Love, Revenge & Buttered Scones E-Book

Bobbie Darbyshire

• Herausgeber: Cinnamon Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 367

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Three troubled people, driven by loneliness, vanity and revenge, dash to the Scottish Highlands, where their lives become mysteriously entwined around a reading group in the Inverness public library. We've all done it—gone after one thing and found entirely another—but never as surprisingly as Henry, Peter & Elena. It's Friday, 18th February 2000, and they're in for an unsettling weekend among the book stacks of the library, on the blizzard-bound streets of Inverness, in the recesses of the Loch Craggan Hotel, and on the treacherous mountain above.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

About the Author

Dedicaton

Half Title

Excerpt from the Inverness Library Events Bulletin

Dearest Marjorie

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-one

Chapter Forty-two

Postscript

Acknowledgements

Love, Revenge & Buttered Scones

Bobbie Darbyshire

Published by Cinnamon Press,

Office 49019, PO Box 15113, Birmingham, B2 2NJ

www.cinnamonpress.com

The right of Bobbie Darbyshire to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988. © 2010, Bobbie Darbyshire.

First published in Great Britain by Sandstone Press, 2010

Print Edition ISBN 978-1-78864-159-3

Ebook Edition ISBN 978-1-78864-169-2

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. This book may not be lent, hired out, resold or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior consent of the publishers.

Designed and typeset by Cinnamon Press.

Cover design by Adam Craig © Adam Craig.

Cinnamon Press is represented by Inpress.

Author of five novels, Bobbie Darbyshire won the 2008 fiction prize at the National Academy of Writing and the New Delta Review Creative Nonfiction Prize 2010. She has worked as a barmaid, mushroom picker, film extra, maths coach, cabinet minister’s private secretary, care assistant, adult literacy teacher, and in social research and policy. Bobbie hosts a writing group and lives in London.

You can find Bobbie on Facebook and Twitter @bobbiedar, or visit her Amazon author page.

Also by Bobbie Darbyshire:

Truth Games

OZ

The Posthumous Adventures of Harry Whittaker

The Third Bus

In memory of Roger Hurrey, 

who cheered this book on

Love, Revenge & Buttered Scones

Excerpt from the Inverness Library Events Bulletin

Book Group Update – January 2000

The December meeting was well attended, and our discussion of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia was enriched by Angus Urquhart’s eyewitness recollections of the Spanish civil war. We were also glad to welcome Sara Ross of Princes Street Publishing as our guest for the evening.

In an exciting change to the forward programme, Miss Ross has persuaded Princes Street’s bestselling author, Marjorie Macpherson, to lead a writing workshop at our February meeting. So for January we’re reading her latest book Heart of the Glen (copies available at the library).

The Book Group meets in the Reference Room on the third Friday of each month. 7 till 10. All comers welcome.

Dearest Marjorie, No one speaks to my soul as you do. I mean you no harm. Why will you not answer me?

Henry Jennings’ last letter to me, I have it by heart. Has he forgiven me, I wonder? Has he found a way through?

I wish I could stop thinking about him. I want to be writing again, immersed in some make-believe world where he can’t follow. Lord knows I’ve tried, but each project dies on the page, because he may read it, and what will he make of it?

So I’ve seen I can’t dodge this. I must first write about Henry, as honestly as I can, and hope that then he’ll stop haunting me and let me move on.

I’ll start with that last letter he sent me, try to recall in what frame of mind I received it, how I came to act as I did. It dropped on my doormat between Christmas 1999 and the New Year, forwarded by my publisher, arriving the same day as a request to run a workshop for a reading group in Inverness. The combination was disconcerting. I don’t know which unsettled me more. 

The Inverness thing verged on an instruction. It’s high time you went public, emailed Sara from marketing. It can only add to your sales now. Let’s start with some low-key events and build.

I took calming breaths. I find it hard, saying no. I gathered myself and picked up the phone.

‘Come on now,’ Sara scolded. ‘You’re going to have to face this sooner or later. Just a toe in the water, we won’t broadcast it. I’ll be surprised if it gets picked up. And trust me, I’ll square everything with the librarian. She’s warm-hearted, you’ll like her. I know she’ll take perfect care of you.’

I don’t know why, but as Sara banged on I was beginning to waver. Was it Henry who was changing my mind? Or the kind Scottish librarian? Or my fondness for Inverness, one of the gentler places on this benighted planet? Whatever it was, my nerves were subsiding. The craving to meet my readers was outweighing the fear. I was saying yes.

‘That’s marvellous,’ cried Sara. I had to hold the receiver away from my ear. ‘You’ll be fine, I promise. They’re a lovely bunch. You won’t regret it for a minute.’

