The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds

  She looked at the author’s biographical details. He was affiliated to the University of Manitoba and was a graduate of the University of Toronto. There was no further clue to where he came from. He sounded as if he was writing from the perspective of a Canadian aboriginal, or a member of a First Nations group—the terminology, Isabel knew, was sensitive and she was never sure exactly what was considered appropriate and what was not. But he did not say he was a member of such a group. And, anyway, did it make a difference to his argument?

  She imagined what the author would say if she rejected the paper. “There! Proves it! Bias. Prejudice. Silencing of the challenging view.” No, she would not allow herself to think of that, because it was irrelevant to her decision, or should be. The real test was whether this was a defensible, well-expressed view—and it was both of those. And she was certainly not reaching that decision because she wanted to overrule Professor Lettuce. That would be very satisfactory, but it was a pleasure that should have no bearing on her editorial decision. What the paper presented was uncomfortable, perhaps, and the author’s conclusions might seem harsh and unsympathetic, but it was representative of a viewpoint that had found considerable support in Canadian officialdom and could hardly be dismissed on the basis that it caused discomfort. In, she thought. Publish. Lettuce will be green with anger, but that is not why I’m doing it, she hurriedly told herself: the pleasure of flouting Lettuce’s opinion was a collateral benefit, nothing more. No, she reminded herself; I must not think that. I must rise above Schadenfreude and such pettiness. I must do the right thing because it is the right thing, and for that reason alone. She got to her feet. The window of her study was half open, and she could pick up the scent of summer—the smell of vegetation, of humidity in the air, of a world of humming insects and mulch, of life.

  She gazed out of the window. It was close to midday and was not a time when Brother Fox usually showed himself. Foxes liked the watches of the night, or the early hours of a summer morning when the human world was silent. But now he was there, poised halfway between a tunnel of old lavender bushes and the sheltering panoply of a late-flowering rhododendron. The rhododendron provided his heartland, the vulpine headquarters from which he planned his raids. Now he was briefly out in the open and seemed, for a few moments, to be enjoying the sun on his back. He lifted his head and sniffed, and then, quite suddenly, dropped to the ground and rolled over on to his back. Isabel gasped, thinking she had witnessed a death, but it was not that—it was a roll, a brief, hedonistic revelling in the sheer joy of being in the sun, of being warm and of being alive. Within a few seconds he was back on his feet and had resumed his journey; the dappling shadows had him now; he was gone. She felt disappointed. She wanted him to stay; she wanted him to engage with her. But she knew that he would not. She was nothing to him, even if he understood, as she hoped he did, that she was not an adversary. We are often nothing to the things that fascinate us, or the things we love; she was well aware of that. Charlie, though, did not know that; the world loved him, he believed, because he loved it. Trains loved him, toy cars loved him, long-suffering stuffed toys loved him too, just as he loved them. It was an example of perfect mutuality that would end soon enough—when he discovered that the world did not centre upon him, that it was sometimes cruel and that love given was not always reciprocated. When would that be? When he was six? Eight? Or did that realisation come much later, in adult life, perhaps, when the first big disappointments struck, when it first dawned upon us that we were not, as we secretly believed in our youth, as deserving of love and success as we had previously imagined? Charlie, dear Charlie, she whispered, may you be protected from that until the last possible moment, and even then may it seem a small cloud on your horizon, a tiny shadow on your landscape. May that be your fate, my darling, my darling boy.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE IDEA OCCURRED to Isabel later that day, shortly after she had collected Charlie from nursery school. It came as she was walking home—a short journey in her steps but an odyssey in Charlie’s—an odyssey that was interrupted by stops to examine objects found or spotted: a piece of paper lying in the gutter, a twig from one of the trees whose boughs overhung the garden walls along the road, a feather from a seagull. The gulls, unwelcome guests in the neighbourhood, occasionally conducted aerial battles, mewing and screeching in outrage over some infringement of territory, some obscure gull slight. Charlie, who for some reason could not manage the word seagull, called them seagirls, and Isabel now did too, in the way in which we take from our children their special words, their mispronunciations, which strike us as such fitting, attractive neologisms.

  “Seagirls cross,” said Charlie, looking skywards.

  Isabel, however, did not hear this comment, as the idea had dawned on her and it seemed to her that this was the obvious thing to do. It was an unlikely thing to do, of course, and it might not survive close examination, but she could try it.

  Why not?

  “The seagirls …,” Charlie repeated, looking at his mother for support.

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “The seagirls.” But she did not expand. “Come on, Charlie. Let’s hurry.”

  He tugged at her hand. “The seagirls …”

  She picked him up. “Let’s just go home, Charlie. The seagirls will be all right. I don’t think they need us.” She paused. “Chocolate pudding.”

  It never failed: the ultimate, fool-proof bribe. Even so, Charlie sought confirmation. “Chocolate pudding?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “When we get back.”

  He was silent for the rest of the journey, thinking, perhaps, of the treat that lay ahead. And when Isabel arrived back at the house, she found that Grace was only too happy to take Charlie into the kitchen and prepare the treat for him. Grace indulged Charlie, and would have willingly provided chocolate pudding in vast quantities, had Isabel permitted it.

