East Fortune Read Free

way. The A198.’
    â€˜There was an incident earlier.’
    Incident.
    â€˜Cleared up now. They radioed. It’ll take ages to go crosscountry.’
    â€˜Please.’
    â€˜You’re throwing your money away.’
    â€˜I don’t care about the money.’
    â€˜You want me to go by all the windy back roads?’
    â€˜If you can.’
    The taxi driver began to talk about Edinburgh’s new traffic measures, which took everyone round the houses, and picking up the stag parties and hen nights (women were the worst, you wouldnae think it but they were). The streets were like the bottom of a baby’s pram, he said,
all piss and puke.
    Jack arrived home. The house was too big for him now that the family had left. He looked out at the long-redundant swing, and at the photographs of the children in silver frames: his two daughters against a celestial-blue studio backdrop.
    He lived in a villa of red sandstone with flagstone floors and a large family kitchen. He had bought it when it was falling apart and he had been restoring it over twenty years. He had not worried then about coastal erosion or global warming; all he had wanted was a house on a cliff and a view out into infinite possibility. It would never be as grand as his parents’ house but he had wanted to provide the kind of childhood environment he had known himself, a constant sense of home, a place of refuge.
    He opened the door to the larder and looked at foodstuffs past their sell-by date, left over from a time when his wife had prepared all the food. There were items he didn’t have a clue what to do with: baking parchment, liquid glucose syrup, dissolving gelatine, organic hemp oil. At the back he could see a Highland Spring bottle with a Post-it note Sellotaped over the label.
HOLY WATER. DO NOT THROW AWAY.
Maggie was a Catholic. There had been tension within his family about her from the start.
    He turned on the television. Jeremy Paxman was arguing with George Galloway. ‘Are you proud of having got rid of one of the very few black women in Parliament?’ Although the debate was feisty it did not seem to have any relevance to anything in Jack’s life at all. Nothing mattered except the boy in the road.
    He made a pot of peppermint tea and took it outside. He sat on the garden swing in the dark, rocking himself backwards and forwards, like one of his two daughters, Annie and Kirsty, ten years previously. He thought of the alternative routes he could have taken on the road home: any other decision that would have spared him this.
    He tried to think again if it might have been his fault, if there was anything he could have done to avoid the accident. He hoped the boy had given some kind of warning or left a note. He should have asked.
    He finished his tea and returned to the house. He stopped outside the bathroom and read the framed poem on the wall outside.
    I have a child; so fair
As golden flowers is she,
My Cleis, all my care.
I’d not give her away
For Lydia’s wide sway
Nor lands men long to see.
    Maggie had given it to him on Annie’s first birthday. Now Jack walked into the family room, passing once loved objects that were no longer needed. There was his grandfather’s wax stamp and his Morse code key, the frayed lampshade he had never replaced, the Greek amphora Kirsty had made at a pottery class when she was thirteen.
    Through the window he could see the mist of summer rain, lit by the garden light, dripping in quick repetition from the slates of the roof into the gutters, bouncing off the down pipe and the satellite dish, falling through the blossom and the leaves, resting on the ferns and the climbing hydrangea: everything Maggie had planted to make the garden theirs.
    Jack tried to recall good things in his life; the luck and the happiness he had known that might explain this balancing act of fate, this nemesis: Fortuna, a sudden reacquaintance with death.
    That morning he had felt hopeful.