The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds

by Alexander McCall Smith

  By the time Isabel drew level with Stirling, the mackerel sky had drifted away. She glanced at the shape of Stirling Castle against its backdrop of green hills, with the Wallace Monument rising spikily behind it. Isabel smiled. Scottish rugby crowds still sang about William Wallace, seven hundred years after he had defeated the English army of cruel Edward, “and sent him packing,” as the song had it, “tae think again.” Well, he had, she supposed, but why did we still need to sing about it? She automatically answered her own question: Because we may not have very much else, apart from our past. It was not the answer she had expected to arrive at, and she thought it was probably wrong, and defeatist. We did have a great deal else. We had this land that was unfolding before her now as she turned off towards Doune; these fields and these soft hills and this sky and this light and these rivers that were pure and fresh, and this music that could send shivers of pleasure up the spine and make one so proud of Scotland and of belonging. We had all that.

  DUNCAN MUNROWE CAME OUT of his front door to greet her.

  “Your car,” he said, “is lovely.”

  “It doesn’t always start.”

  He smiled, and touched the roof of the car as if to confirm that it was real. “The best cars don’t,” he said. “I’d never want a car that had so little personality that it always started.”

  This brief exchange confirmed what she had felt over that lunch in Edinburgh. Her host was slightly eccentric. Out of touch with the modern world. His own man.

  She looked up at the front of the house. It was fairly modest in its proportions—a comfortable country house of the sort that in the very early eighteenth century, when she suspected it was built, would have housed a minor country gentleman—one who did not actually have to farm, but had the farming done for him. And it still housed exactly such a man, she thought, as she glanced discreetly at Duncan and took in his outfit: the moleskin trousers, the waistcoat, the Harris tweed jacket. One would not drive a tractor or unload bales of hay in those clothes. One might watch other people do it instead. And that, she thought, was a good enough definition of the rentier class as any. And of me too, she found herself thinking, guiltily. The land and gas company in Louisiana that enabled her to live as she did was based on the physical work of others—people whom she did not know. Her maternal great-grandfather had been responsible for that, and the trickle-down effect had seen to the rest. He would never have imagined that she, his descendant, living in twenty-first-century Scotland, and editing a philosophical review, of all things, would be reaping the benefits of the financial plotting and scheming at which family history held him to have been such a master. At least it was not plantation money—or slave money, to give it the name that more accurately reflected its origins. They had not been involved in that, as far as Isabel knew, for had they been, she could never have accepted the legacy, even generations later. Or at least she hoped she would not have accepted it, although there was plenty of slave money in Britain. There had been the great plantations in the West Indies, and the descendants of the people who benefited from those—the sugar families and others—must still be there, still enjoying, although attenuated by the years that had passed, their sticky, suffering-based fortunes. She hoped she would never have accepted it, or its equivalent, although honesty required one to remind oneself that when there were bills to be paid, an offer of money was harder to reject than when there were no such bills. Other people’s money, we tell ourselves, is always less deserved than our own.

  At school she had known a girl who came from a family that had done very well out of coal mining two generations earlier. They had been good people, and charitably inclined, but Isabel had once said to this girl, with all the thoughtlessness of her sixteen years, “Think of all the miners who got sick and died.” And the girl had stared at her mutely, and turned white, and then cried. Something had been said by the girl’s father to Isabel’s father—they knew one another through membership of a golf club—and Isabel’s father, who never spoke harshly, had said to her, “Don’t blame other people for things that happened before they were born. And don’t blame them for things that seemed right at the time, even if we come to see that they aren’t right any more. And finally, remember that our people—that’s your mother’s people and my people—were probably not angels, because nobody was an angel in those days, except those people at the bottom of everything, who had no alternative.” He had held her gaze, and she had shrivelled inside with embarrassment and guilt. It had been so easy to strike a position of moral superiority—it always is—but she had not intended to hurt her friend. Her father had paused for a moment, and judged the lesson to have been learned. “Remember that, darling, and say sorry for what you said. That’s all you have to do.”

  Was Duncan speaking to her? She had been thinking about unearned money and her father and coal mining, and as often happened when she was thinking, time became slightly distorted and seemed to pass without her realising it.

  “Sorry, what was that?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I didn’t say anything.”

  She looked again at the front of the house. “Early eighteenth century?”

  He smiled. “Very close. 1698. There’s a date carved into one of the lintels on the other side.” He gestured towards the door. “Do come in. I’ll show you round, if you like. My wife, I’m afraid, is in London. We have a small flat down there, and she likes going to the opera.”

  “So do I,” said Isabel. “If I lived in London, I’d live at the ENO and Covent Garden. Or New York. Imagine living in Manhattan and being able to walk—to walk!—to the Met.”

  “I’m told you’re half American,” he said.

  They were entering the hall—a comfortable, simply furnished room from which a stone staircase ascended at the far end.

