Free Infidelities by Kirsty Gunn

driving. Sneezing. Tim himself sitting there next to their mother in the car, the family car. Tim who’d stayed the night the night before, who’d stayed many nights … Awful for teenagers, the whole thing. Awful.
    ‘Mum?’
    And now here was Tim with her, with them, in the middle of nowhere. An estate agent’s brochure on the dashboard … They knew something was up. Of course they did. Though she hadn’t said a word about the house, aboutwhat she and Tim had been discussing, a fresh start, all of that. God no. She’d just said, ‘Let’s go to the country for lunch’, that’s all. ‘And look, we might see this house on the way.’ ‘What house?’ And she’d shown Elsa the details in the brochure, the big rooms, the stable for a pony. ‘But I like our house,’ Elsa had said. ‘I don’t want to move anywhere else.’ ‘I know, I know. But let’s just have a nice drive, okay?’
    So yes, it was awful for them. In their own car with their mother’s boyfriend driving. Even that word, though Sarah had never used it. ‘Boyfriend’. Because that’s what everyone said, didn’t they? After a divorce and they’d met someone new? No matter how old, people called him a boyfriend. Mostly they did, or ‘someone new’.
    And Nicky and Elsa had to be with ‘someone new’, their mother’s ‘boyfriend’ … God, Sarah felt ill with it. What was she doing? Yet here they were, in the middle of nowhere, driving off to see a house that they all might … What? Live in? Was that really the plan? What on earth was she thinking?’
    ‘It’s going to be great,’ Tim said. And touched her thigh again. ‘Look around us, all. It’s beautiful here.’
    But was it? Really? On one level. Sarah could see, through Tim’s, through an American’s eyes … The Scottish countryside, all that. Rural Perthshire, and only an hour from Edinburgh … Who could say Perthshire wasn’t lovely? But now? With its brown hills? In this cold?
    ‘Beautiful,’ said Tim again. Though he didn’t say ‘beautiful’. BeauDiful’s what he said. With his American accent. With his cold. Not beautiful at all. Nothing was.
    *
    They turned off the little road up the private drive. There was still no sign of the actual house. It was like turning into a field, the drive just a swath of dark cut into the earth, through the tall dry sedge that bordered it. In summer all this would be green. In summer … Sarah thought. When would that ever be? In summer when all this land around would be cut for hay and golden green? When the trees up ahead, that she could see now, would be in full leaf and casting a lovely purple shade across the lawn that came now fully into view, in front of a large grey house and the glimpse of a river, beside.
    ‘Deserves its name all right!’ Tim said, delighted. ‘Doesn’t it? Look! Behind? That’ll be the glen, right? And the river here beside it? Come on—’ He’d stopped the car, turned off the engine. ‘Let’s have a look!’
    He reached down at Sarah’s feet and pulled up a jacket.
    ‘This will be fun!’
    For a second, Sarah had a glimpse of that boyish charm she’d been so attracted to, when was it … six months ago? After Alastair had left. This will be fun, he’d said then, too, when they’d met at a cocktail party and he’d invited her there, straightaway, out for supper at some really fancy place. And it had been, fun, hadn’t it? Then? When she’d needed some fun? She’d thought so at the time, anyway …
    Now he walked off away from her, putting on his jacket as he went, opening the gate and leaving it wide, stopping, Sarah saw, to pull the wretched handkerchiefout again. Yet he was good looking, wasn’t he? Tall, with that American build from playing lots of sport. They all played football, didn’t they, American football and it made them tall like that, with those broad shoulders … Everyone had said he was good looking. Now he stopped to blow his nose and cast his gaze around the house