by Wendy Holden
Harry cut in. ‘Does it look like it made me laugh?’
‘Well, no, but…’
The glow of the fizzing orange street lamp fell on his broad shoulders and dark, tousled hair. Beneath drawn black brows his expression was bitter. ‘It was all wrong!’ he stormed. ‘Everything about it was wrong. They went the wrong way up the Neva, they had churches in Kiev that were actually in Moscow. The Russian was so bad it was incomprehensible.’
This tirade surprised Laura. Did anyone watch Bond films for accuracy? They were, as everyone knew, fantasies on all fronts. The idea that Caspar was brave, loyal and clever was the biggest fantasy of all. In real life, as he had demonstrated many times, he was the exact opposite of all three.
‘It was pretty silly,’ she agreed. ‘That bit in that Moscow park, where Caspar – I mean Bond – went past and downloaded stuff from his smartphone into that rock filled with listening devices!’
She expected Harry to vehemently agree at the utter ridiculousness of this. Instead he raked a hand through his thick black hair and said, ‘Actually, that’s just about the only accurate bit in the whole film.’
Laura was gobsmacked. ‘You mean there really is a spy rock?’
Harry nodded. ‘I’ve seen it,’ he said. ‘I’ve downloaded into it.’ His face, briefly emptied of anger, was full of longing. His eyes, under the street lamp, looked wistful, even moist. He seemed to be recalling happier and more exciting times. Then, abruptly, he seemed to realise where he was and the frown returned. ‘As for your friend,’ he added vehemently, ‘his acting was more wooden than the IKEA catalogue.’
It had been said before, many times. Laura felt stung on Caspar’s behalf, even so. ‘I thought he was slightly better than in the last one,’ she countered.
Harry’s dark eyes glittered with disbelief. ‘He was crap,’ he said savagely, ‘in every possible way. More than that, he’s a dinosaur throwback who treats women like dirt.’
Laura didn’t hear the obvious insecurity in this, the cry for help from a man whose self-esteem had suffered a body blow. She’d had enough of Harry’s whinging now, not to mention his blind hypocrisy.
What about his treatment of women? He had absolutely no idea how horrible her own day had been, and obviously cared even less. She began to tell him as much. Harry listened, hands shoved in the pockets of the hated smart new overcoat, a sardonic expression on his finely chiselled face.
When she had finished he said, with mock awe, ‘Wow, sorry. Of course life’s much worse for you among the champagne facials and the vagina steamers.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ exploded Laura. A crowd of cinemagoers was picking its way between them, chattering about babysitters and what to have for dinner. ‘Bound to be something in Ottolenghi,’ one of them was saying.
When they’d passed and the pavement was clear, Laura faced Harry again. The hiatus caused by the hipsters had given her pause for thought. She now realised that he was sad and frustrated and that both these emotions, familiar to her, were entirely new and bewildering to him. His criticism of the film was actually a howl of grief for his old professional life. For his own derring-do days when he would fly to Moscow at a moment’s notice. For the story he was setting up for others but wanted to do himself.
He was being rude and objectionable, but it was misery that was driving it and she should be more understanding.
She took a deep breath, preparing to reach out. But there was no one now to reach out to. The area of pavement beneath the street lamp where Harry had stood was empty. He had gone.
She walked around a bit, looking for him. Perhaps he had just gone ahead of her, walking off his frustration. But there was no sign of him in the distance in any of the streets she looked down. Gardens filled with wheelie bins and parked cars, interspersed with skips and VW camper vans, stretched as far as the eye could see. But no Harry. He had disappeared completely.
Laura walked home slowly, her heart almost as much of a lead weight in her body as the still-undigested quinoa bhaji. It had been a truly terrible day. She had been menaced by the bullying Bev and had lost her star writer; her editorial integrity was further threatened by an ad-grubbing trip to a rainy northern bog – and now her boyfriend had walked off into the night. Things really couldn’t get any worse.
Chapter Six
Laura spent a tense night at Cod’s Head Row. She was unable to sleep; she was waiting. But Harry did not, as expected, return in the small hours. There was no movement in the small hours whatsoever.
