Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 06 (6 page)

“There are some paintings which are unambiguously didactic,” Guy observed drily.

Isabel smiled. “The wise virgins look very dull,” she said. “I rather suspect I should have preferred the company of their foolish sisters.”

Guy turned the page, to reveal a display of three portraits. “Pieter Nason,” he said, pointing to the first of the paintings. “He did some very fine portraits. There’s one in the National Gallery on the Mound. And what have we here …”

He pointed to the painting below—a much smaller photograph, and consequently less detailed.

As Isabel gazed at the painting, she felt a sudden flutter of excitement. The face was unmistakable—that proud but ultimately rather weak face: Charles Edward Stuart, none other than Bonnie Prince Charlie.

“It’s him,” said Isabel quietly. “The Young Pretender.” Her eye went to the description under the photograph. “Circle of Domenico Dupra, Turin,
Portrait of Charles Edward Stuart.
”

“Dupra was a reasonably well-known Italian portrait painter,” said Guy. “He was first half of the eighteenth century, which would have made him a contemporary of Charlie’s.”

Isabel looked at the estimate. “Should we go for this, Guy? The estimate is low. Look. It starts at two thousand pounds.”

Guy thought for a moment. “It would complement your portrait of James VI,” he said. “We could have a tilt at it. You never know with these Stuart portraits. There might just be somebody who’s very keen.”

“Jacobites,” said Isabel.

Guy agreed. Historical enthusiasm kept the market in portraits alive: people had their heroes, likely and unlikely, he explained. “Somebody recently offered Gandhi’s spectacles at
an auction in New York,” he said. “They were eventually withdrawn, but had they not been, they would have brought in a tremendous sum.”

Isabel thought about this. Gandhi’s spectacles. She remembered seeing a photograph of his possessions at the time of his death: those small, oval spectacles, a pair of sandals, a dhoti; a photograph that had moved her almost to tears. That tiny patrimony spoke more powerfully of the greatness of his soul than any words could. And she reflected upon how curious it was that the people bidding for them could compete to pay thousands of dollars for things that proclaimed the ultimate unimportance of those very dollars.

She looked more closely at the picture of Bonnie Prince Charlie. She did not like him—he was vain, a chancer really, who must have shared the inflated notions of entitlement that infected all those exiled Stuarts. Yet no matter how outrageous his claims, there was an undoubted romance in his story, and it was for this reason that she was prepared to have him on her wall. Scotland had not been well treated by the English at the time; the Scottish parliament had not been consulted by Westminster in the choice of the Hanoverians, and the Stuart cause had become synonymous with the resentment of a put-upon nation. This weak and rather effete Frenchman, bedecked in tartan, had become the focal point of Scottish resistance to London’s diktats, and that still resonated.

“Will you bid for me?” Isabel asked. “Let’s try to get it below the estimate. Twelve hundred?”

Guy made a note in the margins. “Good as done,” he said.

They finished their perusal of the catalogue and went back upstairs. Jamie arrived a few minutes later; she saw him coming
up Dundas Street, with Charlie clearly asleep, tucked up in the pushchair.

“We went all the way down to Canonmills,” he said as she went out to join them. “He’s sleeping the sleep of the just.”

Isabel bent down and looked at Charlie. The tiny features were in repose, the mouth slightly open to allow the passage of air. Such an intricate collection of cells, she thought, all miraculously put together to produce a centre of human consciousness, so fragile, so infinitely precious to those whose life was transformed by it. She straightened up. The summer sun was riding high now, gilding the hills of Fife across the Forth. A bus laboured up the hill, bound for Princes Street and the Mound, the passengers in shirtsleeves for the unaccustomed heat. For a moment, Isabel’s eyes met those of someone looking out of the window, a thin-faced woman with her hair done up in a bun. The woman began a smile, but stopped, as if conscious of somehow transgressing the conventions of isolation with which as city-dwellers we immure ourselves. The bus moved on, and Isabel felt a sudden desire to run alongside it, to wave to the woman, to acknowledge the unexpected exchange of fellow feeling between them. But she did not, because she never acted on these impulses, and because it might have puzzled or even frightened the other woman.

She turned to Jamie. “Can you remind me of the words of ‘King Fareweel’?” she asked. She knew that Jamie had an impressive knowledge of Scottish music, including the more arcane corners of the subject. “King Fareweel” was mainstream, the sort of thing sung by Scottish patriots in moments of enthusiastic inebriation, and by nostalgic Jacobites in cold sobriety.

The question took Jamie by surprise, but Isabel often said odd things; he was getting used to it.

“Now a young prince cam’ to Edinburgh toon,”
he began, half singing, half speaking, “
And he wasnae a wee bit German lairdie / For a far better man than ever he was / Lay oot in the heather wi’ his tartan plaidie.”

“That’s it,” said Isabel.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Isabel’s niece, Cat, telephoned at seven. Isabel had been awake since six and had taken Charlie on an outing in the garden. He had been late in starting to walk, but now seemed eager to make up for lost time, rushing off purposefully and quite indifferent to any falls that came his way. It was an exhausting business for her, if not for Charlie himself, as he had to be watched every moment. She had a playpen, which at least could give her time to get her breath back and do things that needed to be done in the house.

“Do people approve of those things?” Jamie had asked when the pen had been delivered. “Don’t some people look on them as little prisons?”

Isabel had read about this. “Some do,” she said. “But not everyone, by any means. It all depends on how long the child is in one. If they’re in it for short periods of time they can enjoy playing by themselves.”

“But not for hours.”

“No, not for hours. And nor should children be parked in front of the television.”

“Which we don’t have,” Jamie pointed out.

“No.”

