The Hunting Party. Lucy Foley
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All that hair – so blonde and shiny it didn’t look quite real. Eyelashes so long she was once told off by a teacher for wearing mascara: the injustice! Real breasts – at twelve. She was good at sport, clever but not too clever (though at an all-girls’ school, academic prowess is not quite the handicap it is at a mixed one).
The other girls couldn’t understand it. Why would she be friends with me when she could have them, any of them? There had to be something weird about her, if her taste in people was so ‘off’. She could have ruled that school like a queen. But because of this, her friendship with me, she was probably never quite as popular as she might have been. But that didn’t matter to the boys at the parties we began to go to in our teens. I never got the invites to houses of pupils from the boys’ grammar up the road, or parties on the beach. Miranda could have left me behind then. But she took me with her.
When I think of this, I feel all the more ashamed. This feeling is the same one I used to get when I stayed over at her beautiful Edwardian house and was tempted to take some little trophy home for myself. Something small, something she’d hardly notice: a hairclip, or a pair of lace-trimmed socks. Just so I’d have something pretty to look at in my little beige bedroom in my dingy two-up two-down with stains on the walls and broken blinds.
There’s a knock on the front door at about eight: Nick and Bo, thank God. For a moment I had thought it might be Miranda. Nick and I met in freshers’ week, and have been friends ever since. He was there through all the ups and downs of uni.
The two of them come in, checking out the place. ‘Your cabin is just like ours,’ Nick says, when I let them in, ‘except a bit smaller. And a lot tidier … Bo has already covered the whole place with his stuff.’
‘Hey,’ Bo says. ‘Just because I don’t travel with only three versions of the same outfit.’
It’s not even an exaggeration. Nick’s one of those people who have a self-imposed uniform: a crisp white shirt, those dark selvedge jeans, and chukka boots. Maybe a smart blazer, and always, of course, his signature tortoiseshell Cutler and Gross glasses. Somehow he makes it work. On him it’s stylish, authoritative – whereas on a lesser mortal it might seem a bit plain.
We sit down together on the collection of squashy armchairs in front of the bed.
Bo sniffs the air. ‘Smells amazing in here, too. What is that?’
‘I had a bath.’
‘Oh, I thought that oil looked nice. Don’t do things by halves here, do they? Emma’s really knocked it out of the park. It’s awesome.’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘it is.’ But it doesn’t come out quite as enthusiastically as I’d meant it to.
‘Are you all right?’ Nick jostles me with his shoulder. ‘I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but you seem a bit … off. Ever since this morning. You know, that thing on the train earlier, with you being put in the other carriage, I’m sure it wasn’t intentional. If it had been Miranda, that would be a different story …’ He raises his eyebrows at Bo, and Bo nods in agreement. ‘I wouldn’t necessarily make the same assumption. But it was Emma. I just don’t think she’s like that.’
‘I’m not sure she’s my biggest fan, though.’ Emma’s so decent, and I’ve wondered in the past if it’s that she’s seen something she doesn’t like in me and recoiled from it.
Bo frowns. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘I suppose it’s just a feeling …’
‘I really wouldn’t take it so personally,’ Nick says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Maybe it’s just that I haven’t seen everyone in such a long time. And I shouldn’t drink in the day – it always makes me feel weird. Especially when I haven’t had enough to eat.’
‘Totally,’ Bo nods. But Nick doesn’t say anything. He’s just looking at me.
Then he asks, ‘Is there something else?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘No, there isn’t.’
‘You sure?’
I nod my head.
‘Well, come on then,’ Nick says, ‘let’s go fuel you up at this dinner. There better be at least some combination of bagpipes, venison, and kilts, otherwise I’m going to ask for my money back.’
Nick, Bo and I walk over to the Lodge for the dinner, arm in arm. Nick smells, as ever, of citrus and perhaps a hint of incense. It’s such a familiar, comforting scent that I want to bury my face in his shoulder and tell him what’s on my mind.
I was a bit in love with Nick Manson at Oxford, at first. I think most of my seminar group was. He was beautiful, but in a new, grown-up way entirely different from every other first-year male – so many of them still acne-plagued and gawky, or completely unable to talk to girls. His was a much more sophisticated beauty to, say, Julien’s gym-honed handsomeness. Nick might have been beamed in from another planet, which in a way he had. He’d taken the baccalaureate in Paris (his parents were diplomats) where he had also learned fluent French and a fondness for Gitanes cigarettes. Nick laughs now at how pretentious he was – but most undergraduates were pretentious back then … only his version seemed authentic, justified.
He came out to a select few friends in the middle of our second year. It wasn’t exactly a surprise. He hadn’t gone out with any of the girls who threw themselves at him with embarrassing eagerness, so there had perhaps been a bit of a question mark there. I had chosen not to see it, as I had my own explanation for his apparent celibacy: he was saving himself for the right woman.
It was a bit of a blow, his coming out, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. My crush on him had had all the intensity that one at that age often does. But over time I learned to love him as a friend.
When he met Bo he fell off the radar. Suddenly I saw and heard a lot less of him. It was hard not to feel resentful. Of Nick, for dropping me – because that’s how it felt at the time. Of Bo, as the usurper. And then Bo had his issues. He was an addict, or still is, as he puts it, just one who never takes drugs any more. Nick became pretty much his full-time carer for a few years. I suspect Bo resented me in turn, as a close friend of Nick’s. I think now he’s more secure of himself and their relationship these days … or perhaps we’ve all just grown up a bit. Even so, with Bo, I sometimes feel as though I’m overdoing things a bit. Being a little too ingratiating. Because if I’m totally honest I still feel that with his neediness – because he is needy, even now – he’s the reason Nick and I aren’t such good friends any more. We’re close, yes. But nothing like we once were.
It’s even cooler now; our mingled breath clouds the air. There are ribbons of mist hanging over the loch, but around us the air is very clear, and when I look up it’s as though the cold has somehow sharpened the light of the stars. As we stumble along the path to the Lodge, I happen to look over towards the sauna, where I saw the second statue, earlier, the one that had been facing towards us. But, funny thing, though I search for it in the light thrown from the building, assuming it must be hidden in shadow, I can’t see it. The statue is gone.
As I tramp through the snow, trying to step in Doug’s big footprints, I’m thinking of the guests, sitting about in their cabins and wondering: not knowing yet.
Unless … I push the thought away. I can’t let my mind race to conclusions. But if Doug is right, there’s something more sinister at play. And something had gone wrong between them all, that was clear. There had been a ‘disagreement’, that was how