“Didn’t he have a wretched childhood?” said Guy. “That’s sometimes an excuse, isn’t it? The fact that one has had an awful time as a child can explain so much, can’t it?”
Isabel reached for her cup of coffee. “Does it? I wonder. I think that there’s a case for putting your early years behind you. Plenty of people have done that. They grow up and then draw a line.”
Guy considered this. “Yet the early years won’t necessarily go away. If you’re desperately unhappy when you’re young, aren’t you damaged goods?”
Isabel was prepared to concede this of James VI. “He had that awful tutor, that Buchanan man, who intimidated him.”
Guy nodded. “An inhumane humanist. Very grim.”
“And James,” Isabel continued, “was brought up in such a loveless atmosphere. A major case of maternal deprivation. Then his mother had her head chopped off, we must remind ourselves. That hardly leads to happiness. And his father was blown up, wasn’t he? Again, not a good thing for a parent, or for anyone, actually.” She paused, warming to the theme, which was a favourite one of hers. She thought Henry Darnley, Mary’s husband, was vain and scheming, a narcissist, and even if one would not wish an explosion on anybody, there were some who did seem to ask for it. “And even before he was blown up he would hardly have been a particularly good father, murdering Mary’s secretary, for heaven’s sake, and having all those affairs.”
She glanced about her. A woman at a nearby table was listening, and not bothering to disguise it; did she realise, Isabel wondered, that they were discussing events of four hundred years ago? But let her listen. “Then, of course, when some light comes into James’s life at last, it is taken away from him.”
“Light?”
“His cousin,” said Isabel. “Esmé Stuart, his cousin from France. He turned up in Scotland when James was thirteen, and James fell in love with him. He was very beautiful, by all accounts, and James at last had a friend. Poor boy.”
The eavesdropper’s eyes widened involuntarily.
He wrote poetry, Isabel continued. This sad boy-king of Scots wrote poetry. After Esmé Stuart had been forced out of Scotland by scheming nobles, James had written a poem about a rare Arabian phoenix coming to Scotland and being persecuted. “That was Esmé,” she said. “The boy he loved. He disguised him in the poem as a female phoenix because, well, in those days … It was so sad. And they are lovely lines—full of sorrow and loss.” And well they might have been, she thought. What sorrow there must be in loving somebody who does not love you back; or loving somebody whom the world says you cannot love.
They both fell silent. Then Guy said, “You were talking about ears burning.”
Isabel toyed with her cup. “Yes. There are a few people in this city who know that every Saturday their names are going to be mentioned at numerous dinner parties. They know it. Imagine that, Guy. Imagine knowing that there are ten, maybe twenty, tables at which you are being taken to pieces and then put together again—if you’re lucky.”
Guy made a face. “Uncomfortable.”
“Yes. Deconstruction always is. And that’s where the burning of ears comes in. If there’s any truth in the idea that your ears burn when somebody’s talking about you—and there isn’t, of course—then imagine the ears of these unfortunates. They must glow like beacons in the night.”
“Gossip,” said Guy. “Nobody should worry about gossip. There’s no need for ears to burn.”
Isabel looked up sharply. “Oh really? Don’t you think that gossip can be pretty wounding?”
“Yes,” said Guy. “Malicious gossip can. But a lot of gossip is mild—and really a bit pointless.”
Isabel agreed. “Utterly pointless,” she said. “Look at those glossy magazines that publish tittle-tattle about the doings of celebrities. None of these people actually does anything of any worth to anybody. Not really. But do people like to read about their private lives? Yes, they do. And how. He breaks up with her. She buys a house in France or is seen on so-and-so’s boat. She goes to the gym, and is photographed coming out of it. And so on and so on. Why do people read that sort of thing?”
“Do you read them?” asked Guy.
“Me? Of course not,” said Isabel. She paused. Even as she gave her answer, she realised that this was not true and would have to be corrected. One should never mislead a friend, or an enemy for that matter, she thought. We owed the same duty of truthfulness to everybody, no matter what we thought of them. “I don’t buy them, but as for reading—well, never, that is, never unless my teeth play up.”
Again Guy looked at her blankly.
“I read them when I go to the dentist,” she said. “There are some magazines that we read only when we go to the dentist. Mine has all of them in his waiting room. He also has those ritzy fashion magazines with advertisements for expensive designer sunglasses and so on, and magazines about boats. He has a boat, he told me. So I read these magazines from time to time. But only at the dentist’s.” She looked at him apologetically. “Should I feel ashamed?”
Guy shook his head. “No. We all have guilty pleasures. Yours is harmless enough.” He paused. “But back to burning ears. Who are these people whose ears burn?”
Isabel smiled. “The principals of schools,” she said. “Listen next time you go to a dinner party. People talk about the principals of their children’s schools. They do it all the time.”
Guy digested this. He frowned. “Strange.”
Isabel shrugged. “It keeps people going. Not that these teachers do anything dramatic—or not usually, although there was a good bit of gossip doing the rounds last year when one of the schools appointed a new head of French and then unappointed—or, should we say, disappointed—him before he even arrived to take up the job.”
Guy said that he had heard about that—vaguely.
“The rumour mill went into full-time operation,” said Isabel. “There were all sorts of stories going the rounds.”
“Such as?”
“Amazing things. One I heard was that he had applied under a false name and was wanted by the French police. The French police! I suppose to be wanted by the French police is somehow more exotic than being wanted by other police forces. It can’t be very glamorous to be wanted by the Glasgow police—rather ordinary, in fact—but the French police, now there’s a cachet.”
“And the truth?”
“The board had a change of heart. They had their reasons, no doubt, but these were probably pretty prosaic, and no reflection on the candidate. The French police wouldn’t have come into it, I would have thought.”
Guy changed the subject. He had a catalogue that Isabel had expressed an interest in seeing, and he had brought it to show her. There was an auction coming up at Christie’s in London, and there were several paintings, including a Raeburn, that Isabel said she had heard about. Now, as he put the glossy publication on the table, Isabel went straight to one of the pages he had marked with a small, yellow sticky note.
“Sir Henry Raeburn,” said Guy, as Isabel opened the catalogue. “Look at it. Portrait of Mrs. Alexander and Her Granddaughter.”
Isabel studied the photograph that took up most of one of the pages. A woman in a white-collared red dress was seated against a background of dark green. Beside her was a young girl, of eight perhaps, half crouching, arms resting on the woman’s chair.
“His colours,” said Isabel. “Raeburn used those fabulous colours, didn’t he? He occupied a world of dark greens and reds. Was that the Edinburgh of his day, do you think?”
“Their interiors were like that, I suppose,” said Guy. “Those curtains. Look.”
Isabel reached out and touched the photograph, her finger tracing the line of the fabrics draped behind the sitters. “I find myself thinking of what their world was like,” she said. “When was this painted? Does it say?”