Stonemouth (33 page)

Ellie drives much like she always did, with the same easy grace she brings to most tasks: braking seldom and gently, swinging the car quickly, neatly, into curves on a single stuck-to line she rarely needs to amend, carrying plenty of speed through the open bends and feeding the power back in progressively. Actually maybe her driving’s a little more erratic than it used to be, though that could be the road surfaces; they look more beaten up than I recall. Still, Ellie avoids the holes, factors those in, keeps everything smooth. We overtake a couple of tractors but then get stuck behind a slow driver in an old Kia, and stay there too long. This was always Ellie’s weakness as a driver: not quite aggressive enough. Naturally, she always thought that I was – to the same degree – not quite patient enough. I’m starting to think the truth lies somewhere in between, which definitely means I’m getting old.

Seven or so years ago Ellie and I drove down the coast to Pyvie, on a whim at the end of the season. The weather had cooled after a hot summer and the leaves were scattering off the trees to lie like litter on the brown earth. It was another snatched weekend, both of us back from our respective universities, like a forty-eight-hour leave. We’d taken one of the Murston dogs with us, an old golden Lab called Tumsh, heavy with age but still up for a run along a beach or a rabbit chase into the undergrowth.

We held hands, walked through drifts of leaves while Tumsh investigated interesting smells. We found the deserted tea room looking out over the beach with massed trees at either end, watching through the salt-streaked windows as the dog ran up and down the beach outside, barking at seagulls.

The tea room was closing for the winter later that afternoon. The staff – already mostly taken up with cleaning everything and packing everything away – served us with a sort of cheery brusqueness, from
a much reduced menu. Tea and yesterday’s baking, to the sound of catering clattering and voices impatient to be home.

Later, near one end of the beach, along from the pitted tarmac expanse of the car park, we discovered the remains of a little narrow-gauge railway system that must have given rides to kids. The track was only about as wide as my hand, outstretched, and there were some bits just lying around, scattered and loose. Where the tracks were still anchored to the ground, they snaked along between bushes and miniature hills, and in one place there was a dip and a mound where something like a cross between a bridge and a tunnel let a little twisty path arch over the railway. A wooden shed at one end of the complex might once have held the trains and engines that had run here, but they were long gone and the shed was wrecked, doors missing, wooden roof bowed with rot or age or maybe from kids jumping up and down on it.

I picked up one length of track, about as long as I was tall. It was very light, probably aluminium. I held it easily with one hand and could have broken it, it felt, using two. Tumsh tensed near by, front legs splayed, thinking the length of track was a stick I was about to throw.

On the beach we found a thick length of rope, just three metres long but as thick as my arm, sturdy enough, it looked, to moor supertankers with. She and I made jokes about enormous plugs, about giant bits of soap. The wind whipped the water, uncombing my hair, and sending hers flying and lashing about her head and face until she tamed it with a woollen hat.

We walked with hands in pockets, but arm in arm, uncoupling only to pick up a stick and throw it for the dog. Tumsh tore across the tarnished beach, sending sand arcing with each turn, stopping at the water if a stick went into the waves, when he’d stand there, panting, staring at the stick, then looking back at us, tongue lolling.

Later we walked along a path by the side of the sea, near the abandoned miniature railway network, and, suddenly, there was a train: real, full size, charging down the coastline from Stonemouth,
heading for Aberdeen and Edinburgh and then to who knew where – London probably, Penzance perhaps – roaring through the trees just above us, close enough for us to smell its diesel smoke and see the people – their faces pale, like ghosts’ faces – looking down at us.

‘Let’s wave,’ she said, and raised her hand, waving.

I waved too. I think we both felt like children, then we felt foolish, because there was nobody waving back, and it is a sad thing to wave at a train and not have anybody bother to wave back at you, but then, in the last carriage before the rear engine unit and another blattering roar, there was a flurry of movement, and a wee face pressed up against the murky glass beneath a blur of childish arm and hand, waving.

We went back to the tea room. It was closed, all the tables, seats and signs taken inside behind rolled-down shutters, the staff car park deserted.

