Fear and love and obligation and guilt. They were all filling me up so I barely had any space for anything else. There was a bit of a pause then and I hoped I hadn’t sounded too bitter. I likedLachlan and I didn’t want him to think I was such a cow that I hated my brother for his love of history, even if that was so close to the truth that it made me uneasy.
‘We have to get back.’ Lachlan spoke so quietly, I almost didn’t hear. His words were subsumed under the mass of raging contradictory emotions that were making my stomach rebel against the cheese and dubious meat dinner. But when he repeated them with slightly more force, I stopped worrying about my sibling relationship and the fear came thundering to the fore.
‘You think we might not?’
Lachlan slumped a bit further. ‘I dunno,’ he said and sounded completely defeated. ‘I want to be reassuring. Ineedto be. This lot—’ he threw a glance at the sleeping huddle ‘—they need me to be in charge.’
‘But why?’ I had to push down the feeling that I also looked to him to be in charge, to know what was going on. ‘That’s not fair.’
Lachlan sighed so deeply that the table moved. ‘Someone has to be.’
‘You don’t have to take it on yourself though.’ I touched his arm. ‘You’re allowed to be as scared as the rest of us.’
‘But am I allowed to show it?’ I got a quick glance. ‘Admit it, Pax. If nobody takes charge, if nobody leads – well, you’ll know this, being a teacher. Ten minutes of leaderless milling about and anarchy breaks out. It would be likeLord of the Fliesdown here. They’re scared, they’re desperate and we can live without everyone turning on everyone else.’ Another sigh. ‘So it has to be me.’
He sounded so forlorn that I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to reassure him, but how could I when we were all as out of our depth as one another here? Instead I touched his hand where it lay on the table and hoped that said it all.
Lachlan put his other hand over mine. His was heavy and warm and reassuringly rough in places. ‘I don’t know, Pax,’ he went on. ‘I’m feeling useless here. All those years of study and I’m not getting us home.’ Now his sideways glance was rueful. ‘I need to get back. Otherwise all my furniture is sitting around in a cottage by a burn while my redundancy money is dwindling down?—’
‘Redundancy money?’ I interrupted him. ‘I thought you were a history professor?’
The rueful glance was replaced by the steady stare with a lot of activity going on behind it. He’d slipped, and the increased warmth of the palm that lay over my hand told me he realised it. ‘Ah, yes, sorry about that.’ His mouth twisted as though he was working out the sentences in his head before they came out. ‘In the common parlance, I think I stillidentifyas a history professor. I don’t know how much you know about further education, Pax, but they are cutting everything. Everyone. I’ve no idea, maybe they’re merging History with Industrial Design or bloody Textiles or something, but the fact is that I’m out of a job. That’s why I’m doing this research for Historic Environment Scotland.’ A hand indicated the cellar. ‘Ruined castles. Minor families and their lands.’
Things began to make a little more sense now. ‘So you’re not actually a history professor now?’
His eyes dropped away from mine and he fidgeted. ‘I don’t know how to be anything else,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve been lecturing practically since I got the doctorate, and before that it was mostly studying, reading and research. Now academia is closing down around me, I’ve got to get a “proper job” and I’m not quite sure what to do. I’m a bit lost, Pax, to tell the truth. All I can do is history. I’ve lost everything that meant something to me.’
And you’re trying to regain control by being in charge here.‘Oh, Lachlan,’ I said.
‘So.’ He straightened up and withdrew his hand from on top of mine. ‘Now you know. I’m trying to run things because I’m trying to stop feeling as though life is out of my control.’ A flick of a smile, rather grim, but at least he was smiling. ‘I’m not a bossy bastard. I’m just a sad bloke who’s unemployed and groping for meaning.’
Everything he had said about life being out of control was twanging inside me as secret agreement. ‘Yes, I sometimes wonder if I’m not a bit lost myself,’ I said in a sudden blurt of fact-facing. ‘I’m teaching because it’s what I’m qualified to do, not because I enjoy inspiring young people with a love of chemical bonds and the periodic table.’
‘Then why keep doing it?’
‘Because I don’t know what else I would do. It’s what I’m good at – well, that and riding ponies and there’s not a lot you can do to monetise gymkhana events and trying to get a recalcitrant Exmoor over coloured poles, particularly once you’re past puberty. I need to keep a roof over my head and the bills paid.’
The words tumbled out of me. It was the first time I’d really acknowledged just how much my life had accreted around my job. I did it because I dared not stop. It made me as out of control of it all as Lachlan was of his, although at least I was still employed.
We sat in a rather depressed silence for a few moments. Behind us, the gentle breathing of the rest of the team was reassuringly regular and the visits to the basement by the kilted men became fewer and the noise from above began to dwindle to the odd muted laugh and an occasional bark.
I suddenly felt the overwhelming foreignness of it all. It felt as though I’d been taken on a surprise holiday that turned outto be less of a surprise and more of a shock – cockroaches in the bath, no air conditioning and monsoon conditions outside while the food was congealed and the pool emptied for cleaning.
I wanted to gohome. Despite my best efforts, tears began to fall and I tried to cry quietly so Lachlan wouldn’t notice this soft realisation that I was three hundred years from everyone who loved me.
Out of the darkness a handkerchief loomed, pressed into my hand with a passing pat on the shoulder. I clearly hadn’t suffered my misery in the silence that I’d intended.
‘It’s all right,’ Lachlan said reassuringly. ‘It’s moderately clean.’
I wasn’t quite sure about the ‘moderately’, but it was that or wipe my nose up my sleeve so I cried into the crumpled cotton for a few minutes more. There was a scooped-out, hollow feeling at the bottom of my chest, the feeling you get when you’ve been crying for hours, when the emotion is still there but you have run out of ways to express it.
‘Lachlan…’ I said. I had nothing to follow it up. Even myvoicesounded empty.
A woolly-jumpered arm stretched out of the darkness and came around my shoulders. ‘I know,’ he said gently. ‘We’re not just homesick, we’re timesick too and that’s not something that we can get over with a quick phone call to family and a plate of bread pudding.’
I snort-laughed. ‘Bread pudding?’
‘What? I like bread pudding. My mum makes the best bread pudding in Argyllshire. I know I’m home when I turn into the brae and the air smells of burning raisins.’
