Chapter 35
35
At least wondering about how on earth Mr. Hart was staying at the same hotel as us is a diversion from dwelling on Auntie Tricia’s verbal IEDs.
I don’t know quite why she’s frightened me so much, when it’s nothing Susie didn’t say already, using more expletives, over pints in The Gladdy. I think it must be due to growing closer to Fin. Before, he was a folklore take, a changeling, the goblin swapped for the real baby son in the crib, who they then raised by mistake. Not the man at the wheel of a rented Mercedes at this very second, a man who I might have been stupidly growing fond of, and yes, even crushing on. I had predicted that when the old version of Finlay resurfaced it would be jarring. Is that this?
But, Aunt Tricia was so sure. No one would be that excoriating of a nephew without cause, would they? Was it true his mother didn’t tell him she was dying, and Susie didn’t contact him either? That’s such a huge accusation and the women who could contradict or explain it are dead. His father is incapable.
I scour my memory banks for a Susie reference to Tricia, and can only recall something about “a right pterodactyl,” but her aunt had fallen out with her father too so it’s not necessarily an endorsement of Fin’s opinion.
“If my dad is staying at The Waldorf, of course,” Fin is saying as I zone back in, checking his mirror at the lights, “he may have been shaky on the detail.”
“His sense of direction seems completely sound though.”
“True.”
“My man on reception was going to warn me if he appeared!” I say, for the sake of something to say.
“Except your friend was one of at least five working the desk, on that shift alone. We had a one-in-five chance. Depending on the shift.”
“True.”
We pull up and Fin hands the keys over and he nods at the revolving door to indicate you first . For the first time in this trip, the tension feels as if it’s between us, no longer about its objective.
“Where should we start?” I say to Fin, as we survey the lobby, and Fin says, “Right there.”
Mr. Hart is ten paces away in his coat, packed bag at his feet.
There’s no time to wonder if and how to introduce myself, as his face breaks into the warmth of instant recognition.
“Eve?! Goodness, what are you doing here?” he says, face wreathed in smiles.
It’s a sad irony that he’s losing his mind but physically he’s worn so well. He’s so little changed from the Central Casting, tall, responsible Mary Poppins father of my childhood memories. “And your young fellow,” he says, acknowledging a mute Finlay.
“Uhm... I’m Christmas shopping!” I say, off the top of my head. “You?”
“Came for a trip to see family, but I’m checking out now.”
“You saw your brother?” I ask, stupidly.
“Yes, my brother and my sister are here. Couldn’t raise my brother at all, he seems to be away.”
“Ah... How was your sister?”
“Oh, same old, same old. What was that line from Frasier ? You’d get more warmth from a wedding buffet’s ice sculpture. Patricia could certainly keep the shrimp cold.”
I laugh, as much in surprise as mirth—his having Tricia’s number and remembering lines from old sitcoms. This is also the Mr. Hart I remember—shaking out his paper and making affectionately acerbic remarks to Susie and me as we disappeared out the door, up to no good.
“Now you’re back down to Nottingham?” I say.
“Yes, yes, I am...” He checks his watch. “If I get a clear run I think I’ll be back by tea time.”
“Oh. What a coincidence, so are we?” I say to Finlay, who nods. We’d expected to have to do some persuasion; we’d thought we’d be ahead of Mr. Hart in this whole Edinburgh encounter game plan, and the reversal has left both of us gawping.
“Race you!” Mr. Hart says, in jolly fashion. “Ah, thank you!” he adds, as Waldorf staff appear.
“Drive safely!” I say, and watch uselessly as a white-gloved doorman signals he has his car keys. I look to Finlay for objection or confirmation and he raises, and drops, his shoulders.
“Well, ‘Visit Scotland, Operation Recover Iain Hart’ was a thunderous success?” Fin says, as we watch his dad head for the revolving door. “I dread to think what would’ve happened without us being here.”
“Should we try to stop him?” I say.
