The Hunting Party

by Lucy Foley

  ‘Of course.’ I tried for something assertive, but it came out as little more than a whisper. He sounds so businesslike, so removed. Perhaps it’s possible to be so where he is, far away in London … untouched by the atmosphere of death that has permeated every inch of this place.

  I try Iain next. I only have a mobile for him, no home number. It goes straight to voicemail. The problem with only being contactable by mobile in this part of the world is that most of the time you don’t have enough signal to be reached. I’ll leave him a voicemail. I’m sure he’d be touched by the boss’s concern, but frankly he’s the least of my worries at the moment.

  I’m about to leave a quick message when there’s a knock on the door.

  It’s Doug. ‘They’re here,’ he says. ‘The guests.’ While I’ve been on the phone, he’s gone and rounded up the others from their cabins, shepherded them into the Lodge.

  Doug looks awful – I’d noticed it earlier, but not really seen it, being too distracted by the immediate disaster. His eye sockets are a dark, bruised purple, as though he hasn’t slept for a week. It looks almost as though the guest’s death has affected him personally. His hand, I notice, is bandaged, a thick gauze covering most of the skin. I hadn’t seen it when we were outside, of course, because he had been wearing gloves.

  ‘What happened to your hand?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh,’ he says. He holds it up and looks at it as though he’s never seen it before. ‘I suppose I injured it.’

  ‘When? It looks bad.’

  ‘Don’t know,’ he says. He scratches the back of his head with his other hand. ‘A few days ago, I suppose.’ But that’s not true – it can’t be. He hadn’t been wearing a bandage at the Highland Dinner … I’m sure of that; I would have noticed it. And the injury beneath must be bad for him to have used the bandage: I’ve seen Doug with terrible cuts and bruises before, and he hasn’t even bothered with a plaster.

  ‘Shall I tell them you’re coming out to talk to them?’ he asks. I notice that he has hidden the bandaged hand in the pocket of his jacket.

  Somehow the role of telling the guests has fallen to me: we seem to have agreed upon that without even discussing it. Trying to swallow down my mounting dread, I nod, and follow him out of the office.

  The guests are assembled just down the corridor in the living room, waiting for the news. Just the London guests: the Icelandic pair are back at their bunkhouse. Doug and I decided to tell the group of friends first: the death, after all, will be a much more devastating revelation for them.

  When I go into the living room they all look up at me. I have been on this side before, in my old job. All those anxious families waiting for news, me having to tell them the very last thing they want to hear. It was not successful. There was an unforeseen complication. We did everything we could.

  I dig my nails into the skin of my palms. I have also been on the other side of this. I know exactly how it feels. Their faces swim before me, upturned, expectant, utterly intent on what I am about to say. I feel a lurch of nausea in the pit of my stomach. What I am about to tell them is going to change their lives for ever.

  ‘We have found her,’ I say. The questions begin almost at once; I put up a hand for silence. The important thing is to get the terrible news to them as quickly as possible now, to extinguish any lingering hope. Hope is a great thing, when there is still a chance of everything being OK. But in cases that are quite literally hopeless it can do much more damage than good. Though: I don’t think any of them really have hope any more. They know already. But the confirmation of that knowledge is something else.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s very bad news,’ I say. You could suddenly cut the atmosphere with a knife. The horrible power of being in this situation hits me with full force. I hold all of the cards, ready to lay them down in front of the guests – they will make of them what they will.

  ‘I’m very sorry to tell you that she’s dead.’

  There’s the shock at first: they are united in that. They stare at me as though they are waiting for me to deliver the punchline. And then each begins to process the information and their grief in different ways: hysterics, mute incomprehension, anger.

  I know that none of these reactions are any more or less valid. I saw all of these on the ward, whenever I had to inform next-of-kin. And as any paramedic will tell you, it’s often the quiet ones you need to worry about after a disaster: not those who wail and scream about their pain. But those who wail and scream are still in pain. Grief can be as different in the way it displays itself as the people who experience it. I know this all too well.

