The Missing Years Read online

  I am unwelcome here. As if Morag hadn’t made that clear already . . . For a moment I entertain the thought that Morag might be the anonymous donor, but then I dismiss it: she didn’t look nearly well enough to drive herself, and I can’t imagine the sensible companion with her allowing this sort of thing. No, there are at least two people who don’t want me here, Morag and someone else. The wayward sister of Mr. Jamie McCue? The hotel manager? Someone else I haven’t even met yet? It occupies my thoughts for all of the drive to Edinburgh, even though there’s nothing to be gained from dwelling on it, and gradually resentment takes over from shock. Even though selling the Manse is exactly what I want to do, it irks me that by doing so I will make these awful people happy. One part of me wants to live happily ever after here, metaphorically sticking two fingers up to Morag and her anonymous co-believer every day with my vomit-inducingly perfect husband and children . . . Though I’m hazy on exactly how the husband and kids part might come to pass. And I’m not sure the Manse would want us anyway.

  My father makes a living captaining a tourist boat in Mombasa. He’s lived in several different places in Africa, but he feels settled in Kenya now; he can’t imagine ever leaving. He has a decent place to live, and the job is a good compromise between a simple life and the comfort of sophistication: the romance of the high seas coupled with the commercial safety of the tourist trade. Nothing too complicated. If he had to explain in a few words why he walked away all those years ago, that might be it: it felt like life had become too complicated. A job, a wife, a mortgage, a child, friends, relatives, all with expectations; he was drowning in them, failing them all. He was losing himself. But that was then; he was a different person. He can only be who he is now.

  FIVE

  The wood—my wood—is a joy.

  Wandering through the trees, I feel far more like myself than I have all day. It’s being outside the Manse, I think. When I’m there, I can’t help straining myself to tug on memories that tease, just out of reach. Even when I catch on to one, my mother and father only lurk in the edges of it, a solid adult presence that’s peripheral to my childish concerns. I thought I had discovered a gleaming Technicolor memory, of my mother in the garden, but then I realized I was just seeing the tableau from the box room photos. Though perhaps in time I will believe it’s a memory. How can one tell the difference?

  I feel better when Carrie is in the house too. But Carrie is staying up in Edinburgh for dinner with the cast; she rang to say so. I wonder if this is just the start. In mere days she might not be coming back at all. I know she thinks I invited her here as reparations for not making the funeral, but that was beyond my control. And it’s not an apology for all the times I didn’t call or didn’t visit. It’s not even an apology for allowing my relationship with my mother to drive me away without thinking about what else I was leaving behind, because I truly don’t know what else I could have done. What it is, is an attempt to start afresh, because we both might need someone we can count on in life. I thought I had that, but I was wrong.

  So Carrie is in Edinburgh, and here I am walking among the trees—mainly oak and pine, I think, but horticulture is not my strong point—which create an almost closed canopy, though the tree trunks are widely spaced and the ground level is clear of bracken or bushes. Instead layers—perhaps centuries—of pine cones, needles and leaves have created a thick brown-red carpet that delivers a spring to each step. I ought to have a dog, I think. A black Labrador, perhaps; something that looks like a gundog—and then I laugh at myself. As if I have any idea of how to care for a dog. As if I even really know what a gundog does.

  It takes me five or six minutes to get to the other side of the wood, so I estimate it to be roughly half a mile wide, or perhaps less, because I appear to have veered off to the west a little given that I’ve come out at that end of the fishing lake. The lake—loch, I should probably say—isn’t large. It’s broadly kidney bean shaped, roughly two hundred meters by one hundred meters. For a body of water located in one of the most spectacular areas of Scotland, it’s curiously unpretty. There are no trees, no plants of any kind lining the water. I wonder if it was man-made. Walking around it is harder than expected, as in places the land rises very steeply away from the water into rounded hillocks, but there are a few areas of easy access, almost like dirt beaches, where I spot evidence of use: the odd empty crisp packet, a discarded can of Tennent’s Special. In one bush I spy a lid labeled PowerBait. My fishing lake—loch—does not go unused, it seems. I try to imagine spending an afternoon casting a line here. I’m not sure I can think of a leisure pursuit more mind-numbingly boring.

