Chameleon. Mark Burnell
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as though she was in her mid-forties but Boyd later told Stephanie she was older. Squarely built, she was nevertheless elegant. Usually stern, she could never quite extinguish the sparkle in her eyes. For every obvious feature, Valeria Rauchman possessed a contradictory quality not far beneath the surface.
The first few days of tuition were intense since Stephanie was unable to exercise. ‘Not as good as I’d expected,’ Rauchman declared after the first lesson. ‘But with a lot of time and effort, who knows?’
A week after Rauchman’s arrival, the last commercial group of the season left. Stephanie watched them file onto two minibuses bound for Inverness. Boyd spent the next two days with his assistants, cleaning the cabins and closing them down for winter. On their last night, he spent the evening with them at the staff cabin. Stephanie and Rauchman remained at the lodge. After supper, Stephanie stood by the sitting-room window and looked out. Weak orange light spilled from the cabin’s windows. It was a still night. Intermittently, they could hear faint peals of laughter.
Rauchman said, ‘It’s good that he’s happy tonight.’
Stephanie looked across the room at her. ‘How well do you know him?’
‘I’ve known him for years. I knew Rachel, too.’
‘What was she like?’
‘Lovely. Quiet but strong. Stronger than him.’
Stephanie felt a pang of jealousy. ‘How did you meet him?’
‘That’s not for me to say.’
‘But you knew him before he came here?’
She nodded. ‘We used to run into each other from time to time. Zagreb, Jakarta, Damascus.’
‘What was he doing in those places?’
‘The same thing I was doing. Working.’
‘In a place like Damascus?’
‘When I saw him in Damascus, he was on his way home from Kuwait.’
‘The Gulf War?’
‘After Iraq invaded Kuwait, he was sent in to gather intelligence. For the six months leading up to Desert Storm, he lived in Kuwait City itself. On his own, on the move, living in rubble, living off rodents, transmitting information about the Iraqis when he could. He stayed until the city was liberated.’
‘And then you just happened to bump into him in Damascus?’
Rauchman smiled. ‘Don’t pretend to be so naïve, Stephanie. I know who you are. So you know how it is.’
‘He doesn’t talk about those things to me.’
‘Of course not. He never talks about anything that’s close to him. That’s why he’s never mentioned you.’
It was a week before Stephanie resumed training. A fortnight later, Rauchman was called to London for several days. Stephanie and Boyd embarked on a four-day trek. Boyd selected their clothes and prepared a small pack for each of them. He carried a compass, but when it was clear he made her navigate using a watch and the sun. She remembered the process: in the northern hemisphere, you hold the watch horizontally with the hour hand pointing at the sun. Bisecting the angle between the hour hand and the twelve, you arrive at a north – south line. From there, all directions are taken.
Her ankle healed, her stamina almost as developed as his, they travelled quickly, no matter what the terrain. Stephanie enjoyed the daily distance covered. By daylight, they stuck mostly to high ground. In the late afternoon, they would find a river or burn and descend towards it. Being the harsh landscape that it was, food was scarce. They had nothing to bring down a stag, a hind or a bird, so they fished for trout. In each pack there was a tin containing fishing line, a selection of hooks and some split lead weights. Stephanie proved to be useless at fishing and caught just one trout in four days, Boyd snagging the rest.
They carried groundsheets for night-time shelter. They plundered saplings from forestry plantations and draped the groundsheets over makeshift frames. Boyd had allowed them the luxury of lightweight Gore-Tex sleeping bags. By choosing places that offered some natural cover, the groundsheets proved largely effective against rain.
Each pack contained waterproof matches to light small fires at night, the flames securely contained within stone circles. They cooked gutted fish over glowing embers. Boyd supplemented their diet with bars of rolled-oat biscuits. When it was clear, he taught her how to read the major constellations in the sky: the Plough, Cassiopeia, Orion.
On the final morning, Stephanie awoke before Boyd. It was still dark. She watched the creeping daylight in the east and the rise of a plum-coloured sun. She heard the distant roar of an old stag on the slope above. Later, they spotted it, corralling its hinds along a ridge. They tracked the animals, taking care to remain downwind and out of sight. Boyd brought her close to them. They crawled through a peat hag rank with the stag’s musky scent and then found a flat slab of rock that overlooked the deer. When the animals moved on, Stephanie and Boyd climbed to the peak, from where they saw the lodge, a speck dwarfed by a wall of granite.
They sat on a rocky lip, their legs dangling over a fifty-foot drop, and ate the remains of their rations. Stephanie glanced across at Boyd, who was chewing a rolled-oat biscuit. He was looking down at his filthy boots and at the air beneath them. He was smiling.
‘What are you thinking about?’
He shook his head. ‘I was just wondering what it must have been like for your parents. Having you as a child, that is.’
‘And you find the idea of that funny?’
‘I find the idea of it terrifying.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
‘Were either of them as strong-willed as you?’
‘Both of them.’
‘Christ.’
‘So was my sister. And one of my brothers.’
‘Must’ve been a lot of noise.’
Stephanie laughed out loud. There had been. All the time. ‘But I was the worst.’
‘You reckon?’
‘I was a nightmare for my parents. Especially when I was a teenager. Too bright for my own good, too headstrong for anyone’s good. I never wanted to be anything like them.’
‘What teenager does?’
‘True. I always tried to disappoint them. And I was pretty successful at it. I was the brightest in my school but I underachieved. I got caught smoking and drinking. I listened to the Clash and the Smiths and hung around with the kind of boys I knew they’d dislike.’ Stephanie gazed at the drop, too. ‘Is there anything in the world more self-centred and pointless than a teenager?’
‘Of course not.’
‘The strange thing is, now my parents are gone, I find I’m envious of them. If I ever got married, I’d want a marriage like theirs. With stand-up rows and unruly children.’
‘And I thought the idea of you as a child was frightening.’
Stephanie turned to him. ‘You can’t see me as a wife? Or a mother?’
He opened his mouth, then checked himself. ‘I was going to say “no” but the truth is, I really don’t know.’
‘I’d want a house like the one I grew up in. I’d want a childhood like the one I grew up in.’
‘Don’t tell me. You’re just an old-fashioned girl at heart.’
She giggled, which was something she rarely did. ‘I know. All that rebellion for all those years and then it turns out there’s a part of me that’s just dying to be a conformist.’
It was a wet Wednesday. The previous evening, Valeria Rauchman had returned from London. When Stephanie came downstairs, she and Boyd were talking in the