Chapter 30
30
“By the way, if you’ve got the energy, I’ve booked a place called Café St. Honoré for a meal tonight. It’s been there years, we went there every time we visited, back in the day. Possible my dad will be there, tucking into Stornoway black pudding, telling the waiters what’s what about Scottish independence. I thought it was easiest to combine a visit with eating, given we need to eat.”
Invites to dinner have been warmer, but I agree.
“See you in the lobby to leave at half seven?” Fin says, as we prepare to part in the lift of The Waldorf.
“Is it super posh?” I say, warily.
“No, more of a buzzy bistro kind of thing.”
“Nice. This is turning into O.J. Simpson’s hunt for his wife’s killer, isn’t it?” I say. “I will leave no golf course or beach resort uncombed!”
Fin boggles at me and then bursts out laughing.
“Oh my God,” he says, as he recovers.
“What?”
“You’re...” Fin shakes his head. “You’re so constantly outrageous, and yet somehow get away with it. If I said half the things you did, I’d be in prison.”
“Thanks,” I say.
“It’s not exactly a compliment,” Fin says, as the lift doors roll closed, and I say: “I know.”
In my room, I pull out the one vaguely smart dress I packed, unsure why. It’s black—of course—fitted around what you’d call the bodice, requires a balcony bra, and has a flared skirt. The last time I wore it, Justin accused me of planning to “marry his dad and steal his inheritance.”
I remember my suspicions about Fin, who’s since turned out to be a man of means. That makes him chasing any change to his dad’s will less likely, surely?
By some sort of cosmic ordering, after I pull the dress on and drag the hard-to-reach low zip up my back with some effortful pushing and pulling, my phone rings with a call from Justin.
“Hello, Ed says you’ve been kidnapped and sex-trafficked. Is this true, and if so, can you ask Finlay Hart if he’ll sex-traffic me?”
I honk.
“Hello! It’s good to hear your voice. Nothing of that nature, sorry. God, what is Ed like?”
“He’s going to become a Tory MP by forty, at this rate. Will start booming about degeneracy and scroungers and how tanga briefs aren’t proper underwear,” Justin says. “Seriously, I think he’s hyper and ragged in the way we all are. But yes, he is fretting.”
I describe the situation in Edinburgh and Justin sighs. “I know this sounds inappropriate—but then I am inappropriate, so that’s what’s going to happen—but I envy you.”
“Why?”
“Being in a different place with no memories attached to it sounds so good. I keep thinking, oh I’ll tell Suze this, oh I’ll see the gang at the quiz, I’ll WhatsApp her. Oh wait, hang on, no, I won’t. Life now is horrific. I keep wanting to go back to those minutes before I got that call from Ed.”
I hadn’t thought of that, of the value of my escape, but I know exactly what Justin means.
“Yes!” I say, gripping the phone handset in gratitude. “God, yes. Forgetting and then remembering again is so awful. It’s like hiring someone to follow you around to kick you, every time you relax.”
“What’s the brother like? He seem sad, or is being up north yet more time away from his home planet? Planet of the Tall Sexy Rude Men?”
“Sad, I don’t know. I think he was already sad. There’s more to him than we thought, I think.”
“Oy oy! I knew you were stupid, but I never thought you were blind. Plumb those hidden depths, definitely.”
“Yeah yeah.” I heavy sigh at Justin, smiling.
“Listen, I didn’t call you up to insinuate lewd things, though it’s enjoyable. You know it’s my birthday next weekend?”
“Yup.”
“I was going to forget about it altogether, stay in and drink myself into a stupor. But I’ve decided to go the other way and drink myself into a stupor at a second location. What do you think to me, you, and Mr. and Mrs. Ed in a cottage in Derbyshire for a weekend? Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights? It speaks to my need to be out of the house and around people, but not out of a house and around people, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh. Me and Hester in close proximity?”
I blurt this before considering he presumably knows nothing about what went off at Susie’s wake. Fortunately, Justin seems to take it as a reference to the standard antipathy.
“Yes, I know, as ever. But, drink through it. I think Ed must’ve read her the riot act about being a Bridezilla as we’re hearing a lot less about the merits of blush ranunculus versus peach peonies in springtime bouquets.”
