Just Last Night(29)

Later, I remember him being a Most Crushed On at school, wreathed with the unattainability that’s only enhanced by a remote and distant nature, and given a rock-star halo that only an older good-looking lad at school and actual rock stars can achieve. Girls would breathe, “Oh my God, Finlay Hart,” as if the very syllables could get them pregnant.

Then eventually he disappeared altogether, first to London and then to the States. He was very much one of those kinds of people who flit through the same space as you only briefly, and leave in a cloud of jet exhaust fumes and rumor, as soon as they can. The type too otherworldly to have any social media accounts, but in a deep trawl on Google you can find a mention of them in the society diary about an art gallery opening in 2008. Who just seem to move faster, and differently, and have their own laws of physics. By the time you notice them, they’re long gone.

“Yeah, he only went to New York because he got model-scouted in Covent Garden and the agency paid for his fare over,” I remember Susie scoffing. “Never mention this though, he can’t know I told you,” which was a little theatrical of her, given I’d not seen him in decades.

To my twenty-something ears, this as any sort of embarrassment was up there with “What a loser, he only uses his BAFTA as a toilet doorstop.”

“He did modeling? Why can’t it be mentioned, did he have his willy out or something?”

“Oh, no idea, it’s just too much,” Susie said, putting the back of her hand to her forehead in mock faint. I gathered on that occasion she quite liked the theatrics that an evil hot brother in the Big Apple entailed. “The only photos I ever saw were him in a roll-neck sweater and duffle coat looking like a Gap workwear dick, and Mum had to beg, wheedle, and threaten those out of him.”

“And he doesn’t model now?”

“No, he is a—wait for it—shrink. Ugh. My brother, messing with anyone’s head. What a charlatan. He rinses rich old women with neuroses on the Upper East Side who fancy him, no doubt.”

Then their mum died, and the long-lost, long-gone, unlamented Finlay Hart was forced to reappear in ordinary Nottingham.

I remember the jolt of seeing adult Fin in an immaculate navy coat at their mum’s funeral, straight-backed with an incredible-looking auburn-haired girlfriend, clad in frock coat and spiky black heels. Her mobile went off during the ceremony, the unfamiliar rat-a-tat of a USA dial tone. She calmly switched it off without the slightest facial twitch of self-consciousness. Fin didn’t react at all. They looked as if a European prince and princess were on an official engagement to inspect a disaster zone.

I wish he hadn’t fucking come, Susie hissed at me, surreptitiously Lime-Drop-flavor vaping by the mulled wine urn in the village hall wake, afterward. When I saw the Harts orbiting each other like satellites, I realized she’d not exaggerated his estrangement. It hadn’t dissolved on contact into even a forced friendliness.

Watching from afar, I noticed Mr. Hart making a remark to Finlay, who replied in what looked like a curt fashion and then twitched imperiously at his own cufflink, short of anything more to say. Or perhaps simply uninterested in finding any more to say. They both looked blank, Mr. Hart slightly stunned, and soon moved apart again. No smiles, no tears, no wordless supportive arm squeezes, no warmth whatsoever. It made me inwardly shudder, and my family hadn’t exactly written the handbook on functionality.

Susie had seen this too. Oh, Dad, don’t bother, seriously, she muttered. He’s not gonna change. This hasn’t changed him, and nothing will.

Apparently Fin was incensed by their dad’s insistence to have the service in a church because their mum wasn’t religious, and it went downhill from there.

“You must be Mr. Hart, Junior,” said some nice old boy, pumping his hand and energetically and fearlessly greeting him, in our hearing.

“Hart, an ironic name for someone born without one,” Susie said.





12


“Hi, you left me a message? It’s Fin.”

I jumped as if stung when FINLAY HART sprang up on my phone screen.

I don’t know why this has caught me off guard. After a half an hour’s reverie, he’d started to feel like a myth, not a real man with a mobile.

“Hi! Thanks for calling me back,” I say, in the tone of panicked jollity you automatically slip into with a total stranger whose attention you’ve summoned. Then it dawns on me it’s a wholly inappropriate tone to use before I announce the death of a close family member. We’ve been plunged into extreme circumstances where slight misjudgments equal horrendous gaffes.

Blood pounds in my ears as I say, with excessive formality: “Thanks for ringing back so quickly. I am so very, very sorry to be the one to break this news, Fin . . .”

“I know,” he says. “Are you calling to tell me Susie’s been killed? I know.”

I’m stunned, twice over: first that he knows, and second that he sounds so matter of fact.

“Oh. How?”

“The police contacted me this morning.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t know, I was told the hospital didn’t have details for you.”

“You were her best friend?”

“Yes. I’m her best friend,” I say. Incorrectly correcting Fin Hart on the tense of my relationship to his deceased sister is both ridiculous, and feels necessary.