The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (9) (8 page)

“They will,” said Isabel. “I remember my mother, but the memories are sometimes fuzzy,
like a film that’s not quite in focus. I remind myself by looking at photographs and
by thinking about her.”

Isabel thought for a moment:
If she could only walk in through that door. If she could only do that …

They were both silent. Then Duncan glanced at his watch before looking out of the
window, as if expecting somebody. His appointment in Nelson Street, Isabel imagined;
his daughter opening the door to him, a kiss on the cheek, the exchange of small talk,
a cup of tea—how precious. She noticed the watch, which was thin, and made of rose
gold. It was discreet, understated. It was exactly right for him.

“Alex has been very upset by the whole business,” he said. “She was particularly attached
to that painting—she always has been. I keep off the subject because it’s just too
painful for her.”

Isabel thought this quite understandable. She was reminded
of a picture of her own that she could not bear to lose—a drawing by James Cowie of
a boy, one of his Hospitalfield portraits. Cowie drew the young people whom he taught;
they were delicate portraits, entirely natural, catching what the language of James
VI’s time referred to as “man’s innocency.”
Innocency
: what a wonderful word, and different, in some indefinable way, from
innocence
. The difference, she thought, lay in the poetry.

“And I must confess it’s painful for me too,” Duncan suddenly added. “I suppose I’m
mourning that picture. Or that’s what it feels like.”

He reached for the raincoat he had draped over a chair. “I’ll tell Martha about our
meeting,” he said. “She’ll be pleased.”

Isabel inclined her head. “Good.”

Duncan rose to his feet. “Dear Martha.”

Isabel was not sure what to say. So she said, “Of course.”

It was the best thing to come out with in any circumstances in which one was at a
loss for anything more. “Of course” fitted most occasions, as it meant that whatever
the other person had said was perfectly understandable, and indeed correct; which
is what most of us want to hear.

“Although she can occasionally go on a bit,” he added.

Isabel noticed that there were the traces of a smile about his lips.

“Of course,” she said. “But we all can, can’t we?”

“Of course,” he said.

They went to the counter, where he paid the bill. “I’ll be in touch, if I may, when
we hear from … from these people.”

“Please do.”

“And we’d very much like you to come out to the house. Come and have dinner and stay
the night. You and your husband. And little …”

“Charlie.”

“Yes, Charlie too. Would you like to do that?”

She said she would. She was intrigued. But it was more than that. She had taken a
liking to this man—to the subtle and sensitive mind that she had detected beneath
the unlikely exterior. And she felt sympathy for him. He had lost a painting that
he loved and that he had been, generously, intending to give to the nation. The thieves,
then, had not just stolen from a private individual, they had stolen from the whole
nation. If she could help to deal with that—even if she had no real idea what she
could possibly do—then she would do it.

They said goodbye on the pavement outside. He turned and walked back into Bruntsfield,
on his way to visit his daughter in Nelson Street. Isabel watched him go and reflected
on how a casual observer, driving past, perhaps, and seeing him in the street, might
come to entirely the wrong conclusion: might see a rather formal, even slightly military
figure, might take him to be exactly what in one sense he was—a country gentleman—and
would not imagine for a moment that this was a man who knew, and cared about, art;
who could mourn the loss of a picture. But then we can misjudge one another so easily,
she thought; so easily.

CHAPTER FIVE
 

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY
, which was a Saturday, Jamie was playing in a concert in St. Cecilia’s Hall and Isabel
had a ticket. Grace had agreed to look after Charlie and arrived early so that she
could do his dinner and give him his bath too. Isabel would have preferred to do that
herself, but she knew how much Grace enjoyed her time with Charlie and so she did
not begrudge it.

“And perhaps give him a quick mathematics lesson,” she said.

She spoke jokingly, but Grace was immediately defensive.

“I only do that when he’s fresh and in a mood to absorb things,” she said reproachfully.
“The end of the day is no time for that sort of thing.”

Isabel made a conciliatory gesture. “Absolutely not.” She thought of something else
to say. “Could you put some of that oil in his bath? His skin seemed a little dry
the other day.”

Grace looked sideways at Isabel. “But I always do. You have to be careful about that.”

If she always did it, then the implication was that Isabel was at fault. “I am careful,”
she said, meeting Grace’s gaze.

They heard Charlie playing in the morning room with Jamie,
and Grace went through to greet them. Isabel retreated into her study.
You have to be careful
. Of course she was careful about dry skin—as if she did not know about it. It was
too much—did Grace think that she knew more about looking after children than Isabel
did? It was ridiculous. She looked up at the ceiling. No, it was not really ridiculous:
what was ridiculous was her own attitude to Grace’s entirely understandable lack of
tact. All that Grace wanted to show her was that she knew what she was doing, and
the reason why she felt she had to do this was because she thought that she—Isabel—would
not think that she knew … Isabel laughed, and the tension, the resentment, disappeared.

“What are you laughing at?”

It was Jamie, who had followed her into her study and was standing behind her. Isabel
crossed the room to close the door behind him—Grace had acute hearing.

“It’s something Grace said,” she explained. “She reminded me that you have to be careful
about children getting dry skin.”

“Charlie’s skin isn’t dry.”

“No, but sometimes it can get a bit on the dry side. If you don’t use that baby oil
stuff.”

“But I always do.”

She smiled. “Not you too! I didn’t say that you didn’t use it. I’m not accusing you.”

“But Grace is? Grace is accusing you of letting his skin get dry?”

Isabel laughed again. “No, this is becoming absurd. She just wanted me to know that
she knew about it. I got all huffy and came in here thinking what a cheek she had
and then realised that I had no reason to think that. And shouldn’t. So I stopped.
And that’s when you came in.”

