Chapter 7
I appreciate how difficult it can be to risk a friendship. I found the love of my life early on, when I was a wee young thing. I believe you did too. Now it’s your turn to take a chance.
Extract from Joy’s journal
Tilly showered with the bathroom door locked. Even though she knew Logan was out walking Barney, she checked the coast was clear before nipping along the hallway in a towel. She promised herself to be up and dressed in time to join them tomorrow.
With a plan for the next few days sketched out, they cracked on with the jobs.
Working hard was in her nature, and clearing gardens and redecorating was her comfort zone.
After travelling around Southeast Asia for six months, she’d returned to the UK, bought a campervan and invested the money she’d been left in a property in Sunderland that she had worked on night and day transforming it into a house that she’d sold for a chunky profit.
Interior design had been her dream, but she’d swiftly realised that buying and selling houses was not only exciting, but it also put her interior design skills to good use, transforming soulless or run-down houses into homes that young families and professionals would want to live in.
While Tilly had been travelling, Logan had left Edinburgh and moved to Mull to live with Joy, working remotely as a graphic designer for a couple of years.
When Tilly needed help on a big renovation in Newcastle, he’d dropped everything to help her out.
She’d thanked him by booking him on a leatherwork course and he hadn’t looked back, making a new life for himself in Edinburgh, although he’d been conflicted about leaving Joy alone on Mull.
Logan made a start on sorting through the dining room, and Tilly wandered around the house with a notebook and pen, making a list of jobs.
The downstairs rooms needed decluttering and sprucing up, while Joy’s bedroom required some serious TLC, but that would be the hardest one to broach.
She wasn’t sure if Logan had set foot in there yet.
She went back downstairs and her eyes fell on the painting propped against the hallway wall that Joy had left Ivor.
There had been no sign of Ivor since his angry outburst yesterday.
Tilly hoped he’d made it home in the rain okay and wasn’t lying in a ditch.
Logan obviously hadn’t built up the courage to take the painting round to him yet.
There was a history with Ivor, Joy and Logan, and of course with Logan’s ex-girlfriend Màiri.
Tilly wondered if Joy’s journal would reveal anything.
* * *
Tilly stopped at lunchtime and with Logan focused on the piles of paperwork spread across the dining table, she didn’t disturb him.
She made them both a coffee, then took a plate of cheese, bread and apple into the garden and sat on the bench beneath the oak tree to eat.
Afterwards, she picked up Joy’s journal, promising herself she’d only read for ten minutes before going to the cottage to see what needed to be done.
Joy’s journal was themed by the seasons, starting in the autumn after Tilly and Logan had stayed with her. The writing was moving and evocative, half nature diary, half memoir, with Joy pulling threads of her past into the narrative.
Sitting in the dappled sunshine with the breeze rustling the branches of the trees, Tilly was transported to the past as she read vignettes of Joy’s younger days.
The six years of happiness that she’d treasured with her husband were woven between descriptive passages of the changing landscape as summer transitioned to autumn.
Joy’s words were compelling, and when Logan was mentioned, it piqued Tilly’s interest even more.
It was fascinating to see him through someone else’s eyes.
I was born at a time when love was far more straightforward than it is for yours and Logan’s generation.
We had courtship, proposal and marriage, whereas you have to deal with the minefield of online dating and chat snap or whatever it’s called.
Of course you have the benefit of it not being frowned upon to sleep together before marriage or choosing not to get married at all.
My parents were strict and I would never have gone against their rules.
The only way for us to be together was to marry, even if that meant moving far from my family and my darling sister.
It was an easy decision because I loved him with all my heart, but I do wonder if I’d been born at a different time with the freedoms you and Logan enjoy, would I have hesitated even slightly?
I’ll never know. But I’ve seen the difficulties Logan has gone through with dating and girlfriends!
I don’t envy him navigating love in the modern world.
The part that stuck out for Tilly was the next paragraph when Joy stated I found the love of my life early on, when I was a wee young thing.
I believe you did too. Had Joy understood Tilly’s confusion when it came to Cal and the way she’d felt about him?
