“But I don’t understand; do you know her?”
“No, nothing like that.”
I slip my hands down his hip, taking the keys from his pocket. I unlock the rental car quickly and get behind the wheel. Jürgen sits in the passenger seat, shaking his head.
“Was she from your school then, an old friend?”
I start the car.
“I don’t have any school friends.”
He frowns, as if he’s only just found this out about me.
“You don’t? Why not?”
I have friends, of course, but the oldest and truest friendships I have are the ones I forged at university or soon after, when an element of choice was introduced to the selection process. Plus my husband’s friends, such as they are, though generally not their wives for some reason. Thanks to his extreme niceness, genial blue Austrian eyes, his obvious likability, Jürgen has always been the social one in our relationship. Though these days he’s just as happy to spend an evening at home, working in his studio or tinkering with his bikes. Occasionally we go to a gallery opening or drive visitors around whatever city we are living in, or meet an old editor of mine for brunch. I can count nearly all these friends on one hand. But not one of them is Divine.
“I don’t know,” I tell him with a shrug and turn the key in the ignition. “I just don’t.”
We break the journey in Yorkshire, spending the night in a bed-and-breakfast where we barely leave our four-poster bed. In the morning we scramble into clothes, unwashed, stumbling into the dining room moments before the end of service. The landlady, a stern matronly looking woman, reminiscent of a former housemistress of mine, stands with her hands on her hips, scowling at the clock. We slip sheepishly into our seats, trying not to laugh. Across the room two women, dressed in shorts and walking boots, barely glance up from their maps. A middle-aged man butters his mother’s toast. Next to us an elderly couple smile and raise their glasses of orange juice.
“Congratulations,” the wife says, leaning over and patting Jürgen on the back of his hand.
“Is it that obvious?”
The couple smile knowingly at each other.
Jürgen’s T-shirt is inside out, my hair unkempt. As we brush against each other under the table, there’s a stench between my thighs, musky and sour, like overripe fruit. I cringe, thinking of our attic room, the paper-thin walls and creaking bed frame, and bury my head in Jürgen’s shoulder. The landlady slams a teapot on the table in front of us.
Jürgen asks the couple how long they’ve been married.
“Forever,” the old man groans.
His wife flaps her napkin at him.
“Fifty-four years this September,” she says.
I can feel Jürgen’s fingers as they weave through mine, how his wedding band grates over my knuckles as he squeezes, causing me to wince.
“Any advice?” Jürgen asks.
The elderly pair gather their room key and newspaper and spectacles from the table. The husband gets up and pulls back his wife’s chair so she can stand.
“Be kind,” the wife says.
They nod at us.
“Good luck.”
During checkout Jürgen stops in front of the landlady and kisses me, a hand slipping down the back of my trousers, and then we pack up the car and are back on the road. I begin to think that the unpleasant incident at St. John’s is forgotten, that the whole ugly scene is behind us. But then, unexpectedly . . .
“No school friends,” Jürgen says, sliding his hand up and down my thigh as I join the motorway. “That’s interesting, you know?”
I can see that my new husband finds this baffling. I wish I’d never mentioned the word Divine. He can’t let it alone. He taps one finger against the glass as we cross the border into Scotland, staring out at the uneventful landscape, green fields with yellow pocket handkerchiefs of oilseed rape, culs-de-sac, warehouses and roadside cafés, food trucks parked in rest stops. We have another four hours of driving ahead of us to get to Skye, not to mention the ferry.
“Not one?” Jürgen checks, uncharacteristically pushy.
“No.”
“How come?”
The four men that are his best friends all come from the same Salzburg village where he grew up. Andreas, Hansi, Thomas B, Thomas F. Two of them were christened together, they went to the same school, shared their first cigarette in Hansi’s woodshed, stole their grandparents’ schnapps, chased their first girlfriends on Krampusnacht, pretending to be the Christmas devil, masked and growling, nipping their sweethearts’ ankles with leather whips, threatening to carry them to the underworld. They have shed blood together, hunted together, drunk wept at each other’s weddings, actually staggering around the dance floor like bears. They are his family, closer than his actual brothers (one older, one younger, who I have to remind Jürgen to call on their respective birthdays). He is loyal to the core and would do anything for these four men, including jumping on a plane at the drop of a hat, or loaning them money without any expectation of return. A private annoyance of mine.
“Were you bullied?” Jürgen wants to know as we pull over to fill up with petrol.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Unpopular then?” He pokes me. “Eine Streberin. How do you say, a geek?”
“No.”
I grip the pump handle, my knuckles blanching.
“So you loved school?”
“Who loves school? It was fine,” I snap, instantly regretting my tone. “I mean, I don’t remember. Can we just drop it?”
Back behind the wheel he curls his hand around the nape of my neck to soothe me, rubbing his thumb up and down below my ear. He has calluses, little circular pads on the base of each finger from cycling that are rough as pumice.
“You don’t know if you liked school or not? You must remember something.”
“Not really,” I say, wriggling out of Jürgen’s grip, flustered, trying to concentrate on the road.
“Try,” he says.
I don’t answer.
Why won’t I talk to him? Is it just that I’m embarrassed? The boarding school education, the implication of wealth and privilege, the Old Girls’ network. When I met Jürgen (a sculptor I was sent to interview for a Sunday supplement, a rising star), he was still sleeping in a tent in his studio, washing in a sink, subsisting on grants and sporadic commissions. A self-made man, the descendant of mountain people, literal peasants—cattle herders and cheese makers—he described to me during the course of that first meeting how he’d paid his way through art school felling trees and slaughtering goats.
Jürgen turns his whole body to face me.
“Seriously, you’re kidding, right? You won’t tell me this?”
Ashamed, I say nothing.
He can see that I’m not going to budge.
This does it. Silently thunderous, Jürgen takes out his guidebook and reads the history of Skye. His stare bores down into one page then the next. We’re not the kind of couple who bicker. I sit behind the wheel, gnawing on the inside of my cheek, trying not to cry.
On the ferry to Armadale we stand apart, his hood up, my scarf wrapped around my head against the spray. He has his camera around his neck but doesn’t take one photo. When we get to the island, there are midges, huge biblical clouds of gnats. We cover our mouths with our T-shirts and run into the croft house we have rented, cornered together inside the tiny kitchen.