Chapter Fourteen 2009
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Even those who hated going to Scotland for the summer couldn’t help but be charmed by my grandmother’s estate.
She required all her prime ministers to visit for at least one weekend a year, something the public school boys loved and most Labour leaders and female PMs dreaded.
But even for those who didn’t relish the idea of spending summer shivering in long grass while trying to murder a beautiful stag, there was something about the Highlands.
The scale of it humbles you. Its beauty is stark and honest. It’s a wild place that demands you be wild in it.
When Louis and I were children, our annual Scottish pilgrimage was non-negotiable. But for our sixteenth summer, Papa relented to our incessant pleas to join the Shankars in New Zealand and the Cook Islands. In exchange, we had to spend the rest of our holidays with him in Scotland.
Mum planned to spend our first summer as a broken family drifting around the globe doing charity work and lounging on acquaintances’ yachts.
But she made sure to be in Edinburgh when we landed in the Highlands.
Her plan was to drive three hours north to fetch us from Aberdeen Airport, make the sixty-minute journey to the estate to drop us off, and then return to the city alone.
“Mum, that’s insane—we’ll get someone from the estate to pick us up,” Louis had insisted.
But this was her tiny window in which to spend time with us before we were back at Astley for Michaelmas.
Our Remove year was finally done and we were joining the ranks of the Hundred.
The end of our school years felt aeons away, but I could tell that for Mum it was imminent.
She was just thirty-six, had already survived a disastrous marriage and was nearly done raising two children.
She was more beautiful than ever. But I sensed that the decades of life ahead of her were more frightening than inspiring.
Papa was suddenly interested in enforcing the terms of the custody arrangement, and her time with us was strictly curtailed.
For the first time since her childhood, she was alone.
I felt a deep shame that I had negotiated with Papa to spend two weeks with my friends instead of Mum.
“Can I drive?” I asked, knowing that she loved to teach me things.
“Oh, dearest, I’ve had this bloody photographer up my arse since Edinburgh,” she said, peering over the top of her sunglasses and out the rear window of the car. “Can you imagine what they’d say if they saw photos of me letting you drive without a licence?”
There were far too many indistinct cars lingering outside the airport for me to tell if anyone was trailing us, apart from our security detail.
Louis thought she imagined it at least half the time, but after years of being hunted by men with long lenses, Mum had the reflexes of a Mafia don or an MI5 agent.
Sometimes we’d be shopping or eating brunch and her sharp shoulders would rise.
She would swivel her head around and say: “Someone’s watching us.
” I never knew what to say because everyone was watching us, always.
“So,” she said, glancing in her rear-vision mirror as we swung out of the airport car park, tailed by our security officers, “how was the holiday? Tell me everything.”
“Yeah, it was pretty good,” Louis said, his eyes hidden behind his Ray-Bans.
“What, that’s all I get?”
“Kris and I went down a few double-black diamond runs on Mount Hutt,” Louis offered.
“That sounds a bit dangerous, dearest.”
“It’s alright if you know what you’re doing. Kris is the best skier I’ve ever met.”
From the back seat, I watched Louis’s body language and listened to his intonation for clues.
Trying to figure out what was happening between him and Kris had become a fixation of mine.
Amira and I still avoided talking about it directly, only hinting at what we had seen up on The Mound.
If it weren’t for what we had glimpsed through the trees, I would have no idea they were anything but mates.
During our time in New Zealand and the Cook Islands, Kris and Louis stayed in hotel suites next to ours.
But their rooms were rank-smelling, chaotic messes, and they were always roughhousing and calling each other filthy names, and I started to wonder if perhaps boys just like to tenderly hold each other now and then and it didn’t mean anything.
Mum grew quiet as we approached the castle gates.
Our security officers had radioed ahead, so they swung open and Mum barely had to brake as we passed a clutch of curious tourists.
After a week in the glorious sun of the South Pacific, I could feel the cold settling back into me.
I didn’t want to imagine Mum driving all the way back to Edinburgh alone.
I didn’t understand how this was preferable to our previous arrangement, in which Mum and Papa stayed apart at all costs, but no one had to spend summer alone.
