The Loft

There was a pair of green wellingtons outside my door in the morning, size five, with a Kerrow tag on a loop of string round one ankle. Boot room, guest rack. Return after use.

So not bought, and not his. Borrowed from a rack the estate kept for brides’ mothers who had come in the wrong shoes. I stood in the corridor in my socks and was more relieved than I would have liked, and also, very slightly, disappointed, and I had the sense to be embarrassed about both.

He was in the hall at eight with Isla and a clipboard. Priscilla came down at two minutes past, in trainers, holding a coffee as if it had been prescribed.

“Boots,” Duncan said, looking at mine.

“Borrowed.”

“They’re all borrowed.” He turned for the ballroom. “We start inside. It’s going to rain at eleven.”

It rained at five past.

· · ·Scene break

The ballroom was the Victorian part of the house showing off. A long room with a sprung floor, six tall windows onto the terrace, and a plaster ceiling of vines and birds that had been repaired so well I only found the join because I went looking for it. The morning light came in off the sea and lay along the floorboards.

I walked it the way I walk every room I might buy. Doors, then windows, then where people will stand when they are bored.

“Two hundred and twenty seated,” Isla said. “Two eighty for a standing reception. We turn it round from the ceremony drinks in fifty minutes.”

“Fifty?”

“Forty-five when Ross doesn’t drop a table.”

“How many dates last year?”

“Ninety-one,” said Duncan.

“Saturdays?”

“All of them. Fridays too. Thursdays from May to September.”

I did the arithmetic in my head and did not say it aloud, because the number was good and it was his and I did not want to be seen admiring it. Then I stood by the far wall, where the bar was, and looked at the terrace doors.

“The bar’s at the wrong end,” I said.

Isla’s head came up.

“It’s between the doors and the room. At about nine o’clock, when everyone wants a drink and a cigarette at the same time, the queue for the bar blocks the way out, and your staff have to carry trays through it.” I pointed. “Put it on the inside wall, by the service door. The queue runs along the wall, the doors stay clear, and your staff restock from the corridor without crossing the floor.”

There was a short silence.

“Isla’s been saying that for two years,” Duncan said.

“Three,” said Isla. She looked at me as if I had come out of a cupboard she’d thought was empty. “He says the photographer likes it there.”

“The photographer likes it there because the light’s behind the bottles,” I said. “Move the light.”

Duncan wrote something on the clipboard. He did it without comment, and it was the first thing all morning that felt like being in the same room as him.

· · ·Scene break

The kitchens were new, and loud, and nobody in them was interested in us.

Neil walked us round in his whites with a tea towel over one shoulder. Two combination ovens the size of wardrobes, a bank of induction hobs, blast chillers, a pastry section with its own cold room, and against the far wall, left from the old house, two heavy gas ranges on bottled gas that Neil said he kept for stock and for his temper.

“All of this electric?” I said.

“All of it, bar those two.”

“And if the power goes?”

“Then I use those two, and swear.” He gave me a look that had some respect in it. “Rab’s out running his generator now, if you want to hear her.”

Through the back door, across the yard, something coughed twice and caught and ran with a noise like a tractor that disapproved of you.

“Cold rooms and emergency lights,” Neil said. “Like he told you. She’ll keep the fish alive. She won’t cook it.”

Priscilla made a note. I watched Duncan watch me asking the question, and thought that he had been waiting to see whether I would. It was a small thing. It was the kind of small thing I had been paid a great deal to notice for nine years, and I found I wanted him to have seen that I still did.

· · ·Scene break

The walled garden in the rain was grey and green and smelled of wet box hedge. The paths had been relaid in gravel; the old glasshouses along the south wall had new glass; the lawn in the middle was where the marquee went in high summer and where, Isla said, every couple wanted the photographs, whatever the photographer told them.

The garden gate was in the north wall. It was a plain wooden gate, painted grey, with an iron latch. Beyond it, a lane ran down past the stables to the road.

I did not look at it. I was aware of not looking at it the whole time we were in the garden, the way you are aware of a step in the dark. Duncan stood with his back to it and talked about drainage.

At half past eleven Priscilla’s phone went. It was the partner’s lawyers in New York, who do not sleep, and she took it under the glasshouse eaves with a finger in her other ear. Isla was called away by a radio on her belt. That left the two of us on a gravel path in borrowed boots, and the rain.

“One more,” Duncan said. “It’s not on the schedule.”

· · ·Scene break

The stable block was the oldest building on the estate after the tower. The stalls were a store now, full of folded tables and crates of glasses and the white chairs every wedding in Britain sits on. At the end, a ladder went up through a hatch to the loft.

