Chapter 25
25
The immutable law of my workplace is that you are always in the wrong, somehow. When I ask to be granted the holiday allowance that we were being strong-armed to take, it turns out I’m still a troublemaker.
“Yeah, it’s wunderbar you’re miraculously complying, Eve, but does it have to be, like, today ?” Kirsty drawled, when I requested it, having emailed the evening before. “Has Brad Pitt swung by in his Gulfstream and said ‘Get in, loser, we’re going shopping’?”
Kirsty is a pretend-posh person. She could come from Cairo or Kettering.
“Yes, ideally today, please?” I say, ignoring the sarcasm. Kirsty does a windy sigh and leaves me listening to the tap-tap of her mocha shimmer Shellacs on her keyboard, as if she’s calling up a vital spreadsheet when she’s almost certainly continuing an email to a friend. “Hmmm...” She draws it out. “Hmmmm... if you can work a half day and take the afternoon off, I can just about swing it. Call me your Fairy Godmother,” she says.
I got off the phone to her and explained my exceptionally fortunate dispensation to the rest of the office.
“Fucking hell, the fuss they make over leave. You’re not Obama, are you,” Phil says. “It’s not like the irreverently captioned clickbait farms will be in chaos, and the financial markets racked with uncertainty until you return. Death to our neoliberal overlords.”
“They have to create a narrative, Phil,” I say, playing to his gallery. “Where we take liberties and they’re endlessly patient and understanding. That way their punitive measures are always in the context of being harassed, exhausted parents who finally snapped.”
“I think they’re just twats,” Seth says.
Ed messages to tentatively ask if we’re ready to reinstate the pub quiz yet, and I say no. When he tries to message again asking how I’m feeling, I reply that I’m up north for it.
My phone rings.
“Edinburgh, why?”
I explain.
“The fuck ?! You’re going to Scotland with him?”
“Yes?” I’m troubled by the strength of Ed’s reaction.
He couldn’t fake this, simply to act the good guy protector for much-needed brownie points—he seems genuinely astounded.
“You don’t know this guy from Adam and what we do know is unpleasant. How is this remotely safe, for one thing?”
I hadn’t fully thought it through, and I don’t want to admit this.
“He’s back to New York soon, I don’t think he’s likely to...” I trail off.
“Commit any offenses when it’ll mean extraditing him to charge him? Solid reasoning, five out of five.”
“What are you suggesting? I know he’s never going to win Personality of the Year but I didn’t take him for any sort of sex predator.”
“No, if I recall rightly, you more liked him for serial killing. Plus hoodwinking his decrepit father out of a fortune.”
“If he is doing that, this way, I have a ringside seat for the plot...”
“What?! Are you Jessica Fletcher now?”
Ed leaves an aghast pause.
“... You’re not yourself and you’re not thinking straight.”
“I appreciate the chivalry, but I know what I’m doing. Life isn’t risk-free and I caused their dad to do this runner. I have to help or I won’t sleep at night.”
Ed says, “Hmmm. He was certainly happy to blame you, wasn’t he? What does that tell you?”
I mutter noncommittal things. He twisted my arm, but I have to admit that had he not done so, I would’ve said no.
“If you’re doing this, can I ask you to do something? For me?” Ed says.
“Which is...?”
“Message me every day, at nine p.m., in such a way that I know it’s definitely you, and let me know you’re alright? Don’t say it’s an arranged check-in, in so many words. Then if anyone else has your phone, they won’t know to do it on your behalf. If I don’t get the message, I’ll be calling the police, and on the first train up there. Send me a photo of the license plate of the car too. Don’t let him see you taking it.”
I laugh. “Seriously? You don’t have to turn white kni—”
“Yes, I’m serious!” Ed says, with vehemence. “You’re about to skip to another country with a dubious man you don’t know, on a wild goose chase where he’s running the show and picking up the tab. This has Very Creepy Interlude all over it.”
I agree I will send proofs of life and Ed calms down a notch. Yet when I end the call, my insouciance evaporates.
I T’S TWO O’CLOCK in the afternoon by the time I’m waiting with my packed bag outside my house, ready to climb into Finlay Hart’s waiting car. It’s a dark Audi, you called it wrong there, Susie.
He gets out and opens the trunk, takes my bag from me. He’s wearing a fine-knit sweater under a navy trench coat, which he shucks off his shoulders and throws across the back seat. I notice his clothes have that quietly expensive quality where they’re unshowy, yet hang perfectly. If I bought a black sweater and a blue coat, they wouldn’t look like that.
There’s no opportunity to slyly paparazzi license plates. First fail.
