Ever Fallen in Love

by Zoe Strachan

  Are you sure we’re going the right way? I asked.

  You’re like a bloody kid, he said. Are we nearly there yet?

  How did you find out about this place again?

  Library. The one in town, like, not the uni one. They had a local history display.

  Dark horse, I said.

  He shrugged. Went there to do my essay. Escape from dick-for-brains and all his nobby pals. Calum might be geek of the week, but you’re lucky to have him.

  I guess so, I said. What’s the big deal anyhow?

  Och, I just want to take a look, he said. That’s all.

  We turned left onto a single track road, where hawthorn tangled along the barbed wire fences. Cows looked up from their chewing, resigned eyes following our progress, then a tumble of heifers kept pace with us for a field’s length, nudging each other as if daring each other to get closer. Luke kept his distance but I reached out and rubbed one animal’s nose with my knuckles. It tilted its head against my fist then half reared and skipped back to its companions, as if it was showing off.

  Here we go, Luke said, as we approached a T-junction.

  Ahead were three red brick cottages, each shaped like a child’s drawing of a house: a central door with a window on each side, a chimney poking out from a tiled roof. The first cottage was in good repair, with a valiant attempt at a garden bordering the path to the front door, which had a polished brass letterbox and knocker.

  Dream home in the country? I said.

  Yeah. Except it looks like the roses round the door have got some sort of blight.

  As we walked past I saw that the other two cottages were dingier. The woodwork was painted a municipal dark green that didn’t go very well with the brick and as we got closer I noticed net curtains in the windows. There was a small, efficient potato patch alongside one house, and a lean-to full of chopped logs for the fire.

  Overhead bulbs, I said.

  Yes, Luke said. A Formica folding kitchen table.

  One of those fifties fireplaces. With beige tiles.

  A gas fire with the ignition switch broken.

  Watery mince every Thursday evening.

  At five thirty.

  I sighed, rather louder than I’d intended, and he laughed.

  Do you want to chap the door, like? Pop in for a cup of tea? Leaven the life of the lonely widower with our bright young chatter?

  Maybe, I said. If it was that easy.

  It isn’t. So dinnae go maudlin on me now.

  I flicked him the Vickies and he laughed.

  Anyway, he said. I think we’ve established that it’s tied housing. So we’ve got to be on the right track.

  We were a whole six weeks away from those lives we now found it so easy to interrogate. I still had a touch of homesickness too. Breathing quietly so I wouldn’t disturb Calum in the next bed, listening to the night wheeze of his asthmatic chest; soaking in the deep, claw-footed tub in the institutional bathroom, suddenly fearing that the lock wouldn’t hold as someone banged on the door to tell me to hurry up – these things took their gentle toll. Not to mention always preparing my own meals, toiling down to the basement only to discover that the washing machine was broken again and two more flaccid tangles of lace or satin were pinned to the notice that begged, PLEASE do NOT put wired bras in the wash.

  This new road was a little busier, in that another tractor crawled past us and squelched through a muddy rut into a field, and a couple of cars sped past, veering across the central line to save us scrabbling into the ditch. Soon the fencing was replaced by a wall, enclosing mixed woodland.

  Step one, Luke said. Stick a wall round the pretty bits so nobody else can enjoy them.

  We followed the wall along until we reached a gatehouse. Not some little stuccoed Georgian cottage, but an imposing stone keep with a turret, and a solid metal-studded wooden gate. Which was closed.

  Damn, he said softly. On the plus side, it doesn’t look particularly inhabited.

  Hard to tell from out here, I said, squinting up at the windows in the turret.

  Let’s keep going, he said, peering round the corner of the wall. He waited until a car passed out of sight then swung his leg over the wire fence and climbed into the field.

  Come on.

  What is it, I asked, hesitating, then scrambling after him as soon as he started walking.

  Wall doesn’t go all the way around, it’s fence again along here. We can get over and go through the woods.

