Chapter 3
Someone awfully clever once observed that no one can attempt to tackle the second half of their life using only the tools from the first half.
Roz had been thinking about that all morning, ever since she’d awakened with the sun just before half past five, still processing the bombshell news from that Sunday’s Zoom call with her daughter, Ally, announcing her plans to move in with her police officer boyfriend as soon as she returned from her temp job in Switzerland.
Roz had been expecting it, of course, but it still hurt.
When Roz was younger, she’d had the very same endless energy and ambition, a devil-may-care, throw-yourself-into-things attitude.
That, combined with a lot of love and dedication, had seen her through to this point in her life at the age of fifty-six.
What she needed now, however, was a whole new set of tools, because the future was nowhere near as exciting and appealing as it had appeared to her as a teenager, back when anything felt possible.
Whatever was coming next, she was unprepared for it.
What new tools she would require for this second act of her life, she had no idea.
She was coming to feel as though she had some pieces missing, like a junk shop jigsaw, and nothing she tried seemed to fill the spaces properly.
Not even the hours she’d devoted to helping Peaches with her sewing, not even caring for Wayward, the abandoned puppy her son rescued back in January, and who she’d adopted.
Wayward was now a boisterous, teething, tumbling thing intent on destroying her furniture.
Fortunately, McIntyre, her husband, had become equally as intent on repairing all the things Wayward damaged.
On days like today, when she awoke fiendishly early, no hope of getting back to sleep, she’d clip on Wayward’s lead and button her ankle-length coat over her pyjamas and walk the riverside path while Cairn Dhu slept, and she’d wrack her brains over how she had managed to lose control of her own life.
At what point had she lost her equilibrium, and her courage?
Her parents had adored her, of course, and her grandparents too.
Throughout her schooling, where she’d excelled at most things from spelling to sports, she’d still preferred to stay home and do her crafts by the fireside, rather than run around with her pals.
All through college she’d helped her grandparents with the upkeep of their big mill house (even then it had been too big for them to cope with).
By the time she graduated from college and was working at the primary school down the road, she was caring for them both while her mum and dad were trying to get their bistro off the ground in Marbella, of all places.
By the time her parents were letting their business fold to retire in the sun, Roz’s grandfather was gone and Roz was feeling like a permanent fixture at the mill house, keeping the place going for her grandmother.
Roz could have sworn her Granny McIntyre had held on until she’d met Charlie one fateful Walpurgisnacht, and there’d been a whirlwind romance and a wedding only four months later, when Charlie took the very nineties ‘New Man’ decision to take her family name, eschewing his – admittedly unfortunate – name, Charlie Gas.
He’d joined the McIntyre clan just at the moment Granny McIntyre was departing it, and Roz’s grief was cushioned in the most surreal way by the discovery she was having twins and that she had inherited the family mill house.
Her parents never did come home from Marbella, and now here she was, having spent thirty of her fifty-six years on earth caring for, teaching, wiving, parenting and repairing those around her, placing her own needs aside in all of it.
As a consequence, nowadays she wasn’t sure where her centre was, feeling herself like a planet hit by a giant asteroid years ago with bits of her broken off and drifting away from her in space: her grandparents, her parents, Ally and Murray, her husband, even, and now she was just a loose accretion of dust somewhere in the middle of them all.
That’s why you’ll find her this morning wandering along the towpath, drinking coffee from her thermos and asking herself the question that was growing louder within her.
Is this it for me now?
Wayward was particularly energetic. Maybe because she was still high on the feeling of having scattered the hissing geese and their goslings all across the surface of the wide River Nithy only moments ago.
Pulling on her lead and telling her off only made Wayward’s game more exciting, so instead of turning for home when they reached the weir across the water – and the point where the outskirts of Cairn Dhu town merged with the start of Stranruthie village – Roz had chosen the cow-parsley-lined path and the long way round, eventually looping back to the end of the high street furthest from the mill house and repair shop.
The coffee in her flask was all gone, Wayward was tiring a little – at least, she was no longer straining at the lead – and the April Monday morning traffic was starting to build as the commuters took to the road.
