Chapter 28
28
Although I appear at ten to one, in hopes of being first, Finlay is already sitting at the bar. He’s toying with the spoon in the saucer of a cup of tea, amid lots of young shiny people in 1920s costumes, buzzing from high spirits and midday alcohol.
They join in a lusty round of “ Happy birthday Dear BOBBY! ” while a pleased-with-himself-looking cherubic lad with a side parting in a white tuxedo and lopsided bow tie raises a coupe glass to them. I notice the women, in feather headbands, dropped waists, and kiss curls, are in badges saying “East Egg,” the dapper men branded “West Egg.”
“It’s one of those passage of time ironies, isn’t it,” I say, quietly, after greeting Fin and ordering a Diet Coke. “ The Great Gatsby was about how wealth and glamour and social climbing will hollow you out and destroy you, steal the love of your life away. So naturally we appropriate it for hey, let’s get wrecked costumes for parties that unironically celebrate those things.”
“Haha. Never mind Jay Gatsby, I could tell them wealth and social climbing as a mysterious nobody in New York doesn’t lead anywhere good. My culture is not your prom dress, Bobby,” Finlay says, with a knowing smile, looking up from under his brow. I’m momentarily floored by his exceptionally quick and self-aware riposte, combined with looking like a sodding film star. I can practically see the fireworks going off behind him.
“A ‘passage of time irony’... is a good phrase. I’m a walking ‘passage of time irony,’” he says.
I laugh in admiration, and Fin and I share a confidential look. I get the distinct impression he’s trying to make a connection with me, but I don’t know why he’d do that. I’ve lost my bearings and need to recover them, swiftly.
“I wasn’t aware psychology was lucrative and social climby,” I say, carefully, steadying myself. “But then I don’t know any psychologists so I’m not sure what I’m basing that on. Also, psychiatrists in films look old as wizards. Wait, which are you, and what’s the difference?”
“I’m a counselor-psychologist. In essence, the difference is that psychiatrists prescribe drugs. I don’t prescribe drugs. Lucrative, it depends,” Fin says. “If you go into private practice and you’re successful. I got a lucky break early on.”
“What sort of lucky break?” I ask, sipping my drink.
“Hmmm...,” Fin says, appraising me. “I have these thoughts about what I want going back to Susie, then realize it can’t.”
“Me too,” I say.
“What, you’d have ever worried I’d talk to her?” he says, raising an eyebrow.
“No, in general. The impulse to refer back to her and realizing you can’t anymore.”
“OK. Please don’t repeat this anyway, but... when I first began treating people at my own practice, after my residency, a friend sent someone with a profile to me.”
“With a profile?” I repeat, blankly.
I think of Finlay as sharing a lexicon with me, and every so often he sounds like an NYT Long Read. As if he’s going to start using words like “storied” and” preposition” and “luscious plums.”
“They were working on a big-budget film and not able to carry on and needed therapy, someone to talk to.”
“Oh God, you mean they were famous ?”
“I did sessions with them, they felt able to return to work, the studio saved a lot of money and the film won Oscars.”
“Shit!”
“Then the person I helped told their friends about me. That formed the basis of a very strong client list.”
Fin drinks the last of his coffee.
“You’re the head doctor to a bunch of neurotic A-list actors, so can set your prices at ‘totally mad bilk’ level? And you know all their secrets?!”
“I’m good at what I do, my clients are human like you or I, and my prices are competitive, thank you,” Fin says, rolling his eyes, but with no real ire. “Patient confidentiality is inviolable.”
“What made you want to go into it?”
“I had some therapy myself,” Fin says, and I feel like his background plus his Statesideness meant I should’ve anticipated this. “It was really interesting to me, unraveling why we behave the way we do. I wanted to help people in the same way. Not to sound too Miss Universe. ”
“Susie never knew this thing about being ‘doctor to the stars’? You really wouldn’t tell her?”