What had I done? I put down the phone expecting panic to hit, but it didn’t. Instead I found the small, irrevocable act of courage was giving me a lift. An infusion of luck and capability. It had me looking at Henry’s letter, too, with a different eye.

Reading your books is like meeting my better self in a dream...

Dear Henry. He was a decent man, I had no doubt of it, as genuine as any of us manages to be. He was lonely, that was all. Had need, as each of us does from time to time, of an imaginary love. I’d been a coward not to reply to him.

But please, Marjorie, don’t be alarmed. I completely understand that you are separate from me. You have only to say and I will stop sending these letters. Until you do I cannot help but hope.

He wrote from the heart, he deserved careful answer. I’d sat down to do it once or twice, but whether I resorted to truth or fiction I found my words would inevitably cause him anguish—it is no small matter to puncture a dream. So I’d kept putting it off. It was bad of me—I make it a rule to answer fan mail by return, if only with brief thanks, so why not Henry? 

The truth is, I liked him. Liked getting his letters. Didn’t want them to stop. His comments on my books were pleasing—he saw the things I’d put in that no one else spotted, connections and echoes that I flatter myself lift them a touch higher, make them more than mere pot-boilers for the romantic fiction market.

I don’t have you on a pedestal. I’m sure you are as fallibly human as the next person. But I know that a woman who can write as you do is a woman I must love. 

Nice one, Henry. And I liked the photograph he’d sent me. His eyes. His ingenuous smile.

Okay, I’ll come clean, he appealed to me. I’d even sunk to making a few enquiries, rung round for business references to check if his letters were a wind-up.

They weren’t. He was just what he said and what his photograph displayed. Forty-one years old. Shortish, roundish, shy. Engagingly old-fashioned, somehow marooned outside the flood of modern life. Ex bank manager, now sole embodiment of HIJ Associates Financial Advice, working from his home in Guildford. Only one discrepancy. He claimed to be a widower, but one of my sources indiscreetly let slip that Mrs Ingrid Jennings, the missing I from HIJ, had deserted with a stockbroker seven years since. A forgivable spin on a lonely heart’s life, I decided.

I have ‘Heart of the Glen’ at last. I haven’t opened it, just weighed it in my hands. I’ve learned not to rush or spoil...

There was a rhythm to his prose that suggested he would never desist. My discomfort was growing as I kept failing to answer him. And then, that morning, at last I thought I saw how to do it. Meeting my readers. Meeting Henry.

So little divides kindness from cruelty. I meant well, that’s my excuse, but it hardly serves. So thank goodness—though I take no credit for it—thank goodness it turned out more or less for the best in the end.

At least, I believe and hope it did. For Henry, and for the others too.

Henry Jennings, Peter Jennings and Elena Martínez. Those were their names. 

I wasn’t with them that dark February morning at the turn of the millennium, rattling over the privatised points between the fields of mad cows towards Inverness. I’d gone up earlier, decided to make a week of it, research the next book, do a bit of misty reminiscing and moseying around. 

No,  Henry, Peter and Elena, in various states of excitement, each was travelling alone that day. Each stared alone through a rain-streaked window, anxious for the journey to be done and the future confronted. And at intervals each sought solace for a nervous stomach in the buffet car.

In Henry’s case, the dash from his seat was so furtive that it drew the attention of all who witnessed it. He’d jumped out of his skin at Kings Cross at the sight of his brother, with tatty backpack, slouching ahead of him towards the front carriages. Landed, sweating with panic, in his first-class compartment at the rear. What on earth was Peter doing on this train? Such an unkind blow, it seemed deliberate, yet he could think of no reason. Fighting paranoia, he decided that only strong drink would do the job properly and managed to fetch it without bumping into the lout. 

Peter’s trip to the buffet was also reluctant, in his case because of penury. The fare was a rip-off, he was down to a fiver and some loose change, and he had no idea where he would spend the night. Reward? He must be off his head—this had to be some nasty bastard’s idea of a joke. Ha ha, fucking hilarious, mocking an unrecognised genius. Just wait till he caught up with whoever it was.

Elena waited in line for food behind Peter in a state of fretful impatience, her one thought to track down her quarry in Inverness. Was el malo still alive? He must be, he had to be, she willed it to be so. 

Henry Jennings, Peter Jennings and Elena Martínez. Swaying towards the buffet car and back to their seats. Negotiating the doors that slid shut in their faces. Stepping around children and over dogs. Seeing and trying not to see the sleepily entwined couples whose body language said, ‘We just travel between beds.’

Henry tried not to see the couples because he wanted Marjorie in his arms so badly he could barely draw breath. He was weary of sharing his life with ghosts. He prayed that this journey would deliver a real woman to him at last.

