The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds

  “Yes. There was a small literature on it before Blunt made his attribution. Prior to that, it was thought to be by a seventeenth-century Veronese painter. Then Blunt looked at it and gave it the nod. His word counted for more than anything else at the time.”

  “Anthony Blunt?”

  Duncan smiled. “The very same. Better known as a spy than as the authority on Poussin, I suspect.” He paused, and glanced quickly at his watch. He was anxious—she could see that.

  “When did he see it?”

  “In the mid-seventies. A guest recognised it—a distant cousin of my father’s who happened to be an art historian. He had been at the Courtauld during Blunt’s reign there, and he knew him well enough to phone him up and tell him about it. He said that he was sure enough to encourage Blunt to come up to look at it—my father was unwilling to let it leave the house. He was very attached to that painting.”

  “So Blunt came up?”

  “Yes, he did. He was very grand, apparently. Very tall and with a certain haughty detachment. He could look right through you, my father said. I remember his saying that Blunt’s look was like ice.”

  Isabel had read something to that effect. And yet Blunt was human; others had spoken of his generosity, his kindness, his warmth. “Perhaps he wanted to keep people at a distance. Shyness sometimes has the same effect, and then we reach the conclusion that somebody is cold, when in fact they’re just reserved.”

  Duncan agreed. “Yes, people are very quick to dismiss others they’ve never met. Blunt kept his distance, I imagine, and I don’t see what’s wrong with that. I can’t understand why people expect everyone to open up immediately to everyone they meet.” He looked at her, as if assessing whether they could speak at this greater level of intimacy. “Reticence can be a virtue, don’t you think?”

  Isabel was not sure. “Keeping yourself to yourself? Possibly …”

  Duncan continued. “Not wearing your heart on your sleeve. Not displaying your private life for all to see.”

  “As on those television programmes? Where people expose their relationship problems to the public gaze?”

  He nodded. “Exactly. We live in an age where the assumption is made that you can—perhaps should—talk about every aspect of your life, even to complete strangers.”

  “Some would simply call that honesty,” Isabel suggested. And she thought of a line from Auden where he talked about being honest like children. It was from the Freud poem; Auden said that Freud taught us the benefit of such honesty. Children were honest—often disarmingly so—but could an adult be the same?

  Duncan shifted slightly further down the settee, away from her—as if distancing himself—putting into practice the reticence to which he had just referred. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m not being rude—or unduly reticent. It’s just that the sun was getting in my eyes.”

  A beam of morning sun, warm and discrete, a shaft of yellow, was coming in through a window on the side of the room; it was this that he had shifted to avoid. A yellow knife, thought Isabel; a yellow knife through the air of the room.

  “Yes, we have to be honest,” he said. “But honesty is not incompatible with a certain reserve, or reticence—call it what you will. Call it privacy, perhaps. It makes sense, I should have thought, to talk about a sense of privacy. People have every right to some degree of privacy and perhaps that’s what reserved people feel. They value their privacy.”

  Isabel had nothing against that. She, too, believed that there were areas of our lives that we were entitled to guard against the eyes of others. People may have nothing to hide in their living rooms, but they were entitled to curtains that would keep others from looking in.

  “What you say is interesting,” she said. “And I think I agree with you—for the most part.”

  He smiled. “Good. I imagined that we might agree on quite a number of subjects.”

  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—c
ould 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

  ISABEL 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 starin
g 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.”

  Isabel persisted. “It was very rude of me.”

  Heather Darnt looked up at her, and Isabel felt her eyes again move helplessly to the birthmark. Now the lawyer looked amused. “You don’t have to apologise. I’m used to it.”

  “The painting …,” began Duncan, in an obvious attempt to move the conversation on.

  “Yes,” said the lawyer. “The Poussin.”

  She pronounced it Powsinn, and Isabel noticed a flicker of amusement cross Duncan’s face. And so did the lawyer.

  “Clearly, I mispronounce it,” she said calmly. “I very evidently don’t have your advantages.”

  Isabel winced. “We all know what we’re referring to. It doesn’t matter how one pronounces it.”

  The lawyer looked at her with amusement. “Sometimes pronunciation matters a lot.”

  Isabel looked away. There were some encounters that started off on the wrong foot and never recovered. This was one of them.

  “The painting,” said Duncan. And then, correcting himself, “My painting.”

  Heather Darnt busied herself with removing a paper clip from the top of a sheet of paper, and then slipping it back into position. Isabel watched her: She’s the nervous one, she thought. I have no cause to be anxious, nor does Duncan; but she does.

  “Where is the painting?” Isabel asked suddenly. “Have you seen it?”

  The lawyer did not look at her as she answered. “I believe that the painting is in Scotland. I don’t know exactly where in Scotland, but it’s still here.” She paused. “Have I seen it? The answer to that is no.”