Chapter 16 #2
The wind caught the back of my head. My practical short haircut was beginning to grow out – I generally needed a trim every six weeks and I’d been close to that already when Lenny had spontaneously invited me up here. I tried to smooth it back down with my hands.
‘It’s okay, Pax,’ Lachlan said gently. ‘We’re all scared.’
‘I know! I just—’
‘Look. Sit down. Don’t think about it. Tell me about your family.’ He patted the steeply rising side of the pathway, where Cellar Dog was currently draped over a rock in a way that looked incredibly uncomfortable.
‘I’ve already told you, I don’t remember much.’ I hesitated for a moment and then sat down. What else did I have to do with my day anyway?
‘No, not that. I meant recently. Now.’ Lachlan’s eyes could be very piercing, I had discovered. It was a gaze that could drag answers out of a stone. ‘You, your brother. Your parents got married twice, I think you said?’
I stared at him for a moment, then at the dog and then finally out at the agrarian landscape. ‘Nope, sorry,’ I said after the wind had threatened to take the skin off my eyeballs. ‘I am failing to see what anything in my upbringing could do with us having to be here.’
‘Absolutely nothing.’ Lachlan stared alongside me, his eyes scanning the headland although I didn’t know what for.
There was no sign of life apart from a tracery of smoke rising in the distance.
Then he turned abruptly. ‘This is me, wanting to get to know you. This is our “over the coffee” chat; our “meeting for dinner” talk. The sort of conversation we’d be having if we’d met properly. ’
‘Oh.’ My cheeks grew hot with the embarrassment. I’d become so focused on the here and now that I’d lost sight of anything else. ‘Right. Sorry.’
‘No need. So, you grew up with divorced parents and Pony Club, that’s about all I know.’
I had skated over my slightly unconventional upbringing. It wasn’t becoming in a teacher to admit that you’d hated education and, in fact, the whole business of being young.
But I had already told Lachlan so much of that awful feeling of guilt that had driven me for most of my life.
I might as well fill in the gaps. ‘It’s a bit hard to explain.
My mum and dad married very young,’ I said now, with my eyes having found the two guards again, who were sitting comparing swords.
‘I mean, ridiculously young; Mum was only eighteen. They had Lenny and I think they were really just too young. They love each other, that’s the awful thing, but they can’t live together.
When Lenny was small they split up. Mum went back down south to be near her family and Dad stayed in Scotland.
They’d bought a little piece of land up by the coast and he was building them a house.
He’s still building it,’ I said, with an ironic twist to my words.
‘Anyway. They still had to see one another, because of Lenny, and despite family opposition they decided to have another go at being married.’
Thoughtlessly I picked up a pebble and tossed it away. It rolled down the slope, but the guards instantly stood up and stared in our direction, scanning the background for the source of the disturbance. Cellar Dog sat up and scratched again and they relaxed back onto the grass.
‘This time round they had me. There’s seven years between me and Lenny, so I expect they forgot how dreadful small babies and children are for a relationship.
’ I took a deep breath. ‘They nicknamed me Pax because I was meant to bring peace to their relationship. Clearly I didn’t, because they divorced again five years later. ’
Silence. A sort of silence anyway – the sea kept sliding up and down the rocks, the gulls kept calling and the two guards chatted on in the broad Scots that meant I could only understand one word in three.
But I was silent. I hoped that Lachlan could pick the bones of my emotions out of the body of the quiet.
‘You think it was your fault?’
So, he’d managed it.
‘Intellectually? No, I know it wasn’t. I was a child. If I couldn’t make them give me ice cream for breakfast, then I certainly couldn’t make them divorce.’
Lachlan was looking at my face now. I didn’t have enough hair to hide behind, so I had to bear his scrutiny, but I didn’t have to return it and kept my eyes on the guards and watched him from the corner of my eye. It meant I could see him without seeming to be paying him any attention.
‘Emotionally, though, you feel it was down to you.’
