Stonemouth

In any other town this would be a sort of double oath, but not here. Jings is the less salubrious of Stonemouth’s two principal night spots, though if you stood in the other one, Q&L’s, without having seen Jings first, you could be forgiven for assuming you must already have found the club deserving that particular distinction. Frankly they haven’t got much going for them beyond, well, persistence, but they’re kind of all we’ve got. I remember being with Ferg the first time he encountered the literal as well as metaphorical tackiness of the Jings’s carpet. He just stood there, shifting from foot to foot a couple of times and went, ‘Hmm. Mulchy.’

‘Well, I suppose I did fancy Anjelica,’ I admit. ‘Not many men who didn’t, just, you know: on first principles. However, I suspect Grier talked it up a bit beyond that.’

‘I have it on good authority Grier talked it up a lot beyond that,’ Ellie says.

‘You ever mention this to Grier?’

‘Never saw the point.’

I wonder whether I ought to mention the whole thing with the cameras and the photos of Jel and me, and the way my thoughts have been turning. But that might be too much. And anyway I could still be wrong.

We arrive at the lowest of the hotel’s terraces and lean on the stone wall — chest height here, a couple of metres tall on the far side — which separates the hotel grounds from the back nine of the Olness course. Beyond — over two thin fairways, a couple of access tracks and a lot of knobbly, knee-high rough — neither beach nor sea looks much closer.

‘You really not sure how you feel?’ I ask her. ‘About me, I mean,’ I add, and know the last bit was unnecessary the instant the words are uttered.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’m really not sure.’ She studies me for a few moments. ‘I’m not even sure what you mean, Stewart. Saying you still have feelings. What does that mean? What are these feelings? I know people usually mean that they still like a person a lot, or love them a little, or a medium amount, even if they’re not what you’d call in love, or maybe they are, but, again, not that much.’ She raises her hands, lets them fall. ‘It’s all so…mealy-mouthed, isn’t it? It’s like a bargaining chip, like a first step in a negotiation: I’ll admit I might still like you a bit and we can take it from there if you want, and if not then I haven’t exposed my position too much and I won’t be too humiliated if you reject me because I only used the word “feelings” rather than “love”.’

She sighs, rubs her hands together, palms flat as she leans on the wall, looking out across the cropped and tended grass towards the sea.

‘I’m not sure what I feel about you,’ she tells me. The best I can put it is that I have these conflicting feelings. It’s not that I have to search for feelings about you, that they’re so minor or hidden I need to look hard to find them, it’s more that I have really…intrusive feelings about you, but they’re contradictory, they clash, and I can’t work out the balance of them. Not yet.’

‘So part of you still hates me?’ I try to make this sound helpful, air-clearing, rather than self-pitying, which I suppose it might be.

She sighs heavily. ‘Hate might be too strong. After you’d gone I would wake up sometimes, crying, raging, wishing I’d let the boys get you that night, but that never lasted long: seconds, minutes, just long enough to think it through and know it wasn’t what I wanted at all.’ She’s still staring out towards the waves. ‘But I felt wronged, Stewart: humiliated, embarrassed, made to look a fool. We’d been shaping up to have this ideal, idealised life together, the envy of all who surveyed us, and suddenly it was all gone and I was just a stupid, betrayed girlie who should have known better, who should have known what men were like, or at least what you were like, and I was thrown back into my family again, or confronted with the choice of doing whatever it was I really wanted for myself, and, even there, I sort of no longer knew. Lost my confidence, lost my certainty. So I blamed you for all that.’ She shrugs, glances at me. ‘Not so much now; kind of accepting you just exposed something lacking in me, maybe. Guess it would have surfaced at some point anyway, even if we’d got married and been happy together initially.’

‘Yeah, but we were talking about having children by then. That might have changed everything.’

‘I suppose. You’d have had your career, I’d have had children to look after, or a balancing act to perform between them and whatever I’d decided I really wanted to do, and we’d have struggled on, not the first couple to tie their fractured lives together with kids.’

We’re both staring out to sea now, leaning on the wall, elbows on the curved stone top, hands clasped. Jeez, this all sounds so depressing.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘But it might have been…great!’