They were engaged. Planning to marry in the next few months.
Since then, I’d heard Holly on the phone to her siblings, Lewis and Miranda, on numerous occasions, murmuring in other rooms, but whenever I broached the subject she said there was nothing to talk about. ‘Not until I actually meet her,’ she had said, the last time I had brought Jasmine up, a few days before we’d departed for this trip. ‘Then I’m sure I’ll have lots to say.’
‘Good stuff, hopefully.’
‘Actually, I’ve decided to be optimistic. Dad’s been on his own for a long time, so this Jasmine must have something special about her. He’s very choosy.’ She had put her arms around my neck. ‘Like me.’
We drove on. The landscape was all greens and greys, the craggy hills ascending to our left, the cold sea below to our right. In the distance, beyond that forbidding, churning water, the dark mountains of Skye: the Cuillins, the Red and the Black. As soon as Holly asked me if I would like to join her and the other Grants on their annual trip to Applecross, I had looked it up on Google Maps. This was my first ever trip to the Scottish Highlands and I didn’t want to appear completely ignorant about the local geography in front of her family.
‘We always spend Hogmanay there,’ she had told me. ‘New Year’s Eve, to you and me.’
‘I do know what Hogmanay is.’
‘Oh, I know. But my parents always insisted we say Hogmanay while in Scotland. They bought a holiday home there thirty years ago.’
‘When you were, what? Six?’
‘Yep. We’ve been every year since. A couple of weeks every summer, and the week between Christmas and New Year– apart from, well, you know.’
She meant her lost years. The decade she’d spent in Asia and Australia.
‘We hardly ever went on foreign holidays,’ she went on. ‘Dad never took us to Disneyland or the Maldives. It was always Scotland.’
‘Deprived of visiting the Maldives. You poor thing.’ My family’s idea of an extravagant holiday had been a week in a caravan in Camber Sands.
‘I know, I know.’ To her credit, she had cringed. ‘I was a totally spoilt, privileged brat. Please, whenever I say something like that, you have my permission to tell me to shut the fuck up.’
We rounded a bend, and Holly said, ‘You’ll need to take a left turn in a minute, just before the visitors’ centre.’
Ahead of us, at the end of this stretch of road, was a one-storey prefabricated building, a church looming behind it.
‘The centre is closed in winter, before you get excited and start planning touristy activities and wondering if there’s a gift shop. There’s no supermarket either, before you ask. Not even a Tesco Express.’
‘Iseverythingshut?’
‘Everything except the pub.’
She reached across and squeezed my thigh again. This was a very Holly thing to do. She was always grabbing hold of me, pulling at my sleeve or the front of my T-shirt, tugging my hair. Sometimes she would pinch me and say, ‘Just checking I’m not dreaming.’ I wasn’t sure that was how it was supposed to work– weren’t you supposed to pinch yourself?– but Iliked it. She was physical, kinetic, restless. And I wondered what she would be like here, where it seemed there was so little to do. It seemed like the kind of place that would make people go mad.
We took the left turn and drove along a straight road that ran parallel with a river. And then we were climbing again, up a curving slope, and Holly said, ‘That view. That’s what made my mum fall in love with this place. Why we came back here again and again.’
I slowed the car almost to a halt and followed her gaze, mouthing awow. From up here, we had a perfect view of the bay on the eastern edge of the peninsula. Following the curve of the bay was a row of white houses, and I could see more houses in little clusters further back. The clouds had parted, just a crack, to reveal a streak of blue sky, and the sea shimmered, but only for a moment. The gap closed up again and the waves and the land beyond turned a shade darker, and then we were moving again, around another bend, and Holly said, ‘There it is. Up on the cliff.’
There was a sharp incline to our right. I drove up it, glad the rental car was an automatic, the house coming into view as I rounded a bend. If I’d been on foot I would have stopped dead and rubbed my eyes like a cartoon character.
‘Thisis your house?’
‘Yep.’
‘Holly, it looks like a castle.’
It was as grey as the rainclouds above, presumably constructed of granite, three storeys high with sloping stone-slabbed roofs and four or five chimneys jutting towards the sky. It looked solid, built to withstand the worst the Scottish weather could throw at it rather than cannonballs and arrows, but to me it was the kind of place a laird would live. Possiblya baron. To add to the effect, a flag flew from a pole on the roof: the blue and white of Scotland, even though English people owned it.
‘It’s nothing like a castle,’ Holly protested.
‘Says the woman who described her enormous flat in Brighton as “cosy”.’
We reached the top of the slope, drove across a gravel courtyard and pulled up in the parking area at the front of the house, next to a little red Fiat, and I got out. Turning, I realized we were only thirty or forty feet from the edge of the cliff, and I walked to the edge to take in the view of the sea and the islands beyond. Light rain kissed my face and I pulled my coat tightly around me, shivering a little. In the distance, beyond the bay and its row of white houses, another huge building stood on high ground, a building that was substantially larger even than the Grants’ holiday home. Now, that would be where the local nobility lived, I thought, though even from this great distance I could sense there was something off about it, an air of abandonment.