Finlay shrugs. “He’s got a valid driving license and the wish to go, and how are we getting his car back anyway? The main aim was to get him home again in one piece and having not signed up to any pyramid schemes. As far as we know, that’s going to be the case.”
The detachment in his tone tells me that the Finlay Hart who told me I could boss my life if I wanted, and showed me old photos on his phone, he’s gone, at least for now. The shutters have come down again. I took Tricia’s side by doubting him, it seems.
“I guess so.”
There’s a literary word for what I’m feeling: bathos. Anticlimax. This is the end of our pursuit, but it doesn’t feel the way it was meant to. Did I want a struggle, a sense I’d saved Mr. Hart from harm? No, thinking it through, of course I didn’t.
“Can you pack fast, and meet back here in fifteen minutes?”
“Yes,” I say.
“OK, you go ahead, and I’ll check us out.”
As I get the lift up to my room, I should feel lighter.
Instead my stomach has a stone in it, a rock, like a dragging weight.
I keep hearing that word, over and over again. Almost like a taunt, asking me if I’m going to believe it or not. Asking what I’m going to do with it.
I jab the button for the first floor.
Nothing. I’m going to do nothing with it, because I’m hours away from never having to see Finlay Hart again in my whole life, and this is a puzzle I will never solve. I feel sure Susie took the last pieces to her grave. The lift pings, first floor.
Poison.
T HE MOOD ON the journey back to England is suitably subdued. We don’t have to meet each other’s eyes, and we have a shared purpose, at least. I fiddle with the radio, or the air con, and Finlay makes the occasional banal remark regarding the traffic, and all in all, the satnav probably says as much as either of us.
“I feel ridiculous at having dragged you all this way for a two-minute chat with my dad,” Finlay says abruptly, as we pass Leicester, and I know what he also means is: you saw all that dirty washing, and for what?
I recall how much he hated me being in the family home, that week before Susie’s funeral. Trips to nice restaurants were making a virtue of necessity.
“Honestly, it’s fine,” I say. “I don’t have tons of amazing uses for my holiday allocation from City Nights anyway. Change is as good as a rest, as they say.”
“I don’t think when they said ‘change’ the meaning was so elastic as to encompass getting a full-bore blast of my dysfunctional family,” he says, with a grimace.
Oh, he’s still dwelling on the aunt encounter the way I am too. That has to rate as one of the strangest fifteen minutes of my life.
“Think you’ll stay at... what’s it called? City Nights?” Fin says.
“I will for now, I have a mortgage and a cat to raise. It’s more whether City Nights will stay at me. There aren’t many ways to make a living from typing snappy things these days, are there?”
“What would you like to do? What’s your dream job? Writing, presumably?”
“Yeah, you know those Long Reads in the NYT , or like they used to have in Vanity Fair ? Thousands of words, really brilliantly written, and the journalist got months to research the subject. You know, like old Hollywood scandals involving the Pickfair Mansion, or some true crime investigation thing. The sort that ends up getting turned into a book. Like the one about the Golden State Killer.”
“You’ve got a sunny nature, eh?” Finlay says.
“Well, there are Cure songs about me,” I say and then regret it.
Fin looks gratified, but pinkens slightly. I wonder if he wishes he’d not told me that. I wonder what he’s said and done out of spontaneity. I wonder where all that do you ever wish you could drop the act conversation came from.
“Seriously, yes, I do know what you mean,” he says. “About the writing. That sounds really good. So how do you get into that, then?”
“I have no idea,” I say. “Plus, you’d need a time machine for a golden age of print media and proper budgets.”
“I have uses for that time machine,” Fin says. “Does it seat two?”
“I’m not sure I’d trust what you’d do with it,” I say, and smile, to defuse any insult.
“I’m not sure I trust what I’d do with it.”
A meaningful silence ensues. I feel I have to break it, especially given this is likely the last time I’ll ever see Susie’s brother.
“We’d both head back and tell Susie to look the other bloody way though, right?” I say, bluntly, the pain of this thought making me graceless.
