‘No, don’t worry about it,’ said Sofia. ‘I do them all on Sunday nights and take them out of the freezer as we go.’
‘What is it today?’ said Phoebe.
‘Hummus and radishes!’ said Sofia. ‘Isn’t that amazing? I’ve made it into a happy face for you in your lunch box.’
‘Radishes don’t make anyone happy,’ said Phoebe.
‘I love radishes, Mummy!’ said Pippa, appearing in the kitchen doorway. Somehow already in her blue school uniform and neat tartan kilt, she looked immaculate, ironed, put together, her shiny hair shimmering in a neat ponytail.
Sofia smiled at her.
‘Well, good for you,’ she said. ‘Would you like some extra raisins?’
‘Oh yes, please!’
‘“Oh yes, please”,’ mimicked Phoebe. ‘“Oh please, please, I would like more STUPID RAISINS because I am STUPID PIPPA”.’
Carmen headed for the door, just in time to hear Sofia admonishing Phoebe for her rudeness.
‘And wish Auntie Carmen good luck on her first day in her new job.’
‘Good luck, Auntie Carmen!’ sang out Pippa.
Phoebe frowned.
‘I hope the other people are nice to you,’ she said in a tone of voice that made clear she didn’t expect that ever to be necessarily the case.
‘Thanks,’ said Carmen, who was rather worried about that herself.
Sofia wasn’t wrong about her up and down steps theory. She had insisted she take Princes Street. There was another way, but it involved upper streets and lower streets and, without wanting to be insulting, she said she wasn’t sure Carmen was quite ready to take that in. Carmen had agreed with her.
So instead, she walked along the main road of the capital. One side was lined with the usual big city shops and brands, but on the other, ridiculously, was a set of formally laid out gardens with bandstands and fountains. These ended abruptly at the foot of a cliff which rose hundreds of feet in the air, an ancient grey castle perched on the top of it as if in a different realm altogether. This was a city in the lowering grey cloud, busy with its own affairs in the sky.
Running through the gardens, as if to make things even more ridiculous, ran several railway lines clogged with locomotives, like a giant’s train set.
It was quite the oddest place Carmen had ever been to, and, even more weirdly, everyone she passed, heads down, most clad in pompom hats and parkas similar to Sofia’s, (which Carmen, shivering in her leather jacket, now regretted passing up) didn’t even seem to notice that half of their main shopping street had been ripped away and replaced with a fairy-tale.
She found the steps behind what appeared to be a huge Greek temple – Well of course, she thought – and, panting and realising how unfit she was, reached the top opposite a pitch-black version of Dracula’s castle. There were yet more steps ahead.
You are kidding, said Carmen, almost out loud, and frowning at Google Maps.
Sure enough, the map directed her to a narrow set of steps that spiralled up and vanished into the gloom. She looked back and surveyed the city now spread out at her feet, the gardens neat, the streets heading back to the water in perfect rows, an occasional honk from the trains below, the endless drone of the bagpipes played all day for the tourists and the faint dinging of the trams, going nowhere. What a strange place this was.
Carmen sniffed, and marched on up through the dark tunnel of something absurdly called ‘New College’ and found, to her surprise, that it popped her out at the top of the Royal Mile.
The ancient thoroughfare that ran between the castle and all the way down to Holyrood Palace was full of shops selling anything and everything that could get some tartany nonsense stamped on it, but it was early in the morning and the tourists were not yet abroad.
Anyway, Carmen didn’t notice the eye-level shops straightaway. As she emerged from the dark tunnel of the ancient steps, she could see only a three-sided courtyard and a towering structure with windows that seemed to funnel upwards.
How could they have built so high without lifts or modern technology? There was no car noise here, no trains, not even a bagpipe, just quiet footsteps passing by. And as she walked through the courtyard and stepped out onto the cobbles, polished beneath her feet, Carmen had the slightest sense of a spell, of a step in time. She wondered who else had stepped on them in their time: kings and queens, the poor and forgotten, uncounted for hundreds of years. She herself could be anyone: a dairy maid, a farmer’s girl, a grand lady, stepping out into an unchanging Edinburgh world.
A lonely shaft of sunlight appeared and lit up an old black and white building next door to the narrow passageway she had emerged from, and she watched it shine on the ancient panes of glass, so neatly and tidily divided, six on the bottom, six on the top.
Who lived here, she wondered, among this most ancient of roads, with stone watering troughs for horses still standing, and tiny narrow passageways and mysterious staircases disappearing hither and thither? And did you feel it every day, that it was magical?
Then a busker loudly set up with a drum and a penny whistle close by, and the spell was broken, and she realised the shop in the building was selling something called Ye Olde Tartan Fudge and she sighed. Work, after all, was still work, and she was running late.
She had one more set of steps to go, thankfully downwards, to take her onto Victoria Street.
As soon as she got there, she checked again: this was definitely the right place and she almost sent a message thanking Sofia. Because Victoria Street was about the most irritatingly pretty place she’d ever seen.
The street was a row of curved buildings underneath some kind of balcony arrangement – Edinburgh’s notion of sticking streets on top of each other was incredibly peculiar, like the area called the New Town being really, really super old – and curved down towards a large open space at the bottom called the Grassmarket. This must be, Carmen realised, what Sofia meant by an upper and a lower section.
There were little shops lining the length of the street, each painted a different, cheerful colour – pink, green, blue. There was a hardware shop, a French restaurant, a magic shop with a wide array of herbs and broomsticks, expensive-looking shops for hunting and fishing and tweed, chichi little restaurants – and a bookshop.
It was green with a beautiful display of bicycling frogs towing books wrapped in Christmas paper. It was adorable and perfect and for a second Carmen genuinely felt quite excited.
Then she saw it was the wrong number, and in fact a books and antiques shop, not what she was looking for at all. The McCredie shop, it turned out, was two doors down.
This shop was also green, but in this case, a pale olive colour. And in fact, it didn’t really look like a shop at all. The dusty window was crammed with maps, with folders and big old reference books but not in an enticing, imaginative way like the other bookshop. Instead they were simply piled up haphazardly against the glass, so it was impossible to read what they actually were.
The place looked less like a shop of any kind and more like a two-storey fire hazard. She checked her phone again. Yup. This was definitely the place. But what on earth could she do here? Who would ever even come here? She couldn’t imagine any customer ever being enticed through its doors.
She frowned. Maybe it was one of these scams and actually fronted a massive drug-running business. Sofia wouldn’t have put her up to that though. But otherwise how could anyone who ran a place like this afford to use Sofia’s services? That made the most sense so far.