interspersed with heavy, dark, intricately gnarled wooden furniture that gave the appearance of being volcanic in origin. The house’s inventory - drawn grimly to my attention by a spotty clerk who obviously resented the fact I was younger than he was - came in three volumes.
I christened the place Xanadu, but never did find any sleds.
My friends, of whom I saw less these days, suggested parties when they first heard about the place. On seeing it, they usually agreed with me that to mount a serious whoopee on the premises would be to invite cultural catastrophe on a scale usually only witnessed during major wars and James Last concerts.
One of my pals - graduated, employed; moving on to better things - sold me his old VW Golf, and I drove down to Lochgair most weekends, usually on a Thursday night as I didn’t have any classes on a Friday. James and I helped mum, who was redecorating the house. She was talking about knocking down the old conservatory and putting in a new one, perhaps covering a small swimming pool. She had also formed the idea of building a harpsichord, and then learning to play it. We took tea at the Steam Packet Hotel on occasion, and James kept an Ordnance Survey map on which he inked in all the walks we undertook, on the hills and through the forests around Gallanach.
Mum and I had started going through dad’s diaries. Some were pocket size, some were desk diaries; a couple of early ones were effectively home made. They went back to when he’d been sixteen. I’d suggested Mum read them first in case there was anything embarrassing in them, though I think in the end she just skimmed them. They weren’t the stuff of scandal, anyway; the entries we’d sampled when we first discovered them in the box at the back of the cupboard were about as revealing as they ever got; really just appointments, notes on what had happened that day, where dad had been, who he’d met. If there was a single indiscretion recorded there, I never found it. The same went for any but the most basic observation or idea; he’d kept those in the A4 pads.
It was at the bottom of the box containing dad’s diaries, in an old presentation tin which had held a bottle of fifteen-year-old Laphroaig, that I found Rory’s diaries; little pocket books, usually a week-per-two-pages. Dad must have filed them separately from the other papers.
I got very excited at first, but then discovered that Rory’s diaries were even more sparse - and considerably more cryptic - than my father’s, with too many initials and acronyms to be easily understood, and too full of week- and even month-long gaps to form a reliable impression of Rory’s life. There was no diary for the year he disappeared. I’d tried to make sense of Rory’s diaries, but it was uphill work. The entry for the day of my birth (when Rory had been in London) read:
K r; boy 8£. Prentis?!? M ok Eve, pub.
The entry for the next day read: “vho” in shaky writing, and that was all. “ho” and “vho” (or sometimes h.o. and v.h.o.) often followed entries regarding pubs or parties the night before, and I strongly suspected they stood for hungover and very hungover. K meant Kenneth and M Mary, pretty obviously. ok was itself (its opposite was nsg, which stood for Not So Good; he’d spelled it out the first time he’d used it, following a “48hr h.o.” after Hogmanay the previous year). A small r meant “rang”; a telephone call. And I had indeed weighed in at eight pounds.
I found a few mentions of “CR” - I even recognised some of the notes I’d read the previous year; he must have jotted them down in his diary first before transferring them to his other papers. But there was nothing to provide any new answers.
The one thing that stayed with me as a result was not a solution to anything, but rather another mystery. It was on a page at the back of the last diary, the diary for 1980; a page headlined by the mysterious message:
JUST USE IT!
... a page covered with notes, some in pencil, some in ball-point, some in very thin felt-tip, but a page which held the only instance anywhere in all the papers I had where Rory had made an effort not just to alter or score out some words or letters, but to obliterate