He polishes off the whisky and sets down the glass. “No,” he answers. “Edinburgh.”
Chapter Two
Baggage Claim
The plane dips beneath a thin scrim of cloud, and Susan presses up against the window as Edinburgh reveals itself below.
The Firth of Forth glitters invitingly in the peek-a-boo sunshine, which is reliable enough today to call boats out to the little islands: Inchkeith, with its lighthouse; Cramond and Inchmickery, with their hunkered down, wartime fortifications that refuse to give way to time and tide. Just ahead, the spiderweb spans of the bridges link Edinburgh to the whimsically named Kingdom of Fife.
And there, to the left: the city. Susan’s been here before, but now she looks at it differently, feeling a sort of proprietary excitement and pride in her new home. She watches as farm fields and kelly-green hills give way to rows of shops and terraced stone houses. Unlike London, there are no skyscrapers here, just a few ugly council block towers looming defiantly over Victorian-era semi-detatched houses and 1920s bungalows. Susan spots Edinburgh Castle on its jutting, craggy perch, looking out over its domain.
She marvels at the city’s many guises, packed together and changing in the blink of an eye. The pleasant seaside promenades of Portobello swiftly give way to the commercial docks and old warehouses of Leith, which just as quickly transform into South Queensferry, easily identified by its proximity to the sunset-orange Forth Rail Bridge. The tide is low, revealing large expanses of sand, rock, and muck in some places, temporarily spoiling the view for those with waterfront properties. Beyond those shores lie the thickly clustered buildings and perplexing warren of hilly streets that defy any sort of grid pattern and beg to be explored.
London has its history, of course, but so much of it feels new. Edinburgh clings to its past; lives in it. It pools around an ancient castle and packs into narrow streets and old buildings. It clings to its cobblestones and turns genteel Georgian townhouses into office buildings with Escher-esque interior layouts. The Scots are an admirably thrifty people. They see no need to build new when what’s there already will do perfectly well, thank you very much.
The plane lands and Susan retrieves her bag from the overhead, feeling the firm, sharp corners of the album nudge the canvas sides. She inches down the aisle of the plane, a maddening crawl past harassed fellow passengers and plastically smiling cabin crew. Once free, she surges forth, speeding toward the exits just beyond the baggage claim. There’s so much to do: house keys to be collected, the restaurant to visit, the chef to catch up and make plans with. She aches to be free of airports, of London; to get started, to set things right—they can’t wait another moment. Not another Regent Street.
At last! She reaches the escalator, gets stuck in the bottleneck there, but at least the exit is within sight. So close!
But then she sees, just up ahead on the escalator … No. It can’t be. Can’t possibly be. His shoulders seem broader, his arms far more muscular. And … it can’t be.
The auburn-haired man who transfixes her turns at the bottom of the escalators and makes his way to the baggage carousels. A few minutes later, Susan, too, reaches solid earth and makes for the exit, convincing herself, It can’t be.
But it is.
As she passes the carousel for her own flight, she sees him again, and there is no mistaking him. Yes, he’s definitely fitter (his physique now speaks more of hours in a gym than hours in a kitchen), and his hair longer, pulled back from his face in a low, short ponytail at the nape of his neck. His clothes are simple but clearly expensive, as is the artfully distressed leather satchel at his feet. He stands with his arms crossed, watching the carousel turn. As Susan passes, however, he turns his head and looks straight at her.
Chris Baker.
Every part of her freezes, heart included, it seems, at least for a moment. But then that one bit starts beating very fast, and her mouth feels dry and her skin hot. She stares at him, wondering what she should do or say. Apologize? Try to explain herself? Just greet him as an old friend? (“Wow, fancy meeting you here! Small world, eh? How’ve you been?” As if nothing ever happened.)
She stands there, clutching her bag, for what feels like eons but is really only a second or two. Then Chris turns away, back to the luggage carousel, as if he hadn’t seen her at all.
* * *
Twenty-two Moray Place is not the home Susan would have chosen for herself. It’s one of a series of nearly identical, four-story, Georgian-style buildings set in a ring around a viciously fenced central garden accessible only to residents. These have always been homes for the rich; they bear the hallmarks of refined ostentation: decorative columns across the front, and enormous windows with tiny, curlicued balconettes on the three central floors.
The Napiers’ new home is one of the few in the area that is still fully intact: most have been carved up into offices or luxurious flats. Susan’s first thought, when she opens the front door, is that it’s overwhelmingly beige. Not a hint of color or personality to be seen in any of the public rooms except the dining room, which, for some reason, is royal purple. She can see why Julia was excited by it. A blank slate for her to play with. She’ll probably start by painting the entryway the same gray color that features in the London house. Something by Farrow and Ball that was all the rage among Town & Country readers (“It’s not gray, Susan, it’s Mole’s Breath. Can’t you see the blue undertones?”)
The beige, even the Mole’s Breath, Susan could live with, but the kitchen! She groans at first sight. It’s a kitchen for people who don’t cook. Reflective white cabinets that will show every fingerprint, and an unforgiving slate floor. She makes a mental note to pick up some rugs from IKEA to put down and steels herself for the bedrooms.
Not beige. A riot of color, in fact. She chooses the one with wallpaper least likely to give her a headache, plunks her bag next to the door, and retreats.
* * *
A private hire car collects Chris from the airport and deposits him on his new doorstep on Mill Lane in Leith. His flat is one of six built in the shell of a Victorian office building. History on the outside, modern on the inside. How very Edinburgh. How very Leith. Edinburgh’s former docklands, now experiencing a resurgence. Not quite the place that produced Renton and Sick Boy anymore.
It hasn’t fully left behind its grubby past, so quaint cafés peddling flat whites and oversized scones to yummy mummies sit alongside cheap chippies with faded, gap-toothed signs and lurid yellow, plastic interiors that date to the eighties. There are still plenty of people here with accents so thick you could spoon them up like custard. But former warehouses are now restaurants and posh flats, and shiny new residential towers at the waterfront try to make everyone forget about Leith’s working-class background.
Chris’s flat, like so many others, is brand-new and so still lacking personality. The blank white walls feel cold and stark, but it’s only a place to sleep. He mostly liked it for its plentiful natural light and location just a few blocks from his restaurant.
Leith is his home territory. Cables Wynd House, the “Banana Flats” made famous (for all the wrong reasons) by Trainspotting, is just around the corner. He grew up there. Sam too.