Losing My Identity Page 10

  ‘You see what I mean about it getting out of hand?’

  ‘But that view!’ He parked carefully and got out to take in the full one-eighty panorama of sea loch and hill. Several oystercatchers and a solitary gull were in full cry. Somewhere inland, the long, gargling call of a curlew – rare enough, those days. When Leila was a child, they’d been everywhere.

  There was little wind, so the loch’s voice was a soft, insistent whisper, not the rumble and crash you’d get in a westerly. Leila closed her eyes for a moment to savour the heady scent of sea-wrack and iodine and ozone.

  She’d never felt lonely at Ardvreckie. The steady beat of the tide in the loch was like a heart. A dependable one. And on a still night, that half-human sigh when the tide turned. Even when she was there in cold weather, she’d sleep with the bedroom window cracked open, so that she could hear it.

  It hadn’t always held good memories. For several years – in her twenties and thirties – Leila hadn’t visited at all.

  Although Greer always refused to leave the Dennistoun flat, she’d been ashamed of it. Leila wasn’t allowed to invite school friends home. But once she reached her teens, she could always ask at least one to accompany them to Ardvreckie during the summer holidays. Some years, three were invited, one after the other.

  Lynn Andrews came to stay in the year when they were both fourteen.

  Two miles closer to the village, some Christian happy-clappy set of do-gooders ran a summer camp for city boys from disadvantaged backgrounds.

  The year Lynn came to stay, it took her about two days to get her eye on one of the disadvantaged boys. Being from a poor home hadn’t stunted his growth. Or his sexuality. He was probably a year older than the girls, but already a man. Lynn demanded that they make the trip to the village to buy ice cream every day, often walking barefoot along the melting tarmac road. She wore the latest fashionable full skirts. She even slicked her mouth with deathly-pale pink lipstick, once they were out of sight of Ardvreckie. Leila was always in her child’s outfit of shorts and severely-buttoned blouse. (Lynn would unfasten the top three buttons of it, impatiently. ‘Honestly, Lilo, you look like a little kid.’) Inevitably, they’d meet the object of Lynn’s interest, loitering with his sidekick on the wooden bridge over the burn. Inevitably, the girls had to buy ice cream for them too.

  Two days before her father was due to collect her, Lynn shook Leila awake in the wee small hours. She was fully dressed. ‘Come on. Let’s go out for a while.’ Before Leila was properly conscious, her friend had opened the bedroom window, shinned out onto the ledge, and dropped onto the boxes she’d had the foresight to pile underneath earlier. ‘Hurry up,’ she hissed. ‘You don’t need to put on anything fancy.’

  ‘How will we get back in?’

  ‘There’s a ladder. I noticed earlier. We can use that.’

  They crept towards the garden wall. The front gate squeaked. The boys were waiting just over the wall.

  Leila had half-thought of turning to go back, but both cottage doors would be locked from the inside, and there was no way she could move the old-fashioned timber ladder on her own.

  She shimmied over the wall after Lynn and scampered towards the shore with the other three.

  Lynn and her beau soon disappeared into the long bracken, while Leila sat miserably on a rock beside Frankie, the other boy. He was actually quite a pleasant lad. Harmless. Not the type she’d ever have met in Glasgow, all the same.

  When Lynn eventually came back, the lads wandered off in the direction of the camp, while the girls went home.

  Inevitably, Greer was waiting for them in her dressing-gown, her face pink with anger.

  There had been a hell of a stooshie next day. The two boys were sent home in disgrace, and Sir John withdrew permission for the camp to use his land ever again. Leila was grounded for the rest of the holidays.

  So the place had always held a sense of guilt for her. Poor Frankie got punished for doing absolutely nothing.

  Hari positively gloated in the place. He and Leila walked down to the edge of the sea-loch.

  ‘One of the men from the estate used to clear the rocks from this, so there was a seaweed-free path out to the sandy patch for swimming,’ she said.

  ‘We could swim!’

  ‘Not quite yet. It’ll be freezing. Maybe later in the summer, once it’s warmed up a bit.’

