We walk on.
Fin seems to have changed his opinion of me from ‘dreadful’ to ‘acceptable’, much to my quiet astonishment.
‘Don’t lose faith,’ I say, distracting myself. ‘If these are places your dad might go, we stand some sort of chance. It’s a huge place, but the likely locations we are searching are not huge.’
‘He’s not staying at The Waldorf, though, clearly,’ Fin says. ‘Strike one for my being able to anticipate his movements.’
‘Like the IRA, you only need to be lucky once,’ I say, and Finlay bursts into laughter.
‘They wouldn’t quite know how to deal with you in New York, you know,’ he says. ‘I can see this from having been away and come back again – you’re a very British kind of bad taste.’
‘Bad taste!’ I mock-huff.
‘Bad taste, but amusing,’ Fin says. Under my artificial fibres,I glow. Even if these compliments are a device. Tools, to do a job. ‘Unserious outerwear.’
My parka has a giant doughnut of deep red faux fur around the hood, the colour of devil’s food cake. No mockery by men with high cheekbones and even higher IQs will make me love it any less.
‘OK, let’s find the historic family seat,’ he produces his iPhone and studies a map. ‘It’s quite something. I wouldn’t have minded inheriting it, even with all its noisy ghosts.’
I shudder, not with cold. The wind ruffles his hair and a passing pair of thirty-something women throw Finlay a wolfish look, and then me a wary glance.
Oh be my guest, gals, you have no idea. Might as well build yourself a snowman, it’d be warmer, and you’d have the carrot nose for sustenance.
I look out at the sea and take a deep breath. Didn’t the Victorians prescribe sea air for invalids? I feel like I’m convalescing.
‘Right, eleven minutes in this direction, I am promised,’ and we set off.
‘Mind if we walk along the beach for a bit?’ Fin says. I agree, though after we’ve headed down to it on the concrete shallow path and started tramping through the sand, I regret it. These boots were not made for beach walking.
‘You OK?’ Fin says, and I say ‘Fine, fine’ while concealing my effortful semi-stumbling because it’s one thing to be Whimsical Coat Girl and another to be And Packed the Wrong Shoes Too Girl.
‘There’s a method behind my madness,’ Fin says. ‘We’ll get a better view from here.’
‘A better view?’ I say.
‘There it is. The original Hart family residence,’ Finlay says, drawing to a halt, pointing across the road at an incredible detached sandstone villa. Its main trunk is like a huge rounded tower with a pointy spiral for a roof, flanked by giant bay windows and a huge curved front door with metal hinges, like they have in fantasy dramas. It’s colossal, like a mini castle. If I’d not been told it was someone’s home, I’d have assumed it was a new Michelin-starred restaurant serving daring fusion dishes, too elegant to feature its name prominently, or a jazzy church.
‘It’s stunning,’ I say. ‘This was your dad’s family home?’
‘Yup. Alright, isn’t it.’
‘Alright is not the word.’
Fin’s hands are in the pockets of his coat, shoulders hunched against the wind, face very pale in the chill wind.
‘It feels so strange looking at it now. You know, the last time I’d have been stood here, my dad would’ve been pointing out this and that about the architecture, reminiscing about him and my Uncle Don smashing a downstairs window with a football during the ’66 World Cup. My mum would’ve been complaining the wind was messing her hair do up. Susie would’ve been in her plastic tiara and tutu.’
‘And what would you have been doing?’ I say.
‘Listening to my dad, I guess, or else no one would’ve been. Looking awkward, with my pipe-cleaner legs.’
I almost remark I remember you at that age, but given we’ve never broached encounters with each other back in the day – not that they really matter – it feels odd to start now. I block out the memory of the kiss, and I hope he has too. He must’ve had many, many women lunge, since.
‘It’s a gastropub with rooms,’ he says. He nods toward the cavernous bay window on the left. ‘That’s the bar.’
‘Really? It does look too massive and splendid to be someone’s house.’
‘Want a drink? It’s not impossible Iain’s ahead of us on that.’
‘Yeah, why not?’ I shrug, with the slightest shiver of nerves at the prospect his dad is in there. I’ve been given a room in a five-star hotel, with expenses, on the basis he will respond positively to me. Fin wouldn’t blame me if he didn’t, I’m sure, but I’d still feel like a freeloading fraud.
Hang on, I ask myself: once he no longer has a use for you, how are you so sure about what Finlay Hart would or would not do? No one gets a reputation by accident. I have a suddenly powerful, disorientating sense of Susie watching me trot obediently after Finlay, banging on the glass that now divides us, screaming: ‘Stop.’
29
‘If I could afford this, I’d turn it back into a home but leave this room kitted out as a pub,’ I say. It’s charming and cosy as hell in here, spartan but homely, half-melted pillar candles on wrought-iron stands and a crowded bar area selling packets of crisps and wedges of brightly iced cake with silver ball sprinkles, under glass covers.
We choose pints of the real ale on draught each and a seat in the window where we can see the sea. As the light dims outside, the lamps inside seem warmer. A scan of the room has produced no sightings of Iain Hart.
Fin himself likes to move around unnoticed, I notice, he doesn’t carry himself in a way that draws attention: subtle, almost stealthy. Being beautiful must be an inconvenience.
‘Can you believe this was ever someone’s sitting room?’ I say, casting a look around.
‘To be perfectly honest, the Hart dynasty are sufficiently crazy …’ Finlay pauses, ‘professional term, don’t quote me’ – I smile, and once again, I can tell he’s making a special effort with me, ‘that their house being so large it’s now used as commercial premises is the least of it.’
‘How were they crazy?’
‘My grandad had a shop, then a chain of successful pharmacies. He sold them, retired at forty-eight, set about drinking, gambling and womanising. He and my grandma loathed each other in that way you loathed each other in a toxic marriage in the 1950s, but never dreamt for a moment you’d leave. Or that your poison might infect the kids. When my grandad was home, he chain-smoked so many cigs, there was a nicotine patch on the ceiling above his chair.’
‘Woah!’
Finlay casts a look upwards at the ceiling. ‘My dad would be able to point to the spot.’
I try to imagine this space, like a television device ‘star wipe’ effect, dissolving into a vision of the Hart paterfamilias dragging resentfully on endless Craven As, the mother offstage banging pots and pans, little Iain and little Don playing with a train set.
Fin drinks his pint and I drink mine and I think of the utterly terrible and bizarre set of circumstances that led to me sitting here, as the sky outside turns from deep blue to paler purple. What would Susie think of me being here? For once her voice is silent. I feel like she’s watching, instead.