Not long before we left, on the way back to the car, Ellie hid behind a tree while Tumsh was off chasing a squirrel. When the dog came back he could tell she ought to be there, but he couldn’t see her. He barked, looked all about, jumped with his front legs only, barked again. Ellie cried out, ‘Tumsh! Oh, Tumsh boy!’ from behind the tree, making the dog bark more wildly, then she came strolling round, and the dog ran to her. She went down on her haunches, took its big face in her hands, shaking him side to side, telling him what a fine and silly dog he was.

The light started to go as great grey fleets of cloud rolled in off the sea, filling the sky, erasing any trace of sun and dragging, curled underneath them, light grey veils of rain, curved like tails.

In the car on the way back we had to keep the windows down because Tumsh must have rolled in something horrible; the rain started, and the smell coming off Tumsh and the rain slanting in through the cracked windows and the grey-brown landscape outside made the journey seem long and not much fun.

We were in a long queue of traffic stopped at some temporary traffic lights on the main road back north when Ellie said, ‘We
should get away, somewhere.’ She looked at me. ‘You and me, Stewart. When we’ve both finished our courses. If we’re going to stay together. Will we stay together, do you think?’

‘Eh? Course we will. We’ll be together for ever. That’s the general idea, isn’t it? You and me? Together?’

‘Yes. Until we’re old.’

‘Only
until
we’re old?’ I said, pretending shock. ‘Like, we should split up when we’re sixty or ninety or something?’

She smiled. ‘For ever.’ She held my arm. ‘But we should get away somewhere, don’t you think?’

‘Where to? What sort of place? How far away?’

‘I don’t know. Just somewhere else. Somewhere sunny, yeah? Sunny and hot. Just not here.’ She rested her head on my shoulder as I watched the lights far in the distance turn from red to green, probably too far ahead for us to make it through in this pulse of traffic. ‘Just…away,’ she said.

We started to edge forward.

So I’m sitting in Ellie’s Mini as we potter along behind the in-no-hurry Kia, remembering that day seven years ago, and how low I felt then for some reason. Maybe just the weather, maybe some combination of that and other trivial but still dispiriting details, like the dog stinking of decay, but maybe due to some premonition – through some brief internal glint of self-knowledge rather than anything superstitious – that what she and I had wasn’t going to last for ever after all: wouldn’t last sixty years or even six.

I watch Ellie’s face as we drive in procession behind the slower car. I have missed such moments. I would always do this: just watch her in profile as she drove. I was always waiting for a moment when she looked less than beautiful, when she looked ordinary. Never found one.

Grier, I noticed the other day as we walked from the blinged X5 to Bessel’s Café, can do stealth. On the street, she walked differently, held herself differently – her head down, her expression frowning
a little, her gait sort of efficient but gauche, untidy – and basically attracted no attention. In the café she seemed to shake off this magic cloak of semi-invisibility and suddenly she was
there
, as obvious as a beautiful-actress-playing-plain in an ancient Hollywood movie taking off her glasses and shaking down her hair.
Why, Miss Murston
…That was when the majority of male eyes started turning in her direction.

I’ve a friend – a close friend by London standards, just an acquaintance given the way I came to think of friends when I grew up here – who’s a fashion photographer and he says you can have a genuine supermodel turn up at the studio and you think she’s the cleaner at first, until she’s turned on whatever it is she has to turn on, the camera is pointing at her and she’s dressed in whatever she’s supposed to be dressed in, however barely. Then she looks no more like a cleaning lady than she does a laser printer. Kapow; lights on, burning.

I guess Grier is like that; whatever beauty she has is dynamic, animated; a function, not a state.

With Ellie, it’s not something she can turn off. I remember her being almost as beautiful when she’s asleep as she is fully awake; it’s there in the depth of her, in her bones, in her skin and hair.

Eye of the beholder and all that. One of the truer clichés, I guess. I’m biased, but I think El’s only got more beautiful over the last five years. There’s a sort of substance to her looks now, maybe even a leavening of sadness or world-weary wisdom informing them; making her beauty seem earned at last, rather than just something she fell so casually heir to.

