The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “What lies behind an attitude like that?” Isabel had asked.

  Mimi had thought for a moment and then said, “Ask Dr. Freud.”

  “Fear?” suggested Isabel. “Fear of having nothing left?”

  “Possibly,” said Mimi. “Or a stony heart.”

  Now, with the last of the Milne recited—for a second time—she switched out Charlie’s light and kissed him goodnight. He was drowsy and already half asleep, but he puckered his lips slightly as she planted the kiss on his forehead. She could have wept; she could have wept for the love of him, as any mother might while watching over her child. There was no human emotion stronger than this, she felt; biology dictated it and the heart willingly became party to the bond. That was what Renaissance artists meant when they painted those beautiful, entrancing madonnas: their work was commissioned by religious piety, but the spirit that moved the artist was nothing to do with that but everything to do with maternal tenderness and love, with what she felt now …

  Jamie had laid the table in the kitchen and poured Isabel a glass of New Zealand white wine; the chilled glass was covered in a mist of condensation, small rivulets beginning to move down towards the stem. She took the glass in her hand and held it up to the evening light from the window. Outside, viewed through the wine, Scotland was blurred and made golden-yellow. Up above, there were clouds, and beyond them was a slice of blue that made her think again of Poussin and of his skies; it was the same shade of blue that the artist had habitually used in his paintings, a blue that spoke of the cold that was there in any real sky, at that altitude.

  Jamie was busying himself with the chopping of parsley.

  “I’m using curly parsley rather than the flat-leaf sort,” he said. “Do you think it matters?”

  “That’s fine,” said Isabel. “Flat-leaf parsley has a stronger flavour. Curly will probably go more easily with the other things you’re using.”

  Jamie finished chopping the parsley and moved on to garlic. “Double quantities,” he said, smiling at Isabel. “To protect us against any vampires that may be lurking around Edinburgh.” He held up a half-chopped bulb of garlic and then crossed the room towards her, holding it out in front of him for her to sniff.

  She took the hand in which he held the garlic. She steadied it and then sniffed at the half-sliced bulb. It bled—the garlic bled—a clear liquid.

  “Lovely,” she said. “Sinful.”

  He stood before her. She looked into his eyes.

  “I love it,” he said. “It goes with everything, doesn’t it?”

  “Except kisses,” she said.

  He lowered his hand. “No? So one should kiss people before eating garlic?”

  “If that’s what one wants to do,” she said. And I do, she thought. I want to kiss you. I want to kiss you.

  He leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. Then again. And once more.

  “I have to cook,” he said, drawing back.

  “Yes, indeed.” She took a sip of her wine. “I had an uncomfortable meeting today,” she said.

  “Oh? Tell me about it.”

  She answered his invitation with a question. “Do you know that feeling when you meet somebody who’s ill-disposed to you—right from the beginning, before you’ve even had the chance to offend them?”

  Jamie had encountered that. “Yes, I know it. There’s a conductor who hates me. I could tell straightaway. The moment he lifted his baton at the first rehearsal, he hated me.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe he doesn’t like bassoons,” he said.

  Isabel thought: No, it was not that. It would have been something quite different; something to do with the way that Jamie looked, something to do with who he was. Envy? Jamie was young, and older people can hate the young just because they are young and because they are going to have the world for a long time yet.

  Jamie tipped a pile of chopped vegetables into a large cast-iron frying pan and moved it on to the plate of the cooker. The oil in the pan sizzled. “Who was this person anyway?” he asked.

  “She’s a lawyer from Perth,” said Isabel. “A woman called Heather Darnt.”

  “Never heard of her,” said Jamie. “But I don’t like her either.”

  Isabel smiled. “Thanks for the solidarity. She’s horrible.” She realised that to describe somebody as horrible sounded very childish. She had a friend—someone she had known at school—who used expressions like that, who spoke the same way as she did when they were both fifteen. People could be horrible, or horrid, or, by contrast, fab, or cool. These adjectives were interspersed with Scots terms, words that were vividly expressive, as Scots can so often be. The overall effect was one of decisive partisanship.

