No pictures of her father—he hates to be photographed unless it’s with someone important—but five pages in, the pictures of Susan’s mother start. Marie laughing while sunning herself by that pool. Smiling as she pretends to read a book. Giggling as she poses on a windy castle rampart with Kay. Mum always seemed to be laughing or smiling, even at the very end, when she must have been in so much pain.
And there, on the second-to-last page—there it is: a photo Susan had forgotten all about. Her, her mother, and Elliot, in the kitchen. Susan remembers that day.
“We’re going to teach you to make the best brownies,” her mother declared. And they did.
Susan’s head to toe in chocolate in the picture, getting ready to lick the spoon. Her mother and grandfather laugh and applaud and show off the fruits of their labors. It’s the first of many times Susan joined them in the kitchen, learning her grandfather’s secrets with her mother’s encouragement. Her sisters had no interest: Margaret once burned herself and refused to go near a stove again, and Julia had more or less been on a diet from the age of ten. Elliot used to shake his head as he watched her pick at her plate.
“She’ll never be any good with food,” he would murmur to Susan. “To make great food, you have to love food. You can’t just like it or tolerate it. It’s a bit like marriage in that way.”
Susan does love food. It’s why she’ll never look good in skinny jeans. And she’s fine with that.
She turns to the last page in the album, and every last bit of her body clenches. Her heart rate picks up just a little. No family picture this time, but a photo of Elliot, already looking frail, his arms slung over the necks of two much younger men in chef’s whites. The one on the right—cocky, smirking straight into the camera—went on to become the head chef at Elliot’s Regent Street. It’s thanks to him they wound up serving horsemeat as prime rib. The other man—broad shouldered, russet haired, hint of a lantern jaw, nose slightly crooked after having been broken once, smiling admiringly at Susan’s grandfather—is Chris.
Susan snaps the album shut, swallowing hard against the lump in her throat. It shouldn’t be this hard after all these years. It’s ridiculous to still feel this way. He’s long gone, on to bigger and better things.
But still …
She buries the album at the bottom of her bag, changes into her pajamas, and climbs into the silly bed, which is so soft it’s like trying to sleep on a marshmallow. She draws her knees up to her chest, trying to distract herself with thoughts of Edinburgh and work, as she’s always done.
It will be a relief to get out of London.
* * *
There are many things Chris will miss about New York, but the international departures lounge at JFK Airport is not one of them. He speeds through it, past the places selling ludicrously overpriced, soggy sandwiches and I ♥ NY snow globes, and settles in at the bar in the British Airways First Class Lounge.
“Talisker, please, mate,” he says to the bartender. “Neat.”
As the bartender serves his drink, a woman a little farther down begins eyeing Chris. He studies her out of the corner of his eye. Conventionally pretty. Blonde. Thin as seaweed. Not really his type. Women like her remind him of Julia Napier, and try as he might, he can’t forget the look she gave him that one time Susan brought him home for dinner. Like he was dog shit someone had just tracked into her house.
This woman smiles, which immediately sets her apart from Julia. Chris smiles back instinctively. She takes that as encouragement and approaches.
“Sorry for staring, but you look familiar,” she begins. “Are you on TV?”
Chris’s smile stiffens a touch. “Yes.” He steels himself for the inevitable follow-up.
Her eyes widen. “Oh, are you the guy from Outlander?”
There it is. Not that he can blame her—or any of the others who have made that exact same guess. The resemblance is deliberate. His producers realized that they, too, had a well-built, medium-height, red-headed Scotsman they could capitalize on. They encouraged him to bulk up (“Your viewership is eighty-six percent female; you need to give them something besides the food to drool over”) and grow his hair out. He’ll chop that off before getting back into the kitchen. Maybe then people will stop thinking he’s Sam Heughan.
“No, sorry,” he tells the woman.
She recovers quickly. “I should have known that,” she purrs. “You’re much better looking.”
He guesses she’s a couple of glasses of wine in, but nevertheless lifts his whisky in thanks.
