We’re back in the living room of the Lodge, all a bit tipsy. Tired from the day, too – but no one wants to go to bed, because it’s a novelty to be together like this. Samira and Giles have joined us now – Priya’s finally fallen asleep apparently, though Samira keeps holding the baby monitor up to her ear as though worried it has stopped working. There’s a lot of laughter and hilarity, the booze loosening us.
‘So what did we miss?’ Giles asks.
‘Not a lot,’ Nick says. ‘Though clearly I should have brought a kilt. De rigueur here, it seems.’
‘I think it’s a good look,’ Miranda says, with a glance in the direction of the gamekeeper, who’s kneeling in the grate to make our fire. ‘Oh,’ she says, mysteriously, ‘and we met the other guests …’
‘What are they like?’ Samira asks.
Bo does a heavily accented impression of the man, Ingvar.
‘Ze blood lust,’ he says, gesticulating, ‘don’t you feel it stirring in you in a place like zis, ze urge to keeeeeell?’
Miranda snorts with laughter, ‘Yes, yes – that’s it exactly!’
He’s a good mimic – he would be, being an actor. But he’s also slurring a bit, drunker than everyone else. He had some problems with drugs in the past, apparently, but alcohol doesn’t seem to be off limits. At the dinner he was knocking back the glasses of wine like water.
‘God,’ Samira says, ‘he sounds like a bit of a freak. But presumably … you know, a harmless one?’
‘He liked you, Katie!’ Miranda says.
‘Did he, Katie?’ Giles asks, grinning.
Katie colours. She’s curled up on one of the sofas next to Nick, feet tucked under her, as though she’s attempting to take up as little room as possible. ‘I don’t think so,’ she says.
‘Oh yes he did,’ Mark says, ‘I think he wanted to drag you off into the woods and have his way with you.’
Again, I’m aware of the gamekeeper’s presence. But he’s hardly going to tell the other guests what he’s overheard, is he? I watch as he makes a teepee of the wood and kindling: there’s something satisfying about his efficiency. Giles and Mark were peeved that Miranda thought it necessary to go and get him, but their first few attempts fizzled out within minutes. He doesn’t look particularly impressed about being asked, either – I suppose it is pretty late. I wonder if anyone other than Miranda would have been able to summon him at this time of night.
Miranda, speaking of, is now at the cocktail cabinet making us ‘boulevardiers’, her speciality: a negroni, with the gin swapped out for bourbon. She had them served them at her wedding.
‘Want one?’ she asks the gamekeeper.
‘No,’ he says, looking at the floor. ‘I’ve got to be getting back.’
‘Suit yourself.’
He stands up, wipes the soot from his hands on his jacket, and makes for the door. ‘Goodnight!’ Miranda calls, as it closes.
‘Good riddance,’ Mark says, ‘he’s hardly a barrel of laughs, is he?’
‘Not everyone has your wit and charm, Marky-Mark,’ Miranda says, as she brings the cocktails over to us, then huffs down onto the sofa, kicking off her pumps in one fluid motion. Her toenails are painted a perfect dark blood red. I love that colour, really chic. I’ll have to remember to ask her what shade it is.
‘I want a smoke,’ she announces. ‘I always want a smoke with one of these.’ She takes out her packet. They’re Vogue lights. I know, because I smoke the same ones – I haven’t smoked anything else since I took up the habit, at nineteen.
‘I don’t think you can smoke in here,’ Nick says.
‘Of course I can. Fuck that. We’ve paid enough for the privilege, haven’t we? Besides,’ she points at the giant fire in the grate, which is sending up clouds of peat-scented smoke, ‘that thing stinks enough to mask the smell.’
But someone could look in and see you, I think. Heather, or the gamekeeper, Doug. When you look at the windows now you can mainly just see the reflection of us, the room, the fire. And then just beyond, the very faint outline of the night-time landscape: the darker black of the trees and the gleam of the loch. But we’re pretty blind to anything else out there.
It said it on the form, I remember. Quite clearly: no smoking indoors, please. If someone sees her, we’ll be charged the damage deposit. But I won’t say anything, not now at least. The last thing I want to be is a killjoy. I just want everyone to have a good time.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Miranda says, ‘where’s my lighter? I thought I’d left it right there on the coffee table. It’s a special one: it was my grandfather’s. It has our crest on it.’
Miranda always finds little ways to remind people of the grand stock she comes from. But I don’t think she does it in a mean way, really. It’s just how she is.
Mark fumbles in a pocket, finds his lighter. Miranda leans forward into the flame, so far that we can all see the raspberry lace of her bra.
‘Perhaps your stalker took it?’ Nick says teasingly, leaning back and taking a sip of his whisky – he refused a cocktail.
‘Oh God,’ Miranda says, widening her eyes. ‘I swear … every time I lose something, I half find myself blaming it on him first. It’s rather convenient.’
‘What stalker?’ I ask.
‘Oh,’ Miranda says, ‘I always forget how new you are, Emma.’
No she doesn’t. She’s always reminding me how new I am to the group. But I suppose I don’t mind.
‘Manda had this stalker,’ Samira says. ‘It started in Oxford, but it carried on in London for several years, didn’t it, Manda?’
‘You know,’ Miranda says, airily, ‘sometimes I could almost believe that there never really was one. That it was someone playing a joke on me, instead.’
‘Funny sort of joke,’ Julien says. ‘And I don’t remember you being that blasé about it at the time. It was fucking creepy – you must remember how much it frightened you?’
Miranda frowns. I suspect she doesn’t like the implication that it had worried her. Playing the victim is not her style. ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘he used to take stuff from me. Weird things, little things – but often with some sentimental value. To be honest, it took me a while to work it out. I’m so disorganised that I’m always losing things and never finding them again.’
‘He’d return them, too,’ Katie says, over the top of the magazine she’s reading. She’s been so quiet for the last hour or so – while everyone else has been making so much noise – that I’d almost forgotten she was there. ‘Later on, he’d return them.’
‘Oh yes,’ Miranda says. For a moment I think I see a shadow of something in her expression – some fear or disquiet – but if the memory unnerves her, she conceals it quickly. ‘At Oxford he used to leave the things he’d taken in my locker at college, with a little typed note. And then when we were in London, I’d get stuff posted to me – also with a note. Little things: an earring, a jumper, a shoe. It was like he was just keeping them for a while.’
‘It was horrible,’ Samira says. ‘Especially when we lived in that gloomy little house in second year next to the railway tracks – do you remember? I always thought you must have been so scared. I was scared, just thinking that he was lurking around.’
‘I think I actually found it quite funny, more than anything,’ Miranda says.
‘I’m not sure you did at the time,’ Katie says. ‘I remember, in college, you coming to my room in the middle of the night with your duvet over your shoulder, saying you felt like someone had been in your room, watching you. You used to come and sleep on my floor.’
Miranda frowns. I suppose that’s the problem with old friends; they have long memories. It’s as if Katie’s not playing by the rules – her comment has cut through the fun.