The Road to Haddington

Isla drove the estate van the way she ran a floor: fast, early, with the radio off and both hands where she could see them.

It was a clear morning after the rain, the kind East Lothian does as an apology. The fields were very green and the sky was enormous and the coast road had been cleared of Wednesday’s tree, which lay cut into rounds on the verge with the sawdust still pale. She did not speak until we were past it. She did not look at me at all. I sat in the passenger seat with my hands in my lap and the seat belt across my chest, and understood that she had chosen the van because it had no back seat, and the road to Haddington because it had no lay-bys worth the name.

“Mrs Imrie found the note,” she said.

I said nothing.

“Ten to eleven. She went up with your flowers. Granddad had told her to take them up at a quarter to and she was five minutes late, because she’d been crying in the kitchen, because she always cried at weddings, she said it got it out of the way.” Isla changed down for the bend at the farm. “The room was empty. The dress bag was on the bed. The note was on the dressing table. She stood there holding your flowers and read it, and then she went down the back stair and out through the garden and found Granddad at the chapel door with me.”

“He read it standing up. I watched him. He read it twice, and his face went—“ She stopped. “I’ve never seen anyone’s face do that. It went old. It just went. And he gave me the orders of service he was holding, and he said, Stay here, hen, and don’t let anybody in or out, and he went up the aisle.”

“Isla—“

“You’re not talking.” She did not raise her voice. “You’re listening. That’s the deal. I’ll tell you when you can talk, and it won’t be soon.”

I closed my mouth.

· · ·Scene break

“Duncan was at the front,” she said. “With Hamish—no, sorry, not Hamish, that’s the best man at the one in August. With his friend from college. Jamie. I can’t even remember Jamie’s surname now. He moved to Perth. Duncan was standing where you stand, with his hands behind his back, looking at the window, because he’d said to me that morning that he was going to look at the sea until he heard the door, so that he wouldn’t turn round too early and look like a numpty.”

A tractor came the other way with a trailer of bales. She pulled in to let it past, and raised one finger from the wheel to the driver, and the driver raised one back.

“Granddad went up and gave him the note. In front of everyone. There wasn’t anywhere else. Three hundred people saw my grandfather walk up the aisle and put a piece of paper in his grandson’s hand. They didn’t know what it said. They knew.”

The tractor went past. Isla pulled back out.

“He read it. He didn’t sit down. He didn’t say anything to Granddad or Jamie or the minister. He folded it up and put it in his inside pocket, and then he turned round and looked at the three hundred people, and he said—“ She stopped again, and this time it was longer. “He said, There won’t be a wedding today. I’m sorry you’ve come all this way. There’s lunch in the house, and you’re all very welcome to it. And then he walked down the aisle, on his own, with everybody watching, and he came to the door where I was, and he stood beside me.”

I had my hands pressed flat on my knees.

“He shook every one of their hands,” Isla said. “All three hundred. Every single one, as they came out. He thanked them for coming. He said the same thing to each of them, thanks for coming, mind the step. Old ladies were crying on him. Your side and ours. Your father’s people from the hotels in their good suits, not knowing where to put their faces. He shook their hands. And I stood next to him and took the orders of service back, one at a time, because I didn’t know what else to do with my hands, and that’s why I know it was two hundred and sixty. I counted them afterwards on the kitchen table. I needed to count something.”

The road went down between hedges. There was a sign for Haddington, and a speed limit, and the first houses.

“It took an hour and ten minutes,” she said. “I looked at my watch when the last one went. He was twenty-five.”

· · ·Scene break

The florist was on the High Street, in a shop with a blue front and buckets on the pavement. Isla parked on double yellows and put the hazards on and said, “Stay here,” and I stayed there.

She came out with the shop’s owner and two of her staff, and they loaded the Guthrie–Mistry flowers into the back of the van in white boxes and tall wet buckets: the bouquets, the buttonholes, the arrangements for the chapel step, great armfuls of something white and green that smelled like cut grass and honey even through the glass. Isla signed for them and got back in.

We did not leave at once. She sat with her hands on the wheel and looked through the windscreen at the High Street, the stone fronts, a man in a suit going into a door with a brass plate beside it.

“That’s our solicitor,” she said. “Lachlan Munro. He’s done the books since Granddad. He’ll have had your lawyers on the phone this morning, poor man. He hates the phone.” She started the engine. “Right.”

· · ·Scene break

“That afternoon,” she said, on the road out, “he went up on the roof.”

“The roof.”

“The west wing. There was a section over the old nursery that he’d stripped the week before and felted and not slated, because he was going to do it after. After the wedding. He’d said to Granddad he’d do it the Monday, when you’d gone back to your work.” She said your work without any weight on it; she did not need any. “He changed out of his suit. Mum found it on the bed with the tie still in the collar. He put his work clothes on and went up the ladder at two in the afternoon, with a hundred people eating sandwiches in the ballroom underneath him, and he slated it. All of it. Till the light went. You could hear him through the ceiling, all through lunch. The hammer. People kept looking up.”

I thought of Fergus. Nobody wanted to be dancing and nobody wanted to be the first one to go home. I thought of the band starting at half past seven, and the ring of the hammer stopping above them when it got too dark to see.

“He came down at ten,” Isla said. “He went to the corner room. Your room. He sat in there with the door shut. Auntie Elma took him a plate, and it came back, and Mum took him tea, and it came back. I didn’t go. I was twenty. I was so angry I couldn’t stand in the corridor.”

