Isla Kerr came out of the office with a set of floor plans under one arm and Priscilla behind her, and stopped when she saw me, the way you stop at the top of a stair you have misjudged.
She had been twenty the last time. She had stood at the chapel door that morning in a borrowed jacket, handing out orders of service, because Hector said the family should be the first faces people saw. Now she was thirty and cut her hair short and wore a lanyard, and had her brother’s habit of looking at a thing until it told her what it was.
“Ms Halloway,” she said. “I’ll take you up.”
We went up the main stair and along the gallery to the east wing, and she walked half a step ahead the whole way, which is where I put junior staff when I want a client to feel led rather than followed. She talked as we went. Fire doors, the lift that had gone into the old service stair, the breakfast hours, the wifi password, which was the name of a dog I had once walked on the beach below the house. She said it without looking round.
The east wing corridor was carpeted now, and painted a soft putty colour, and hung with photographs of the house in different weathers. Four doors. At the far end the corner room, with its two windows, one on the garden and one on the sea.
Isla stopped at the door before it.
“You’re in East Two,” she said. “It’s the best room we have that isn’t booked. I’m telling you that so you know I’m not being petty. I don’t do petty with a client.”
“I didn’t think you did.”
“The corner room’s the bride’s from Thursday.” She unlocked my door and held it. “It’s the Bride’s Room now. Every bride dresses in it. The light’s good. It photographs.”
I had known it would be something. I had not known it would be that. I kept my face where it was and thanked her, and she looked at me for a moment longer, and then she said what she had come up the stairs to say.
“I’ll say it once, so it’s said. Then I’ll do my job, and you’ll get what every client gets, which is the best of us.”
“All right.”
“I handed out three hundred orders of service that morning. After the minister came out, I stood at the door and took them back, because Granddad said we’d want them for the recycling.” Her voice did not move at all. “I got two hundred and sixty. People kept theirs. I still don’t know what for.”
I said nothing. There was nothing I could have said that was not a draft.
“Dinner’s seven, in the servants’ hall,” she said. “Staff eat together on Sundays. Duncan says you’re to eat with us. I’d have put you in the dining room.”
She went back along the corridor. She did not look at the corner room as she passed it, which told me she never did.
Scene break
East Two had a four-poster that nobody had slept in when I knew the house, a window seat, a bathroom made out of what had been a linen press, and a view over the walled garden to the chapel roof and the Forth beyond it. The chapel roof was new slate. It looked very clean.
I unpacked, because that is what you do in a hotel room when you want your hands to have a job. Suits on the left of the wardrobe, knitwear folded, laptop charging on the desk by the window. I put the washbag in the bathroom and then stood holding it for longer than a washbag needs.
The ring box was in the zipped pocket at the back. Dark blue leather, worn pale at one corner where my thumb had been going for ten years.
I had brought it. I had packed it in New York on Friday night, after the partner’s call and before I knew where I was going, and I had told myself it was because I never walk into a negotiation without every asset in the room. That was true in the way that most of what I told myself was true. It was also the case that I had meant to send it back every June for ten years and had not, and that a woman who has not done a thing ten times is not going to manage it in a padded envelope on the eleventh.
I did not open it. I put it in the drawer of the bedside table and closed the drawer.
Through the wall, the corner room was quiet. Somebody had left its window open to air it. I could hear it knocking faintly on its latch when the wind came off the sea.
Scene break
The servants’ hall was the old kitchen, low and warm and stone-flagged, with a table down the middle long enough for sixteen. It had been Hector’s favourite room. He’d eaten breakfast in it every morning of his life with the paper folded to the racing, and it looked as if somebody had decided that the best way to keep him was to keep feeding people in it.
There were twelve of us. Duncan did not sit at the end. He sat in the middle of one side with his sleeves pushed up, and a pot of stew went round from his hands, and he served himself last.
The staff were polite to me in a way I recognised, because I had trained people to do it. It is how a good team handles a difficult guest: warmly, early, all together, and with a plan. Neil Strachan, the head chef, a big bald Glaswegian with forearms like hams, told me the stew was ox cheek and the bread was from Haddington and neither was on the menu for the paying customers, more’s the pity for them. Gemma Lyall, his sous chef, asked Priscilla about New York restaurants and listened to the answers as if she might have to cook them. Mrs Imrie, who had kept the house for thirty years and had been here that morning, passed me the butter without being asked and did not meet my eye. Rab, who did everything outside that was not the garden, told a long story about a peacock. Ross, the kitchen porter, nineteen and very tall, ate three plates without speaking.
Nobody said wedding.
It took me about ten minutes to see that it was a rule. The Guthrie–Mistry party were Saturday’s lot. The rehearsal dinner was Wednesday. The walled garden was where the photographs happened. When Priscilla, who did not know the rule, began a question with “So how many weddings do you—“, Isla said “Events,” so smoothly that Priscilla finished the sentence with the new word in it and did not notice.