“But you are on TV?” she confirms. “Which show?”
“I hosted a cooking show,” he admits. Chris’s Cookout isn’t something he’s enormously proud of, but he does owe a fair bit of his success to it and supposes he should be grateful.
“Oh. Oh, right! That one where chefs are dropped in random places and have to collect ingredients and cook over fires and in caves and stuff? I love that show!”
Loads of people do for some reason. The producers were outraged when he told them he wanted to stop after four seasons.
“But it’s a hit!” one of them wailed. “We were about to start merchandising you! We had baking tins and everything all lined up. We were thinking about Iceland next year!”
Much as he loved the idea of freezing his balls off while watching a bunch of publicity-hungry chefs try to start a fire on ice, he had to decline. He has his own dreams, and they do not include six more seasons of Chris’s Cookout.
“So, you’re not doing it anymore?” The woman sighs. “Shame. Guess I’ll just have to binge-watch it on Netflix or something. Or pick your brain on the flight over. You always had the best cooking tips.” She looks up at him through her eyelashes. Her voice turns husky. “Is London your final destination?”
He polishes off the whisky and sets down the glass. “No,” he answers. “Edinburgh.”
Chapter Two
Baggage Claim
The plane dips beneath a thin scrim of cloud, and Susan presses up against the window as Edinburgh reveals itself below.
The Firth of Forth glitters invitingly in the peek-a-boo sunshine, which is reliable enough today to call boats out to the little islands: Inchkeith, with its lighthouse; Cramond and Inchmickery, with their hunkered down, wartime fortifications that refuse to give way to time and tide. Just ahead, the spiderweb spans of the bridges link Edinburgh to the whimsically named Kingdom of Fife.
And there, to the left: the city. Susan’s been here before, but now she looks at it differently, feeling a sort of proprietary excitement and pride in her new home. She watches as farm fields and kelly-green hills give way to rows of shops and terraced stone houses. Unlike London, there are no skyscrapers here, just a few ugly council block towers looming defiantly over Victorian-era semi-detatched houses and 1920s bungalows. Susan spots Edinburgh Castle on its jutting, craggy perch, looking out over its domain.
She marvels at the city’s many guises, packed together and changing in the blink of an eye. The pleasant seaside promenades of Portobello swiftly give way to the commercial docks and old warehouses of Leith, which just as quickly transform into South Queensferry, easily identified by its proximity to the sunset-orange Forth Rail Bridge. The tide is low, revealing large expanses of sand, rock, and muck in some places, temporarily spoiling the view for those with waterfront properties. Beyond those shores lie the thickly clustered buildings and perplexing warren of hilly streets that defy any sort of grid pattern and beg to be explored.
London has its history, of course, but so much of it feels new. Edinburgh clings to its past; lives in it. It pools around an ancient castle and packs into narrow streets and old buildings. It clings to its cobblestones and turns genteel Georgian townhouses into office buildings with Escher-esque interior layouts. The Scots are an admirably thrifty people. They see no need to build new when what’s there already will do perfectly well, thank you very much.
The plane lands and Susan retrieves her bag from the overhead, feeling
the firm, sharp corners of the album nudge the canvas sides. She inches down the aisle of the plane, a maddening crawl past harassed fellow passengers and plastically smiling cabin crew. Once free, she surges forth, speeding toward the exits just beyond the baggage claim. There’s so much to do: house keys to be collected, the restaurant to visit, the chef to catch up and make plans with. She aches to be free of airports, of London; to get started, to set things right—they can’t wait another moment. Not another Regent Street.
At last! She reaches the escalator, gets stuck in the bottleneck there, but at least the exit is within sight. So close!
But then she sees, just up ahead on the escalator … No. It can’t be. Can’t possibly be. His shoulders seem broader, his arms far more muscular. And … it can’t be.
The auburn-haired man who transfixes her turns at the bottom of the escalators and makes his way to the baggage carousels. A few minutes later, Susan, too, reaches solid earth and makes for the exit, convincing herself, It can’t be.
But it is.