  We picked our way through the overgrown woodland, climbed another fence, and found ourselves on the driveway. From the back the gatehouse looked abandoned, close to derelict, and it seemed hard to imagine that anyone would mind us being there. A smidgen of my new-found sense of entitlement had stuck.

  An afternoon stroll, Luke said, as if echoing my thoughts. Nothing wrong with that.

  Private? We didn’t see any signs.

  Bloody hell, he said, tripping in a pothole. This’d wreck the suspension on the Bentley, eh?

  Sunlight began to filter through the sprawling trees which flanked the road, and the beleaguered, mossy driveway was soon dappled with light. Birds darted in and out of the hedgerows and when the wind picked up, russet leaves fluttered down all around us. I had a sense, almost, of time blurring. We rounded a bend and the landscape suddenly opened up. To the right the ground sloped down to a curving river where willows arched towards the water. The grass was shorter on the other side, and a little way away, beyond a couple of small copses of trees, I saw a castle, or a mixture of castle and country house, built from grey stone.

  Nice, I said.

  He nodded.

  What if we meet someone? I asked.

  There’s no law of trespass in Scotland. And no harm in looking.

  We can always apologise. Talk our way out of it.

  Of course we can, he smiled. Unless they have dogs.

  After a few hundred yards the shabby driveway looped round and over a small humpbacked bridge. Now that we were closer to the castle, I noticed a flashy turret or two that matched the gatehouse, as if the building had been added to and altered by successive generations.

  How, I said after a while, can all this belong to someone?

  That’s the question, he said.

  We kept walking. There was nobody around, no cars passed us, and there were no signs of recent activity apart from some bales of straw left piled at the entrance of a field. We got closer and closer to the castle until we were standing at the bottom of a flight of wide stone stairs that led up to a balustraded terrace. A perfect spot for drinks before dinner, or for surveying one’s domain with a breakfast coffee. All of a sudden, Luke leapt up the steps, two at a time.

  What are you doing? I laughed, hanging back.

  He turned to face me.

  Didn’t I say? The librarian told me that the owners have had to sell up. There’s nobody home.

  6

  Stephie darted towards the sea, and Richard heard her squeal as the icy water splashed up her bare legs.

  ‘You must be joking, it’s Baltic,’ she shouted back to him, but she continued along the waterline anyway, skipping in and out of the foamy waves as the sea surged forward then dragged away from the sticky sand at her feet.

  ‘What did you expect,’ he called. ‘The Aegean?’

  She ran back over the sand towards him, her cheeks vivid with the exertion. She looked very alive, he thought, his mind stumbling at the strangeness of the observation.

  ‘Okay then,’ she said. ‘If it’s so lovely, why don’t you go in?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘In a bit.’

  ‘Nah, that’s not good enough. You said it was good for swimming here, and now you’re chickening out.’

  ‘I’m not chickening out,’ Richard said. ‘I’m just doing mental preparation.’

  ‘Yeah right. Go on,’ she said, ‘I dare you.’

  ‘There are people over there in jumpers. Look, that man’s wearing a woo
lly hat.’

  Stephie scanned the beach. ‘Yeah, and those kids are in their swimsuits.’

  ‘Children don’t feel the cold.’

  ‘Stop trying to change the subject. A dare’s a dare, and I dare you to get in that water right now.’

  ‘All right then, I will,’ he said, and put the picnic basket down by his feet, then stood on the heel of one trainer and pulled his foot out without untying the laces. Stephie laughed as he wobbled on one leg, stuffing each sock into his shoe.

  ‘I’ve been neglecting gym duty,’ he said. ‘Mainly because there isn’t a gym.’

  ‘The sea’s nature’s gym,’ Stephie said.

  ‘Happy now?’ he said, standing there pale in his swimming trunks, the wet sand squishing coldly between his toes. She nodded and he took a deep breath and ran towards the sea, barely letting the chill of the water register on his calves before he plunged straight in. The breath burst from his body as every inch of skin froze and he started a frantic crawl, his heart racing until he became aware of warmth suffusing his body again. He paused, treading water.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ he shouted towards the shore. ‘Come on in.’