  She went into her study and took three pieces of writing paper from the stationery drawer. Sitting down at her desk, she pushed aside the small pile of papers on which she had been working that morning—the papers on the ethics of adoption—and began the first of the letters. The wording, she had decided, would be identical: the only difference being the name in the salutation. She wrote first to Duncan: Dear Duncan, I have found out what has happened. Obviously, I need to talk to you privately about this, as the last thing, I imagine, that you would want would be for it to become a public matter, with all that it would entail for the family. I assure you I shall be discreet. With kind regards, Isabel Dalhousie.

  She looked at the handwritten letter and reached for another sheet of notepaper. Kind regards was wrong. Not only did it sound slightly contrived, but she was not sure that regards could be kind: they could be warm regards, they could be best regards, but kindness, surely, was something that would be in the heart of the person sending the regards and it would be unduly self-congratulatory to impute kindness to oneself. Perhaps it would be better to write With all best wishes, but then she thought: Does this letter really come with all best wishes? It did not. Yours aye was an appropriately Scottish ending to a letter, but it meant Yours ever, and it implied long and loyal sentiments. These were not there. Yours was best, then—the simple contraction of Yours sincerely or, indeed, of Yours faithfully or Yours truly. What had she been taught at school? Isabel remembered those lessons in that stuffy classroom where Miss … what was her name? … McLaren or Maclaurin had taught them the etiquette of correspondence. “Don’t forget, girls,” she had said, “you will be judged by your competence to write a letter. So remember the rules. Never, ever write Yours sincerely in a formal or business letter. We are not sincere in such letters, girls; we are, by contrast, faithful.” At which Amanda … what was her name, the first girl in the class to report on experience with a boy? (experience being the term used darkly by the teachers to warn of the consequences of such things)—she, that Amanda, had sniggered and whispered, “Speak for yourself!” Amanda … Amanda … Isabel looked up at
the ceiling. Amanda Weir—that was her name. She was two divorces down the line now, Isabel had heard, both because she had gone off with somebody else, and that was presumably because faithfulness had meant so little to her. Amanda Weir had grown into unhappiness because she did not realise that happiness came from sticking at things—things that often seemed mundane, prosaic, boring, unglamorous.

  Isabel rewrote the letter in exactly the same terms as her first attempt, inserting only the deliberately perfunctory Yours, Isabel. She reread the letter, and then wrote an identical one addressed to Alex and one to Patrick. Next, she addressed the envelopes, wrote Strictly Personal on the top left-hand corner of each, and went into the kitchen to inform Grace that she was going out briefly to the postbox. A scene of chocolate chaos greeted her: chocolate smeared around Charlie’s mouth, chocolate on his hands and across the front of his shirt. Grace smiled guiltily. “I tried,” she said. “I’ll put him in the bath afterwards.”

  Isabel returned the smile. “Such happiness,” she muttered.

  AFTER SHE HAD POSTED the letters in the small postbox on the corner, Isabel stood for a moment and considered what she had done. She often did this after consigning something important to the post; she stood and reflected. Posting something was a simple act, but it could be the first of a sequence of important events that changed one’s world, or somebody else’s. The letter of application for a job that might take one far from home; that might result in one’s meeting the person with whom one would spend one’s life … A letter could change so much, could create just as much as it might destroy.

  Isabel imagined what the effect might be of the letters she had just put through the mouth of the postbox. What if she changed her mind? Could one ever recall a letter after posting it? It would surely be impossible. Letters lay in the postbox until the next collection—which she noticed was barely an hour away—and then they were removed by the postman when he passed by in his van. One might stand by the postbox and ask him for the letter back, but surely he could never accede to such a request. How would he know that the letter was yours? And once a letter was handed over to the postal authorities they were, she presumed, the legal custodian of that letter until it was handed over to the intended recipient. But they did not own it, she thought, because the letter and its contents remained your property until it was given to the person named on the envelope. So surely you could ask for the return of your own property? No, she decided, you could not; it was not that simple.

  For a few moments Isabel wondered whether she had made a bad mistake. She had claimed that she had found out what happened, but it was simply not true, and if she were to be asked to expand on it, she would have nothing to say. But that was the whole point, she decided: she hoped that two of the three would ask her what had happened, while the third would not. And the reason for that was that the third would know and would not need to enquire. Unless, of course, all three asked, which would suggest that all were innocent. Yet the guilty could affect ignorance; there was that to consider, and sometimes the guilty were adept at it—more adept than the innocent might be in the assertion of their innocence.

  She moved away from the postbox. It was too late: the stone had been thrown into the pond and all she could do was to return home and wait for the ripples to break—if there were to be any. As Isabel walked back down the road, the seagulls’ cries were now a Greek chorus, or so it seemed to her. She looked up at them as they circled overhead. Their earlier dispute resolved, their mewing was now less strident, but some, at least, appeared to be directed at her. Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns … And then there were the lilies to be considered; they neither spun nor weaved and yet Solomon in all his glory … She stopped herself. The wisdom of Solomon. Would he have written such a letter? Possibly, she thought. Possibly.

