ISABEL LOOKED AT HER WATCH. She had imagined that they would have plenty of opportunity to talk before the lawyer arrived, but the time seemed to have disappeared. There was a lot she wanted to discuss with Duncan, but now there was only half an hour before they would be joined by the lawyer. There would be discussion of the recovery of the painting: proposals, no doubt, and figures. She was struck by the naked effrontery of it—an effrontery that was there, she supposed, in all deliberate crime. By his acts, the criminal effectively said to the victim: You don’t matter. And that, Isabel thought, was the most fundamentally wrong of all attitudes, whether it lay behind acts of great cruelty or the mundane crime of bag-snatching. You don’t matter. How could anybody look another person in the eye and say that? Quite easily, it seemed—there were enough instances of it, every day, every moment of every day, in just about every context of human life.
When Isabel had read the letter, Duncan suggested that they move through to the drawing room, taking their coffee with them. Once there, they seated themselves on a settee, Duncan at one end, Isabel at the other. Isabel noticed how comfortable the settee was, with its plumped-up feather cushions. Penury was a matter of hard chairs and mean cushions; prosperity—old money—was a matter of feathers: an absurd reductionist view of it, but at times quite strikingly true.
“They could have taken anything else,” Duncan remarked. “They could have taken any of the others and I wouldn’t have felt it.” He pointed to the wall behind them. “That Gimignani behind us,” he said, “I wouldn’t have blinked an eyelid if they’d carted that off. Or the Ramsays or the Raeburns. You can replace those—not with exactly the same painting, but something that does pretty much the same job.”
“They knew its value,” said Isabel.
He nodded miserably. “I know,” he said. “But somehow it made it personal. As if they wanted to hurt me.”
“I doubt that,” said Isabel. “If they wanted to hurt you, they could have done something really unpleasant. Set fire to something perhaps. There are plenty of ways of hurting somebody in such a manner that you can get away with it.”
“I suppose so.”
She watched him. He belonged to a sector of society that did not like to show its feelings. Displays of emotion, in their view, were vulgar—showy. And yet there was no doubt in her mind now as to how he was feeling.
“I assume that the existence of the painting was well enough known,” said Isabel.
Duncan thought for a moment. “If you did your research,” he said. “It’s in some of the books on Poussin—not in others. Under the photograph it usually just says Private Collection, but there’s a literature on this. If you trace the painting’s progress through the salerooms, you can find out when it was bought by my grandfather. And you’ll see his name down as the purchaser. Those were more trusting days.”
Isabel was interested in his mention of the literature. “People have written about it?”
“Yes. There was a small literature on it before Blunt made his attribution. Prior to that, it was thought to be by a seventeenth-century Veronese painter. Then Blunt looked at it and gave it the nod. His word counted for more than anything else at the time.”
“Anthony Blunt?”
Duncan smiled. “The very same. Better known as a spy than as the authority on Poussin, I suspect.” He paused, and glanced quickly at his watch. He was anxious—she could see that.
“When did he see it?”
“In the mid-seventies. A guest recognised it—a distant cousin of my father’s who happened to be an art historian. He had been at the Courtauld during Blunt’s reign there, and he knew him well enough to phone him up and tell him about it. He said that he was sure enough to encourage Blunt to come up to look at it—my father was unwilling to let it leave the house. He was very attached to that painting.”
“So Blunt came up?”
“Yes, he did. He was very grand, apparently. Very tall and with a certain haughty detachment. He could look right through you, my father said. I remember his saying that Blunt’s look was like ice.”
Isabel had read something to that effect. And yet Blunt was human; others had spoken of his generosity, his kindness, his warmth. “Perhaps he wanted to keep people at a distance. Shyness sometimes has the same effect, and then we reach the conclusion that somebody is cold, when in fact they’re just reserved.”
Duncan agreed. “Yes, people are very quick to dismiss others they’ve never met. Blunt kept his distance, I imagine, and I don’t see what’s wrong with that. I can’t understand why people expect everyone to open up immediately to everyone they meet.” He looked at her, as if assessing whether they could speak at this greater level of intimacy. “Reticence can be a virtue, don’t you think?”
Isabel was not sure. “Keeping yourself to yourself? Possibly …”
Duncan continued. “Not wearing your heart on your sleeve. Not displaying your private life for all to see.”
“As on those television programmes? Where people expose their relationship problems to the public gaze?”
He nodded. “Exactly. We live in an age where the assumption is made that you can—perhaps should—talk about every aspect of your life, even to complete strangers.”
