The Charming Quirks of Others

“I don’t think so,” she said. “There’ll be time enough to find out about cactuses in the future. Cactuses, alcohol, the breaking of the heart: lots of time to learn about all that.”

She had her own plans for the day. The previous day, before going down to Abbotsford, she had telephoned Charlie Maclean with a request to meet the father of the man who had been lost on Everest. Charlie had mentioned that he knew him, and she wondered whether she could have a word with him. Charlie was obliging, and came up with a telephone number. “He’s retired now,” he said. “He actually lives not far away from us. He still does some nosing for one or two of the distilleries. He was very good.” He paused. “Apparently he never really recovered from what happened. He was an only son—the climber. There’s a daughter, but she’s not quite right, I believe. Unfortunately she’s a bit glaikit.” He used the Scots word for mental handicap. It was not a word that many used any more, preferring learning difficulties, the modern euphemism. But there was nothing unkind about glaikit, which survived because the policing of language had not extended to the Scots lexicon.

She had telephoned the father and he had said that he was prepared to see her. He asked her what it was about and she explained. “I want to know more about what happened on that expedition,” she said.

He sounded weary. “You’re writing something?”

“Not exactly.”

“You really want to talk to me?” he asked. “I wasn’t there, you know.”

“If you don’t mind.”

There was a short silence. He does mind, she thought, and understandably so. But this is not what he said. “Very well. If it’s important to you.”

He spoke with resignation, but it was not his tone of voice that struck her: it was the phrase If it’s important to you. That phrase, she observed, was the foundation of so much of our moral dealing with others. We recognise what is important to them; we take it into account. And if we did that, then so much else followed: recognition of rights, the practice of courtesy—everything, really, that made for peaceable relations between people. Gay marriage, she thought: some people might not like the idea, but if they thought If it’s important to you, the case for their recognising it became so much stronger, so much more obvious. Unless, of course, one applied the same question to the objectors, in which case one was back where one started—trying to reconcile two mutually antipathetic positions, which was about as easy as ensuring that olive oil and balsamic vinegar remain mixed after shaking.

Isabel closed her eyes; one could not construct a moral position based on analogies of balsamic vinegar.

“Are you there?”

The voice on the line brought her back from her philosophical wandering.

“I am. Sorry. I was thinking about something else.” She apologised again and then made the arrangement. He would see her at his house at ten-thirty. He gave her the address, which was just outside Edinburgh, near Roslin Chapel, on the edge of the Pentland Hills. He lived off a road that ran between Roslin and the village of Temple; a strange slice of landscape, caught between narrow, twisting glens and the more rolling terrain that became the Border hills.

“You can’t miss our house,” he said. “It’s ochre. You won’t see any other ochre houses. You can’t go wrong.”

As he had anticipated, she found the house easily. It was larger than she had imagined: somewhere between a functional farmhouse and a house that would in the past have been called a laird’s house—a house that at the time of its building would not have been grand enough for a family with real aspirations, but which would have been perfect for one that wanted to be comfortable.

The house was served by a short drive, on which gravel had been freshly laid, making a satisfactory crunching noise under the tyres of her car; a noise like the crashing of waves on the shore; a good sound, she thought. She parked, and then, getting out of the car, looked at the house before her. It was a fortunate house, she decided, as it must have been built just before Georgian became Victorian. The shadow of Victoria was there, but had not quite fallen on this building, which still had the scale and pleasing proportions of Georgian architecture. An easy house. A house that was comfortable in its skin, or mortar perhaps.

The ochre came from the harling, that roughcast coating of tiny pebbles and lime that was applied to the outside of Scottish houses. This had been painted in the warm shade that one found occasionally in eastern Scotland, brought from somewhere else, from the Netherlands, perhaps, in the days of trade between the Scottish ports and their Dutch neighbours over the North Sea.

He had seen her and opened the front door as she stood before the house, looking up at its facade. “Miss Dalhousie?”

Iain Alexander looked somewhere in his early seventies, perhaps, but well groomed and with the clear, slightly ruddy skin of the Scottish countryman. Wind and rain were the foundations of that complexion; wind and rain and the cloud-scudded skies.

They shook hands. She gestured to the front wall of the house. “You’re very lucky living here,” she said.

“I know that. Yes, we are fortunate. Ochre is such a warm colour.” He spoke simply, with an accent that was redolent of old-fashioned Edinburgh. “My late wife was particularly fond of this place.” He pointed vaguely at the grounds. “She created a marvellous garden, which I’m afraid I’ve rather let run to seed. But one can’t do everything—or anything, sometimes.”

He invited her in, leading her down a book-lined corridor into a large drawing room that faced, unusually, the rear garden. There were paintings on the walls, all of them conventional: landscapes, a study of birds in flight, a small classical study, an old framed map of the county of Midlothian. And there, above the white marble fireplace, was her Raeburn, the one that she had examined with Guy Peploe and that she thought he would be bidding for on her behalf next month. She stood still for a moment, wondering whether she was mistaken. Was it a copy? Or was it another painting altogether, one that looked uncannily like the real Raeburn?

“Is that …” She broke off. It was her painting; it had to be.

“Raeburn,” said Iain. “My pride and joy. Or it is at the moment …” He, too, trailed off, before adding, “It has to be consigned to the auction house soon. I shall miss it.”

Isabel moved forward to examine the painting more closely. At the bottom of the frame there was a small gilt lozenge on which she now read the inscription: Sir Henry Raeburn: Mrs. Alexander and Her Granddaughter.