Jamie shrugged. “An argument about nothing.”

Isabel agreed, but pointed out that a great deal of life was all about small things
like that: arguments about baby oil, about eggs, about who’s put something in the
wrong place. She had not yet mentioned the Korean mathematics book, but now she did.

“I meant to tell you. She’s giving him mathematics lessons.”

Jamie’s face fell. “You mean …”

“Yes, she’s taught him how to divide.”

“But I thought it was his natural ability …”

Isabel smiled. “It is. No amount of tuition would enable an untalented three-year-old
to divide. No, he’s obviously got ability.”

Jamie sat down. He looks cross, thought Isabel. First, the dry-skin affair, and now
mathematics.

“She should have asked us,” Jamie said eventually. “I mean, things like that—educational
matters—are parental affairs, wouldn’t you say? I wouldn’t try to teach some other
person’s child how to do mental arithmetic. Would you?”

Isabel sat on the arm of his chair. It was the most comfortable chair in the house
and it occupied pride of place in her study, where it had always been. Jamie liked
it and would sometimes sit reading in it while Isabel worked; she liked having him
there, but his presence did not help her to work. Isabel had always found it difficult
to concentrate with other people in the room; they distracted her, as she found herself
wondering what they were thinking. It would be fascinating to have some sort of printout
of the thoughts of other people—a stream-of-consciousness report. It would read, she
suspected, like a badly constructed novel, by an author who had no sense of the flow
of narrative.
Look at her. Where did she get that? I had something like that back when I was living
in that flat. Who lives there now?
Did I turn the iron off? I’m feeling a bit hot. What did the weather forecast say?
Bill hasn’t telephoned. He said he would
. And so on, for page after page.

She addressed his question. “It’s different with Grace. She has a lot of responsibility
for Charlie. She’s not quite family, but she’s close enough. And that makes her an
important part of his life.”

He looked up at her. “I suppose so. But still …”

“Yes,” she said. “But still.”

“I’d like to see the book.”

She suggested he ask her.

He got up out of the chair. “We still need to think about all that. We need to ask
ourselves whether we really want him to have lessons at this point. I’m not sure that
I want to turn him into a performing monkey.”

Neither did Isabel.

“And there’s another thing,” said Jamie. “You have to be careful how you teach things.
Music teachers are very careful about teaching very young children. You can get it
all wrong and then they grow up with bad habits. Or you can ruin their lips—you don’t
let small children play brass, for example.”

“We need to talk to her,” she said. “Both of us. But not now.”

“When?”

She sighed. “After the weekend.” She wanted to enjoy the concert and did not want
to go out after a row with Grace. But there was more to it: she also wanted to make
it easy for Grace; she did not believe in painting people into a corner and making
them lose face. So she would have to work out a method of doing it that would mean
that Grace would believe it was her decision. It would not be easy, and Isabel had
to admit that she had no idea how she could possibly do this.

THEY WALKED
to St. Cecilia’s Hall. The weather had held and the evening air was balmy. In the
Meadows, the large slice of park that separated Edinburgh’s Old Town from the Victorian
suburbs to the south, spontaneous games had sprung up: rounders played by a mixture
of parents and eight-year-olds; a small game of cricket with only five or six fielders
and a tennis ball. Isabel looked up at the branches of the trees that formed a canopy
above the footpath they were following. The trees were in full leaf, but sky still
showed through gaps in the foliage, a fading blue with drifting lace-like clouds.
It made her dizzy to look at clouds when they were moving, as these were, and Isabel
reached for Jamie’s arm so that they might stop for a moment.

“Look at those clouds,” she said. “They’re very high. Cirrus, I think.”

Jamie looked up too. “I don’t know the names. Does it help if you know the names?”

She shrugged. “In the same way as it helps to know the names of trees. Or flowers.
People tend to know about trees and flowers, but not about clouds. Strange, isn’t
it?”

“Maybe it’s because they’re always there,” said Jamie. “We take for granted things
that are always there.”

As they continued on their way, Isabel felt a deep sense of contentment. There were
other cities where, on an equally fine evening, much the same scenes as these would
be played out. There were cities of equal or similar beauty: Venice, Vienna, St. Petersburg.
But this place, this city, this particular sky was
hers
, the place where the accident of birth had placed her. And she knew it so well; knew
each turn of its winding streets; each cliff-face of ascending stone; each sweep of
skyline.

As they made their way down Forest Road, and passed Sandy Bell’s Bar, she remembered
how, some years ago, she had been there with that man who had had the heart transplant.
And before that, she had been there to listen to the music, and had heard Hamish Henderson
sing “Freedom Come All Ye” and his heartbreaking “Banks of Sicily”; and a young Irishman
launch into “Sam Hall.” He had had such expressive eyes, and had sung as if he meant
every word—“My name it is Sam Hall, and I
curse
you, one and all.”

And in Candlemaker Row she remembered how she had walked down there not all that long
ago with Jamie after a concert in Greyfriars Church, and they had talked about the
Covenanters, or she had thought about them—she could not quite remember which. She
slipped her hand into his.

“Nervous?”

He shook his head. “I like what we’re playing tonight. And it’s not very demanding
for me—the benefits of being down on the bass line.”

When they arrived, Jamie went into the green room with his fellow musicians, leaving
Isabel to choose a seat in the upstairs room. The concert was part of a series organised
by the Early Scottish Music Society, and there was to be a drinks reception afterwards,
for which preparations were already being made. Jamie had suggested that they stay
for this, as it was an opportunity for the performers, who otherwise would not have
time to socialise, to get to know one another. Isabel was happy to agree; she had
friends who had season tickets to these concerts and they might be there.