Isabel thought. “No. I don’t think so. Which innocents were they?”
“Dutch innocents,” said Robin, passing her a mug of tea. “Dutch innocents—massacred by Spanish troops. Except…”
“Except?”
“Except the painting—or one version of it—tells a different story. A later owner found it too vivid and ordered the truth to be painted over.”
“That wouldn’t have been the first time that a painting was changed in that way,” said Isabel. “Nor the last, for that matter. I was in a gallery in Moscow once and saw a picture of the Politburo with the nonpersons painted out.”
Robin smiled. “Probably more successfully than the Bruegel. The problem with The Massacre of the Innocents is that you look at it and you wonder why the soldiers are all stabbing a very large turkey. And why is a large bag of wheat lying on the ground, in the middle of nowhere? Then you see the children underneath the turkey and the sack, painted over, but no longer well concealed. A restorer has made a start and then maybe not liked what he saw underneath.”
Isabel paged through the catalogue. The old masters revealed the small range of their interests—or those of their patrons. Endless religious scenes, low-country landscapes, the occasional interior. “I wish they’d been free to paint other things,” she said. “More reportage. More work scenes. More life as it was.”
Robin sipped at his tea. “Painters rarely paint for posterity. They portray the things that people want to admire at the time.”
Isabel frowned. She was not sure that she agreed. “Guernica?”
Robin put down his mug. “Yes, I suppose so. I suppose Picasso wanted to put that on the record.” He paused. The bird in the neighbouring tree had raised the pitch of his song, and for a few moments they both listened to the ringing challenge. Then Robin rose to his feet. “I almost forgot. That painting.”
Isabel looked up from the catalogue. “What painting?”
Robin was making his way back into the gallery. “Hang on a sec. I’ll get it,” he said over his shoulder.
Isabel turned a page of the catalogue. A worldly wise infant looked out from his mother’s knee; above his head, a thin circle of gold, a halo; in the background, a line of cypresses marched off across a landscape that was Tuscany or Umbria. She looked at the mother’s face, at the expression of gentle solemnity that seemed to be the approved look of motherhood. Had she ever looked at Charlie quite like that?
Robin reappeared, carrying a small painting, a double handbreadth or so across, which he put down on the table in front of Isabel. “Here it is,” he said. “It came back from the framer yesterday.”
She gave a start. It was another fox; a small painting of a fox, standing in a clearing, sniffing the air.
“Brother Fox,” she muttered.
Robin sat down again and reached for the teapot. “Brother who?”
She picked up the painting and looked for a signature.
“Nothing,” said Robin. “No clue as to the artist. But rather well executed. A nice little painting.”
Isabel put the painting back on the table. “Yes,” she said. “It’s nice. But…but why are you showing it to me?”
Robin looked puzzled. “Jamie said that you’d collect it. He bought it a few weeks ago and said that you’d be in for it.”
“My Jamie?”
“Yes.”
She was at a loss as to what to say. Robin, watching her, looked puzzled. “Is there something wrong with the frame? We thought it was rather a good choice.”
“No. The frame’s fine.” Isabel looked at the painting again. The only conclusion she could reach was that Jamie had bought it for her as a present. But then why would he not have told her to go in and collect it, if that was what he had wanted? He had forgotten; that must be it. The important thing was that Jamie had bought it for her. He had come in and bought it for her. “He’ll probably be in for it himself,” she said. “I won’t take it now.”
She closed her eyes for a few moments, feeling again the sun on her brow. The moment was delicious, one to be savoured. I shall remember this, she thought. The painting would not have been cheap, and he would have paid for it with his hard-earned money. How many music lessons did a small painting of a fox represent? Twenty? Thirty? No matter: Jamie had specially chosen it for her, and that showed that he loved her, which is what she wanted to know, more than anything else. It was a moment of realisation, of understanding, and it took place against a background of sun and geraniums and the pure voice of a bird.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SHE STILL FELT ELATED when she sat down for the lecture in the George Square Lecture Theatre. So a child might feel on Christmas Eve, she thought—filled with anticipation for the gifts to come. But she did not analyse her sense of pleasure beyond that, and it was as well, perhaps, as Jamie had not given her a present before, if one did not count birthday and Christmas presents, which were reciprocal, anyway. The painting of a fox was a perfect choice; Brother Fox was their secret, the one that she shared with him. Grace saw him, of course, but did not like him, and in particular believed that he was slowly destroying the garden.
“There’ll be nothing left by the time he’s finished,” she had complained, after Brother Fox had succeeded in unearthing a cluster of bulbs that had been carefully planted the year before. Now they lay exposed, one gnawed slightly and then spat out, the others tossed carelessly about the edge of the lawn.
“Vandal,” Grace continued. “You know that man who came to deal with the wasps last year? That man from somewhere out near Peebles? Well, he told me that he knows how to deal with urban foxes. He traps them and then takes them out into the country and lets them loose.”
“That’s what he says he does,” Isabel retorted.
Grace met the challenge with a stare. “Yes. That’s what he does.”
“But I suspect that he doesn’t,” said Isabel. “He just says that so that the urbanites feel all right about it. Dalkeith is very different from Edinburgh. They’re not particularly sentimental out there. He’ll kill them. And he can do it. Foxes are officially vermin.”
Grace said nothing, but pointedly picked up the bulbs and began to replant them.
“He has to live,” muttered Isabel, and left her to it.
“And so do bulbs,” said Grace.
Isabel almost said, “It’s my garden, and if I want to let the fox dig things up, then that’s my affair.” But she did not. She could have said it, as it was true, and it was perfectly reasonable that one should allow a fox free rein of one’s garden if one liked foxes, which she did. But she had never asserted her rights as employer and owner, and never would. Grace was treated as a colleague; requests to do things were never given as orders, and most of all Isabel never acted as if her money gave her power. It did—and she knew it—but she never abused it. Yet there were limits, which both understood. Grace could not call the man from Dalkeith to deal with Brother Fox because the garden was not hers; both understood that.
Now, sitting in the second row of the lecture theatre, she put the fox painting out of her mind and looked about her. Edward Mendelson’s lecture had been widely publicised by the Scottish Poetry Library and by The Scotsman, with the result that several hundred people had bought tickets, and even if the lecture theatre would not be full, it would not look empty. She felt relieved; she had been to enough philosophy lectures where a small turnout had brought embarrassment to both speakers and hosts. In Cambridge there had been a professor who had always said the same thing on such occasions, even on fine days: This weather keeps people in and It’s so hard for people these days. That had been greeted with nods of understanding, but she had always wondered why it was so hard for people these days. Was it any harder to attend a philosophy lecture than it had ever been? Surely not; if anything, it would be easier. Lecture theatres in the past had always been uncomfortable, perhaps deliberately so, in order to keep the audience attentive. The old anatomy lecture theatre in the university was famous for its discomfort; narrow, knee-bending benches racked steeply, almost vertiginously upwards—the better to allow a view, of course, of the dissection below, but hardly comfortable. And other lecture theatres had been little better; no soft seats, cold, noisy in the wrong way; everything that the modern lecture theatre or seminar room now eschewed. No, it was not hard for people these days, or rather, if life was still hard, then it was less hard than it had ever been before.