Chameleon. Mark Burnell
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‘Valeria’s gone. She didn’t want to wake you. She asked me to say goodbye to you.’
‘When did she go?’
‘Early this morning. I drove her into Lairg.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Your preparation is over. At least, this part of it is.’
Stephanie wanted to say something, to protest. But she couldn’t.
Boyd seemed to sense it. ‘I got a call last night, after you’d gone to bed. Tomorrow morning, you’re going home.’
‘It’s not home.’
Boyd poured coffee from the pot into an enamel mug and offered it to her. ‘You can go for a run if you like, but I thought we might give it a miss this morning. You’re in good enough shape.’
‘But not so much fun to look at?’
He smiled. ‘No, I’m afraid not. I miss the bouncy bits you arrived with.’
‘You’ll get over it.’
‘Don’t be too sure.’ He refilled his own mug. ‘I need to go to Durness. Do you want to come?’
She could taste the sea before she saw it. They drove slowly on roads where sheep were the major source of traffic. They entered Durness at midday, sweeping past the primary school before halting outside the Mace store, a small supermarket with a post office counter, where green fees could be paid for Durness Golf Club, mainland Britain’s most northerly and windswept course. There was a BP filling station opposite the store, a small wooden hut beside the old pumps.
They bought groceries at Mace. There were half a dozen people inside the store. Boyd appeared to know them all. He fell into conversation with a couple at the till. A wiry man with copper hair shot a glance at Stephanie and then cracked a sly joke she couldn’t hear. Laughter all round. A fat woman in a grubby black fleece asked Boyd how his season had been.
He caught Stephanie’s eye. ‘More challenging than usual, Mary. But more rewarding, too.’
There was more conversation, more laughter, Boyd at the centre of it, relaxed, social. To Stephanie, who was silent and watching, it was a minor revelation. Outside, he suggested a walk. They headed out towards Balnakeil, a mile away, past the Balnakeil Crafts Centre, where small shops were located in corroding concrete huts erected in the Forties to house German prisoners-of-war. Boyd parked the Land-Rover by the old house at Balnakeil, on the opposite side of the road to the walled churchyard. Stephanie said she wanted to look inside. He shrugged and said he’d wait for her by the gate onto the beach.
The tiny stone church had no roof. Its walls were coated in ivy. The graveyard was crowded. Most of the headstones were old, their engraving partly erased by decades of ferocious weather. Many commemorated men and women who were not buried in the cemetery: those who’d been lost at sea, or in colonial wars fighting for the expansion of the British Empire, or those who’d emigrated to Australia, India and South Africa, in search of a life less gruelling. Scattered among the old graves, there were a few more recent.
Including Rachel’s.
It was in the far corner, by the stone wall. A small, unremarkable square headstone laid down the basic facts of her life. Dead at thirty-five. It made no mention of the cause but Stephanie knew that it had been breast-cancer. Beloved wife of Iain. The bottom half of the headstone was blank, leaving enough space for another entry.
She looked across the cemetery. He was facing the sea.
She joined him at the gate and they walked onto the beach in the direction of Faraid Head, the farthest tip of the headland. The tide was coming in, but still low. The sand was hard, wind blowing a thin film of it across the rippled surface. They stepped over squelching beds of seaweed and scattered rubbish: a single shoe, part of a seat-belt, strips of slime-coated plastic. At the far end of the beach, a concrete track rose between dunes. In some places sand obscured it, but the direction was clear and they followed it. Between the dunes the wind died, in the open it was fierce.
As they crossed a cattle-grid, Stephanie said, ‘There was a man in London before Malta. Frank White. I was in love with him. He was in love with me, I think. But it was a strange kind of love. I couldn’t tell him anything truly personal. It was a love built on lies, except at the end. Then, I told him everything, and he accepted it. He’d known there was something about me right from the start.’ She shook her head at the memory. ‘After Malta, I disappeared. But I sent messages to him. I gave him the opportunity to follow me, to meet me. To vanish with me.’
‘But he didn’t?’
‘No.’
‘Any idea why not?’
‘I guess he didn’t love me as much as I thought he did. Or as much as I loved him.’
‘Maybe he had too much to lose by following you.’
‘Believe me, he didn’t.’
‘Have you tried to contact him again since you’ve been back in London?’
‘No. It’s been four years. He belongs to another part of my life. A part that … well, the idea of it’s just too complicated.’
‘I know what you mean.’
Stephanie doubted that. She took a deep breath. ‘Anyway, when I realized there wasn’t going to be a future with him, I didn’t feel there was any future at all. I didn’t disappear to escape from Magenta House. Not really. I disappeared to be with him.’ Boyd had stopped walking so she stopped too. She smiled sadly. ‘My first broken heart. I was twenty-three but I took it like a fifteen-year-old.’
‘And became Petra because of it?’
‘I didn’t become anybody. I was already Petra.’
‘I’m not with you.’
‘I didn’t choose to live Petra’s life because my heart got broken. But I was confused and angry. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s self-pity, but when I look at the way I was then I don’t see that I had much of a chance. Trained to perfection – to breaking point – I was bound to fracture sooner or later.’
‘Probably,’ Boyd conceded.
‘In the end, all I did was not change. There was no real decision. Instead of Alexander, there was money, although it wasn’t about the money. It was about the work. The day-to-day existence; rejecting contracts, accepting contracts, planning them, executing them, getting away with it. Attention to detail in all things.’
‘What were you looking for?’
‘Mechanical perfection. I wanted to be a machine. To feel nothing at all.’
‘And did you succeed?’
‘I think so. For a while …’
Beyond the cattle-grid, the road was tarmac with grass on either side, sheep roaming freely. In the distance, at the tip of the headland, Stephanie saw a small building, a look-out tower with black and yellow squares painted on the walls. An old Ministry of Defence facility, Boyd told her, with a concrete helicopter pad. Useful for air-sea rescue.
As they approached it, the incline grew steeper. Dozens of rabbits ran wild. Stephanie walked to the cliff’s edge and peered at the two-hundred-foot vertical drop. She watched raucous waves hurling themselves onto the rocks below, cracking, foaming, receding. She felt the vertiginous pull, as familiar to her as the desire to succumb to momentary madness and to make the leap herself. She leaned further over and sensed Boyd tensing beside her.
‘Why did you stop?’ he asked.
She described Bilbao. ‘I don’t know why it happened. It just did. In the first few weeks after it, I thought it was some kind of nervous breakdown. But now,