  JAMIE WAS TEACHING that afternoon and returned in a bad mood. This was unusual for him, and Isabel knew that it would not last; Jamie’s temper was equable, and although he might manage a few minutes of silence, he seemed incapable of sustained grumpiness. Cat was the past master at that: she could sustain a huff for days on end, sometimes to the extent of forgetting—Isabel suspected—the original cause of her annoyance. Isabel had often thought that much the same thing happened in those puzzling animosities between whole nations: although there might be fresh aggravations to keep relations on edge, the original casus belli of many of the great historical dislikes were shrouded. The Greeks and Turks disliked one another, and each could provide chapter and verse for why this was so, but behind many such recited wrongs there lay ancient animosities based on incidents that really were forgotten. Greeks and Turks … she remembered now. When she was six, or thereabouts, there had been a boy who lived in the next street whose parents had been friendly with hers. This boy, David, was brought by his mother to play with her and spent long afternoons in her company. His favourite game, which she tended to tire of well before he did, was one of his own invention, or so she believed, and it had been called “Greeks and Turks.” The memory of this game always brought a smile to Isabel’s lips, as the rules had been so simple. One person was the Greek and the other was the Turk. The Greek chased the Turk and then, on catching him or her, became the Turk, to be chased in turn by the Greek. There were no further implications to the game—it continued until either the Greek or the Turk fell over and grazed a knee, as sometimes happened, or decided that endless running around in pursuit of another was of waning interest. That conclusion was more frequently and more quickly reached by Isabel than by David, and reflected what the young Isabel was to discover as she became older: that boys and men were content to chase things while girls and women saw no point in such behaviour.

  Jamie’s bad mood, such as it was, had been caused by one of his pupils.

  “I don’t like that boy,” he said as he came into Isabel’s study. Charlie was having a nap, and Isabel was in the middle of a rare tidying session. There was so much paper, so many piles of books, that had she thought about it she too might well have decided to indulge herself in a bad mood. But in general, in the average marriage there is room for only one bad mood at a time and on that afternoon Jamie was there first.

  She shifted a pile of papers from one surface to another; the guilt that a pile of papers may induce can be so easily dissipated by a small move, she decided. “What boy? Thomas?”

  Thomas was a pupil of whom Jamie had spoken more than once—a boy, he complained, who persistently came to his music lesson without some important part of his bassoon—usually the crook, but often the reed or the sling. Jamie would always have a spare crook that he could lend him, but he disliked providing reeds, which had to be placed in the mouth. He had told Isabel about how he had tackled the subject with Thomas, telling him that one’s saliva was, as a general rule, best kept to oneself. Thomas had stared at him uncomprehendingly and had forgotten to bring his reed to the following lesson as well.

  “No,” said Jamie, flopping down in the armchair beside Isabel’s desk, “not Thomas. Barry.”

  Isabel picked up an unopened letter that had somehow escaped her attention and examined the postmark. “Barry?” The letter was postmarked two weeks earlier, and she winced.

  “He’s fourteen,” said Jamie. “And he has the most ghastly mother. He’s ghastly himself, but his mother is really seriously ghastly. And the father’s ghastly too. They’re nouveaux riches and wear really flashy clothes. Barry had this sort of shiny shirt on today and a belt made out of some endangered species. His father came to collect him and he was wearing sunglasses—very designer—and endangered shoes.”

  Isabel smiled. “They probably weren’t actually endangered. Some of these things are imitation crocodile, or lizard, or whatever it is. They’re just plastic.”

  Jamie was having none of this. “No, they’re not. Not in this case. You could tell that the father goes for the real thing. He probably shot his shoes himself.”

  Isabel raised an
eyebrow. Jamie was usually tolerant in his views, and rarely vituperative. And surely it could not just be Barry to set him off like this. “Anything else happened?” she asked casually.

  He was silent.

  “Nothing?” she asked.

  Jamie sighed. “There was a letter. It had been delivered to the flat. I told them—I told them two or three times that my mail was to come here, but these people are hopeless, just hopeless. You may as well save your breath.”

  Isabel said nothing. It was clearly nothing to do with Barry or his father’s shoes; it was the letter.

  “What was it?” she asked gently.

  Jamie spat the word out. “Tax.”

  “Ah.”

  “They said that I underpaid last year. They said it was my mistake.”

  Isabel was about to say “It usually is” but realised that this might not be the moment. So she said instead, “They’re ghastly …” It was, she realised, a curious echo of Jamie’s complaint about the unfortunate Barry and his family; a word, as often happens, can be like a musical worm in the mind and invite repetition. But it slipped out. Tax inspectors were not ghastly, she thought; they were simply doing their job, and they did it, she imagined, fairly well—for the most part. They had to contend with all sorts of dishonesty and rudeness on the part of taxpayers, who were, no doubt, quite capable of being particularly ghastly in their dealings with tax officials, and so …