by Val McDermid
Henry looked fondly on the two girls. ‘Ah, Cat. You’ve got a gift for always finding the positive. We should all learn from that.’
‘And the positive is that Father will never accept Bella Thorpe as a suitable chatelaine for Northanger,’ Ellie said firmly. ‘She might think she’s engaged to Freddie, but five minutes with Father and it’ll be all over. There’s no way he’d support Freddie marrying someone with nothing to bring to the party.’
‘Surely your father doesn’t expect Freddie to marry for money?’ This was as monstrous a notion to Cat as any she’d attributed to the General.
‘It’s not quite that simple,’ Henry said. ‘It’s always good to bring more money into an estate like Northanger, to build for the future. But it’s not about greed. It’s more to do with understanding the power and obligation that goes with great wealth and great property. It’s the reason why you seldom get divorces among the dukes and earls and landowners, unless the estate is entailed. Divorce means splitting the land and the money, which ultimately makes life very hard for your children. So the landed classes put up and shut up and send the wife to live in the dower house or the cadet branch property. Thank God I’m a younger son and don’t have to bother about all that crap.’
‘And you don’t have to bother about leaving,’ Ellie added. ‘Northanger is the last place you’ll find Freddie right now. If he really is engaged to Bella, he won’t dare come near Father. And if he’s not? Well, he’s due to rejoin his regiment very soon and he’ll be desperate to make the most of every minute of freedom. So you’re safer with us than anywhere else.’
Reassured by this, Cat found herself able to rediscover some pleasure in the day. Since Henry was departing that evening for Glasgow, they made the most of their time, visiting Coldstream and Jedburgh as well before returning to Northanger. But before Henry left, they extracted a promise from him that he would have them to Woodston for lunch on Saturday. The General insisted he’d drive them over himself. ‘Always good to see the place,’ he said. ‘Besides, if I’m coming, Henry will have to make sure to lay on a decent spread. I’m doing this for your sake, ladies.’
It was, Cat thought, a small price to pay. What counted was that she would be in Henry’s company once more. She would have another opportunity to demonstrate that she had moved on from her disastrous adventure. An opportunity, in short, to demonstrate how much more amenable she was than Bella Thorpe.
28
Cat was convinced that the rain had started the moment Henry left. All through Friday, there was a slow, steady drizzle that turned every vista misty. Cat and Ellie made the most of their confinement, however, by starting to investigate whether it really would be practical for them to work together on some books for children. Before too long, they had discovered their ideas were remarkably similar and by the time they went to bed on Friday evening, they were delighted and confident that together they could make something that children would enjoy.
Saturday was no brighter when they left Northanger. The General gloomily predicted that the further west they went, the heavier the rain would become. He even cracked a joke about Glasgow and rain, which stunned Cat into silence.
The young women were in the back of the Mercedes together, and as soon as they climbed out of the valley and into the land of 3G, they were both engrossed in their phones. Momentarily, Cat let out a yelp of surprise. There, in her inbox was an email from the woman she hoped never to hear from again.
Hi Cat
Susie said she didn’t think you had wifi at Northanger Abbey but I told her that’s totally incredible. I meant to write before but you know how it is in Edinburgh, not a minute’s peace, right? I’ve been on the point of emailing you every day since you left, but always got interrupted by something or other. Anyway, here I am now, so get back to me soon as you can, ok, gf?
Honestly, Cat, since you took off for NA, it’s been a drag. Everybody worth talking to has left town, I swear. But if you were here, it would be primo, like before. The thing is, I haven’t heard from Jamie since he went back to Newcastle and I’m worried in case he’s got hold of the wrong end of the stick, you know how dim men are when it comes to emotional stuff. So I need you to put in a good word for me with your bro because he is totes the only man for me. Totes.