At the main entrance, she kept her sunglasses on while she watched a house porter unload our bags from the trunk.
“Hi, Barney,” she said sweetly to the man, who blushed and bowed, even though she was no longer an HRH.
She had a magical ability to hear a name once and retain it for the rest of her days.
I was struck by the urge to ask Mum to come inside, at least for a little while.
But I knew neither she nor Papa wanted that.
The wound left by their separation was no longer fresh, but it festered and refused to properly heal.
Granny had a coolly practical view of the whole thing and would see it as neither appropriate nor necessary for our mother to come inside.
“Well, my dear ones,” she said, opening her arms. “I’ll miss you.”
The three of us embraced for a long time.
She was still bony in my arms, but she had lost the frailty of the previous summer.
Deprivation had never been her style. She preferred to lose control entirely, black out for minutes at a time, gorge herself to the point of pain and then undo it all in the privacy of the bathroom.
But when the divorce papers were finally signed, she seemed to stop eating altogether.
Control had always been my preferred method, though I always seemed to yield to my titanic hunger by dinner time.
Like everything else, Mum turned out to be far better at self-harm than me.
“Are you going to be okay?” I asked.
“Of course, dearest,” she said, sniffing a little and trying to cover it with her famous smile. “I’ll be in Edinburgh for the rest of the week, and then I’ll be in Europe for a month. I’m so busy, it’s ridiculous.”
“We’ll be with you the week before school starts,” Louis reminded her.
She kissed both of us on the cheeks and climbed in the car. “Be good for Granny!”
We were silent as we watched her drive down the long road, our lonely mother with none of the guard rails that kept her life moving forwards.
Inside the castle, we learned that Papa had been “detained by business” at his own estate and wouldn’t be arriving for another few days, at least. I saw the hard edge of Louis’s jaw set in a grimace, but he said nothing.
Richard and his girls had already been there for weeks.
I barely knew Demelza and Birdie, who were twelve and ten at the time, but they grabbed the chairs on either side of me at the table and spent the whole evening whispering in my ear and fighting for my attention.
I tried to keep my mind hazy on the long summer ahead.
These holidays seemed to exist solely to wear Louis out with vigorous bloodsports.
Meanwhile, I would be left to wander around, my little cousins trailing behind while I pretended not to watch the castle gates for Papa’s car.
Granny and Richard ordered us all to bed at 8 p.m. so we’d be fresh for stalking in the morning.
“Be ready to leave at 4 a.m., my boy,” Richard boomed at Louis, twirling his brandy glass.
Our uncle had an almost masochistic drive to make a man of my brother.
As the heir, Louis was more important than all of us.
So Richard delighted in doing things like pushing him face first into cold water while we fished.
When we were five, Richard had forced Louis to break a grouse’s neck when the birdshot had failed to kill it.
I’d always made a point of avoiding my uncle, though he didn’t seem to notice. I was no one to him.
The week passed this way, Louis’s participation in stalking and fishing mandatory, mine optional.
I walked the moors and read fashion magazines in the library with the girls.
Demelza, who wore denim cutoffs that showed off the crease of her prepubescent arse, did everything she could to give Birdie the slip so she could have me to herself.
“I told her we’d meet her on the terrace, so she won’t know where to find us,” she snickered.
Demelza seemed to have been born sophisticated and mean. Fully grown adults found themselves vying for her approval. Our great-aunt Beatrix had a quick and devastating tongue, but even she steered clear of little Demi when her eyes narrowed and her mouth quirked into a grin.
I sighed. “Let’s go get her. We can’t let her spend the whole day alone.”
Demelza groaned. “God, you’re lame.” She rolled her eyes but did as I said.
Louis, who was up before dawn every morning, sank into sofas in the afternoon and promptly fell asleep.
Papa’s unavoidable business up the road spilled into a second week.
After ten identical days, a red stag with fourteen points was spotted a few miles from the castle.
Eager to lose my little shadows, I trudged to the car in the blue morning light to join Richard and Louis for the hunt.