Peter tried not to see them because the chance would be a fine thing. All the women he knew had grown tired of ooh-aahing his poems and lending him money. Plus women were trouble. Was this paper-chase some ratbag’s idea of revenge?

And Elena tried not to see them because the miles and days were piling up between her and the bed she belonged in, which might not be kept warm for her return.

Unpacking their little paper carrier-bags alone. Henry, a clutch of brandy miniatures plus a large packet of prawn-cocktail-flavoured crisps. Peter, a can of bitter and two KitKats to last him eight hours. Elena, orange juice and a chicken-salad sandwich on wholemeal. The rage was consuming her. She must stay strong for what was to come.

Henry, Peter and Elena. Each agitated. Each alone. Each seeking release in Inverness.

Chapter One

Henry

There was a dark pink envelope in among the manila, addressed in an italic hand that Henry didn’t recognise.

He wasn’t fooled for a moment—it was junk mail no doubt. Likely another of those introduction agencies. A few hundred quid for six phone numbers, a champagne dinner for ill-assorted strangers. Jumped-up computer dating. He’d given up on all that, but he was still on their mailing lists, salt in the wound.

Sure enough, there was nothing inside but a printed flier. A flimsy bit of rubbish, not up to the style and weight of the envelope, folded blank side out. Open it up, just a cheap-printed ad for some damn thing—

He stared.

Marjorie Macpherson! It was a flier advertising Marjorie Macpherson!

He had to sit down. He had to take this in. He pushed the breakfast crockery aside and sank onto the kitchen chair, smoothing the paper flat on the table.

SHAPING THE STORY  How are novels invented? Have you ever wished that you could invent one? Spend three hours with Marjorie Macpherson and discover her secrets. Join her 7-10pm, Friday 18 February, in the Reference Room of the Inverness Library. All welcome.

There was a computer graphic of a quill pen, and a fragment of local street-map with the library shown in red. That was all.

Except the envelope.

He picked it up. Looked inside. Sniffed it. Examined the points and flourishes of his name and address, the blurred imprint of the postmark. 

London. Not Inverness. London.

Did Marjorie send this? Had she answered him at last? Could it be?

Second class. No message.

Of course. He remembered. He’d bought ‘Heart of the Glen’ on the Finchley Road the day he called on that client. He’d used his MasterCard. Targeted marketing, that was all this was.

He could ring the shop. He remembered the garish shopping centre. Which of the glossy book-chains had it been?

Although actually, no, he didn’t want to ring. They would only confirm it was a promotion, and he wanted to believe, or pretend to believe just for a while, that it wasn’t. That Marjorie’s hand had touched this envelope, her tongue had moistened the flap, her fingers had guided the pen, shaping his name, shaping the story, calling him to Inverness.

Damn it, what did it matter who’d sent it? Friday the eighteenth of February, the Reference Room of the Inverness Library. He would be there, of course he would. At last he would be where she was.

What was today, the fifth? He counted days on his fingers. Thirteen to wait. It was so long, how could he sleep or eat or work meanwhile? For then he would see her, the actual Marjorie Macpherson, not his dream of her. He would see her face and hear her voice. And she would see him.

He was trembling, he realised, and leaving damp prints on the dark pink envelope. His brain was trying to dislodge the thought that was flashing in projected letters, like credits on a cinema screen. He got up and paced the kitchen, refusing to read the message in his head.

YOU’LL SEE HER. AND THEN IT WILL BE OVER.

He struggled to hold on to hope.

IT’S USELESS. SHE’LL SAY NO.

How could he tell what she would do? He hadn’t a scrap of information, not even a picture of her face. The dust-jackets of her books were inscrutable, her publishers said she didn’t ‘do publicity shots’, they weren’t ‘at liberty to divulge personal details’. 

Yet he knew so much. Her warmth, her humour. Her solitude. She wasn’t married, he felt sure. Or not happily. It was there in her writing, she was as alone as he was. And her age, he could sense that too. Not too impossibly old or too foolishly young for him, her take on life was so similar. A few years his senior perhaps, was that why she was shy? 

YOU’RE MAD. SHE’LL SAY NO.

How slim the chance was. Three hours in a room full of strangers. A queue of lingering fans seeking autographs and advice. How could he win her? What could he find to say?

And then he realised.

‘I’m Henry Jennings.’ That was all he needed to say. She would know him—she had his photograph and his letters. Marjorie wasn’t shy, she wasn’t cold, she was romantic. She was testing his love, his courage. He stared at the flier, willing this to be true. She would smile and agree to a drink or a meal. Her presence would make him bold. He would become the man he could be, the man who lacked only Marjorie Macpherson to make him himself.

