Love transforms everything,
doesn’t it?”

She assumed that he might be embarrassed by this talk of love, as any young man might
be. But Eddie seemed to relish it. “Everything’s really great, Isabel. I feel really
great.”

She leaned forward, across the table, and kissed him gently on the cheek. He was surprised,
and she heard his breath come sharply; but again he did not seem embarrassed.

“I’m happy for you, Eddie,” she said. “Stay head over heels in love. Buy her flowers.
Give her lots and lots of kisses. Worship her. Diane, Diana: they’re the same goddess,
you know. Diana, the Huntress.”

Eddie looked at her wide-eyed. “She’s a nurse.”

Isabel laughed. “Don’t be too literal,” she said. “Being in love allows a certain
poetic hyperbole.”

Eddie remained wide-eyed.

“What I mean by all that,” said Isabel, “is: go for it.”

The translation was effective. Eddie beamed. “Thanks, Isabel.”

WITH CHARLIE STILL
at nursery school, Isabel and Jamie ate their lunch on the lawn, shaded by the large
oak tree that dominated one side of Isabel’s garden. They sat on green canvas deckchairs
that were nearing the end of their life but were still the most comfortable garden
furniture that Isabel had ever known. The fabric, rotted in places by summer after
summer of not being put away promptly enough when rain began to fall, had now ripped
in several places, and it was only a matter of time, Isabel thought, before it would
give way altogether and deposit the person sitting on the chair unceremoniously on
the grass. She would not mind if that happened to her, or to Jamie—it seemed as if
deckchairs were designed to humiliate their owners, to trap their fingers, to dump
them on the ground—but she did not want it to happen to a visitor.

Now, sitting in the shade on that particularly hot day, Isabel struggled to eat a
slice of onion tart without distributing flaky crumbs of pastry or fragments of onion
all over her clothes. Jamie did not have that problem. He had disposed of his shirt
and had only an old pair of jeans to worry about. She glanced at him, and then glanced
away. There was no spare flesh on him, she thought; just muscle. She had always felt
that somehow it was unfair: Jamie never went to the gym. So did one get like
that, she wondered, just from playing the bassoon? She glanced at him again; his skin
was brown from exposure to the summer sun, and he was perfect. She wanted to touch
him. But did not, and instead looked up at the sky, which was empty.

“Do you believe in angels?”

He had not been paying attention; a bee had landed on his foot and he had leaned forward
to flick it off.

“Do I believe in eagles? Of course I do. Who doesn’t? You can see them flying about
in the Highlands.”

“Angels.”

“Oh, that’s another matter.”

Isabel looked back up at the sky. “There is no evidence for the existence of angels,
and I suppose we must reluctantly conclude that they don’t exist. It’s a pity, I think,
because I can just imagine them floating across a sky like this one.”

Jamie looked up.

“What’s that poem you quoted to me once?” he asked. “Something about Italy.”

Isabel closed her eyes. “ ‘Angels in Italy.’ Al Alvarez wrote it. He’s in Italy, in
the country …”

“Tuscany, of course.”

“Of course. And suddenly he sees angels. He says something about how they make no
sound, although their wings move. That’s how it starts.”

Jamie was intrigued. “Their wings make no sound? That’s what he says?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “And then he goes on to say that people down below are doing all
sorts of ordinary things—like cutting wood with a buzz-saw. And the leaves on the
vine rattle like dice. All while the angels are crossing the sky, until the clouds
take them.”

Jamie whispered again, savouring the words. “Until the clouds take them.”

Isabel was silent for a moment. Then she turned to face Jamie. He was watching her.
His eyes were kind. She reached out and laid a hand against his cheek and then let
it slip down to his shoulder. His skin was smooth. If he had wings, they would sprout
here, perhaps, right here; great wings; angel, angel.

For a few minutes nothing was said. She felt Jamie’s shoulder move slightly as he
breathed; she felt, she thought, his heartbeat. She willed him not to say anything,
not to disturb the moment. They looked at each other. His lips moved almost imperceptibly
into the slightest, the faintest of smiles.

And then it seemed right to speak. “I saw Eddie this morning,” she said.

He sounded drowsy. “Oh yes?”

“He wants to get engaged to a girl he’s met.”

Jamie smiled. “Good. Poor Eddie.”

“He’s still very young.”

Jamie thought that did not matter. “He thinks he’s old enough to set up home with
her. That’s what he wants.”

“Perhaps.” She paused. She had taken her hand away from his shoulder now. There had
been a moment, an extraordinarily intense moment, but it had passed and they had begun
to talk about Eddie. What had happened?

The deckchair canvas protested—a tiny, ripping sound as a bit more gave way. And then
it came to her: Auden’s poem. She had been thinking about “Angels in Italy” while
all the time she might have been remembering Auden’s “A Summer Night.” Was that not
about sitting outside, at night, in a deckchair in the company of friends; and with
Vega “conspicuous overhead”?
Auden had later described how during those few minutes sitting under the stars with
his friends he had experienced a mystical understanding of
agape
, that non-sexual love of others. He had been vouchsafed a glimpse of
agape
and it had stayed with him for some time before it had faded. Had she felt something
similar?