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Somehow, somehow, I managed to slip away in the middle of the day, even while Glenn was home, using the excuse of doing shopping, or meeting a friend for lunch. Something innocuous. But the truth was, I just needed time away from it all. Him.
He knew of my propensity to run, to get away when pressure built. And whereas before he’d tagged along, or tried to, this time around, he sensed that solitude was what I needed. Solitude in a city of nearly half a million people. With tourists and performers added on top of that. Where in the hell would I find solitude?
Arthur’s Seat.
I hadn’t climbed the extinct volcano in Holyrood Park in a number of months but thankfully had done so alone, since my divorce. I didn’t want my previous ascent to be a reminder of Joseph while trying to deal with thoughts of his successor. Or predecessor.
Strange how Uisdean Glenn Peterson bookended my marriage. Before and after. Two completely different persons in the same body.
It never ceased to amaze me, the dramatic change in the landscape from the Royal Mile, all built up and urban and so very, very city-like, to an extinct volcano slap bang in the middle of Holyrood Park no more than two miles from the centre of town. Despite a nagging need to punish myself, I went for my usual route up the main walkway and over Salisbury Crags. Because it was free to climb Arthur’s Seat, my ‘solitude’ was only relative; many tourists who had descended on the city had obviously decided to save their money for the shows of the Fringe and the accompanying nightlife. During the day, in the middle of the summer, hillwalking was the order of the day. Free, and the view from the top more than made up for the inevitable exhaustion. Secretly, I couldn’t help but envy some of the visitors who’d see that panorama over the capital, the castle, and the sea for the very first time. It looked like an impossibly green and beautiful chunk of the Highlands had been cut out, lifted across Scotland and placed in the middle of the city by some genie who wanted to give us all the perfect vantage point. There. Look at that. Doesn’t it take your breath away?
The route I’d chosen, not too hard on my legs, was familiar enough to get me to the peak in an hour without too much concentration. I knew, given my state of mind, that it would wander. And in the middle of the day, early afternoon, a lone climb remained safe enough. As ‘lone’ as it could be, with so many tourists around. Enough space to think, and enough people nearby to help out if something went wrong.
Isla never could understand my love of hillwalking, although she’d been more than happy to let me take Daniel on a walk several times to tire him out. Not so much babysitting as “Here, take him. Exhaust him, Auntie.”
Shoving my hands as far into my pockets as they would go, I hunched my shoulders. The sun didn’t beat down too hard today, but I’d only worn a very light jacket because the higher I climbed, the warmer I’d get. I just hoped I’d be able to quiet my thoughts before my muscles gave out, although...if I could cope with losing sleep to Glenn, a two hundred and fifty metre elevation wouldn’t present too much of a problem.
Other climbers passing by on the rocky pathways and carved stone steps paid me little mind, concentrating too hard on staying well away from the steep drop, and simultaneously appreciating the view. At this time of year, besides the well-worn paths flattened by year upon year of visitors, most of Arthur’s Seat was covered in a thick layer of lush green grass, with occasional sprigs of heather and various wild bushes. The view nature provided held people’s interest far more than I ever could.
The summer breeze whipped at my hair as I walked, and as I settled into a rhythmic step, the thought of why I’d come here at all whipped at my brain; undeniable, unavoidable.
Glenn Peterson had to be dealt with. What I’d kept from him.
“Oh, fuck,” I blurted out, thankful that in that moment I trod the gravel path alone. No-one else climbed or descended near enough to me to overhear my words and even if they had, I could just blame the blurted-out curse on nearly losing my footing, or having a stone in my shoe.
“Fuck,” I whispered again, thinking about what could have been. Rising nausea reminded me of why I’d refused to dwell on the subject for years now. Not just in conversation with, for example Isla, but in my own mind, I consistently made the effort to push everything down, put a lid on it all. Years had passed; who cared?
I did, disturbed by the knowledge for nineteen years I’d kept something from Glenn that, I supposed, he had a right to know. Not that I owed him pieces of my past, not that I owed him anything, but I knew he’d want to know.
He’d consider it an insult to later discover what I’d experienced, what I’d gone through, knowing that I’d kept it from him all that while, that I hadn’t been able to trust him with the truth.
Who would tell him though? Isla wouldn’t betray a confidence, and that left only me to speak up. So I could keep my own counsel...my conscience bothering me in secret, but that would mean looking at Glenn every day and thinking, I know something you don’t know. That would be a grave sin in the context of our relationship. When I loved, I loved completely and Glenn had a strange, sixth sense which enabled him to pick up on when I was hiding something, keeping a matter to myself. He might not be able to articulate exactly what that matter was, but he’d know it existed. I’d only nursed my secret experience this long because he hadn’t been around to prompt a confession.
