Chapter 23 #3
This was going to be harder than I’d imagined.
‘I bet it’s nice to meet your fans,’ said Lenny, with a touch of the sibling rivalry I’d had so much of when we’d been younger, making me feel a little bit less dislocated. ‘But anyway. Here they are.’
A car drove through the postern and bumped out onto the grass.
The postern access had clearly been widened and extended since I’d last seen it, because it had allowed a new SUV to come up the headland.
The sun was in my eyes and I had to put my hand up to shield them as the light scalded in, reflected from the sea beyond.
This was a July day, I reminded myself. Not the November I had left.
No snowstorms. No bodies falling from the track.
We were back in July and things were different.
The SUV jounced a few more metres and stopped. Two people inside had a short discussion, then got out and, to my astonishment, wrapped their arms around each other to come over.
‘Mum? Dad?’ Together? Here? I had to remind myself that things were different now, but this wasn’t just different, this was bloody torn-down-and-rebuilt-in-a-contemporary-style different.
‘Hi, guys,’ Lenny called and waved and my parents, still deep in conversation, came over. Mum let Dad go for long enough to give me a hug.
‘Hello, sweetie.’ They looked different too.
Mum was more relaxed, which made me realise how tightly wound she’d always been in our past reality.
In love with a man that she couldn’t stand but couldn’t live happily without and bringing up two children in the shadow of her parents’ expectations.
And Dad, who’d always been enthusiastic but careworn, tatty round the edges with homespun poverty, now wore a very nice outfit that made him look younger.
They were both grinning. ‘We thought we’d come over and say hello and welcome back to Scotland.
’ Mum turned to Lenny. ‘All right if we stay over in the kirk house tonight, Len? I thought it would be nice for all of us to be together.’ She gave Kaylinn and Lachlan a ‘potential mother-in-law’ look.
‘Get to know everyone properly, now that Pax has finally sold the flat and made the move!’
I wanted to ask how Granny and Grandad were, whether my pony Finch was still alive and being kept by them, where Mum and Dad were living and, basically, what the hell was going on here, but, of course, I couldn’t.
I began to see what Lachlan had meant by ‘tactful questioning’. Oh well, no doubt I’d catch up soon.
I wondered if I had a Wiki page I could look myself up on.
‘And we can celebrate our anniversary in style!’ Dad said. ‘We’ve got some champagne in the wagon.’
‘Anniversary?’ I couldn’t stop myself.
My mother and father looked at one another and giggled like a couple of schoolkids being faced with their sixth-form crush. ‘Forty years, can you imagine?’ Mum said.
‘No, actually, I can’t,’ I muttered and Lachlan gave me an elbow in the ribs.
‘It was a bit touch and go when these two were small though, wasn’t it?’ Dad put in, still grinning at Mum as though besotted. ‘But we got through it and you two turned out all right.’
I might be a novelist who wrote ‘steamy scenes’, but their smiling and gawping at one another was beginning to make me feel slightly nauseous.
I knew – I had known – that Mum and Dad loved one another really, deep down, they just hadn’t been able to live with one another.
Looking at them together now I was slightly glad that I’d had that alternative upbringing, because it was hard to imagine how these two would have had time or room for children in their relationship.
Ah well. Just because this reality had a lot of wish fulfilment going on, it didn’t mean it was perfect, did it?
But if they’d been so happily married for all of my life… ‘Mum, about my name?’ I asked cautiously. ‘I mean… Lachlan was asking me the other day, weren’t you, darling?’ I added.
‘Was I? Oh, yes, I remember now, I was.’ Lachlan’s startled reply made me smile ‘Pax is an unusual nickname for Perdita. I was wondering where it came from.’
‘I thought I’d let you tell him.’
If they hadn’t called me Pax after the temporary peace in their relationship, then really, why?
‘Old family name,’ my father said. ‘After your great-granny.’
‘We wanted to use it as your first name, but everyone said you’d be mistaken for a boy,’ Mum joined in.
‘So we put Perdita on the birth certificate but always called you Pax.’ Their eyes met again and they simpered at each other.
It really was sickening and made me want to never look at Lachlan at all.
‘The name goes back, what, four generations, was it, Michael?’
