Chapter 33
33
The morning after the night before, and I’m apprehensive at seeing Finlay. Following any awkward encounter, nothing’s as hard as the second your eyes meet, before the hello, and you give away everything in the discomfort of your expression.
Will he get all “American therapist” and discuss it? I hope not. I want the British version: squash it into the glove box, so to speak, and never mention it again. Finlay Hart dolefully explaining to me why I’m not someone he wants to kiss—even in glorious splendor, after smoked old-fashioneds, with no strings, when someone else will be washing the sheets and we’ll be on different landmasses within a week—really isn’t a clarification I want or require.
Time ticks past in the lobby and my edginess increases: is he trying to make an alpha male point by keeping me waiting? When it’s almost half nine, I decide something is up and call his mobile. It rings out. I ask reception to contact him in the room.
“I’m sorry, madam, I’m getting no reply,” says the brightly lipsticked woman in the pussy-bow blouse.
I check my watch. 9.35 a.m. Did I get the time wrong? That still doesn’t explain the lack of response. Did he get a tip on his missing father and rush out at dawn? But why not answer his mobile, if so? Or message me? I conclude there’s nothing left for it but to go up there myself, hammer on the door, and see if he’s fallen asleep or something.
I cross the lobby, catch the lift empty. Seconds later, the doors slide open on the third floor with a ping, and I follow the arrows to the correct section of the rabbit warren of corridors to find 312.
I turn a corner and almost bark out loud at the sight confronting me. Which is Fin Hart, back against the door of his room, naked but for a scrap of towel being held taut across his groin to protect his modesty. The cotton covers the essentials but stops short of his bare hip, making it clear he’s got nothing else on. I realize the rest of the towel is on the other side of the door, leaving Finlay with these half measures.
“Eve!” he shouts and holds up a palm like he’s stopping traffic.
“What on earth?!” I turn my eyes upward and shield them with a hand. “And good morning to you, sir!”
“Someone knocked at the door when I’d got out of the shower, I answered it, there was no one here. I got my towel trapped in the door and it locked shut on me!”
“That’s called knock down ginger,” I say. “Knock down definitely NOT ginger it seems, hahaha.”
“Har fucking har. Please can you get another key card from reception so I can open this bloody door?”
“OK, will do. First, I have something to say, and I’m about to make eye contact—my gaze strictly staying at head level again. Are you ready?”
“Where else would you make eye contact other than at head level, fuck’s sake?”
“Hahaha. Well now you’re asking.”
I risk a glance at Finlay’s furious, blushing face. He must still go to the gym as I’ve not seen a chest like that anywhere except in magazines bought by Justin.
“What was it you want to say?”
“Do you want my coat?” I say, tweaking at the red fur hood.
“No, I do fucking not! Key card, now!” Fin says and I guffaw. The more indignant he gets, the funnier this Carry On and Don’t Try to Glimpse My Willy skit gets.
“If you say so, it was a generous offer. It’d be me landed with the dry-cleaning bill if you rubbed your goolies on it,” I say, hooting as I turn and retreat the way I came.
I snigger all the way down in the lift, across the lobby, and even when I’m asking for another key card, and explaining the contretemps.
“We can send a staff member to open it,” says the lipstick woman, dubious about casually running off spare room key cards.
“I think it had better be me, or he’ll go off on one about his privacy. Seriously, please don’t get me in that much trouble,” I plead.
After a short negotiation where she needs to be reassured that Fin and I checked in together by tapping on keyboards and calling up records, and I’m safe to be given access to his room, she produces an envelope with a card.
I head back up again, still smiling.
“Where did you go for it, fucking Delhi?!” Fin shrieks as I round the corner and I collapse, bent double laughing.
“Stop being angry while naked, it’s too funny, ahahahhaa.” I pass the card to him and Fin snatches it with his free hand.
“This is going to be a dance of the veils, eh,” I say, as I realize Fin’s got to somehow twist around to use the card while staying behind his towel. And when he opens the door, the towel will drop?
“Yes, which is why you’re going to turn around, please,” Fin says.
“We are all naked under our clothes, nothing to be ashamed of.” I mock sigh, while turning my back.
A moment later, I hear a small commotion, swearing, and a female shriek behind me, and turn to see two sixty-something women clutching each other. There’s a fraction of a second’s blur of pink, as an unclothed Fin disappears into the room and the door slams shut behind him.
“That was an unexpected treat!” whoops one of the women. “Better than dress circle seats at Mamma Mia! ”
“What a lucky girl you are,” says the other.
W E DRIVE TO Leith in a terse mostly silence with the radio blaring Pulp. It’s a shame it’s “Do You Remember the First Time?” as it immediately feels like discomfiting commentary. Nevertheless I suspect Fin and I are in the kind of atmosphere where anything other than “Hi Ho Silver Lining” would seem loaded with subtext. Probably even that.
We park up and Finlay’s phone points us to his uncle’s old place, a five-minute walk. It’s much smaller than the family home, a simple, boxy but appealing stone two-bed terrace. It reminds me of my house.
I comment on the disparity with the last property.
