The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds

  “Yes,” said Grace. “I’m going to teach him to count money next. There’s a chapter on that in the book. It’s called ‘The Baby Accountant.’ ”

  Isabel bit her lip. She was grateful to Grace for all she did for Charlie, but did she really want him to be a baby accountant? Charlie should develop at his own pace, she thought. He should get every help, naturally, but Isabel was definite that she did not want to be a pushy parent who made her child jump through all sorts of hoops. Surely Grace did not want that for Charlie either. Surely not.

  “MISS DALHOUSIE?”

  He was already sitting at a table when Isabel arrived at Falko’s Konditorei, the German bakery and coffee shop along the street from Cat’s delicatessen. There were only a few other people in the café, but even had there been a much larger crowd Isabel would have had no difficulty in picking out Duncan Munrowe. It was largely a matter of dress—a jacket in a quiet browny-green; a dark-blue tie, discreetly checked; brown brogues: the uniform of the moneyed countryman—nothing ostentatious, nothing loud. And that was just the clothing; the physiognomy, too, revealed his origins: regular features, chiselled, showing a certain intelligence, even if not the face of an intellectual or aesthete. It was a handsome face, she thought, and the man’s overall bearing was impressive.

  “Isabel, please.”

  “Of course. And I’m Duncan: Duncan Munrowe.”

  They shook hands. The handshake, too, conformed to type.

  Duncan Munrowe thanked her for agreeing to see him. “It’s an awful cheek on my part,” he said. “We haven’t met, and here I am inviting you to listen to my problems.”

  Isabel laughed. “I don’t mind.” And she decided that she did not; her immediate impression of him was positive. This man, she decided, was exactly what he purported to be: a country gentleman, for want of a better term; nothing more, nor less, than that. He was at the opposite end of the spectrum from … She hesitated: Who was at the other end of the spectrum? It came to her: Professor Lettuce and Christopher Dove. Scheming philosophers. Waspish backbiters.

  “Well, you’re very kind,” Duncan said. “But I must admit I feel a trifle embarrassed.”

  She assured him that this was unnecessary. As she did so, she considered his voice. There was a hint of a Scottish burr, but only a hint. That would have been taken out of the Munrowe voice two or three generations ago through being educated at schools that modelled themselves on the English public-school system, even if they were in Scotland. Or they would have been sent off to the South, to Harrow or Eton, or the like, where the conditioning of the English upper class would have been all-encompassing and where young Scots became indistinguishable in voice and outlook from their English contemporaries. That practice was changing, but there were still many people who lived in its shadow.

  They placed their order with the waitress. Isabel glanced about her; it was not crowded, and the nearest table, from which their conversation might easily be heard, was empty.

  “I suppose it would help,” Duncan began, “if I told you a little bit about our collection. I’ve heard, by the way, that you’re interested in art.”

  “Oh?” She wondered how he knew this. It would be Martha, of course, who had seen her mother’s painting and had perhaps noticed some of the other pictures. And Martha would probably have overstated Isabel’s knowledge of the subject, which was, by her own admission, modest.

  “Yes,” he said. “Guy’s mentioned you—I know him too. I’ve bought the odd thing from his gallery, but I must admit I haven’t really added very much to the family collection.”

  That explained it. Isabel regularly discussed art with Guy Peploe who ran the Scottish Gallery in Dundas Street.

  “As you may know,” Duncan continued, “quite a bit of our collection is in the Scottish National Gallery on the Mound. Which is where it should be, in my view. Private collectors are just custodians, I think. They look after works of art but they don’t really own them. Not in any absolute sense.”

  It was an admirable sentiment, and Isabel found herself warming all the more to Duncan. This was not one of those well-heeled people who are smug about their possessions. “Do you think that many others share your view? Other collectors, that is.”

  Duncan shrugged. “Some do, as you’ll see if you look at any of the big collections. Look at the Burrell in Glasgow—Burrell gave everything he had to the city—the whole shooting match. And there are lots of other examples. The Met in New York is full of collections that have been given or bequeathed. The Wallace Collection in London. That odd place outside Philadelphia that used to let you look at it only when there was a full moon or whatever. The name escapes me, but he handed over the lot, didn’t he? Or sort of handed it over.”

  “The Barnes,” said Isabel.

  “That’s it. He gave the lot, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. And will you?” asked Isabel.

  For a moment a shadow passed over his face, and she realised that her question, which had just slipped out, was intrusive, even rude. You did not ask people just how charitable they intended to be.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you. It’s none of my business.”

  He smiled. “Not at all. It’s a reasonable question, and I’d raised the subject anyway. No, I’m not going to give everything away. I’m going to pass some on to the next generation.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “But the more important things will go to the Scottish National Gallery.” He stopped, and looked at her, lowering his voice. His tone, now, bore a note of apology. “The Poussin, for example.”

  “The one that was stolen?”

  “Yes, although I suppose that’s very much in doubt now.” He paused again. “And that makes me feel extremely regretful. After all, I promised it to them.”

