The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds

  He smiled. “Maybe.”

  “Yes. You come from a certain sector of society—a privileged one, if I may describe it as such—and yet you don’t identify with all that. In fact, you identify with the opposite. So you reject inherited wealth, but at the same time you know you’ve benefited from it. And your father …”

  She saw him stiffen slightly, but the moment quickly passed.

  “Your father is everything you don’t want to be. And yet you’re fond of him.” She hesitated, but only a second or two. “You want him to love you, but you think he doesn’t.”

  She stopped. Patrick was looking down at the tablecloth; his salad was barely touched. He spoke suddenly. “Pop doesn’t like me. That’s the problem.”

  She reached out across the table and touched his arm gently. “I don’t think that can be true.”

  “It is. He doesn’t like me because I’m gay. Did you know that? He can’t bring himself to accept it.”

  “Perhaps he needs time.”

  “He’s had a long time. Since I was sixteen and told him.”

  “He may need longer.”

  “He hasn’t got longer.”

  She wondered what he meant.

  “His heart,” he said, pointing to his chest. “He has a condition. He may be all right, but he could drop dead any moment.” He paused. “Put it this way: he wouldn’t get life insurance.”

  “I see.”

  She wanted time to think of the implications of this. If Duncan was unlikely to survive very long, then the issue of the fate of the painting became rather more pressing. So, if somebody wanted to stop the Poussin going to the nation, then he might think it necessary to act sooner rather than later. Her pasta was beginning to get cold. “I should tackle my lunch,” she said, twisting a couple of strands of tagliatelle round her fork.

  “Of course.” He was watching her. He seemed on the point of saying something, faltered, and then spoke. “Why do you suspect me?”

  The tagliatelle, made slippery by the sauce, unwound and fell off Isabel’s fork. She thought: Sensitive conversations and difficult-to-manage food do not go together.

  He was staring at her now with a look that seemed to combine challenge and reproach. “I don’t know why you think that,” she muttered. I’m being disingenuous, she realised; I know why he should think this. This self-reproach shamed her, and, after a brief hesitation, she continued: “Yes, I did think that. I considered the possibility, that is … And now, I’m not sure …” She trailed off.

  She found herself thinking about his political position. If that were as it seemed to be, then he would have no interest in preventing the Poussin from going to the nation—in fact, that was exactly what he would want. Unless that same political position could prompt him to relieve an insurance company of whatever sum might be payable as a reward … The doubt resurfaced.

  “Well, I can tell you something,” he said. “It’s not very nice being suspected of stealing from your own father.”

  “No,” she said. “It can’t be. And look, I’m sorry: all I said was that I had considered the possibility. That’s all. I’m not accusing you of anything.”

  He sat back in his chair. “My life’s a bit of a mess,” he said. “I accept that.”

  She asked him why.

  “Emotionally,” he said. “I’ve had bad luck with a relationship. I love somebody, you see, who can’t love me back. It can’t work.”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Thank you. I’ve loved him for a long time. Fourteen years, in fact, which is almost half my life. Since I was fourteen.”

  She was silent.

  “I’ve tried to do something about it. I’ve tried to forget. But I keep thinking of him, and all I want is to be with him. That’s all. That’s it.”

  She felt a pang of sympathy. She had loved John Liamor, and for a few years after that had come to an end she had felt the same way. But she had recovered, as most people in that position do after a while. Time does its work; a scab builds up over the emotional wound and protects it. Only if you scratch does it bleed again. Was he scratching at it? she wondered.

  “Do you mind?” he asked.

  “Mind? Mind about what?”

  “Mind about my speaking of this.”

  She was quick to reassure him. “Of course not.”

  He closed his eyes briefly, as if to deal with some pain within him. “I was sent to boarding school. That’s what they did—still do—that class. It was thought to be the only education worth having.”

  “I know,” said Isabel. “It’s hard to believe that now.”

