The Charming Quirks of Others

Mine, she thought. My painting of my four-times great-grandmother. She turned to him. “Why are you selling it?” It was a tactless question, and she realised this immediately after asking it. People sold things because they did not like them or because they needed the money. There were hardly any other explanations. And he liked this painting.

“Needs must,” he said. “I’m reluctant to part with something that has family associations, but …” He shrugged. “Financial necessity.” He spoke with an air of embarrassment, and she understood: he belonged to a generation that viewed any discussion of money as in bad taste. Indigence was borne with fortitude; solvency with modesty.

She blushed, and thought: I have made him admit to poverty. She looked again at the picture. “I know about this portrait,” she said.

He did not seem surprised. “Raeburn is well known.”

She turned to look at him again. “I know who this woman is.”

“It’s on the frame,” he said simply. “Mrs. Alexander. A distant relative of mine.”

“And of mine,” said Isabel softly. “Except not-so-distant, in my case. My four-times great-grandmother.”

For a few moments he said nothing. They looked at one another rather sheepishly, both aware that the nature of their encounter had suddenly and subtly changed. They had begun as strangers; now they were relatives, even if distant ones.

He looked out of the window momentarily and then back into the room. “Is this really why you’ve come to speak to me? Is it to do with this painting?”

She shook her head. “No, not at all. I had no idea that you and I were connected.” She paused. “And I must say I’m delighted to discover a new distant cousin.”

He seemed to relax. “Extraordinary. But then we’re not a large population in Scotland, are we? I read somewhere that the DNA people say that an awful lot of us are related. More than we think.”

“The Alexander connection should have occurred to me when I saw your name. I wasn’t thinking.”

Iain gestured to a chair, inviting her to sit down. “I have a family tree somewhere,” he said. “We had a cousin from New Zealand who turned up and burrowed away in Register House for months. He came up with this great long chart that he unravelled on the kitchen table. Rather like the book of Genesis: so-and-so begat so-and-so, unto the nth generation. A lot of pretty boring detail.”

She knew what he meant. She understood why people did such things, but she could herself never summon up interest in the details of who had married whom and who had which children; unless of course, there was an interesting historical anecdote. She was related, through her mother, to the first man to land an aircraft in Mobile, Alabama, and to a woman who became a nun after being cleared of murdering her lover, the owner of a disreputable nightclub in New Orleans. That was interesting, but only mildly so. The fact that one had landed an early aircraft in Mobile meant that one had an aircraft in a day when very few people did; it also meant that one was brave, perhaps, or foolhardy. And as for the nun … She must have done it, thought Isabel, and the jury must have reckoned that the man deserved it; juries regularly acquitted the flagrantly guilty as long as they thought the victim was sufficiently deserving of his fate. All owners of nightclubs were disreputable, she thought; it was not a profession that attracted fine, upstanding people. Not generally.

She sat down and there followed a conversation about how she and Iain were connected. It was not complicated, but it was very distant, following lines that had diverged almost two centuries before. And yet it was something—this knowledge of association; it could not be ignored. It was a form of connectedness, the one with the other, that people looked for instinctively when they met somebody. This was why people searched for mutual acquaintances when they were introduced to strangers, trying to find if the other person knew the people they knew. It was as common as conversation about the weather; and as reassuring, in its way. Weather bound us together: remarks about rain, or cold, or whatever the isobars were doing to confound our hopes reminded us that even if we did not know somebody, they felt the same as we did and had to put up with, or, more rarely, to celebrate the same weather as we did.

Isabel glanced again at the painting. “I’m sorry that you’re having to sell her,” she said.

His lips curled into a smile. “It is better, of course, to sell the grandmother of another than one’s own. She is your grandmother—great-great, whatever it is—rather than mine.”

Isabel appreciated the dry humour. Why did we use the expression to sell one’s own grandmother? Was that really the worst thing one could do?

“I must confess to something,” she said.

He looked at her expectantly.

“I saw the painting in the Christie’s catalogue,” she said. “And I was planning to bid for it.”

If he was surprised by this disclosure, he did not show it. “Well, I do hope you get it. It would be nice to know that it had gone to an appropriate home. Much better than going abroad—or whatever happens to Raeburns these days.”

She was about to say something about how at least some Raeburns returned to Scotland—she had seen one offered by an Edinburgh gallery, a striking portrait of a Scottish doctor. But she stopped herself, and within not much more than a few seconds she had made her decision; it was an unusual idea, but these were unusual circumstances.

“What if I bought it?” she said.

He raised an eyebrow. “It will be a public auction. If you want to, then you can bid.” He seemed embarrassed as he continued. “It won’t be cheap, you know.”

“I know that,” she said. “But what if I bought it from you—directly? You could withdraw it from auction.”

His embarrassment became acute. “I’m very sorry. I don’t want to seem grasping, but I’ll get a higher price in the saleroom. And I need the money, I’m afraid. I have a daughter, you see, who has a difficult condition. I need the money for her care.”

Of course, she thought: the daughter whom Charlie Maclean had mentioned.