Jamie had bought something called a baby bungee, an apparatus that gripped on to the jamb of a door and allowed the child to bounce up and down on a strong elastic rope. Charlie had loved it, but on the second occasion it had been used he had bounced off one side of the jamb and then back against the other. He had been slightly bruised, even if he had not complained, but the baby bungee had been retired to a cupboard. Charlie, she had decided, was a stoic by temperament, a useful thing in this life. If this stoicism came from anywhere—rather than being an entirely random quirk of personality genes—then it must have been inherited from Jamie, who was fond of saying “It happens” when faced with any frustrating development. Stoicism and defeatism, of course, can be kissing cousins, but Isabel would never find fault in Jamie’s quite exceptional ability to accept setbacks. She had never seen him angry—not once; distressed, perhaps, but not angry, and it seemed that Charlie was the same. Of course the tantrum stage still lay ahead of him, and that would be a stringent test of any stoicism he possessed; it was no use saying “It happens” to a three-year-old brewing a stamping attack.

“Sorry to phone so early,” said Cat. “Crisis.”

Cat was visited by crisis rather more often than others, but the difficulties these crises entailed always seemed genuine enough, even if they were clearly of her own creation. A crisis was a crisis, Isabel believed, and it was unhelpful to allocate blame. You did not ask the drowning man how he ended up in the river, nor point to the
No Swimming
notice—you rescued him; even if he happened to be Dove, Isabel thought, or Professor
Lettuce. A delicious scene came into her mind: Dove and Lettuce had both fallen into a loch and were calling for help. Isabel, passing by, would not hesitate, of course, nor would she relish their evident discomfort as it dawned on them who their rescuer would be. But what if it were in her power to rescue only one of them? It was the familiar and horrific dilemma that must cross the mind of at least some imaginative or overanxious parents: Which of my children would I save? The thought is usually too appalling to contemplate, and the question is suppressed rather than answered.

But here it arose with Dove and Lettuce, both schemers and plotters of the same stripe, and in moral terms, Isabel reluctantly concluded, both of equal merit. The deciding factor in such a case would have to be age; all other things being equal, the sole remaining basis of just discrimination would be that Professor Lettuce, being the older of the two, had less claim for a future than the relatively youthful Dove. So Dove was saved. She did not like the conclusion, but doing the right thing, even if that took the form of making the correct choice in an entirely hypothetical situation, was often uncomfortable.

Cat waited for a reply. Isabel was thinking, she decided, and was probably mentally chewing over something altogether different, as often happened.

“You need me to do the delicatessen?” Isabel asked eventually.

“Yes, if you don’t mind,” Cat explained. “The boiler in the flat has gone on the blink and the engineer is coming. However …”

Isabel was familiar with such issues: the gas people were always unwilling to commit to a time, and would give only the most general indication of when it might be.

“They said that it could be either morning or afternoon,” said Cat. “And they wouldn’t budge. So I have to stay in all day to let them in.”

“Frustrating,” said Isabel. “Of course I’ll help. What about Eddie?”

Eddie was a rather vulnerable young man who lacked the confidence to look after the delicatessen on his own. Isabel believed that he was perfectly capable of doing so, and Cat did, too, but his anxiety had been acute on the few occasions on which he had been left in charge by himself.

“He’ll be there,” said Cat. “But you know the problem.”

Isabel said that she did, and the arrangements were made. Isabel had a key to the business and would open it up at ten to nine, to be ready for Eddie’s arrival. Cat promised that in the unlikely event of the gas engineer arriving early she would come straight in to work; Isabel, however, put her off. “Take a day off,” she said. “That’s what aunts are for.”

Her own words struck her.
That’s what aunts are for.
It was true, of course: aunts were for coming to the rescue, and she always tried to do just that. But were aunts for helping themselves to their nieces’ discarded boyfriends? It was Cat who had got rid of Jamie—an act that betrayed appalling judgement, Isabel felt—and so she could hardly complain when Isabel took up with him. But she had complained, and had done so bitterly. Things were slightly better now, but there was still a touchiness on Cat’s part that could flare up at any time—and it did.

Jamie was not yet up, and so Isabel took him a cup of tea and the copy of the
Scotsman
that came through the door early each morning. When she told him that she would be spending the day in the delicatessen, for a moment she saw a shadow cross his face. She hesitated; they did not talk about Cat
because she was an unseen third person in their relationship, as a former lover sometimes can be. It was akin to a past act of unfaithfulness that can stand, a painful monument, in the history of a marriage—a forbidden memory, cauterised and sealed off, but still with the power to hurt.

“We could see whether Grace could come in,” said Isabel. “She tends to be free on Saturday, so you needn’t have Charlie all day.”

Jamie looked at her reproachfully. “I like having Charlie all day,” he said.

She was emollient. “That’s fine then. He loves being with you.” She bent down and kissed him on the cheek, gently tousling his hair as she did so.

“Don’t do that.” But he did not mean it.

She sat down on the bed. “You don’t resent my helping Cat, do you?”

He looked away. “No, not really.” A small rectangle of sunlight streamed in through a chink in the curtains, across Jamie’s shoulder.

Isabel reached forward and placed her hand against his chest. “I think you do, you know. But I can’t just … just cut Cat out. She’s family. I can’t.”

He looked at her. “I never wanted you to do that.” He hesitated for a moment, and then took Isabel’s hand in his. “I’m the one who feels awkward about this. I know I don’t need to, but I do. I feel embarrassed, I suppose, that I’ve …”

She waited, but he did not complete the sentence. “Embarrassed that you’ve what?”

“That I slept with her, and now I’m sleeping with you.”

He spoke with transparent honesty, but the pain his words
caused him was laid quite bare. Isabel pressed his hand. “But that’s …” She found herself at a loss as to what to say.