He went first and put the light on. I followed him up in the wellingtons, which was undignified, and he did not offer a hand at the top, which was correct.

The loft was dry and swept, and ran the length of the building under the slates. Most of it was empty. At the far end, under a green tarpaulin, there was a stack of cardboard boxes, and he went and pulled the tarpaulin back and folded it over his arm and stood aside.

Eleven boxes. Taped. Each one labelled on the side in black marker, in capitals, in his hand.

LEITH — KITCHEN. Two of those. LEITH — BOOKS. Three. LEITH — CLOTHES — W. Two. LEITH — BEDROOM. LEITH — BATHROOM. LEITH — PAPERS. And one on the top of the stack that said only LEITH.

I knew the handwriting before I had read the words. He had written every shopping list we had in those capitals. They had been stuck to the fridge in the flat with a magnet shaped like a lobster.

The flat was two rooms above a chandler’s on the Shore. The shop below sold rope and brass fittings and tins of marine varnish, and the smell of it came up through the floorboards, so that for five months everything we owned smelled faintly of boats. We had moved in that February. The kettle only worked if you held the switch down. The bedroom window looked over the Water of Leith, and at night the lights on the far side lay on the water in long lines, and I would sit on the sill in his jumper and read out the funny parts of whatever I was reading while he pretended to be asleep.

I left all of it. I got in a taxi at twenty to eleven and went to the airport, and I did not go back for so much as a toothbrush. I had not thought, in ten years, about what had happened to the toothbrush.

“When?” I said.

“July. The lease ran out.” He was looking at the boxes, not at me. “I took the estate van in. Took a day.”

“On your own?”

“Isla offered. I said no.”

He’d have been twenty-five. I thought of him on the stairs above the chandler’s, with a roll of tape and a marker, going through my drawers, deciding which room a thing belonged to. Writing W on my clothes.

“You could have sent them,” I said.

“Where?”

“My father’s office. Anywhere. Anyone would have forwarded—“

“I wasn’t sending them to your father.”

It came out flat and even and a little too quick. I heard it and put it away to look at later, the way I put away a clause that has been worded with more care than it needs.

“Or thrown them out,” I said.

“They weren’t mine to throw out.”

That was the whole of his reasoning. I knew it the way I knew his capitals. He had kept a debt he didn’t owe in a dry loft for ten years because it wasn’t his to write off, and he had kept the loft swept.

I put out my hand and touched the top box. The one that just said LEITH.

“What’s in this one?”

“Things I didn’t know which room they went in.”

I took my hand back.

The rain was loud on the slates. The light was a single bulb on a flex, and it made the boxes look warmer than cardboard has any business looking, and I stood in front of them in wellingtons from a guest rack with my professional face on and felt it not quite holding.

“They’re yours,” he said. “You can take them. I’ll have Rab put them in the car on Sunday, or ship them wherever you want. New York. Wherever it is.”

“It’s New York.”

“Then New York.”

I looked at the eleven boxes. I thought of opening KITCHEN and finding the kettle with the broken switch, and BOOKS and finding whatever I had been reading out loud from the windowsill, and PAPERS and finding God knew what. The seating plan. The quote for the flowers. My own handwriting from when it still belonged to someone who was going to get married.

“Not yet,” I said.

He nodded, as if that were an answer he had expected and could work with. He didn’t ask when. He unfolded the tarpaulin and put it back over the stack, and tucked the corner in at the bottom so the dust wouldn’t get under it, and I watched his hands do it and thought that he had done this more than once. Come up here. Checked. Tucked the corner in.

“They’ll keep,” he said.

· · ·Scene break

I went down the ladder first. He turned off the light and came after me, and we stood in the stall among the white chairs while the rain came down in the yard.

Priscilla was crossing from the garden with her phone in her hand and her hood up. She raised the phone at me: they want a call at two. I nodded.

“The chapel’s tomorrow,” Duncan said.

“I know.”

“You don’t have to walk it. Isla can give Ms Oyelaran the numbers.”

“It’s on the schedule.”

“I wrote the schedule.”

“Then you should have left it off,” I said, “if you didn’t want me in it.”

He looked at me then, properly, for the first time since the steps. It was not a friendly look and it was not an angry one. It was the look he used to give a roof before he went up it: working out where it would hold.

“Ten o’clock,” he said, and went out into the rain without his hood up, because he never did put it up, and I stood among the wedding chairs and watched him cross the yard and did not let myself look back up at the hatch.