Chapter 36
Chapter 36
C ome on then!” Jean was shouting. “It’s bloody freezing out here!”
Wrapped in twenty layers of knitwear apiece were the KCs. All of them except Elspeth. Majabeen, Jean, the twins, Marian bringing up the rear, all waving frantically.
Instinctively, Gertie put in the code to unlock the door. They hadn’t changed it, which they should have.
“We brought knitwear!” announced Jean, loudly and, probably, unnecessarily.
“How did you know?!”
“Someone was listening to the radio channel,” said Jean, unwilling to admit that perhaps, occasionally, she and Ranald had chatted on it. Just occasionally. They did Wordle together, over the phone. And in the night sometimes. It was hard to sleep as you got older. And it was perfectly innocent anyway so Gertie could shut up.
She looked at Gertie.
“You’re not too cross with us for being interfering old busybodies?”
“We brought blankets for the children,” added Majabeen.
Gertie looked at them, smiled, and shook her head.
“Sometimes,” she said. “I suppose sometimes the world needs interfering old busybodies.”
“Are you kidding?” said Jean, taking her beloved daughter in her arms. “It wouldn’t run without them.”
Gertie indicated the bags of stuff on the floor.
Marian stepped forward immediately and all the others were right there too. Carrying heavy shopping bags through extremely difficult weather was a school of expertise the middle-aged women of Carso had mastered decades before.
“Okay!” shouted Jean, who was wearing a bright purple knitted coat so was the easiest to spot in the blizzarding, slowly dawning day. “Follow me!”
And so it was with amazement that Morag and Ranald saw the party stagger in, huge misshapen forms loaded with bags and slowly trudging the kilometer-long road, straight into the wind and weather, treading, like King Wenceslas, in each other’s footsteps.
“Well,” Morag said, as they deposited their bounty on the airport floor. “Well. This is going to cover it.”
“Bring the bairns home!” said Jean and Morag glanced at her, and realized she was talking to Ranald, who had arrived unobtrusively half an hour before, and was examining printouts of the weather forecast. He looked back at Jean and nodded, briefly.