Bright Air - Barry Maitland [25]
Mary came out onto the terrace, carrying a plate of savoury tidbits that she’d been experimenting with in the kitchen. As I tried a couple, she took in the coroner’s report and the whisky.
‘I thought you were a beer man, Josh. I never saw you drink Scotch until that day Anna came.’ She tilted her head so that she could read the title on the report. ‘Where did you get that?’
‘Anna and I persuaded Damien to get hold of it for us.’
‘Ah.’ Mary sat down facing me, a worried frown on her face. ‘If you need help I could always ask Rory, you know. I’m sure he could arrange for you to talk to the policeman who went out there, if it would make you feel any better. I think his name was mentioned in the press at the time.’
‘Thanks. Maybe later.’ It was a kind thought, but the last thing I wanted was to get Rory involved.
‘I wonder if this is such a good idea, Josh, raking over the past like this.’
I looked at her in surprise. ‘I thought you were for it.’
She gave me a sad smile. ‘I didn’t realise then that you’re still in love with her. You are, aren’t you, dear?’
I blinked at her, and remembered a crack my father had made one Christmas, that Mary was a witch, with the gift of second sight. I think she’d caught him out over something to do with Pam, while my mum was still alive.
She reached forward and squeezed my hand. ‘We’re all just ships that pass in the night, Josh. For a brief time we make friends, we fall in love, and then we’re alone again. We all have to cope with that.’
‘Sure.’ I shrugged, embarrassed by this bit of homespun wisdom. Four years before I would have said coping wasn’t a problem, but I seemed to be getting softer with time. ‘With a little help from these …’ She thought I was reaching for the whisky, but instead I grabbed a couple of her savouries. She laughed and clipped my ear as she went back to the kitchen.
I was drawn back to the report by a lie. In one of his statements Marcus, the leader of the team, had described Luce as being a ‘highly skilled but impetuous climber’. I supposed he’d said it as a precaution, as a first small step to protecting himself and the university against any future accusations of negligence. But it was a lie—Luce was never impetuous. That was the amazing thing about her, that she could do the most breathtaking things with such control and deliberation.
That got me thinking about Marcus again, the most enigmatic and, for me at least, the most perplexing of our circle. For although he was one of us, it was never quite possible to forget that he was also a member of staff, a senior lecturer and director of the university’s Conservation Biology Centre within the Department of Zoology, and tutor to Luce, Curtis and Owen. He elided the two roles, teacher and friend, in a way that I hadn’t seen before at university, allowing him to slip from one to the other, so it seemed to me, according to the circumstance. His social life seemed to revolve entirely around his tutorial students, with whom he would be viciously funny, putting down his academic colleagues and deriding the ways of the university—then he’d abruptly assert the authority of his position and turn on one of them with some scolding remark.
That wasn’t the only ambiguous thing about him; it was hard to be sure how old he was, dressing young, usually in black with his hair often pulled back in a ponytail. And then there was his sexuality, a continuing topic of discussion among us. He’d never been married, and though his manner seemed mildly camp he was reputed to have once got a female student pregnant. He seemed to exercise a hold over both male and female students that to me seemed sexual.
Luce disagreed with me about this of course, putting his charisma down to his brilliance and his standing in his field. There was that; after watching that video of him in Oslo I could imagine the impact he must have had on his students. None of my lecturers were inspiring, and the idea of any of us wanting to own a video