‘Lenny struggled. He was nearly thirteen and I’m sure you remember being an adolescent boy.
It wasn’t easy for him and he blamed me.
Oh, not really, or not that he knew, he was a fairly decent brother, as brothers go.
He’d spend hours sitting out in the paddock filming me with our big old video camera when I was trying to improve my riding. ’
Lachlan made a ‘well, that was decent’ face with scrunched mouth and small nods.
‘But he’d laugh himself silly whenever I fell off.’
‘It doesn’t sound as though you were exactly impoverished by your parents splitting, if you had a pony.’ He was still looking at my face.
‘Mum’s family were a bit Home Counties. We lived near Grandma and Grandpa – they had a big house by the river. I think they bought the ponies and paid for a lot of our childhood. They never really approved of Dad, so we only saw him in the holidays. Plus, he was four hundred miles away.’
Grandparents who’d paid to keep Mum close to stop her running back to Scotland, to her impoverished Scottish lover.
Two children raised with all the advantages money could buy, so that she would feel too guilty to uproot them and take them to the draughty, cavernous house amid acres of nothing, with no ‘background’ except mountains.
We’d been bought. And I, with my ponies, had fallen for it. Lenny, not so much.
‘But it means that I feel I owe Lenny,’ I said quietly. ‘That’s why I agreed to take out the loan so we could buy this place.’ I glanced behind me at the incongruity of the sturdily built castle and the acres of headland. ‘I’m still trying to make it up to him for splitting our parents up.’
Lachlan made a ‘scoffing’ noise. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Pax,’ he said, with a flare of annoyance. ‘You know perfectly well you did no such thing.’
‘Yes, of course I know. But there’s knowing and there’s knowing, isn’t there? Lenny is so keen on this bit of history being back in the family that he’s mortgaged himself to the hilt to make it happen. I just took a loan to make up the rest, that’s all.’
‘Dangerous.’ Lachlan’s expression softened. ‘But as a previously exiled Scot, I recognise his desire to return to the homeland.’
He sounded more amused than annoyed again, I was glad to hear. It made me uncomfortable to hear others’ opinions of my innermost feelings, even when I knew that those opinions were correct. ‘What about you? Where were you “exiled” to?’
‘Oh, Oxford, where I did my degree.’
‘How utterly dreadful for you,’ I replied tartly and it got me a hefty laugh.
‘I know! Not precisely Elba, is it? They’ve got a Marks & Spencer and everything.’ Then the laughter stopped. ‘But I wanted to be home. Scotland suits me.’
‘Because you burn to a crisp whenever you cross the border?’
Now the laugh was pure amusement. ‘Aye! But not in a vampiric, “doomed never to cross the threshold” way, more in a “need factor fifty just to cross the road to the newsagent” way. It’s bloody fierce, the sun further south.’
‘So holidays to Greece are out?’ I grinned at him.
‘Well, I can wear a hat and lots of sunscreen. But I warn you that I will be red-faced and sweaty and you’ll need to keep hosing me down.
’ Lachlan stopped looking at me with that slightly amused expression he’d been wearing and looked back over the landscape that stretched before us, the coastline a flat green plain that eventually rose inland to mountains whose tops bore the faintest tracery of snow already.
He gave a deep sigh. ‘I don’t know enough about this place or this time.
I was just getting started at the research for the job of writing about it when…
’ an open-handed wave over his shoulder ‘…all this happened.’
I copied him and stared out over the precipitous descent to where it rose back up to the mainland proper. In our time, our real time, there was a scruffy barn and a field of sheep and it was where Lenny and I had parked our cars. The lack of any of this made me homesick again.
‘The kids will miss me, if I never get back.’ I thought of the school, fourteen hundred pupils of varying abilities and levels of interest in chemistry.
‘Will they, now? I presume you mean at the school, not that you’ve got a whole family of wee ones pining for you, because I think you would have mentioned that before now.’ Lachlan gave me a nudge.