April

“She isn’t selling to you,” I said. “I want to be clear, so it’s on your notes. She’s grateful for the offer and she’s read every page of it. She isn’t selling.”

There was a pause in London.

The man on the other end ran acquisitions for a group with thirty-one hotels and an office on a square I used to walk across on my way to meetings with my father. He was not a bad man. He had offered a fair price for a forty-room hotel on the harbour at Tobermory, with its own boat and a bar that had been in the same family for three generations, and he had offered to keep the staff for two years, which is standard, and he could not understand why a woman of seventy-one with no children who wanted it was saying no to him through a negotiator in a flat in Leith.

“May I ask who she is selling to?”

“The people who make her breakfasts,” I said.

I had been working on it since January. Nan Carruthers had rung me after Christmas, because somebody who had been at a wedding at Kerrow had told somebody on Mull that there was a woman in Edinburgh who would tell you the truth about your own hotel and not charge you for the parts you didn’t like. It was not an accurate description of my rates. It was accurate about the rest. I had gone up on the ferry in the rain and sat in her bar for two days and read her books, and on the second evening I had asked her the only question that mattered, which was what she wanted, and she had said that she wanted the girl who did the breakfasts to still be doing them in ten years, and the boat to still go out, and nobody from London to paint the bar grey.

So we were selling it to them. The staff, forty-four of them, through a trust, paid for out of what the hotel earned, over nine years, with a bank in Inverness that had never once written to anyone in capitals. It was slower than London’s money and smaller. It had taken me four months and three ferries. It was the best deal I had ever done, and I had done it at my own kitchen table with a kettle that works.

I bought the kettle in October, when I took the flat. Three streets back from the Shore, two rooms and a table, and a window that looks at other windows, not at the water. I stand beside the kettle anyway while it boils. It turns out I am the kind of person who does that.

“Thank you for your time,” I said to London. “I mean that.”

I put the phone down and rang Priscilla, because it was Friday.

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The merger completed in November.

Sixteen hotels went into it, with the Edinburgh one on page one of every brochure in America, chandeliers and all. The three closed in January, as they were always going to close. Six hundred and two people worked in them on the last day. Two hundred and eleven took the places Priscilla had made the partner find, in the group and in the partner’s own hotels, some of them a long way from home. Three hundred and ninety-one did not. I know the number because Priscilla sends it to me every quarter with the one she sends the unions, and I do not put it anywhere but here.

I went to one of the three on the day it shut. I did not do anything there. There was nothing to do. I had been the chief operating officer when the plan was written, and I thought somebody should stand in that car park who had been, so I stood in it.

My father stepped down as chairman in February. His guarantee was released at completion, and he kept his house, and he has taken up sailing, badly, off the south coast. He rings me on Sundays at six. He calls me darling. It is not a board call, so I let him. In March he asked me, in the voice he keeps for planning committees, as if the words might go off, whether I thought the Kerrs would mind if he sent a card to Morven for her birthday, and I said I thought she would put it on the mantelpiece and say nothing about it for the rest of her life, and he sent it, and she did.

Priscilla runs the Scottish end of a very large company now, from the Edinburgh hotel, from an office above the banqueting kitchen. She says she can hear the pass through the floor at half past ten on a Friday. She says somebody is always taking table four’s plates to table fourteen.

· · ·Scene break

Kerrow refinanced in November.

Not with the bank. With a different lender, in Perth, a building society that lends to farms and had never heard of Hector Kerr or my father and did not care about either of them. Duncan went with seven years of accounts in which nothing had gone to Haddington for two years, and Isla went with seven years of events figures and a face that the loans officer later told Lachlan Munro he would not forget. They came back with a loan against the house, over twenty years, at a rate that did not need to be written in capitals, in both their names. Isla is a director. Her name is on the letterhead now, under his, in the same size.

She stayed furious for a month, as promised. Then she stayed furious for a second month, on principle. In January Neil got his pastry chef. In February Gemma went to Lyon for her course, paid for out of the events budget, and Isla drove her to the airport herself and made her promise to come back.

The chapel is still not on the invoice. I checked the new rate card. There is no line for it, and a gap where the line would be, and Isla has put a small drawing of the chapel roof in the gap, which I think is a joke and Isla says is not.

