The Restoration Game (25 page)

“Oh, Alec,” I said. “You're wonderful.”

He smiled back in such a relieved way that I hugged and kissed him all over again.

I disengaged, still holding the envelope. I didn't want to fold it in half, so I curved it around the inside of one end of the clutch bag, and clicked the clasp shut.

“There's something I want to tell you, too,” I said.

“Yes?” He looked nervous again.

“I'm not pregnant or anything,” I assured him.

“Oh,” he said. “Good.”

“Let's step down on the shore,” I said. “I can see you want to light that pipe.”

Alec laughed, in a caught-out way. “OK.”

He went to the foot of the steps and held out a hand to help me down. With my other arm I did the elbow thing with the clutch bag and the hem-hitch with the hand, and descended step by step. On the shore (or beach, as I seemed to recall its being grandly called in the ads) I was able to hold the purse in one hand and the loose fistful of fabric in the other, and thus keep my balance while finding places to plant a heel that weren't sand, slippery stone, or seaweed. We didn't go far. Alec crunched along in his sensible black boots (polished, I'd noted, as a gesture to the occasion) and then turned about and lit his pipe while waiting for me to catch up.

I located two adjacent patches of acceptable ground to put my feet on and stood pigeon-toed on them, facing Alec while holding my purse in my crossed hands in front of me. I must have been trying for a sort of girlish guilty-but-innocent owning-up look, but from the way Alec eyed me, wary and puzzled even through his first puffs on the pipe, it didn't seem to be working.

“So,” he said. “What do you have to tell me?”

“I have to go away,” I said, as if confessing to something.

“Away? Where?”

“Ah—” I hadn't thought this through. It was on the tip of my tongue to lie; to invent some elderly great-aunt in the South of France or a girlfriend with a sudden spare holiday ticket to the Caribbean; but I couldn't.

“I can't say,” I blurted.

“What?”

“I just can't,” I said, digging myself in deeper and wishing fervently I'd had the wit and guts to lie a second ago.

“When?” he said.

“Tomorrow.”

Alec exaggerated a blink. “That's sudden. Everything all right?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “Everything's fine.”

“And when are you coming back?”

I got lipstick from my lower lip on my upper teeth. I could taste it.

“I don't know.”

“You don't know? What sort of—?” He cocked his head, narrowing his eyes against the sun. “Is this some…confidential business trip or something?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“You got some, what is it,
ballpark figure?
Days? Weeks?”

“No idea,” I said.

Alec ducked his head, shaded his eyes and peered all around, then leaned forward, hand cupped to a conspiratorial ear. “Come on. You can tell me. Nobody's listening.”

“I can't,” I said, miserably. “Sorry, Alec.”

He straightened up.

“That's a bit—look, is it something to do with your work?”

I shook my head, then temporised. “Sort of.”

I found myself blushing, not because this wasn't true (it was, though just as evasive as it sounded), but because mention of work brought back a cascade of uncomfortable memories of Sean criticising me at some length and depth and volume in the office the previous day, basically losing it—a phrase that could also be applied to my current employment status.

Alec of course saw the blush and interpreted it the obvious way.

“Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“What's this, twenty questions?”

“Hey!” He sounded stung. “No, just wondering if it's anything I can help with.”

“Oh!” I said, relieved. “No, it isn't.”

“And you don't trust me enough to tell me about it?”

“It's not like that!”

“What is it like, then? Hey, come on, Lucy.”

He stepped closer. Rough-skinned palm gentle on my bare shoulder, moving slowly. I felt tiny, tickly vibrations from the chiffon frill snagging on the hairs on the back of his hand.

“Tell me.”

I so wanted to tell him everything, to throw on him the burden of the Other Thing, but the thought of that made me physically jolt, and Alec withdrew his hand, looking hurt.

“I do want to,” I said. “But I can't. I just can't.”

“Why the hell not?” he said. “I don't mean to pry, or anything, but—” He rubbed his hand backward across the top of his hair. “It's nothing personal, right?”

“No,” I said. “It's not fucking personal.”

Alec took a step back. Shells crunched. Somebody opened the door on the balcony and a jaunty fiddly tune skipped out, then got slammed again.