All welcome. He frowned. That was odd. More than odd, completely ridiculous. Her books were so popular, the event would be oversubscribed. Unless... 

Yes! He banged fist on table, making the eggcup jump. For wasn’t this proof that the flier was a personal invitation? He would accept. He would go. He would match her romantic gesture.

YOU’RE MAD. SHE DIDN’T SEND IT. SHE’LL SAY NO. IT’LL BE OVER.

He hammered the table. ‘I’m not. She did. She won’t. It bloody well won’t.’

It was no use. ‘What do you think?’ he wailed. ‘You’re a woman. What would you do in her shoes?’

The ghost of his mother, Maggie Jennings, two years dead, beamed at him from her chair by the window. ‘Well, dear,’ she said. ‘We can’t be sure of course, but it looks very much like an invitation. And if it is, then it would be unkind, wouldn’t it, to entice you all that way just to turn you down? But why don’t you give them a ring?’

Yes. The phone lay on the table. He picked it up and tapped in 192.

‘Hello... Scotland, please. Inverness... The public library...’

He took a note of the number, then a deep breath before dialling again, endeavouring to feel businesslike.

A friendly young woman picked up. ‘Inverness Library. May I help you?’ 

‘Good morning, yes. I was wondering. The workshop on the eighteenth?’

‘Yes?’ Reassuringly matter-of-fact.

‘The places, are they limited? Would I need to book?’

‘No.’ She sounded perplexed. ‘It’s only a workshop for our book group.’

‘Oh dear. I see.’ The blood was rushing in his head. So it was true. Marjorie had sent this. 

‘Were you wanting to join the group?’

‘No. Well yes. What I mean is, I’m a particular fan of Miss Macpherson’s, so I wonder, might I come along, just for the evening?’

‘Of course. I’m sure they won’t mind.’

‘Thank you, thank you so much.’ The excitement was tumbling out of him. He mumbled goodbye, put down the phone, and grinned through a mist of joy at his mother’s ghost.

‘It’s true,’ he told her. ‘It’s really happening, Mother. Marjorie sent this. She’s read my letters. She wants to meet me.’

Chapter Two

Elena

‘But, Elena—’  

‘No, Mikhail!’ Furiously shouting. ‘We will not discuss this more. You are wrong! I am right! Usually it is the other way, but this time, no!’

It was difficult to speak her frustration in English—she lacked the vocabulary—but with seven languages between them English was the only one they shared. For a moment she saw Mikhail’s eyes blaze, as though he would shout in his turn. But then the fire went out of him. He dropped into a chair and turned his face to the window. The silence grew long as he stared into the gloomy Brussels afternoon.

‘I am right, Mikhail,’ she repeated. ‘Only I can know this.’

Still he said nothing, watching the rain without expression.

Her fury exploded. ‘Enough! You refuse to understand, then I am leaving.’

With no time for thought, she was snatching up her coat and bag, yanking the door wide then slamming it behind her, hearing the slam speak her anger more powerfully than words could do. 

She marched towards the lift. He did not follow, his door remained closed. She punched the lift button.

Spain. He insisted they should end their jobs here and take new ones in Spain. So many times she had said no, yet still he repeated she must do this stupid thing. She hated even to think of Spain. 

She leant her head against the bars of the lift as it went down. The stench of cleaning fluid grew stronger as she neared the bottom. She could not hold her breath long enough to escape it. The hall floor shone wet from today’s mopping and a faint haze of blue smoke hung around the concierge’s open door. Elena ran out and down the steps, muttering, ‘No, not now,’ but it was useless. Always these smells carried her to her aunt’s deathbed three months ago. She turned to walk home, head down against the freezing rain, hugging her shoulders, remembering Spain.

‘Tell me, Aunt Marisa. Do not leave me without telling.’

A complaining wind rattles the shutters. The air is thick with incense and disinfectant. The struggle is over. Marisa’s face is smooth and her eyes grow dim. Her fingers pull at the lace bedcover. Elena takes hold of her hand and pleads. ‘Stay, Aunt. Speak. All my life I have carried this shame.’

Marisa barely shakes her head.

‘I beg you, give me the reason.’

No sign. No movement. The fingers she holds are frail, knuckles loose beneath the skin like sticks. And the dying woman’s features, pale as watered milk, seem unfamiliar sunk in a white pillow above a white nightgown.

As far back as Elena can remember, her mother and aunt wore black. Shoes, skirts, shawls, scarves. Juanita and Marisa Martínez, old before their time, unsmiling, silent, thin, dressed all in black and covering their hair. Speaking softly as though fearful of being too loud. Kissing her with sorrow in their eyes. 

