‘What about your mum?’
Kite waited, weighing up the most diplomatic response. Martha had yet to meet his mother; he didn’t want to tip the scales against her in advance.
‘It hardened her, no question,’ he replied. ‘Here was this glamorous woman, married to a man she loved more than any wife had ever loved any husband as far as I could tell, but he’d loved alcohol more than he’d loved her. More than he loved me, come to think of it. Dad’s true friends were Smirnoff and Gordon’s and Famous Grouse. Those were the half-bottles I’d find in the pockets of his jackets in the cupboard where he hung his suits. Twice a week a van would come down from Whighams of Ayr carrying six dozen cases of wine and another of spirits for the hotel. Dad would be waiting to greet it like Joanne Whalley was going to jump out in a nurse’s uniform.’
‘She was the one in The Singing Detective?’ Martha asked.
‘Yeah. That’s her.’
Martha climbed off the bed, came over to the window and hugged Kite. When they kissed he could smell the smoke on her breath and felt dizzy. The next thing he knew she had put Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me on her record player and they were making stoned love to ‘Catch’. Afterwards they went downstairs to the kitchen, made ham and cheese sandwiches in a Breville toaster and brought them back up to Martha’s room with a bottle of Bulgarian white wine stolen from the fridge.
‘So how did you do Common Entrance if you were going to a local school in Portpatrick?’
Kite was now in bed wearing a pair of boxer shorts, watching the naked Martha flicking through her record collection.
‘Put the other side of the Cure on,’ he said.
‘It’s a double album,’ she replied, removing the record from the sleeve and putting it on the turntable. Lowering the needle, she hit the vinyl in the wrong place so that it scratched midway through the first song.
‘What’s this?’ he asked as the song began again. He was looking at the bright red lips on the album cover.
‘“Just Like Heaven”,’ Martha replied. ‘You’ll love it.’
‘Mum hired a private tutor,’ he said, answering Martha’s question about Common Entrance, the exam every boy had to take if he wanted to get into Alford. ‘Name was Roger Dunlop, as in Green Flash. He was a colleague of Billy Peele’s from Alford with no wife, no family, made extra money in the holidays cramming boys for Oxbridge and A levels. He came up to Killantringan three times, stayed for free, taught me eight hours a day then arranged for me to sit all the exams at the hotel with a retired headmistress from Castle Douglas invigilating to make sure I didn’t cheat.’
‘Did you?’ Martha asked, climbing into bed beside him.
Kite was drunk on his share of the Bulgarian wine and still slightly stoned.
‘Cheat?’ he said. ‘Moi? How could you even ask that question?’
In France, Xavier had told Martha that he and Kite had been less than model schoolboys, constantly in trouble with Lionel Jones-Lewis and permanently in the headmaster’s office on one charge or another.
‘You cheated,’ she replied deadpan.
‘Fine.’ Kite raised his hands in mock surrender and looked around for more of the wine. ‘I’d never studied Latin,’ he continued when he had found and poured it. ‘My dad was a working-class lad from Dublin. My mum was an ex-model who went to parties with Jean Shrimpton and left school at sixteen. They didn’t exactly read The Odyssey to me as a bedtime story.’
‘That’s a good job,’ said Martha. ‘The Odyssey is Greek.’
‘Smart arse.’ He pinched her shoulder. ‘Anyway, Latin was what nice prep school boys from Sunningdale and Ludgrove were taught from the age of eight. They didn’t go in for it at Portpatrick primary in 1982. Probably still don’t. We had Miss Mowat, who was brilliant at maths and science, but not so good when it came to dead languages which hadn’t been spoken in Scotland for two thousand years.’
‘So poor Lachlan felt justified in cheating?’
Kite laughed at how much she was enjoying teasing him.
‘Fully justified,’ he said, and this time pushed her over so that she almost knocked the butts and ash out of the scallop shell. ‘Alford insisted that all boys needed Latin, so I had to sit for hours and hours with Roger declining amo, amas, amat and translating endless paragraphs describing Hannibal crossing the Alps. I was actually all right at it, just couldn’t remember a lot of the vocab. The night before the common entrance was a Sunday and the chef decided to walk out because Mum hadn’t given him a pay rise. She’d stepped in and was cooking for a full dining room of thirty-odd people. I was chopping onions and carrots in the kitchen and fetching stuff for her from the fridge. Didn’t get to bed until eleven and had no time to revise. Did you see The Godfather on TV the other day?’
Martha, who was straightening out the bedclothes, shook her head.
‘OK, well Dad had rented it on video from a shop in Stranraer and never taken it back. The shop had given up on the fine, so we sort of owned it. I’d watched it at least six times without Mum knowing. There’s a bit where Al Pacino tapes a gun behind a cistern in the bathroom of an Italian restaurant so that he can go in there, grab it and shoot the two people he’s having dinner with. I just stole that idea. On the Monday morning I stuck a Latin dictionary behind the cistern in the staff toilet where the headmistress wouldn’t see it
