“That one of the peat cutters is one of my favourites,” he said. “The tones are almost sepia, don’t you think? Like an old photograph.”
Isabel agreed. “When I look at old photographs,” she said, “I often think of how the people in them are all dead and gone. It’s a thought, isn’t it? There they are in the photographs, going about their business without much thought to their mortality, but of course it was there all the time.”
Walter was intrigued. “Yes, of course,” he said. “There’s a photograph which really affected me, you know, when I was sixteen or seventeen. We had a book of poetry of the First World War—Owen, Sassoon, people like that—and there was a photograph in it of five or six men in the uniform of a Highland regiment—kilts—standing in a circle in front of the local minister. They were about to leave the Highlands to go off to the war.”
He paused, and his eyes met Isabel’s. “When I first saw it, I stared at it for quite some time. Half an hour or so. I just stared and wondered which of those men, if any, came back to Scotland. It was an infantry regiment, as the Highland regiments were, and their chances must have been pretty slim. They were slaughtered, those men. I remember looking at the faces, looking at the detail, thinking,
They were both silent for a moment. Then Isabel said,
“Rather like those pictures of the young men sitting on the grass around their Spitfires, waiting to be scrambled. How many of them lasted more than a few weeks?”
“Not many,” he said. “No. Awful. But have you noticed how those young pilots seemed to be smiling in so many of the phoT H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S
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tographs? Whereas those Highlanders just looked sad, uncom-prehending, I suppose. It seems somehow different.”
Walter took a step back and looked at Peter. “You’ve explained to . . .”
“Isabel.”
“Yes, of course. Well, perhaps you’d like to have another look at the painting. It’s in the dining room.”
They followed him into the adjoining room. The painting was propped against a wall, half in shadow, and Walter moved it out, leaning it against the back of a chair. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?”
Isabel looked at the painting. “I can understand why people were so sorry about his death,” she said. “He would have been a very great painter. When did it happen, by the way?”
“About eight years ago,” said Walter. “It was all over the papers at the time. It made the front page of
It’s a bad bit of sea off Jura. People call it a whirlpool, but it’s more than that.”
There was silence. Walter pointed to the painting. “Just round the corner from that point. He’d taken to putting out lobster pots and so he had a small boat which he took out in the wrong conditions. Exactly what happened to Orwell, or just about. Orwell survived, and finished
Peter, who had been staring at the painting, looked up. “I’ve seen it. We were up on Islay once and went for a cruise round Jura. We stopped some way away from the Corryvreckan itself, but we could hear it. It was like a jet —a roaring sound. And there were amazing high waves rising and falling.”
“If you get the tides right,” said Walter, “you can sail right through it. It’s like a millpond at slack water. Then, when the tide turns, it hits a submerged mountain of some sort under the 1 1 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h surface and all hell breaks loose. That creates the whirlpool effect.”
As Isabel listened, her eye wandered back to the painting.
Perhaps that was what made these paintings sad for her—the knowledge that McInnes would die in the very place he painted so lovingly. But this, she thought, was not a McInnes. If one looked at the two paintings on the wall, and then at this one, it just felt different. They were not by the same hand.
“WELL?” SAID PETER as they walked back along Hope Terrace.
“That was interesting,” said Isabel. “Thank you for arrang-ing it.”
Peter stared at her quizzically. “Is that all you’re going to say?”
Isabel looked up, at the thin layer of high white cloud that was moving across the sky from the west. Cirrus. “No, I’ll say more if you want, but I’m not sure where to start. Him? Walter himself? A surprise. The way you’d spoken I thought of him as being much older. And there he is, living in that rather muse-umish house . . .”
“With his mother,” added Peter.
Isabel was surprised. “Really? I thought you said . . .”
“I thought that the parents were dead, but I was wrong.
She’s still with us, he told me. When you went out of the room to go to the loo, he said something about her. I was astonished.
I’ve never seen her, but she’s there apparently. She’s only in her early seventies, but he says that she doesn’t go out much.”
Isabel thought for a moment. Did that change anything?
The idea of Walter Buie living in that house by himself, with his ill-tempered dog—whom they did not meet— intrigued her simply because she wondered why he chose to live by himself.
What did he do about sex, or was he one of those asexual T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S