Elena bends her head, battling to calm herself, fighting the malevolence of the shuttered, creaking house. How terrible to die alone like this. Since she arrived yesterday, no one has come except the priest, and he with lips compressed, offering only the forgiveness of God, cold as the winter sun. 

‘What was it, Marisa? What was the terrible thing we did?’

Her aunt’s eyes are closed, her breathing is ragged. She is falling beyond the reach of sound. 

There is no escape. The shame will follow as far as Elena can run and waits always for her here, where she becomes a child again, shunned by the adults who mocked her as children. 

Nothing has altered. As she stepped from the taxi into the square, the hush fell, a gob of spittle landed in her path. And now, behind the shutters along the narrow stone streets, she senses how the villagers mutter and shuffle like vultures. Marisa Martínez is dying. Qué alivio! not before time.

From childhood, Elena learned to hide her face. With eyes downcast, to keep close to her mother and aunt as they ventured to market or church, or into the mountain vineyard where they worked apart from the other women. 

‘But, Marisa, it was never so bad for you and Mama as it was for me. You did not have to go to school.’

The memory sends a chill through her veins. The teacher brusque, the children cruel. Each day for years, shrinking in shadows, fearing their tricks and taunts.

‘Your mother is the devil’s whore, Elena. Vale! Where is your father?’

Her father? The devil? She ran home wailing with fear.

‘Alfredo was a good man,’ her mother comforted her. ‘But they punished him for showing care to Marisa and me. The shame was ours not his, ours before he knew us, we could not ask him to share it. And I was thirty-seven, too old to be his bride. He excused himself, he returned to Sevilla, we did not see him again. I did not tell him you would be born. Maybe he heard from others, maybe not. But you must not blame him, little one. Each must think of himself. Es el mundo.’

‘Yes...’ Elena remembers how Marisa sighed, paused in her incessant lace-making with longing in her eyes. ‘... yes, but you are a child of love, Elena. At least for one summer Juanita knew love. They vowed that neither of us should have husbands, when their own—’

‘Hush,’ said her mother. ‘Do not let envy wag your tongue.’

‘Pero por qué, Mamá? Why should you not have husbands?’

But no, her mother shook her head. And her aunt sniffed and resumed her work, knotting and twining the slender white threads.

Marisa’s fingers fidget now in Elena’s palm, picking and pulling, making lace from the air. Elena strokes them, repeating, ‘Tell me, Aunt. What wrong did we do?’

She was eight years old when she learned her father’s name. Twelve when her mother took fever and died, swearing her aunt to silence. Fifteen when she walked for hours, down into the valley, to board a bus to Seville and knock at her father’s door. 

‘Nada, papa,’ she whispered as she approached. ‘I want nothing. Only to see your face and to know the reason my family is cursed.’

Too late. The previous winter Alfredo had died also and his house was sold.

No answer in Seville. Her mother dead. The village impenetrably hostile. And now, Marisa, the last who might tell her, taking the secret to the grave. 

‘Have pity,’ Elena cries aloud. ‘All my life, will no one answer me?’

She clutches the cold fingers to her cheek. The eyelids tremble. The blue lips part and move. 

‘Aunt?’ She bends her ear to catch the sound.

‘There.’

‘What? Where?’

The fingers stir. She lets them go. ‘There.’ The hand drops, then moves again, as if to make a fist, as if to point.

‘Where, Aunt. Where?’ She bends her head to catch the dying whisper.

‘In the drawer.’

Henry

The train reservation was safe in his wallet. Now a letter of confirmation arrived from The Royal Highland Hotel, making his heart pump faster. 

Five days to go.

The flier still lay in its envelope on the kitchen table. He slid it out with feigned inattention, seeking the thrill of surprise once more.

Marjorie Macpherson... 

Have you ever wished... 

Discover her secrets... 

Join her...

Suddenly his insides were dissolving with terror. In his mind he was at the door of the Reference Room of the Inverness Library, trying to go in. For the hundredth time he struggled to imagine it. He would arrive last not first, he’d decided, on the dot of seven. Resigned to his absence, she would be surveying the expectant faces, but as he came in her eyes would meet his. She wouldn’t speak. She would smile barely a flicker. Their gaze would hold as he strode forward to take his place at the back of the tight circle of chairs.

What would he see? What would she see? Panic still threatened, like a cat waiting to pounce. 

‘I must decide what to wear,’ he said loudly. He would distract himself with that.

