Nick, Bo and I walk over to the Lodge for the dinner, arm in arm. Nick smells, as ever, of citrus and perhaps a hint of incense. It’s such a familiar, comforting scent that I want to bury my face in his shoulder and tell him what’s on my mind.
I was a bit in love with Nick Manson at Oxford, at first. I think most of my seminar group was. He was beautiful, but in a new, grown-up way entirely different from every other first-year male – so many of them still acne-plagued and gawky, or completely unable to talk to girls. His was a much more sophisticated beauty to, say, Julien’s gym-honed handsomeness. Nick might have been beamed in from another planet, which in a way he had. He’d taken the baccalaureate in Paris (his parents were diplomats) where he had also learned fluent French and a fondness for Gitanes cigarettes. Nick laughs now at how pretentious he was – but most undergraduates were pretentious back then … only his version seemed authentic, justified.
He came out to a select few friends in the middle of our second year. It wasn’t exactly a surprise. He hadn’t gone out with any of the girls who threw themselves at him with embarrassing eagerness, so there had perhaps been a bit of a question mark there. I had chosen not to see it, as I had my own explanation for his apparent celibacy: he was saving himself for the right woman.
It was a bit of a blow, his coming out, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. My crush on him had had all the intensity that one at that age often does. But over time I learned to love him as a friend.
When he met Bo he fell off the radar. Suddenly I saw and heard a lot less of him. It was hard not to feel resentful. Of Nick, for dropping me – because that’s how it felt at the time. Of Bo, as the usurper. And then Bo had his issues. He was an addict, or still is, as he puts it, just one who never takes drugs any more. Nick became pretty much his full-time carer for a few years. I suspect Bo resented me in turn, as a close friend of Nick’s. I think now he’s more secure of himself and their relationship these days … or perhaps we’ve all just grown up a bit. Even so, with Bo, I sometimes feel as though I’m overdoing things a bit. Being a little too ingratiating. Because if I’m totally honest I still feel that with his neediness – because he is needy, even now – he’s the reason Nick and I aren’t such good friends any more. We’re close, yes. But nothing like we once were.
It’s even cooler now; our mingled breath clouds the air. There are ribbons of mist hanging over the loch, but around us the air is very clear, and when I look up it’s as though the cold has somehow sharpened the light of the stars. As we stumble along the path to the Lodge, I happen to look over towards the sauna, where I saw the second statue, earlier, the one that had been facing towards us. But, funny thing, though I search for it in the light thrown from the building, assuming it must be hidden in shadow, I can’t see it. The statue is gone.
NOW
2nd January 2019
HEATHER
As I tramp through the snow, trying to step in Doug’s big footprints, I’m thinking of the guests, sitting about in their cabins and wondering: not knowing yet.
Unless … I push the thought away. I can’t let my mind race to conclusions. But if Doug is right, there’s something more sinister at play. And something had gone wrong between them all, that was clear. There had been a ‘disagreement’, that was how they all put it when they came to tell me about the disappearance.
It would be easy to say, with hindsight, that I had a sense of foreboding three days ago, when they all arrived. I didn’t see this coming. But I did feel something.
My Jamie was fascinated by the idea of the ‘lizard brain’. Maybe it was something to do with his job. He saw people on the edge, acting purely on instinct: the father who ran from a burning house before saving his children, or, conversely, the one who shielded his wife and baby from a blaze and suffered third-degree burns over half of his body. It’s all down to the amygdala – a tiny nodule, hidden amongst the little grey cells, the root of our most instinctive actions. It’s behind the selfish urge to grab for the biggest cookie, the comfiest seat. It’s what alerts you to danger, before you even consciously know of a threat. Without it, a laboratory mouse will run straight into the jaws of a cat.
Jamie believed that people are basically civilised animals. That the essential urges are hidden beneath a layer of social gloss; stifled, controlled. But at times of even fairly minor stress, the animal within has a go at breaking through. Once he was stuck just outside Edinburgh on a train for four hours, because of an electrical fault. ‘You saw straight away which people would eat you,’ he told me, ‘without any hesitation, if you were stuck on a lifeboat together. There was a man who was hammering on the driver’s cabin after only a few minutes, bright red in the face. He was like a caged animal. He looked at the rest of us like he was just waiting for one of us to tell him to shut up … then he’d have an excuse to lose it completely.’
That’s the thing, you see. Some people, given just the right amount of pressure, taken out of their usual, comfortable environments, don’t need much encouragement at all to become monsters. And sometimes you just get a strong sense about people, and you can’t explain it; you simply know it, in some deeper part of yourself. That’s the lizard brain, too.
So I find myself, now, returning to three days ago, the evening they all arrived. My first, animal impressions.
The Highland Dinner on the first night of the stay is one of the promises made by the brochure. But every time we host it, I think the guests would be quite happy to do without. It always seems to take on the atmosphere of an enforced occasion, like a state dinner. I’m sure it’s just another means of extracting money from them. The mark-up on the food, even accounting for the fact that the ‘best local ingredients’ are used, is huge. I’ve also wondered if it’s a way of keeping the community onside, because local lads and lasses are employed as the waiting staff, and all the ingredients are bought from nearby suppliers; save the venison, which comes from here.
I have read the headlines from when the boss first bought the place – from the family who had owned it for generations – articles complaining about the ‘elitist prices’, the ‘barring of local people from their own land’ – there’s a right to roam in the Highlands, which the old laird had always upheld, but the boss had fences and threatening signs put up. He claims they are to deter poachers but, funny thing, apparently that wasn’t so much of a problem under the previous owner. Maybe the poachers hadn’t got themselves organised, weaponised, hadn’t realised the healthy demand for venison and mounted stags’ heads. But I think there might be another angle to the deer killings that happen now. In the vein of a lesson taught, something taken back.
Once, in our nearest shop in Kinlochlaggan (still over an hour away), I happened to tell the shopkeeper where it was that I worked. ‘You seem nice enough, lass,’ she said, ‘but it’s a nasty place. Foreign money.’ (By which she meant, I presume, the boss’s Englishness, and the fact that the guests often come up from England, or from further afield.) ‘One of these days,’ she told me, ‘they’ll pay the proper price for keeping people from what’s theirs.’ I remembered then the theory I’d heard about the Old Lodge, the one I don’t tell guests: that the fire hadn’t been started by the gamekeeper, but by a disgruntled local, slighted by the laird.