  Isabel felt that he hardly needed to reproach himself over that, and told him as much. He listened attentively, but she could see that her words did not persuade him. It was something to do with honour, she thought; this man was out of his time, barely at home in an age as casual as ours. There were people like that.

  “Tell me about the painting,” she said. “I looked it up but one can never really tell from a photograph.”

  He responded enthusiastically to her comment. “I couldn’t agree more about photographs. You don’t get any sense of the presence of the painting—the atmosphere it creates just by being there in the room. For that, you have to see it in the flesh, so to speak.”

  He sat back in his chair. The waitress had arrived with their order—an open sandwich for Isabel and a slice of quiche and a salad for Duncan.

  He seemed suddenly to have remembered something. “Have you noticed something about Caravaggio?”

  She was not sure how to answer. One could hardly be unaware of Caravaggio, but to notice something … His use of light?

  “It’s just this business about seeing a painting in a room, in front of you. Caravaggio is so powerful he sterilises any other paintings on the wall in the same room. It just doesn’t work. He overpowers them.”

  “Poussin doesn’t?”

  “The opposite. Poussin is a tremendously courteous painter. He doesn’t shout at you. Far from it.”

  They began their lunch. She saw that he ate delicately, and slowly, which surprised her. She had imagined that he would have a hearty appetite; country people usually did. But then she remembered that Duncan Munrowe was very far from being a typical country landowner.

  “The Poussin we have lost,” he went on, “is a late one. Like many of his paintings of that period it has what the experts call a ‘cool palette.’ In other words, it’s not very bright. Those lovely, rather faded colours.”

  “Like A Dance to the Music of Time?”

  He nodded. “Yes. Or that other one—you know, the one where the giant is carrying the man on his shoulders, the one in the Louvre?”

  Isabel did know it. “One of my absolute favourites,” she said. “The man standing on the giant’s shoulders is ju
st so utterly extraordinary. But it’s not in the Louvre—it’s in New York, in the Met.”

  He blushed. “Of course. I forget what’s where. For me, the Louvre’s …”

  Isabel knew what she thought of when she thought of the Louvre. There was a certain inevitability to it. “The Mona Lisa?”

  He shook his head. “No. I’m afraid that painting does very little for me—I suppose because it’s become so well known. And the room it’s in is always full to the brim with parties of teenagers on their Paris trip. You can hardly breathe.”

  “So you search out Poussin?” she prompted.

  “Yes,” said Duncan. “And also that wonderful Ghirlandaio—the one in which the young boy is looking up in wonderment at his grandfather with the very bulbous nose. Youth and old age. It’s such a lovely painting and the look in the old man’s eyes is just extraordinary. How do you capture a look of such fondness? How do you get that in paint? Yet he does. It’s a magnificent painting.”

  “Which is what great painting is about,” said Isabel. “Capturing those profound human emotions.”

  Duncan agreed. “That’s right. And it makes one ask if we have any great artists among us at present. Who are they? Who’s doing that sort of thing now?”

  “David Hockney can,” said Isabel. “Look at the emotion in those paintings of young men, and some of the portraits too.”

  “And Lucian Freud?”

  “Yes, him too.”

  He looked thoughtful. “But great painters seem to be thin on the ground, do you think?”

  “Perhaps.” She steered the conversation back to the Poussin. “So, what happened?”

  “The theft?”

  “Yes.”

  He put down his knife and fork. “You may know that we open the garden—and the house—to the public on a couple of days each summer. It’s a great way of sharing. We’ve always done it at Munrowe House.”

  “And that’s when it was stolen?”

  “So it seems. We were quite busy—there were almost two hundred people who came and had a look round. Maybe more.”

  She asked whether they were free to wander around the house as well. Was nothing done about watching them?

  He looked at her ruefully. “Of course we had arrangements. There were five or six volunteers—friends of ours, or people who work on the estate next door. We tried to make sure that there was somebody in each of the rooms that was open to the public. There were six of those—the main drawing room, the dining room, the library and so on. But the system didn’t work, I’m afraid, and there were spells in between shifts when there was nobody in a room.”

  Isabel was curious as to how a painting could have been carried out in broad daylight, with people milling around.

  “I’m afraid that was very simple,” said Duncan. “The Poussin was in the drawing room, and that room has a French window that opens on to the garden. But the bit of the garden in question is secluded, and there’s a sort of hedged corridor that goes round to the back of the house. It would have been very easy to take the painting out by that route and then bundle it into a car parked near the kitchen. Very simple, I’m afraid. We didn’t check beforehand to see whether that door was locked—and it wasn’t.”

  He sighed. “The insurance people hit the roof when they came round. I pointed out to them that if it had been as obvious as all that, then why had they not raised it with me when their man came round last year to look at the alarm system? They wanted to check that we had proper alarms and they had a good walk round the house. They said things seemed fine then.”

  “And how did they respond to that?”

  “Silence. They answer the questions they want to answer and ignore the others. They’ve been very tight-lipped about this.” He paused. “I’m afraid I’ve been seriously distressed by these people. Seriously …” His voice faltered.