“At me,” I said. It came out before I could stop it.

“I said you’re not talking.”

“I’m sorry.”

“At you. At him. At Granddad, for walking up the aisle. At everyone who’d kept their order of service. At the band for playing.” She pulled out round a cyclist, wide, and waited until she was past him. “Mostly at him. For shaking their hands. For thanking them. I wanted him to shout. I wanted him to throw something through a window, and I’d have handed him the thing to throw. And he said thanks for coming, mind the step, three hundred times, and then went up and slated a roof.”

We were back on the coast road. The Forth came into the windscreen on the left, blue this morning, very flat, Fife clear on the far side, every field.

“He never went after you,” she said.

I looked at her.

“I asked him. That night, through the door. I said I’d drive him. Airport, New York, wherever you’d gone, I didn’t care, I’d have driven him to the moon. He said no.” She was looking at the road. “I asked him again in the July, when he was packing up the flat. He said she knows where I am. That’s all he’s ever said about it. She knows where I am. Ten years.”

· · ·Scene break

She stopped the van at the lodge gates, which I had not expected. There was nobody at the lodge; Morven’s bicycle was gone from the wall. Isla pulled onto the verge and turned the engine off, and the silence came in, and a lark somewhere very high up.

“You can talk now,” she said.

I found that I could not, for a moment. It was not the stillness from boardrooms. It was something else, and I had not felt it since I was a child, and I did not have a name for it.

I did not say that I had been twenty-two. I did not say that I had been sitting in my father’s office at four in the morning with a letter that had my own marriage in it as a line item. I did not say that I had left because I could not bear to let him walk up that aisle bought and not know it, or that I had thought, God help me, that being left was the kinder of the two things I could do to him. All of that was true, and all of it would have been a defence, and she had not driven me forty minutes to hear my defence. She had driven me to make sure somebody in the car knew what had happened to her brother.

“Thank you for telling me,” I said.

She turned her head.

“That’s it?”

“I don’t think I get to say anything else. Not today.” I made myself look at her. “There’s a reason. It’s a real one. Some of it’s mine to tell you and I will, if you want it. Some of it isn’t mine. It’s his, and your grandfather’s. I won’t tell you his part without him.”

“Granddad’s?” Her face changed. “What’s Granddad got to do with it?”

“Ask Duncan.”

“I’m asking you.”

“I know you are,” I said. “And I’m telling you I won’t. I’ve done enough to your family without deciding what it gets to know about itself.”

She looked at me for a long time. Isla has her brother’s way of looking at a thing until it tells her what it is, and I let her, and did not do anything with my face.

“You didn’t defend yourself,” she said at last.

“No.”

“The whole way. I waited for it. I had answers ready.”

“I’m sure they were good.”

“They were very good.” Something happened at the corner of her mouth that was not a smile and was related to one. “I don’t forgive you. I want to be clear. I don’t know if I’m going to. But I wanted you to know what he’d be forgiving you for, if he’s daft enough to. I didn’t want him doing it for something you’d never had to look at.”

“That’s fair.”

“I know it’s fair. I’m always fair. It’s exhausting.” She started the engine. “And I’ll tell you something else for nothing, since we’re here. I’ve been doing the events at that house for eight years. We did ninety-one dates last year. Ninety-one. We should be all right. We should be more than all right. And every spring there’s the bank, and every spring he says it’s the roof, and I’ve seen the roof. The roof’s paid for.” She put the van in gear. “So if you’re going through our books for your partner, Ms Halloway, and you find out where it goes, you might tell me. Because he won’t.”

· · ·Scene break

I did not wait for night.

I told myself it was because I would be working that night, and that was true; Munro’s seven years would be in the data room by the afternoon, and the partner’s lawyers would want their questions by morning. It was also true that I could not sit in East Two with a kettle on the desk and a staff clause out in New York and Isla’s hour and ten minutes in my head, and do nothing with my hands.

So at twelve, while Isla’s staff carried the white flower boxes up to the chapel and the ballroom was dressed around me for Saturday, I went across the yard and up the ladder.

The tarpaulin, the corner, the bulb. I took down the lower of the two boxes that said LEITH — CLOTHES — W, and set it on the boards, and took off the yellow tape.

My summer. Folded, the way he folded things, in squares. The yellow dress I had worn to the pub on the harbour. Jeans. A raincoat that had never kept out any rain. The trainers I ran in on the Shore in the mornings, with the laces tucked inside them. Two cardigans. A swimming costume, which made me laugh, once, out loud, alone in a loft, because I could not remember having ever gone into the Forth voluntarily and there it was, folded into a square.

And at the bottom, under all of it, his jumper.

Navy wool, gone thin at the elbows, with a hole at the left cuff where he used to push his thumb through. The one I had sat on the windowsill in, reading out the funny parts. It was his. It had always been his. He had bought it before he met me and worn it on the roof and let me take it every evening, and in July, packing the flat in a day with a roll of tape and a marker, he had picked it up and decided which room it went in.

He had put it in with my things. He had written W on the box.

I held it for a long time, kneeling on the boards, with the sound of Saturday being built across the yard.

Then I put everything back except the jumper, and folded the flaps, and put the tarpaulin over the stack and tucked the corner in. I went down the ladder with the jumper under my arm, the way I had gone down with the kettle, and nobody saw, which made two, and I was beginning to think that the house was letting me.