Nick, Mark and Julien can’t go fast enough. They’re almost elbowing each other in their haste to get ahead, to be first up the hill. That can’t be very safe while carrying loaded rifles, can it? At one point Mark turns and seems to shove Julien. Lightly, but unmistakably. He makes a joke of it, and I see Julien force a laugh … but I can see he’s not really amused.
It’s a relief when we pause at the Old Lodge: a sad, fire-blackened old ruin. Doug gets out a hip flask and passes it around. When he hands it to me I let my fingertips touch his, for just a moment too long. His eyes are such a dark brown that you can hardly make out the pupils. I want Julien to see this, to register this man desiring me.
I’m not a big fan of whisky but somehow it feels right here, in this wild place. And the warmth of it helps, too, seems to soothe this weird mood I seem to have found myself in since last night. I take another swig, and when I pass it back to Doug I see that my mouth has left a pleasing stain of lipstick around the neck.
It looks as though someone might have been up here before us. It’s just the remains of a few cigarettes, scattered here and there. But Doug picks up one of the stubs and looks at it, intently, as though there might be a secret message written on the side. I notice that he pockets it. Bizarre. Why would you pick up someone’s old cigarette butt? Then I look at his battered jacket, his worn boots, and feel an unexpected tug of pity. Perhaps, I realise, he’s going to keep it and smoke it later.
KATIE
The Old Lodge, when we get to it, is a horrible place. It’s probably the only ugly thing in this landscape, a burned shell, with just one blackened block still standing. It’s somehow colder here than anywhere else, perhaps because it’s so exposed to the elements. Why on earth would you build something here? So far from shelter, and from help. I think of the fire. It must have been seen for miles around – like the beacons they lit for the millennium up and down the country.
There is a silence here that is different to the silence on the rest of the estate. It’s like a held breath. It feels – as clichéd as this might sound – as though we are not alone. As though something, someone, is watching us. The stones are like old bones: a skeleton of someone who has died and been left out in the open, denied the dignity of a burial. When we get near enough I am sure the air smells of burning. That’s impossible, isn’t it? Or could there be some way in which the smoke has gone deep within the stone, remained locked in there? It wouldn’t be hard to believe that the fire happened a few years ago, not nearly a century in the past.
The stable block – the bit that survived because the flames couldn’t make the leap – is almost obscene in its wholeness. They’ve put a keypad lock on it too, I realise – like the one on the barn – presumably to stop guests just wandering in, if it’s not safe. The sky is a very pale violet. Doesn’t that mean snow? What would we even do if it did start to snow, properly, while we’re stuck out here? We’re completely exposed here, on the flank of a mountain. The Lodge – the New Lodge, I suppose – looks like a small shard of glass from here, beside the loch, which looks grey and opaque as lead in the strange light, the trees ringing it a charcoal bristle. The station, roughly the same distance from us here as the Lodge is on the other side, looks like a toy town model.
‘I don’t know why we’re doing this,’ Miranda says, suddenly, ‘when we could be back at the Lodge getting stuck into the champagne.’ She complained on the climb up here, too: about the boggy ground and the icy water seeping over the top of her boots. It’s because she wasn’t any good at the target practice – I’m sure of it. If she had turned out to be a crack shot, it would be a different story – she’d be leading the charge. Miranda hates being bad at anything. I could practically see her lip curl as Doug praised Emma, as though she didn’t believe someone like Emma had any right to be a good shot.
‘It’s so fucking cold,’ she adds, ‘I’m sure the deer will be hiding somewhere out of sight, if they have any sense. Surely we’re not going to catch anything now?’
Nick wheels suddenly on his heel to face her. ‘Hey!’ the gamekeeper shouts. ‘Careful man, you’re carrying a loaded weapon.’
‘Sorry,’ Nick looks slightly abashed. ‘But to be honest, I’m pretty tired of hearing about how bored you are, Miranda. Why don’t you go back to the Lodge, if you’re so keen for that? We’re never going to surprise anything if you keep moaning about what a terrible time you’re having.’
There’s a resounding silence in the aftermath, the freezing air seems to drop another few degrees. Miranda looks as if she has just been slapped. Everyone has been a little more tense on this excursion, but this is the first openly hostile thing that anyone has actually said. Perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s between Nick and Miranda. Nick, after all, has never been Miranda’s greatest fan. I don’t think he’s ever really forgiven her.
When Nick came out to a few of us, in our first year at Oxford, he hadn’t yet told his parents, who were then serving an ambassadorship in Oman. It wasn’t that he was afraid of doing so, he told me. ‘They’re pretty liberal, and they might have guessed already – there were a couple of guys, when we were in Paris, who I got close to.’
But he wanted to choose the right moment, because it was an important milestone, an affirmation of who he was.
Miranda claimed that she knew none of this when Nick’s parents came up for reading week, and Nick introduced them to everyone in the JCR. There was some discussion about end-of-year exams, and Miranda said – in a nudge-nudge wink-wink tone – ‘Don’t worry, Mr and Mrs … M, we’ll make sure Nick has his nose to the grindstone and doesn’t just go off chasing after all the prettiest boys.’
She wasn’t even supposed to know, that was the worst of it. The select group Nick had confided in had not included Miranda. I had not been proud of myself for telling her. I was very good, normally, at keeping secrets. But I had been drunk, and Miranda had been teasing me about my crush on Nick, and it had just come out. Of course, I had begged her not to say that she knew. And yet she claimed to have no memory of this at all. She claimed, too, afterwards, that she assumed Nick’s parents ‘just knew’.
I was sure that Nick would never forgive me. So I was relieved by his reaction. He was furious, that was true. But not, thankfully, with me. He told me that he had thought of several unpleasant ways in which to exact his revenge on Miranda, but couldn’t find anything that matched the scale of what she’d done to him.
‘I know it shouldn’t really matter,’ he told me, ‘I was going to tell them this week anyway … over a nice lunch or something. But it was the principle of it. I know it wasn’t an accident. I think she did it because she liked having that power. And to cause trouble between the two of us, of course.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, surprised.
‘I’m pretty sure she resents your being friends with me.’
‘That’s rubbish,’ I told him. ‘Miranda has loads of other friends, and I have … a few.’
‘Yes, but she doesn’t have any other close friends – have you noticed that, Katie? She’s only got you – and Samira at a pinch. And I don’t think she likes sharing her toys.’
Now, of course, that’s all water under the bridge. Or, at least, Nick has done a good job of suggesting as much. I wonder, though, whether he still thinks of it. Wounds inflicted at that sort of raw, unformed time in our lives tend to cut the deepest – and leave the worst scars.
‘Hey,’ Samira says, sharply. ‘Let’s all just chill out, OK? We’re here on holiday.’
Funny, I don’t remember Samira being quite so sanguine in the past about things. And I recall her struggle with herself at brunch, how she managed to bite back whatever rejoinder she might have made to Miranda then.