  “Or maybe not exactly horrible,” she continued. “Just rude. Cold. Rather sinister.”

  Jamie nodded. “The sort of person you can picture commanding a firing squad? There are more people like that than you imagine.”

  “I know.”

  “And so what did she say?”

  Isabel told him about their conversation and the promise that the painting would be available for inspection. He listened intently, stirring the vegetables in the frying pan as Isabel spoke. When she had finished, he turned and fixed her with a stare.

  “You’re not going to go?” he asked. “You aren’t going to go and meet these people, are you?”

  “Duncan wants me to,” Isabel replied. “And I’ve agreed.”

  For a moment Jamie said nothing, and turned back to his cooking. “I know I can never persuade you not to do things,” he said over his shoulder. “So I won’t try. But just be careful with this one.”

  “It’ll be in full public view, I imagine,” said Isabel. “They won’t want to give us an actual address to go to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we could pass that on to the authorities, and they could turn up and recover the painting.”

  “So how will you do it?”

  She did not know the answer to that. “I imagine that it will be in a bar or a café, or somewhere like that. We’ll be told to meet them somewhere at the last moment.”

  Jamie looked doubtful. “Why somewhere public? But won’t it look very odd if you start examining a painting in the middle of a bar?”

  “I imagine they won’t want somewhere private because they’ll want to be able to melt away into a crowd, or into the traffic perhaps. So it’s likely to be somewhere public, but where …” She looked at him helplessly. “I don’t know exactly. In fact, I don’t know at all. I’m not very good at these things.”

  He smiled at her. “I could say, then, that perhaps you shouldn’t take them on. But I won’t say that. I really won’t.”

  “What will you say instead?”

  He hesitated for a moment. “That I’m really happy that you’re the way you are. That I’m glad that you’re not somebody who can ignore the troubles of others. That you’re the most perfect woman I’ve ever met in my life and that I love you more than the … more than the Atlantic Ocean.”

  She put down her glass. “What you’ve said is more than enough for any woman,” she said. “To be loved more than the Atlantic Ocean …”

  “It’s true,” said Jamie. “I know it sounds odd …”

  The Atlantic stood for so much—for breadth and openness and empty, watery wastes—and was not the most obvious metaphor for love; but she knew why he should have thought of the sea in trying to say what he wanted to say: Burns had talked of the duration of his love, which would last, he said, Till a’ the seas gang dry, and so she said, “I understand. It doesn’t sound odd at all—not to me.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  IT WAS ALEX MUNROWE, Duncan’s daughter, who contacted Isabel with the suggestion that they meet, rather than the other way round. Isabel had thought of getting in touch with her: having met Patrick, the son, her curiosity about the family had been aroused. Duncan had said very little about his daughter, other than to mention that she lived in Nelson Stre
et and to let drop the information that he saw her regularly when he came down to Edinburgh. There was nothing unusual about that, even if it suggested that Duncan might have a preference for the company of his daughter. He would not be the only father to feel that way; many fathers had closer relations with their daughters than with their sons. The evolutionary biologists might have something to say about that, thought Isabel, and if they did not, then the Freudians certainly would. But in this case it was no real concern of hers; she had not been asked to involve herself in the internal dynamics of the Munrowe family, and it was only curiosity that drove her to speculate about Alex.

  The telephone call came on the day following Isabel’s trip to Munrowe House and her uncomfortable meeting with Heather Darnt. After introducing herself, Alex apologised for telephoning Isabel at home. But there’s nowhere else to telephone me, she thought.

  “My father gave me your number,” Alex continued. “He said you wouldn’t mind my getting in touch.”

