Chapter 26
A lone in Inverness, I stand at an empty, graffitied bus stop, clutching my phone in my hand, not knowing who to call. The only family I have would never answer – no matter my desperation – and the only friends I have, I have hurt and left behind. Just the thought of them renews my tears all over again.
Sliding aimlessly through the device, void of any notifications other than spam, I can hardly see the screen for crying. There is only one number, from an unsaved contact, that has attempted to reach me in the past few weeks and, with barely a shred of hope, I call it.
‘Lady Alice? Are you all right, lass? Where are you? Tell me and I shall fetch you at once.’ Mrs Buchanan’s voice answers first ring and I can only respond in choked sobs.
A muffled voice comes in the background that I can’t quite make out and Mrs Buchanan turns away from the speaker to respond though I still hear her. ‘She’s crying, Jim. Go and fetch the car.’
‘Why do I mess everything up?’ are the only words I can squeeze past my tears.
Mrs Buchanan sighs softly. ‘There is nothing we can’t fix, my child.’ Her words caress me. ‘Now you just tell me where we can fetch you from and I promise, I promise you, we will make everything okay.’
Breathing through my tears as though each tiny droplet is another stab of hurt, I finally manage to draw together some semblance of a direction. ‘You just sit tight okay, and you stay on this phone whilst we come and get you.’ I do exactly as I’m told. Though I can’t bring myself to speak, I sit clutching the phone to my ear for an hour and a half, listening to the housekeeper’s reassuring words that break the silence every so often as she listens to my broken breathing in response.
Time melts into the night and all I can do is watch the quiet street around me. The usually unobserved pockets of life come out to play and soon the empty streets of Inverness are teeming with stories that I make up to try and distract myself from the tragedy of my own.
As the stars cloud over with the threat of rain, Mrs Buchanan’s car finally arrives. With Jimmy in the driver’s seat, the housekeeper sits beside him, still holding her phone to her ear, as she offers me a sad smile. Sliding out of the car, she first stops off to collect something from the boot. Unfolding a tartan picnic blanket, she lays it over my shoulders before sitting down beside me, clutching my cold hands in her bony pair.
In silence, I wait for her anger, for her to say ‘I told you so’. I prepare to be scolded. In silence we stay, only the soft hum of the running car filling the space in between us as she presses my hands in hers until they grow clammy with the heat and I rest my head on her shoulder.
‘Shall we go home?’ Mrs Buchanan’s voice is soft, as though speaking to me through a dream.
‘Yes please,’ I answer in a whisper, and she gets to her feet, my hands still in hers as she walks me to the car and closes the door behind me.
Jimmy doesn’t say a word. He only turns up the heater until I can feel the puff of warm air hit me in the back seat. When Mrs Buchanan gets in beside him, he murmurs to her, ‘I’ve let him know we’ve got her. Poor boy is beside himself with worry.’
Unable to muster desire for anything, let alone being nosy at a time like this, I don’t bother to ask who this mysterious ‘him’ may be. Instead, I sink down in my seat and rest my head against the window, clinging to the sleeves of Fraser’s jumper, wishing I had never bothered to come at all.
‘You’re safe with us, child. Now try and get some sleep. Give your brain a wee break and we can sort everything with a clearer mind.’ Mrs Buchanan leans through the front seats and taps me affectionately on the knee as Jimmy pulls away from the kerb and we set off on the road back to Balmoral.
Sleep takes me without a fight. It constantly claws away at me anyway, pulling me back to bed, and refusing to release me.
My sadness isn’t a black dog, it’s a black hole.
We reach Balmoral as morning begins to break. Wordlessly disembarking, the three of us walk into the sleeping castle, and follow Mrs Buchanan to her office. When the door is opened, I see that a large mahogany captain’s desk takes up most of the room with two green leather Chesterfield chairs facing one another on either side. Mrs Buchanan sits in one, and I take the seat opposite.
Her desk is neat. Nothing clutters the top aside from the scrunched-up wrapper of a Werther’s Original that she brushes off into the waste paper bin. Jimmy joins us a few moments later, though I hadn’t noticed his absence. In his fists he clutches two mugs, one of them dribbling with whipped cream down the sides. Placing them down in front of both me and Mrs B, he squeezes my shoulder and plants a warming kiss on the crown of my head.