  But the thought goes through me, all the same: is it possible that one of these displays is just that? A display? A performance? As they ask me questions about the body, how I found it, how it looked when I found it, I wonder: does one of them know all of this already? Does someone know more than he or she is letting on?

  Back in the sanctuary of the office my phone rings. I seize it, expecting the boss again, or the police – perhaps with an update on when they expect to be able to get here. It’s not the police.

  ‘I can’t talk right now, Mum.’

  ‘Something bad’s happened. I can tell.’

  How can she tell from six words? I clench my jaw. Then unclench. ‘I can’t talk now. I’m fine, that’s all you need to know at the moment. I’ll tell you about it later. OK?’

  ‘You didn’t call yesterday, like we agreed you would. So I knew something had happened.’ Her voice is ragged, frayed at the edges with worry. ‘Oh Heather, I knew I shouldn’t have let you go and live in that place.’

  She has never understood it. Why, having suddenly found myself all alone in the world for the first time in fifteen years, I would choose to compound that loneliness by moving to such a place. But what she couldn’t understand – because it wasn’t really something I could explain, only something I felt – was that I felt much more alone surrounded by people. All our friends, however much they were trying to help, and sympathise, reminded me of him. And the city we had lived in together. Around every corner was a café where we had eaten brunch, or a bookshop we had browsed, or even a branch of Sainsbury’s where we had picked up a ready meal curry and a bottle of wine. Our apartment was worst of all, of course. I could hardly bring myself to be inside it before it was sold. Here were all the memories of a life together, of growing up together: the place we had lived in practically since we left university. My whole adult life.

  And being around people – people carrying on with their lives, busy and messy, settling down, having children, getting married – just emphasises how much my own has stalled, indefinitely. Perhaps for ever.

  So yes, sometimes, I get lonely here. But at least this landscape has always seemed suited to loneliness, and I am not confronted, every day, by all that I have lost, by the echoes of my old life, whole and happy and filled with love. And yes, sometimes as I had in the city, I have found myself almost unable to get out of bed, and have had to force myself to get dressed, eat my breakfast, make the short walk to the office in the Lodge. But it is a lot easier to face the day when you know you won’t have to face other people and their happiness.

  Here, I have been able to go and howl my misery and my anger – yes, there’s a lot of that – at the mountains and the loch, and feel the vast landscape soak up something of my grief. Here, loneliness is the natural state of things.

  When it happened, part of me wondered if I had been simply waiting for it, that I had always known it would come. I had always felt, ever since Jamie and I got together, that it was too good, that we were too lucky. That happiness like this couldn’t possibly last: we were using up more than our allotted quota of the stuff, and at some point someone had to notice. Fate decided to prove me right. The expression that Jamie’s boss, Keith, wore when he came to tell me. I knew before he opened his mouth. Smoke inhalation. No one realised, in the chaos, that Jamie hadn’t reappeared. He’d been trapped, in the burning house. The other firemen had
done everything they could. Had been hunkered down there with the paramedics.

  Keith had done CPR on Jamie for a full forty-five minutes before they could get there. When he began to cry I had had to look away, because it was such a terrible, unexpected sight. Seeing a man like Keith cry. And because that, more than anything, made it all real.

  Jamie was a fireman. He could have been many things, with that brain of his: a scientist, a lawyer, a professor. But he wanted to do something that he really felt mattered, he told me – like I did. The thing that made him one of the best was that he always went the extra mile. As Keith said, at the service, when others had given up on a lost cause, Jamie would try that little bit harder, risk that little bit more. He had seemed, at times, almost invincible. But he wasn’t. He was just a man. A big-hearted, brave, self-sacrificing man – but definitely mortal.

