Chapter 11
11
I Google search: what time is it New York. Lunchtime. My hands tremble with the enormity of the task I’ve taken upon myself with offering to ring Fin and guiltily, although it’s seven at night and I lost my best friend today so I am not sure why I feel guilty, I pour myself a glass of white wine to take the edge off. It might be because Susie can’t have a glass of wine.
I can’t have any more than this, I know that: the prospect of waking up hungover tomorrow is unbearable, because the prospect of waking up tomorrow is already unbearable.
Does the fact that Susie and her brother were estranged make it easier or harder to have this conversation? More complicated, I think, barely easier. I have no gauge of his response. I’ve never had to break news like this in my life before. I see why Ed was so traumatized by calling me.
After some stiffening gulps of fridge-cold supermarket Sauvignon, I pick up Susie’s phone.
What if she changed her passcode? I can imagine her having done that, not because she didn’t trust me but because she was fastidious.
Justin is right, she guarded her privacy carefully. Not obsessively, not much more than average, but Susie had inherited her mum’s idea that it was vulgar to let it all hang out in public. Her Facebook was a tightly locked down space for seventy or so people and no one ever knew from such a forum who she was dating. Her longer-term boyfriends were sometimes irritated at her refusal to post his’n’hers profile pictures, or change “Relationship Status.”
Gobbing away on Twitter or posting bikinis on Instagram were inconsistent, she said, with her being something senior and respectable in finance, which meant she spent half the week in London and earned twice as much as the rest of us.
I press the keypad of her phone with exaggerated care and the screen ripples into the small square tiles of a rainbow of apps. Oh God. I feel the high of successful access, and the prickle of intrusion without permission.
I reassure myself—I’m here for one reason only and that’s her brother’s phone number. I won’t snoop. I’m the guardian of Susie’s world in here, and it’s a responsibility I take very seriously.
I scroll down to Contacts and go directly to “H.” There are a few family members in there, but no Fin, and no one who sounds like a nickname for Fin. Somehow, I don’t think she ever called him Brenda.
I try “F.” Nothing there either. “B,” for brother? Nope. I’m at a loss. Does she hate him so much she erased him from her phonebook?
I feel sure she hadn’t taken that step (unless there’s been a huge, game-changing fight, but she’d have likely mentioned such a thing). I recall every once in a blue moon her seeing a message, Susie’s lip curling and her saying: Ugh Fin, he can wait.
However disliked her brother was, not knowing it was him when he called would’ve only put her on the back foot.
I’m out of ideas about where he’s been hidden, so I scroll manually through her list, starting with Annie Butler, Aveda Salon, and Andy Wightman.
I think about the ripples in the pond from this news, the many people who need to be told. I have one person to inform and I’m already failing at the task. I’ve started to give up hope, having scrolled from A to Z, when I trip over, second time around in the B section:
My Wanker of a Brother
Oh. Oh. It’s obviously him: followed by a row of digits for a mobile phone number, with the international code in front. I write it down carefully on a notepad and switch Susie’s phone off. She’s only on four percent battery—or, she was ?
The absence keeps winding me, the surreal idea these items are without an owner. I’m worried that if her phone dies and can’t be revived, even though I’ll never browse its contents, I’ve lost a part of her. I plug it into my charger and watch the lightning bolt appear over the battery icon. If only bringing other things back was as easy.
My Wanker of a Brother. The residual anger that sizzles from her inability to even give him his name.
It’s not as if it’s news to me that she didn’t get on with Fin, but this level of antipathy is still an unwelcome surprise. Susie was plenty open with the three of us about most things in her life.
The two subjects she was tight-lipped about were her dad’s illness and her relationship with her brother. She’d tell me the basics, but in a clipped, obliged, “so you know the score and we can move on” sort of way, making it implicitly clear it was not something she found easy.
She never went into detail about Fin, but gave me to understand he was wantonly nasty to her parents, emotionally frigid toward her, and a disruptive influence in an otherwise happy home. I was upset when Kieran emigrated; she was merely glad to see the back of Fin.
Susie had so few sensitive spots, she was so raucous and confident, that the ones she did have seemed acute and important.
I add Finlay Hart to my phone contacts—I can’t call him from Susie’s phone for obvious reasons, and I don’t feel right calling him without the respectability of a number using his title.
Susie, I wish you were here to tell me what to do. Though I have an uncomfortable suspicion she’d tell me that Fin didn’t deserve to be told. He can stick a row of broken heart emojis on Facebook like every other hypocrite who didn’t actually like me.
The rift after the death of their mum was profound.
She said to me: “Put it this way, I found the bottom of the bucket. If someone doesn’t care about their mother dying, what do they care about? No point thinking anything’s going to mend it now.”