“Argh, OK. I doubt I can swing another day off so soon though. I’d have to get there for Friday night?”
“Good. That way we’ll have unpacked the groceries, made the ice cubes, and found the firelighters.”
Justin asks what I’m up to and I tell him about dinner.
“What are you wearing? Can I see?”
I switch from the call to the camera, take a selfie, and send it to him.
“I think you’ve correctly judged the mood of the nation there,” Justin says, after receiving it. “Hair up, maybe? Knock him dead. If we’re still allowed to use that phrase after Susie. She’d squawk at that!”
“She would.” I smile, and get the solar plexus punch of happy-sad, lemon juice with sugar.
After I ring off, I spend time in front of the mirror in the gleaming marble bathroom, sticking pins in handfuls of my lightly backcombed hair until I have an acceptable bird’s nest that I think looks sort of French chanteuse in smoky speakeasy.
Within half an hour and one Kir Royale, it will no doubt land as more “It’s fine if she doesn’t want to be found, her family just want to know she’s OK.”
I N THE LOBBY, I can’t see Finlay at first. I pick my way very carefully across the marble floor, which resembles an ice rink in my precarious footwear.
Annoyingly, as I’ve had my tongue poking out in concentration and I’m holding the sides of my coat for balance while I thought I was unobserved, I spot Finlay leaning against a wall, watching my progress with an expression of indulgent amusement.
“Still not giving up on those boots, huh,” he says.
There I was thinking my hobbling on the beach had gone undetected.
“I’m very loyal,” I say.
We walk to the Café St. Honoré in a glacial dusk, me trying in vain to pretend I’m not walking like I’ve got two hip replacements on the steep inclines of New Town.
I wonder what lives are being lived behind the smart blank blinds in the sash windows.
At one point, I slide-stumble and Finlay catches my elbow and says, “Got it?” and I say, “Hmm mmm, yep ta,” and feel furious at myself for emulating some Bambi-legged ditzy cliché. It’s fine to go arse over tit around your friends (well, if you must have an audience) but with Finlay Hart I want to stay in control.
When we get to the restaurant, my feet are sore but my heart lifts.
“This could not be any more my thing if it was named Evelyn’s Actual Thing,” I say, under my breath, looking around once we’re seated, waiters having politely shaken their head in unfamiliarity at Fin’s discreetly proffered photo of Iain Hart.
The floor is black and white square tiles, the walls are crammed with artfully tarnished mirrors. There are glossy black curved chairs, the pendant lights are glowing orbs that throw everyone into moody, woozily drunk half-light. It’s a pastiche of 1940s Paris that makes me feel as if I’ve fallen face first into a date in a romantic novel.
“Lollipop bay trees in box planters outside, those fairy lights above the wall of wine... it’s my Moon Under Water of restaurants,” I say, as we open the menus.
“Let’s hope you like the food then,” Fin says. “It’s got a lot to live up to.”
“They could put a slab of Morrisons chicken liver paté onto a plate with some Ritz crackers and I’d be happy,” I say and Finlay smiles a small smile and asks my approval of the red he’s ordering.
“What originally took you to the States, did you go there to study psychology?” I say, as we finish the bread.
Finlay shoots a look at me. “Susie would’ve told you that.”
“She did.”
“Then why ask?” he says, evenly.
“Because”—I feel myself becoming less afraid of Finlay; how much of that is familiarity, and how much is C?tes du Rh?ne, I don’t know—“the polite way is to ask. Not confront someone with something you already know, which obliges them to tell you.”
“That’s merely a longer way around to the same destination. I think we call it fishing.”
“God’s sake!” I say, in exasperation. “I’m making conversation. Whatever you told me the answer was, I’d accept. Including ‘It’s none of your business.’ You act as if there’s landmines and tripwires everywhere, when there aren’t.”
Fin sits back, fiddling with his wineglass stem and surveying me, and seems to come to a decision.
“I’m sorry. I’ve had so much shit when I’m here, I come into the ring with my boxing gloves up. I don’t always know when to lower them.”
“OK.”