At the time I’d decided to have an abortion, it being less of a decision and more of an obvious choice, I’d known it was the right thing to do for me. That was what had had me wrestling with my conscience, my feelings of selfishness, that I had done it purely for me. “And,” as Isla had said on many an occasion, “Glenn doesn’t get a say in this. He’s the one who left.”
“But I told him to,” I’d pointed out in return, and in the here and now, realised I’d muttered those words out loud. There were no other walkers within earshot, luckily enough, and I course-corrected even while contemplating what had occurred years before; vowed to keep my mouth shut.
Isla had always said it didn’t matter whether or not I’d told Glenn to go; the fact remained, he had, and he’d not made contact again. “And stop making excuses for him,” my sister had said, any time I’d mentioned rehab. “He might try it, but he’s never stuck at it. The staying away from former associates can hardly be held up as a hard and fast rule for an addict’s recovery if he’s not even in recovery. Judging from what I’ve heard, he’s never managed to stay dry for more than a few weeks at a time. He could have phoned you any time he wanted...and the fact is, if he’s still using, do you want him contacting you about...well, about this?” And she’d nodded towards my gently-rounded abdomen, curved only with post-pregnancy hormones by then, and the expulsion of a clump of cells. “He’s in no fit state to be anyone’s father, and the bottom line is, you don’t want to be a mother, do you?”
“At least, not yet,” I’d said.
“And not with him.”
That rejoinder had been less easy to agree with. It wasn’t that I’d thought this was my one and only chance to ever be a mother vacuumed out of me and sluiced down the drain; there was no reason on Earth to assume I wouldn’t go on to have normal, healthy pregnancies at a time more suitable to my body, bank balance, mental state and relationship status. But I couldn’t help consider that this had been my last chance to be a mother, partnered by Glenn.
And yet.
It was the right decision. Of that, there was never any doubt. I’d been a mess at nineteen. A barely-sober mess and it would have been a miracle if the pregnancy, such as it was, had progressed without incident, judging by my prodigious alcohol intake and occasional dabbling with narcotics. If I’d somehow managed to conceive while off my face, my body was obviously fertile enough to make parenthood at some point in the future a distinct possibility.
Except, here I was at the age of thirty-eight, childless and wondering if, all this time, I’d been hanging on for a chance to make things right. No, that suggested my teenage decisions had been the wrong ones.
My taste in relationships hadn’t been ideal, but the blow-up with Glenn and his subsequent departure, those had shocked me into facing up to reality. An abortion, an extended stay at what I laughingly referred to as a ‘health spa’, years of therapy in between auditions and somehow, I’d made it through to a successful career and a less-than-successful marriage to another man I’d loved beyond reason.
I didn’t need to lie recumbent on a therapist’s couch right now to know boomeranging back to the very man whose departure had sent me into a depression spiral wasn’t on paper a smart move, especially as a freshly-minted divorcee, but...but the chemistry with Glenn wouldn’t be denied. It had never left, just gone into hibernation.
Dormant, not fully extinct, unlike the ancient volcano on which I now stood. The view across the city made my heart beat faster. My God, I loved this city. It, and the rest of this country, never failed to make me feel better.
I’d recovered once; I could do it again if need be. Maybe that wasn’t the best way to treat my soul, to say “Fuck it, I’m gonna do this potentially-damaging thing and let my soul heal again once all the damage is done,” but...the thing was done. And it hadn’t even been done since the moment Glenn had got me off in a poky little B&B in the West of Scotland. It had been done since I’d invited him to stay. He’d known what was going to happen. I’d known. For all our denials and our insistence that this was just about seeing if we could be civilised grown-ups...
“My God, Afton, you’re an idiot, sometimes,” I whispered to myself, tucking a stray strand of hair behind one ear and finding a semi-isolated patch of grass on which to sit. Being up so high and in an exposed place, the breeze was a little cooler here, and carried my words away from other sightseers and into the ether.
“Auld Reekie,” I said to the panoramic view in front of, all around, me. “What the hell do I do now?”
The ease with which Glenn had left had hurt so much. He’d gone and not looked back.
And constantly looking back was a fault of mine.