He liked his best suit. At Mother’s funeral, Peter had sniped that the snug-fitting waistcoat gave him a Mafioso air. But no, it wouldn’t do—pinstripes were too formal. He substituted moleskins, checked shirt, tweed jacket, the Sunday-pub gear he’d worn in the photograph that was lying on Marjorie’s writing-desk. Or beside her bed.

The thought of the photograph had his heart racing. He kept a copy among the circulars stuffed in the toast-rack. He pulled it out and scrutinised it anxiously, relieved to see how likeable he appeared, relaxed in a summer garden, smiling to camera. Himself, yet not himself.

He was breathing more easily. This was the man she would see, the man he would be. And she... she would be Marjorie.

He held tightly to the photograph. 

He’d felt handsome that glorious Sunday last June, briefly confident in the role of romantic hero. He’d caught sight of himself unawares in the hall mirror as he came in from the pub, buoyed by a couple of brandies. He’d seen it could be so. He’d marched down his front path and up his neighbour’s before the mood could pass.

‘Hope you don’t mind, Trevor, but I need my photo taking.’ 

‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,’ Trevor had intoned, propelling his Super-Lite chair over the ramps into his back garden. Too vain himself, thank goodness, to think of asking for reasons. ‘Which background would Sir prefer? Roses, foxgloves or whitewashed brick?’

Was Marjorie perhaps wheelchair-bound like Trevor, Henry had sometimes wondered. It wouldn’t put him off.

Foxgloves, he’d chosen, and the mock-orange coming into bloom. And deaf to Trevor’s heckling, with courage gathered from the pub and the hall mirror, and the scent of new blossom in his nostrils, he’d smiled into the lens as though straight into his beloved’s eyes.

The ghost of his mother coughed gently from her chair by the window. When he lifted his eyes from the photograph, she too was smiling. All would be well. He picked up the secateurs. He was due at Trevor’s. He set off along the hall.

Where he saw in the mirror a nondescript, middle-aged man with fear in his eyes. He called to the kitchen, ‘Please, Mother. You mustn’t be kind. What do you really think?’

She came to the doorway. ‘You’ve a strong chin, Henry,’ she said. ‘Plenty of hair. Good teeth.’

He struggled to see himself favourably. Taller than he was wide. Solvent and solid. Nice, damn it. Dependable, decent, a man of integrity. He was in with a chance, surely?

It was high time he told someone. It would help make it real.

‘I’m in Scotland next weekend,’ he said lightly as he drew the bolts on Trevor’s French window. 

‘You’ll be back to take me for my fitting, I hope.’

Trevor’s new leg. Henry nodded. ‘Monday. Yes. No problem.’ After all Marjorie lived in London. He carried the stepladder into the garden. ‘Inverness is where I’m off to. I’ve not been there before.’ He set the ladder up on the uneven flowerbed and tested his weight on the bottom step. ‘It isn’t a client I’m seeing.’ He climbed gingerly upwards, unlocking the secateur blades. ‘Actually, it’s...’

How should he describe her?

‘It’s a lass.’ 

‘Oh yes?’ said Trevor. ‘Be savage, for God’s sake, Henry. Be merciless.’

‘What?’ The ladder wobbled. He peered through the thicket of wisteria twigs.

Trevor frowned up from his chair. ‘Prune to two buds it says here. It all has to come off.’

Elena

The days were passing so slowly, did Mikhail not feel them the same way? Yet he remained silent. She could think of nothing but Spain and Mikhail, Mikhail and Spain, wanting one, loathing the other.

How much she was missing him. His strong arms, his kisses, his soft Russian voice. But more than these things, without him she was beginning to dislike herself again, to feel she was a bad and undeserving person.

She unwrapped and reread the horrors found in Marisa’s linen drawer, praying for release from her burden, but it did not come. It was not her fault, yet forever she must carry the shame, as Jesus carried the sins of the world.

Mikhail had made her feel forgiven. Gradually she had told him everything, her worst, most ugly self, and still his eyes shone with love. In her whole life, no one had been this way before, accepting her fears and resentments, allowing her to speak her bitterness with honesty.

‘This is who you are, Elena. Your suffering is part of you. Always I will understand.’ 

She should have known it could not continue. Ever since she had told him her mother’s secrets, he had been seeking remedies. 

‘For now you can mend yourself, Elena. When you ran, the pain followed you. With the truth you can go home. Together in Spain with me you will find the cure.’

Wrong. Wrong. Why would he not understand? Nothing had changed. Spain had made her who she was and there could be no cure.

Spain, and el malo. ‘Urquhart’—that was the evil one’s name. How to pronounce it? Oor-coo-art? This name was all she knew, and the year, 1937, and the place, her village high in the Sierra Nevada behind the Republican lines. It was not enough information. How many times had she typed words into Mikhail’s laptop, begging the Internet for a clue? So many Urquharts in the world, but none of them el malo. He was dead, almost certainly. If not in 1937, then later. Had he lived, he would be more than eighty years old.