“I got model-scouted in London and taken onto the books of a place that also had New York offices. I only did it for a couple of years, I hated it, but I made enough money to pay me through my degree. I find it hideously embarrassing.” He shrugs.
“Why?! If I’d ever been a model, you’d not shut me up about it. Even when my grandkids were like: seriously, Granny, because you look like a warthog.”
“I had to stand there as if I didn’t exist, while people discussed if my arms were too thin, or my profile photographed as well from the left-hand side.” Fin tilts his face accordingly and my stomach flexes, as all I see is slightly bristled jaw by candlelight. Pretty sure I could take a good photograph of it.
“... Or if my look was too ‘catalogue generic’ et cetera. My only talents being utilized were the ability to stand still, or walk down a ramp. It was the very opposite of an ego pump.”
“Wowee. Who knew?”
“If you want to be told how good-looking you are, pay for someone’s drinks all night at a bar. Model bookers and clients will tell you how good-looking you aren’t. I would honestly flip burgers before I’d go back to it. Not that they’d have Dumbledore here, aged thirty-six.”
“What did your family say, that made you bite my head off?” I ask, with a smile for safety.
“You spoke to Susie, right?”
“Yes. She said you were very oversensitive about it.”
“Hahaha. If you want a perfect nutshell of how they turned the effects of their behavior into my problem, you couldn’t do much better than that. My dad thought it was synonymous with me coming out as gay, my mother and sister thought it proof of preening vanity. ‘You? A model?!’ So yes, I was ‘sensitive.’ The same way someone makes a noise if you hammer a nail into them.” He pauses. “Do you know why Spanish flu was called Spanish flu?”
“Because it started in Spain?”
“That’s what everyone assumes. In fact, to protect the morale of troops in the First World War, they underreported people dying of it here. Spain was neutral and free to broadcast it, leading to a belief that Spain was worse affected than everywhere else. Hence the name. They found themselves landed with the rep for being the flu hotbed, purely for being more honest. That’s me in the Hart family. I was the one who complained, and so I got blamed as being the source. The Finlay flu.”
“What did you complain about?”
“Long story,” Fin says, after a pause, in a way that says not now .
I don’t know what else to say.
“Sorry, you did ask about the Zoolander years, and here we are. This is why I usually don’t want to talk about myself,” he says, face drawn again.
The starters arrive.
For the first time I wonder properly if the ballad of Finlay Hart is a story of his being done wrong. It’s seductive, especially when he’s sitting opposite with rolled-up sleeves and those forearms in this lighting, but my instincts still rebel against it. It was three votes against his one, and I’ve seen for myself how icy he can be.
“Fair enough. Susie always said you were a lot, when you were younger.” I say this in a throwaway, rather than accusatory way. “That’s all. But I’m ignorant on this, compared to you, obviously. I only had her side.”
“I was a lot,” Fin says, dully, spearing a cornichon with his fork. “Or I got that way. She wasn’t making everything up. It was more what she left out. How’s your terrine, is it good?”
I have a mouthful of it so have to do a one-handed thumbs-up.
“What did she leave out?” I say, after swallowing.
“Can I ask you something?” Fin says, as if he hasn’t heard me. “You knew my sister very well? The best of all, I think it’s fair to say.”
I nod.
“How do you think she’d have acted, had I died? How do you think—if she’d flown to Manhattan to sort the funeral and walked into a room of my friends who, if not hostile, had negative preconceptions of her, given the bad terms we were on—she’d have handled it?”
“Uhm...” I’m glad of the wine. I take a stiffening swig. “She would’ve... she’d have been Susie, I guess. Irreverent and tough. She’d have...” Oh, this is tricky, wanting to honor truthfulness while not being offensive. “She’d have probably said it would’ve felt different if you two were closer.”
To put it mildly.
Finlay nods. “Yes. Exactly. She’d have assumed my friends were the enemy, informed them of her rights, shed few tears about me, and got the hell out. My friends would have thought she was, how did you put it? A lot.”
He goes back to his rillettes. His point’s been made decisively yet effortlessly.
It’s not like me to be at a loss for words.
How had I not seen this? How had I, someone who prides herself on thinking hard on things and being a sharp judge of character, never seen Finlay and Susie were, in fact, very alike?