  “I went to a place up north. It takes girls too now, but in those days it was just boys. It was, I suppose, quite good academically, but it had this big thing about rugby too. We all had to play. I hated it.”

  “It’s not for everyone,” said Isabel. “We had to play lacrosse, which is equally not for everyone.”

  He smiled. “Those places …”

  “… are behind us,” said Isabel. She had been happy enough at school, and she felt vaguely disloyal now to be suggesting otherwise. “I wasn’t really unhappy,” she corrected. “I suppose I resented the restrictions on freedom, but what teenager doesn’t?”

  Patrick was silent for a moment. Then he continued. “I don’t know why I should be telling you this. I don’t normally talk about it.”

  She encouraged him. “If you don’t normally talk about it, then perhaps it’s something that wants to be talked about.”

  He looked away. “Yes. This person I fell in love with. He knew. I never told him—never dared—but he knew. And he was very kind. He didn’t tell me to get lost or anything, he just gave me his friendship. That was all. He couldn’t reciprocate what I felt, but he said to me that I was his best friend. He said that when we were fourteen, and I thought about it and thought about it. Not a day went past, not a day, but that I remembered what he said.”

  He paused. “Do you mind if I go on?”

  She shook her head.

  “You see, I don’t know if other people get this. People don’t necessarily empathise. I feel that you do, though. You seem the type to understand, if I may say so. I suppose that’s why Alex persuaded my father that you would be the person to help him.”

  The remark might have passed unnoticed. Isabel’s thoughts had begun to drift; she had been thinking about the other boy, trying to envisage him. She saw two boys on a cross-country run, against a backdrop of the Scottish hills, their hair soaked by the rain, shins streaked with mud; and she saw, for some odd reason, a deer that was watching them from the edge of a forest. The deer had a look of frightened interest, the look that would precede its bounding off into the covering darkness of the trees; and one of the boys had a heart that ached, and the other was looking up at the sky, at the veils of gentle rain, like thin muslin curtains across the landscape, and …

  She gave a start. “Sorry. You said …” She collected her thoughts. The deer had bounded off, the boys were gone. “You said that your sister persuaded your father that he should speak to me. Did you say that?”

  He was surprised by her interest. “Yes.”

  “How did you know that?”

  He shrugged. “Martha told me. I saw her a couple of days ago. Or rather, she saw me and came and buttonholed me about the Cockburn Association—she’s a big supporter and she knows that I approve of them.”

  “Martha told you,” Isabel half muttered.

  “Yes. She said that Alex was very keen to get you involved. She was the one who pushed for it once she mentioned your name.”

  “Who mentioned my name?” asked Isabel.

  Patrick looked at his watch. “Martha did,” he said. “But look, I have to get back to work. We’ve got a meeting. Some company’s coming to make a presentation to us.”

  “Wanting money?”

  He nodded, and signalled to the waitress for the bill. “Everyone wants money.”

  Everyone wants money, thought Isabel
. Yes.

  She suddenly felt emboldened to ask him, “Why do you work with money if you have such a low opinion of the financial world?”

  He was clearly surprised by her question, but not offended; he smiled before he answered, “I needed a job. Simple.”

  “Not because you wanted a job that paid well?”

  He shook his head. “I live pretty simply. And the job involves investment in products that make people better. Should that be a problem?” He looked at her, as if working something out. “My sister said something, didn’t she?”

  Isabel had carefully avoided passing on Alex’s comment, but Patrick had divined what lay behind her question. He did not wait for her to confirm or deny it. “She accuses me of being venal, but you know something: when people accuse others of something, it’s because they see themselves as being guilty of that precise thing. Yes?”

  Isabel agreed. She had often observed as much.

  “She’s the one who’s interested in money,” Patrick said. “Her fiancé—I don’t know whether you’ve met him, but he’s had two marriages already and three children. He was cleaned out financially—completely cleaned out, and the kids are at fee-paying schools, so that’s thirty thousand all told a year, out of taxed income. He must be pretty hard up, and Alex earns nothing, or more or less nothing. I suspect she secretly can’t wait for my father to go. She’ll want to get her hands on anything that’s not actually nailed down.”