They passed the animal feed store, the post office, the bank and the police station, none of the buildings showing any signs of life yet, but at the primary school gate there was a figure unlocking the Perspex door on the notice board by the gate.
Roz recognised the woman immediately as her old boss, Mrs Hoolit, the headmistress. She had worked at the school forever and, given that she was at work before half-seven on a Monday morning, she was showing no signs of slacking off any time soon.
Roz didn’t like to think it, but Mrs Hoolit was white-haired now, when before she’d boasted the thick auburn brush of so many highlanders. Where there had once been freckles on her cheeks there was now a papery coolness, but she seemed just as sprightly and busily efficient as she’d always been.
They greeted one another in their usual friendly way, and Wayward, who Mrs Hoolit hadn’t yet had the pleasure of being mauled by, immediately set about putting ladders in her tights. The head teacher didn’t seem to mind and fussed the dog anyway.
After asking how each other’s families were doing, Roz couldn’t help mentioning the notice newly posted to the board. A job advertisement.
‘The school’s hiring?’ she asked. ‘A one-to-one? What’s that?’
‘We’ve a wee boy starting in Primary One come August,’ Mrs Hoolit said, locking the notice board shut. ‘And he’ll have a teaching assistant of his own.’
‘Are you talking about Jolly? I mean, Jolyon Sears?’
‘That’s the lad. You know him?’
‘He and his mum, Mhairi, are repair shop regulars, and they come to the garden project on Sundays. Jolly loves it.’
‘Ah, well, you’ll know he’s deferred starting school for a year already, so he’ll be a bit older than most of the class?’
Mhairi Sears and Roz’s twins had gone to school together, so they all went way back, and it wasn’t unusual that Mhairi had told Roz all about her decision to keep Jolyon in nursery for another year.
That was when they’d been finishing off work on the repair shed garden project’s polytunnel back in February.
The new term had seemed a long way off then.
‘Time’s going in fast,’ Roz observed.
‘Not too fast, I hope. I have to get interviews started and someone in post before we break up for the summer holidays.’ Mrs Hoolit had no sooner said this than her expression changed to something enquiring, and a little bit cunning.
‘You’re not considering getting back into the classroom, are you, Rosalyn? ’
‘Me?’ Roz wanted to laugh at the very thought, but it came out more as a spluttering refusal to even entertain the idea. ‘Not at all.’
‘You were always wonderful with the pupils. I often get parents telling me how they remember you teaching them. They’re grown up with bairns of their own at the school now, but they haven’t forgotten you.’
‘Oh my goodness!’ Roz didn’t think she liked the idea of this very much.
‘As you say,’ Mrs Hoolit went on with a shrewd smile, ‘time flies fast. Applications close at the end of the month, for anyone considering it.’
Roz knew the woman too well to miss her meaning. ‘Mrs H, you know I’m needed at the repair shop, and at the garden project on Sundays…’ She had been about to say she was busy with the house and the twins too, but that wasn’t true. ‘And Charlie’s winding things down a bit… hopefully.’
This was met with a pointed look that made Roz feel like the most awful liar.
‘Well, I mean, he will be, when the repair shed quietens down again.’
‘Hmm.’ The older woman let herself back inside the school gate, still smiling knowingly.
‘How could I work in a school again?’ Roz appealed, increasingly panicked, even though Mrs Hoolit wasn’t saying a word. ‘It’s been twenty-eight years. Times have changed. Schools have changed. I’m out of touch.’
The head teacher made a little shrug like these were minor details. ‘You could take a refresher course… and in the meantime pick up some volunteer hours to reorientate you.’
‘I’m not registered any more.’
‘One online form would see to that.’
‘A refresher course would cost money, wouldn’t it?’
‘There’d be a salary, come August. And this’ – Mrs Hoolit tapped the edge of the notice board – ‘is a permanent post, for as long as Jolyon is on the school roll.’
The promise of a regular pay cheque certainly had more appeal than the idea of going back to teacher school and everything that would entail.
They’d managed this far on McIntyre’s redundancy payout from the tractor factory and the last of their savings, but there were bills coming in soon that they’d struggle to pay.
‘But I’d need references,’ Roz protested. ‘No one on the school board will remember me.’