You have missed out on some seriously bad wardrobe malfunctions round Charlotte Sq Gdns. Fat middle-aged women in jeggings, FFS. And honestly, some of the men have no clue about colour-coding. I wish you were here to take the piss with me. But I bet you’re so busy having a totes lush time that you never think of your friend Bella. I could tell you things about that family you’re hanging out with that would make your hair stand on end, swear down. Thank goodness that nightmare Freddie Tilney has left Edinburgh to go back and kill some more innocent women and children.
You remember how he was always chasing me? Giving out the innuendoes and totes gagging for it? After you went off with the rest of his family, he just got worse. It was like, every time I turned round, there he was, making out I wanted him. Yeah, right, I wanted him like HepC. I know lots of girls like that sort of thing, but you know me better, Cat. I never met a man with a higher opinion of himself, and he was desperate for me to share it. He even took me to that mausoleum on Ainslie Place to try and impress me, can you believe that? And when I made it clear that I was totes not into him and I was engaged to Jamie, he started flirting with that dog Charlotte Davis. Can you believe the man?
But here’s the thing. He was really pissed off with me and I think he got hold of my phone at a party the other night. When I checked my phone, I could see there had been messages sent to Jamie that I didn’t send but, like, the text was erased so I couldn’t see what they said. And now he won’t answer his phone to me and I’m really unhappy about the situation. So I thought you could, like, tell him about Freddie getting hold of my phone and saying god knows what to Jamie. Because you know how sensitive Jamie is, right? And sometimes, when I couldn’t escape Freddie and I had to dance with him or whatever, Jamie looked really hurt, like it was my fault some idiot had attached himself to me.
Anyway. I’m miserable without you, I have the most miserable face in Edinburgh. Last night Susie Allen said I looked like an advert for misery. Help me out, Cat. We’re going to be sisters, remember? If we can just get over this bump in the road. Please, please help me sort things out with your lovely bro.
Love you, miss you.
Bella
Even Cat, with her propensity to see the best in everyone, saw right through the artifice of the message. She read it through again and couldn’t credit the inconsistencies, contradictions and downright lies. She was ashamed of Bella and ashamed of herself for having taken so long to see through her. Her pathetic pretence of friendship was as disgusting as her excuses were empty and her demands brazen. Did she think Cat was so thick she’d actually plead with Jamie to take her back? Unbelievable.
She dug Ellie in the ribs and handed her the phone, scrolling up to the start of the message. ‘Can you believe this?’ she said softly. The General was listening to Radio 4, but Cat knew all about the enhanced hearing of vampires. As soon as she had the thought, she scolded herself. She had drawn a line. She was moving forward.
‘She’s unreal,’ Ellie murmured. ‘I think both our brothers have had a lucky escape. What a devious cow!’
‘I thought she was my friend. But she clearly thinks I’m an idiot, and nobody chooses to be friends with an idiot. More fool me for not seeing that she was using me to get closer to James. I swear I don’t think she ever gave a damn for either of us.’ She sighed. ‘I chose really badly there.’
Ellie leaned into her. ‘It’s like Henry said, you were thrown together and she just dazzled you with her fancy clothes and her smart London talk. You’re worth so much more than her.’
‘You’re very sweet. You and Henry both.’
‘That’s because we like you, numbskull. Wait till Henry sees this email, though. He’ll totally crack up.’
>
In spite of the General’s forecast, the rain cleared as they skirted Glasgow and approached Loch Lomond. It was still far from a sunny day, but at least it was dry and clear as they drove up the lochside road to emerge at a substantial two-storey stone villa that sat a little distance back from the edge of the loch in its own grounds. ‘Here we are,’ the General said as they turned into the driveway. ‘Clearly it’s not on the scale of Northanger Abbey. Doubtless it’s a mere cottage by comparison with Andrew Allen’s pile. But it’s a decent size and it’s perfectly habitable. And it’s convenient for Henry when he has to try cases in Glasgow. Who knows, he may even end up making it his home in the long run. It’s only been in the family fifty years or so, Frederick could hardly object to my cutting it out of his estate.’