  Isabel listened carefully. If she had been looking for a motive for Alex to be behind the theft, then she could not have hoped for a clearer statement of it.

  The bill had been brought to the table, and Patrick was extracting his wallet.

  “Please let me pay,” said Isabel.

  He put his wallet back. “That’s kind of you,” he said. “Thank you.”

  She had one last question, and she put it playfully, as if she were not quite serious about it. “She wouldn’t be behind it, would she?”

  He frowned. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because you’ve just described to me how she needs money. She might also be unwilling for the Poussin to go to the National Gallery. After all, that’s a loss to your father’s estate of several million pounds.” She watched for the effect of her words.

  He shook his head vehemently. “Definitely not. No. She wouldn’t. I know her, and she wouldn’t.”

  “Or her fiancé?”

  He was equally adamant. “No. Not him. Definitely.”

  He stood up. “Thank you for what you’ve been doing for my father,” he said. “He and I may not be close, but I love him, you know.”

  She shook hands, keeping his hand for slightly longer than one would normally do with a handshake.

  “I suspect he loves you too.”

  He looked at her wryly; disbelievingly.

  “And there’s another thing,” she said, lowering her voice. “You told me about your feelings for the person you loved. You told me about your efforts to forget. I had exactly the same problem, you know. I was married to somebody who didn’t love me or, if he did, had an odd way of showing it. I got over him eventually, but it took a long, long time. I didn’t forget him, though. That’s not the way to do it—”

  She had not finished, but Patrick was already beginning to move away. He does not want my advice, thought Isabel, because he’s not ready to stop loving. Love was a bit like alcohol in that way: the alcoholic would not listen to advice until he was ready to stop drinking. Love was a little bit like that; not always, but it could be.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THEY LAY IN BED late the next morning, Charlie sleeping between them. He had awakened early and Jamie had played with him for half an hour or so before bringing him into bed with them. The early start had caught up with the child, and now he had dropped off again, clutching a teddy bear and the already threadbare blanket he liked to drag around with him.

  “Look at his eyelids,” said Isabel, her voice lowered. “He’s dreaming.”

  Jamie propped himself up on an elbow and gazed at Charlie. “How strange that we made him,” he said. “This infinitely complex collection of cells is our son. We made him.”

  Isabel smiled. “Or facilitated him. The spark comes from somewhere else.”

  Jamie looked into her eyes. “And becomes Mozart.”

  “In Mozart’s case, it did,” said Isabel. She frowned. “We haven’t sorted out the mathematics problem.”

  Jamie shook his head. “I went to see her again, but let’s not talk about it just now. She’s hard to read. Tell me about yesterday.”

  He had been back late from a concert in Glasgow, and Isabel had already been asleep when he had come into the bedroom shortly before midnight. They had seen one another briefly in the afternoon, when Charlie had been handed over.

  She sighed. “I had lunch with Patrick.”

  Jamie looked blank. “Patrick?”

  “Duncan Munrowe’s son.”

  “Oh yes.” He remembered now. He stroked Charlie’s hand gently. The small fingers moved, gripped the teddy.

  Isabel told him about the meeting. “He’s certainly not behind it,” she concluded. “I don’t think he has any reason to be.”

  “Whereas his sister has?” said Jamie.

  Isabel nodded. “Yes, every financial reason. Her fiancé has two expensive divorces behind him. She doesn’t work.”

  “Being hard up doesn’t make you a criminal,” Jamie pointed out.

  “Of course not.”

  “And you said that Patrick was adamant that it couldn’t be her. He must know his own sister.”

  Isabel thought about this. “Unless he was protecting her.” It was an idea to be dismissed as soon as it was raised. “Which I think is unlikely.”