It’s only now, in the light of the desk lamp, that I notice the both of them are bundled into their dressing gowns and Mrs Buchanan still has one stray curler in her hair as though she had forgotten it in her urgency.
‘Sit up with us for ten minutes to drink your hot chocolate and then get up to bed, lass.’ Her face is unchanged from the day I met her. Her expression is still firm, her words still authoritative, but this time, I understand her. Mrs Buchanan cares. She cares more than a mother, or a friend. In her company, with her stern love, I believe her when she tells me it’s going to be okay.
‘I’m so sorry.’ I can’t stop the tears as they come. I have done nothing but ruin everything since I got here. So caught up in myself, in rebelling, in being angry, in having my head in the clouds, I never saw any of these people for who they truly are. I saw them as characters in a story, as people existing as a plot around me, and it’s only now, when they stay good, when they stay true, when I have shown my true colours, that I realise just how awful I have been. Using my own sadness, my hatred of myself and my life as an excuse to sabotage the happiness of everyone else, I didn’t stop once to realise just what I do have. I have been loved this whole time, and not once did I allow myself to see it.
‘It’s okay. Shhh, you’re okay, lass.’ Mrs Buchanan walks around the desk to hold me to her chest. She embraces me, comforts me, allows me to cry and cry and cry until her dressing gown is positively soaked through.
I have been so sad for so long that I have refused to allow myself the privilege of feeling happy. Perhaps I had forgotten what it was like, not noticed what such a feeling was. Or perhaps I believed that staying stuck in this pit is easier than the strain of trying to clamber out. It has been the safer option to bask in the melancholy, than risk the pain of losing every happiness. By pushing away Fraser, I have renewed my misery, on the off chance that one day the heartbreak of losing him in another way would be even more painful to bear.
‘You just let it out, lass.’ Mrs Buchanan strokes my hair. ‘We have all day, and an empty castle. Cry as loud as you want.’
‘I love him,’ I choke through my sobs.
‘We know you do, hen.’ Jimmy speaks, and neither of them ask who I refer to.
‘No, not Atticus. Fraser,’ I say, looking between them both, but neither of their faces change expression.
‘You think us old crones haven’t noticed?’ Mrs Buchanan laughs.
‘We may be crabbit auld bastards now, but we know what love looks like.’ Jimmy places a hand on both mine and the housekeeper’s shoulders. ‘And I know for certain that that boy thinks the world of you.’
‘I wish I wasn’t me.’
‘And who else would you be?’ Mrs Buchanan says sternly. ‘Do you think that if tomorrow you woke up in a whole different body, with a new name and in a different part of the world, that you’d suddenly know what you’re doing? That all of the things that you have suffered through will all of a sudden be easier to deal with?’
I blink up at her.
‘None of us have a clue what we’re doing, Alice. Certainly not in love. Life isn’t a fairy tale. There isn’t one conflict to overcome; there isn’t a singular bad guy to defeat before you’re allowed your happily ever after. Life is a series of battles, and you can’t give up after the first. So what? You lose your shoe at a ball and when no one comes to find you just carry on living a life that’s slowly driving you insane? No. You need to go out there, be your own hero, be your own fairy godmother and chase whatever it is that will make you happy. Stop counting down the minutes to midnight and enjoy the moment as though time has stopped altogether.’
Her words, though delivered like a telling-off, are so impassioned, so emotive, that I can only sit in a stunned silence as she pants with fatigue.
‘There is no such thing as the perfect time, or the perfect circumstance,’ she says after catching her breath. ‘If you want something, you make room for it, you make it work, and every struggle to get there will be the most rewarding thing you’ve ever done.’
‘What if it all goes wrong?’ I breathe, my tears slowing to a silent trickle down my cheeks.
‘Then at least you can say you’ve tried.’ She wipes my face with her calloused hands and tucks my hair behind my ears. ‘Right, now get your arse to bed. I’ll wake you up for breakfast so make sure you’re wearing pyjamas.’
‘Thank you, Mrs B,’ I say, earnestly.
‘Call me Mary, lass.’ She smiles, and I nod. ‘And Alice …’ her voice halts me as I reach the door to leave ‘… above all, the love of a man isn’t the key to happiness. Falling in love isn’t going to miraculously fix everything. Take your time, to heal, to get to know yourself, your own mind. If your love is meant to be, it will wait.’ She casts a quick side glance at Jimmy who blushes softly in the corner of the room.
‘Goodnight.’