‘You’re smiling?’
She could not help herself; it is a concomitant of my allowing my thoughts to wander excessively, she thought. Then I smile or even say something. ‘I’m sorry. It’s nothing to do with what you’ve told me. It was just an odd thought about something else – about a racehorse . . .’
Stella stared at her intently. ‘A racehorse?’
‘Nothing,’ said Isabel. ‘It really has nothing to do with what we were talking about. Sometimes my mind wanders off. I’m sorry; you now have my full attention.’
Stella was silent, staring out of the window, out past Isabel, who was seated with her back to the street. Then, quite suddenly, her gaze shifted back to Isabel. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. That must be it. Norrie.’
Isabel looked at her expectantly.
‘Norrie,’ Stella went on, her tone becoming more forceful. ‘What a perfect way of getting back at us. Perfect.’
Isabel understood. However, she could not help but sound incredulous; real life simply did not involve plots like that; real life was disappointingly mundane. ‘Revenge? Do you really think so? Do you think that he – any doctor – would do that sort of thing? Risk people’s lives?’
‘Doctors do odd things,’ snapped Stella. ‘They’re exactly the same as the rest of us.’
Isabel wrestled with the possibility. Stella was right about the frailty of doctors; they had extramarital affairs, cheated on their tax returns, involved themselves in dirty politics. And there were spectacularly wicked doctors – doctors like Mengele – to show that for some the Hippocratic oath meant nothing. Anything was possible – from anyone. ‘You’re suggesting that Norrie altered the data? You’re suggesting that he did this to ruin Marcus? To ruin his uncle over some long-running sense of being deprived of something that his mother thought should be his?’
Stella’s answer was simple. ‘Yes. Exactly.’
Isabel, looking away from Stella, gazed out of the window. A man was walking up Dundas Street; a man wearing a chocolate-brown corduroy jacket of the fusty, vaguely raffish sort once worn by art teachers. He stopped and patted the pockets of his jacket, as if feeling for something that he hoped he had brought with him, before glancing in through the café window. His eyes met Isabel’s, and he seemed to hesitate. There was recognition, but no recognition. We have met one another before, thought Isabel, and we both understand that. But we do not know who the other is, which speaks eloquently, she thought, of the way we live now, knowing more and more, but less and less.
12
Isabel felt relieved when Stella looked at her watch and announced that she had to leave. She suspected that it had been a trying meeting for both of them. For her part, she had been landed with the awkward task of telling Stella that Marcus had done precisely what he had been accused of doing; not an easy message for the wife of any wrongdoer to absorb. And then she had been obliged to listen to Stella labouring the point over Norrie Brown’s grudge; the family feuds of others are never anything but discomforting for the rest of us. And Stella had been tenacious, worrying away at the ancient casus belli: Of course that’s what he would have done. It would be the perfect revenge, don’t you think?
Isabel had disagreed: People don’t do that sort of thing. They just don’t. And why do you think he would have shared his mother’s feelings over the farm? He hardly ever went there – you told me that yourself. It wasn’t a case of blue remembered hills. It would have been old business for him. But it seemed as if Stella heard none of this, or, if she heard it, dismissed it.
‘What do you want me to do?’ she had asked, when Stella looked at her watch. And she knew, even as she uttered the words, that they were the wrong ones. She should bow out of this now; she had done what she could to throw some light on the situation, and the light had turned to murk, complicated by the unlikely suggestion that Marcus’s disgrace had all been engineered by an embittered nephew.
Stella did not wait to answer. ‘Well, obviously I want you to . . . I’d like you, rather, to sort this out. If you wouldn’t mind . . . I know I’m imposing on you.’
And she started to cry, the sobs coming up from somewhere within her, racking her frame. She struggled to control herself. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry . . .’
Isabel leaned forward and put an arm around Stella’s shoulder. At a neighbouring table a young man looked at them, and then looked away tactfully.
‘You don’t need to say you’re sorry for being human,’ whispered Isabel. ‘Nobody needs to say sorry for that.’