“I don't get it,” Alec said. “It's not really business, it's not personal, and you can't tell me anything about it, not even how long you're going to be away.”

“I don't know how long,” I said.

“If you've joined the bloody army and you're flying out to Afghanistan, now might be a good time to tell me,” he said.

“Well…”

“Well, what?”

“It's sort of like that. More like that than the other things.”

“Jesus!” Alec stooped, and tapped out the contents of his pipe on a stone, then straightened up, not taking his eyes off me all the while. “You are messing with my head, girl.”

He said this in a forced, light tone I'd seldom heard in his voice before, and never in anything addressed to me. The few times I'd heard it, it had meant he was really angry and not showing it, like with bad service or a railway fuck-up.

“That's not what I meant,” I said, “to do.”

“OK,” he said. “OK.” He let out a long sigh. “So I won't be seeing you again before I go?”

In all this fraught conversation I'd almost forgotten he was leaving too, in a week. I caught myself doing that annoying nerdy visible wheels-turning-over mental calculation, just blatantly standing there thinking about things instead of answering right off the bat like normal people, and closed my eyes and gave my head a little shake, to stop it.

“No,” I said.

He looked out at the Firth for a moment, then back at me, and smiled. “Well,” he said, “there's always tonight.”

I'll say this for guys: they'll forgive a lot if there's sex in prospect.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I can't.”

“Can't what?”

“Have you over tonight. I've got a million and one things to do, really late, and get up really early, and—oh shit! I have to do my
hair”

He just looked at me.

“That is so fucking lame, Lucy,” he said. “You'll have to learn to do better than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Take it any way you want,” he said. “Oh well. Enjoy the rest of the evening.”

“Wait, what—”

He leaned forward, caught my shoulders, and kissed my forehead, quickly.

“See you in New Zealand,” he said. “If that's what you want. I don't know if you do anymore.”

And with that he turned and ran across the sand and shingle.

“Alec!” I cried.

I took a couple of paces after him and sank a heel into sand. By the time I'd extricated it he was gone, up a slipway on to the pier and around a corner to the alleyway that led to the street.

I dithered for a moment, then opened my purse and took my iPhone out. I almost dropped it as I thumbed his number. After a couple of rings I got the message service.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Asshole.

I tramped back across the stepping-pebbles and up to the balcony in very bad dudgeon indeed.

3.

“Lie like a rug,” Ross advised me.

I looked at him across the cab. We were hurtling down the A1 in a big container-truck. I'd just poured out my troubles to him.

“What?” I was getting tired of hearing myself say that.

“That's what you gotta do, in this business,” he said, overtaking a Sunday driver as if crushing a bug underfoot. “Lie like a rug. To your nearest and dearest. First time I went to the East, I phoned my mother as usual on the Saturday evening from some pit-stop outside Dortmund and nearly told her where I was going, and mangled it at the last second to ‘East Anglia.’ I'd never lied to her before.” He laughed. “The guilt wears off with practice. Didn't your mother ever tell you that?”

“No,” I said. “I guess because she was too busy lying like a rug to me.”

“Didn't you get it?” said Ross. “She was teaching by example.”

I had to laugh.

This is how I'd got there.

After a few more futile attempts to contact Alec on his turned-off mobile, including leaving a couple of weepy messages on the answering service, I went to the Ladies, blew my nose, dried my eyes, splashed my face, reapplied makeup, and marched out, making a bold face on it. I joined in the Scottish country dances, and bopped to the disco beat when these mercifully stopped, and joined hands and sang “Auld Lang Syne” about ten o'clock, drank too many flutes of cava and tall glasses of vodka and cranberry juice, and did all the bridesmaidy things for Suze and saw the newlyweds off and fell into a black cab and slept all the way from South Queensferry to Lauriston Place and fell out of it and gave the driver thirty quid or so in a completely wasted (in both senses) grand gesture and toppled up the stairs to the flat.

That was about midnight.

I woke with a thumping headache and a full bladder and the clock at 03:25, wondered why (a) I was sleeping on top of the duvet with the light on and (b) where I'd got this long posh pale lilac nightie. For a blissful but brief moment I snuggled into a warm thought that maybe Alec had bought it for me and by the way where was he?