  Stephie sat down on the sand beside his clothes so he stretched into breast stroke, swimming towards a horizon distorted by the glare of the sun. He allowed the sensation of moving through the water to consume him, tried to empty his mind of everything bar the tiny adjustments in force of his legs and arms necessary to compensate for the cold.

  He’s been here since the beginning of term.

  No matter how hard Richard pushed his limbs against the water, Calum’s letter was still there, nudging into his mind. He’d swum in the sea at university too, with Luke. Once or twice in the summer, rather than as part of the staged Martinmas ritual. Richard remembered a strange feeling of invincibility, somersaulting in the cold salt water to drown the noise of the first wave of UN peacekeepers screaming off the RAF runway on their way to the Balkans. He and Luke, water falling silkily from their goose-bumped skin as they ran from the sea to their towels, feet slithering through the cool sand as they scrambled back into their clothes. The way a pint afterwards felt as though it had been earned.

  He asked after you.

  Richard slowed his pace, another memory popping unbidden into his mind, a conversation remembered almost verbatim despite the years that had passed. Luke sitting opposite him, his hair wet with seawater, asking, ‘She pretty, your sister?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘So she’s a bit of a hound then?’

  ‘No-o. Not at all.’

  ‘So she is pretty. Nice tits?’

  ‘How exactly am I meant to answer that? Not only is she my sister, but I’m gay.’

  Luke had smiled, a cheeky, provoking smile, and cupped his hands to his chest, where his t-shirt clung to the damp skin underneath. ‘Just demonstrate.’

  Richard had grabbed a handful of sand and hurled it at him, but it’d caught in the breeze so they both ended up spluttering it from their mouths. As they walked back up the ramp to the promenade, Luke had asked, ‘So when’ll she come and visit then?’

  ‘With you around,’ Richard had said. ‘Never.’

  Struggling more to swim against the tide, Richard tried to imagine Luke as he might be now. A year shy of thirty, run to fat, prematurely balding. Without that intent, laughing gaze. He looked over his shoulder and realised he was much further out than he’d realised. Stephie was standing again, or at least he thought it was her. Yes, the red of her top, and he was sure he could make out her denim shorts. He waved, but she didn’t respond. He tried again, but she seemed to be using her hands to blinker her eyes from the sun. He launched into a fast crawl again, back towards the land.

  ‘You twat,’ she said, throwing his towel towards him as he waded out the sea. ‘You had me worried for a moment there.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, giving himself a brisk rub down. ‘I got a little carried away. The water was nice.’

  ‘Yeah well, even strong swimmers drown.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘I know.’

  They went up onto the headland with the picnic, which had been hastily scavenged from the contents of the fridge and augmented with a bottle of wine. Richard had vacillated between his concern about Stephie’s studying and his unwillingness to adopt the role of nanny, but he couldn’t get round the fact that it was too rare a day to waste indoors. They’d piled everything onto the back seat of the car and he’d driven them over to the big bay on the other side of the peninsula.

  ‘Is there sheep shit everywhere?’ Stephie asked.

  ‘Pretty much,’ Richard said. ‘It is the countryside. But over there doesn’t look so bad.’

  They stretched out on the springy grass, turning their backs on the caravan park and facing the sea. Waves swept in and fragmented against the rocks below them, and the children they’d seen earlier were building sloppy sandcastles that dissolved every time the tide flooded their haphazard moats.

  ‘I’m having another Maidens flashback,’ Stephie said, unwrapping the egg sandwiches and waving them towards Richard so that he could smell them.

  ‘Yes, but we didn’t get wine then,’ he said, struggling with the bottle and his Swiss Army knife.

  When they’d finished eating Richard lay back and raised one hand to shade his eyes. Clouds lazed across the pristine blue sky.

  ‘You said you wanted me to fill in a few gaps,’ he said after a while.

