BY THE TIME she got back to the house, having been interrupted on the way back by bumping into a garrulous neighbour, the morning was already almost over. For Isabel, the watershed was always eleven-thirty; that was the point at which if nothing was achieved, then nothing would be, the point at which one had to think about lunch, now just an hour away.
Since Charlie had started going to his playgroup, the mornings had become even shorter, as he had to be fetched shortly after noon, and it took ten minutes to get him back and another ten minutes to get him changed out of his morning clothes; by this time, he would be covered in finger paint, crumbs, pieces of a curious modelling substance much approved of by the playgroup authorities, grains of sand from the sandpit and, very occasionally, what looked like specks of blood. Boys, it seemed to Isabel, were magnets for dirt and detritus, and the only solution, if one were wanted, was frequent changes of clothing. Or one could throw up one’s hands and allow them to get dirtier through the day and then hose them down—metaphorically, of course—in the early evening.
Isabel opted to change Charlie, and so his morning clothes, once abandoned, were replaced with afternoon clothes. She decided that she rather liked the idea of having afternoon clothes, even if one were not a two-year-old. Changing into one’s afternoon clothes could become something of a ritual, rather like changing for dinner—which so few people did any more. And the afternoon clothes themselves could be the subject of deliberation and chosen with care; they would be more loose-fitting than one’s morning clothes, more autumnal in shade, perhaps—clothes that would reflect the lengthening of shadows and sit well with the subtle change in light that comes after three; russet clothes, comfortable linen, loose-fitting collars and sleeves.
“You thinking?”
It was Isabel’s housekeeper, Grace. She had worked in the house when Isabel’s father was still alive, and had been kept on by Isabel. It would have been impossible to ask Grace to leave—even if Isabel had wanted to do so; she came with the house and had naturally assumed that the house could not be run without her. Isabel had felt vaguely apologetic about having a housekeeper—it seemed such an extravagant, privileged thing to do, but a discussion with her friend, Peter Stevenson, had helped.
“What good would it do if you were to stop that particular item of expenditure?” Peter said. “All it would mean was that Grace would be out of a job. What would it achieve?”
“But I feel embarrassed,” said Isabel. “Somebody of my age doesn’t need a housekeeper. People will think I’m lazy.”
Peter was too perceptive to swallow that. “That’s not it, is it? What’s worrying you is that people will think that you’re well-off, which you are. So why not just accept it? You use your money generously—I know that. Carry on like that and forget what you imagine people think about you. It’s not an actual sin to have money. The sin exists in using it selfishly, which you don’t.”
“Oh well,” said Isabel.
“Exactly.”
Now Grace stood in the doorway of Isabel’s workroom, a bucket in hand, on her way to performing the daily chore of washing down the Victorian encaustic-tile floor in the entrance hall. Isabel was not sure that this floor had to be washed every day, but Grace had always done it and would have resisted any suggestion that she change her routine.
Now Grace’s question hung in the air. She often asked Isabel whether she was thinking; it was almost an accusation.
“I suppose I am thinking. But not about work, I must admit.” Isabel, who was seated at her desk, gave a despairing glance at the piles of paper before her. “I’m afraid that I’ve accomplished very little this morning.”
“Me too,” said Grace. “I’ve done none of the ironing yet, I’m afraid. All those shirts of Jamie’s.”
“Leave them,” said Isabel. “Jamie can iron them himself. It’s very therapeutic for men to iron. Therapeutic for women, that is.”
Grace shook her head. “I’ll do them later this afternoon.” She put down the bucket. “Where does the time go? Do you ever ask yourself that?”
“Constantly,” said Isabel. “As most people do.” She smiled. “Mind you, how much of our time, do you think, is spent asking ourselves where the time goes?”
Isabel remembered that it was a Friday, which meant that Grace would have spent the previous evening at one of her spiritualist meetings. She enjoyed hearing about these, as Grace was always prepared to give a candid assessment of the visiting medium. The previous week the visiting medium had been from Glasgow and had made contact with spirits who voiced an interesting, if somewhat unusual, complaint.
“He said that there were a number of spirits trying to get through. He said that that they were all from Glasgow.”
Isabel had raised an eyebrow. “Do spirits live in particular places? I thought that the whole point about being disembodied is that you rose above constraints of place. Have I got it wrong?”
Grace shook her head. “Spirits often hang about the places that were special to them before they crossed over,” she said. “He said that these spirits wanted to get back to Glasgow because they weren’t happy in Edinburgh.”
“A likely story!” snorted Isabel.
“My feelings too,” Grace had replied.
Now, Isabel asked about the previous evening. Was the medium any good, or at least better than the man who contacted the unhappy Glaswegian spirits?
“Much better,” said Grace. “He was one of our regulars. We had him about four months ago and he was really good. He saw somebody’s husband—clear as day, he said. I was sitting next to the woman and I comforted her. It was very moving.”
Isabel said nothing. The fundamental premises of Grace’s spiritualist meetings might not have withstood rigorous, rational examination, but there was little doubt in her mind about the solace that they gave. And what was wrong with anything that gave comfort to lives bereft of it?