Since my last visit with Isla, I’d called to seek her advice, and she’d more or less pointed out that it – my past, the consequences of my affair with Glenn – seemed to bother me enough to make a serious talk with him a necessity. “It’s not that you did anything wrong, or have anything to feel guilty about, Afton,” she’d said. “But the fact remains, you feel like there’s unfinished business. If you didn’t want to tell Glenn about everything that happened, you wouldn’t be asking me about it now, twenty years later. You’d just leave it in the past, and let it lie.”
“Jesus Christ, how did you get so wise about relationships?”
“I married a sensible man.”
I’d grimaced. “Sensible sounds boring.”
“Sensible has never left me worrying over the consequences of something that happened decades ago.”
“Point taken.”
“I don’t have to worry about telling Jamie anything because he knows all the important stuff already. Now, I’m not saying you need to tell Glenn about it, but if your affair is going to become a relationship, you have to feel comfortable with him, and if you feel guilty for keeping secrets...even if he doesn’t necessarily have a right to know...you’re going to be ill at ease all the time.” Isla had sighed heavily. “This would be so much easier if you’d only fall in love with someone younger, more your own age, who wants the same things in life. Without baggage.”
“You’re trying to force sensible on me again, sis.”
“I’m just saying, sensible is an option. Although I can see why you’d be so starry-eyed about someone as well-known and successful as Glenn Peterson. Just be aware; well-known and successful is a good basis for a fling. A secure relationship? Not so much.”
“Maybe the baggage is one of the things I’m attracted to. That connection, it’s always been there. It’s never gone away.”
“Normal people build a shared history, Afton. They don’t pile up enough baggage to restock Louis Vuitton.” Isla had paused, before apologising for nagging. “I know he’s handsome and famous and no doubt powerful, and all of that is a heady cocktail. If this were just a Fringe-fling, all well and good, but it isn’t, because of your past together. Maybe you see a cleaned-up Glenn as a chance to redeem whatever went wrong, but that being the case...maybe you feel like you need to get everything off your chest if your fling, affair, whatever, is to have a chance of becoming something more?”
“Maybe.” I’d scowled then, almost angry at myself for getting into this emotional mess. “I still can’t believe you’re younger than me.”
“One of us has got to be the grown-up,” she’d snapped back, though with laughter in her voice. “Ask yourself this – do you really care for him, or is this a new kind of therapy, a way to offload everything onto him? Do you want him to apologise for the way he treated you?”
“He already has.”
“I mean, do you want him to apologise for the things he doesn’t yet know about?”
“I don’t know,” I’d said with a shrug. “But I do know this. Whether or not he’s got a right to know about everything I went through, whether or not there’s any chance of him finding out about the details of my medical history through any means legal or otherwise...I want to stop feeling worried that he’ll discover the truth one day and hate me for it.”
“Why on Earth would he hate you, Afton?”
“Well...” I’d rolled my shoulders and not for the first time eyed the living room door, hoping Glenn would not return from his shower before my sister and I wrapped up the conversation. “Not for the action taken, but because I kept it from him.”
“Fuck him, if that’s his way of thinking. Seriously, fuck him, Afton. It wasn’t his decision to make. You’d split by that point. You were the one who’d have to live with the consequences and remember, you were in such a mess at the time. I don’t mean just mentally, I mean physically. Sure, you’d managed to get pregnant but there’s no guarantee you would have carried to term anyway. Your body was under tremendous strain already, and...look. Far be it from me to tell you what to do–”
“But you’re going to anyway, right?”
“It’s why you called me, just admit it. My advice would be, tell him everything. Then you won’t have to worry about him ever finding out the truth from someone else, by fair means or foul. I mean, not that he would. You know, medical records and all that, they’re private in this country, so...I’m just saying, it would set your mind at rest, to have the truth out. It wouldn’t be hanging over you, if you knew, finally, for sure, that he wasn’t going to negatively judge you for any of it.”
“And if he does?”
“If he does, keep him there until I manage to drive through to Embra again, and I’ll kill him for you. He’s got no fucking right to judge you, Afton. He’d be lucky to have you.” At that point, Isla sounded like she spoke through gritted teeth. “He wasn’t here. It wasn’t him who had to clear up the mess he left behind. He wasn’t the one who put you back together.”
Eventually, more hillwalkers, triumphant at their finally conquering an extinct volcano, congregated at the top of the hill and not wanting to be caught up in socialising, I realised it was time for me to take my leave. I wasn’t one of those actresses who swanned about expecting to be recognised, but at times like this, making polite conversation with complete strangers wasn’t high on my list of priorities. To lessen the chances of that happening, I hauled myself to my feet, brushed a few stray blades of grass off my jeans and headed literally – and I hoped not metaphorically – downhill.