As she passes the carousel for her own flight, she sees him again, and there is no mistaking him. Yes, he’s definitely fitter (his physique now speaks more of hours in a gym than hours in a kitchen), and his hair longer, pulled back from his face in a low, short ponytail at the nape of his neck. His clothes are simple but clearly expensive, as is the artfully distressed leather satchel at his feet. He stands with his arms crossed, watching the carousel turn. As Susan passes, however, he turns his head and looks straight at her.
Chris Baker.
Every part of her freezes, heart included, it seems, at least for a moment. But then that one bit starts beating very fast, and her mouth feels dry and her skin hot. She stares at him, wondering what she should do or say. Apologize? Try to explain herself? Just greet him as an old friend? (“Wow, fancy meeting you here! Small world, eh? How’ve you been?” As if nothing ever happened.)
She stands there, clutching her bag, for what feels like eons but is really only a second or two. Then Chris turns away, back to the luggage carousel, as if he hadn’t seen her at all.
* * *
Twenty-two Moray Place is not the home Susan would have chosen for herself. It’s one of a series of nearly identical, four-story, Georgian-style buildings set in a ring around a viciously fenced central garden accessible only to residents. These have always been homes for the rich; they bear the hallmarks of refined ostentation: decorative columns across the front, and enormous windows with tiny, curlicued balconettes on the three central floors.
The Napiers’ new home is one of the few in the area that is still fully intact: most have been carved up into offices or luxurious flats. Susan’s first thought, when she opens the front door, is that it’s overwhelmingly beige. Not a hint of color or personality to be seen in any of the public rooms except the dining room, which, for some reason, is royal purple. She can see why Julia was excited by it. A blank slate for her to play with. She’ll probably start by painting the entryway the same gray color that features in the London house. Something by Farrow and Ball that was all the rage among Town & Country readers (“It’s not gray, Susan, it’s Mole’s Breath. Can’t you see the blue undertones?”)
The beige, even the Mole’s Breath, Susan could live with, but the kitchen! She groans at first sight. It’s a kitchen for people who don’t cook. Reflective white cabinets that will show every fingerprint, and an unforgiving slate floor. She makes a mental note to pick up some rugs from IKEA to put down and steels herself for the bedrooms.
Not beige. A riot of color, in fact. She chooses the one with wallpaper least likely to give her a headache, plunks her bag next to the door, and retreats.
* * *
A private hire car collects Chris from the airport and deposits him on his new doorstep on Mill Lane in Leith. His flat is one of six built in the shell of a Victorian office building. History on the outside, modern on the inside. How very Edinburgh. How very Leith. Edinburgh’s former docklands, now experiencing a resurgence. Not quite the place that produced Renton and Sick Boy anymore.
It hasn’t fully left behind its grubby past, so quaint cafés peddling flat whites and oversized scones to yummy mummies sit alongside cheap chippies with faded, gap-toothed signs and lurid yellow, plastic interiors that date to the eighties. There are still plenty of people here with accents so thick you could spoon them up like custard. But former warehouses are now restaurants and posh flats, and shiny new residential towers at the waterfront try to make everyone forget about Leith’s working-class background.
Chris’s flat, like so many others, is brand-new and so still lacking personality. The blank white walls feel cold and stark, but it’s only a place to sleep. He mostly liked it for its plentiful natural light and location just a few blocks from his restaurant.
Leith is his home territory. Cables Wynd House, the “Banana Flats” made famous (for all the wrong reasons) by Trainspotting, is just around the corner. He grew up there. Sam too.
But Chris tries not to think about that.
Why here? He could have opened his restaurant anywhere. Why Edinburgh? Why Leith? It’s not as if he has very many fond memories of the place. His most recent time here definitely wasn’t great. What brought him back? Is it that he does, in a begrudging, Scottish sort of way, love this city, with its vibrant clash of old and new, rich and poor? Its neighborhoods like little towns in themselves, clustered around a sort of high street with the obligatory butcher, baker, and newsagents where you can buy the latest gossip rag, a bottle of cheap plonk, and freshly made samosas, all in a space roughly the size of Chris’s bedroom.