  Back at the start of my loop, I survey the loch again before starting back: I could sell it without a single pang of regret. Not the wood, though. I feel differently about that. My father must have walked this wood. He must have known the landscape, known the people. And they knew him. It’s laughable that I hadn’t put that together, that I hadn’t considered I might encounter people who were acquainted with him. Were friends with him, even. Our parents were pals, you ken. Parents, plural. Perhaps not everyone will react like Morag, then. My parents had friends—the photos prove that. There are people who could tell me about them. About my father.

  I could find those people. It’s not why I’m here, but it wouldn’t be difficult, and in truth it’s exactly what I’m trained for. To ask the question, to follow the leads, to build up a picture, a shape of events; not just this happened, then this, then this, but a story. A coherent whole that answers not only the first question—What happened?—but the ones that follow. How? Why?

  It’s not why I’m here.

  I’ve almost returned to the now-familiar garden wall when a small movement catches my eye. There’s a cat, gray and sleek but slender in a way that suggests this creature has no intention of being merely a house cat, slowly stalking something I can’t see. From the angle of the cat’s gaze, I guess the quarry must be on the other side of the iron gate. The cat inches forward, her haunches bunched underneath and her tail swaying slowly but deliberately behind her. I try to spy whatever it is that she has spotted, but I can’t see anything on the long expanse of green lawn. No doubt my eyes are less keen than hers, particularly in the fading light. I inch myself forward to get a better look, and she turns her head slowly to me then dispassionately returns her focus to the prey, which, judging by the cat’s continued stillness, hasn’t been scared off by my movement. The cat is now less than a meter from the gate, and what she is staring at through the ironwork ought to be only just inside the garden, but there’s still nothing I can discern. The sun is beginning to set behind the Manse, in a glorious spread of golds and reds that the news reader earlier told me is in part due to the concentration of volcanic particulates in the atmosphere. I like it, this knowledge of unexpected consequences—it makes me appreciate the sunset more.

  The cat, though, is not focused on the sunset. Instead she moves suddenly, not through the gate as I expected—the bars are plenty far enough apart for her to slip through—but leaping lightly onto the top of the drystone wall. She picks her way carefully around the top, repeatedly turning her head to focus on a spot within the garden. With the cat gone, I move toward the gate myself, glancing again at the Manse.

  There’s a figure in the attic window. In less than a heartbeat it’s gone, without moving, as if swallowed directly into the air.

  I strain to look closer, and there’s nothing there. But there was—I’m sure of it. I’m almost sure of it. I had the impression of a slight figure topped by a triangle of hair surrounding a pale face . . . I stand in indecision with one hand on the gate, my heart thudding in my ears. I’m simultaneously absolutely sure I saw a person and absolutely sure what I saw was a trick of the light. But the twilight is taking hold, shifting and bending and filtering the light to a dark gray everywhere except where the remnants of that glorious sunset still linger. The cat pauses to consider me silently, or perhaps she’s sti
ll looking at her invisible prey.

  “There’s nothing there,” I tell her. “I’ve changed the locks.” But I can no longer pick out her gray figure in this dusk. I shall have to leave this wonderful wood, go into the Manse, and I shall have to check every room, and there will be nothing there. I will know there never was, and yet the certainty of what I saw, what I know I saw, will sit in my stomach in a block of icy leaden dread.

