could visit the bookshops, go to the galleries, see friends: she felt a heady sense of having choices in what to do with her time, that delicious feeling that there were simply no claims upon her. Apart from Charlie, of course, and Jamie, and the house, Grace, and occasionally, and in a subtle way, Brother Fox.
S H E D I D N OT T E L L JA M I E where she went the next day, which was to a house in the Stockbridge Colonies. The Colonies were rows of neat, late-nineteenth-century houses, stone-built and terraced, with one house below and one above, the upper front door being reached by an external stone staircase built 1 4 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h up against the wall of the house below. They were attractive houses, although somewhat cramped, built for the families of skilled tradesmen at the end of the Victorian era, like the mining cottages one saw in some of the villages of East Lothian, on the plain that stretched out to the cold blue-grey line of the North Sea. At the end of each row of houses, on the gable wall that fronted the street, there were carved representations of the trade of those who occupied the houses beyond: the miller’s wheel; the maltman’s rake; the calipers, chisel, and hammer of the stonemason. Of course the tradesmen had been replaced by young professionals and advertising people, but these houses were still not too expensive and some of them were occupied by older people who had paid very little for them thirty years ago.
She found Teviotdale Place halfway along the road that crossed over a small bridge. Edinburgh’s river, the Water of Leith, not a great river by the standards of many cities, looped its way through Stockbridge at this point. The end houses in the Colonies were all on the edge of the riverbank, a good place to be in summer, when the river was low, but an unsettling place to live when the Water of Leith became overambitious, as it did after heavy rains up in the Pentland Hills. It was a comfortable street, as all these Colonies streets were; proving, perhaps, the proposition that we are happiest when living in courtyards or, as in this case, in streets that face one another and are almost courtyards. Children could play here, in the street, and be watched from both sides; washing could be hung out on the lines that were strung from walls to the black-painted, cast-iron washing posts that emerged from tiny lawns; cats could prowl through lavender bushes and wisteria and along the tops of the pint-sized walls that separated garden from garden.
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Isabel had been given the address by Guy Peploe, whom she had seen the previous day, when she had dropped into the Scottish Gallery. There had been a conversation about McInnes—and a further look at the Jura painting which Guy still had—and then he had casually mentioned that he had seen McInnes’s widow a few days earlier, that she was still in Edinburgh and he ran into her from time to time.
“Did she marry the man she was having an affair with?”
asked Isabel.
Guy looked out of the window. They were sitting in his office in the gallery, and the sun was streaming down into the garden at the back.
“No,” he said. “She did not. He went off to London, I think.
He was an artist too, but he came into some money, I seem to remember, and he went off with somebody else. Pretty awful for her. She was pregnant when McInnes died, and she had a baby.”
“His? Or McInnes’s?”
Guy shrugged. “I have no idea. But she had a little boy, anyway. I see her with him from time to time. He must be eight or so, because that’s how long McInnes has been dead.”
Isabel reflected on the sadness of this, when Guy said, “She lives down in the Colonies. Above that man who plays the fiddle at ceilidhs. You might know him—everybody seems to. He’s recorded a lot.”
“I do know him,” said Isabel. “He sometimes plays with David Todd. He’s quite a character.”
“Above his house,” said Guy. “That’s where she ended up,”
He paused. “And if things had worked out otherwise, and with the prices his paintings command now, they could have been living . . . oh, in the south of France, if they wanted to.”
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“And that little boy would have had a father,” said Isabel.
“Yes,” said Guy. “That too.”
N OW , standing outside the house in Teviotdale Place, Isabel looked down at her hands. She did that when she was nervous—she looked at her hands—and it somehow gave her courage. She thought, I have no excuse to go and see this person. I don’t know her, and she owes me nothing. I am calling upon a complete stranger.
But if that had not stopped her before, it did not stop her now, and she pushed open the small, ironwork gate and began walking up the path to the open staircase to the upper flat. The door was painted blue and there was a small black plaque: mcinnes. She pushed the doorbell, a round, highly polished brass doorbell that was obviously well loved.
Ailsa McInnes answered the door. She was a woman of about Isabel’s age, wearing jeans and a brightly coloured striped shirt. She was barefoot.
“Ailsa?”
The woman nodded and smiled. There was a friendliness about her which Isabel picked up immediately and warmed to.
Isabel introduced herself. She hoped that she did not mind her calling round without warning, but Guy Peploe had passed on her name. That was true, thought Isabel; he had provided her name.
“Guy? Oh yes.” The woman gestured for Isabel to go into the house. “It’s a mess, I’m afraid. My wee boy isn’t the tidiest child in the world.”
“He’s at school?”
“Yes. Stockbridge Primary, down the road. He’ll be back 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