  ‘I’ll hold you to that – I’m already hoping I get invited back?’ He nudged her playfully with his elbow.

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘It’s so peaceful! Do you own the shore?’

  ‘I suppose the Crown Estate does. No one ever comes here – maybe the odd walker, in the summer. But mostly, it’s very private.’ They could go skinny-dipping. One day, perhaps. ‘Being so close to the water means it never gets truly dark here, even in winter. There’s always some reflected light.’

  The palaver of getting the rabbits’ pen set up, and the beasts happily settled was quickly accomplished. Leila still couldn’t get used to the way they’d watch her, huge-eyed, mouths full of hay, jaws working. She was sure they resented her.

  She felt a warm glow of domesticity as she prepared their meal, and watched Hari eat eagerly.

  ‘Is this Egyptian food?’ He seemed to have enjoyed it anyway. Clean plate.

  ‘I imagine it’s more Moroccan. Middle-Eastern fusion cuisine, that’s my bag.’ And she was sad for a nano-second, remembering how amicably Sam and she would work side by side in the kitchen. If only we could have stayed in kitchens all our lives… ‘Why – doesn’t it measure up to curry?’

  ‘It’s delicious. Was your mother a keen cook too then?’

  ‘My mother? My mother would have been quite happy with a house that had no kitchen!’

  The only slightly sour note was after supper. Leila hadn’t thought to acquire and transport a tea-master’s cabinet of curiosities. Nor had Hari dreamt that any civilised person didn’t stock at least six kinds of Darjeeling in every house they owned.

  The Scottish Blend teabags in the cupboard had probably been there for at least five years. Leila sniffed surreptitiously. ‘It’s an airtight tin. I’m sure it’ll be fine. The local shop’s shut by now, and I’m certain they won’t have anything more specialised than this anyway.’

  He sighed. ‘It’ll be all right as a breakfast drink. The first time you have breakfast at my place, I shall give you Assam. And I might even allow you to put milk in that. Soya milk.’

  She wanted to tell him not to bother. She loathed soya milk with a great loathing. But she was lost in analysing ‘the first time you have breakfast at my place’.

  ‘Tell me more about this mystery over your grandmother,’ he said.

  She recounted what she had discovered via the art school and the internet. But he had no more idea than Leila what else she could do to solve the conundrum.

  ‘I wish I’d known about it while my mother was alive. I have no idea if she actually knew Eva Connor wasn’t her mother – but she must have, surely? I don’t have much experience of children, but I know I remember my grandmother, and she died when I was ten. Flora seems to have vanished sometime shortly before my mother and Eva moved to Roseisle Drive, so Greer would have been seven or eight. So she must have had memories of her?’

  Hari shrugged. ‘I suppose so. She never mentioned anything about it?’

  ‘Not a thing. If I hadn’t found that watercolour, I’d have been none the wiser. Isn’t it odd, all the things you realise you should have asked people while you had the chance?’

  He sighed. ‘Maybe in most cases it would make no difference. People only ever tell you what they want you to hear, even parents and children, and husbands and wives.’

  Leila didn’t want him to think about his dead wife. She leapt up from the table.

  ‘Right. I’m off to bed. We should make an early start tomorrow.’

  She put three loads of laundry through the machine next morning. She’d been a little worried that there would be bl
ood-soaked scrubs, but of course all these probably got taken care of by work. Just shirts that looked too clean to have been worn, underwear, one set of bedlinen, several towels. In a couple of hours, the back garden was full of billowing laundry; her pink boiler-suits alongside his gear.

  Hari smirked at her workwear.

  ‘The farmers call me “the pink lady”. I was bored with green wellies and coveralls when I finished with the last practice, and I bought myself my first pair of bright pink wellies. Then I decided that, since I didn’t have to please anyone other than myself, being my own boss, I’d buy coveralls to match. I have them monogrammed by the supplier – look.’