  She waited for him to say something, but he was silent. Charlie shifted his limbs slightly, but was still fast asleep. Jamie looked at the boy, then at Isabel, and smiled.

  “However,” Isabel said. “However …”

  Jamie looked at her expectantly.

  “However, he said something else which struck me as being very significant.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “He said that Martha suggested me in passing but that it was Alex who really pushed for me to be involved. She was the one.”

  Jamie shrugged. “I don’t see what difference it makes,” he said. “You. Martha. Duncan. What’s the difference?”

  Isabel lay back on her pillow and stared at the ceiling. “I think it all adds up. Alex wanted to have suspicion focused on her brother in order to deflect any suspicion that might otherwise be attached to her. So what does she do? She gets somebody else involved—somebody into whose ear she can pour poison.”

  Charlie stirred now, his eyes opening. He half turned towards Isabel, before turning to Jamie and reaching for his hand. Jamie said: “Look, he’s taken my hand.” But Isabel’s mind was elsewhere. It could be that Patrick had asked Martha to invite her to intervene. Then, to throw suspicion on his sister, he would say that she had recommended Isabel’s involvement. And as for his firm rejection of the possibility that Alex was behind the theft, that again could be a deliberate deception. He might think that Isabel thought that he was deliberately covering for his sister, thus increasing the level of suspicion under which Alex laboured.

  Or neither of them was involved. Both could be completely innocent. Isabel remembered her university logic classes all those years ago. She had been taught to deal with possibilities in a rational, ordered way. Formal logic dictated that you moved from what you knew to what implications may flow from your knowledge. It required one to weigh evidence and reach conclusions on the basis of those implications. Applied here, the principles of formal logic led to the conclusion that in the absence of any further evidence, responsibility for the theft of the painting could be attributed to neither Alex nor Patrick.

  Isabel closed her eyes.

  “I’m getting up,” said Jamie. “I’m going to give breakfast to this wee man.”
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  “Lots of breakfast,” said Charlie. “Lots of egg. Lots of egg. Egg and Marmite toast.”

  “Egg and Marmite toast,” agreed Jamie. “A very good choice.” Marmite, that salty yeast paste so adored by Britons and so vigorously disliked by Americans, was not the first choice of the average child, but was craved by Charlie, just as he relished olives and, more recently, garlic.

  They left the room and Isabel lay alone in the bed. She stretched out her left leg, lazily, and felt the warmth of the sheet where Jamie had been lying: his heat shadow, as she thought of it; like the heat shadows of those unfortunate residents of Pompeii who were consumed by the lava but who left the outline of their forms on the stone. She had lived with him now for a sufficiently long time to forget, or at least find it hard to remember, what it was like before him, before this young man had moved into her life and into her home, possessing both; so that she dreamed of him and felt his presence about her, a cloak of comfort. And when he was not there, when he was in Glasgow rehearsing or, as occasionally happened, he went abroad for some concert—he had been the previous month to Amsterdam, to play at a music festival—she felt his absence keenly. She always knew where he was, she realised; which made her think of how important it was for us to know what others are doing. When we met friends, for instance, and asked them what they had been doing, we really did want to know. But why? It was, she thought, because of our sense of being with others; our need to anchor ourselves in a network of friends and acquaintances. This was our bulwark, our dyke against the sea of loneliness that we were only too aware washed about us.

  She got out of bed, showered and then dressed for the day. She was under the shower for longer than she had intended—it was not good for the skin, she believed, but it was certainly good for thinking, just as walking was. And under the shower that morning it occurred to her that there was a further motive for the theft that she had yet to consider. She had assumed all along that what the thieves really wanted was money—the reward from the insurance company. But what if the real object were the Poussin? What if the person who stole the painting had no intention of collecting the reward but actually wanted the painting for itself? If that were true, then the negotiations for the reward could be just a smokescreen—to make it look like a financially motivated theft.