doesn’t talk about it, but I know she thinks about it from time to time.”
“That’s the problem with mediums,” Isabel ventured. “The future may be unpleasant, for all we know, and I wonder if that knowledge is really . . .”
She did not finish; the message conveyed by Grace’s look was unambiguous. She did not like to discuss her spiritualist beliefs: this was a matter of faith.
“Oh well,” said Isabel, cheerily. “I hope that Maggie feels better. A gallstone can be very uncomfortable.”
She had a late lunch and fed Charlie. Then, when he dozed off—he was to have a sleep before the visit to Maggie—she went out to the garage at the side of the house. It was dark inside the small, windowless building, and she had to feel for the switch. But once she had turned it on, the light revealed the mysterious shapes for what they were: the curves of her green Swedish car, the upside-down bunches of last year’s lavender that she had hung to dry from the exposed roof beams and had then forgotten, the neatly rolled coils of hose pipe, the bicy-cle that she never used now.
She slipped into the car and savoured, for a moment, the smell of the leather seats. It was a reassuring smell —the smell of something individual, and therefore rare in an age of moulded plastic. Somebody, some Swedish hand, had stitched that leather to make these seats; and it had been done with the same care that had been lavished on the engine, which never let her down, and started now, obediently, making the chassis of the car trem- ble slightly, as if in anticipation of the trip.
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The traffic was light as she drove up Colinton Road and out onto the Stirling road. To her right, stretching down towards the Firth of Forth, the fields were full of ripening oilseed, patches of extravagant yellow. And beyond them, over the Forth and to the west too, were the hills of Fife and Stirlingshire, blue-green, indistinct in the warm afternoon light. She opened the window on her side of the car and savoured the rush of the wind, heavy with the scent of the country—mown hay, water, the soil itself. The sky, she noticed, had some cloud in it, but this cloud was thin and wispy, travelling fast in some high, invisible airstream; beyond that there was nothing—just an inverted bowl of blue over Scotland.
She did not rush. It would take her an hour and a half to reach Comrie by the back road past Braco, and she decided that she would enjoy the journey. There was enough to think about, of course, but she knew that if she dwelled too much on what she was doing she would think only of complications and reasons she should not do it at all. She was going in search of Frank Anderson, not because she was in any doubt that he was McInnes, but because she had come this far. She had taken it upon herself to look behind the paintings, and she had found out a closely guarded secret about the artist’s survival. It was not clear to her what it was that had been achieved—other than satisfying the curiosity that had been raised in her when she had first begun to question the paintings’ authenticity. One result was that the paintings had been shown to be completely authentic. When Guy Peploe had looked at them and pronounced them to be by McInnes, he had been absolutely right.
His eye had not failed him; he had seen McInnes in the paintings, and indeed McInnes had been there.
In one sense, Andrew McInnes and his friend Mrs. Buie had not deceived anybody. McInnes had painted a McInnes—
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h he could do nothing other than that, whatever he did—and Mrs. Buie had offered a McInnes for sale, both to the gallery and to the auction house. The only deception—on the part of Mrs. Buie—lay in the fact that the paintings were offered as the work of an artist thought to be dead. She was uncertain what to make of that, but at least she was sure that it would not be repeated; Walter Buie himself had made that clear enough as he saw Isabel out of the house.
“My mother has never apologised about anything,” he had said, looking back over his shoulder. “I’m ashamed of her. Really ashamed. I know that she’s getting on, but . . .”
Isabel looked at him. Peter Stevenson had been right; Walter Buie was an upright man. People might be rude about old-fashioned Edinburgh, but it was upright. Reserved, proud, perhaps; but upright.
“I feel that I should apologise for her,” Walter went on. “And I promise you this: there’ll be no more McInnes paintings coming from her. I promise you that.”
“You shouldn’t reproach yourself,” said Isabel. “She did it only to help him. He’s the one who chose to deceive everybody with that disappearance of his. Your mother was only trying to help.”
Walter thought about this for a moment. “There are times when one shouldn’t help,” he said. Yes, thought Isabel. And perhaps one of those was when your friends ask for major financial guarantees. But then she thought, Of course I would do exactly as he did. I am not one to lecture him on that; I would not turn a friend away either.
Now, as she turned onto the road that led from the village of Braco across the hills to Comrie, her anticipation over her meeting with McInnes increased—if there was to be a meeting, she 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
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reminded herself. She did not know exactly where he lived or whether he would be in when she arrived. It was ridiculous, travelling all that way up into Perthshire without any certainty that the person she was hoping to see would be there; ridiculous, she thought, but that’s what I choose to do because . . .
because I am a free agent and doing something like this is exhil-arating and underlines my freedom.
The road crossed a moor; on either side, rising up gently, dotted with grazing sheep, were the slopes of heather-covered hills. There were no houses, no sheep byres, nothing to show the hand of man but a few fences marching off into the distance. It was a lonely place, but a gentle one, not desolate, as some northern places can be. And then the road began to dip down towards Glenartney and the River Earn, and Comrie was before her, grey-slate roofs among trees, small white-gabled houses, a village typical of that part of Scotland—well ordered, quiet, a place where nothing much may happen, but where that suited the inhabitants well enough.
She drove into the High Street, the road which ran directly through the village from one end to another, and parked the green Swedish car near the Royal Hotel. On the other side of the road was a newsagent’s shop, its front window filled with local notices stuck to the inside of the glass with pieces of tape.
Isabel could never resist these for their social detail. In Bruntsfield the equivalents gave news of vacancies in shared flats, suitable for those with a good sense of humour, nonsmokers, the easygoing; news of virtually new computers being sacrificed; of kittens requiring dog-free homes. Here there were offers of grazing for ponies, of jam-making pans now surplus to require-ments, of fishing tackle. The Royal Hotel needed waiters and waitresses