“We should be there by dinner time,” he says, after hello. “Five hours, I reckon. Give or take.”
“Dinner is the best time to arrive anywhere,” I say, in a hopefully amicable tone, as I get into the passenger seat. “... How come you don’t sound more American? There’s only the smallest hint.”
I’m trying for friendly irreverence. It has belatedly dawned on me that never mind danger, I furthermore have hour after tedious hour in the company of someone with the conversational charm of a wooden actor playing a Nazi guard.
“I thought I did,” Finlay says, neither sounding offended or especially animated. “I moved to the States when I was twenty so your accent and vocabulary is pretty fixed by that point. Plus, a lot of friends are expats.”
A lot of friends . I struggle to picture them, but maybe he’s the life and soul, over there.
Once in the driver’s seat, he fiddles with the radio. “Do you want music on?”
“Sure,” I say.
“You choose,” he says.
I poke at it until 6 Music blares out.
“What’s playing? I’m so out of touch these days,” Fin says, checking the wing mirror as we pull into the flow of traffic.
“It’s ‘This Is What She’s Like’ by Dexys Midnight Runners,” I say, pleased that I happen to know by complete chance because I’m pretty out of touch myself these days. Justin loves Dexys. “You know, they did ‘Come On Eileen.’”
“Yeah, I know that much,” Fin says, with a smile.
He navigates out of the city and to the motorway with reasonable ease, punctuated by a stentorian male GPS voice, barking instructions.
“Only to get me to the motorway and I’ll turn it off,” Fin says, and I say “Sure” again, like a little robot. The car is comfortable and smells of valeted leather. I stretch my legs out in the footwell and feel grateful at least that I’m not writing about getting bendy with Wendy.
I’ve always liked this part of any trip, the sense you’re escaping. Whenever a plane lifts off, I think about what a tiny piece of the planet I inhabit, how limited my horizons are.
I can hear Mark in my head saying, “Yet I couldn’t get you to Stoke Newington.” And his line in our break-up fight: “You know what fucks me off the most? You’d move here for Susie and the gang.”
He was probably right.
“Don’t judge me for the automatic, it’s years since I’ve driven stick, as they say,” Fin says, as we zoom past the postwar houses that line the ring road.
I smile at the idea that of the things I might judge Finlay Hart for, it would be his not using manual gear change. A bonus—comfortable silences are easier when you don’t have to stare into each other’s faces.
I steal a sly look at Fin at the wheel, grudgingly admire the hard, leading-man jaw—clean-shaven once more—the arms with rolled-up shirt sleeves, and classy, rather than showy, leather-strap vintage watch.
No one said evil couldn’t be attractive. It’s how evil gets a lot of its workload done, in fact.
I amuse myself at the idea of him talking into a recorder, like Agent Cooper. It’s an imperfect comparison: Cooper looked like baby-faced FBI. Finlay Hart looks like the clean-cut assassin who nobody can remember clearly afterward.
“Whereabouts do you live in New York?” I ask.
“Park Slope. A gentrified but still almost affordable part of Brooklyn, if you don’t know it.”
“Do you like it there? New York as a whole, I mean?”
“Yeah... mostly. I’m not sure I want to stay for good. Put it this way, when I get together with friends all we do is moan about how awful it is, which is the point you know you’re a native. How about you? Do you like Nottingham?”
For once, Fin’s determinedly neutral tone sounds like something approximating grace.
“Hahaha. New York... to Nottingham. Big Apple to... tiny oranges. Big cats to bin raccoons.”
Fin smiles. “I like it.”
Of course he does, in that gently patronizing way that cool people, who have nothing to prove, feign approval of uncool things.
“You left it,” I say, also smiling.
He loosens his collar and peers up at a road sign. “Sometimes people leave places they like. Sometimes people leave people they like.”
“You’re a therapist, aren’t you... are we into therapy now? Can you charge for this?” I say.
“No matter how many years I’ve done my job, this being said to me never gets old,” he says, still smiling, but it’s thinner, and I make a mental note he doesn’t want to discuss his work.
“Do I like Nottingham. Yes in some ways, no in others,” I conclude.
“That’s every adjusted person’s view of anywhere really, isn’t it?” Fin says. “I’d mistrust anyone who said, ‘Yeah where I live, best place ever , it’s perfection.’ I would suspect it’s more about their choices having to be the best ones.”
I steal a sidelong look at him. This sort of cynicism, I can work with.
“You say that, but my dad lives on a sheep farm in Australia and I think you’ll find it’s literal heaven on earth.”
“Do you mistrust him?”