  Isabel assured her that she did not mind in the least. “In fact, I was hoping to meet you at some point. Your father told me all about you.” She said that without thinking; Duncan had mentioned her, but had hardly said very much at all.

  There was a silence at the other end of the line and Isabel wondered whether she had inadvertently given offence. But she had not. Alex confessed that she had been finishing off a piece of toast and had been licking butter off her fingers. “I know that sounds rude,” she said. “But I have to go out shortly and there are two calls I have to make.”

  “It’s not rude at all,” said Isabel. “There may be some occasions when you certainly shouldn’t phone somebody, but while eating toast is not one of them.”

  There was a further silence before Alex cleared her throat; a crumb had gone down the wrong way, Isabel decided.

  “My father is very grateful to you. So am I.”

  Isabel felt embarrassed. “I’ve done nothing.”

  “You’re being a support for him,” said Alex. “Martha Drummond said you would be, and she was right.”

  “Well,” said Isabel, “I’m sorry that he’s had this happen to him.”

  “It’s awful,” agreed Alex. “Of all the pictures they could have taken, to take that one … It’s just so cruel.”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “It is.” She waited for Alex to reveal why she had called.

  “Could we meet?” asked Alex. “So that I can put a face to the name.”

  Isabel agreed, and a time was agreed for later that day; she was going over to that side of town, and she could drop in at about four in the afternoon, if that suited Alex.

  It did. “Sponge cake? Sandwiches? Coffee? Tea?”

  “Sandwiches, if you’re making them,” said Isabel.

  “Cucumber?”

  Isabel laughed. “You guessed.”

  “Nobody dislikes cucumber sandwiches. Or nobody I’ve met.”

  Isabel suddenly wondered: Are there cultures where the cucumber, for some reason, was spurned? People had such strange ideas about food: apples had, in some places, once been regarded as sinful—Eve’s fault—and potatoes had been seen as encouraging laziness. Cucumbers, surely, had escaped censure, and, rather, had attracted admiration, even though it was not always complimentary to be described as being “as cool as a cucumber.” The French might describe a lover as a little cabbage, but not, she thought, as a little cucumber. Certainly not. She smiled.

  “Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “Sorry. I was thinking.” She did not say that she was thinking about cucumbers.

  Alex gave her address, and they rang off. Grace had just arrived and Isabel could hear her in the kitchen emptying the bin in a way that told her that something had incurred her housekeeper’s displeasure. When things were knocked together or banged, it was a clear sign that some incident, probably something in the newspaper, had served to irritate Grace.

  Isabel left her study and entered the kitchen. Grace had just tipped the contents of the bin underneath the sink into a large black plastic sack. She looked up as Isabel entered.

  “Have you seen the Scotsman today?” Grace asked.

  I was right, thought Isabel.

  “There’s an article about a wee boy in Fife who’s a real expert in physics. He’s just nine and he’s outstripping the seventeen-year-olds. They won’t let him go to physics classes at the secondary school.”

  Isabel was not prepared for this. She had been putting off a discussion about Charlie and mathematics, but this report seemed to be leading in that direction.

  “Who’s preventing him going there?” she asked.

  “The education committee.” Grace spat the words out with maximum distaste. “Those councillors. What have they ever done? That’s what I ask? They’ve all made a career of being politicians and they’ve never done anything in their lives. And then when a boy of real talent comes along, they say things like, ‘Our resources must be fairly shared—we can’t encourage one child at the expense of another.’ Can you believe it? That’s what they said.”

  Isabel moved towards the kettle. A cup of coffee could often calm Grace down, and she decided that this was an occasion for just such a tactic.

  But Grace continued. “It’s the same with Charlie, isn’t it?”

  Isabel was noncommittal. “I’m not sure—”

  Grace cut her short. “Yes, it is.” She looked reproachfully at Isabel. “He’s doing very well, you know.”