“Some would simply call that honesty,” Isabel suggested. And she thought of a line from Auden where he talked about being honest like children. It was from the Freud poem; Auden said that Freud taught us the benefit of such honesty. Children were honest—often disarmingly so—but could an adult be the same?
Duncan shifted slightly further down the settee, away from her—as if distancing himself—putting into practice the reticence to which he had just referred. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m not being rude—or unduly reticent. It’s just that the sun was getting in my eyes.”
A beam of morning sun, warm and discrete, a shaft of yellow, was coming in through a window on the side of the room; it was this that he had shifted to avoid. A yellow knife, thought Isabel; a yellow knife through the air of the room.
“Yes, we have to be honest,” he said. “But honesty is not incompatible with a certain reserve, or reticence—call it what you will. Call it privacy, perhaps. It makes sense, I should have thought, to talk about a sense of privacy. People have every right to some degree of privacy and perhaps that’s what reserved people feel. They value their privacy.”
Isabel had nothing against that. She, too, believed that there were areas of our lives that we were entitled to guard against the eyes of others. People may have nothing to hide in their living rooms, but they were entitled to curtains that would keep others from looking in.
“What you say is interesting,” she said. “And I think I agree with you—for the most part.”
He smiled. “Good. I imagined that we might agree on quite a number of subjects.”
That, she realised, was a statement of friendship. “So did I,” she said.
She gazed thoughtfully at the place where the Poussin had been. Sir Anthony Blunt had been gay.
She dropped the question into the conversation without really considering it; it seemed to be the next place for their discussion to go. “Do you think that people need to state their sexuality? Do they need to tell people?”
He did not answer immediately, and she glanced at him. He had folded his arms across his chest, a gesture that Isabel always interpreted as protective. Had she unthinkingly presumed too much by asking the question? Had she strayed into the very territory of the private they had been discussing?
His tone now was distant. “No,” he said. “It’s their own business. What does it matter to the rest of us if somebody is … that way? I don’t see it as any business of mine, frankly.”
She noted his use of the term that way. It was old-fashioned, but she felt that it also disclosed a certain distaste. Not to use an accepted term raised the distinct possibility that one did not like that expression, or did not share the assumptions that went with it. Gay was a word that gay people themselves had endorsed and was different, therefore, from the mean-spirited language that others had used in the past.
The topic was obviously not one he wanted to discuss, and so she moved away from it, not wishing to intrude further.
“So you say Blunt accepted the painting?” she asked.
Duncan seemed relieved that they had come back to art. “Yes. I was in my late teens then and not all that interested in the paintings. I knew what they were, but I had yet to develop much knowledge of art. That came a bit later.”
“Were you here when Blunt came?”
“No, I was away at boarding school. I heard about it from my father.”
“You heard about the icy look?”
“Yes, although I wouldn’t want to make too much of that—as I’ve said. I was more interested in the fact that he came up after he had been revealed as a Soviet spy. I’d read about all that in the newspapers, of course. They had a field day, as you can imagine.”
“Indeed they did,” said Isabel. “After all, who could invent a better story for them? Soviet agents. The rarefied world of art connoisseurship. The fact that he was some sort of cousin of the Queen’s. There was something for everybody in it.” She had been about to add sex to the list, but stopped herself in time.
“They loved it. They bayed for his blood, but, as you know, he had been given immunity by the government in return for spilling the beans. They couldn’t prosecute him or no government immunity would be worth the paper it’s written on in the future.”
Isabel agreed. Pacta sunt servanda—agreements should be honoured. It was one of the most basic of the rules we needed to function as a society. Keep your promises.
“He was a broken man afterwards,” said Duncan. “I read a biography a few years ago that described it rather well. He continued to live in London but was careful about going out. He went to the cinema in Notting Hill once and was recognised. The audience slow-handclapped him until he left. Can you imagine it?”
Isabel was busy doing just that. She saw the cinema and Blunt coming in—that tall, aesthetically distinguished figure who must have found it very difficult to appear anonymous. She saw him sitting down in his seat, perhaps with a friend or two—some people, at least, stuck by him—some of his old friends and students from the Courtauld who either forgave him or thought there was nothing to forgive. She saw another member of the audience a few rows forward turn his neck and stare and then whisper to those around him. And then she saw more heads craning to see whether it really was him, and then, perhaps more as a joke than anything else, or an act of bravado, a man somewhere started to clap slowly. And then the psychology of the crowd took over, and people felt the bravery of the group. The slow-handclapping swelled—a crowd will always pick up a stone—and Blunt, at first confused, begins to realise it is him they want to leave. Me? A glance exchanged with his companions, and then a retreat that not even a proud and unrepentant man—if he really was like that—could find anything but humiliating. Their bad manners, a companion whispers, but Blunt, too shocked, is unable to speak.
