The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (9) (14 page)

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
 

I
SABEL 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 those—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?”

“Yes. There was a small literature on it before Blunt made his attribution. Prior
to that, it was thought to be by a seventeenth-century Veronese painter. Then Blunt
looked at it and gave it the nod. His word counted for more than anything else at
the time.”

“Anthony Blunt?”

Duncan smiled. “The very same. Better known as a spy than as the authority on Poussin,
I suspect.” He paused, and glanced quickly at his watch. He was anxious—she could
see that.

“When did he see it?”

“In the mid-seventies. A guest recognised it—a distant cousin of my father’s who happened
to be an art historian. He had been at the Courtauld during Blunt’s reign there, and
he knew him well enough to phone him up and tell him about it. He said that he was
sure enough to encourage Blunt to come up to look at it—my father was unwilling to
let it leave the house. He was very attached to that painting.”

“So Blunt came up?”

“Yes, he did. He was very grand, apparently. Very tall and with a certain haughty
detachment. He could look right through you, my father said. I remember his saying
that Blunt’s look was like ice.”

Isabel had read something to that effect. And yet Blunt was human; others had spoken
of his generosity, his kindness, his warmth. “Perhaps he wanted to keep people at
a distance. Shyness sometimes has the same effect, and then we reach the
conclusion that somebody is cold, when in fact they’re just reserved.”

Duncan agreed. “Yes, people are very quick to dismiss others they’ve never met. Blunt
kept his distance, I imagine, and I don’t see what’s wrong with that. I can’t understand
why people expect everyone to open up immediately to everyone they meet.” He looked
at her, as if assessing whether they could speak at this greater level of intimacy.
“Reticence can be a virtue, don’t you think?”

Isabel was not sure. “Keeping yourself to yourself? Possibly …”

Duncan continued. “Not wearing your heart on your sleeve. Not displaying your private
life for all to see.”

“As on those television programmes? Where people expose their relationship problems
to the public gaze?”

He nodded. “Exactly. We live in an age where the assumption is made that you can—perhaps
should—talk about every aspect of your life, even to complete strangers.”

“Some would simply call that honesty,” Isabel suggested. And she thought of a line
from Auden where he talked about being
honest like children
. It was from the Freud poem; Auden said that Freud taught us the benefit of such
honesty. Children were honest—often disarmingly so—but could an adult be the same?

Duncan shifted slightly further down the settee, away from her—as if distancing himself—putting
into practice the reticence to which he had just referred. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m
not being rude—or unduly reticent. It’s just that the sun was getting in my eyes.”

A beam of morning sun, warm and discrete, a shaft of yellow, was coming in through
a window on the side of the room;
it was this that he had shifted to avoid.
A yellow knife
, thought Isabel;
a yellow knife through the air of the room
.

“Yes, we have to be honest,” he said. “But honesty is not incompatible with a certain
reserve, or reticence—call it what you will. Call it privacy, perhaps. It makes sense,
I should have thought, to talk about a sense of privacy. People have every right to
some degree of privacy and perhaps that’s what reserved people feel. They value their
privacy.”

Isabel had nothing against that. She, too, believed that there were areas of our lives
that we were entitled to guard against the eyes of others. People may have nothing
to hide in their living rooms, but they were entitled to curtains that would keep
others from looking in.

“What you say is interesting,” she said. “And I think I agree with you—for the most
part.”

He smiled. “Good. I imagined that we might agree on quite a number of subjects.”