‘How’s the book coming along?’ asks Beverley, stepping outside to join him and handing him a gin and tonic as she sits down, sipping on her own. She leans across and they kiss briefly. To their mutual surprise, romance has been revived between them in this most desolate of places and they’ve come to realize that they might not have much in the world any more, but they still have each other. And ten million quid in the bank, of course.
‘It’s very interesting,’ he says. ‘Although, obviously, I’m reading it for ironic reasons.’
She smiles, glancing at the front cover. There was a time in her life when her husband had been able to amuse her like this regularly and it seems that that time has returned. Sitting together like this, outside in the fresh air, looking across the sea, they find themselves chatting as amiably as they did when they were a young couple, but it’s a relief to be simply living in the present. They can sit here for hours, exchanging small snippets of conversation or just saying nothing at all, and she feels closer to him than she has in years. It’s come as something of a delight to both of them to realize that they still love each other.
Some days, Beverley accompanies George on his walks to the village and back, and they stop for lunch and a drink in the one pub that stands down there, sitting by the fireplace enjoying a hearty stew and talking about life, love, politics, history, culture and art until the sun goes down, at which point they head back to the cottage hand in hand. Two days earlier, on their walk home, they even stopped in the woods, throwing themselves upon each other to make love with a vigour they have not displayed in many years.
She hasn’t yet told her husband, but Beverley has decided that, upon her next trip to the village, she will go in search of paper and pens, for she has an idea for a semi-autobiographical novel that she’s interested in pursuing. She hasn’t written one herself since her very earliest efforts, but she feels a strong desire to pursue this book alone. They have no plans to leave Scoraig anytime soon and she quite likes the idea of sitting quietly every morning for a couple of hours and allowing the story to build before her, the characters to take shape, the world she might imagine out of nothingness. She will write about a family, she has decided, not a young woman in search of love from a wealthy, damaged man. A family with faults and flaws, who have gone wrong somewhere but are trying, are desperately trying, to connect with each other again. Their downfall, she knows, will be choosing publicity over privacy, followers over friends. She’ll take the events of her own family’s lives over many months and encapsulate them into five days. She might even soften them a little by including scenes that took place when the children were younger and she and George were more loving towards each other. She has a title for it already: The Echo Chamber. She doesn’t know whether her family will like being featured at the centre of the story or not, particularly as she has decided to portray them with all their eccentricities intact, but she can’t think about that for now. As her late colleague Kingsley Amis once said, if you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
‘Look,’ she says, nudging her husband as she catches sight of their elder son, Nelson, making his way along the beach towards them, carrying something in his hands. ‘What’s he got there?’
‘I can’t tell,’ says George, following the direction of her eyes. They watch silently as he climbs the steps towards the cottage.
‘Oh Lord,’ says Beverley. ‘That’s not what I think it is, is it?’
‘I think it might be.’
‘Look what I found,’ says Nelson, smiling broadly. ‘It was all alone and seemed completely lost. How on earth would a tortoise find its way to the Scoraig peninsula?’
‘It’s probably been walking for decades,’ says George, taking a sip from his drink. ‘In search of other tortoises.’
‘I doubt it will find any, but who knows?’
‘Why did you bring it up here?’ asks Beverley. ‘Speaking as a mother, shouldn’t you have just let it be?’
Nelson shrugs. He’d been strolling along the beach, which he does every day, wearing what he liked to think of as his Baywatch uniform, although he’d never confess that to anyone, when he saw the poor unfortunate creature standing on its own and felt a sudden urge to befriend it.
‘You should put it back,’ says Beverley. ‘Let it go where it wants.’
‘I thought I might keep it. I could name him Yaroslav the Wise, after the great eleventh-century Ukrainian prince.’
‘Yes, we all know who Yaroslav the Wise was,’ says George. ‘We’re not complete ignoramuses.’
‘No, it’s a bad idea,’ says Beverley. ‘They’re not meant to be kept as pets anyway. And we don’t have anything to feed it.’
‘The village shop doesn’t even sell After Eights,’ adds George. ‘You’re lucky to get a Mars bar most days.’
‘I suppose,’ says Nelson, placing the creature on the ground, where it turns slowly with a disgruntled sound and begins the process of returning whence it has come, a walk that will inevitably take many months, if not years. He watches it as it moves away and envies it a little. A life of solitude does not seem like such a bad thing, and he’s enjoying living in this part of Scotland, with no particular plans to return to the real world. Shane broke up with him when he realized that almost everything Nelson had said to him during their brief romance had been a lie, and he’d been forced to end his relationship with his therapist, Dr Gosebourne, when he learned that she’d been conducting an affair with his father, which had almost resulted in another sibling. In his sorrow, he had retreated into the arms of his parents, who, most unexpectedly, had embraced him and were now doing all they could to make him whole again. He’d never really thought about them in these terms before but, since their arrival in Scoraig, he’s grown to realize how deeply he loves them. Sitting down on one of the veranda’s steps now, George reaches out a hand and lets it rest on his son’s shoulder for a few moments, and he remembers what it was like to be a child, when there were just the three of them. They had been very happy days, and somehow, unexpectedly, they seem to be returning.
‘If I had a phone,’ says Elizabeth, stepping out of the cottage door and stretching her body out in a great yawn, ‘I would take a picture of the three of you looking out to sea and post it to Instagram. It would be an amazing shot.’
‘If you had a phone,’ says Nelson. ‘But you don’t.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘Nor do I miss it.’
‘Liar.’
‘Well, I miss it a bit. But not as much I thought I would.’
It had taken six weeks for Elizabeth to convince the authorities that she was neither a terrorist nor did she have any plans to take a machete to the Prime Minister’s head. While she received a caution for her behaviour, it was nothing compared to the ignominy that fell on her when it was revealed that @ElizCleverley and @TruthIsASword were, in fact, the same person, a revelation that led to a long and distressing conversation between George and his daughter. Once again, the newspapers revelled in a week’s worth of revelations, going back through her tweets, likes and replies before contacting every famous person she had ever messaged for their response to her unkindness. Most had been disparaging, of course, saying that she must have some form of mental illness, or perhaps been bullied in school as a child, since she had now turned into such a bully herself, and the more she was reacquainted with the messages she’d sent, the more ashamed she felt of her behaviour.