The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds

  His voice was small. “Please.”

  There was a knocking sound from outside. The customer who had been browsing was now standing at the counter knocking peremptorily on the glass, demanding service.

  “I’m tempted to make her wait,” said Isabel under her breath. “Impatient woman.”

  Eddie gave a wry smile. “She’s a real cow, that woman. She comes in quite regularly. She thinks she owns the place.”

  Isabel touched him lightly on the shoulder. “Everything fine now?”

  He nodded.

  WHEN ISABEL RETURNED HOME that evening, exhausted by what had turned into a busy early evening in the delicatessen, Jamie had already bathed Charlie and dressed him in his pyjamas. The small boy, beaming with pleasure at the return of his mother, launched himself into Isabel’s arms, burying his face in her hair.

  “Clever Mummy,” he said.

  She looked at him with delight. “How very kind, Charlie. But I’m not all that clever, darling. Just average.”

  Jamie smiled. “Yes, you are. Not average, I mean. Yes, you’re clever.”

  Isabel ruffled Charlie’s hair. “You’re the clever one, I think. You’re the one who can tell me what two and three make.”

  “Five,” said Charlie immediately.

  Isabel looked at Jamie, who made an “I told you so” gesture.

  “That’s absolutely right,” she said. “Two and three do indeed make five.”

  “Olive,” said Charlie. That had been his first word, and he still referred to it frequently.

  “Olive?”

  “More olives,” said Charlie. “More olives now.”

  Isabel looked at Jamie. “Have you been giving him olives?” she asked. She had been trying to cut down on the number of olives Charlie ate because there was too much salt in the brine in which they were stored. She did not think that too much salt would do him any good.

  Jamie shook his head. “No,” he said. “Grace …”

  “Grace!” shouted Charlie. “Grace got olives.”

  Isabel sighed. It would be another thing they would have to discuss with Grace: olives and mathematics—both, in their way, problematic.

  Jamie looked at his watch. He had a rehearsal that evening and would have to leave shortly if he were to be on time.

  “Oh,” he said, “that man you were talking about—Duncan Munrowe—called this afternoon. He said could you phone him back this evening. He asked me not to forget to pass on the message. He asked me twice. I got the message … about the message.”

  He handed her a slip of paper on which a telephone number had been pencilled.

  “Did he say anything else?” asked Isabel.

  Jamie thought for a moment. “He said something about there having been a development.” He looked at her almost reproachfully. “Yes, that’s what he said. He said there had been a development.”

  Isabel waited until Jamie had gone off to his rehearsal and she had settled Charlie before she telephoned Duncan Munrowe. Charlie was clingy—he often was when she had spent an entire day out of the house—and she allowed him a small extension on his day, sitting on the edge of his bed, his tiny hand now moving, now restful in hers, as she told him a story of her own making. She had turned out the light, but in spite of the curtains the room was not completely dark. At midsummer, in Scotland, the night is never truly dark, and Charlie’s bedtime came well before sunset. Even later, approaching midnight, the sky only dims, fades into something between the clarity of day and the opacity of night, a long-drawn-out crepuscule.

  A week or two earlier she had started to tell Charlie a story that had immediately thrilled him and that he had insisted on hearing again. It had become a serial, the episodic life of a man made out of mud, who loved the rain but at the same time had to avoid it—for obvious reasons. “He’d melt, you see,” she said. And Charlie had nodded wisely; he knew that from sand-play at the nursery.

  “Some of his friends had melted,” said Isabel. “And he missed them.”

  She did not know why she had said that; it was the wrong note to introduce into a bedtime story; an adult note of loss that would only sadden a child. And yet every child had to confront the notion of loss at some time, and perhaps this moment came earlier than we liked to imagine.

  “He could make his friends again,” she added. “He could find some mud and make his friends again.”

  “No,” said Charlie. “Friends all gone.”