Cat wasn’t listening because Henry had appeared in the porch at the sound of the car. Her spirit quickened at the sight of him and she felt a curious yearning sensation in her stomach. He waved as they approached, then hurried over to open the back door. ‘You made it,’ he said cheerfully.
‘Of course we made it,’ the General said, stepping out of the car and squaring his shoulders.
‘Come on in, the coffee’s on,’ Henry said, bowing low and gesturing towards the house.
A small but well-proportioned hallway led into a pleasant sitting room with views of the garden to the rear and the side, which disappointed Cat, who was longing for a vista of the loch itself. ‘We’ll just have some coffee and then I’ll show you around,’ Henry said.
‘Have the decorators not completed the drawing room?’ the General called after Henry as he left the room.
‘Yes. But the furniture hasn’t come yet,’ he called back.
Until he returned, the General prowled up and down, checking the mantelpiece for dust and the crystal decanters for smears. The coffee was served as the General liked it, in china cups, and it came with an assortment of tiny pastries that Cat felt she could have eaten all day. But her impatience to see the rest of the house restrained her appetite and she was finished ahead of the others.
Seeing this, Henry jumped to his feet, saying, ‘Come on, Cat, let me give you the tour.’ She hardly dared let herself believe it, but it was almost as if he was as keen to be alone with her as she with him.
He waved her ahead into the hall then showed her into the kitchen opposite. It was nothing like Mrs Calman’s domain – it was a country kitchen that resembled her home in Dorset, except that everything in it was at least twenty years newer. There was even a small table in the side bay window where it would be possible to take a more modest breakfast than the General ever laid on in his other homes. ‘It feels very welcoming,’ she said.
‘I like it here,’ Henry said. ‘Northanger is fabulous and I’m lucky to be part of it, but Woodston is built on a more human scale. I could imagine living somewhere like this very comfortably.’
‘I understand why,’ Cat said, following him into a dining room whose view made her exclaim, ‘Henry, this is glorious!’ Before her the loch shimmered in the pearly light. A handful of small boats skimmed the water and, in the distance, she could see the rounded humps of foothills giving way to mountains behind.
‘It’s a pretty stunning way to start and end the day, sitting in here taking one’s meals,’ he admitted.
She dragged her eyes from the view and took in the elegant Georgian dining set that occupied the centre of the room. Table, eight chairs, a long sideboard. And beyond, an elegant marble fireplace with, she was pleased to see, a modern gas fire with its arrangement of fake coal and logs. It would actually be possible to live here without servants!
A second door led from the dining room into a substantial drawing room which shared the dramatic view of the loch. Its walls were a pale muted green and the room smelled faintly of fresh paint. It was completely empty of furniture. ‘Father decided this room needed to be redone. As you can see, the decorators just finished. There won’t be furniture for a couple of weeks yet. But you get the idea?’
‘It’s the perfect room, Henry. I wouldn’t care if I had to sit on the floor in a room like this.’ Cat whirled around like a ballerina, twirling easily on the polished oak boards.
‘Let me show you the garden,’ Henry said, opening the French windows that led outside. They strolled down towards the loch, with her host pointing out items of interest in a faintly desultory way. ‘Any more news from your brother?’ he asked as they skirted a small fountain with a pond stocked with koi carp.
‘Oh, I must show you this. It completely slipped my mind, I’ve been enjoying this so much.’ Cat waved a generous arm at the garden while she fished out her phone with the other hand. ‘This will totally blow your socks off.’ She opened Bella’s email and handed Henry the phone.
He read it carefully, his expression tightening as he reached the end. ‘What do you make of that?’ he said.
‘That I was a fool ever to be taken in by her. That she is everything I would hate to be. What do you think?’
‘I think it’s to your credit that you see her so clearly now. Anyone can be fooled for some of the time by the likes of Bella Thorpe.’
She had never seen such an expression of distaste on his face, not even when he’d found her creeping around the turret in the night.