  What they don’t tell you is that when someone you love dies you might be angry with him. And that was true, I was so angry with Jamie. Before, life had meaning. Everything about us was meant to be. The way we met – him deciding at the last minute to come to a house party thrown by a friend of a friend. The beautiful light-filled apartment we found in Edinburgh’s Old Town, which the owner decided to rent for a song to anyone who would also dog-sit for him when he went away travelling. Even just the way we fitted together, he and I – two pieces of a very simple jigsaw that, when combined, made the picture complete.

  When he died, nothing made sense any more. A world in which he could be taken from me had to be a cruel, chaotic place. And I thought – briefly, but definitely – about ending it all. In the end it wasn’t any desire to survive that stopped me from doing it; it was the knowledge of what it would do to my family.

  Coming here was the next best thing, you see. It was a way of escaping from life as I had known it, from everything that tied me to the past. Sometimes I think it’s a little like dying – a slightly more palatable option than the pills and the jump from the Forth Bridge that I had contemplated in the weeks after Jamie’s death. So in an odd way this landscape has been a sanctuary. But now, with this new horror and the falling snow trapping us in and keeping help out, it has become, in the space of twenty-four hours, a prison.

  Two days earlier

  New Year’s Eve 2018

  EMMA

  Last night, Mark and I had some pretty great sex. He threw me onto the bed. There was an intensity to his features, a dark cast to them. He looks quite similar when he is turned on to when he’s really angry.

  I don’t know what got into him. It might have been the stuff we all took (which I shouldn’t have had, looking back, because I say stupid things – things I don’t mean to say aloud). But his intensity might also have had something to do with the thing he’s just told me, too – the thing he’s found out – that strange, almost erotic delight we sometimes take in someone else’s messing up.

  I know people wonder about Mark and me. ‘How did you two meet?’ they ask. Or ‘What drew you to him?’ and ‘When did you know he was “the one”?’ Sometimes I’ll tell them it was his dance moves to Chesney Hawkes in the middle of Inferno’s dance floor that got me, and that will normally get a laugh. But that’s only a temporary measure to stall the questions that will undoubtedly follow, the deeper, more probing enquiries.

  They’re looking for the romance, the chemistry, the vital spark that drew us together, that keeps us together. Normally, I think they probably end up disappointed in their search. Because, the truth is, there is no great romance between us. There was no grand passion. There wasn’t ever that – even in the first place. I don’t mind admitting it. It wasn’t the thing I was looking for.

  There are people who hold out for love, capital letters LOVE, and don’t stop until they’ve found it. There are those who give up because they don’t find it. Boom or bust – all or nothing. And then, perhaps in the majority, there are those who settle. And I think we’re the sensible ones. Because love doesn’t always mean longevity.

  I’m happy with what we’ve got. Mark too, I think. People seem to comment a lot on the fact that we’re not that similar. ‘Opposites attract,’ they say with a knowing look. ‘Isn’t that right?’ The important thing is for a couple to have certain interests or hobbies in common, that’s how I see it. A few areas – or even just one area – for which you share the same degree of interest. Which we do. There’s one thing in particular. And no, it’s not that, though we do have good, even great sex.

  So no, we don’t have the huge chemistry of a couple like Miranda and Julien … though something, now I come to think of it, seems to be off between them – I wonder if I’m the only one to notice it. And yes, I do know Mark has a whopping crush on Miranda, in case you were wondering. I’m not an idiot. In fact, I see quite a bit more than most people give me credit for. I don’t mind. I really don’t. I can almost hear the incredulity. But I promise it’s the case. You’re just going to have to take my word for it, I’m afraid.

  So no, when I saw Mark in that sweaty nightclub just off Clapham High Street, I didn’t necessarily think: Here is the man of my dreams, this must be the thing great literature and film is made of; true love, love at first sight. It wasn’t like that.

  What I saw was at once more and less than that. I saw a life. A new way of being. I saw the thing I had always wanted.

