‘That’s where you’re wrong. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about. You know, with the McGahern thing. There maybe could have been a connection between Parky and McGahern. Parky was hard. Don’t let the pansy stuff fool you. He was hard as any of my team. Harder. I know the way he was. Never bothered me. But the army wouldn’t take his sort because they thought they would corrupt other soldiers, that sort of fucking shite. So Parky disguised it. Pretended to be something he wasn’t just so’s he could fight for King and country.’
‘Parks fought in the war?’
‘More than that. I didn’t think about it before. He was in the seventh armoured division. Parky was a Desert Rat. Like Tam McGahern.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I drove to Edinburgh, rather than take the train again. That way I could avoid rush-hour-commuting contract killers. Before I left I ’phoned to say I was on my way. I parked the Atlantic in St Bernard’s Crescent and was shown into the same office as before.
Helena walked into the room and I felt the same kick-in-the-gut reaction.
‘I don’t see you for years then twice in the space of a couple of weeks.’ She smiled and offered me a cigarette from a solid silver box. ‘Am I to infer something from that?’
I smiled. ‘I’m not here on business, Helena,’ I lied, ‘if that’s what you mean. I wanted to see you again. Maybe we could have dinner together?’
She angled her head back slightly, raised the arch of a perfect dark eyebrow and looked at me with her vaguely imperious manner. Like she was appraising me. Sometimes Helena could look haughty. That was when I really, really wanted to fuck her most.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘We’ll eat here. I have a flat on the top floor. Why don’t you come back at seven? There’s a door at the back takes you into the kitchen. If you ring there I’ll come and get you. I don’t want you coming in the front…’ She let the thought die but I knew what she meant: she didn’t want me reminded what her business was.
I stood and picked up my hat. ‘It’s a date. We can talk about old times.’
Her smile flickered. ‘No… not old times. All I want to think about is the future.’
I drove the Atlantic back into the city centre and stopped at a snobby wine merchants in George Street. The guy behind the counter was thirty at the most but striving hard for middle-age. He wore a pair of those ridiculous tartan trousers, known as trews in Scotland, and looked at me as if I couldn’t afford the wine. Truth was, it was a push. The Scots were not great consumers of wine, preferring instead their drinks to double as drain cleaner. In Edinburgh, anything potentially exclusive had a web of snobbery swiftly spun about it, and the guy behind the counter made a point of slowly emphasizing the names of the wines, as if it would help me understand. Having been brought up in New Brunswick I could speak French well, so I amused myself by humiliating him by showing off my francophone skills, asking for wines that didn’t exist and then looking angry when he said they didn’t have them.
I put the bottle of Fronsac in the boot of the car and walked down to a bookstore in Princes Street. A cold wind stirred the dust in the streets and tugged at the raincoats of the glum-faced passers-by. I stopped and looked up at the castle, which towered above Princes Street. There was a flutter in my chest: the same vague feeling of unease. I had had it since I had left Glasgow and at the odd time before that, too. I spun around quickly and startled a young housewife who had been walking behind me, clutching the hand of a pre-school toddler. She passed, as did several others. But I didn’t see what my instinct was telling me should be there. I walked on and into the bookstore, trying to tell myself I was imagining things. But it was still there, that feeling that I was being shadowed. Very professionally.
After parking the Atlantic in Dean Street, I walked to the back of St Bernard’s Crescent. Helena must have been waiting for me in the kitchen, for she opened the door at my first knock. She was wearing a less formal outfit, a deep red dress that exposed her slender arms and long neck, and her hair was loose and brushed her shoulders.
‘Come on up,’ she said. I followed her out of the kitchen and up a tight stairwell that had obviously been intended originally for servants. It was clear she was trying to keep me from seeing the main business of the house. As if I could forget.
I had half-expected her to bring food up with her from the kitchen, but when we got to the attic part of the house, it was clear it was a self-contained dwelling. Her space. Away from business. The rooms she had would originally have been the servants’ quarters but, given the Georgian scale of the house, were still impressive enough. There was a small alcoved section, divided off by a bead screen, behind which something bubbled on a hob and filled the room with a rich, appetizing aroma.
‘The only thing I miss up here is having a piano. There’s one down in the drawing room, but I seldom get a chance to play it.’ I gave her the book I’d picked up for her that afternoon in Princes Street, Coins in the Fountain by John Secondari, and she took the wine from me, pouring us a glass each.
While she cooked I looked out of the window. There was a stone pillared colonnade edging the roof and I could see out across the trees in the crescent below. Edinburgh sat mute and grey under a sky shot through with sunset-red silk. I thought of how I’d been here before, in a different apartment looking out over a different city while Helena had cooked and we had chatted and laughed and deceived each other with talk of the future. In my experience, the future was like a seaside day out to Largs: in principle it sounded great, but when you arrived there it just turned out to be the same old shite.
I suddenly felt tired and wished I wasn’t there. But I smiled as cheerfully as I could when she came through with two plates of goulash.
‘It’s almost impossible to find half-decent ingredients here,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what it is the British have against food that you can taste. That you’d want to taste.’ She laughed and revealed a hint of the girl she’d probably been before the war. She seemed relaxed and I noticed I could hear her accent more. She had left something of the Helena I’d talked to two weeks before down in the house below. Like a formal coat she wore only for business.
The goulash was delicious. As it always had been. We drank the wine I’d brought and then a second bottle she had. We talked and laughed some more, then fell on each other with a savagery that was almost frightening. She scratched and bit me and stared at me wildly with something akin to hatred in her eyes. Afterwards we lay naked on the rug, drank what was left of the wine and smoked.
‘Why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?’ she asked, her voice suddenly cold and hard again.
‘I’m here to see you, Helena,’ I said, and almost believed it myself. ‘After I saw you the other week I couldn’t stop thinking about you. About us.’ At least that much was true.
‘There is no us,’ she said, but the chill had thawed a little. She turned on her side and we looked into each other’s eyes. ‘There never was an us. So why don’t you save us both a lot of time and get to what it is you want. Unless you’ve just had it.’
‘Don’t, Helena. It’s not you.’
‘What? To be bitter and cynical?’ She laughed and rolled onto her back again. She stared up at the ceiling and smoked and I took in her finely sculpted profile. ‘We’re both cut from the same rotten wood, you and I, Lennox. So cut the crap and tell me what you want.’
‘Okay, I did want to ask you something, but I did come here to see you. To be with you.’ I sat up and took a long pull on my cigarette. ‘Listen, Helena, someone… a friend of mine… was talking to me the other day. About wanting to get away. To have a new start. Why can’t we?’
Helena turned to me. The only light was the glow from the fire and the red-gold of it etched the contours of her body. When she spoke her voice was low. ‘Stop it. We’ve been here before.’