  Isabel reached across to touch him gently on the forearm. He looked down at her hand, surprised, but did not draw back. She left her hand where it rested for only a moment or two, but it was enough to establish a connection of sympathy.

  “It’s obviously been pretty upsetting for you,” she said. “The loss of the painting in itself must be bad enough, but to have it compounded by a row over insurance must make it all so much worse.”

  He gave her an appreciative look. “Yes, I’m afraid you’re right. I should perhaps have been a bit more robust about it all, but I’m afraid I just found the whole thing … well, a bit tawdry. I feel dirtied by it. It’s odd, I know, but that’s the way I feel.”

  “But that’s the way that anybody who’s been burgled feels,” Isabel said. “It’s a violation. Your space has been invaded. It’s a shock. And then along come insurance people who make you feel guilty about it, although you’re the victim. It’s entirely understandable.”

  They were silent for a while. Then Duncan said, “That’s why I asked to speak to you. I wanted to have somebody on my side, if I could put it that way. Lawyers are all very well, and I could have asked Douglas Connel—he’s very helpful, but he’s doing a lot of other things for me at present and I felt it would be burdening him unduly.”

  “I know Douglas,” said Isabel. “I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.”

  “Maybe not. But I also thought that for this it might be better to have somebody who isn’t a lawyer.” He looked at her cautiously. “And there’s a reason for that.”

  Isabel waited for him to explain. He picked up a paper napkin and folded it carefully, and then refolded it.

  “We’ve had an approach, or rather, the insurance people have had an approach. It’s tentative at the moment, but it looks as if something might be happening.”

  “An approach from the thieves?”

  “Possibly.”

  “And are they going to talk to them?”

  “I imagine so. The insurance company wants to avoid paying the claim if at all possible. If they can get the painting back from the thieves for less than the claim, then that suits them just fine.”

  “I see.”

  “Remember those Turners that were stolen in Germany?”

  Isabel remembered it, but only vaguely.

  “They got them back through negotiation with the thieves,” Duncan said. “In our case, though, there’s something unusual going on.”

  She waited. The waitress had come to clear their plates.

  “They want to talk to me,” he said quietly. “They’ve made the initial approach to the insurance company, but they seem to have gone off them for some reason. Maybe it’s something the insurers said. Perhaps they rather scared the thieves off. Anyway, they’re now talking directly to me.”

  She asked what the insurance company thought of that. They were surprised, he said, and unsure what lay behind it. They felt it might be unwise for him to talk directly to the thieves and they were also at pains to stress that Duncan had no power to negotiate in relation to the return of the painting. That was their affair as insurers and the thieves would have to go to them for that. After a while, though, they had changed their tune when it came to initial talks, especially after the thieves had gone quiet for a few weeks. Duncan could talk directly to anybody, as long as he kept them informed and did not try to commit them to any payment.

  “So what would you like me to do?” Isabel asked.

  Duncan stared at her uncertainly.

  “I’m perfectly happy to help,” she prompted. “You needn’t feel awkward about asking.”

  “I have to meet them,” he said. “They’ve told me they’re going to be in touch about a meeting. I don’t yet know where it’s going to be.”

  “How did they contact you?”

  “Initially by letter. Anonymous, naturally. Printed on a plain sheet of paper and postmarked Glasgow. It told me nothing.”

  “You showed it to the insurance people?”

  He nodded. “They photographed it. I’m not sure if they showed it to the police. The police have been informed, of course, but seem to be taking a bit of a
back seat at present. It seems the insurance company doesn’t think it helps to involve them too closely at this stage, as far as I can tell.”

  “You said—‘initially.’ Have they been in touch again?”

  He shifted in his seat uneasily. “They telephoned me. At three in the morning.”

  She waited for him to continue.

  “They asked me if I had received their letter. That’s how I knew it was the same people. The insurance people say that you get all sorts of cranks phoning up pretending to be the thieves, trying to get in on things. At least we know this is the same group.”

  It occurred to Isabel that they might still be impostors who had nothing to do with the theft. How could he tell?

  “The letter had a photograph with it. It was a close-up of a section of the painting under strong light. It couldn’t have been taken when it was in our possession, on the wall—the lighting was quite different.”

  Their coffee had arrived. Duncan took a sip, looking at Isabel over the rim of his cup. “They said they’d phone to make the arrangements quite soon. They said it wouldn’t be them I would be meeting—it would be somebody acting for them. I thought I might tell them that I’ll be accompanied by a friend. I’ll stress that you have nothing to do with the insurance company.”

  He waited expectantly. “All right?”

  Isabel nodded. “All right.”

  He looked relieved. “Thank you. And I’m sorry that this has all been about me and I haven’t asked you anything about yourself. I know that you edit a journal—Martha told me that—and I know that you have a reputation as being somebody who sorts out people’s difficulties. But apart from that?”

  “I live in Merchiston,” Isabel said. “Just round the corner from here. I run the journal from the house. And I’m married to a musician. He plays the bassoon.”

  Duncan listened politely. “I see.”

  “And I have a three-and-three-quarter-year-old son called Charlie. And that, I suppose, is it. And you? Do you have family?”