“I tried to tell my family as little as possible,” Fin says, and the shutters visibly come down, in his tight expression.
I push my luck with Finlay, but I can feel the danger well enough to not joke or poke anymore.
“Can I ask something?” he says, putting the spoon in the cup. “What was the Twin Peaks music about at the end of Susie’s service?”
“You didn’t like that?”
“I didn’t dislike it, I thought it was a curious choice, that’s all.”
“Why? She loved the show and its atmosphere fitted somehow, I guess. She liked to say she was Laura Palmer.”
The Laura Palmer they couldn’t kill. That has aged badly.
“A series about a blonde homecoming queen with a demonic side who died tragically young?” Fin says. “Her life a seething mass of sex, drugs, and dysfunction behind the apple pie, charity bake sale surface? It honestly didn’t occur it might look like some sort of... comment?”
I open my mouth and for once I’m lost for words.
“For it to be a comment, any of that would have to resemble Susie?” I say.
Fin sits back and contemplates me.
“Ready to head off?” he says, eventually, with a nod at my glass, and I say yes and neck my drink.
What on earth...? Did he know about Susie’s few grams of coke, or what?
“I NEVER THOUGHT of Edinburgh as having a seaside,” I say on the fifteen-minute drive, adding, “Despite it being a port, obviously,” in case Finlay thinks I’m full airhead.
Fin ordered an Uber to take us to Portobello, saying he doesn’t fancy city-center motoring on what feels like the “wrong side of the road,” for the time being, which seems fair enough to me.
“Apparently, Sean Connery worked as a lifeguard at swimming baths out here,” Fin says, as we emerge from the car into the freezing gray of a wintertime promenade.
“You’d want to be covered in whale grease to do that in Scotland, wouldn’t you?” I say, shoving my balled hands deeper in my parka pockets.
“I’m an idiot, aren’t I,” Finlay says, as we wander down the street, past the railings and the band of pale deserted sand that must be thronged in high summer. There aren’t many people out and about, the odd rollerblader whizzing past us, a pleasant tang of fish and chips in the air, the occasional gull cawing.
“Why are you an idiot?” Uncharacteristic of Finlay to self-criticize.
“As you said. I’ve come to a city of half a million people on the basis I’m going to bump into one confused man who himself is following no real rhyme or reason. Someone who won’t even know who I am if he sees me. I don’t think this makes much more sense than the penguin enclosure.”
“Hah. It must be so incredibly hard to have a parent treat you like a stranger,” I say, thinking about it for the first time. “Like... abandonment. Even though it’s not, it’s an illness, obviously.”
Finlay looks at me and, I feel, is really focusing on me. He pauses a few seconds before replying.
“... I didn’t expect Susie to have someone like you as a friend,” he says. “I’m glad she did.”
“Thank you,” I say, while feeling there are dots to connect that I haven’t connected, in why these two things followed on from each other. Maybe they didn’t, maybe it was a way of not discussing his dad’s dementia.
“There were women at the wake who seemed more what I expected,” Fin says, hesitantly. “Vampy kind of clothes?”
“Oh... the Teacup Girls!” I exclaim. “That’s what Justin called... never mind, another time. Yeah, they’re quite different to us. That speaks well of Susie, really, though. She had different friends from different parts of her life, but she wasn’t snobby. Susie was socially mobile. But not a climber.”
We walk on.
Fin seems to have changed his opinion of me from “dreadful” to “acceptable,” much to my quiet astonishment.
“Don’t lose faith,” I say, distracting myself. “If these are places your dad might go, we stand some sort of chance. It’s a huge place, but the likely locations we are searching are not huge.”
“He’s not staying at The Waldorf, though, clearly,” Fin says. “Strike one for my being able to anticipate his movements.”
“Like the IRA, you only need to be lucky once,” I say, and Finlay bursts into laughter.