  ‘Mmm,’ Stephie said, rummaging in the cool bag. Richard closed his eyes as she withdrew the bottle and heard her splash more wine into her glass, and then his own. Stop, he’d been about to say, I’ll have to drive later, but instead he propped himself up on his elbows and took a sip.

  ‘Look over there,’ Stephie said, indicating where a yacht with brilliant white sails was scudding beyond the bay.

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it,’ Richard said. ‘It’s so still here but only a little way out there’s a gale blowing.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He lay back down and looked at the sky again. ‘Funny, I never see any shapes in the clouds apart from more clouds. Or cotton wool. Or …’

  ‘So I guess what I’ve been wondering,’ she said, ‘Is what went on with you a few years ago, when I was still at school.’

  ‘Did you ask Mum?’

  ‘She says it’s water under the bridge.’

  ‘It is,’ Richard said. He squinted up at Stephie, but she was still looking out to sea, not at him at all.

  ‘Well let’s just say I don’t like family secrets. Not when I’m meant to be part of the family.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Richard said. He plucked a blade of grass and started to peel it apart, discarding each moist green strip. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Why you left uni, why Mum and Dad fell out with you, why you ran away to Dundee and then to here.’

  ‘Anything else while you’re at it?’

  She sighed. ‘I’m not asking for chapter and verse. Just the edited highlights.’

  ‘Well, first of all I didn’t run away to Dundee, I went to do a course. Then I got a work placement, then I went self-employed and now I’m here. There’s no big mystery. I told you before, I just fancied a change.’

  ‘Yeah, but no friends, no visitors.’

  Richard propped himself up and looked at her. This time she met his eye.

  ‘You’re not the only visitor I’ve had you know,’ he said.

  She turned away again, started poking the ends of her laces into the eyelets of her trainers.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I don’t know enough to figure out what the right questions to ask are. Help me out a little, okay?’

  0

  We peered through the glass into an empty room, large enough to have been a ballroom. Speckled mirrors faced off above parallel marble fireplaces, and although the plasterwork had yellowed, the wall sconces ringing the room held their gilt.

  Mean gits, I said. They even took the light bu
lbs with them.

  Luke reached out, tried the handle on the middle of three doors that led into the room. It didn’t yield, of course not, and I had a flash of anxiety as I wondered if there was an alarm. He smiled at me, an open and innocent smile that belied any nefarious intent, scanned the open ground behind him, and tried the handles of the other two doors.

  Oh well. He shrugged, as if he hadn’t expected success, then vaulted over the balustrade, landing with his knees bent in a barren flowerbed. I took the stairs.

  We skirted round the side of the house until we reached a gate. Flecks of rust crumbed off the hinges as I pushed it open. Beyond it was a daisy-strewn drying green with rusted metal posts at each of its four corners, the same as the one at home, except that this was larger and secluded by grey stone walls. A flagstone path bisected the green and led to another gate directly opposite the first one, through which we passed into a courtyard flanked by some rundown outbuildings. We reconnoitred the back door – or servants’ entrance, I suppose it was – but it was well secured.

  Let’s go back, Luke said. This bit’s dull.

  Kind of sad though, I said. Seeing it all locked up and abandoned like this.

  Think of all the poor bastards scuttling back and forwards through that door, hanging out the washing, he said. I wonder if they’d be sad to see it abandoned.

  They might be if they lost their jobs.

  We retraced our steps across the drying green and back to the rear of the castle. Under two of the little turrets there was a small paved area, partially obscured by unchecked conifers. Luke wandered over to take a look.

  I thought there might be a door here, he said, but it seems not.

  It was a dank little corner, with two small, grubby sash windows. I pressed my nose up against the glass of one, quickly withdrew when I noticed a large cobweb. Inside was a disappointingly small, square room, completely empty. I was about to suggest we moved on when Luke tried to push one of the windows open. It creaked loudly enough to send a couple of magpies flapping into the air behind us.