‘More than that. I’d have to check the documents but I think it’s been used as a family name since – oh, seventeen twenty-something?
We gave you both family names, Lennox James and Perdita Isobel.
We thought they sounded good together. But Pax always suited you better.
Come on, let’s go and see what they’ve found down at the dig.
’ Dad tugged at Mum’s arm. ‘I’m interested to see if they’ve found any Pictish stuff.
I’m sure my father used to say that this was an old Pictish site. ’
‘Oh, George,’ I whispered.
‘Sorry, darling?’
‘No, nothing.’ So he called one of his children after me.
The idea made me smile and I wondered how he’d got his wife to agree to naming a child after a demon.
And then I wondered how far the name James went back, whether George had commemorated his brother-in-law by naming one of those longed-for sons after him.
Mum and Dad wandered off, holding hands. I stared after them because the sight was so unbelievable.
‘Kaylinn, you can introduce Pax to the team,’ Lenny said. ‘Kaylinn came as a digger, Pax. Now she’s working on a book about… what is it about, Kay?’
‘It’s a feminist approach to the eighteenth century,’ she said. ‘Maybe you could introduce me to your agent and your publisher, Pax? Put in a word for me?’
When the men looked away, I made a bug-eyed face at her and she smiled serenely back.
It seemed that Kaylinn had also seen a big improvement in her life since she’d got back.
Dating my brother? Well, he certainly had everything she wanted in a boyfriend.
I wondered if she’d have liked him as he’d been before, in the other life, scruffy and diffident and stamping down his intelligence so he always seemed vague and aimless.
Yes, I thought, she probably would have liked him then too.
I felt a brief pang of missing my ‘other brother’, but one look at the beautifully cut jeans and the expensive waxed jacket told me that Lenny probably wouldn’t ever want to go back to that.
He’d got the castle he’d always wanted, a lovely girlfriend, a future.
Maybe losing the diffidence and gaining parents who looked as though they’d stepped straight out of a romantic movie was a price he could pay.
After all, would I want to go back to being that put-upon and overworked chemistry teacher?
I glanced over at the gleaming car on charge, at the beautiful castle, felt Lachlan walking alongside me as we crossed the headland towards the archaeologists and felt slightly shallow by admitting that, nope, this was better. Very much better.
‘Hello!’ Mal greeted us as we arrived.
‘This is Pax,’ Lachlan said very, very quickly. ‘She just arrived today.’
Mal looked me up and down slowly and David wandered over to have a look too. Everyone else kept digging and I was a little bit scared that someone was going to comment on why these two random archaeologists were showing such an interest in me.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Nice to meet you.’
‘We think we’ve got Pictish carvings,’ David said. ‘We’re uncovering them now.’
As everyone else went to look, Kaylinn, David, Mal, Lachlan and I stayed on the edge of the trench, looking silently at one another.
‘So?’ I hissed eventually. ‘What happened? You’re here, so…’
‘Things are – different, yes.’ Mal looked as though he was trying out phrases in his head.
‘Was it real?’ Kaylinn breathed. ‘Did it really happen, all that stuff with George and Jamie and the goat and the turnips?’
Mal shuddered. ‘I feel such a visceral objection to even the word “turnip” that it must have done,’ he said. ‘I used to be quite keen on the odd mashed swede, but now I can’t even bear the thought.’
‘It’s weird, though,’ Kaylinn said. ‘I video-called my mom as soon as – well, when we got back here. We’d never been gone and she had no idea why I was crying.’
‘Everything’s changed,’ David put in bluntly.
‘Amber is in an assisted-living facility. I’m free to study for my Masters, and that’s what I’m doing.
’ He frowned and bit his lip. ‘I dunno. I miss… I miss her. I miss the life we had. I know things are supposed to be better but…’ He swallowed hard.
‘I don’t know what to think. She needed me and she doesn’t need me any more. ’
‘But you can still see her? You can visit?’ I touched his arm and he gave me a weak smile.
‘Oh yes. And I should be grateful, I guess.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s still weird.’
‘I think it’s payback,’ I said, carefully not looking at them, but keeping my gaze fixed on the softly rolling surface of the very blue sea beyond. ‘We did what Time wanted us to do and it gave us new, improved lives. If that’s a good thing.’