The silence rang in Laura’s ears to the extent that she almost missed the old days when her upstairs neighbour Edgar, off his face on drink or drugs, would crash in and fall up the stairs. But Edgar was away with his whistling choir. They were touring Mexico whistling Handel’s Messiah. It sounded an unlikely combination to Laura; in the meantime, the closest thing she had to human companionship was a pair of Harry’s old boxer shorts, which she went to bed clutching like a teddy bear.
Dire possibilities, magnified by darkness and tiredness, loomed in her imagination. Had Harry actually left her? For good? Surely not, over such a silly row. On the other hand, his fury had been volcanic. He was much more miserable about the new job than she had realised. Should she have realised? Was it all her fault?
She had tried calling him every ten minutes, but it always went to voicemail. At first she left anxious messages, but got spooked by her own tense tones in the darkness and stopped. After that she just lay in the dark staring at her smartphone, willing it to ring, hugging the boxer shorts.
As dawn approached, the rattle of bottles could be heard. It was Olly, the former hedgefunder turned old-fashioned milkman, delivering pints in proper bottles to modish Shoreditch doorsteps. But as Olly’s prices were far from old-fashioned, Laura still got Tetrapaks of semi-skimmed from the supermarket. She could hear Olly cheerily greeting the first wave of foragers headed for the local park. Their harvests of fat hen and Jack-by-the-hedge would later be on display at staggering prices at Nigel Forage, the local ‘wild greengrocer’.
Laura had got so used to all this these days she barely noticed it. But now she wondered whether Harry didn’t actually have a point about it being pretentious.
She turned over, trying to get comfortable on the thin blue sheets from a supermarket basics range. Not for her the reconditioned heavy Victorian bedsheets on sale down the road at Mrs Keppel’s, an emporium specialising in vintage linens. What sort of street could support a vintage linen emporium anyway? Mrs Keppel’s also stocked bracelets made out of old forks twisted into circles and with their tines teased out into curls. Laura could remember standing with Harry in front of a display of these and dropping heavy hints that she would like one for her birthday. She shoved her face into her pillow and groaned. What a truly terrible idea.
But as the rising sun came through the kitchen window and hit the wall of the room where Laura lay, her hopes started to rise. Harry would return soon. He had to. He had left his stuff here.
Her mind ranged across what his stuff actually was. Minimal, crappy shaving equipment, got free on planes. The battered slippers with the backs trodden down. And the other one of his despised suits, the one he had not been wearing. Both bought in the sale at John Lewis for a third of the original price in an exercise taking less than five minutes.
There was no reason at all for Harry to come and get his things, Laura gloomily realised. Had he been one of the area’s typical male residents he’d have had to send a pantechnicon for his beard oil, cult Japanese jeans and messenger bag made of leather from old LNER train seats.
Harry owned nothing remotely like this. Nor did he remotely wish to. He was the least affected person she had ever met and only now, she felt, was she beginning to appreciate what she might have lost.
Still, if she didn’t get up she’d lose more. Her job, for one thing. Laura started to get ready for work, despair knotting in her stomach.
At the office, Bev Sweet continued to lay about the staff.
It was, people were saying, like Stalin’s terror. You could almost hear the gunshots from the sixth floor. People who had formerly disappeared for three-hour liquid lunches now had their fennel salads and kombucha at their desks. Visits to the loo were unprecedentedly quick, and fag breaks a thing of the past. As a consequence, tempers were frayed all round.
Laura made several despairing calls to Harry’s office, but according to the desk secretary, Autumn, he had not yet come in. ‘Look,’ Autumn said, sounding terse after Laura’s sixth call. ‘When he comes in I’ll get him to ring you, okay?’
‘Is Ellen there?’ Laura asked, calling for the seventh time five minutes later.
Ellen O’Hara, another foreign correspondent, was Harry’s close friend, whom Laura had met on her first date with him. He had taken her to an exclusive reporters’ club called the Not Dead Yet and it had been one of the most amazing nights of her life.
Autumn’s tone remained frosty. ‘She’s in Syria.’
Laura groaned inwardly. She had hoped Ellen might know about the story Harry was setting up. His absence might have something to do with it; he might be seeing someone about it. Perhaps it was even a story for Ellen, although the word ‘Syria’ sent a shiver down Laura’s spine.