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “On my mother’s side.” And then she wondered: Who told him? Did Martha know about her mother? Possibly. Or had he been asking people about her? She looked up at the ceiling, which had a surprisingly elaborate cornice: plaster thistles, twined about one another, were interspersed with roses. It was in good condition, and although it was predominantly white, here and there were traces of other colours: the thistles green in their foliage and receptacles, with faded purple just to be made out on some of the flower heads. The roses, though, were untouched, and were the white of the surrounding plaster, which was significant.

  “Roses,” she said.

  Duncan followed her glance. “Yes. Roses.” He paused and said, “Long before our time. My grandfather bought this place in the nineteen twenties. The roses, we think, date back to the early seventeen hundreds. And, yes, they are—”

  “Jacobite.”

  He nodded. “The family who lived here then were fairly strongly of that persuasion.” He looked up at the cornice. “The Jacobite white rose. We believe that one of them helped Prince Charlie on his way to Edinburgh. Fed his troops or something like that. Probably gave him money.”

  “And suffered the consequences when Charlie came unstuck?”

  He looked down again. There was sympathy in his eyes. “They lost the place, but stayed alive. Others were less lucky.”

  She reflected on how human sympathy could be felt for ancient misfortune. The Jacobite uprising—that lost cause that almost succeeded—had been in 1745; over two hundred and fifty years separated us from them, and Duncan felt sympathy for those amongst the ranks of the losers who had occupied his house. One could feel sorry for any suffering, Isabel supposed, even if it was a long time ago, but surely there were limits—a point at which hearing of suffering no longer engaged our emotions. The Christians facing the lions in Rome? The victims of the Assyrians who enjoyed massacring the inhabitants of besieged towns? The distance in time was too great; suffering, to move us, must be warmer than that.

  Suddenly she said, “It helps if you know the name.”

  He looked at her in puzzlement. “I’m sorry … I’m not quite with you.”

  She explain
ed. “I was thinking about suffering and the passage of time. We can feel more sympathy for the victims whose names we know.”

  He looked at her with interest. “Yes, I suppose that’s right.”

  “Aberdeen man lost at sea,” she muttered.

  “What? Aberdeen …”

  “It’s how an Aberdeen newspaper was said to have reported the sinking of the Titanic. I suspect it’s apocryphal, but it makes the point, doesn’t it?”

  He laughed. “Local papers always see the world in that way. That’s what they’re about.” He gestured for her to follow him and led the way into a room off the back of the hall. “The library,” he said. “Rather a lot of unread books.”

  Her eyes went to the shelves that stretched up to within a few inches of the ceiling. All four walls were covered; piles of books stood here and there, teetering, vulnerable, she judged, to the slightest footfall. “But who doesn’t have a lot of unread books? It’s nice, though, just to know that they’re there.”

  He picked up a book that had been placed on the edge of a nearby shelf. “I suspect you’ve read much more than I have. Scott. You know, I’ve only read one of his novels? Just one. Rob Roy.”

  “Scott was very prolix. You can’t read everything. I’ve never got beyond the beginning of Proust. I love him, but I can’t seem to get beyond about page three.”

  They were comfortable in each other’s company, and this confession seemed to accentuate the ease of their relationship. The confession itself was not entirely true; Isabel had read more Proust than that, but other people undoubtedly found it reassuring to think that one had only read a few pages. Certainly those who claimed to have read Proust in his entirety got scant sympathy from others. And yet, she suddenly wondered, should you actually lie about how much Proust you’ve read? Some politicians, she reminded herself, did that—or the equivalent—when they claimed to be down-to-earth, no-nonsense types, just like the voters, when all the time they were secretly delighting in Proust …

  “We should take a look at some of the paintings,” Duncan said. “That’s more to the point.”

  Isabel put Proust out of her mind and followed Duncan into a large drawing room. In some respects it was typical of drawing rooms in such houses, furnished with armchairs and sofas in good but faded fabric, a sofa table with a silver tray on which stood a couple of decanters, a fireplace—Robert Adam or a follower, she thought—and this was where the similarity with a hundred such rooms in Scottish country houses ended: the paintings. One wall was completely covered, floor to ceiling, hung with large works which even as she entered and saw them side on, Isabel could more or less identify: a small Renoir of a woman, ruddy-cheeked as all of his women, in a hat; a de Hooch interior, with a Dutch girl and light slanting in from a window—almost a Vermeer, but not quite; what looked like a Bonnard—and must have been, Isabel decided.

  She caught her breath. “I hadn’t expected …”

  “We’re very lucky,” he said.

  Isabel moved into the middle of the room to get a better view of the paintings. “There’s everything you’d want,” she said.

  “That’s what people tell me,” said Duncan. “And that’s where the Poussin was. Over there.” He directed Isabel’s attention to the wall above the fireplace.

  If she had expected a glaring hole, she was disappointed. An ornate candlestick, in candelabra style with crystal drops, had been placed at either end of the mantelpiece and had made up for any visual emptiness that the removal of the Poussin might have caused. She could just discern, though, a rectangular shape—a section of wallpaper that had been protected from fading by the picture that had once hung there.