I take a swig of wine, breathe deeply, and hit the phone icon. It takes a while to connect and then rings in that slightly tinny, distant-sounding way of a phone on another land mass. I haven’t practiced what I’m going to say. Possibly stupidly, I feared rehearsal would amplify my nerves. Plunge in. As Ed said, there is no good way to say it.
Eventually, a click, and I get a voice mail. The message is British-accented, and efficiently brusque.
Hi, it’s Finlay, I can’t answer right now, obviously. Leave a message and a number for me after the beep if you want a call back.
Voice mails produce performance anxiety at the best of times, and I flap and feel clammy before blathering: “Hi, this is Eve Harris. I am a friend of your sister, Susie. Please give me a call back when you get this on this number.” (Pause.) “It’s important.”
As I put my phone on the coffee table, Roger settles next to me on the sofa, curled nose to tail in the shape of a furred croissant. I stroke him and feel the comfort of a nonverbal and contented companion.
“Susie’s dead, Rog,” I say, to his back. “Susie died . Can you believe it? I can’t believe it. I want her back so much. I want it to be yesterday, so much.”
Exhausted tears start to pour forth from me again and my nose runs, adding to a sense that I am at primary school with a skinned knee, wailing for my mum. Mum. I should tell her. But I don’t want to tie up the line if Fin calls back. I can imagine him being irritated, busy businessman on the East Coast, hearing the blip-blip and the caller knows you are waiting , and being irritated with me by the time we’re connected. None of that will help.
What would help? Not more wine.
I get more wine.
M ENTALLY, I PULL the files I have marked “Finlay Hart.” They’re both dusty and slender, figuratively speaking.
I’ve known Susie since primary-school age and although Fin was two years older, he always seemed much older to me. Two years in youth is a chasm.
If I went for sleepovers, he was always a scarce presence. He was slight in build, but tall, with watchful eyes and Susie’s same enviably thick hair, but much darker brown, like their dad’s.
He wasn’t unfriendly toward me, but neither was he friendly. He didn’t have many mates of his own and I’d hear Susie teasing him about it. Once I heard him reply: Well, you only have HER. She looks like a sad-eyed doll. One of the chubby-faced ones with a hair ribbon that are found in attics. I ditched my hair slide with the bow on it, after that.
In our nice suburb, I came from the scruffy end at the far side of it, living with a warring mum and dad. The Harts’ address was a spacious, 1930s detached house with a driveway, a garage, a well-tended front garden and a storm porch for boots and umbrellas. Their street did parties with bunting for Royal weddings. My mum called the Royals parasites.
In that way that kids are aware of social castes, I vaguely assumed Finlay Hart, all of ten years old, thought me a little beneath.
“SUSIE. IT’S FOR YOU” were his entire words of greeting when he happened to yank open the inner, then outer front door when I called.
One memory stands out, something I rarely think about.
The only thing I did with both Hart siblings was bike rides. In a time when children were still allowed to get on two-wheeled transport and piss off for vast stretches of time, we used to pack a picnic into the satchels on the back of the saddle and cycle out from our suburb to the countryside.
Sometimes we were a foursome, with a girl called Gloria on their street who had a voice like a foghorn and a helmet haircut. (She’s a Liberal Democrat MP now.) Susie and Gloria were locked into a ridiculous competition in regards to stamina—their obsessive need to outdo each other carried through to their degrees and careers. Until Gloria got married at twenty-five and had triplets six months later, and Susie was finally happy to hand over the winner’s trophy.
On one scorching day, both of them pedaling like maniacs—out of breath, but pretending not to be, keeping up appearances with effortful conversation—I gradually fell behind. Fin was keeping pace with me, possibly because as the eldest, and male, he anticipated a major fury coming his way if they lost possession of the sad doll girl.
Under a large tree by the side of a road, he and I stopped for a rest, my metallic green bicycle with white shopping basket propped against it. Fin had something sharp and racy in black and red, which was more like a couple of metal right angles than mode of transport.
“They have to come back this way,” Fin said. “Let’s wait for them to pass.”
I liked this idea, and we lolled against the bark and picked blades of grass and listened to the bee-buzz hum of distant lawnmowers. We lay down and closed our eyes and imagined we were comfortable enough to sleep. We sat up again, because the ground was lumpy and grass is tickly.
“Have you heard of kissing?” I asked Fin.
I’d seen it on a television program the night before; the woman was in a pink nightie with thin straps and slippers that looked like high heels. I’d been riveted. I’d said to my brother, Kieran, “I’ve never seen Mum and Dad do that,” and he said, “That’s because they don’t like each other in the way that man and lady do,” and, well, from the mouths of babes.
“Yes,” Fin said. “Of course I know what kissing is.”
“Would you like to do it with me?”
(I don’t think I’ve ever been as forthright with a member of the opposite sex since.)
He glanced up from under his floppy fringe and gave a nonchalant shrug. “Yeah, I s’pose.”