  But now the man made out of mud was happy, as he had discovered a pond where mud ducks lived and he was throwing bread made out of mud to these mud ducks. Not a sophisticated story line, thought Isabel, but Charlie was rapt; this was social realism to him because he knew a real pond where there were real ducks to which he threw bread with his father.

  The story over, and Charlie on the verge of sleep, Isabel leaned forward and planted a kiss on his brow. She felt a wisp of his hair against her lips; it was so fine, and smelled of soap and the fresh linen of his pillow, and something else that she could only label love, or happiness, or something like that. Then she crept out of the room and made her way into her study where she had placed Jamie’s note on her desk.

  She dialled the number. It took a long time for the telephone to be answered, but Isabel was prepared for this; people who lived in the country often seemed to take much longer to answer than those in towns. Their houses were bigger. She had never seen Munrowe House but she could imagine that it had lengthy corridors and inconveniently placed telephones. She imagined a bell ringing in one of those corridors, and Duncan looking up from what he was doing and trudging off to answer it.

  “Munrowe House,” he announced politely.

  It sounded quite appropriate to Isabel, but she could not help but wonder: At what point should one give the name of one’s house on the telephone? It would sound ridiculous to answer 36 Oak Avenue, or Flat 28, or something of that sort.

  “Munrowe House,” Duncan repeated.

  She thought: The house speaks, and smiled. “It’s Isabel Dalhousie.”

  He thanked her for calling back. “I didn’t want to burden your …”

  “Husband. It was my husband.”

  “Yes, I didn’t want to burden your husband with the details, but the other side has been in touch again.”

  She found the expression rather strange. “The other side” was how lawyers spoke in litigation. Or spies, she imagined. But the thieves really were the other side, she thought. Criminals of any sort put themselves on the other side from the rest of us who were not criminals, or were only occasionally criminal. Isabel had received a parking ticket recently and had reflected on the fact that she was required to pay a fine. Did that make her a criminal, even if only briefly and in a very attenuated way? Surely not. Yet it was still an offence that she had committed—the wording of the penalty notice made that quite clear.

  “What did they say?” she asked.

  “They want a meeting. They’ve given me a time.”

  “I see.”

  She could hear Duncan’s breathing at the other end of the line. She could sense his anxiety.

  “Have you spoken to the insurance people?”

  He said that he had. “They wanted to come but I told them that the other side said that they wanted to see only me.” He paused. “And I’m going to interpret that as meaning you and me. They’ll just have to accept that.”

  She wanted to repeat what she had said before—that she did not see what she could possibly bring to such a meeting, but she had agreed to be there and she would not renege on it.

  “They haven’t given me much warning,” Duncan went on. “They want to meet tomorrow. Do you think you could possibly make it?”

  Cat would be back and Isabel would not be needed at the delicatessen. But there were those journal proofs, which even now stared reproachfully at her from their position at the top of her in-tray. She sighed, and failed, through sheer tiredness, to mask the sound.

  “I know it’s no notice at all,”
said Duncan apologetically. “It’s not my idea …”

  Isabel reassured him. “No, don’t apologise. I’ll be all right. Where is the meeting going to be?”

  She was not prepared for his answer.

  “Here. At the house.”

  He detected her surprise. “I know,” he said. “It sounds very brazen, but I gather this is not the thieves themselves we’ll be meeting, but a lawyer acting for them, or for an intermediary.”

  “Their lawyer!”

  Duncan explained that the insurers had told him at the outset that anybody who did get in touch would probably not be the original thief, or even the people in possession of the painting. “They said that it could be lawyers,” he said. “And they were right.”

  “Do lawyers write anonymous letters? You said the original letter was anonymous.” She imagined an anonymous letter from a firm of lawyers. It would be signed Anon or From a Friend, as anonymous letters tended to be, but it would then say: For and on behalf of Messrs … and give the name of a firm.