  With the Manse waiting silently for me to decide what to do, I take a breath, push the gate open and cross the garden briskly, determined not to look reluctant. The absurdity of that strikes me, and I almost laugh. Look reluctant to whom? Because now I am hell-bent on practical action, and in this no-nonsense spirit, it’s easy to see that my mind conjured a female figure after the shock of the possibly charming Mr. McCue’s nighttime visit and not only hearing about his alarmingly free-wandering sister, but seeing the evidence, too, in the ashtrays and the rifled box room. The back door is just as firmly locked as when I left it, and given the locksmith’s visit, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that nobody has the keys to this house but me. I turn on the kitchen light, and for once the immediate drenching in rational, cheerful yellow! is welcome. It carries me through the entire ground floor, room after room, where I snap on the light in each, check them over and move on with the lights still on, warding off the now near-total darkness that has descended. The stairs to the second floor give me slight pause, but I grab the poker from the living room and forge onward and upward, each step of the stairs creaking as I lay down my weight on it. The sound is like a dry chuckle from a rarely used throat. The Manse is laughing at me, but I can’t be annoyed at that. I’m almost laughing at myself.

  There’s nothing on the second floor, except confirmation that Carrie’s room gets better reception when my phone suddenly unleashes a torrent of text messages. The first beep of the sudden onslaught makes me jump, but the adrenaline wave subsides quickly. They’re all administrative—confirmation of change of billing details for the phone and broadband. Nothing from Jonathan. I turn my attention back to the room. Carrie’s bedroom is in the same muddle that she left it, the duvet tangled on one side of the bed and a hairbrush and makeup bag on the exposed bedsheet. Two of the drawers in her chest of drawers are half open. It would probably be possible to entirely ransack this room, and I would just put it down to Carrie’s relaxed attitude to tidying up.

  Only the top floor is left. I climb the stairs slowly, poker in hand, feeling less able to congratulate myself on calm rationality. Sheepishly neurotic might be a more accurate description. The poky bedrooms upstairs aren’t a worry, and in any case, they offer scant concealment—in one glance it’s obvious there’s nothing and nobody hiding within them. It’s the box room that looms in my mind. Of course it would be that room, with its cartons of who-knows-what waiting to drag me down into the past. No wonder my tired anxious brain placed a figure in that room, of all rooms. The door is slightly ajar, the hall light spearing inside in a single slanting stripe. I slip my hand inside without disturbing the door and fumble for the light switch. The bulb flickers mulishly for a moment then yields to give a steady glow.

  I take a deep breath and fling the door open, brandishing the poker. The door bounces off a box and smacks the poker back into my face, right on the bony crest of my eyebrow, hard enough to make me yelp. If someone was watching, they would have found it hilarious, but at least I’ve already seen that the room holds nothing more than it did earlier today. I rub my eyebrow ruefully and look around once again, then move to the window, trying to figure out what I might have seen from where I was standing, if I had indeed seen anything. A box perhaps, maybe this one, topped by a rather bedraggled beige tasseled lampshade. It’s not exactly triangular, but in the dim light, with a fleeting glance and a suggestive mind, probably anything can morph into any shape. It doesn’t matter anyway. I turn for the door, then on second thought lift down the lampshade, and also the box it was sitting on, so there’s no chance of making the same mistake twice.

  Back downstairs I make toast for dinner and eat it in front of the television in the living room, channel-hopping until I find one on which Dirty Dancing has just started. I make it to about halfway before becoming aware of a sense of prickling unease. Glancing around, I realize I haven’t drawn the curtains. The darkness seems to be staring in at me, but even as I tug the drapes shut, I can’t help wondering whether that is the equivalent of an ostrich sticking its head in the sand—if there’s something out there, shouldn’t I be able to see it? And anyway, what if the something is inside rather than out?

  There wasn’t anyone in the box room. There couldn’t have been. I changed the locks.

  I return to the film and watch until the very end of the credits, well past the point of exhaustion, then I shove one of the new keys under the mat for Carrie and fall into bed, determinedly not thinking about the figure in the box room. Because there wasn’t anybody there. I changed the locks.