The bar is on the inside wall. The photographer has come round.

· · ·Scene break

The green door is repainted every second spring. It was Hector’s habit, and somebody kept it up, and in March, at the Sunday table, with the pot going round, Duncan put down his fork and asked me across the table, in front of everybody, what colour.

The table went quiet. It was the same quiet as the ballroom on the night of the staff party, when the farm boy shouted, and it went round the room the same way, in about four seconds.

“It’s green,” said Rab. “It’s always been green.”

“It’s been green since my grandfather,” said Duncan. “I’m asking Wren.”

I thought about it for a week. I am not good at choosing things nobody is going to pay for. I went to the paint shop on Leith Walk three times and came out with nothing, and the fourth time I took the jumper with me in a bag and held the cuff against the cards until the man behind the counter found one that matched.

The tin called it something about a harbour at night. It is the dark blue of a navy jumper gone thin at the elbows, and I call it jumper. Isla calls it a scandal. Mrs Imrie, when she saw it, said nothing for a long time and then said it would show the dirt less, which from Mrs Imrie is a sonnet.

He painted it on the first Saturday in April, in the morning, before the wedding party arrived. He took the door off its hinges and laid it on trestles on the gravel, the way Hector had, and I held the tin, and Morven came up from the lodge and sat on the steps in her coat with a cup of tea and watched us, and said at the end of it that Hector would have hated it, and that she liked it very much.

It took two coats. It dried in the sun. By two o’clock it was back on its hinges, and the house looked like a man who has changed his tie and is waiting to see if anyone will say.

· · ·Scene break

We went up to the loft afterwards, with the paint still on his hands.

I have opened the rest of them over the winter. One a weekend, on Saturday afternoons, sitting on the boards with the tarpaulin folded back. The second kitchen box, which was pans. The rest of the books. The other clothes. The bedroom, which had the lamp from my side of the bed and the sheets, washed and folded before he packed them, which I had not known until then and have not been able to stop knowing since. The papers: the lease, the quote for the flowers, a birthday card I had given him with a drawing of a roof on it that I had forgotten I could draw.

The bathroom box had my toothbrush in it.

For ten years I had not once thought about what happened to the toothbrush. He had put it in a sandwich bag and written W on the bag, in the capitals, and I sat on the boards in January holding it and laughed until I could not see, and he came up the ladder to find out what was wrong and sat down beside me and did not ask.

We finished the Reverend in February, in the window seat in East Two, where I sleep on Saturdays. I read him to North Berwick, which he thought vulgar, and on round the coast to Aberdeen, which he thought worse. Duncan lay on the bed with his arm over his face and did not pretend to be asleep. He had a pencil. He ticked the ones he liked. Twice they were the same as mine.

So there was one box left, in April. It sat where it had always sat, on the top of the stack that was not a stack any more, on its own under the tarpaulin: the one that said only LEITH.

Things he didn’t know which room they went in.

He folded the tarpaulin back and stood beside me and looked at it. Then he put his hand in the pocket of his coat, and took out the ring box, and held it out to me.

Dark blue leather. One corner worn pale.

I did not take it at once. I looked at him.

“I’m not asking you anything,” he said. “I want that clear, so it’s on your notes.” His mouth went, at one corner. “I’ve kept it since September where I keep things. It’s yours. Keep it where you keep things.”

I took it. His thumb came off the worn corner and mine went onto it.

There is no wedding. There isn’t one planned. Nobody at the Sunday table has said the word, and I have noticed that it is a rule, and that I do not mind the rule, and that one day somebody will break it, and it may be me. It will be at a table, not in a letter. It will not be drafted.

I put the box in my jacket pocket, with the pound coin, which has been there since a Friday in September, and which he has never asked for back.

“That one?” he said, and nodded at the last box.

I looked at it. LEITH, in his capitals, in black marker, ten years old.

I love this man. I have said so on paper and on a quay and most days since, and I am not going to take any of it back. I did not need to know what was in the box to know that.

“Not yet,” I said.

“It’ll keep,” he said, and put the tarpaulin back over it, and tucked the corner in.