She marched up to Mr McCredie, who was sitting by his fireplace in the nook, poring over accounts in his half-moon spectacles and looking unpromising. She startled him of course, but he went to pour her a cup of tea. She was beginning to not mind it with lemon in it. She had got nowhere trying to convince him to try a gingerbread latte though.
‘Do you have any Christmas decorations?’ she said. ‘I think we should put some up. Everyone else has absolutely loads.’
‘Doing things everyone else does has never been my speciality,’ said Mr McCredie.
‘I bet,’ said Carmen. ‘But do you have any?’
He led her through the door she had assumed led to his bedroom, but it didn’t: there was, in fact, a flight of stairs.
‘Edinburgh architects must just have been off their faces the entire time,’ said Carmen.
‘I think building vertically in a vertical city makes perfect sense,’ said Mr McCredie. ‘Look at Amsterdam.’
At the top of the staircase, Carmen gasped as the door opened into a huge drawing room.
It was above ground – absurdly, an entire storey above ground; nothing made sense – and it looked out onto the other side of the block onto the Royal Mile itself.
Two windows faced the front and two the back, but they weren’t in grand proportion like Sofia’s house; instead they were small and higgledy-piggledy. The room itself, however, was large, with high ceilings and a vast fireplace against the left-hand wall. There was a grand piano in the corner covered in a pink fringed cloth, with pictures in silver frames lining it. The rug was faded, with an old design of pink roses, covering the wooden floor. Old sofas of elegant design, with curled wooden arms, were put out tidily. A candelabra swung from the ceiling, and old paintings lined the walls. It was a beautiful room, although it felt like it belonged to an earlier age. Mind you, so did this city, Carmen was beginning to learn. It was beautiful, but somehow strange; out of time, like those houses people leave behind or board up, which remain untouched for sixty years.
There was nothing new in the room at all. There was a radio but no television; there were books of course, but no magazines; a clock, but no computer or even a charger. Nothing that looked like the normal detritus of modern life. Even the photographs were all terribly old: black and white and in dusty frames. Nothing from Mr McCredie’s own life. He was there as a child; he was not there after that.
‘Wow,’ said Carmen, looking for something to say. ‘Well. This is lovely. And you have a secret tunnel to the office. That is pretty cool.’
‘Is it?’ said Mr McCredie, looking around. ‘It was my parents’ home really. I never quite … found a way to move on.’
Once again, Carmen got the sense of sadness coming from him, chiming completely with the room, full of unwound clocks. Not anger, like you found in some men, not bitterness. Just sadness, like a child who has had a treat taken away and doesn’t quite know what to do with themselves.
‘Good house for parties,’ said Carmen, meaning it. Through another door to the side was a small kitchen and another set of stairs, but here was big enough for a ballroom.
‘Oh, there used to be … yes. There used to be parties in here,’ said Mr McCredie, his eyes growing misty. ‘My mother loved a party. We’d have a band; there’d be music and dancing … ’
‘An amazing place to grow up.’
‘You’d think,’ he said shortly. ‘Oh yes … I had everything, I suppose.’
Carmen looked at the pictures on the piano. His mother had been very beautiful: long dark hair, strong brows, a strong chin and a little mouth like his. His father was rather fierce-looking, with a big mop of hair and quite a beard. He was actually very attractive, Carmen thought.
‘Was your granddad really an explorer?’ she said before she realised what she was saying.
He blinked, but then obviously assumed that most people in Edinburgh would know his family. Sofia had said they were well known, thought Carmen, relieved that she hadn’t dropped herself in it.
‘Well, he went on the Graham Land expedition,’ said Mr McCredie, showing her an old photograph of lots of men grinning cheerfully below the decks of a ship, wine bottles open. ‘He was really just a boy then though.’
‘That’s amazing,’ said Carmen genuinely. ‘Explorers in the family! I didn’t even realise it was a job. Were you never tempted to head for the snowy wastes?’
Mr McCredie looked down. ‘Oh, yes. But I’m not sure I’m the type.’ He frowned. ‘Wherearethose medals? I’m sure he got given one once.’
‘It must be worth a lot, surely,’ said Carmen.
He looked at her.
‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘Nobody cares about these things these days. Unless you were on the expeditions where people died.’
At which Carmen wondered then why it was that he had absolutely no idea where they were, and nobody who would care for them after he’d gone.
‘Well, I’m here to fetch your Christmas decorations,’ she reminded him. ‘If they’re in the attic, I can probably scout for the medals at the same time.’
Mr McCredie had picked up one of the pictures of his mother, a studio shot from the 1940s, as she looked on at a three-quarter angle, past the frame, her lovely brows and high cheekbones outlining her face.