“Yes,” Grace continued. “This medium—he’s called Mr. Barr; I don’t know his first name, I’m afraid—he works in a bank. In the back room, I think; he’s not a teller or anything like that. Anyway, he has a real talent for getting through to the other side. You can see it in his eyes; he just has that look to him—you know what I mean?”
Isabel did. “The light—”
“Exactly,” said Grace. “It’s the light that shines from the eyes. There’s no mistaking it and he had it. It was like …” She searched for an analogy, and then decided, “Like a lighthouse.”
Isabel struggled with the image. Lighthouse eyes would presumably send forth beams at intervals, which would create a rather odd impression, she felt, especially at night, and if such people lived by the sea …
“He said something very interesting,” Grace continued. “He said that he was getting a strong message from somebody who had been a stockbroker in Edinburgh in his lifetime. He was now on the other shore and wanted us to know that everything would be all right.”
“That’s reassuring,” said Isabel.
“I think he was talking about the country’s economy. He said that we shouldn’t worry—it was going to be all right.”
Isabel raised an eyebrow. “I wonder how he knows?”
Grace assumed a rather superior expression. “They know,” she said. “We may not understand how they know, but the important thing is that they know. It’s to do with time. Time has a different meaning in the spirit world.”
Isabel did not contradict this; she knew there was little point. If asked to justify her claims about the world beyond, Grace tended to shelter behind the idea that there were some forms of knowledge that somebody like Isabel simply could not grasp.
“Scepticism closes the mind,” she would say. “Like a trap.”
Grace continued with her report. “He became quite specific, you know. He mentioned a particular company that he said would do well. He said that all the conditions were right for this to happen.”
Isabel expressed her surprise. “A tip? An investment tip?”
/> “No,” said Grace. “It was not like that at all. The spirit was just sharing something with us. He was obviously happy that this company would do well and he wanted us to share his happiness.”
Isabel hesitated for a moment. Grace’s meeting must have been rich in comic possibilities, with the medium issuing what amounted to a stock-market prediction, and some of those attending, perhaps, discreetly writing down the details.
“What company?” she asked on impulse.
“West of Scotland Turbines,” said Grace. “You’ll see their shares in the paper. Look at the stock-market page.”
“So they exist?”
“Yes, of course they exist. I looked them up. They make turbines for hydroelectric schemes.”
Grace appeared to feel that they had spent long enough on turbines and went on to say something about needing new scouring liquid for the upstairs shower, which was becoming mildewed. She looked at Isabel slightly reproachfully, as if she were responsible for the mildew. Isabel thought: It’s not my fault, but Grace will always blame me.
Then Grace said, “Oh, somebody phoned while you were out. I asked for her name, but she just left a number for you to call back. It’s in the basket. Some people don’t give their names, which is odd, I think. It’s as if they’ve got something to hide …” She examined Isabel as if she were conniving in, or at least condoning, a whole series of anonymous calls. Then she continued, “She sounded Australian.”
It was the woman whom Cat had met. Isabel glanced at her watch: there was time to return the call before she went off to collect Charlie. That would mean, of course, that she would have done no work at all that morning, and would probably do very little that afternoon. Did it matter? Would the world be changed if the next edition of the Review of Applied Ethics did not come out on time? The answer, of course, was that it would make very little difference—a humbling thought.
Isabel rose from her desk and made her way into the kitchen. If Grace wanted to leave her a note, there was a small basket on top of the fridge in which notes were placed. There was one now, with a number scribbled on it in pencil. Underneath the number, Grace had written: woman. Isabel smiled; she was reminded of her father, who had once said to her, “Don’t write—or say—any more than you have to. Just don’t.”
Or think, perhaps?
Isabel took the note back to her study. There she wrote on it West of Scotland Turbines, and then picked up the telephone.
CHAPTER THREE
ISABEL HAD SUGGESTED meeting Jane Cooper the following day at Glass & Thompson. This suited both of them: Jane had somewhere to go in Princes Street, and Dundas Street was no more than ten minutes’ walk from there—and Isabel had to return a catalogue to Guy Peploe at the Scottish Gallery, a few doors down.
Her visit to Guy was brief, as the gallery staff were hanging paintings for the next show and she knew that this was not a time when they needed distraction. The invitation to the private view was on her mantelpiece: A History of Scotland in Landscape.
“Landscapes,” said Guy, pointing to a number of paintings stacked against the wall. “Solid and reliable landscapes. People love them.”
“Which is just as well for galleries,” said Isabel, peering at the vaguely familiar view depicted in one of the paintings. It was somewhere in East Lothian, she thought; looking back along the coast towards Edinburgh. But there was something not quite right.
“When was this done?” she asked, trying to make out the signature at the bottom.
Guy glanced at the painting. “Last year. You’ve probably heard of him. We showed him a couple of years ago.”
“This is the view from somewhere near Tranent, isn’t it?” asked Isabel.
Guy nodded. “Yes, in the direction of Edinburgh. That’s Arthur’s Seat over there, isn’t it? He’s got the haziness of it rather well, don’t you think?”
