Just Last Night(85)

“You want me to be an iridescent beast,” I say, without thinking.

“A what?” Fin says.

“Oh, sorry. A private joke I had with Susie. I had a fixation with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, when we were in sixth form. I read this story about Zelda being a wayward Southern Belle socialite at a party. It said she was at her ‘iridescent best’ and I misread it as her being an ‘iridescent beast.’ So Susie and I used to say, whenever we were going all out to impress in a situation, that we were going to be iridescent beasts.”

Fin shakes his head in a if you say so way.

“Riiiight. Yes, please be an iridescent beast, Evelyn.”





34


Finlay cranes his neck over the headrest to reverse park while the car’s sensors go blip-blip-blip. The sweeping curve of Georgian crescent with its luxuriant, rain-soaked mature trees is a strikingly elegant address and I feel a commensurate foreboding about what we’re walking into. I don’t think you bullshit and bluster your way past the kind of individuals who dwell behind these glossed doors, in their giant tax brackets.

Our conversation on the way here has done nothing to allay my fears.

“Just how bitter was the falling-out?”

“Put it this way. Last we heard she was having a pacemaker fitted. My dad said: ‘I hope her surgeon has shaky hands.’”

“Oof. Whenever I’d say about someone, ‘I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy,’ Susie used to say, ‘I fucking would, that’s why they’re my worst enemy.’”

“Hah. Sounds Susie-esque. She and my father had quite a lot in common in outlook.”

“Do you think your dad remembers he and his sister had fought?”

“No idea. We’re about to find out.”

Fin rings the bell on the canary-yellow door in the townhouse, which, unlike the last door we stood in front of, is in perfect condition. The tall edifice feels like a personification of Aunt Tricia, bearing down on me. We hear footsteps beyond and the door’s thrown open by a woman with close-cropped silver hair. She’s in the semiofficial uniform of middle class, “liberal arts college” women over sixty: outsize coral and turquoise Tibetan-style necklace, neutral floaty jersey top with draped jersey cardigan, wide linen trousers.

“Well well,” she says, in a silver-spoon kind of English accent, folding her arms. “Après the father, le déluge! Why would you be moved to call on me, after all this time, Finlay? It is Finlay, isn’t it? You were in an under-fifteens football uniform, last I saw you.”

“Yes. Hi, Aunt Tricia,” he says. “I’ll explain. This is my friend, Eve. Susie’s best friend, to be strictly accurate.”

“Wonderful to meet you,” she says, brusquely, with a quick appraising stare at me, pushing reading glasses up the bridge of her nose. “What’s that got to do with me?”

“We’re looking for my father. We’d heard he’d been to see you and wondered if he’d said where he was staying in Edinburgh?”

“So you thought you’d simply turn up on my doorstep, after . . . let’s see. How many years is it?”

“Twenty?”

“Twenty-two, but who’s counting? Apart from me. Why not call first?”

“I didn’t have a number for you.”

“I’m sure I’m in the phonebook.”

“Sorry, it just didn’t seem a conversation to have on the phone.”

A moment develops, where our welcome hangs in the balance.

“Come in, then,” she says, with an exasperated sigh, and I wilt in disappointment that we’re getting an audience with her. I’d hoped, once she demonstrated her hostility, that this was going to be bloody but brief.

We follow her down a hallway painted with so much brilliant white it’s like stepping into a modern art gallery. The floor is treacle brown and there are moth orchids in glass jars with pebbles on a dark side table. In the high-ceilinged sitting room beyond, everything is again white, apart from two squashy linen-covered sofas, a royal purple. There’s virtually nothing else in the room, bar a wicker basket full of logs for the open fireplace, and a huge floor standing lamp, its bowl-shaped shade a bright chrome.

I have only known Auntie Tricia forty seconds to judge, yet the house already seems a convincing expression of its owner. Blinding migraine-inducing blankness, punctuated by furniture that shouts at you. We’re not offered a drink.

“Terrible business about your sister,” Tricia says, though without much sympathy.

“Awful.”

“I spoke to Susie a few years ago. After your mother died.”

“Right.”

“She said you hadn’t bothered to visit when your mum was sick.”

I glance worriedly at Finlay, who doesn’t flicker.

“That’s not quite true.”

Tricia snorts. “Oh, come on, Finlay. Susie said you didn’t make the trip until the funeral.”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t bother, I didn’t know she was ill. Maybe Susie didn’t know what my parents had or hadn’t told me, but I didn’t find out about my mum’s terminal diagnosis until two months after she’d been given it. Why would I lie?”