‘I’m going to leave you lads to it,’ I say, stroking Leonard’s ears.
Ed looks crestfallen. ‘Not like you to fold first?’
‘Pacing myself,’ I say.
In bed, a duvet pulled up to my chin that smells of ‘strange place’, I hear Justin and Ed creak up to bed on the hollow wooden staircase.
I know why Ed’s being weird. He thinks he has to strive to win what he once took for granted. He might be right.
37
I wake early in a constructive mood and put my hair in plaits, which I’ve not done for years – due to men in pubs who yanked them like bell pulls, and fearing it would be seen as a bid for male attention. As I fold thick sections of my hair over my fingers, I think of Finlay Hart, saying in his eyes I’d not failed at anything. He must be flying today, or tomorrow. He might be in the sky right now.
In my mind’s eye, the image of Finlay Hart checking the gate for his flight, throwing his leather-strap watch in the security tray, preparing to step onto a plane: it gives me stomach pain.
The twinge provokes me to run over The People vs Finlay Hart for the umpteenth time. ‘Poison.’ The Fin I met, and the one I remember from our childhood, could be aloof to the point of disconnected. Perhaps even lonely. You looked so worried, for a kid. Maybe it takes one to know one. All this animosity swirls around him, and all I can detect is an unbearable sadness. What was the Spanish flu about? Was he sickness or symptom? Or both?
I like him. I feel an affinity with him that I can’t explain, and I think it’s mutual. That’s what he was getting at when he told me about the jukebox song in the New York hipster bar.
I pick my way downstairs quietly and make a mountain of scrambled eggs before anyone’s awake, full of that hearty feeling of being up and useful when everyone else is asleep.
Unfortunately, Hester appears first, but it probably does us good to be forced into stiff small talk for the fifteen minutes or so it takes Ed to enter the dining room, flushed from the shower.
‘You did all this? I’m in awe,’ Ed says to me, as I bring another plate of toast to the table, and I shrug: ‘Oh well I woke up early, for some reason.’
‘Plus you found time to style yourself as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz,’ he says, and I’m careful to pass on the other side of the table and sit down next to Hester, lest he make a playful grab. ‘You’re getting away with it ’cos you look that youthful.’
Hester’s eyes narrow at Ed. ‘They were bunches, not plaits.’
‘Oh right,’ Ed says, swigging his orange juice.
‘There I am worrying about how you’d prefer my bridal hair and I bet I could wear a beanie, for all you’d care,’ she says.
‘Hahaha. Bridesmaids in rubber promotional Guinness logo top hats.’
Justin walks in in his grandad pyjamas, yawning, Leonard at his feet, yapping. ‘Yes Leonard, there is a tin of Chum in our luggage, if Ed hasn’t eaten it. Settle down.’
‘Morning boys!’ I say. ‘Eggs are keeping warm in the oven.’
‘Bloody hell, you on amphetamines? I thought you were Wiccan. I’d not anticipated you rising until it was getting dark outside again.’
I gurgle. There’s something strange about this Saturday and I realise what it is. For the first time since I lost Susie, I feel a glimmer of happiness. It’s a very qualified happy, like a flickering lightbulb, but something approaching happy blinks on and off nonetheless.
The only thing you lack is self-belief.
Is that true? I hold onto the idea, trace its reassuring contours, like a polished stone in my pocket.
After breakfast, we bundle up and go for a walk, forgetting that this time of year is completely inhospitable to a bunch of city twats wandering around in untamed nature, without sufficient rain-proofing or sensible footwear. It’s larks until we get two hours in, a degree of exhaustion takes hold and we have yet to see civilisation again. It dawns on us we are significantly lost, as opposed to cute-lost.
Ed has Google Maps on his phone, Hester standing by him with her arms wrapped around herself and chin buried in her chest. Justin is wheeling in the near distance with his arms thrown wide, Leonard running in circles around him on his jumpy little legs. Justin cries: ‘We’ve gone on holiday by mistake!’
‘Is he pissed already?’ Ed says to me, in irritation. I miss Susie’s interjection here; she’d have handled Justin’s exuberance and Ed’s grouchy misanthropy in a dry one- or two-liner.
Actually, while stomping up hill and down dale, I’ve seen the method to Justin’s rural madness. When breathing in lungfuls of cleaner air and concentrating on moving my body forward, grief eases. Exercise helps.
‘Right, my phone says there’s a small inn or lodgings house in that direction.’ Ed points into the distance. ‘If the Lord spares us, we should make it by nightfall.’
‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ Hester says.
‘Yeah, more like twenty minutes if we get a yomp on.’
‘Thank fuck for that.’
It occurs to me I’ve not heard one friendly word between Ed and Hester since we arrived, and I don’t know why. They should be in pre-wedding euphoria.
As Ed promised, we find a pit stop at a village pub where we eat spongy white rolls stuffed with grated cheese – as does Leonard, covertly – iceberg salad with green peppers and a breakwater of fat, deep-fryer 1970s chips, and drink pints of brown ale that taste of biscuits and socks. In hunger, weariness and the toll of the low-level panic before we found it, it’s a majestic feast.
After getting soaked to the skin on the way back, Leonard zipped into the front of Justin’s coat, head sticking out, we finally reach the cottage. Ed builds a fire and Justin gets more fizz out of the fridge.
‘By the way, I know this isn’t a light topic, but we need to decide what to do with Susie’s ashes,’ Ed says, dusting his hands. Justin sets four flutes down on the seaman’s chest that doubles as coffee table in the sitting room.
‘It’s harder to find a place with a not outdoorsy person, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘We can’t exactly spread Susie at Searcys Bar at St Pancras. We should ask Finlay what he wants, too.’
‘He’d not care,’ Ed says.
‘I think he would. Either way, he deserves a say.’
‘If he didn’t go to the crematorium to claim the urn, how arsed can he be?’
‘He lives in the States. What opportunities did he have if you’d already claimed it?’
Ed double-takes.
‘What exactly went on in Edinburgh to turn you from “the psycho brother’s trying to embezzle a fortune” to “he would care, he’s a sensitive model – slashie – quack who looks great in patent meggings”?’ Ed says, in a squeaky impression of my voice. ‘Or have I answered my own question?’
‘Okay, I’ve had enough of this, fuck this,’ Hester says, voice like a scalpel through the air, making everyone’s hairs stand on end.
‘Enough of what?’ Ed says, warily.
‘You obsessing over her,’ Hester says, pointing at me but not looking at me.
A grisly hush descends.