‘It’s just that I’ve got nobody to help me,’ said Stella. ‘And so I latch on to you. And you were so kind to me. Said yes. I couldn’t believe it . . . that somebody would help me out of the goodness of her heart.’
Now there was no possibility that Isabel could refuse. And as Stella calmed down, Isabel reassured her that she would not abandon the case. She heard herself say that – the case – and thought: Who do you think you are? You’re beginning to talk like some ridiculous sleuth, when you’re just Isabel Dalhousie, intermeddler. That was the right word, although it was heavy with self-criticism. She imagined the dictionary definition – intermeddler: one who meddles in affairs that are no business of hers; as in: ‘Isabel Dalhousie was a real intermeddler’ or ‘Isabel Dalhousie, an echt intermeddler’ (for echt, see the Real McCoy).
She stopped that line of thought, which could quickly lead to an inappropriate, badly timed smile. We do not smile when people weep / But weep we may / When people smile. The lines came from nowhere, as such lines did to her; unbidden, but redolent of something elusive, only half-understood – sometimes – and oddly memorable, as had been those lines about the tattooed man that she had whispered to Jamie before they fell asleep together in each other’s arms; the tattooed man who had loved his wife and was proud of his son, the tattooed baby. They were ridiculous, and frequently trite, but these little stories, these little snatches of poetry, provided their modicum of comfort, their islands of meaning that we all needed to keep the nothingness at bay; or at least Isabel felt that she needed them.
‘I’ll do what I can.’
She meant to sound businesslike, and she did. But she also sounded cold, she thought; which was misleading, because she did not begrudge the other woman her help. Have the courage of your convictions, she thought. So what if you’re an intermeddler? Intermeddle, and don’t feel bad about it. And there was a possibility, just a possibility, that Stella was right. Isabel had not liked Norrie Brown, although she had been unable to decide why this should be so. Now the doubts began to implant themselves in her mind. She did not like Norrie Brown because he was a liar. Isabel had always been able to sense lies; it was a sixth sense – a sixth sense that nosed out mendacity, and it had warned her about Norrie Brown. She had not been listening at the time, and had not picked up the warning. But now it seemed to her that it was coming through clearly, a strong signal from the utterly inexplicable intuitive headquarters that women had and which men, she suspected, might just miss out on. But that was another issue; something for a special edition of the Review which would engage the feminist philosophers, the advocates of the philosophy of care. Yes, they would love it, as they relished any chance to put men in their place. ‘Female Intuition as a Resource in Moral Philosophy’ would be a good title for the issue, and it would attract scores of submissions. But no, she would not do that, because she did not like some of the feminist philosophers; ideologues, she thought, and strident, too. And yet, and yet . . . There was Christopher Dove, for example, and his friend Professor Lettuce. Had it ever entered their heads that their perspective on the world was a specifically male one, and not the view from nowhere? They had both condescended to her in a way in which they would not condescend to a man; they needed to be taught a lesson. They needed feminism.
She turned to Stella and saw her, suddenly, in a new light. Here was a woman who felt powerless. The might of the male-dominated medical councils had been directed against her
husband. A pack of journalists – probably all male, at least in the case of those who would have led the pack – had crucified him. And she could do nothing about it, but watch despair engulf him, and shed her tears, as she had just done, in full public view.
Isabel had already made her decision, but now it became even firmer. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll look into your theory about Norrie.’
Stella thanked her. ‘Except it’s not just a theory,’ she said. ‘I think that it’s true. I really do. And I think that you’ll find the same thing.’
Edward Mendelson’s lecture was not until four, which was a good two hours away. As she said goodbye to Stella outside Glass and Thompson, Isabel wondered what to do with those two hours. If she walked home, she would have half an hour, at the most, to spend with Charlie before she had to leave again for the lecture. If she took a bus, it would not be much different: the traffic was heavy, and there were road works in Hanover Street that were holding everything up. The answer, then, was to stay in town for the next hour and then make her way up to George Square, where the lecture was being held.