Mikhail and Spain. Spain and Mikhail. It was no use. She could not sleep or choose. At work her colleagues asked, was she all right? She shook her head, not knowing how to answer. How could they understand when Mikhail did not?  

She could wait no longer. She rang his office, but he was not there today, they said. She tried his room, his mobile, she left messages, she waited. Still he did not respond. 

Her anxiety grew. Where was he? Was he still angry? She set aside her pride and ran back through the winter shadows. Braved the stench of incense and disinfectant and rode the lift again. 

Her knock brought no answer. Tears blurred her eyes. She had Mikhail’s key in her hand. She turned it and stepped inside.

The bed was unmade, today’s newspaper on the table, an aroma of coffee in the air. He had been here, he had heard her messages, but he declined to answer them. His silence filled the room. To stay, to go, it was the same. She was broken and could not be mended.

The laptop screen flickered, renewing itself. It sparkled through her tears. A game of Minesweeper, lost with only a single bomb to find, the little yellow face, its mouth turned down, inviting her to click and play again. She took hold of the mouse and instead clicked on Google. She typed ‘Urquhart’ into the search box one more time.

Undiscovered Scotland: Urquhart Castle... picturesque ruins, north shore of Loch Ness... owned by Historic Scotland and open to the public

The Clan Urquhart Website... Urquhart motto: “Meane Weil, Speak Weil and Doe Weil”

Angus Urquhart... eyewitness recollections of the Spanish civil war...

What? Elena gasped. She double-clicked the site. Read hungrily. 

El malo! It was he!

Book Group... third Friday of each month... 7 till 10.

Today, what was today? She counted Fridays on her fingers as the printer gave her the page. Tomorrow, yes. But time was short. She must visit her apartment, pack, tell her boss, check there was a seat on Eurostar. She headed for the door.

Then paused. Looked back at Mikhail’s rumpled bed. Returned to the table. Scribbled a note for him.

I am here and gone, Thursday the 17th. Are we still angry with each other? I leave messages on your mobile. I must speak with you but cannot now delay. I find Urquhart alive! I go to Scotland. I will ring from there. Please Mikhail, answer the phone. Elena.

Leaning to put the note on the pillow, she stalled. The mattress beneath her hand was warm. She stood a moment staring at the bed. It told her nothing. She turned again and left.

Henry

The alarm went off on cue. His bag lay packed beside the bed. He tried not to think, he tried not to be afraid. He was into his moleskins and striding out bravely towards the station, taking deep breaths of the frosty air, head high among the Guildford commuters. Inverness was far away. He calmed himself with thoughts of its being an imaginary city, as approachable as the end of the rainbow.

Waterloo swept him off the train in an immense, sucking tide of workers. He had to struggle like a spider in a bathtub to break free of the flow into the Underground and join the queue for taxis. 

‘Kings Cross Station.’ He had spoken the words. He was gliding over the river and up Kingsway, the traffic flowing fast and sure, stealing his breath.

He was out of the taxi now, checking the platform on the departure-board, swimming against another tide of commuters. He was making his way towards a train that quivered with potential like a rocket at Cape Canaveral. 

The grey-suited crowds were left behind. Here were others, dressed like himself in greens and browns, backs to the teeming centre, faces to the outermost reaches. His heart was lifting on a rush of certainty. Fear and doubt were dropping away. His ticket was in his hand, his carriage was in sight. In a few minutes he would be flying, clear and straight to the heart of the glen, where his love awaited him.

Then. What? No! His brother!

In crumpled grubby black as usual. Shambling ahead with that unmistakable half-saunter-half-fidget, glancing back along the platform as he reached for a door, sending Henry bolting into his carriage, where he sat shaking and panting and confused.

How the hell was Peter here? Was this a set-up? No one knew about Marjorie. Did they?

His euphoria took a nosedive. The romantic hero tumbled from the stepladder. In a flash of clear vision, he saw himself through his brother’s eyes, laughably past it, acting crazily, dotty about some stranger who would tell him to get lost, tell him, in Peter’s unkind phrase, to ‘get a life’.

Goddamit, he needed a drink.

Chapter Three

Peter

At the far end of the train, Peter Jennings did furious battle with himself. What was he thinking, shelling out next month’s rent on a February trek to brass-monkey land? A rip-off wild-goose chase, sure as wild-goose eggs, and he the mug. But what? What con? What brand of joker? Bloody mind games. Straight through the crap, no messing, he’d give them hell, making some kind of fool of him.