‘But here’s what I don’t get,’ she said. ‘I get that she was trying to get her hooks into Freddie and that somehow he escaped her clutches. What I don’t get is what Freddie thought he was doing? You told me yourself he knew she was engaged to James. Why couldn’t he have chased after some unattached girl? Why flatter Bella so much that she ditched James, and then leave her in the lurch? That seems incredibly cruel to me.’
Henry made a rueful face. ‘All Freddie will have seen was the challenge of the forbidden fruit. He’s not deliberately cruel. Just immensely self-centred and depressingly vain. I think he’s never been properly in love with anyone but himself, so he has no notion of how much hurt he causes.’
‘What you’re saying is he never really gave a toss for Bella?’
‘Pretty much, yes. All he was looking for was a bit of fun to occupy his leave.’
‘So he led her on? Just for what he could get out of it?’ Now Cat was the one displaying disgust.
Henry nodded. ‘That’s my shitty big brother.’
‘I’d have to agree with that. I don’t think I’m ever going to like your brother, Henry. Even though he’s done my family a favour in a roundabout way. And I suppose Bella will survive because she’s not got much of a heart to break.’
‘And if she’d had a heart to break, she’d never have got tangled up with Freddie in the first place because she would have been too tender-hearted to dump James like that. I am sorry that Freddie is such a pig, though.’
‘You turned out very differently.’
Henry smiled. ‘Some people say I was my mother’s son, while Freddie takes after my father. I couldn’t possibly comment.’
Before Cat could pursue this, their colloquy was interrupted by the arrival of Ellie and the General, who kindly insisted on walking Cat down to the landing stage and giving her a lecture on the names and heights of all the hills that could be seen from that vantage point. By the time he had finished, it was time for lunch, a delicious collation of cold meats, salads, cheeses and assorted items from a local delicatessen whose produce the General particularly recommended to Cat. She imagined it would be extremely unlikely if she were ever to have the opportunity to patronise it, since it was almost five hundred miles from her home.
After lunch the General decided he needed a nap before driving back to Northanger, so the others walked out on the lawn once again, settling in a little gazebo with a view north up the loch.
‘So, Cat,’ Henry said, leaning back on the bench and stretching his legs out. ‘What are you going to do with your life?’
Cat was nonplussed. This question was normally the domain of her parents’ generation. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I was homeschooled so I don�
��t have any of the qualifications that get you to university. I’m not academic like James. He breezed through A-levels and Oxford entrance, but just reading the exam papers made my head swim.’
‘But you’re clearly not stupid,’ Henry said.
‘She’s just not academic,’ Ellie said firmly. ‘She’s a brilliant story-teller, Henry. Wait till you see the ideas she’s come up with for kids’ books. I’m going to illustrate them and we’re going to publish them online if we can’t get a proper publisher.’
Henry grinned. ‘I’ll shut up, then. You’ve clearly got it all worked out.’
‘I’m good with kids,’ Cat said. ‘I thought about becoming a nanny. But you need qualifications for that too. And I’m not sure how much I want to live in somebody else’s house.’
‘I guess we’ll just have to become the next Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler,’ Ellie said. ‘To save you from the fate worse than death of other people’s kids.’
‘So I suppose you’ll have to come back and visit us again?’ Henry said, looking pleased. ‘If you two are serious.’
‘Oh, we’re serious all right,’ Ellie said. ‘This might just be what it takes to persuade Father to let me go to art school.’
‘Good luck with that one,’ Henry said drily. ‘Now, who wants to walk down the shore to the ice-cream van?’
By the time they’d returned from their walk, the General was up and about and making a list for Henry of things that needed to be attended to at Woodston. ‘Are you not coming back with us?’ Cat asked. Fond as she was of Ellie, Northanger without Henry lacked a certain sparkle. And without him to keep her imagination in check, a certain menace.
‘My case resumes on Monday. Tomorrow, I have to visit my client in prison, so it’s not possible. But if we finish on Tuesday, as we’re supposed to, I’ll come back to Northanger for dinner.’