I knew things would have changed, of course. In the time I’d been living in London, we’d seen a fin-de-millennium built and dismantled. This was all a new start now.
The change to the Royal Circus was the biggest shock. We were only staying one night before going out to Glencoe, but it was long enough to take in what had become of the place. It had turned rough. The Georgian splendour, the gracious living, the monument to Appollonian culture as Serena put it, all of it had become tawdry and over-used. Gone, in short, to the bad. The old building where I had lived those months in the late Nineties, seemed to be swarming with ragged children. They sat on the stars with unwashed hair and catcalled us as we went up. The doors to the dark flats were open and you could glimpse the rot and the horror within. The entire place had let itself go. Cobwebs mapped the vertical spaces between banisters.
Timon didn’t prepare us for any of this. He was pleased to see us, and talkative, but everything he talked about was Belinda this and Belinda that. He was obsessed with the vigil tomorrow night, with making it a right-and-proper memorial to his lost beloved. “And if that bastard Professor mucks and fucks it up,” he said, with unusual vehemence, “I’ll rip his heart out.”
Timon, who took books very seriously of course, thought he had extra info on the Professor, because he had read Mandy’s first novel, which ends with her Scheherezading the Professor to sleep. To Timon’s mind, the Professor had always been a villain. Muscling in on Mandy and now on the memory of Belinda.
“I wish we could have all had quiet lives,” said Timon, as he led the way to Colin’s flat above.
Katy said very little. She was still awe-struck by Timon in the flesh, even though she had seen him before. He was too preoccupied to notice her silence or my dismay at how the custardy walls of the stairwell had turned to streaky brown.
“I haven’t aired the rooms yet,” said Colin, sitting heavily down at the table. “I forgot. And it’s so hot in here.”
The flat felt as if no one had opened the windows or doors in months. Colin looked terrible. He was in a dressing gown, a purple one much too large for him, and he wore nothing on his feet. When he’d let us in and walked down the hall, you could see his soles were black from soot, fag ash and dirt.
“Are you alone here?” I asked, knowing the answer.
He laughed. “Me and Timon are alone together in our two flats. We both go drifting around and sometimes we have a drink together.” He opened a couple of bottles of wine. “Drink. I won’t, though.” He rubbed his face. “Wendy, remember when I said that you see ghosts only if you’ve suffered?”
I didn’t want him to go into this now. I must really have felt like a parent to Katy, because I wanted all the talk around her to be pleasant and distracting. Nothing like this.
“It must have been you who suffered in the end, Wendy. Because me and Timon are the ghosts, aren’t we? We became the ghosts in the end.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
Colin turned on Katy then. “You’ve got a new young man, haven’t you?”
Oh god, I thought. He’s heard.
But all Colin said was, “Look after him. He’s a good fella.”
Katy nodded, her eyes wide. Nervously she fiddled with her overfull glass of wine.
Colin asked, “I’ve not thought properly about entertaining you all on your brief stay. Is there anything you’d like to do tonight in Edinburgh? Anything special?
But there wasn’t. We wanted an early night, so we could be up in time to drive to Glencoe. Timon had a car, an unreliable old thing. We had to pick up Astrid from the launderette’s back door at half past five in the morning. Timon made easy work of strapping her wheelchair to the roof rack.
“Wendy,” said Astrid as we watched him work. “I have been praying for your happiness, but I have got the feeling that you are not, and am I right?”
I made sure Katy was out of earshot. “I think Josh is doing something he shouldn’t.”
“Jesus God.”
Then we drove out of early morning Edinburgh, leaving the ruined Royal Circus and Colin behind. The country unfurled before us into ranges of hills mottled with the startling colours of marble sponge cake. We were quiet with each other at first, till Timon relaxed into his driving, put on a tape and started singing to it. The atmosphere became lighter the further we drove. The roads wound about the hills, the day crept on and we sang along. Rather gradually, it became a holiday.
They stopped halfway for tea in the garden of a pub. The tea things were brought to them on a tray by a woman who couldn’t stop laughing. “Don’t mind me!” she went, and left them to it.
“I told you,” said Timon, “that we’d see the biggest hedge in the world.” For the past hour in the car he’d been telling them about this café, on the roadside beside the world’s biggest hedge. The hedge was in the record books. Thirsty, they had kept an eye out for it.
“That can’t be it,” Wendy had moaned. “That hedge is only about four foot tall.”
Until, eventually, they drove alongside a green wall one hundred and fifty feet high. They crawled along in its shadow, peering up out of their windows. Wendy couldn’t help but imagine this was the perimeter to the