“He never apologised,” said Isabel. “Or did he?”
“He said that he regretted it,” said Duncan. “That’s not the same thing as saying sorry.”
“But perhaps he didn’t feel sorry,” said Isabel. “He was recruited in the nineteen thirties, wasn’t he? A lot of people believed then that communism—and the Soviet Union—were the only forces really standing up to fascism. So maybe he felt that what he did was right.”
Duncan did not disagree. “Yes, it was ideological—to begin with. Then when Stalin came along it was too late. Blunt wanted out, but it was difficult.”
“So he thought he had done the right thing?”
“Undoubtedly.”
Isabel gave this some thought. “But he was wrong, wasn’t he? And the whole point of his offence was that he betrayed his country.”
Duncan’s smile was challenging. “Is that always wrong?”
She thought that if he were expecting a simple answer, she was not going to give him one. “That depends on what one’s country is up to, doesn’t it? We don’t think that people who betray their own country when it happens to be a tyranny are doing wrong, do we? Russians who betrayed the Soviet Union were welcomed here with open arms, I seem to remember.”
“So no real betrayal?” he said. “Because they were acting in the real interests of their country anyway—those interests being obscured by the tyranny in power?”
“Something like that. There’s a difference between loyalty to a government and loyalty to a country.”
He pressed further. “Which would cover Blunt? And Philby? And Maclean and Burgess?”
“We didn’t have a tyranny in power. That’s the difference.”
She could see that he was not prepared to make that distinction. “I’m not happy about that,” he said. “Let’s say that there was a coup in this country—in Britain—and we had an unelected government. We could still owe a duty of loyalty to our fellow citizens not to betray the state of which we were all members.”
Isabel looked up at the ceiling. There was a crack in the plaster, stretching from one side to the other, a zigzag, a San Andreas fault. “Tribal feeling?”
She had not intended to sound flippant, and she was not ready for the look of sheer anger that passed across his face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make light of it.”
He clearly felt guilty for showing his anger. According to the code by which he lived, a gentleman did not do that. That’s what he was thinking, she decided; that’s why he was reproaching himself.
He made a reassuring gesture. “I know that.” He paused. “You know, it’s very stimulating for me to have this conversation. Living out here, I don’t get enough of that sort of thing. My neighbours …” He sighed. “They don’t talk about these things—their interests are mostly horses and cattle. I couldn’t discuss loyalty with them—not at all: they’d find it too awkward.”
“That’s understandable,” said Isabel. “Most people don’t question themselves about such matters.”
“Maybe they should,” Duncan mused. “Maybe we’re all too used to spending our time in a state of …” He frowned as he tried to find the right term. “In a state of deadened acceptance rather than …” Again he struggled. “Engagement. Yes, that’s it—engagement.”
“Maybe.”
He brushed some imaginary lint off his trousers; we clean things that are already clean. His shoes, Isabel noticed, were highly polished—so highly so that they caught the light from the window, as a mirror might. Why, she wondered, would one spend so much time—and it must have taken a lot of time to get that shine—in buffing leather? People dressed for certain things, of course, for a special meeting or task—what had Michael Longley written about Emily Dickinson? She dressed each morning with care for the act of poetry …
They were interrupted by a car drawing up outside the house, the sound of crunching gravel drifting in from outside; it was like a wave breaking on the shore, thought Isabel—it had the same quality. Duncan rose to his feet quickly.
“We can finish our conversation later,” he said. “We’ve touched on things that we need to talk about a bit more.”
She said that she agreed. Loyalty, Anthony Blunt, Poussin, living with passion rather than with dull acceptance—there was a lot to be said about all of these subjects. Whole books had been written on them; whole libraries—or sections of libraries in the case of two of them. And nobody ever claimed to reach a definitive conclusion, nor felt they had put the matter to bed. “You could talk about these things for ever, don’t you think …,” she began, but was cut off. Duncan was moving towards the door, distracted to the point of ignoring her; he suddenly appeared rude, which was most unusual for him, she thought, but he did not mean it. He’s afraid … That explained it. He was afraid of this lawyer and what she represented, or rather the person she represented, the thief, he who had come into this room and taken the beloved painting, disregarding the consequences of his action, the distress caused by the act of misappropriation. She returned to her earlier thoughts on the shocking attitude of the criminal towards his victim—it was the moral primal scene, to borrow the language of Freudians: the realisation that people could treat others as if they did not matter. And yet they did—they behaved exactly like that—all the time, and with conviction. Whole nations said it to other whole nations. You do not matter. You do not count.