“... Yes,” I say, and in mutual surprise, I laugh and Fin grudgingly smiles. His face looks completely altered in amusement, like he was never the other person all along. It freaks me out a little.
God, it’s come back to me: Susie conceding he was probably a good model because “he looks different in every single photo. Not like a different photo of the same person, or another angle, a different person. Brrrr.”
That now-familiar hard pang that I can never tell her any of this. With the added psychic blockade of the fight I can never have with her either.
After over an hour of intermittent, low-key small talk, Fin sees a blinking on a mobile he has in a holder and says: “Ah. Romilly’s calling me.”
“Romilly?”
There’s no time for further explanation as he prods “Accept Call.”
“Hi, Rom.” Fin frowns. “You’re on speakerphone, I’m in the car. I have someone with me.”
Crackle. “Who?”
“Eve. She was a friend of my sister’s. She’s helping me find my dad. Remember he absconded?”
“Oh. Hello, Eve?” says a crisp, East Coast, Sex and the City voice. A Charlotte one, or actually—Miranda.
“Hi!” I say.
“I wanted to let you know that Ethan’s appointment went fine. They want to see him again in three months, but they don’t think there’s any damage to his hearing.”
“That’s great. Is he happy?”
“Oh yeah, he’s back to being a little jerk again. I took him to Balthazar to celebrate and he ate half the breakfast menu. The waiter couldn’t believe it.”
“Good! Tell him I’ll bring him something back from here.”
A pause. Hard to say if it’s a transatlantic connection pause or a loaded pause.
“Call me when you get to Scotland. On a private line,” Romilly says, eventually, which I take as a forthright dig at me. Or maybe it’s merely Big Apple directness?
“Your girlfriend?” I say, once Fin’s pressed to end the call.
“Ex,” Fin says.
“Ah.”
From her frostiness toward me, I intuit that Fin ended it and she’s not over it, but who knows.
“She has a little boy, from a previous relationship. I like to know how he’s doing,” Fin says. “We stay in touch about him.”
“Was she at your mum’s funeral? She had red hair?”
Fin looks surprised. “Yes. Were you there?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t see you.”
This strikes me as a peculiar thing to say. If he didn’t know me in adulthood, he wouldn’t have known me by sight, so how would he know if he saw me? That event doesn’t strike me as one to pry into further, however.
“Romilly,” I say. “Unusual name.”
“Her parents are French Canadian. Why did you make that face?”
“What sort of face?”
“A kind of ‘huh typical’ face.”
I realize I did do this. “It’s just. ‘Romilly.’ So cool. You were never going to date a Doris.”
“Given Dorises are over eighty, no, probably not.”
“You say that, but it’s becoming trendy again. Middle-class nurseries are full of Dorises and Mauds.”
“I wasn’t planning on dating a five-year-old either.”
“Everyone calls their kids grandma names or silver-screen film star names now.”
“Isn’t Eve an old movie name? All About Eve .”
“I’m Evelyn, actually.”
“Evelyn. That’s nice.”
I can’t tell if Fin being pleasant is him being pleasant, or being pleasant is a tactic of some sort, which I’m not Wolf of Wall Street enough to grasp.
“Thank you. It is nice. Even if it sounds a bit like I listen to The Archers and keep dried lavender sachets in my pants drawer.”
“You’re fond of saying whatever’s in your head, aren’t you?” Fin says, throwing me an accompanying smile to defuse the accusation.
“You’re fond of never saying what’s in your head,” I blurt, with a return smile.
Despite the fact he’s driving at eighty-two miles per hour, Fin manages to give me a stare of mild consternation. Is the shrink not used to being shrunk on?
The moment is interrupted by a seriously peculiar and unfamiliar sensation. All of a sudden, the car’s lurching and bunny-hopping down the road, with a nasty clanging sensation, as if the underparts are banging directly on the tarmac. “Underparts” is the extent of my automotive expertise.
“Ah fuck, I think we’ve got a blowout,” Fin says. I brace my palms on the dashboard in front of me as he signals and moves rapidly across the road, his expression not flickering as he checks the mirror.
I’m glad he’s in charge because if I was driving, and this sickening pitching had started, my response would likely involve high-decibel screaming.
We clank down the slow lane, onto the slip road, and into services, the car handling like we’re in a cartoon. When Fin pulls to a halt near the entrance to Burger King, I heave a huge deep breath, and can feel a high tide of moisture at my hairline.
“Overall, I didn’t enjoy that,” Fin says, sounding typically composed, but when I look at him, he’s as ashen as a lunar landscape. I’m glad I didn’t realize he was as frightened as I was, until now.