“They wouldn’t quite know how to deal with you in New York, you know,” he says. “I can see this from having been away and come back again—you’re a very British kind of bad taste.”
“Bad taste!” I mock huff.
“Bad taste, but amusing,” Fin says. Under my artificial fibers, I glow. Even if these compliments are a device. Tools, to do a job. “Unserious outerwear.”
My parka has a giant doughnut of deep red faux fur around the hood, the color of devil’s food cake. No mockery by men with high cheekbones and even higher IQs will make me love it any less.
“OK, let’s find the historic family seat.” He produces his iPhone and studies a map. “It’s quite something. I wouldn’t have minded inheriting it, even with all its noisy ghosts.”
I shudder, not with cold. The wind ruffles his hair and a passing pair of thirty-something women throw Finlay a wolfish look, and then me a wary glance.
Oh, be my guest, gals. You have no idea. Might as well build yourself a snowman, it’d be warmer, and you’d have the carrot nose for sustenance.
I look out at the sea and take a deep breath. Didn’t the Victorians prescribe sea air for patients? I feel like I’m convalescing.
“Right, eleven minutes in this direction, I am promised,” and we set off.
“Mind if we walk along the beach for a bit?” Fin says. I agree, though after we’ve headed down to it on the concrete shallow path and started tramping through the sand, I regret it. These boots were not made for beach walking.
“You OK?” Fin says, and I say, “Fine, fine,” while concealing my effortful semistumbling because it’s one thing to be Whimsical Coat Girl and another to be And Packed the Wrong Shoes Too Girl.
“There’s a method behind my madness,” Fin says. “We’ll get a better view from here.”
“A better view?” I say.
“There it is. The original Hart family residence,” Finlay says, drawing to a halt, pointing across the road at an incredible detached sandstone villa. Its main trunk is like a huge rounded tower with a pointy spiral for a roof, flanked by giant bay windows and a huge curved front door with metal hinges, like they have in fantasy dramas. It’s colossal, like a mini castle. If I’d not been told it was someone’s home, I’d have assumed it was a new Michelin-starred restaurant serving daring fusion dishes, too elegant to feature its name prominently, or a jazzy church.
“It’s stunning,” I say. “ This was your dad’s family home?”
“Yup. Alright, isn’t it.”
“Alright is not the word.”
Fin’s hands are in the pockets of his coat, shoulders hunched against the wind, face very pale in the chill wind.
“It feels so strange looking at it now. You know, the last time I’d have been standing here, my dad would’ve been pointing out this and that about the architecture, reminiscing about him and my uncle Don smashing a downstairs window with a football during the ’66 World Cup. My mum would’ve been complaining the wind was messing up her hairdo. Susie would’ve been in her plastic tiara and tutu.”
“And what would you have been doing?” I say.
“Listening to my dad, I guess, or else no one would’ve been. Looking awkward, with my pipe-cleaner legs.”
I almost remark, I remember you at that age , but given we’ve never broached encounters with each other back in the day—not that they really matter—it feels odd to start now. I block out the memory of the kiss, and I hope he has too. He must’ve had many, many women, since.
“It’s a gastropub with rooms,” he says. He nods toward the cavernous bay window on the left. “That’s the bar.”
“Really? It does look too massive and splendid to be someone’s house.”
“Want a drink? It’s not impossible Iain’s ahead of us on that.”
“Yeah, why not?” I shrug, with the slightest shiver of nerves at the prospect his dad is in there. I’ve been given a room in a five-star hotel, with expenses, on the basis he will respond positively to me. Fin wouldn’t blame me if he didn’t, I’m sure, but I’d still feel like a freeloading fraud.
Hang on, I ask myself: once he no longer has a use for you, how are you so sure about what Finlay Hart would or would not do? No one gets a reputation by accident. I have a suddenly powerful, disorientating sense of Susie watching me trot obediently after Finlay, banging on the glass that now divides us, screaming “ Stop. ”