“Yeah. Remember my grandad’s addictive personality? Uncle Don had it worse, and with less money to squander,” Fin says. “Horses were his thing. Leith’s taken off since he bought here so his house probably shot up in value.”
“He didn’t marry? Or have kids?”
“No, used to say he couldn’t afford to. He was probably right.”
We’ve knocked the brass knocker on the mint-green peeling door but the occupants of Uncle Don’s former residence either aren’t home or don’t want to speak to us.
“What did he and your dad fall out over?” I ask, as we walk back to the main street.
“Money. My grandad predeceased my grandma, and there was an almighty ruck between the siblings about which care home she should go into and whether she even should go into a care home. Don inevitably had a very keen eye on what he expected from my grandad’s estate and was in favor of my gran going budget. The siblings always seemed a tinder box, to be honest. I don’t remember being surprised when we stopped coming up to Edinburgh in the school holidays.”
We wander down the quayside and I ooh and aah at the interesting-looking independent shops and trendy places to eat and drink. Finlay walks with hands thrust in his coat pockets, engaging with me only when he’s prompted. A drizzling rain starts, and I put my hood up.
“Are you in a mood with me?” I say, from under a halo of blood-red fluff, after the fifth or sixth failure of an observation to spark conversation.
“No.”
“You’re very quiet?”
“Maybe, all things considered today, I’m not feeling noisy.”
“All things considered today?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Eve, of all the things I could mean today. I wonder?”
“TowelGate?!” I say.
Finlay glowers at me.
“That’s hardly worth sulking over!” I say.
He really cares about that? He was a model, aren’t they always waving it at anyone and everyone?
“I’m not sulking, I’m just not in a high-spirited, chatty mood. If you had flashed me this morning, how would you feel?”
“Er...” I pause. “Embarrassed, I guess... but I’d—”
“There you go. Embarrassed.”
“OK. I didn’t think you’d be embarrassed.”
“Of course you didn’t, because you don’t think I have normal emotions.”
“I do.” I frown.
“You don’t. You think I’m some sort of Cyborg war machine, sent from the past to attack my sister.”
“Is that a reference to Terminator ?”
“Obviously.”
“He was sent from the future. He was naked when he arrived though so...”
I grin and Fin slow-claps, with his leather-gloved hands. “Thanks.”
“But why would you care?”
“I’m SHY,” Fin exclaims. “I’m a shy person, OK? About a lot of things. Why is that difficult for you to grasp?”
“I didn’t realize.”
“Evidently.”
Am I not allowed to be shy too, given last night featured a reasonably clear rejection of a fairly obvious advance?
“Let’s talk about embarrassment, shall we,” I say, about to vindicate but also embarrass myself, but needs must, can’t make an omelet without breaking an egg. “You’re acting like this is such a big deal, I didn’t even see your nob, not so much as stray pubic area...”
I pause as the question about whether I said that too loud is answered by a couple of bundled-up passersby, who are boggling. Fin is studying the middle distance in a silently furious way.
“I saw, like, two inches of your very important VIP hip—”
“VIP means ‘very important person’ so that doesn’t even make sense,” Fin mutters, and I ignore him.
“And none of it was my fault. What about the fact that last night, we—”
I’m interrupted, mercifully, by the sound of Finlay’s phone ringing.
“Hi, Ann?” he says. He walks a short distance, just out of earshot, to hold the conversation.
I kick my heels until Fin rings off.
“That was Ann, Dad’s cleaner. My dad’s been in touch with her. She couldn’t get him to be precise about where he’s staying but he says he’s been to see my aunt Tricia.”
“Your auntie? You never said you had an aunt up here?”
“That’s because I don’t, really.”
“What does that mean?”
I’m really starting to tire of Hart family riddles.
“She fell out with my dad years ago. When Susie and I were teenagers. A couple of years before my uncle did.”
“Your family is one long string of fallings-out, huh?”
“Tell me about it.”
“But your dad’s been ’round?”
“Apparently so. Which means she must be still at the same house.”
“Why do I have a horrible feeling this is going to turn into a let’s call on the auntie who hates us outing?” I say.
Fin grimaces. “She might have softened with age. Sounds like she let my dad across the threshold. And he might’ve told her where he’s staying. So...”
I raise my shoulders and drop them.
“Sounds like we should go see her,” I say, pulling a face.
“Look, I’ll level with you—yes, Auntie Trish is fairly terrifying. But I think she’d like you. She liked Susie. She’d think you also have a thing she calls ‘moxie.’ If you wanted to be your most charming self, she might give up my dad’s whereabouts to you. Let her believe she’s got you onside, whatever she says to me.”
“You want me to be an iridescent beast,” I say, without thinking.
“A what ?” Fin says.
“Oh, sorry. A private joke I had with Susie. I had a fixation with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, when we were in sixth form. I read this story about Zelda being a wayward Southern Belle socialite at a party. It said she was at her ‘iridescent best’ and I misread it as her being an ‘iridescent beast.’ So Susie and I used to say, whenever we were going all out to impress in a situation, that we were going to be iridescent beasts.”
Fin shakes his head in a if you say so way.
“Riiiight. Yes, please be an iridescent beast, Evelyn.”