  “No, it’s not anonymous,” said Duncan. “It’s not from the person who wrote the original letter. This one is on headed notepaper.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Isabel said. “This is a lawyer acting for somebody who isn’t the thief but who knows the thief? Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So we’re two links away from the thief? There’s the thief, then there’s a second person, and then there’s the lawyer, who’s acting on behalf of the second person.”

  Duncan was patient. “Yes, that’s more or less it. The insurers said that this is the way it often happens. The second person—the intermediary—goes to a lawyer and says, ‘I hear there’s a reward for the return of such a painting. Well, I know where it is and will you arrange for me to get the reward if I tell you where the painting is?’ That’s one of the ways it can happen. There are, of course, others.”

  She asked about these other ways.

  “If there’s no reward, the intermediary can just ask for money from the owner—which means ultimately from the insurer, as the insurer may already have paid up. Or he can go straight to the insurer and ask for money for the safe return of the painting.”

  Isabel thought about this. “That sounds like paying ransom,” she said.

  Duncan agreed. “And nobody likes to do that.”

  “Well, we can talk further about it,” said Isabel. “Shall I come up a bit before the meeting?”

  “Yes. Could you make it before ten in the morning?”

  She thought of her car. She had not used it for weeks and she hoped that it would start. Jamie had been pressing her to get a new one, but she was attached to her green Swedish car and was unwilling to replace it. Swedish cars were under threat and might disappear—overtaken by a torrent of anodyne cars from somewhere on the other side of the world, produced in great numbers in factories run and staffed by robots; those strange, impersonal factories in which there appeared to be no people, just machines with extended mechanical arms that moved according to some pre-programmed choreography. She did not want that. She wanted a car with idiosyncratic lines; a car that looked at home on winding Scottish roads, that could complement a backdrop of granite and heather. As long as it started. That was important too.

  She paused. Was there anything wrong in wanting to have things about you that were made in places you knew, or liked? Was it a form of nationalism—a jingoistic position that was prepared to expect other people to import one’s goods but not to buy theirs? For a long time—since the Industrial Revolution really—the West had expected the East to buy the things we made, but now the tables had been turned and they were making things more quickly and cheaply than we were. Was it unfair, then, to turn round and decline their goods in favour of our own? Or could one prefer one’s own goods because they were made by people for whom one had, by virtue of shared citizenship, some form of responsibility? Charity begins at home. Was that a narrow, selfish adage or was it simply an inescapable, bedrock fact of life in human society? Does the one in need on your doorstep have a greater claim than the one in need in a distant country—if the level of need in each case is exactly the same? It was an old, old problem—the sort of thing that students of philosophy discussed over endless cups of coffee in their first year of study, little imagining that they would still be pondering the very same question twenty years later. And twenty years later, were the answers any clearer? Isabel thought they probably were not. But then one thing you did learn with the passage of time was not to ask too many questions. That was the difference, she decided, between being twenty and being forty. That, and other things, of course.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE CAR STARTED UNCOMPLAININGLY, only protesting slightly as it moved the first few inches of the forty-mile journey to Munrowe House. It was the brakes, Isabel realised: two weeks without movement in the damp climate of Scotland meant that tiny filaments of rust would have built up between the brake pads and brake drum, the beginning of a slow bonding that could turn into a more permanent embrace if the car was unused for six months—or so her mechanic, the obliging Mr. Cooper at the small garage on the canal, had told her. “Cars are like people,” he had said. “We rust up if we don’t exercise; well, so do they.” He had gone on to warn her of the consequences of fluids being left in an engine that was idle for months on end; of how they would eventually eat away at the pipes in which they were trapped, making irreparable holes in cooling systems, causing radiators to fall from their mounts. All of that could happen so easily, he said, and he had then fixed her with a baleful stare, as might a doctor who knew that his advice on diet or exercise would go unheeded.

  Each time the car started after a spell of disuse, Isabel vowed to treat it better in the future and to give it the weekly ten-mile run that Mr. Cooper recommended; but knew that she would not, and that one day his predictions would come true. For now, though, the Swedish car sounded contented enough, and smelled just right too: that odd odour it had—a mixture of old leather, rubber and machine; a mustiness that would be dispelled by the winding down of a window and the resulting rush of morning air.