It was only a short distance down Dundas Street to the Scottish Gallery, and Isabel sauntered in that direction, glancing on the way into the windows of the neighbouring galleries. One of them, which specialised in sporting scenes and landscapes, displayed a large china hare, caught in mid-leap, astonishingly realistic. And just behind him, beneath a large display easel, lurked a porcelain fox, almost life-size, his coat sleek with glaze, his eyes looking out on to the street, bright and wary with the cunning of his species. Brother Fox. She stopped and looked at him; he was so naturally rendered that were he to be placed in her garden, half-hidden, perhaps, by a shrub, he would be indistinguishable from Brother Fox himself. But Brother Fox would not be fooled because he simply would not see him; without a smell, he would not see him – the smell gave everything away. She smiled: it was the same with liars.
The Scottish Gallery was mounting an exhibition of paintings by exiled Polish artists who had made their home in Scotland. There were not many of them, but they had painted enough to cover the walls, and were being examined by a group of five or six visitors. Isabel heard a snatch of Polish, or what she assumed was Polish, and she saw one of the group, a young woman in jeans, turn to a man and point at the label below one of the paintings. He leaned forward and exclaimed enthusiastically, and called to the others who had moved on to another painting.
A voice behind her whispered, ‘They keep finding something. Scraps of their history. It’s a very emotional exhibition for Poles.’
She turned to find Robin McClure, one of the gallery’s directors, standing behind her. ‘I suppose there’s such a big gap for them,’ she said. ‘How many years? Forty years of ice.’
‘Well, they carried on painting. Or some did.’
Isabel stared at one of the paintings: a girl in a room looking out of a window; a feeling of desolation. And beside it a grey landscape under a grey sky – was that Poland? The closest she had been to Poland was Berlin, where already one had the sense of plains stretching out into a sorrowful emptiness further east; and now here it was in paint, greyness and sorrow.
‘I’m becoming depressed,’ she said, her voice lowered; she did not want the Poles to hear her say that their landscape, or their paintings, depressed her.
‘I was just about to make myself a pot of tea,’ said Robin. ‘It’s warm enough to sit outside. We’ve got a little table out the back.’
She followed him down the stairs, past the display cases, and into the small garden. The table stood on a patch of raked white gravel, two French ironwork chairs on either side. Isabel sat in one of these while Robin went back to fetch the tea; she closed her eyes and let the sun play on her face. There was a bird singing in a tree somewhere over the wall that divided the ground at the rear of the building into patches of urban garden. Geraniums were in blossom somewhere close by; she could smell them, that sweet, velvety odour. She opened her eyes and saw that there was a tub of the flowers not far away; red clusters against dark green leaves. The smell took her back, to somewhere far away and long ago; somewhere she could not quite remember . . . and then she thought: Georgetown, and her window box. There had been geraniums in the window box, planted by the previous tenant, who, like her, had been a research fellow in philosophy, and had confessed that the geraniums were the only things she had ever planted in her life. ‘All I leave behind me,’ she had said, ‘are some gerania,’ and laughed.
Robin returned with a generously sized teapot and a couple of mugs. Tucked under his arm was a glossy auction catalogue, which he retrieved once he had put down the mugs. ‘Sotheby’s,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the catalogue. ‘Just in. Their next sale of old masters.’
She reached up for the catalogue and looked at the front cover, much of which was taken up with a picture of a small family group huddled under an oak tree. ‘“Rest on the Flight into Egypt,”’ she read. ‘“Jan Brueghel, the Elder.”’
‘But not the oldest,’ said Robin, looking over her shoulder. ‘One of the dynasty. Son of Pieter and father of Jan the Younger. There was quite a clan of them.’
Isabel scrutinised the painting. ‘Not much seems to be happening,’ she said.
‘Well, they are resting.’
‘Of course.’
‘And the whole point of the painting is the oak tree,’ Robin went on. ‘The flight into Egypt is pretty much incidental.’
He began to pour the tea. ‘But things happen in some Brueghels. Do you know that famous Bruegel – Pieter Bruegel, that is – The Massacre of the Innocents? It’s one of the busiest old masters around. There’s an awful lot going on. I saw it the other day, as it happens. There was an exhibition of Flemish paintings and it was in it.’