  He appeared duly impressed. He had rolled up his sleeves and got into sanding down the window frames Leila wanted to repaint. By suppertime, they’d made enormous progress. All the woodwork was sanded and primed, and the first couple of frames even had their gloss coat on.

  The washing was all beautifully dry. She gave Hari the task of folding everything that needed folded, but kept her eye on what he was doing.

  ‘Not the shirts. I have hangers inside. They can go on those. Makes them easier to iron.’

  ‘Ah – right.’ The hesitancy in his voice was an immediate give-away.

  ‘You don’t know how to iron your own shirts?’

  ‘Never had to. Maybe I need to learn.’

  She was finding she enjoyed teasing him, and said she’d teach him, in that case.

  ‘I’ll do them for you this time. But I’d prefer to wait till we’re back in Glasgow. There’s an iron here, but I have a much more efficient one at home. It’ll take me no time at all.’

  He had split the shirts between the four hangers she’d given him. ‘There seems to be a button missing from this one?’ She rooted in the back of the washing-machine drum and found it. ‘There you are. Easy to sew back on.’ She glanced at his face. ‘OK, so I’ll do that too!’

  She gathered the folded items into a clean bag. Jesus! He’d even folded her knickers. With the crotch to the top; they looked almost indecent. She never folded them like that. She was on the point of getting angry, but laughed at herself, just in time. OCD, moi? Chill, Leila! You’ve been living alone too long. Because if there was one thing Hari wasn’t, it was crude. He was the politest man she knew. Prudish, almost. She couldn’t abide the sort of man who’d emerge from the gents still doing up his flies. But there was no way she could imagine Hari ever doing that, even when he was at home by himself.

  She lazed in one of the ancient, saggy armchairs while Hari cooked. He was critical of the state of her knives. ‘A sharp knife’s much safer than a blunt one. I wish I’d brought my steel with me.’

  ‘There should be one in the drawer to the left of where you’re standing.’

  He found the sharpening steel, and for a quarter of an hour, Leila’s teeth were on edge. He was pleased with his work. It made her flesh creep, to see how meticulously he prepared the blades. She couldn’t visualise this uber-clean, fastidious man in scrubs and a blood-stained apron. She didn’t want to picture those clever, gentle, pristine hands doing what he had to do, day in day out. But if she ever got murdered, or fell under a bus, and her body had to be sliced open in the interests of justice, then sewn up again, she’d want to nominate Hari Gill to do it, every time. Yet he couldn’t sew on a button. But then, there were probably underlings to do the sewing-up-again. He plucked people’s hearts out and weighed them. I wonder what mine weighs? Is it the same as it was before October 2012?

  She shuddered and slammed her book shut. ‘I like a man who knows his place is in the kitchen.’

  ‘My mother was determined I should be able to cook. She said to me “If you’re going to be living on your own, you’d better learn to feed yourself properly”.’

  Leila couldn’t quite figure that out. His wife apparently died a tad over three years earlier, but she was sure he’d said his mother died before that. Maybe he meant she told him that when he was a student? But no, he’d said lived at home all the time he was at uni. After uni then. His first hospital appointment. That’d be it. He’d mentioned he was in Birmingham for a few years.

  They didn’t take the food outside because of the midges, but they risked taking their final glasses of wine onto the small verandah at the front. Leila lit two citronella candles. They sat, talking lazily, until almost ten. The colours in the sky grew more and more vivid.

  ‘Let’s climb up the hill behind the house to see it better,’ she said.

  A typical West Highland sunset. There was enough low cloud for the entire sky to be deep carmine, with stripes of lemon and vermillion and green on the horizon. All the colours were reflected in the water of Loch Fyne. It felt as if the world were holding its breath. Leila was holding her breath too. The air between Hari and her was crackling with static. Neither of them spoke. They just gazed. That’s what the Yanks call old folks’ homes, isn’t it? Sunset homes. I wonder where I’ll grow old?

  ‘I’d forgotten how amazing sunsets by the sea can be,’ he said. ‘It’s beautiful. And so are you.’

  Damn! She’d been so sure he wasn’t going to turn mawkish.

