In that way that kids are aware of social castes, I vaguely assumed Finlay Hart, all of ten years old, thought me a little beneath.
‘SUSIE. IT’S FOR YOU,’ were his entire words of greeting when he happened to yank open the inner, then outer front door when I called.
One memory stands out, something I rarely think about.
The only thing I did with both Hart siblings was bike rides. In a time when children were still allowed to get on two-wheeled transport and piss off for vast stretches of time, we used to pack a picnic into the satchels on the back of the saddle and cycle out from our suburb to the countryside.
Sometimes we were a foursome, with a girl called Gloria on their street who had a voice like a foghorn and a helmet haircut. (She’s a Lib Dem MP now.) Susie and Gloria were locked into a demented competition regards stamina – their obsessive need to outdo each other carried through to their degrees and careers. Until Gloria got married at twenty-five and had triplets six months later, and Susie was finally happy to hand over the winner’s trophy.
On one scorching day, both of them pedalling like maniacs – out of breath, but pretending not to be, keeping up appearances with effortful conversation – I gradually fell behind. Fin was keeping pace with me, possibly because as the eldest, and male, he anticipated a major fury coming his way if they lost possession of the sad doll girl.
Under a large tree by the side of a road, he and I stopped for a rest, my metallic green bicycle with white shopping basket propped against it. Fin had something sharp and racy in black and red, which was more like a couple of metal right angles than mode of transport.
‘They have to come back this way,’ Fin said. ‘Let’s wait for them to pass.’
I liked this idea, and we lolled against the bark and picked blades of grass and listened to the bee-buzz hum of distant lawnmowers. We lay down and closed our eyes and imagined we were comfortable enough to sleep. We sat up again, because the ground was lumpy and grass is tickly.
‘Have you heard of kissing?’ I asked Fin.
I’d seen it on a television programme the night before; the woman was in a pink nightie with thin straps and slippers that looked like high heels. I’d been riveted. I’d said to my brother Kieran: ‘I’ve never seen Mum and Dad do that’ and he said: ‘That’s because they don’t like each other in the way that man and lady do’ and, well, from the mouths of babes.
‘Yes,’ Fin said. ‘Of course I know what kissing is.’
‘Would you like to do it with me?’
(I don’t think I’ve ever been as forthright with a member of the opposite sex since.)
He glanced up from under his floppy fringe and gave a nonchalant shrug. ‘Yeah, I s’pose.’
We shuffled round opposite each other and pressed our mouths together. His lips felt soft for a boy, although I wasn’t really sure what I was expecting. We repositioned our heads and tried again. It was not a good or bad experience, just a curious thing to choose to do, I thought.
Susie and Gloria reappeared in the distance and Fin and I righted our bikes and rolled them back down to the path. Once again, the girls outpaced us and disappeared into the horizon. As we arrived at the Hart residence, I wondered if I wanted to kiss Fin Hart goodbye.
As I was about to suggest it, his dad came shooting out of the house, demanding to know why Susie had arrived home first and unaccompanied by her brother. A torrent of urgent paternal words regards his irresponsibility were unleashed in Fin’s ear and he was propelled indoors by his upper arm, his mum hovering in background, arms folded, to continue the scolding.
‘Oh, hello love!’ his dad said, on seeing me. ‘Put your bike in the boot and I’ll drive you home.’ Mr Hart was always very doting towards me.
Evelyn is such a lovely, clever girl, I’m glad you’ve made one good choice in life at least, Susannah, he used to say, to much eye-rolling and DA-AD! from Susie.
I don’t recall seeing much of Finlay after that hot summer, him having crossed that childhood-pubescent dividing line where girls were stupid, girls who were friends with his sister probably most of all, and being seen with them social seppuku.
Later, I remember him being a Most Crushed On at school, wreathed with the unattainability that’s only enhanced by a remote and distant nature, and given a rock-star halo that only an older good-looking lad at school and actual rock stars can achieve. Girls would breathe: ‘oh my God, Finlay Hart’ as if the very syllables could get them pregnant.
Then eventually he disappeared altogether, first to London and then to the States. He was very much one of those kinds of people who flit through the same space as you only briefly, and leave in a cloud of jet exhaust fumes and rumour, as soon as they can. The type too otherworldly to have any social media accounts, but in a deep trawl on Google you can find a mention of them in the society diary about an art gallery opening in 2008. Who just seem to move faster, and differently, and have their own laws of physics. By the time you notice them, they’re long gone.
‘Yeah, he only went to New York because he got model-scouted in Covent Garden and the agency paid for his fare over,’ I remember Susie scoffing. ‘Never mention this though, he can’t know I told you,’ which was a little stagey of her, given I’d not seen him in decades.
To my twenty-something ears, this as any sort of embarrassment was up there with: ‘What a loser, he only uses his BAFTA as a toilet doorstop.’
‘He did modelling? Why can’t it be mentioned, did he have his willy out or something?’
‘Oh, no idea, it’s just too much,’ Susie said, putting back of her hand to forehead in mock faint. I gathered on that occasion she quite liked the theatrics that an evil hot brother in the Big Apple entailed: ‘The only photos I ever saw were him in a roll-neck sweater and duffle coat looking like a Gap workwear bell end, and Mum had to beg, wheedle and threaten those out of him.’
‘And he doesn’t model now?’
‘No, he is a – wait for it – shrink. Ugh. My brother, messing with anyone’s head. What a charlatan. He rinses rich old women with neuroses on the Upper East Side who fancy him, no doubt.’
Then their mum died, and the long-lost, long-gone, unlamented Finlay Hart was forced to reappear in common-or-garden Nottingham.
I remember the jolt of seeing adult Fin in an immaculate navy Crombie at their mum’s funeral, straight-backed with an incredible-looking auburn-haired girlfriend, clad in frock coat and spiky black heels. Her mobile went off during the ceremony, the unfamiliar rat-a-tat of a USA dial tone. She calmly switched it off without the slightest facial twitch of self-consciousness. Fin didn’t react at all. They looked as if a European prince and princess were on an official engagement to inspect a disaster zone.
I wish he hadn’t fucking come, Susie hissed at me, surreptitiously Lime-Drop-flavour vaping by the mulled wine urn in the village hall wake, afterwards. When I saw the Harts orbiting each other like satellites, I realised she’d not exaggerated his estrangement. It hadn’t dissolved on contact into even a forced friendliness.
Watching from afar, I noticed Mr Hart making a remark to Finlay, who replied in what looked like a curt fashion and then twitched imperiously at his own cufflink, short of anything more to say. Or perhaps simply uninterested in finding any more to say. They both looked blank, Mr Hart slightly stunned, and soon moved apart again. No smiles, no tears, no wordless supportive arm squeezes, no warmth whatsoever. It made me inwardly shudder, and my family hadn’t exactly written the handbook on functionality.