The Valley by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page A

out to lunch. I arrived at the restaurant before Max, but had no trouble spotting his father. The hair was a little thinner, the face more lined and the voice much quieter, but in every other way he was just Max fast forwarded by thirty years. He even had the same sort of patched tweed jacket and check shirt that Max sometimes wore.
    After Max arrived at our table, there was a brief father and son catch-up that was mostly about shooting and fishing. Then, in an effort to include me again in the conversation, Max’s father asked what I was doing for Christmas. I let on that I was remaining in the house in Bristol on my own. My mother and Pete had tried to persuade me to come out to Australia, but it would have meant missing all the parties that I had been invited to in the run-up to Christmas Eve and over New Year. The fact that there were four days in the middle when everyone else would flock back to their families to celebrate Christmas did not bother me in the least. I had a dissertation to complete and was actually looking forward to the break. But Max’s father was truly horrified that I would be all alone on Christmas Day and he insisted that I stay with him and Max in Scotland. Max echoed his father’s invitation, and the two of them browbeat me into accepting, although I did wonder why Max had never asked me himself.
    When the time came, I travelled up on the sleeper to Fort William, and then changed to a small local train, only a little larger than a bus, that chugged at almost walking speed through deep glens to a station with a Gaelic name that I struggled to pronounce. Although it was only mid-afternoon when I arrived, the sun had already set. Waiting for me on the platform was Max.
    We headed out to the estate in a Land Rover similar to the one he drove in Bristol, except it was ten years younger and had two black labradors curled up in the back. It took us over an hour, all on single-track road. We only passed ten other cars. Whenever I asked a question about the family estate, Max just smiled and said I would have to wait and see it for myself.
    We arrived in the dark. Max’s father strode from the house to meet us, insisting on carrying my bag, as he led us back to The Lodge, where he and Max lived. It was set back from a group of five cottages that I could just see in the dark, where the estate workers lived. There was no other human habitation in sight. Across the road, I could make out the shimmer of water in the moonlight. That, Max’s father said, was Loch Hourn, snaking in from the Irish Sea over twenty miles away, and on its far shore rose the dark shadowy shapes of the Glen Avon Mountains.
    The Lodge itself was a solid four bedroom house, with an array of outbuildings and sheds. It was comfortable and absurdly roomy for the three of us, but had no hint of the grandeur I had expected. As I followed Max and his father up to my room, I noticed that the staircase had no carpet and the stairs creaked as I trod on them. Above my head were paintings, mostly of stags and dogs, except for one, which depicted a blonde woman, standing imperiously in a long white dress with a Tartan sash. When I asked who she was, Max said it was his mother.
    He showed me to my room and pointed out the small electric fire in case I got cold; then on his way out, almost as an afterthought, he suggested that I might want to get changed because we were all going to have dinner at the Castle.
    ‘Is that a pub?’ I asked.
    ‘No,’ said Max. ‘It’s where our Lord and Master lives, when he’s not in Chelsea.’
    I should have figured it out before and by the time we drove over to the Castle, I had filled in most of the gaps. Max really had been bought up on a famous sporting estate in Scotland, just like the university rumours said he had, but his family never owned it. Instead his father managed it for its absentee owners, employing battalions of gamekeepers, stalkers, cleaners, cooks and river wardens to ensure that