Or not; I know I’m bringing my own knowledge and prejudices to this evaluation. Would I still think she looks so pensively exquisite if I didn’t know about the failed marriage, the miscarriage, the many things left undone, unfinished? Never mind the hurt I caused her.

And – because I still know which one of the two I’d rather spend the rest of my days with – shouldn’t any rational comparison between El and Grier favour the one who has to work at being attractive, rather than the one who can’t help it?

We
finally whistle past the Kia on a long, dipping straight. It’s a simple, safe, even elegant bit of overtaking, but the wee old guy driving – hunched down, staring forward with an expression of pinched, peering concentration and gripping the steering wheel like a lifebelt in a storm – still flashes his lights at us.

‘And you, sir,’ I murmur, looking in the side mirror.

‘Oh, now,’ Ellie says. ‘Probably just trying to wash his windscreen.’ Then I hear her take a breath. ‘Listen,’ she says.

Here we go.
‘Listening,’ I say, turning in my seat and crossing my arms.

‘I don’t want you to—’ Ellie starts. She sighs. ‘I don’t want you to …’ Her voice trails off. She shakes her head, puffs her cheeks and blows air out, making the kind of noise I associate with exasperated Parisian taxi drivers. She looks at me. I’m looking at her. ‘It is…over,’ she says, turning her attention back to the road. She spares me only occasional glances after this.

‘You mean you and me?’ I ask.

‘Yeah. I’m not…It’s all in the past now, yeah? All done with. Water under the bridge, soap under the wedding ring and all that. That’s how you feel? I mean, it is, isn’t it?’

Fuck.
‘What sort of idiot would I be to feel any other way?’ She’s silent for a while, then she says, ‘Okay, but I need a real answer.’

Fuck and double fuck.
‘Okay. I still…In some ways my feelings haven’t changed. Towards you, I mean. I…I mean I – sorry,’ I say, having to clear my throat. ‘Do you have any water in…?’

‘Here.’ She passes me an opened half-litre bottle of mineral water without looking at me. ‘Not what it says on the label, mind; best Toun watter fra tha tap back hame.’

‘Thanks.’ I drink, taking my time.

‘You were saying,’ she says.

I hand her the bottle back. ‘I don’t expect anything from you, Ellie. I mean, not even forgiveness. I’m certainly not back…I’m not here expecting you to, you know, umm, fall into my arms or
anything. Ahm…Too much has happened, we’ve been apart too long, and in the end…well, I did what I did. But I’m still, as our American cousins would say…I still have feelings for you.’ My mouth has gone dry again and I have to clear my throat once more. ‘For whatever that’s worth.’ I take a deep breath. ‘And if it’s worth nothing, then that’s fair enough. I accept that. But I…I just don’t want to lie to you.’

She nods thoughtfully, drives calmly.

‘You asked, so I’m telling you,’ I tell her. But by this point I start to realise I’m talking just to fill the silence, and so I shut up.

‘Okay,’ she says. There’s a pause. ‘Okay.’

There’s a long silence af ter this, but it is – I think – companionable.

‘So,’ I find myself saying eventually, ‘did you come to find me at Al and Morven’s…because the boys roughed me up?’

She looks thoughtful, still concentrating on the road ahead. ‘I suppose I did. They’d made me angry, made me want to get back at them. Told them I was coming over to your mum and dad’s, just to talk to you. Or I’d make a point of seeing you at the funeral tomorrow, and Donald would know all about it if they even thought of threatening you again. So…stupid.’ She shakes her head. ‘And then bragging to me about it.’

‘Unintended consequences.’

She snorts. ‘At least with Murdo and Norrie you know it is unintended. Nothing as sophisticated as reverse psychology ever clouded their motivations. If Grier did something like that, the first thing you’d think would be, What’s she
really
up to?’

‘Seriously? She’s that Machiavellian?’

‘Oh, you’ve no idea.’ Ellie sucks in a breath. ‘Remember that thing about Grier creeping into Callum’s bed when she was just a kid?’