the wall at the back with names Sellotaped beneath each individual pigeonhole. The one that said “Richard Mott” contained a white envelope. The second indifferent girl read the name written on the envelope. “Martin Canning?” she asked suspiciously and then gave it to him without waiting for confirmation. He checked the tickets and found a scribbled note on one of them.
“Can I go straight in?” he asked, and the first girl, without removing her eyes from her computer screen, said, “No, you have to join the queue.”
“Thanks,” he said, unacknowledged and invisible. And then he had joined the queue. And then the man with the baseball bat stepped out of the Honda.
7
Jackson fought his way up the Royal Mile, through the crowds and the tartan crap, until he finally gained the Castle, soaring almost Catharlike on top of the volcanic rock. He paid the entrance fee and walked along the Esplanade, past the towering scaffolded stands built for the Edinburgh Tattoo. “The Tattoo has a hundred percent box office,” Julia had told him enviously, and tickets were “like gold dust,” and yet within minutes of arriving in Edinburgh she had been given comps for the Tattoo by a complete stranger (claiming to be a piper, although Jackson saw no evidence of bagpipes). She tried to palm them off on Jackson, but he couldn’t think of anything worse than being trapped for two hours in the dark and the summer damp watching a camp spectacle that had nothing to do with the reality of being in the military. “Don’t think of it as military,” Julia said. “Think of it as theatrical. Massed pipes and drums,” she said, reading from a program the so-called piper had given her, “and an army motorcycle stunt team. Highland dancers? And, oh, look, Russian Cossack dancers. That sounds like fun, doesn’t it?”
“No.”
Jackson couldn’t imagine Julia’s play having any kind of box office, couldn’t believe anyone would actually pay good folding money to see
The Castle was a brute of a building, all fairy-tale Scottish from below, but once you were within its glowering walls, it was dank and doom-laden. (This bit of Edinburgh his father might have liked.) The Castle seemed not so much a product of engineering as of organic growth, the dressed stone fused with the rough black basalt of the rock and its own bloody history. Jackson bought a guidebook but didn’t pick up an audio, he hated those things, the unruffled tones of some woman (always a woman) regurgitating predigested bits of information, dictating how you saw things. It reminded him of the voice on his GPS (“Jane”). He had tried other voices on the GPS but they hadn’t worked for him-the French was too sexy, the American too American, and even if he had understood the language he didn’t think he could have trusted an Italian voice telling him how to drive, so in the end he always came back to the quietly insistent tones of “Jane,” a woman who believed she was always right. It was rather like being in a car with his wife. His ex-wife.
He had Julia’s camera with him, so he took a few snaps of the view from the ramparts. Julia never took photographs of views, she said pictures were meaningless unless they had people in them, so he asked one of a group of Japanese tourists to take a photo of him next to the One O’Clock Gun. The Japanese tourists seemed to think this was hilarious and insisted on posing with him before moving off like a school of fish after their guide.
Julia always grinned at the camera as if it were the happiest day of her life. Some people had it and some didn’t, Jackson himself tended to look surly in photographs. Perhaps it wasn’t just in photographs. Julia had once told him that he had a “somewhat threatening demeanor,” a perception of himself that he found alarming. He had tried to take on a more benign aura for his photograph with the Japanese. For a moment Jackson envied them. He imagined it must be nice to belong to a group, most people thought of him as a loner, but he suspected he had been at his most comfortable when he had been institutionalized, in the army and then the police. The individual was overrated in Jackson’s opinion.
He found a table outside the cafe and had a cup of tea and a cake, a lemon poppy seed thing. The poppy seeds made the cake look as if it were speckled with insect eggs, and he left most of it. Julia believed no outing was worth its while unless it ended up with tea and cake. He knew everything Julia believed. He could have gone on one of those “Mr. and Mrs.” quizzes and answered everything about her likes and dislikes. He wondered if she would be able to do the same for him. He honestly didn’t know.
A rustle of excitement preceded the firing of the One O’Clock Gun. The story went that the citizens of Edinburgh had been too cheap to pay for twelve cannon shots for midday and so had settled for a gun at one o’clock. Jackson wondered if that was true. Was the Scots’ reputation for stinginess really justified? Half-Scottish himself (although he didn’t feel it), he liked to think he had been generous with money even when he didn’t have any. Now that he had it, he tried to distribute his wealth far and wide-diamond earrings for Julia, a herd of cows for a village somewhere in Africa. Nowadays you could shop for charity on the Internet as easily as trawling the cybershelves of Tesco.com, adding goats and chickens to your “shopping basket” as if they were bags of sugar, tins of beans.
Jackson knew that ever since he’d inherited the money he’d been looking for ways to get it off his conscience- it was the Puritan in him, the little voice that said if you didn’t suffer for something then it wasn’t worth having. That was what he admired in Julia-she was a total and complete hedonist. And it wasn’t that Julia hadn’t suffered in her life, because she had, more than Jackson. They both had a sister who had been murdered, they both had been motherless children, Jackson’s elder brother and Julia’s eldest sister had both killed themselves. Bad luck on bad luck. The kind of stuff you tended not to talk about because it wasn’t usually a good idea to reveal so much disrepair to other people. That was the good thing about Julia, her family background was even more fucked up than his. They were a pair of freakishly bereaved people.
Jackson and Julia had stood side by side in a police mortuary, gazing at the fragile bird-bones of Julia’s long- lost sister, Olivia. Such things cast a long shadow on the soul, and Jackson feared that it was their understanding of loss that made them true companions of the heart. He suspected that it might not be a healthy thing-yet wasn’t the shared twist of grief in them stronger than, say, a mutual love of skiing or Thai food or all the other things couples based their lives on?
“A couple?” Julia had said ruminatively, when he mentioned something to this effect. “Is that how you think of us?”
“Don’t you?” he said, suddenly alarmed, and she laughed and said, “Of course I do,” tossing her head so that the curls piled upon it bounced around like springs. He knew that gesture well, it nearly always accompanied dissimulation on Julia’s part.
“You don’t think of us as a couple?”
“I think of us as you and me,” Julia said. “Two people, not an entity.”
One of the things Jackson liked about Julia was her independence, one of the things he didn’t like about Julia was her independence. She had her own life in London, Jackson visited her there and she came to stay in his house in the Pyrenees, where they built log fires in the huge stone hearths and drank a lot of wine and had a lot of sex and talked about getting a Pyrenean mountain dog (or Julia did). Sometimes they went to Paris together, they liked Paris a lot, but she always went back to London. “I’m like a holiday romance for you,” Jackson complained, and Julia said, “But that’s rather wonderful, isn’t it?”
For her birthday in April, Jackson took Julia to Venice, to the Cipriani, although both of them discovered that an entire week of either was a little too much. Julia said it was like finding the best cake in the world and then eating nothing else, so that you “sickened on the very thing you craved the most.” Jackson wondered if she was quoting from a play, she often did, and he hardly ever got the reference. “I don’t have a sweet tooth to begin with,” he said rather grumpily.
“Just as well that life isn’t really like a box of chocolates, then, isn’t it?”she said. He got that reference. He’d hated that film. They were on the water bus at the time, making their way up the Grand Canal, and Jackson snapped her as they passed Santa Maria della Salute. Wherever you went, it was like being on a stage set. It suited Julia perfectly.
On her birthday, Jackson took Julia for an evening gondola “excursion”-along with just about every other