We shuffled around opposite each other and pressed our mouths together. His lips felt soft for a boy, although I wasn’t really sure what I was expecting. We repositioned our heads and tried again. It was not a good or bad experience, just a curious thing to choose to do, I thought.
Susie and Gloria reappeared in the distance and Fin and I righted our bikes and rolled them back down to the path. Once again, the girls outpaced us and disappeared into the horizon. As we arrived at the Hart residence, I wondered if I wanted to kiss Fin Hart goodbye.
As I was about to suggest it, his dad came shooting out of the house, demanding to know why Susie had arrived home first and unaccompanied by her brother. A torrent of urgent paternal words regarding his irresponsibility were unleashed in Fin’s ear and he was propelled indoors by his upper arm, his mum hovering in the background, arms folded, to continue the scolding.
“Oh, hello love!” his dad said, on seeing me. “Put your bike in the trunk and I’ll drive you home.” Mr. Hart was always very doting toward me.
Evelyn is such a lovely, clever girl, I’m glad you’ve made one good choice in life at least, Susannah , he used to say, to much eye-rolling and DA-AD! from Susie.
I don’t recall seeing much of Finlay after that hot summer, him having crossed that childhood-pubescent dividing line where girls were stupid, girls who were friends with his sister probably most of all, and being seen with them was social suicide.
Later, I remember him being a Most Crushed On at school, wreathed with the unattainability that’s only enhanced by a remote and distant nature, and given a rock-star halo that only an older good-looking lad at school and actual rock stars can achieve. Girls would breathe, “Oh my God, Finlay Hart ,” as if the very syllables could get them pregnant.
Then eventually he disappeared altogether, first to London and then to the States. He was very much one of those kinds of people who flit through the same space as you only briefly, and leave in a cloud of jet exhaust fumes and rumor, as soon as they can. The type too otherworldly to have any social media accounts, but in a deep trawl on Google you can find a mention of them in the society diary about an art gallery opening in 2008. Who just seem to move faster, and differently, and have their own laws of physics. By the time you notice them, they’re long gone.
“Yeah, he only went to New York because he got model-scouted in Covent Garden and the agency paid for his fare over,” I remember Susie scoffing. “ Never mention this though, he can’t know I told you,” which was a little theatrical of her, given I’d not seen him in decades.
To my twenty-something ears, this as any sort of embarrassment was up there with “What a loser, he only uses his BAFTA as a toilet doorstop.”
“He did modeling? Why can’t it be mentioned, did he have his willy out or something?”
“Oh, no idea, it’s just too much,” Susie said, putting the back of her hand to her forehead in mock faint. I gathered on that occasion she quite liked the theatrics that an evil hot brother in the Big Apple entailed. “The only photos I ever saw were him in a roll-neck sweater and duffle coat looking like a Gap workwear dick, and Mum had to beg, wheedle, and threaten those out of him.”
“And he doesn’t model now?”
“No, he is a—wait for it—shrink. Ugh. My brother, messing with anyone’s head. What a charlatan. He rinses rich old women with neuroses on the Upper East Side who fancy him, no doubt.”
Then their mum died, and the long-lost, long-gone, unlamented Finlay Hart was forced to reappear in ordinary Nottingham.
I remember the jolt of seeing adult Fin in an immaculate navy coat at their mum’s funeral, straight-backed with an incredible-looking auburn-haired girlfriend, clad in frock coat and spiky black heels. Her mobile went off during the ceremony, the unfamiliar rat-a-tat of a USA dial tone. She calmly switched it off without the slightest facial twitch of self-consciousness. Fin didn’t react at all. They looked as if a European prince and princess were on an official engagement to inspect a disaster zone.
I wish he hadn’t fucking come , Susie hissed at me, surreptitiously Lime-Drop-flavor vaping by the mulled wine urn in the village hall wake, afterward. When I saw the Harts orbiting each other like satellites, I realized she’d not exaggerated his estrangement. It hadn’t dissolved on contact into even a forced friendliness.
Watching from afar, I noticed Mr. Hart making a remark to Finlay, who replied in what looked like a curt fashion and then twitched imperiously at his own cufflink, short of anything more to say. Or perhaps simply uninterested in finding any more to say. They both looked blank, Mr. Hart slightly stunned, and soon moved apart again. No smiles, no tears, no wordless supportive arm squeezes, no warmth whatsoever. It made me inwardly shudder, and my family hadn’t exactly written the handbook on functionality.
Susie had seen this too. Oh, Dad, don’t bother, seriously , she muttered. He’s not gonna change. This hasn’t changed him, and nothing will.
Apparently Fin was incensed by their dad’s insistence to have the service in a church because their mum wasn’t religious, and it went downhill from there.
“You must be Mr. Hart, Junior,” said some nice old boy, pumping his hand and energetically and fearlessly greeting him, in our hearing.
“Hart, an ironic name for someone born without one,” Susie said.