‘I’ll get Harry to call you when he comes in,’ Autumn concluded, then put the phone down.
Laura did her best to concentrate on the job in hand: her own. More proofs for the latest issue were arriving on her desk and she applied herself to reading an article about the latest exclusive members’ club to open in London. It didn’t sound very contemporary; staff were shown photographs of the wives and mistresses of members so as not to mix them up and corporate membership was a cool million. Among the services provided for this mind-boggling sum were those of a resident ice-carver who would fashion cubes for your cocktail into any shape required.
Laura paused and whistled under her breath. Even though she helmed a publication chronicling the lives of the rich and famous, some of their excesses still had the power to shock. The gap here between wealth and taste was of Grand Canyon proportions. The statue of a unicorn in the garden was studded with real jewels and one of the many bars had a diamond floor and a solid-gold counter. Laura thought of what Harry would make of a place like this, and missed him all the more.
She called his office again but this time Autumn didn’t even pick up. Screening my calls, thought Laura, bitterly.
The next proof she picked up was about the Clerkenwell Cordwainer, who made brogues from two-centuries-old reindeer leather tanned by Russian artisans with secret techniques. ‘It’s got this magnificent smell,’ the cobbler said of the leather, which, just for good measure, had been rescued from a shipwreck. Imagining Harry laughing, Laura tried to smile.
‘You look cheerful!’ Harriet’s pepper-and-salt head appeared round the door. ‘And I’ve got more good news. It’s all done.’
‘What’s all done?’
Harriet came in, her boxy, mannish suit looking more boxy and mannish than ever. In her hands was an open laptop. ‘Scotland.’
Laura stared at her as the information reloaded in her head. Scotland. The moneymaking, ad-attracting super-issue. The Harry business had driven it completely from her mind. But Harriet had come good with her threat to send Laura to visit Highland properties currently on the market. It was all arranged. Laura was going to spend a week at the up-for-sale Glenravish Castle, South Ross.
‘Where?’
Harriet now placed the laptop on Laura’s desk. On the screen was the estate agent’s website. A range of baronial buildings bristling with towers and turrets set in a glen against a background of mountains at the foot of a silver loch filled the screen. Glenravish, presumably.
‘They’ll be good for a double-page spread at least,’ Harriet was saying gaily of the agents, whose name was Wrack and Ruane. ‘Possibly more; they seem to have the monopoly on these places. Anyone selling a castle in Caledonia,’ the ad director added fancifully, ‘seems to do it through them.’
‘But I don’t want to stay there,’ objected Laura, peering closely at the picture. Presumably, this being a sales platform, this was the most positive image obtainable. But you could still sense the damp and almost see the midges.
Harriet gave her the look over the glasses. ‘But Sandy’s expecting you. And is going to show you some traditional Scottish field sports so you can write them up for the supplement.’ Harriet snapped away her computer.
‘Sandy?’
‘That’s the laird. Sandy McRavish.’
It wasn’t a name to fill one with confidence. Laura pictured a caber-tossing Cro-Magnon Celt who threw women over his shoulders and carried them off to do his worst. Someone huge and ginger in a vest and kilt, like the man on the porridge packets.
In the evening, Laura returned gloomily home. She had been quite unable, during the day, to prise Harriet from the Scottish idea. The ad director was insistent that the wretched land of the mist-soaked rocks was having, as she put it, ‘a moment’.
Laura was quite sure that the opposite was true and spent the Tube journey thinking disbelievingly about the claims her staff had made for the place. What would they know about what was fashionable anyway? People like Pidge and Bodge might be good on gold fried-chicken buckets and diamond-dust facials. But otherwise they lived in a Mustique timewarp where wrinkly rockers were practically worshipped and Princess Margaret was still hot news.
Laura’s neighbourhood, Shoreditch, was where it was at trendwise. And she’d never seen anyone there wear as much as a wisp of tartan. Even mention Scotland, come to that. Emerging from the Tube station feeling grimly satisfied and dispirited, Laura crawled back to the flat in Cod’s Head Row. She wished with all her heart that she were viewing a featureless flat in a stupid-shaped building with Harry.
‘Laurypops!’
