‘Hi,’ Fin says, winding headphones round his phone as he walks into the room in running gear, pushing hair damp with sweat back from his glowing face.
‘Hello,’ I say, standing up.
‘Tea for you, too?’ he says to Finlay.
‘Thanks yes. Milk no sugar, please,’ Fin says, as Mr Hart bustles off to the kitchen.
‘I remember!’
I stare at Finlay and he stares back. We’re both fixed on each other, and as seconds pass, I realise neither of us is trying to pretend it’s anything other than a heart-struck gaze of mutual longing. Everything about his face is so ridiculously, staggeringly lovely to me, in this moment, I’m unable to speak.
Beauty isn’t an arrangement of features, even features as perfect as Finlay Hart’s, it’s a feeling. This is how it feels in the split second you suddenly become aware that you’re falling in love with someone. The click of a jigsaw’s last piece, the rainfall of coins in a jackpot slot machine, the right song striking up and your being swept away by its opening bars. That conviction of making complete sense of the universe, in one moment. Of course. You’re where I should be. You’re here.
‘How are you?’ Fin says to me, eventually, and we both break into broad smiles at the ludicrousness of having declared our feelings without saying a word. I can’t wait to talk to him properly, after we leave here. I can’t wait, full stop.
‘Shortbread on the side!’ Mr Hart says, pushing the door open with his foot, carrying a rattling tea tray in the door, placing it on a footstool. The Hart home is the kind of home to have footstools that match the sofa.
We chat about nothing much and Fin sips his tea, looking at me over the rim of the cup, and I’ve never had such a tumultuous internal response to someone looking over a teacup at me.
‘Mind if I use the loo?’ Fin asks Mr Hart, after ten minutes, and I guess, even if he does have a full bladder, he wants to check for things like electrical appliances in baths.
Finlay’s given directions to a bathroom he must have used for two decades.
When Finlay returns, he looks perturbed. I mouth ‘What?’ but he shakes his head.
After making the smallest of small talk, Fin says: ‘Where did you get the lamp on the landing, by the way? It looks familiar.’
‘Oh, the décor’s my wife’s concern,’ Mr Hart laughs.
Fin clears his throat and darts a look at me.
‘It looks a lot like one from the hotel we stayed in?’
‘Does it? Which?’
‘The Caledonian. In Edinburgh.’
‘Are you implying anything?’ his dad says.
‘No. I … wondered where it was from, that’s all. Can you remember where you bought it?’
Mr Hart doesn’t immediately respond.
‘Are you calling me a liar?’ he says, in a low, even register, one that sets a warning light flashing inside me.
‘No …’
‘It sounded like you were.’
Mr Hart stands up and, in alarm, Finlay and I stand up, too.
‘I’M NOT A BLOODY THIEF!’ Mr Hart roars, at a deafening volume, right up close in Finlay’s face, as I jump out of my skin. I’m not sure I knew anyone could be that loud, let alone a man pushing seventy, with no vocal training or build-up. Incredibly, Fin doesn’t flinch.
He steps backwards, breathing heavily. He closes his eyes and stumbles slightly and for a moment I think he’s going to fall over.
‘Are you OK?’ I say, darting over to him, my hand on his arm.
He doesn’t answer, eyes still closed, and he looks as if he’s gasping for breath, his face a worrying grey. Is he having a heart attack? It’s a panic attack, says an inner voice.
Mr Hart has turned the television on and sits back down, paying no attention to either of us.
‘How about some fresh air?’ I say, and Fin manages to nod with the merest incline of his head.
I help him through the kitchen, to the back door, scrabbling for the key on the windowsill.
I throw it open and we make awkward progress, me half-holding Fin up, down the deep steps into the garden. I don’t want to be responsible for him fainting onto a hard surface. I’d willingly split my head open to break his fall though. That much I know.
On the patio, Fin sits directly on the stone, back resting against the garden furniture, a wrought-iron chair. I sit next to him, my legs outstretched alongside his.
‘Are you feeling better?’ I say to Fin, and he murmurs yes, and I slip my hand in his. He’s very cold, but he squeezes it. He breathes deep lungfuls of the freezing air.
After a while, his breathing is steady and his complexion is a healthy colour again.
I lean my head on his shoulder. He puts an arm round me, his hand holding my waist.
‘Are you ready to tell me whatever it is you’ve not told me?’ I say.
I don’t know where these words have come from – they travel from my subconscious, out my mouth, entirely bypassing my conscious decision to utter them.
‘Yes,’ Fin says, without hesitation.
42
The lipstick-pink hydrangeas I remember from the summers of our youth are still there, their heads now petals of rusted, brittle slate-brown in the depths of winter. There are lights on timers in the flower beds, blinking on in the falling dusk.
Fin starts speaking.
‘The first time my dad beat me I was six. Maybe seven. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. I remember the sheer confusion, above all. More than the pain, or the shock of the violence. Knowing that people thought I was a clever boy, but for some reason I couldn’t figure out what had led to me being walloped like that. Like a maths problem where I just couldn’t add up. Think, Finlay. After that first time, it carried on once every month or so, until I was eleven, or twelve, I think. When I got old enough to fight back, or to tell people – people who could’ve caused real trouble, like teachers. Before then, I drove myself mad thinking there were ways to avoid it, if only I could adjust my behaviour accordingly.
‘There was also about six months or so when I was ten that it mysteriously stopped, which afterwards I put down to him knocking off a secretary at his firm. My being left alone ran concurrent with heated arguments with my mother, lots of slamming of doors, and someone called that slag Christina by my mum, who got her P45.’
Finlay gives me a wry look but I’m not ready for wry yet.
‘I always knew when a beating was coming, I learned to read the signs. He’d get this malicious glint in his eye, or he’d been drinking. Or he’d come back from the office in a foul mood. He’d pick fault, work himself into a temper with me to justify it. It was like an outlet he allowed himself, but he was fastidiously careful. It was always in an upstairs room with the door closed, it was always as quiet as possible. For the most part, he never left bruises. No belt or anything. No marks. He’d already thought about how he might get caught, and in a really twisted way that gives me peace. I don’t ever need to wonder if he intended me harm, if he intended me to suffer in silence, and be disbelieved if I told anyone. I know for sure he did. It might have been an irrational urge in him but he controlled it in an incredibly rigid, rational way.’
My face is burning hot in the extreme cold. I have to take my hand out of Fin’s and rub it on my skirt.