  It was shortly after eight o’clock when she left the house, which meant that she would have an hour for the journey and an hour to talk to Duncan before the arrival at ten of the lawyer—the thief’s lawyer, as she thought of him. That took some getting used to—the notion that those who flouted the law could use the law, even through an intermediary, to pursue their objectives. But lawyers did precisely that; that was the whole reason for their existence: they put forward a point of view even if that position was manifestly unworthy or perverse. Lawyers stood up in criminal courts everywhere, every day, and argued on behalf of defendants who had hurt others in all those ways in which others can be hurt. She understood that well enough: everybody had this right and at least some of those accused were innocent. Yet this was something different: here a lawyer seemed to be assisting somebody to benefit from a crime rather than defending somebody who had already committed the crime. It somehow felt different …

  The traffic was light. Isabel drove out by way of Colinton, past the Victorian military barracks at Redford, and then on to the road that skirted the city and the lower slopes of the Pentland Hills. The sky was empty to the south, over the soft folds of the Pentlands, but to the north there was a bank of cirro-cumulus, a mackerel sky, or Schaefchenwolken—“sheep cloud”—as she remembered her father calling it. For some reason he had used German when talking about clouds and sea conditions; an odd habit that she had accepted as just being one of the things he did. “The weather,” he had once said to her, smiling, “is German. I don’t know why; it just is. Sorry.”

  And there were those Schaefchenwolken, high above Fife and stretching out over the North Sea. That meant a depression was on the way, and rain might arrive in a few hours, even if for the moment the weather was fine. Isabel sat back in her seat and relaxed her grip on the wheel, allowing her mind to wander. There was a lot
to think about: the conversation that she knew she would have to have with Grace about mathematics; the anxieties that poor Eddie had revealed the day before and that would require what was bound to be an emotionally trying trip to the doctor. She reflected on this and decided that Eddie had no reason to worry: they must have talked to him about it when whatever had happened happened. And then it occurred to her that he might not have reported it. That was always possible; people were too ashamed, they suffered in silence. And if that were the case, then Eddie would have received no help, no support at all. Did Cat know? Was she aware of what he might have been going through all these years?

  And then there was Cat herself to worry about. There had been no word of a boyfriend for some time now, which might be good news, or might just as likely be bad. If there were no boyfriend, then it could be a sign that Cat was taking a romantic sabbatical—a nice notion, that, thought Isabel. “I’m sorry, I can’t get emotionally involved with you—I’m on sabbatical from that sort of thing.” It would be like a strict diet: no chocolates, no lovers. And people might speak with the same enthusiasm about the benefits: “Do you know, I’ve felt so much better, so much lighter, since I gave up men. I have so much more energy, and my clothes seem to fit me again.”

  On the other hand, Cat’s silence on this topic might mean that there was an unsuitable man in the background, concealed lest Isabel slip into disapproving-relative mode. That had happened before, when Isabel had only found out about a boyfriend of Cat’s by accident. That awful tightrope walker, for example: Cat had initially not been open about him—understandably so. If I were going out with a diminutive tightrope walker who wore elevator shoes, then I might be reticent too … Isabel stopped herself. It was wrong to write him off because he was very short—that had no bearing on merit. Gandhi had been very short, as had Beethoven. But Bruno, as the tightrope walker was called, was unlike Gandhi or Beethoven: he had no merits at all—at least as far as she could make out; he was domineering and, she suspected, violent too. She shuddered. What would have happened if Cat had married him and she, Isabel, had had to welcome him into the family? She would have done her best, but surely her true feelings would have shown and Cat, sensing this, would have challenged her. “You don’t like him, do you, Isabel? You don’t like him because he’s a tightrope walker.” “Listen, Cat, that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s him; it’s what he is within himself that’s the problem.”