“Yes,” Finlay says, throwing me a glance. “We both would.”
After another brief silence he says: “Thank you.”
“What for?”
“Assuming I didn’t want my sister to die.”
“That’s... obvious, isn’t it?”
“The relative of mine we met, prior to my father, would beg to differ,” Fin says, as he adjusts his grip on the steering wheel, and narrows his eyes at the road. He made such a good model in that picture because of his ability to turn into a hardened blank. You never know what he’s thinking.
“She accused you of neglect but she wouldn’t think you’d want Susie to...?” It’s such a grotesque idea, I can’t finish the sentence.
“Yes, the bar’s really that low,” Fin says, voice thick. “I thought this was the basis of our conversation afterward. The Spanish flu still killed millions of people .” He takes his sight line off the road to give a wry smirk as he says this.
I begin to heat at my words in emotion being repeated back to me, out of context.
“That was your analogy, I didn’t mean you were literally capable of murder! I’ve never thought for a moment you wished harm to Susie,” I say, glad this at least is true, if not the “Finlay Hart’s a killer” insinuations, made in coffee shops, only half in jest, and only a few short weeks ago. I was privately likening him to an assassin on the drive up here. “That’s mad.”
Fin glances and smiles, sadly. “As I say, sorry to expose you to my family,” he says, diplomatically drawing a line, as he changes lanes.
I feel a twinge of complicated affection, and a distinct sensation of regret.
“Can I ask something, personal?” I say quietly. “Tell me none of my business, usual rules apply.”
“Yes,” Fin says, eyes still on the road.
“Why did your mum not tell you she was dying?”
There’s a dreadful pause where I worry this is a terrible thing to have asked.
“... Because I was the last person she wanted to see with the time she had left, I guess,” Fin says. “Quite literally, as I was only informed when she’d been moved to the hospice. I was so angry and hurt, I waited a week before I flew over. And then she’d gone. My aunt was right. What Susie said was true. I only came over for the funeral.”
I risk a quick glance at him and, for a split second, his eyes shimmer with what I think could be tears, but in one blink, they’re gone.
“Sorry,” I say quietly, and insufficiently. I want to ask But why didn’t she care about you? but that is too great a question to level, if an explanation’s not being offered.
I now know why there was such an emptiness to Mr. Hart turning up—he was the point of our mission, yet he ended up feeling like an interruption. I was unraveling something, and the process came to an abrupt halt. I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering what was behind the screens with Finlay.
Count yourself lucky then.
For the first time, I’m irritated by the interjection of imaginary Susie. I want to challenge her—I can’t fit her Fin together with this Fin. There’s something missing in this story, and I’m going to commit to an opinion: I don’t think it’s his heart.
“This you?” Fin says, as the car rolls along my street, toward my house.
“Yeah, this is me,” I say, in resignation. He pulls up, turns the engine off and for a second I think he’s going to say something, but he’s snapping his belt out of the lock so he can get out of the car, handing me my bag from the trunk.
“Thanks for your help,” Fin says, after he slams the lid shut again.
“I didn’t, did I? Sorry about that.”
“You really did.”
“Thank you.”
“Take care of yourself, Eve. And if you’re ever in Brooklyn and need a place to stay...”
“Ditto, Carrington,” I say, motioning toward my house, and we both laugh.
“Careful, might take you up on that,” Fin says, and I hope my expression stays steady and neutral as he looks at me from under his brow.
I put my hand out for him to shake, as much to find a moment to end on as anything. Fin looks at it, takes it, uses it to draw me into a quick, hard hug. I can’t put my other arm around him due to my luggage, so I submit by pressing my face into his shirt. He smells indecently fragrant for someone who’s been driving for five hours, I think. Why is he grateful to me? Ostensibly it’s good manners, but I know in my guts and bones that it’s more than that. Is it because getting along with Susie’s best friend is the closest he’ll come to reconciling with his sister?
He leaves without another word, or a look back, and I’ll never know the answer.