If the Highland Dinner is meant to stem this ill will towards the place, I’m not sure it has worked. If anything, the waiting staff probably return home with tales of the guests’ bad behaviour. I remember a stag party where a drunk – but not that drunk – best man groped a very young waitress as she bent to retrieve a dropped napkin. Guests have passed out in their plates, succumbing to too much of the Glencorrin single malt. Some have vomited at the table, in full view of the staff.
The London group of guests would be better behaved than the stag party, I was sure. There was a baby among them, so surely that meant something, even if the parents weren’t joining us (the mother had asked for their food to be brought to them in their cabin). That left seven of them. The dark-haired man, the tall blonde. Julien and Miranda. A perfectly matched pair, the most beautiful, even the poshest names of the lot. Then there was the thin, sleek, auburn-haired man with the architect’s glasses – Nick – and his American boyfriend, Bo. The third couple: Mark, and Emma. He might almost have been good-looking, but his eyes were too close together, like a small predator’s, and his top half was disproportionately heavy, lending him the unnatural appearance of an action figure. I found myself thinking she was like a budget version of the taller blonde; dark hair at the roots, a roll of flesh showing at the top of her jeans where her top had ridden up. I was surprised at myself. I’m not, as a rule, a judgemental person. But even if you don’t have much interaction with other human beings – as I do not – it turns out that the instinct to judge one another, that basic human trait, does not leave us. And the resemblance was un-ignorable. Her hair was dyed the same shade, the clothes were of a type, and she’d even made up her eyes in the same way, little flecks of black at the corners. While they made her friend’s eyes look large and catlike, they only served to emphasise the smallness of her own.
Then there was the last one, Katie. The odd one out. I almost missed her at first. She was standing so still, so quiet, in the shadows at the corner of the room – almost as though she wanted to disappear into them. She didn’t match the others, somehow. Her skin was sallow, and there were large purple shadows beneath her eyes. Her clothes were too formal, as though she were going on a business trip and had turned up here by mistake.
Normally, though I have to learn the names, I prefer to think of the people who stay here as simply the ‘guests’: guest 1, guest 2, et cetera. I’d prefer not to think of them as individual people with lives outside this place. Perhaps this sounds odd. I suppose I could argue it’s a survival tactic. Don’t get involved in their lives. Don’t let their happiness – or otherwise – touch you. Don’t compare yourself to their wholeness, those couples who come for a romantic retreat, the happy families.
The last twenty-four hours has meant a closer acquaintance with this group – a forced intimacy that I could well have done without.
But I suppose, if I’m honest, even from the beginning I was curious about them. Perhaps because they were roughly the same age as me: early-to mid-thirties, at a guess. I could have been like them, if I had found a high-paying job in the city, like some friends did after university. This is what you could have had, it felt like the universe was saying to me. This is where you could have been, what you could have been doing, at the loneliest time of the year (because New Year’s Eve is, isn’t it?).
I might have been envious. And yet I didn’t feel it. Because I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was an unease, a discontent, that seemed to surround them. Even as they laughed and jostled and teased one another, I could sense something underneath it – something off. They seemed almost at times like actors, I thought, making a great show of what a wonderful time they were having. They laughed a little too hard. They drank a great deal too much. And at the same time, despite all this evidence of merriment, they seemed to watch each other. Perhaps it’s hindsight, making this impression seem like more than it was. I suppose there are probably tensions in most groups of friends. But I was struck by the thought that they did not seem completely comfortable in one another’s company. Which was odd, as they’d told me right at the beginning that they were very old friends. But that’s the thing about old friends, isn’t it? Sometimes they don’t even realise that they no longer have anything in common. That maybe they don’t even like each other any more.
The other guests, the Icelandic couple, walked in just as the starter was being served – ‘locally-caught salmon with wild herbs’ – to a frisson of hostility from the others.
Iain had booked them in. I’d been on one of my rare trips to the local shop, so he’d had to take the call. He could see that the bunkhouse was free on the system, he said, and he’d checked with the boss, who’d okayed it all. I was annoyed he hadn’t written their names down in the book: if I had known, I wouldn’t have promised the other group they’d have the run of the place.
I wasn’t sure what sort of behaviour to expect from these two. They weren’t the usual, well-heeled sort. Both had wind burned complexions, the roughened look of people who spend a lot of time in harsher elements. The man had very pale blue eyes, like a wolf’s, and stringy blond hair tied back with a leather thong. The woman had a double-ended stud passing through the septum of her nose and a tangled dark ponytail.
They arrived at the station with huge backpacks, half the size of themselves. They explained that they had caught a passage on a fishing trawler from Iceland to Mallaig further up the coast – I saw the beautiful blonde wrinkle her nose at this – where Iain collected them and brought them to the estate in his truck. They came with proper gear – Gore-Tex jackets and heavy boots – making the Barbours and Hunter wellies the other lot wore look slightly ridiculous. They hadn’t changed out of their outdoor gear for dinner, so that even Doug and Iain, in their special Loch Corrin kilts, looked rather tarted up next to them, as did the serving staff, the two girls and the boy in their white shirts and plaid aprons. The beautiful blonde looked at the two new arrivals as though they were creatures that had just emerged from the bottom of the loch. Luckily, they were either side of me; she was seated opposite, next to Doug, and fairly quickly seemed to decide that she would waste no more of her attention on them, and give it wholeheartedly to Doug instead. I looked at her, with all that gloss: the fine silk shirt, the earrings set with sparkling – diamond? – studs. She watched him as though whatever he was saying was the most fascinating thing she had heard all evening, her lips curved in a half smile, her chin in her palm. Doug wouldn’t go for someone like her – would he? She wouldn’t be his type, surely? Then I remembered that I had absolutely no idea what his type would be, because I didn’t really know anything about him.
I focused my attention back on the Icelandic guests either side of me. They spoke almost perfect English, with just a slight musicality that betrayed their foreignness.
‘You’ve worked here long?’ the woman – Kristin – asked me.
‘Just under a year.’
‘And you live here all by yourself?’ This was from the man, Ingvar.
‘Well, not quite. Doug … over there, lives here too. Iain lives in town, Fort William, with his family.’
‘He’s the one who collected us?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘he seems like a nice man.’
‘Yes.’ Though I thought: really? Iain’s so taciturn. He arrives, does his work – upon orders received from the boss – and leaves. He keeps very much to himself. Of course, he could say exactly the same of me.
Ingvar said, almost thoughtfully, ‘What makes someone like you come to live in a place like this?’ The way he asked it – so knowing – almost as though he had guessed at something.
‘I like it here,’ I told him. Even to my own ears it sounded defensive. ‘The natural beauty, the peace …’
‘But it must get lonely for you here, no?’
‘Not particularly,’ I said.
‘Not frightening?’ He smiled when he said this, and I felt a slight chill run through me.