I noticed. Duncan noticed me noticing. He passed me the salt before I had looked for it.
He was thirty-five now. He’d been twenty-five the last time I sat at this table, and so thin from a summer of roofing that Mrs Imrie used to put an extra potato on his plate when she thought he wasn’t looking. Nobody put an extra potato on his plate now. He had become the kind of man people fed themselves around.
“Wednesday,” I said, to Neil. “Two hundred for a sit-down dinner. How many are you in the kitchen?”
“Six, if the minibus runs.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then it’s me and Gemma and the Lord,” Neil said, “and He’s never been much use with a piping bag.”
“The forecast’s bad for Wednesday,” said Rab.
“The forecast’s bad every Wednesday,” said Isla. “It’s Scotland. It’s a lifestyle.”
“There’s a warning out. Yellow. Wind off the sea.” Rab turned to Duncan. “I’ll give the generator a run in the morning.”
“Do,” Duncan said.
Priscilla, who had been quiet for nearly a minute, which for her is a sulk, asked what the generator ran.
“Cold rooms,” said Rab. “Emergency lights. Not a lot else. She’s old.”
“She,” said Priscilla.
“Everything here’s a she,” said Neil. “Except him.” He pointed his fork at Duncan. “He’s just the boss.”
People laughed, and I laughed, and it was a real laugh; it surprised me coming out. Duncan looked at his plate. The corner of his mouth went, very slightly, the way it always had when he was pleased and did not want to be caught at it.
It was a good table. That was the trouble. The food was honest and the room was warm and the people at it liked each other, and I sat among them as the only person present who had once cost every one of them a Saturday.
Rab started a sentence about the summer before—and then stopped, and looked at his stew, and Mrs Imrie passed him the bread with some force.
“Before the new roof,” Rab said.
“Before the new roof,” Duncan agreed, and that was the end of that.
Scene break
Priscilla walked up with me afterwards. She waited until we were on the gallery, out of earshot of the stair.
“The girl who brought the tea,” she said, “is called Shona, and she’s Mrs Imrie’s niece, and she told me in the office that you left in the dress.”
“I did.”
“By the garden gate.”
“It was nearer the taxi.”
She stopped walking. I made myself stop too.
“I’m not going to ask why,” Priscilla said. “Not tonight. But you told me it didn’t go ahead, and what actually happened is that you left a man at the front of a church with three hundred people watching, and I’d have liked to know that before I shook his hand.”
“Chapel.”
“Wren.”
“I know.” I did. “You’re right. I gave you the version.”
“You give everybody the version.” She said it without heat, as a fact she had been collecting for six years. “I just didn’t think I was everybody.”
She said goodnight and went along to the west wing, where Isla had put her, and I stood on the gallery and looked down into the hall at the fire burning low and the green door shut for the night. I was very tired. It had been a long day, and most of it had been paid for ten years ago.
Scene break
Somebody was waiting outside East Two.
Morven Kerr was small and straight-backed and had gone entirely white, and she was holding a hot water bottle in a knitted cover the colour of porridge. She must have walked up from the lodge in the dark. There was rain on the shoulders of her coat.
“I’m not going to ask you anything,” she said. “I only came to see you’d a bottle. This wing’s cold, whatever Duncan puts in the brochure.”
“Mrs Kerr—“
“Morven. You called me Morven for a year.” She put the bottle into my hands. It was very hot. “You’ve got thin.”
“I’ve got expensive.”
“Same thing, in my experience.” She looked at my face the way her son had on the steps, once over and taking it in, but where he had filed it she kept it. “It’s good to see you, Wren. I wanted you to hear somebody say it.”
She was the only one who had used my name all day. I held the hot water bottle against my chest and could not find a single thing to say, and I have a thing to say for everything. Anger I could have managed. I had ten years of practice at meeting anger, most of it imaginary. This was worse. She had every right to be the angriest person in the house, and instead she had walked up a mile of drive in the rain to make sure I was warm.
“Goodnight, pet,” Morven said. “Keep the window shut. The sea gets in.”
She went down the back stair. I heard the side door, and then nothing.
I got into the four-poster with the bottle and the lights off and lay listening to the corner room’s window knock on its latch. At about half past ten there were footsteps in the corridor, and they stopped outside my door, and there was one knock.
I got up. I didn’t open it. I stood with my hand flat on the wood.
“Site walk’s at eight,” Duncan said, through the door. “You’ll want boots.”
“I didn’t bring boots.”
There was a pause. It went on long enough that I thought he had gone.
“Size five,” he said, and it was not a question, and then his footsteps went away down the corridor, past the corner room, without stopping.