Isabel thought. ‘No. I don’t think so. Which innocents were they?’
‘Dutch innocents,’ said Robin, passing her a mug of tea. ‘Dutch innocents – massacred by Spanish troops. Except . . .’
‘Except?’
‘Except the painting – or one version of it – tells a different story. A later owner found it too vivid and ordered the truth to be painted over.’
‘That wouldn’t have been the first time that a painting was changed in that way,’ said Isabel. ‘Nor the last, for that matter. I was in a gallery in Moscow once and saw a picture of the Politburo with the non-persons painted out.’
Robin smiled. ‘Probably more successfully than the Bruegel. The problem with The Massacre of the Innocents is that you look at it and you wonder why the soldiers are all stabbing a very large turkey. And why is a large bag of wheat lying on the ground, in the middle of nowhere? Then you see the children underneath the turkey and the sack, painted over, but no longer well concealed. A restorer has made a start and then maybe not liked what he saw underneath.’
Isabel paged through the catalogue. The old masters revealed the small range of their interests – or those of their patrons. Endless religious scenes, low-country landscapes, the occasional interior. ‘I wish they’d been free to paint other things,’ she said. ‘More reportage. More work scenes. More life as it was.’
Robin sipped at his tea. ‘Painters rarely paint for posterity. They portray the things that people want to admire at the time.’
Isabel frowned. She was not sure that she agreed. ‘Guernica?’
Robin put down his mug. ‘Yes, I suppose so. I suppose Picasso wanted to put that on the record.’ He paused. The bird in the neighbouring tree had raised the pitch of his song, and for a few moments they both listened to the ringing challenge. Then Robin rose to his feet. ‘I almost forgot. That painting.’
Isabel looked up from the catalogue. ‘What painting?’
Robin was making his way back into the gallery. ‘Hang on a sec. I’ll get it,’ he said over his shoulder.
Isabel turned a page of the catalogue. A worldly wise infant looked out from his mother’s knee; above his head, a thin circle of gold, a halo; in the backgr
ound, a line of cypresses marched off across a landscape that was Tuscany or Umbria. She looked at the mother’s face, at the expression of gentle solemnity that seemed to be the approved look of motherhood. Had she ever looked at Charlie quite like that?
Robin reappeared, carrying a small painting, a double hand-breadth or so across, which he put down on the table in front of Isabel. ‘Here it is,’ he said. ‘It came back from the framer yesterday.’
She gave a start. It was another fox; a small painting of a fox, standing in a clearing, sniffing the air.
‘Brother Fox,’ she muttered.
Robin sat down again and reached for the teapot. ‘Brother who?’
She picked up the painting and looked for a signature.
‘Nothing,’ said Robin. ‘No clue as to the artist. But rather well executed. A nice little painting.’
Isabel put the painting back on the table. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s nice. But . . . but why are you showing it to me?’
Robin looked puzzled. ‘Jamie said that you’d collect it. He bought it a few weeks ago and said that you’d be in for it.’
‘My Jamie?’
‘Yes.’
She was at a loss as to what to say. Robin, watching her, looked puzzled. ‘Is there something wrong with the frame? We thought it was rather a good choice.’
‘No. The frame’s fine.’ Isabel looked at the painting again. The only conclusion she could reach was that Jamie had bought it for her as a present. But then why would he not have told her to go in and collect it, if that was what he had wanted? He had forgotten; that must be it. The important thing was that Jamie had bought it for her. He had come in and bought it for her. ‘He’ll probably be in for it himself,’ she said. ‘I won’t take it now.’
She closed her eyes for a few moments, feeling again the sun on her brow. The moment was delicious, one to be savoured. I shall remember this, she thought. The painting would not have been cheap, and he would have paid for it with his hard-earned money. How many music lessons did a small painting of a fox represent? Twenty? Thirty? No matter: Jamie had specially chosen it for her, and that showed that he loved her, which is what she wanted to know, more than anything else. It was a moment of realisation, of understanding, and it took place against a background of sun and geraniums and the pure voice of a bird.
The Comfort of Saturdays Page 14