  Mark and I both had difficult childhoods. I was moved from school to school every few years and never managed to find any proper friends. This pales in comparison to Mark’s experience. His dad beat him. Not a couple of ill-advised slaps for being naughty. Proper, old-fashioned, barbaric beating. Once, he told me, his mother put concealer on him to go into school, to cover the bruising around his eye. She didn’t stop his father. She couldn’t. Not as frequently – but every so often – she was the victim of one of his fits of temper herself. When he was younger, Mark was small for his age, and used to get pummelled on the rugby pitch, to his dad’s disdain. Then he began to grow. He drank protein powder shakes and hit the gym. The beatings finally stopped; as though his father had suddenly come to the realisation that his son might be able to fight back: and win.

  Mark has inherited something of his dad’s temper. He throws his weight around. He has never been violent with me … though there have been just a couple of times in the midst of a particularly explosive argument when I have felt he’s on the edge. A door slammed with such force that the wood fractured, a picture we’d disagreed about, smashed against a wall. But he’s not the unfeeling bonehead that people might assume. Last night he may have joked about that incident at the races, but I remember the remorse afterwards, his horror at what he had done … how he was almost in tears hearing that boy had been taken to hospital. I had to stop him from going and turning himself in.

  Mark desperately does not want to turn out like his father. But I also know that, at times, he is frightened that he is becoming him.

  MIRANDA

  I wake early. Julien is curled away from me beneath the sheet. Immediately memories of last night arrive, all looped together and unclear, like a tangled ball of wool. Mark – in the bathroom. The way he had towered over me, the threat of his grip upon my upper arm.

  I get up and dress. I’ll go for a run, try to breathe the weirdness of last night from my lungs. I like running now. I’ve come to like it – it hasn’t always been the case. I didn’t like it at fourteen, when I suddenly went up a couple of sizes and my darling mother got me a gym membership for my birthday.

  I sprint past the other cabins and the Lodge as quickly as I can. I really don’t want to see any of the others yet. I haven’t got my face on – and I don’t mean make-up. I mean tough, fun, up-for-anything Miranda. When I reach the dark shelter of the trees that edge the loch and there has been no call of ‘Where are you off to?’ I breathe a sigh of relief.

  Mark: how dare he? I’m tempted to tell Emma, today. But I can tell how hard she’s worked to bring this all together, how much pride she takes in having found such an awesome p
lace – I’m not quite so insensitive to that sort of thing as people think. So maybe I should wait until afterwards, broach it over drinks with her in London. She must have seen that side of him, mustn’t she? If he was like that with me, how does he behave with her? She seems so capable, so in charge of her life, but – as I well know – the face we present to the world can be misleading.

  The air is noticeably colder today. Some of the puddles of rainwater seem to have frozen overnight. There’s an edge, a rawness, to this cold that is unfamiliar. A chilly day in London is always offset by the warm blasts from overheated shops, the stickiness of the tube, the press of other bodies. But here the cold has a chance to get you properly in its grip. It feels a little like I’m trying to outrun it.

  I’ve taken my phone with me so I can listen to music – I find it always helps to relax me, drowns out all the other noise in my head. Much better than the ‘mindful silence’ my therapist is so bloody keen on. As promised, the little signal indicator is empty. Funny, that we live in a world now where a lack of connectivity might be advertised as a feature in itself.

  A few yards ahead, the path forks off towards another jetty. It’s a perfectly beautiful, melancholy spot. I jog down towards it. There are canoes stacked here, presumably from the summer season – one is on its bottom, and has filled with a winter’s worth of rainwater, now frozen solid. I stand over it, and as I look inside it’s as if my reflection is trapped beneath the surface of ice – as though I am trapped in there. I shiver, though I’m well wrapped up against the cold. I head back to the path.

  I’ve run perhaps two hundred yards along the rutted track we drove along last night, the forest on one side of me, the loch on the other, when I come to a bridge spanning one of the waterfalls that feeds the loch. The waterfall itself is overlooked by a small, derelict-looking building. I wonder what on earth it is. I hang over the edge of the bridge – there’s just three lines of chain between myself and the void – and look down at the waterfall itself, now mainly frozen into icicles, and the black, moss-covered rocks.