  “I can see where it was,” she said quietly. “It must break your heart.”

  He looked at her in gratitude—as if she were the first person to acknowledge his loss. Others must have said something, she thought; he must have been comforted. Unless there were those around him who wanted him to lose his Poussin … A jealous neighbour, one with no paintings of his own, might have smarted at the thought of the great works nearby. Farmers could be envious of each other, she had heard; could resent another’s better crops, better animals. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s ox, nor ass. The Commandment was unambiguous, and also mentioned wives and houses. Nor his Poussin, if he hath one …

  Duncan was saying something about one of the other paintings. “… it’s thought to be the first of a number of paintings that Lotto did for …” Yes, how interesting. Of course. And what better way of dealing with sheer envy than stealing the thing of which you feel so envious. It’s mine now, it’s mine! A secret pleasure, and not enough for some, no doubt, but there were many for whom covert satisfaction would be quite enough and sweeter, too, than any public triumph.

  “There are others upstairs. Rather more, I’m afraid.” He looked at his watch. “I should show you the letter.”

  Isabel dragged herself away from the paintings. “I’d like to see it.”

  “We can look at it in the kitchen,” he said. “I have coffee brewing, if you’d like a cup.”

  They left the hall to follow a short corridor into a kitchen dominated by a large cooking range and a scrubbed pine table. Three cups were neatly lined up on the table, alongside a jug of milk and a bowl of sugar lumps.

  Duncan handed her a piece of paper as she sat down. “This is it,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  He remained silent as she turned her attention to the paper. It was a printed letter, headed with the name of a firm of solicitors in Perth. Isabel thought it looked slightly crudely printed—thanks to modern printers, anybody could make a letterhead these days, and put anything they chose on it. At the foot of the letter were two names—the names of the partners, both women.

  It did not take long for Isabel to read. The letter was signed by a Heather Darnt, one of the partners listed. It established that the firm was acting for a client who was aware of the whereabouts of the painting. We stress that our client is not the party responsible for the theft. Why not say the thief? thought Isabel.

  Our client is keen to facilitate the return of this painting, the letter went on. He does this in the hope that he can in this way prevent damage being done to an important piece of artistic heritage. That is his only motivation.

  That, and money? Isabel asked herself.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ISABEL LOOKED AT HER WATCH. She had imagined that they would have plenty of opportunity to talk before the lawyer arrived, but the time seemed to have disappeared. There was a lot she wanted to discuss with Duncan, but now there was only half an hour before they would be joined by the lawyer. There would be discussion of the recovery of the painting: proposals, no doubt, and figures. She was struck by the naked effrontery of it—an effrontery that was there, she supposed, in all deliberate crime. By his acts, the criminal effectively said to the victim: You don’t matter. And that, Isabel thought, was the most fundamentally wrong of all attitudes, whether it lay behind acts of great cruelty or the mundane crime of bag-snatching. You don’t matter. How could anybody look another person in the eye and say that? Quite easily, it seemed—there were enough instances of it, every day, every moment of every day, in just about every context of human life.

  When Isabel had read the letter, Duncan suggested that they move through to the drawing room, taking their coffee with them. Once there, they seated themselves on a settee, Duncan at one end, Isabel at the other. Isabel noticed how comfortable the settee was, with its plumped-up feather cushions. Penury was a matter of hard chairs and mean cushions; prosperity—old money—was a matter of feathers: an absurd reductionist view of it, but at times quite strikingly true.

  “They could have taken anything else,” Duncan remarked. “They could have taken any of the others and I wouldn’t have felt it.” He pointed to the wall behind them. “That Gimignani behind us,” he said, “I wouldn’t have blinked an eyelid if they’d carted that off. Or the Ramsays or the Raeburns. You can replace t
hose—not with exactly the same painting, but something that does pretty much the same job.”

  “They knew its value,” said Isabel.

  He nodded miserably. “I know,” he said. “But somehow it made it personal. As if they wanted to hurt me.”

  “I doubt that,” said Isabel. “If they wanted to hurt you, they could have done something really unpleasant. Set fire to something perhaps. There are plenty of ways of hurting somebody in such a manner that you can get away with it.”

  “I suppose so.”

  She watched him. He belonged to a sector of society that did not like to show its feelings. Displays of emotion, in their view, were vulgar—showy. And yet there was no doubt in her mind now as to how he was feeling.

  “I assume that the existence of the painting was well enough known,” said Isabel.

  Duncan thought for a moment. “If you did your research,” he said. “It’s in some of the books on Poussin—not in others. Under the photograph it usually just says Private Collection, but there’s a literature on this. If you trace the painting’s progress through the salerooms, you can find out when it was bought by my grandfather. And you’ll see his name down as the purchaser. Those were more trusting days.”

  Isabel was interested in his mention of the literature. “People have written about it?”