The Marrying Game (54 page)

The letting agency was an office, in a depressing row of shops. Anxious-looking people waited on orange plastic chairs. There was a long counter, a line of scuffed filing cabinets and several elderly computers. Phones shrilled continually. Rufa found that nobody was interested in hearing what kind of flat she wanted. Once she had mentioned her price limit, she was handed a sheaf of typed papers.

She sank into a chair to study them. She had decided that she needed a small garden flat, in a quiet area not too far out of town – when she started doing dinners again, she would need to be central, especially when the baby came. Her spirits plummeted when she read the descriptions of flats available. They seemed fantastically expensive, and though she did not know Edinburgh, were obviously ghastly.

She took the papers back to the counter. ‘I’m awfully
sorry
, but these all seem to be shared. I was looking for something self-contained.’

The woman at the counter looked (or Rufa imagined she looked) scornful. ‘You’ll need to pay more, I’m afraid.’

‘How much? Never mind. Could you show me some details, please? I don’t need more than one bedroom, but I would like my own kitchen and bathroom.’

The woman turned her back before Rufa had finished stammering out her wish list. She yanked open a filing cabinet, and pulled out another sheaf of papers.

Rufa returned to her chair. She was glad she was sitting down when she saw the prices. Ye gods, could flats in this grim fortress of a city really cost this much? The cheapest place was in the North Bridge area, supposedly near Arthur’s Seat. Rufa had seen pictures of Arthur’s Seat, set in a sweep of green, and vaguely imagined somewhere like the outskirts of Cheltenham. It might be just about bearable – she was aware that she had been, by most people’s standards, outrageously spoilt. The lady of the manor would have to adjust her ideas downward, as part of the price of her shame.

She asked to see the flat, and the woman at the counter gave her an address. When she got there, she was to contact a Mrs Ritchie on the ground floor. Rufa hailed another taxi. It rattled her through flinty, dreary grey streets, and stopped in the dreariest. She asked the driver to wait.

There were no bells outside the house. She pushed open the heavy door, and found herself in a dark communal hall, painted in a shade of bottle green that reminded her depressingly of her old games kit at St Hildegard’s. There were warring smells of cooking and
disinfectant
. On the wall at the bottom of the stairs was a faded wooden plank, on which was painted ‘STAIR ROTA’. A disc hung from a peg, with the figure 2 peeling away into obscurity.

Rufa rang the bell on the nearest door. Mrs Ritchie answered it. She was a pleasant young woman. She was chewing, and a radio chattered behind her. Rufa fought back a piercing, urgent pang of hunger. Mrs Ritchie led her up echoing brown stairs. Over her shoulder, she cheerfully explained the wooden plank. English people, she said, were sometimes surprised to learn that, in Scottish flats, everyone was expected to clean the stairs and hallways once every six weeks.

Rufa had already decided there were far too many brown stairs, and was appalled at the prospect of cleaning them. The flat was small and incredibly nasty and reeked of damp. She could not possibly live here without killing herself. She could not think of bringing her baby into the world in a place like this.

Faint and dispirited, she returned to the letting agency. This time, the woman at the counter looked at her more closely. If Rufa was prepared to take a short-term let of three months only, she said, she had something that might be more her style. The rent she mentioned was enormous, but just about manageable. Rufa knew it was expensive and impractical, but no longer cared. If the place was halfway decent, she would be buying herself three whole months of not having to face them all at home.

The flat was in a 400-year-old court off the Royal Mile, fifty yards below the Castle. The walls were three feet
thick
, and it was as cold as a dungeon in the Bastille. It had a kitchen, bedroom and bathroom, all tiny. The only nearby shops sold nothing but tartan key rings and Monarch of the Glen T-shirts. In her first week, Rufa was woken three times by twenty-one-gun salutes up at the Castle.

She liked being near the Castle. Its stony solidity made her feel safe. The sentries said ‘Goodnight’ when she wandered past them. Sometimes she walked past on purpose, just to hear a friendly voice. She was desperately unhappy. I might have known, she thought, that Edward only meant to give me the money – not himself.

He belonged, in that sense, to Prudence. He was heavily embroiled in an ancient relationship, and had not felt he had the right to have a full marriage with his legal wife. She now knew why their single night of sex had felt vaguely illicit – Edward had felt he was committing adultery. She hated herself for her stupidity. She hated herself for throwing such a tantrum about Melismate that Edward had felt compelled to rescue her.

She stayed in the flat until she could not bear the cold and the silence, then went for long walks through the steep streets of the blackened, beautiful, monumental Old Town.

She could not help spending Edward’s money, though she tried to pay for everything in cash to make herself harder to find. The only certainty she clung to in the chaos was that she did not want to be found. It was not just a matter of her pride. She felt the pain she had inflicted upon Edward as a dagger in her own heart.