Isabel agreed. The artist had captured the misty, blue light that seemed to play around Arthur’s Seat when one looked at it from some distance. Blue remembered hills, she thought; Housman’s phrase about the hills of Shropshire, made so striking because the remembered was in the wrong, or at least an unusual, place. Remembered blue hills would have sounded so different and would have been quickly forgotten; blue remembered hills had an entirely different effect.
Then she realised what was wrong. “Where’s Cockenzie Power Station?” she asked. Remembered power stations.
Guy crouched down to examine the painting more closely. “Well,” he began. “Now that you mention it …”
Isabel laughed. “It’s possible, of course, that this is just a sketch and that the artist intended to put the details in later on.” She paused. “And then forgot. It’s so easy to forget about power stations, I find.”
Guy straightened up. “It’s a particularly ugly power station, isn’t it?”
“Aren’t all power stations ugly?”
He thought for a moment. “Battersea?”
Isabel thought of the extraordinary four-chimney art deco building on the Thames. Guy was right: Battersea was beautiful and richly deserved its iconic status. But there was nothing art deco about Cockenzie Power Station, which was a large, late-sixties box, a windowless block that marred that lovely stretch of Scotland’s coastline.
“Of course there are some conditions,” she said, “that prevent one from seeing unpleasant things. It may be that there are those who simply do not see power stations. Perhaps a special form of agnosia that cuts out power stations.”
Guy smiled. “It’s more likely a case of a landscape painter doing what landscape painters have been doing for a long time—editing nature.” Guy pointed to another painting that had already been hung. “That’s a Nasmyth. Scottish painters did a lot of editing in the nineteenth century. There’s a famous example—his painting of Glencoe, which makes the hills much craggier than they really are. Really soups them up.”
“Because that’s what people wanted? The romantic Highlands?”
“Exactly. They lapped it up in the nineteenth century—positively lapped it up. Scotland was the most romantic country in Europe at the time. All that Walter Scott and so on.”
Isabel looked down at the painting. “Power stations don’t really fit with that, do they?”
“Unfortunately not. And now we have wind turbines. They’ll have to be edited out, now that we’re covering our hills with those great behemoths.”
Isabel thought for a moment. Dutch windmills were so much more pleasing to the eye than the spiky things of our own times; those old windmills had great sails, comfortable and creaking, not blades of steel slicing into the sky.
“The Dutch left them in, didn’t they? The Dutch masters painted the windmills.”
“In some cases. But who can tell? Perhaps there were many more windmills than Dutch landscape art lets on. Dutch portrait painters were just as capable of improving nature as any others—so their landscape artists no doubt did much the same thing.”
Isabel reflected on this as she walked the short distance up the street to Glass & Thompson. Beauty—whether in nature, in art, or in music—was always ready to do its work; all we had to do was to open our hearts to it. Mozart, Puccini, Titian, or even a mathematical proof, spoke to the heart; they gave us completeness, peace, a glimpse of the divine. We wanted beauty; we wanted to take it into ourselves, to possess it, to absorb it, so that it became part of us. That was why we appreciated a welcoming landscape just as we appreciated a handsome face or body, and that was why a painter might feel tempted to beautify that which he saw before him, making virginal that which had been sullied, improving on that which was not quite magnificent enough. Smaller and smaller corners of unsullied nature were left to painters, now that we had covered so much of our world with concrete, with highways and wires and streams of cars—such ugliness.
Art might still remind us of beauty, might still rescue us from the wasteland we were creating; but there were those in the arts who rejected the view that art should edify and
uplift, who thought that it should aspire to be nothing more than a lens trained on an increasingly sordid reality. To create anything harmonious was seen by such people as superficial; the dark, the discordant, the unresolved—this, they believed, was the province of art, of film, of literature.
She considered all that, and then, as she crossed the threshold of the café, she considered the opposite—or at least she entertained the possibility that the opposite was true. Perhaps it really was the role of art to confront and disturb, to jolt us out of our comfort zones, to dispel our protective assumptions, to horrify us, to make our teeth rattle. Perhaps that was what she should really think, even if she were tempted to persist in a belief in beauty and all its works. That was the problem with being a philosopher: it was not easy. As a philosopher one could not believe just one thing; one had to explore the possibility that what one thought was true might be false; that what one wanted to believe might not be what one really should hold to be true. So much for the examined life: how uncomfortable it could be.
But at least she knew what she wanted for lunch.
SHE WAS THERE before Jane.
“It’s a small place,” Isabel had said over the telephone. “You’ll know it’s me, and I’ll know it’s you, even if we haven’t met before.”
“I’ve seen your photograph,” Jane had interjected. “I looked you up online. There’s a photograph of you on the Review’s website, as you probably know.”
Isabel hesitated, and then decided to come clean.
“Well, I looked you up too,” she said.
She had always felt that one could not refrain from confessing to an equal fault if somebody else confessed first; not to do so was to leave the other at a disadvantage. Of course it was not necessarily a fault to research another person if you were about to meet; indeed, it could be taken as rude not to do so—implying, perhaps, that the other was unworthy of your curiosity.