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romantic country, don’t we? For us, it’s just home, but it’s very dramatic, isn’t it? Rather like living on an opera set.”
They both stood and gazed at the painting for a while. Then Isabel shook her head. “I don’t know, Guy. Or maybe I do.
Maybe not.” He was putting her under no pressure to buy the painting, but she felt that she should explain to him. “It’s just that the other painting had that particular significance for me. I hope you understand.”
Guy reassured her. The other prospective purchaser would almost certainly take the painting. It would leave Scotland, of course, but it was a good thing to share . . . “But again it’s odd,”
he finished. “And getting a little bit odder.”
Isabel frowned. “This one isn’t varnished either?” She bent down again and peered at the painting at close quarters. Charlie, feeling himself being tilted, let out a little murmur, something that sounded like a mew.
“No, it isn’t,” said Guy. “There’s that. But the other thing that puzzles me is that the two paintings should come onto the market one after the other, and within the space of a few days.
That’s a bit surprising, especially when the market has been starved of McInneses for a long time. People tend to hang on to them.”
“Somebody has obviously decided to sell,” said Isabel. “Or they’ve died and their family are disposing of them. You can imagine the scene. Young relatives with no interest in painting.
Highland scenes. Sea. Hills. Not what we need. Let’s sell and take the money.”
“That happens,” said Guy. “But these would appear to be from different sources.”
“Who?”
Guy sighed. “I can’t tell you, I’m afraid. I hope you don’t 7 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h think I’m being unhelpful, but I can’t really disclose who is offering this one. These things are confidential, you see—
clients like it that way.”
Isabel understood. People might not like others to know that they were having to raise money. “Of course.” But how would Guy know that this painting came from a different source if he didn’t know—and the same principle of confidentiality would preclude it—who had consigned the other painting to Lyon & Turnbull?
He saw the question coming. “You’ll be wondering how I know they’re from different places? Well, our client told us that he”—he corrected himself—“that she hadn’t heard about the painting at Lyon & Turnbull. Unless she’s misleading us, which I don’t think she is. In fact, it’s impossible. She’s not the type.”
“I wonder where she got it from?” asked Isabel.
“In this case, I believe she bought it from the artist himself.
Shortly before his death, I think. Sometimes there’s a gallery label,” said Guy. He reached forward and tilted the painting away from the wall. “Look—nothing on the back, apart from that writing over there.” He pointed to where somebody had written, in pencil, jura, with mountains. There was another handwritten line underneath:
“That’s McInnes’s writing all right,” said Guy. “I’ve seen our own labels that he scribbled on. Or sometimes he wrote instructions about where the painting was to be delivered. Or where he was staying when he painted it. Sometimes lines of poetry—he liked to put MacDiarmid in. Odd things.”
“MacDiarmid liked that part of Scotland,” said Isabel.
“ ‘Island Funeral.’ That was one of his better efforts, in spite of the flannel. He was a bit of a shocker, you know.”
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“But he could . . .”
“Yes, he could,” said Isabel. “He could stop us in our tracks.
That poem about the island funeral makes the hairs on the back of one’s neck stand up.” She paused and remembered. “I went to one once, you know. An island funeral. An aged cousin of my father’s who had married into a family on South Uist. They were Free Presbyterians and there were no prayers. All those dark-suited men standing in a huddle, and the coffin left outside.
They sang psalms, those strange Gaelic psalms, and then they went and buried her in silence with rain coming in from the Atlantic, nothing heavy, just soft rain. And that light. The same light that’s in that painting over there.”
Guy said nothing for a moment. He could see the scene that she was describing, and there was nothing that he could add.
Isabel broke the silence. “Are you sure that this is a McInnes? Are you absolutely sure?”
He was. “I’m pretty certain, Isabel. We wouldn’t offer it as a McInnes if we weren’t. All my colleagues are sure. Robin.
Everybody.”
Isabel wondered how anybody could be certain about anything in the art world. There were all those fake Dali prints still in circulation—almost mass-produced fakes, like the reproduc-tion paintings turned out to order from Russian studios. If they could do old masters for a couple hundred dollars, then surely with a bit more time they could do something considerably more convincing?