  Isabel frowned. “We’re very grateful to you, Grace. We’re very grateful to you for everything you do. But in this particular instance, I think that there may be a case for speaking to an expert …” And here she looked at Grace before going on, “I freely admit I’m out of my depth here. I don’t know how to teach mathematics—how to get the right approach. We could ask an expert—maybe somebody at one of the schools, at Watson’s perhaps.” She paused. “Don’t you think that’s a good idea?”

  “We already have an expert,” said Grace. “The book I’ve been using to help Charlie is written by a world expert. She’s in California.”

  “The fact that somebody is in California doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s …” Isabel searched for the right word. “Reliable. In fact, California is the sort of place where all sorts of fads take hold. It’s famous for that. It’s a big place for fads.”

  Grace came back immediately. “Not this book. The book I’ve been using is definitely not faddish. It’s been proved.”

  Isabel sighed. “I think we need to talk about it,” she said mildly. “If children learn mathematics the wrong way, they can develop bad habits. Then you can’t get them to do it the right way ever again.”

  Grace narrowed her eyes. “I’m not making any mistakes,” she said. She turned away. “And if you don’t trust me with Charlie, then quite honestly I don’t really see how I can continue to work here. I’m sorry, but what other conclusion can I reach?”

  Isabel gasped. “Oh, Grace, I didn’t mean to upset you. I really didn’t. Of course I trust you with Charlie. We both do.”

  “Then why did you say that?”

  Isabel spoke softly. “I didn’t say what you think I said. All that I said was that mathematics is the sort of thing that perhaps an expert …”

  “An expert? That is, anybody but me. That’s what that means, doesn’t it?”

  Isabel shook her head. “No, not at all. I’m not an expert either. Nor is Jamie.”

  “And you haven’t even read the book,” said Grace. “You’ve accused me of making all sorts of mistakes and you haven’t even read the book.” She turned away and began to undo the strings of her apron, which dropped to the floor as she loosened it. She did not bend down to pick it up, but patted her hair as if to compose herself for her next move. “I’m sorry that it’s ending in this way,” she said.

  “Look,” said Isabel. “I’m really sorry if I’ve offended you. I didn’t mean to. You must know that, Grace. It’s just that neither Jamie nor I
want to push Charlie too much. We want him to have time to be a little boy. There’ll be time for mathematics later on.”

  Grace was not listening. “I was merely doing what needed to be done,” she said. “No more than that.”

  “Well, then, let’s talk about it. Let’s sit down and work it out.”

  Grace moved away. “No. It’s too late for that. I’m going now,” she said.

  “Grace—”

  The kitchen door slammed. Isabel sat down and put her head in her hands. Grace had resigned twice before, and on both occasions had been persuaded to return. In neither of the previous cases did Isabel feel it had been her fault—and she was right: she was an infinitely considerate employer. She imagined that once again Grace would be prevailed upon to change her mind, but it would involve prolonged explanations and assurances. And neither of the previous resignations had been so firm and so reproachful, which did not bode well for a rapid resolution. Jamie would have to be involved, Isabel decided. Grace normally ate out of his hand, and he had been responsible for bringing the last resignation to an end. He would be an ambassador, sent on a mission of reconciliation and peace-keeping, the bearer of a diplomatic note and a peace-offering.

  That was what Grace would expect, and it was what she would get, although for a brief moment Isabel allowed herself to speculate on what would happen if she were simply to accept Grace’s resignation. Would Grace then apologise and ask for her job back, or would she stand on her dignity? It was inconceivable that Grace should go. She had been there for ever, it seemed, and the house would not be the same without her. Isabel owned the house, it was true, but that did not make her feel that she, alone, had the right to be there. The right to be in a place came in different forms: the legal title was one such form, but only one, and could sometimes be considerably weaker than moral rights of another form altogether. Those with legal title often misunderstood that; they thought that a piece of paper—a legal device—spoke more eloquently than any human link, any claim of long presence or association. But they were wrong, even if they had the crude mechanisms of enforcement on their side.