  He’d caught her expression. ‘Sorry. That was a corny remark. But I mean it. You are beautiful.’

  ‘Hari! I’m sixty-four.’

  ‘So?’

  He laid his arm round her shoulders, hesitantly enough to reassure her.

  ‘This is an amazing place! You said your family owned it for a long time?’

  ‘Ever since I can remember. I had my second birthday here – somewhere at home are the snaps to prove it.’ Though she was pretty sure it was a holiday let in those days, and she and Greer and Grannie only had it for June and July. The thought of Grannie sent a shiver down her spine.

  In fact, Greer hadn’t owned the cottage until Leila was around fifteen. That year, she announced that Sir John had signed over the place to her as a gift. It was all legitimate. She left it to Leila in her will, along with the flat and all her possessions; the title deeds were fully in order. That was the same year she’d announced that Leila was old enough to sleep in the cottage alone, and that she wasn’t to worry if she was home late a few times. There were guests at the big house, and Sir John – though it stuck in her mind that her mother called him “John” that time – ‘John likes me to help him entertain, seeing as he’s on his own.’

  Leila had a sudden, disturbing memory of another birthday in the cottage. She must have been five or six. Greer was a somewhat distracted presence. Grannie had coaxed a cake out of the temperamental oven of the kitchen range (the place had no electricity until 1957; the date was engraved on the telegraph pole in the garden; she must remember to show Hari when they went back down). Grannie had been furious about something. ‘Like mother, like daughter,’ she was muttering to herself. And Leila had run out to her den on top of the enormous rock at the back of the garden, puzzling over what she’d done wrong.

  Hari drew her a little closer. ‘Is this OK? You were shivering a little.’

  ‘It is. But Hari – I want to take things very, very slowly.’

  ‘Of course. You’re the boss.’ He kissed the top of her head, and he held her hand as they walked back to the house. They didn’t talk. She appreciated that in him – he understood the gift of silence.

  Once back at the house, a kiss that barely brushed her lips as they said goodnight, and he went obediently to his own bedroom.

  Most people identified companionship as an essential part of happiness. As a vet, Leila knew that many found that in a cat or a dog or a horse or a ferret. Or a rabbit. She’d always believed she was unusual in that she’d not needed the company of a ‘significant other’. Maybe it merely marked her down as an emotional coward? Having a significant other left you a hostage to fortune. Heartbreak was the inevitable outcome. Why trade autonomy for a chance of happiness that couldn’t, by definition, last for ever?

  After Grannie – Eva – died, Leila would be taken up to the big house more often, u
ntil she reached the age where school friends could be imported as companions, and they could be left to their own devices.

  She remembered Sir John though. He didn’t die until she was well into her twenties. She remembered his slim, tanned face with its aquiline, aristocratic profile. A handsome, energetic man, even in his sixties (which would have been the age he was in her earliest memories). There had been no Lady Arbuthnott, though whether he was a widower she had no idea.

  ‘No!’ she murmured to herself, turning her head into her pillow. She was recalling how the university friends who’d come to stay had teased her about Sir John, and muttered about the ‘dark Celts’, and the folk tales about ships from the Spanish Armada being wrecked on Scotland’s west coast… That was one mystery too far. No way she’d inherited a skin-tone like hers from a minor Scottish aristocrat. But he’d always been very indulgent towards her. She and her friends had free run of Ardvreckie House and its grounds, all summer long, and its ancient clinker-built rowing-boat, kept safe in its boathouse since the 1940s, and so sturdy Leila was sure they could have sailed safely to Ireland in it…

  As they left next day, Leila carefully tied up the binbag.

  ‘What do you do with rubbish here?’

  ‘Burn it or take it home with me. There’s no such thing as a rubbish collection down here. Never has been.’

  ‘I bet there is for the flats – couldn’t you leave it in a bin there?’

  She found that inordinately amusing. He was so strait-laced, but he’d be happy to see her sneak her trash into the bin someone else paid council tax on. She crammed the bag into the Range Rover’s boot. The bunnies could damn well put up with it.