As she turned into Cod’s Head Row, Bill and his husband Ben were waving at her from the doorway of Gorblimey Trousers. This was the pie-and-mash café the former Google execs had opened after relocating, as they put it, from Silicon Valley to Silicon Roundabout. Ben was dressed in a tight white T-shirt with ‘Bollocks To Brexit’ on it. This contrasted with Ben’s which, rather suggestively, said, ‘Bollocks For Brexit’.
‘Come and have a drink,’ Bill added. ‘Och aye the noo.’
‘What?’
‘Och aye the noo,’ repeated Ben. ‘It’s Scottish for “What’s up, guys?”.’
Laura stared at them. ‘What do you know about Scotland? You’re Americans!’
‘As a matter of fact, I have the fondest memories of Aberdeen,’ said Ben, going on to describe a night of madness involving him being carried over a sailor’s shoulder and ending with him crashing out on a roundabout on the ring road. ‘Happy days!’ Ben concluded, ignoring his husband’s thunderous expression.
‘Can we have that drink?’ asked Laura desperately. Had Harriet somehow put them up to this? There seemed no other explanation for Shoreditch suddenly espousing the Scotland-is-trendy theme.
‘Foos your doos,’ Bill added, beaming.
‘It means “How are your doves?” in Scottish,’ Ben supplied.
‘How are my doves?’ Was this outburst of Scots dialect, Laura wondered, better or worse than the Cockney rhyming slang in which the two native Californians generally communicated?
Bill shook his finger, on which several rings sparkled, in mock admonishment. ‘No, no, Laurypops. What you should say is “chaffin’ awar”. That means “my doves are perfectly fine, thank you”.’
He stopped as Ben nudged him. ‘Didn’t you hear the lady? Laurypops needs a drink.’
‘You’ve decorated,’ Laura said, looking round the inside of the bar. Gorblimey Trousers, usually a sea of shabby-chic leather armchairs, was now a sea of tartan. A retina-frazzling yellow, black and red check covered all the tables. Stag heads and swords hung on the walls. And what was that noise? She cocked her head. The music at Gorblimey Trousers was usually a curated mixtape. But this
droning sound – could it be bagpipes?
Indeed it could, Bill enthusiastically confirmed. ‘They’re called Stars In Their Skyes. They’re from Notting Hill and they’re—’
‘All celebrities. Yes, I’ve heard of them.’ Laura’s tone was dejected. It was looking suspiciously as if her staff had been right after all. The Scottish issue actually was on trend. Now she really would have to go to Glenravish.
‘Bottoms up, Laura.’ She turned to find Ben behind the bar, proffering a heavy-bottomed glass. ‘It’s from a distillery on South Uist run by a couple of ex-Microsoft guys.’
It would be, Laura thought, taking a rueful sip. ‘Hmm. It’s quite nice.’
‘Old Sporran single malt,’ supplied Ben.
The name rang a bell. Hadn’t that been the whisky in Thomasella’s chocolates? The first indication of what was to come, Scotland-wise.
Laura took another swig.
‘Good, isn’t it? Perfect with water from the Hebridean bogs.’
Laura snorted into her tumbler. Good to know they hadn’t quite lost their sense of humour.
Over his pink pince-nez, Ben frowned. ‘I’m serious. The right water is crucial for opening up the flavour of the whisky and this stuff has near-perfect levels of peatiness. We get it helicoptered down every morning from Islay.’ He pronounced it to rhyme with ‘clay’ though Laura had already been told firmly by Thomasella that it was pronounced Eye-la to rhyme with ‘Trudie Styler’.
‘I’d better go.’ She drained her glass. She’d had enough.
‘No, you’ve got to stay, we’re having a ceilidh band later,’ Ben insisted. ‘Mull’s the new Ibiza, darling!’ He broke into an impromptu sword dance.
Laura had seldom heard of a better reason for leaving anywhere. She hated folk dancing.
‘And how’s your delicious boyfriend?’ asked Bill, lips twitching.
Laura hesitated. The Old Sporran was starting to warm her insides and she felt herself relaxing. Sitting on an upcycled tractor seat at the bar, she told her friends about the Harry disaster. They were, as she had anticipated, horrified. Less gratifyingly, they blamed her. Neither thought it had been a good idea to take him to Kiev Chicken.