The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds

  “I have two children by my first wife,” said Duncan. “My daughter is thirty and I have a son of twenty-seven. Both live in Edinburgh—my daughter lives in Nelson Street. I’m going down there immediately after this. We see each other regularly.”

  “And your wife?” Isabel asked.

  “Frederika. Freddie for short. I remarried about ten years ago. I had lost my first wife to cancer a few years earlier. The children were still at school. Alex—that’s Alexandra—was just about to leave and Patrick had a couple more years to go. It was very difficult for him. Had he been a little older, he would have coped better, I think.”

  Had his words been written, the last sentence would have been underlined in red, thought Isabel.

  “It’s always difficult,” said Isabel. “I lost my mother at quite an early age. I was twelve.”

  “Yes, it’s not easy. Alex says that her memories sometimes get jumbled up—even though she was almost eighteen when her mother died.”

  “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

  THE 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.

  The concert began. A couple of pieces were familiar to Isabel—the rest were new, but there were full programme notes that explained who the composers were and put their music in context. She did not go out at the interval, but remained where she was, reading the notes for the second half. Jamie caught her eye and smiled; she returned the smile. She felt so proud of him.

  At the end of the concert, the audience went downstairs, where most stayed for the reception. A group of young women in black skirts and white tops circulated among the guests, offering glasses of wine and small, rather greasy snacks. Isabel took a sausage on a stick and nibbled at it: it was not at all warm and seemed to be packed with cold fat. She steeled herself to swallow it. The Scottish diet was famously unhealthy, and it seemed that the same applied to Scottish canapés.

  There was no sign of her friends, and she found herself in conversation with a couple she had not met before. Looking for something to talk about, she asked them where they lived. Their eyes lit up: they had recently moved to a new house and were full of the details. “It has a large conservatory,” the woman said. “With a vine—an established vine.”

  “And there’s a terrific garden,” said the husband.

  “Yes, terrific,” agreed his wife. “The people before us were demon gardeners. Demons.”

  Isabel sipped at her wine, discreetly eyeing the prospects for escape. Jamie was on the other side of the room, with the musicians. They were enjoying themselves, and a peal of laughter sounded across the room to make the point. She pointed to him. “My husband.”

  The woman looked across the room. “On the right?”

  Isabel shook her head. “On the left. And I must have a word with him, if you’ll excuse me.”

  Isabel could tell that the woman was interested. The musician on the right was a short man with a thickset neck, much older than Jamie. She has assumed, thought Isabel, that that is the sort of hu
sband I should have. And now she had seen Jamie and was thinking: How did she get him? People are transparent, Isabel thought; so often we can tell exactly what they’re thinking although they may not have said a thing. And I am equally transparent: this woman knows that I’m not really interested in our conversation and that I don’t really have to have a word with Jamie; not an urgent word; not anything that couldn’t wait until they’ve finished telling me about their garden.

  The woman’s interest in Jamie changed now to offence that Isabel wanted to get away from her. “Please,” she said. “Don’t let us hold you up.”

  Isabel blushed, and moved away. She did not like to give offence, but sometimes it was difficult not to do so. Sometimes the ordinary contingencies of social life meant that offence was inevitable: the turning down of an invitation that one could not accept because one had another engagement—that could give offence, no matter how genuine the excuse: she doesn’t want to come; she says that she’s got something else on … that’s what she says. Or at a cocktail party—those occasions that Isabel sometimes called “trials by cocktail”—you had to move on; you couldn’t stay and talk to the same person for hours; and yet how to detach yourself? What formula could one use for getting away? Could you simply say, “I’ve enjoyed our chat,” and walk away? That was somewhat abrupt. “I must fill up my glass.” “But it’s quite full already.” “Oh, is it? I hadn’t noticed.” Perhaps one might try: “I need some fresh air. I must get to a window.” “Oh, so do I! I’ll come with you.” As a last resort, a quick glance at one’s watch, and then, “I really have to go. What a pity.” “Oh, so do—” “No. Actually, I’ll stay—you go. Goodbye.”

  Isabel moved towards the other side of the room. She sensed that the woman was watching her; she felt her eyes upon her, and thought she should be seen to be walking in that direction. Then she hesitated: Why? Why should she worry about what somebody whom she had just met, and whom she would probably never meet again, should think about her? She had done nothing wrong; she had been perfectly polite when they had been going on about their garden. She had done nothing for which she should reproach herself.