Or maybe it’s not the city, but the people in it that drew him home. He’s never encountered anyone else quite like the Scots. These are a people who refuse to let go of the past entirely, squeezing awkwardly into old buildings and maintaining a grudge against the English that everyone else thinks they should have let go of centuries ago. But to a Scot, Culloden may as well have happened yesterday. The Scots are people of stone, they are. They remember, and they refuse to budge. They withstand, and though you may think you’ve beaten them, you haven’t. You never will. They’ll play their banned instruments and wear kilts unironically in the most inhospitable weather and just dare you to say anything about it. They will rise again and again and again, holding tight to their traditions even as they maneuver themselves into position as a modern society worth paying attention to.
Maybe it’s neither of those things. Maybe Chris has come back to give an emphatic middle finger to the neighborhood that once almost ruined him. He’s returned successful and famous, and the restaurant will just be the capper to it all. You see, a boy from the Banana Flats can make good. We council house kids can rise to the top, and to hell with all the people like the Napiers who used to look down on us.
Damn. He’d hoped to keep Susan from his mind—he’s managed so well these past several years. But here she is again, rising like a wraith. Invading his city (how very English of her!). As he wanders over to a window and looks out at a collection of buildings turned sullen gray by centuries of soot and industry, he wonders: What the hell is Susan Napier doing in Edinburgh?
Seeing her younger sister, maybe? The one who was up here, at Edinburgh University, when he and Susan were together? He’s never met that sister, but Chris imagines she’s just like Julia. Susan had seemed such an odd one out in her family. He’d sort of loved that about her. And he’d definitely loved the fact it didn’t seem to bother her.
He digs his nails into his palms and tries not to remember the things he’d loved. The time she showed up for a date with a massive box of biscuits in half a dozen different flavors (“I was experimenting today”) or how she frowned and bit the left corner of her bottom lip as she really concentrated on getting something right. Or the feel of her hair, or the smell of her …
Chris forces himself to dredge up another memory: of coming home, after a double shift and the worst news of his life (up to that point), to find her s
tanding beside two packed bags. No warning, no explanation. That was it, she was gone. It hurt even worse than he’d expected, and then what happened next …
Chris closes his eyes and digs his nails in harder. He had risked everything for her and got nothing back. And that’s when he realized he’d been nothing to her. A taste of something exotic: a rich girl slumming. Someone to distract her when her life got hard. And when she was done with him, she’d dropped him without a thought and never looked back.
Maybe she’s more like Julia than he thought.
And now, here she is again. Wandering back into his orbit, just when he truly believed he’d put all that far, far behind him. Seeing her at the airport had been like a leap into a steaming pool that turned out to be freezing. It was such a shock, he hadn’t known what to do, so he flailed, bewildered. Looked away to collect himself, and then she was gone.
Maybe she hadn’t really been there at all. Maybe he’d just imagined it. It would make sense—she looked exactly as he remembered her, and who doesn’t change in ten years? That dark, wavy hair cut short, framing a heart-shaped face with skin as smooth and pale as milk. There was a scattering of freckles over her nose and cheeks—how many times had he tried to kiss each and every one? How many times had he tried to come up with a better way to describe the color of her eyes than “mackerel belly”?
But it was her. He knew it was. She has changed, subtly. Her face is a little thinner. Her eyes a little sadder. And she seemed just as shocked to see him. Nothing you conjure up is going to seem surprised to see you.
Hopefully she’s just in town for a quick trip. A couple of days with her sister, and then she’ll be gone.
The sooner the better, Chris thinks.
He has a restaurant to open and a book coming out. He has his hands more than full, And anyway, he sternly reminds himself, Susan’s a bitch. She used him, got what she wanted or needed, and then dropped him. And when he needed her, she hadn’t been there. Even today, in the airport, she hadn’t had the grace to come over and speak to him. And really, she should make the first move, right? After all, she was in the wrong.
All Stirred Up Page 2