She was very tired, and could have slept all day. Merely keeping herself washed and ironed was a huge
effort
. Little by little, however, she began to drag herself out of the slough. Diana Carstairs-McInglis, the kind hostess for whom she had cooked in London, would not be visiting her Georgian house in the New Town until next spring, but she had promised to recommend Rufa to her Edinburgh friends. One of these telephoned soon afterwards, to engage Rufa for a large dinner party. She lived in a castle about an hour’s drive from the city, but offered to provide transport. She also told Rufa where to buy the best ingredients, though most of the menu would be meat, fish and game from her estate.

Work proved to be the best medicine. Rufa spent a frantic day in the antiquated castle kitchen, and slept all the way home in the car. But her cooking was a success, and she rediscovered her delight in producing perfect food. She could see the point of Scotland, when she felt the quality of the beef and the salmon. Her employer had hung the grouse (as she proudly told Rufa) until the maggots had eaten through the necks and she found them on the pantry floor. Rufa threw up twice while plucking the birds and picking out the lead shot, but the result was a miracle of tenderness and flavour. She could still cook and she could still earn money. She had to earn more. She had been born owing the rest of the world a living.

There would be more dinner parties in the weeks before Christmas. Rufa could not think about Christmas. The longing for Melismate bit deeper every day. As she paced the streets, or the parquet floors of the warm National Gallery of Scotland, she mentally rehearsed phone calls to Nancy. She never made them. Nancy would make her come home, to face the awfulness of what she had done. She did not see how she could return as the
old
Rufa. They were all better off without her – Edward certainly was, though she was half ashamed of how cruelly she missed him. The baby, growing steadily inside her, gave her courage. There were days when she was strong enough to fight the whole world for the sake of her child. She began to promise herself that she would go home when the baby was born. It would be a kind of passport back into their good graces, she thought. They’ll have to forgive me when I’ve got a baby.

One of her walks took her down some steps to a narrow street full of arty junk shops and boutiques. There was a café where she sometimes had a cup of tea: a noisy, youthful place, where the students from the university sat for hours. Rufa watched them, marvelling at how green they were. Had Tristan really been this young when she fell in love with him?

I was pretending to be as young as he was, she thought; maybe I was trying to have the youth I missed.

The café put a notice in its steamy window for a cook. Rufa could not overlook a possibility of regular money. She applied for the job, giving Diana Carstairs-McInglis as a reference. After one exhausting night’s trial she was hired, to make mountains of stovies (a delicious mess of mince, onion and potato) for the students. The work was hard and hot, and swelled her feet. Her free days could only be spent lying on the short sofa at her flat, reading tatty classics from a second-hand bookshop in the Grassmarket. But hard work dulled her senses and pushed the hours past. It gave meaning and shape to the days. She became friendly with Amy, the energetic middle-aged woman who owned the café. There were people around her. She began to hate herself a little less.

Knives tore at her innards. Rufa was aware of the pain before she was aware of being awake. Stupid with sleep, she told herself this was the worst period pain she had ever known.

Except that it couldn’t be.

She fumbled for the light. Blood was pooling on the sheet underneath her. She stared at it for ages, refusing to accept what she saw. The knives twisted, intensifying the pain. Rufa broke out in animal howls of despair.

She had not been good enough. She was still being punished. She was suspended on the very edge of the world, with no more reason to exist.

Chapter Thirteen

‘I THOUGHT OF
taking out the wall between the kitchen and the scullery,’ Polly said. ‘To make one big, warm room – rather like the kitchen at Melismate, though tidier, obviously. It’s the spirit of the place I want to recreate.’

She came to Ran’s side of the table bearing her white everyday Wedgwood coffee pot, and poured fragrant dark coffee into his deep cup of steaming milk. He grunted absently, turning a page of the
Guardian
with tremendous flapping that knocked a piece of toast on to the floor. He did not notice. Ran was incapable of doing more than one thing at a time, and reading the
Guardian
took all his concentration.

Polly stooped to pick up the toast. Rome – as she had to keep reminding herself – was not built in a day. Ran was oblivious to his surroundings, and the progress of her great renovation was painfully slow, but changes had been made. She allowed herself to feel optimistic. His squalid kitchen was, at least, clean. The table had been scrubbed, there were new chairs, china and pans. Polly had wrestled the ancient Aga into submission, and it was gently diffusing warmth against the inconveniently bitter November chill. She must remember to light fires for tonight in plenty of time. Country people were used to freezing, thank God. Being able to see your breath
over
dinner was not the social doom it would have been in London.

She went on, in the deliberately sunny, positive tone she adopted when Ran needed chivvying, ‘And while we’re about it, we really should get rid of the wall between the sitting room and what you sweetly call the parlour.’

Ran, intent on his newspaper, blindly gulped coffee, and dug the end of his silver teaspoon into one ear.