Memory restore.

Enter panic mode.

It was kind of like the
fuck fuck fuckitty fuck
scene at the opening of
Four Weddings and a Funeral
, except satanically played in reverse: I had to scramble out of my bridesmaid dress and shoes and jewellery and makeup and underwear and (via a shower and a hair-dying episode involving a stolen bottle of Julie's Clairol, for which I left a guilty fiver, and a twenty-minute wait with wet hair, and another shower and an impatient session with Gail's hair-dryer) into jeans and Kickers and top and the soft leather jacket, and, in the various interludes of that, stuff a week's worth of casual wear and one pair of oxblood pixie boots and my walking boots and trousers and fleece and waterproof and compass and a week's supply of indiscriminate knickers and bras and paperbacks and toiletries into a big black bag with a pair of carrying handles and a shoulder strap; empty the contents of the lilac satin purse into my everyday mini-backpack, remembering (as instructed) to pack my US and UK passports, and to leave behind my laptop; while the red numbers on the clock incremented ever closer to 05:15, the time for leaving the flat on the timetable so very helpfully texted to me by Ross Stewart on Friday evening.

At 05:05, as per timetable, I called a minicab on a number included in Ross's text. At 05:10 I scribbled a note claiming a family emergency for Julie and Gail, clipped it to a couple of fifties to cover my share of next month's rent, and left it weighted with a dirty coffee mug on the breakfast table. I gave a reproachful Hiro a tearful hug, hoisted the black bag, hastily rethought my reading requirements, dumped a stack of fantasy and space-opera paperback bricks, remembered to pick up my everyday mini-backpack in the nick of time, and saw myself out.

I waited at the corner beside the Brauhaus. In the early August morning my mood brightened with the sky. After five minutes a minicab pulled up, with the right phone number on its door and nothing else to recommend it. I climbed over my misgivings, and into the backseat.

“Waverley?” said the driver, facing straight ahead.

“Yes, please.”

At Waverley I lugged the bag to the photo booth and got a passport photo. As the damp quadruple picture dried in my fingers I waited for the colour of my hair to match that of the supermodel's on the Clairol carton. This didn't happen.

I rode the shiny steel escalator to the top of the station, trudged up the steps to Princes Street, and caught a bus to Leith and then another bus out towards Seafield. At a long mile or so of carpet emporia and car dealerships I spotted my stop, scrambled off, and waited by the roadside.

A surprising number of heavy trucks rumbled by. Gulls cried, on the same wind that rearranged my hair. Steel rollers rattled up at the dealership doorways. A container truck passed me, honked, and pulled in just past the bus stop, emergency lights flashing. I stared at it for a moment, then ran to the cab as the passenger-side door swung open and impatient horns sounded behind me.

“You look like shit,” Ross told me.

If he'd looked different in his white van man gear, he looked different yet again now, in plaid shirt, padded olive-green gillet, and aviator shades; his swept-back, gentlemanly grey hair gone, buzzcut to a five-millimetre fuzz; gold sovereign ring and weighty gold neck chain; hands and fingernails and knuckle-wrinkles like he'd worked for decades with wet cement. He took my big bag and slung it behind the seats.

“You didn't say you'd be the driver,” I said, buckling in. “Isn't that a bit risky?”

“Not half as risky as sending Amanda's little girl across Europe with another driver,” he said, as he went through the mirror, signal, obscene gesture out the window, manoeuvre routine.

“You can't trust your drivers?” I asked.

“I don't mean risky to you,” he said. “Risky to me.” “Ah.”

“Got your passport pics?”

I patted my jacket above the deep inside pocket. “Yes.”

He glanced sideways.

“You look like shit,” he said again. “That's good, by the way. What happened?”

So I told him.

I dozed, to wake with a jolt to a glimpse of a sign for Newcastle.

Ross glanced sideways. “Coffee?”

“And breakfast.”

“Rough night you must have had.”

“Don't remind me.”

Ross swung the big rig off the motorway an exit or two later and stopped at a service station.

I made to get out.

“A mo,” Ross said. “Your passport photos.”

I handed them over. Ross snipped them apart with Swiss Army knife scissors, and fished a trucking trade mag from the door pocket.