Here there was a diseased yellow, the color itself, the very pigment, like a howl of disgust and misery. It had the ability to spear his mood, get right to the heart of him; he felt the artist was crying out, personally, for help, straight to him.
“Who is this artist?”
“Mark,” said Kim-Ange, respectfully. “Mark Rothko.”
“Is he still alive? What happened to him?”
Kim-Ange looked at Cormac and he immediately knew the answer.
“Suicide,” he said. “It’s written there.”
“Plain as day,” said Kim-Ange, with an uncharacteristically grim tone.
Suddenly Cormac found himself thinking: of Robbie, yes, but also of Lissa. Is this how she had felt? Why she’d had to move?
“Amazing,” he said, gazing at the paintings.
They passed through halls and rooms of modernism, of the world sliced up and twisted around.
“Why did they start doing this?” he said.
“Why do you think?” said Kim-Ange, pointing out a Braques. “Look when it all started, a hundred years ago.”
Cormac blinked. “After the First World War.”
“After the war”—Kim-Ange nodded—“when the world got ripped apart. After Hiroshima, it got torn up again. You couldn’t look at life the way people had looked at it before.”
Now Cormac couldn’t see enough of it. He wandered through the galleries of Picassos, Dalís, mouth open.
“They’re all soldiers.”
“We’re all soldiers,” observed Kim-Ange, eventually pulling him away. “Art is amazing,” she added perkily. “And you get a slice of cake at the end of it. Shall we?”
And Cormac was just about to enthusiastically agree, and concede that, okay, London maybe did have a bit more to offer than he’d originally thought . . . but his phone buzzed, and he took it out and stared at it, disconsolately, reading a message.
“Oh, bugger,” he said.
Chapter 42
“Why didn’t you call me?” he almost yelled down the phone.
“It’s just a broken wrist,” said his mother, equally crossly. “I called a taxi. Honestly, don’t worry about it.”
“What were you doing?”
“I was on the trapeze.”
“Mu-um.”
“My stupid bicycle. How’s London?”
“So who set it for you?”
“Some nine-year-old up at the hospital.”
“I’ll pop up,” said Cormac.
“You won’t ‘pop up,’” said Bridie. “I am perfectly fine and Yasmeena is coming over.”
Yasmeena lived in Inverness with Lewis, the middle son.
Cormac sighed. “I can get a flight.”
“You can do nothing of the sort! You’ve got a job to do. I am totally fine.”
Cormac took stock. After his father had died, his mother’s default was “totally fine,” and she took any insinuation to the contrary as a total insult.
“Okay,” he said. “Well, at least there’ll be someone to check it for you. I wouldn’t have been allowed.”
“It’s fine!”
“I mean, I would anyway . . .”
“It’s fine! I’m busy anyway.”
“Which wrist is it?”
“My right,” admitted Bridie.
“Mum!” Cormac tsked. “It’s okay, I’m going to get the new girl who’s standing in for me to pop in.”
“I’ve seen her,” said Bridie. “She has hair all over the place.”
“So I hear,” said Cormac.
“And she’s a bit standoffish.”
“You think everyone who doesn’t come from Kirrinfief is standoffish! Remember what you said about that woman with the book bus?”
“Aye, she’s all right, Nina.”
“She is!” said Cormac. “So is Alyssa. I’m pretty sure.”
“Mm-hmm,” said Bridie.
Which is how Cormac found himself writing a note on Monday morning asking, as politely as he knew how, if Lissa could possibly go and visit his mother.
LISSA WAS CURIOUS, she couldn’t help it. Cormac sent her stupid little pictures, but he didn’t give that much away. Not that she’d been thinking about him, but given she was living in his house, she couldn’t help but wonder, couldn’t help being slightly aware of the smell of someone else’s aftershave, shampoo, pillowcases. She hadn’t snooped. But she’d considered it.
She picked up the notes from Joan, although there was nothing in them—a sixty-four-year-old woman in absolutely tremendous health with a snapped wrist from falling off her bicycle—and went around, faintly nervous.
The woman didn’t answer the bell of the small neat Victorian stone house with its arched porch and pretty pathway, and Lissa eventually found herself pootling down the little close at the side until she got into the immaculate back garden, filled with neat rows of daffodils, bluebells, and rhododendron bushes and grass so perfect it looked like someone had trimmed it with nail scissors. The woman was trying to weed with one hand, the other in a sling, and it looked like she would topple over at any moment.
“Um, hello?” said Lissa, trying not to startle her.
Mrs. MacPherson stood up with a start. “Hello?”
“I’m Lissa Westcott . . . the nurse liaison? I just came to check up on you.”
The