  My father is living in Dublin. There’s something about the city that reminds him of Edinburgh, and he always loved Edinburgh: so much friendlier than Glasgow, which is the city of grit, the one that the true Scots understand, feel the lifeblood of in their bones—or so the folklore goes. It was in Edinburgh that he had the epiphany, a shining moment of clarity on a bright, blustery spirit-of-adventure day on Princes Street, with the castle standing proudly against the cloudless sky and a cold wind snatching at his clothes and hair, tugging him away; it was there that he realized he could simply unhook himself from his life and slip away like a dog slipping its leash. But once you unhook, you can never go back. He knows that now. He’s not sure if he fully understood it at the time.

  So he lives in Dublin, and likes it, though he’s not Irish, but the Irish don’t care; they love his enthusiasm for the country—and they need all the enthusiasm they can get, now that the Celtic Tiger has lost its roar and the recession is truly biting. He runs a caravan park that’s owned by a big corporation and bemoans the increasing health-and-safety regulations that require him to post notices such as “Caution: floor may be wet” right next to the swimming pool. He hasn’t remarried. There were several opportunities over the years, but he wasn’t sure he could trust himself not to unhook again.

  SIX

  The station again.

  Carrie called me to let me know she was on the train home, and I offered to come and pick her up. She was gone before I got up, but she left me a scribbled note on the kitchen table. If she were staying at home—her home, the house she grew up in—would she be calling Pete instead? Or her mother? I can picture her on the train, reaching for her phone to call Karen, then catching herself with a sharp intake of breath, and calling me instead. I find myself aching for her despite the fact that I have no evidence at all of this happening.

  In any case, I’m leaning against the bonnet of my car, having climbed out to better appreciate the environment. It’s actually a breathtaking waypost for a traveler to alight into. If it weren’t for the thrum of traffic from the nearby A9, this could be the middle of nowhere—which, technically, I suppose it is. The road I drove in on stretches away from the low gray stone station building in both directions with only the odd fence or drystone wall to suggest that mankind has ever actually settled here. I try to trace the road with my eyes in the failing light, but it’s impossible—my eyes are dragged to the craggy peaks which are darkening by the second, the definition vanishing until they become merely looming dark presences. I feel the weight of time here, of the years that have passed. This landscape has been old for a very long time.

  By the time the train arrives, darkness has truly fallen. From a distance, I see the lights of the train and it’s a jolt, a jarring thrust back into the twenty-first century. The metal-on-metal scrape of the train wheels whips through the rails ahead of the train itself, and for a moment I fancy the rails are alive, buckling and dancing with the intensity of the energy funneling through them. But th
e noise is changing; the train itself is drawing in. Seconds later Carrie steps out onto the platform, her black biker boots easily eliminating the ground between us with her long strides, and her hands thrust into the pockets of the open long gray coat whose tails are flapping behind her in the breeze. Individually everything she’s wearing looks like it came from a jumble sale, but somehow when settled on her frame it becomes imbued with a slouchy elegance I could never hope to find. Perhaps I was already aware of it, but I feel like I’m recognizing it anew: Carrie is seriously cool.

  We say our hellos and climb into the car. Carrie is already yawning. “Were you back late last night? I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “Not too bad. One-ish. I prebooked a taxi back from the station.” She yawns once more and throws a sideways glance at me. “You left all the lights on when you went to bed, you know.”

  “Did I?” I concentrate deliberately on backing out of the parking space. “I was pretty wiped, I guess.”

  “What have you been doing with yourself?”

  Suddenly I can’t think. What have I been doing? And how can whatever it is have taken all day? “Admin and sorting, very dull. And all of it seems to take forever. You’d be amazed by how much I haven’t achieved today.”

  “How did the meeting with the lawyer go yesterday?”

  “Fine. I guess. A bit strange.” We’re pulling away from the station now, and I marvel at the completeness of the darkness around us. There’s no moonlight to be found thus far this evening; Carrie would have needed a torch to navigate this had I not picked her up. The city dweller within me balks at the idea.