Chapter 15
Wednesday
I flick flight mode on and off again, hoping for a valiant bar of reception but there’s nothing. I’ll have to remember to ask Becca for the code in the morning. She offered it to me earlier but she must have forgotten.
The darkness wraps around me and I reach for the lamp. The pale illumination makes me think of moonlight, the loch, the silver glow of my bare skin.
Which, of course, makes me think of Jameson again. Our first night at Tarnmore:
The shocking cold seizing my limbs as I plunged in.
Treading water, looking back at the shore where Jameson stood, bashfully shedding his clothes.
The way he too dived in rather than creeping – graceful, spine arched, biceps taut.
His cry of ‘… the fuck!’ that split the air as he surfaced, spluttering, shaking off a tsunami of loch water.
The cold and the wildness of the night stole my inhibitions.
I drew him towards me, heating our blood with a long, hungry kiss which melted the world around us – vanishing the lapping loch, the cool, dense forest at our backs, our cavorting companions.
My head pounds and my mouth is dry. I forgot to bring a glass of water to bed with me and I don’t trust bathroom taps.
I shiver at the thought of that long walk through the shadowed, sleeping house to the basement.
But I’m really thirsty – if I don’t get a drink I won’t be able to sleep, and I’ll have a horrific hangover in the morning.
I pull a robe over my jammie bottoms and cami, and grab my phone to use as a torch.
I realise as I’m creeping down the staircase that the darkness isn’t a thing of stillness at all, and the house is far from quiet.
Shadows seem to shift and whisper – scurrying out of reach of my torch beam – and the blackness flows like silk around me.
The house creaks and moans and the air hums with expectation and … menace?
No, that’s just my overactive imagination again.
I’m stressed, my mind overreaching. I fight the urge to look upwards as I pass beneath the stag, horrified by the thought of how it will appear in the dark: pale bone and deep hollows lit gruesomely from beneath by my beam.
How ancient, dark and … devilish it will seem.
I manage not to look, but perhaps my imaginings are worse than reality.
I make it through the hall and head for the stairs, gooseflesh prickling my skin.
It feels like someone is stalking my progress from the shadows …
But it’s just the dead, vacant eyes of the deer.
My socks skitter and slide on the bowed steps that lead down to the kitchen; I’d break my neck if I slipped and fell on these stairs. I might lie for hours until someone found me. What a ghoulish thought that is – lying until dawn, dying in the dark.
There are no lights in the kitchen, but the silver patina of moonlight on the snow outside brightens the room.
I switch off my torch to appreciate the milky, ethereal glow coming through the patio doors.
My eyes adjust, as I move my gaze over the outlines of furniture.
Some subtle disruption of the air alerts me to the presence of another being.
I am not alone.
It’s Jameson – of course it is – glancing up with that sheepish little smile I love so much. As if I’d conjured him here with thoughts of cold lochs and hot kisses.
‘Eilish,’ he says, his tone warm.
‘I didn’t expect anyone to be up,’ I say, flustered and defensive lest he think I’ve engineered this somehow.
‘Me either,’ Jameson says. ‘I couldn’t sleep, but I’d rather not sleep with company.
’ His eyes widen with embarrassment and he laughs.
‘If you get my meaning.’ He has that same look he had at the water’s edge that night by the loch, covering his modesty and working up the courage to leap in.
He always liked to give everything due consideration before he acted.
My cheeks heat at the memory, and I wonder if he’s thinking about that night too – how my silver-white limbs frog-kicked as I treaded water, the silkiness of my skin when he took me in his arms.
Probably not – it’s more likely our love affair is ancient history to him and it’s only me that can’t move on. He’s likely surpassed what we had countless times in the intervening years – solid, adult relationships, not teenage lust packaged up as love.
He sounds the same – the hard edge of the northeast softened by the cadence of his mother’s Jamaican accent, which he picked up as a kid and was always there, weaving through his Scottishness.
He’s a meld of cultures – his nurse mother a first-generation immigrant, his father a born-and-bred Aberdonian who worked the oil rigs his whole life.
His parents met at the hospital when his mother treated his dad after a minor accident on the rig.
I met his parents several times and they always seemed deeply in love.
They had fun together. They set a strong example for their kids; Jameson once told me he wouldn’t settle for anything less than that kind of love.
The best-friend kind.
The spanning lifetimes kind.
The kind that for a few blissful weeks, I thought we had.
I sit opposite him. He hasn’t taken his eyes off me, his gaze steady and speculative and I wonder what he sees, wonder how much I’ve changed in his eyes.
My face has lost some of its roundness, and kickboxing has tautened my muscles.
My hair is shorter, and I rarely bother to straighten it nowadays, so it either falls in unruly waves around my shoulders, or else spends its life scraped back in a messy bun.
‘Tea?’ Jameson offers, getting up and reaching for the kettle.
I nod. I never got my cup of tea earlier after the near argument with Kimmy. I curl my toes around the rung of my chair. I no longer want to gulp down a glass of water and race back to bed. ‘Camomile, please.’ I don’t need caffeine to fuel my pounding heart and racing thoughts.
I relax while he makes the tea. The kitchen is warm from the Aga and the view of the icy garden is beautiful – walls and shrubs draped in bolts of white like long wedding skirts.
Cold air swirls against the glass like breath, a chill fog creeping over the patio.
As I sit there, flakes start to stir and spin again, gently at first, but thickening.
