“I’ll do what I can.”
She meant to sound businesslike, and she did. But she also sounded cold, she thought; which was misleading, because she did not begrudge the other woman her help. Have the courage of your convictions, she thought. So what if you’re an intermeddler? Intermeddle, and don’t feel bad about it. And there was a possibility, just a possibility, that Stella was right. Isabel had not liked Norrie Brown, although she had been unable to decide why this should be so. Now the doubts began to implant themselves in her mind. She did not like Norrie Brown because he was a liar. Isabel had always been able to sense lies; it was a sixth sense—a sixth sense that nosed out mendacity, and it had warned her about Norrie Brown. She had not been listening at the time, and had not picked up the warning. But now it seemed to her that it was coming through clearly, a strong signal from the utterly inexplicable intuitive headquarters that women had and that men, she suspected, might just miss out on. But that was another issue; something for a special edition of the Review which would engage the feminist philosophers, the advocates of the philosophy of care. Yes, they would love it, as they relished any chance to put men in their place. Female Intuition as a Resource in Moral Philosophy would be a good title for the issue, and it would attract scores of submissions. But no, she would not do that, because she did not like some of the feminist philosophers; ideologues, she thought, and strident, too. And yet, and yet…There was Christopher Dove, for example, and his friend Professor Lettuce. Had it ever entered their heads that their perspective on the world was a specifically male one, and not the view from nowhere? They had both condescended to her in a way in which they would not condescend to a man; they needed to be taught a lesson. They needed feminism.
She turned to Stella and saw her, suddenly, in a new light. Here was a woman who felt powerless. The might of the male-dominated medical councils had been directed against her husband. A pack of journalists—probably all male, at least in the case of those who would have led the pack—had crucified him. And she could do nothing about it, but watch despair engulf him, and shed her tears, as she had just done, in full public view.
Isabel had already made her decision, but now it became even firmer. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll look into your theory about Norrie.”
Stella thanked her. “Except it’s not just a theory,” she said. “I think that it’s true. I really do. And I think that you’ll find the same thing.”
EDWARD MENDELSON’S LECTURE was not until four, which was a good two hours away. As she said good-bye to Stella outside Glass and Thompson, Isabel wondered what to do with those two hours. If she walked home, she would have half an hour, at the most, to spend with Charlie before she had to leave again for the lecture. If she took a bus, it would not be much different; the traffic seemed heavy, and there were road works in Hanover Street that were holding everything up. The answer, then, was to stay in town for the next hour and then make her way up to George Square, where the lecture was being held.
It was only a short distance down Dundas Street to the Scottish Gallery, and Isabel sauntered in that direction, glancing on the way into the windows of the neighbouring galleries. One of them, which specialised in sporting scenes and landscapes, displayed a large china hare, caught in mid-leap, astonishingly realistic. And just behind him, beneath a large display easel, lurked a porcelain fox, almost life-size, his coat sleek with glaze, his eyes looking out onto the street, bright and wary with the cunning of his species. Brother Fox. She stopped and looked at him; he was so naturally rendered that were he to be placed in her garden, half hidden, perhaps, by a shrub, he would be indistinguishable from Brother Fox himself. But Brother Fox would not be fooled because he simply would not see him; without a smell, he would not see him—the smell gave everything away. She smiled: it was the same with liars.
The Scottish Gallery was mounting an exhibition of paintings by exiled Polish artists who had made their home in Scotland. There were not many, but they had painted enough to cover the walls, and were being examined by a group of five or six visitors. Isabel heard a snatch of Polish, or what she assumed was Polish, and she saw one of the group, a young woman in jeans, turn to a man and point at the label below one of the paintings. He leaned forward and exclaimed enthusiastically, and called to the others who had moved on to another painting.
A voice behind her whispered, “They keep finding something. Scraps of their history. It’s a very emotional exhibition for Poles.”
She turned to find Robin McClure, one the gallery’s directors, standing behind her. “I suppose there’s such a big gap for them,” she said. “How many years? Forty years of ice.”
“Well, they carried on painting. Or some did.”
Isabel stared at one of the paintings: a girl in a room looking out of a window; a feeling of desolation. And beside it a grey landscape under a grey sky—was that Poland? The closest she had been to Poland was Berlin, where already one had the sense of plains stretching out into a sorrowful emptiness farther east; and here it was now in paint, greyness and sorrow.
“I’m getting depressed,” she said, her tone lowered; she did not want the Poles to hear her say that their landscape, or their paintings, depressed her.
“I was just about to make myself a pot of tea,” said Robin. “It’s warm enough to sit outside. We’ve got a little table out the back.”
She followed him down the stairs, past the display cases, and into the small garden. The table stood on a patch of raked white gravel, two French ironwork chairs on either side. Isabel sat in one of these while Robin went back to fetch the tea; she closed her eyes and let the sun play on her face. There was a bird singing in a tree somewhere over the wall that divided the ground at the rear of the building into patches of urban garden. Geraniums were in blossom somewhere close by; she could smell them, that sweet, velvety odour. She opened her eyes and saw that there was a tub of the flowers not far away; red clusters against dark green leaves. The smell took her back, to somewhere far away and long ago; somewhere she could not quite remember…and then she thought: Georgetown, and her window box. There had been geraniums in the window box, planted by the previous tenant, who, like her, had been a research fellow in philosophy, and who had confessed that the geraniums were the only things she had ever planted in her life. All I leave behind me, she said, are some gerania, and had laughed.
Robin returned with a generously sized teapot and a couple of mugs. Tucked under his arm was a glossy auction catalogue, which he retrieved once he had put down the mugs. “Sotheby’s,” he said, nodding in the direction of the catalogue. “Just in. Their next sale of old masters.”
She reached up for the catalogue and looked at the front cover, much of which was taken up with a picture of a small family group huddled under an oak tree. “Rest on the Flight into Egypt,” she read. “Jan Brueghel, the Elder.”
“But not the oldest,” said Robin, looking over her shoulder. “One of the dynasty. Son of Pieter and father of Jan the Younger. There was quite a clan of them.”
Isabel scrutinised the painting. “Not much seems to be happening,” she said.
“Well, they are resting.”
“Of course.”
“And the whole point of the painting is the oak tree,” Robin went on. “The flight into Egypt is pretty much incidental.”
He began to pour the tea. “But things happen in some Brueghels. Do you know that famous Bruegel—Pieter Bruegel, that is—The Massacre of the Innocents? It’s one of the busiest old masters around. There’s an awful lot going on. I saw it the other day, as it happens. There was an exhibition of Flemish paintings and it was in it.”