be thronged in high summer. There aren’t many people out and about, the odd rollerblader whizzing past us, a pleasant tang of fish and chips in the air, the occasional gull cawing.
‘Why are you an idiot?’ Uncharacteristic of Finlay to self-criticise.
‘As you said. I’ve come to a city of half a million people on the basis I’m going to bump into one confused man who himself is following no real rhyme or reason. Someone who won’t even know who I am if he sees me. I don’t think this makes much more sense than the penguin enclosure.’
‘Hah. It must be so incredibly hard to have a parent treat you like a stranger,’ I say, thinking about it for the first time. ‘Like … abandonment. Even though it’s not, it’s an illness, obviously.’
Finlay looks at me and, I feel, is really focusing on me. He pauses a few seconds before replying.
‘… I didn’t expect Susie to have someone like you as a friend,’ he says, ‘I’m glad she did.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, while feeling there are dots to connect that I haven’t connected, in why these two things followed on from each other. Maybe they didn’t, maybe it was a way of not discussing his dad’s dementia.
‘There were women at the wake who seemed more what I expected,’ Fin says, hesitantly. ‘Vampy kind of clothes?’
‘Oh … The Teacup Girls!’ I exclaim. ‘That’s what Justin called … never mind, another time. Yeah, they’re quite different to us. That speaks well of Susie, really, though. She had different friends from different parts of her life, but she wasn’t snobby. Susie was socially mobile. But not a climber.’
We walk on.
Fin seems to have changed his opinion of me from ‘dreadful’ to ‘acceptable’, much to my quiet astonishment.
‘Don’t lose faith,’ I say, distracting myself. ‘If these are places your dad might go, we stand some sort of chance. It’s a huge place, but the likely locations we are searching are not huge.’
‘He’s not staying at The Waldorf, though, clearly,’ Fin says. ‘Strike one for my being able to anticipate his movements.’
‘Like the IRA, you only need to be lucky once,’ I say, and Finlay bursts into laughter.
‘They wouldn’t quite know how to deal with you in New York, you know,’ he says. ‘I can see this from having been away and come back again – you’re a very British kind of bad taste.’
‘Bad taste!’ I mock-huff.
‘Bad taste, but amusing,’ Fin says. Under my artificial fibres,I glow. Even if these compliments are a device. Tools, to do a job. ‘Unserious outerwear.’
My parka has a giant doughnut of deep red faux fur around the hood, the colour of devil’s food cake. No mockery by men with high cheekbones and even higher IQs will make me love it any less.
‘OK, let’s find the historic family seat,’ he produces his iPhone and studies a map. ‘It’s quite something. I wouldn’t have minded inheriting it, even with all its noisy ghosts.’
I shudder, not with cold. The wind ruffles his hair and a passing pair of thirty-something women throw Finlay a wolfish look, and then me a wary glance.
Oh be my guest, gals, you have no idea. Might as well build yourself a snowman, it’d be warmer, and you’d have the carrot nose for sustenance.
I look out at the sea and take a deep breath. Didn’t the Victorians prescribe sea air for invalids? I feel like I’m convalescing.
‘Right, eleven minutes in this direction, I am promised,’ and we set off.
‘Mind if we walk along the beach for a bit?’ Fin says. I agree, though after we’ve headed down to it on the concrete shallow path and started tramping through the sand, I regret it. These boots were not made for beach walking.
‘You OK?’ Fin says, and I say ‘Fine, fine’ while concealing my effortful semi-stumbling because it’s one thing to be Whimsical Coat Girl and another to be And Packed the Wrong Shoes Too Girl.
‘There’s a method behind my madness,’ Fin says. ‘We’ll get a better view from here.’
‘A better view?’ I say.
‘There it is. The original Hart family residence,’ Finlay says, drawing to a halt, pointing across the road at an incredible detached sandstone villa. Its main trunk is like a huge rounded tower with a pointy spiral for a roof, flanked by giant bay windows and a huge curved front door with metal hinges, like they have in fantasy dramas. It’s colossal, like a mini castle. If I’d not been told it was someone’s home, I’d have assumed it