Growl under his breath, then slump. Big deal, no less the sucker. Blowing the scam, then pissing off bedraggled through the no doubt freezing rain to some crummy B&B. He could see it now: massive granite, mangy cardboard cells, guarded money-up-front by a grim teetotal widow, mummified in twenty-seven layers of her own laborious knitting, her multitudinous cats in baskets mulched in layers of knitted squares and ancient fur-balls, jumping with fleas. Skint and sober into bed, with prospect of no breakfast, breathing in the unaffordable stench of the other fuckers’ kippers, before another eight hours courtesy of Signal Failures Inc, scratching the bumps red-raw.

Shit.

Yet still excitement batted inside the cynicism like a fly in a balloon. The bastards had him high and hooked, one whiff and he was craving more. Potent as the cries of encore on the pub performance trail. 

And yes. Why not? Keep moving. Inverness, wherever: somewhere to go. A change from waiting for Fortune to step into the corner caff, where the diet of black coffee and shortbread began to seem more repetitious than inspirational. Or into the office stacked with malign heaps of envelopes demanding to be stuffed with survey forms, plus tea to be made for the suits with privet hedges, flush with loot like big brother Henry, insulting him with their smiles.

Or for it to fall through his letterbox, like the occasional come-on: Thank you for sending poems. Interested in reading more. To be followed, please just once, by YES YES YES and large advance, not unfortunately unable, no call for genius here, mate, and wishing you luck elsewhere.

But now, who knew but Fortune had fallen fair, as always in the end she did, if you were her child, which definitely he was, or would be, it was only a matter of time. And okay, nothing might come of this, but a child of Fortune must fly with the wild geese, must keep the stream of consciousness flowing smooth and lucid, open to the monster of a poem that would one day rise from the depths uncoiling itself into words that no one could possibly ignore.

Yes! Chew finger-end and glare through dust-streaked window. Spray-paint signatures giving way to brave stretch of greenery, atop which Ally Pally sailing by. Yes, yesterday morning, though not through letterbox, too big for the pathetic flap in the Wind-in-the-Willows door of his mouldering, rented houseboat in fucking Suburbiton. And morning was an overstatement, middle of the night more like. Anyway long before any self-respecting poet was awake, let alone out of bed, for who gave a tuppenny toss about Personnel’s mispunctuated little essays on the abuse of flexitime? Yes, Thursday, far too early, through festering dreams had come the knock knock knocking, like a frantic audition for the Scottish play, or the KGB come to grab him for the gulag archipelago, which was one sure route to make the world sit up and take note, lucky bugger, knock knock knock and a ‘Sign here, mate’ and the departing back of merry, whistling Postman Pat.

And there it was. It was in his rucksack now. Take it out. Examine it suspiciously. Draw savage breath. Jiffybag with typed address. Contents: a dog-eared bundle of A4, covered—in spidery script of faded blue ink—with two hundred numbered quatrains of Scottish Gaelic, signed Angus Urquhart 1999. Plus library compliments slip with cryptic message. 

Peter, This is precious. Please return it, soon and in person. The reward will surprise you. Ask at the library. FU.

And FU too! 

No dosh. No wherefore. No ‘Mr Jennings’. Just, ‘Do as I say.’ 

Cheek of the devil, like hell he would. And what in hell’s name was he doing, chasing off to some godforsaken Scottish library to play some game of pass-the-parcel?

Too late. Next stop The Frozen North, and fuck it he’d had nothing to eat today and he was famished.

Elena

‘Ay!’

‘Sorry.’

‘De nada.’

In the buffet car, Elena briefly registered the young man’s scowl and strong blue eyes as he turned and pushed past her. The scowl warmed her. It was good to find anger beyond her own head. She stepped forward through the hot cotton-wool smell of microwaved burgers and fired some words at el camarero. 

‘That sandwich, please. And juice. Naranja. Orange. Thank you.’ She banged her money down.

Her English was poor—she had learned it from a bored teacher. Her fury against el malo had swollen to encompass the language he spoke. It shamed her mouth to utter it.

Trust me, Carlos. Urquhart. Two English words. Two names. Making one filthy lie. On a yellowing, unfranked picture-postcard of the Loch Ness monster.

Blind with fury, she collided with yet more passengers and wrenched at the sliding doors. Silently she repeated the vow that was keeping her strong. I will find him, Aunt. I will find him, Mother, I promise. He will not escape. 

What revenge would she have? She hardly knew. Let him only be alive—Oor-coo-art, el malo, el bastardo—then she would know. She would denounce him, yes, but more. She would shame him somehow, as cruelly and indelibly as he had shamed her family. It would not be enough. Nothing could be enough.