‘There can’t be much more to fall, surely.
’ Jameson sets my mug of tea down by my hand, following my gaze.
I inhale the earthy steam from the cup and take a sip. ‘I know. Thank you for the tea.’
‘No problem.’ He sits opposite me with his mug.
I wonder what we’ll talk about in the dead of night, how it will be between us without the others to bounce off. My abandonment of Jameson particularly looms large in my mind – for though I’ve apologised to them now for leaving, I don’t feel I’ve properly atoned for leaving him.
I owe him more.
I sip my tea. There are things I want to tell him – how I was so scared that night, and it brought back all the worst memories of my mother’s drowning, flashing me back there and making me feel so helpless, so useless. Resurging the panic that overtook me as I dived again and again, searching.
Evoking a trauma I didn’t even realise was there beneath the surface.
Another foil blanket, another police interview, another polystyrene cup of terrible tea. Another flurry of impossible questions that for me amounted to just one – how did I manage to let another life slip through my fingers?
‘Tell me more about your work,’ Jameson says, as though he senses my discomfort and hurtling emotions and is trying to distract me.
I wrap my fingers around my mug. ‘I’ve always been fascinated by the human mind. I thought about psychiatry, but medical training wasn’t for me. Plus, I enjoy a puzzle, and people are the ultimate puzzle.’
Forensic psychology plays to my strengths and interests. It suits me. I love unravelling minds. It’s like solving a mystery.
Jameson nods, head tilted. ‘But you were studying English at St Andrews. I always thought you’d do something with books.’
‘I spend a fair bit of time at the library, and I still love to read. I switched degrees when I moved universities. Literature was our thing, mine and Gen’s, and I couldn’t do it without her.’ I swallow hard, change the subject back to him. ‘I always knew you’d do something to help people.’
Jameson smiles. ‘I tried teaching for a while, but charity work has always called to me. I love what I do. I suppose you and I both help people in a way.’
But where Jameson sees the good in others, I study their darkness.
‘This is all a bit strange, isn’t it?’ Jameson continues. ‘The whole reunion thing.’
I nod. ‘It’s a lot.’
There’s a pause before his next words, as though he’s weighing them carefully. ‘I’ve missed you, Eils.’
‘I’ve missed you too.’ His words warm me more than the tea.
Jameson smiles again and I wonder if he’s thinking about wasted time too – remembering how it was between us. Our affair was brief, but so perfect. At least it seemed so to me.
I take a sip of tea. ‘It’s harder than I thought it would be, seeing everyone,’ I say honestly. ‘I’m really not sure why Alex thought this was a good idea.’
But I’m glad he did.
‘I had my doubts too,’ Jameson tells me.
‘But Alex was persuasive. He’s been set on this for months.
We hadn’t seen Bex in ages, but we met up with her and Euan in Edinburgh for dinner just after they got together.
After that he started going on about organising a reunion.
He wanted you to be here. It was important to him. ’
I want to know if it was important to Jameson to have me here too, but I can’t bring myself to ask.
I want to ask his thoughts on the strange behaviour of the others too – the way Becca united us in the dining room and urged us to protect some shared secret. Alex’s crazy suggestion that Gen didn’t just drown …
That she was … killed.
But I’m enjoying just being here with him.
For a while we talk about everything else except Gen and West Sands.
There’s no awkwardness, no inhibitions. We talk and joke around and it’s …
amazing. We smash through every barrier to the past, and yet this also feels new somehow, like we’re more than our history.
It’s a while before we loop back to the strangeness of tonight, but we can’t avoid the subject and Jameson says cautiously, ‘I still have my reservations about what we’re doing here, unpicking the past like this.’
Because of me?
He continues, ‘I mean, it was awful when she died but if Gen were still alive today who knows if we’d even still be friends? Sometimes I think the past is better left alone, you know?’
I nod vigorously. I’m sick of old rivalries and petty jealousies. ‘Becca and Kimmy have both ambushed me already to tell me all her faults.’
Jameson steps carefully. ‘I think it’s important that we remember the real person, not an imagined version of her. Warts and all. But—’ He sees my face fall and hastily corrects himself. ‘It wasn’t kind of them to pile that on you. Not yet. You only ever saw the best in her.’
Try as I might, I can’t dredge up anything but happy memories of being Genevieve’s best friend. To me she seemed perfect, but I’m not entirely blind to her faults – the way she treated Kimmy was unacceptable, unhinged even. She had a mean streak for sure …
Something about the lateness of the hour and the way he is looking at me, steady and warm, emboldens me. I have to ask. I have to know what he thinks.
‘What Alex said in the drawing room before … about someone being in the water with her … Do you think that’s possible?’
‘You heard that?’
‘I was outside the door.’
Jameson sighs. ‘I don’t know what to think to be honest.’ He doesn’t quite meet my eye and my stomach lurches with sudden fear. Why won’t he look at me?
‘But Alex was serious – he believes it?’
‘I don’t know what Alex believes any more. Here he’s … I don’t know. Different.’
There are shadows beneath Jameson’s eyes, a shadow of stubble on his chin. ‘Why would he be different here to anywhere else?’
Jameson wages some internal war. I see the moment he decides to fold. His shoulders slump. ‘He’s not himself … the drinking—’
‘We’ve all been drinking …’
Jameson looks grave. ‘But we didn’t all just get out of rehab.’