She’d been swept up by passion and a no-strings attached summer fling.
They’d enjoyed all the benefits of the modern world and had slept together without the worry of it being frowned upon.
They’d become friends too; she had wanted to stay in touch with him until he’d got too serious.
Tilly closed the journal and stroked the soft, worn leather.
She imagined that Joy had often picked it up to read back over the thoughts she’d committed to ink.
She was certain that Cal wasn’t the love of her life, but she did have plenty of regrets when it came to the cowardly way she’d ended things.
The sentiment in Joy’s journal of taking a chance made Tilly’s mind up to finally put things right. With Logan sorting out the sideboard in the hallway, she offered to go to Tobermory to stock up on food. It was an errand that needed doing, but it was also an excuse to go and see Cal.
* * *
Fourteen years ago, Cal’s family had sold cheese from a shed at the entrance to their farm. Fast-forward to now and the shed was gone, but in its place at the bottom of the lane was an award-winning café and farm shop that was well known throughout Mull.
Tilly’s nerves were in tatters as she went into the café, which was housed in a large and airy barn with a see-through pitched roof covered in vines. Nearly every table was filled with people tucking into bowls of stew and soup, the warming smells mouth-wateringly good.
Tilly had met Cal’s sister and mum a handful of times fourteen years ago and had seen his dad from afar on the farm, but she didn’t recognise anyone serving behind the counter.
Grabbing a lemonade from the fridge, she joined the short queue.
‘Can I get you anything else?’ the young woman serving asked in a singsong Scottish accent.
‘No, that’s all thanks,’ Tilly said, before taking a deep breath. ‘Apart from I was wondering if Cal, um, Callum Garvie, was around?’
A crease formed on the woman’s line-free forehead. ‘Not here, but he’s on the farm.’ She scanned the lemonade and Tilly paid. ‘I’m his cousin, Isla.’
‘This place is still very much a family affair, then.’
‘Aye,’ Isla said with a smile. ‘I’m about to stop for a break; I can call him if you like?’
‘Would you mind?’
‘Of course not. Who shall I say is here?’ Her eyes narrowed slightly and Tilly’s palms started to sweat. Would his cousin know about how she’d dumped him all those years ago? But Isla would have been a child back then and it was highly likely that Cal hadn’t talked about her to anyone since.
‘Oh, tell him an old friend.’
Tucking the can of lemonade into her bag, she sat at a free table while she waited for Isla to make the call.
An old friend was pushing it. Yes, they’d been more than friendly with each other, but she’d certainly not behaved like a friend the way she’d ended things.
She wiped her hot hands on her trousers, but no amount of focusing on the leafy surroundings of the glass and wood café calmed her nerves.
It was in an enviable spot, not far from Tobermory and overlooking the farm with its fields of cows.
A shadow falling across the table made Tilly look up.
‘He’s busy and said no to begin with, but changed his mind when he asked me what you looked like.’ Isla scrunched her eyebrows. Her earlier breezy smile was absent. ‘If you walk down the lane next to the café, he said he’ll meet you by the gate.’
Was that a good or bad thing? Would he have figured out who she was from his cousin’s description?
Had she changed much? Her hair was the same chocolate brown, although one or two greys were creeping through, and it was longer than the choppy bob she’d had back then.
She had a couple of tattoos in places that weren’t visible, but if Isla had taken a guess at her age and he’d put two and two together…
Tilly thanked her and headed out of the café. She took the track that wound between trees towards the field of cows. Her heart thumped in her ears, louder with each step along the ridged mud, while bad idea, bad idea played over and over in her head.
She made herself wait by the gate when really she wanted to run in the other direction and avoid an awkward conversation, but she’d already done that once.
She had to see this through, if not just for her sake then for Cal’s too.
She wondered how life had treated him and if much had changed in the last decade or so.
He was still living and working in the place he’d grown up; part of her envied him that, the stability and the close, loving relationship he had with his family.
She’d swapped him and Mull for the excitement of travelling, for new friends and experiences, for setting up her own business where she was constantly moving about, forever chasing something.
She wondered which of them was happiest.