Chapter 11
Life in Cairn Dhu went on, and for a few days the gossips made their rounds, and even though Euan Sparks’s name was briefly on everyone’s lips, not a soul had seen him, and his grandfather’s bike stayed under its cover at the side of his house.
When asked whilst queuing to pay for his morning newspaper what his grandson had been getting up to since frazzling Carenza McDowell, Clyde Forte had snapped that it was ‘nane o’ your concern what the laddie does! ’
The town folks soon concluded that Euan had ‘done a midnight flit’, a particularly salacious way of saying someone’s run away in disgrace, and soon he was forgotten about in favour of discussing the imminent Beltane celebrations.
Over in Cairn Dhu’s Repair Shop there was a kind of happy chaos playing out as, after many days spent missing or distracted, McIntyre was present once again and attempting to scale the mountain of repair jobs that had piled up on his workbench.
Only just this morning he had fixed one vacuum cleaner, one coffee machine, one desk lamp, one toaster, and (with the help of horologist-repairer, Dr Bonnet) one ancient clock radio that now lived to tick another day.
It must have been Roz’s losing her temper that had done it, because he’d been sure to bring home to her a lavish (for McIntyre) bouquet of tulips and hyacinths, and they had tried their best to sit through the first two parts of a particularly good murder mystery on TV together the evening before (and only been interrupted three times by repair clients knocking at the mill house door out of hours to check up on when their fixes would be ready).
It wasn’t perfect, but at least he was trying, and he’d even turned off his phone to stop the message notifications going off all the time, as they had in recent days.
He was still jumpy, though. Roz wanted to put it down to her having shouted.
She still saw that same preoccupied glaze over his eyes as he tinkered with a broken barometer as a weather alert came over Sachin’s radio, cutting off The Beatles’ ‘Here Comes the Sun’ to warn of freak gusts of high winds further north which had taken off some shed roofs and blown in a few barn doors before dying down again.
‘Residents in the central Highlands are advised to check the tethers on garden trampolines, bring livestock undercover where possible and remain alert to sudden rising winds over the coming hours.’
No one was paying all that much attention, apart from Peaches, who was packing the last of her clothing collection into travel bags for the drive north to her university campus. She checked the time on her phone and packed all the faster.
Roz kneeled on the rug in the sewing corner in front of Jolyon Sears, putting the finishing touches to the little boy’s costume.
‘Are you sad?’ Jolyon asked using his ACC.
Roz stopped her stitching in surprise.
‘Me? I’m not sad.’
He looked unconvinced. She avoided glancing up at the boy’s mum, Mhairi, who was inelegantly attaching the thick white elastic strap to the back of her son’s decorated paper plate mask with a stapler.
Jolyon had come up with the idea for his own Beltane Bonfire cloak and told his mum about it, then, naturally, Roz had been tasked with bringing his vision to life. His crayon drawing lay on the open sewing box beside them and she had followed his specifications exactly.
‘I’m looking forward to the bonfire party,’ she told him, a little more convincingly, as she set to stitching around the very last buttonhole slit in the green cape. His drawing showed a smiling Jolyon under a yellow sun in a green cape covered in real flowers.
‘Flowers from the garden,’ he’d used the tablet to tell Roz earlier, and she’d decided that if the cape had little holes all over it a few inches apart, and the holes were reinforced with buttonhole stitching to stop them fraying, flowers could be stuck in each one.
Jolyon had agreed that would work and Roz had been at it for about an hour, slowed only by Jolyon’s insistence that he be inside his cape for the last twenty minutes because his patience was wearing thin with waiting.
‘Once more, still like a statue,’ Roz told him now, and she worked her needle as fast as she could.
‘You’re pretty good at knowing when someone’s not quite themselves,’ Mhairi said to her son, and then, in the direction of Roz, ‘You must be looking forward to Ally coming home. I know we are.’
Mhairi and Ally McIntyre had been friends all through school. Roz had watched them grow up together.
‘I know someone else who’ll be looking forward to it,’ Roz deflected, nodding in the direction of PC Jamie Beaton who’d come in for his afternoon break and was paying Senga for his latte and custard tart at the till.
‘Oh yeah, they’re house-hunting already, I heard,’ said Mhairi.
‘You wait all your life for your kids to be independent, show them how to fly the nest, and then, when they finally go, it’s kind of devastating. Exciting for them, of course,’ Roz said, finishing off the corner of the last buttonhole and biting off the excess thread.
There followed a second’s silence where only the wind outside could be heard and Roz patted Jolyon’s arm to say she was done and he could run around and test out his cape, which he did immediately.
That’s when Roz realised with crashing embarrassment that she may have put her foot in it with the boy’s mum.
‘Oh! I mean… I know that’s not going to be everyone’s experience. Every child’s journey is different, of course…’ she floundered, not knowing what else to say to Mhairi, who was looking at her a little abashed.
‘It’s OK, don’t feel bad. Who knows what kinds of independence Jolyon will have. He could do anything, be all kinds of brilliant things!’
Mhairi watched Jolyon over by the repair triage desk showing an admiring Sachin his cape. He was spinning so that it flew out around him like a mini matador.
‘I think about it though, most days,’ Mhairi went on, her eyes never leaving her little boy.
‘I try to picture what might happen to Jolyon after me and his dad aren’t around.
Who’ll be helping him live independently?
Who’ll be saying goodnight and good morning to him?
Where will he live? What if he gets poorly or he’s having a hard time? ’
Roz listened, not knowing what to say. She couldn’t honestly say she’d asked herself these specific questions about her twins, beyond a hopeful curiosity about how their lives would play out.
Whenever she’d pictured Ally and Murray’s middle-age, she’d always been fairly confident they’d find nice partners, even if it had taken a few tricky years and some false starts for them to get there.
She’d had a feeling both of them would get pretty good jobs after college and that’s exactly what happened, even if they weren’t exactly rolling in money.
They both drove cars, had friends, travelled; both of them knew how lucky they were.
Maybe they’d have kids of their own one day.
And eventually the mill house and its grounds would be theirs, meaning they’d probably keep coming home to the Cairngorms even if their adventures did call them further afield in the future.
Looking at Mhairi now, she realised the young mother didn’t have anything like her certainty. ‘You worry about this sort of thing a lot?’ she asked her.
Mhairi looked at her in a pensive way. ‘It keeps me awake some nights.’
Roz wondered if she’d sounded complacent or unaware sometimes as she’d talked with Mhairi in recent years, but she didn’t have time to pursue that line of thought because Jolyon was back and trying to drag his mum away.
He was pointing through the shed wall to the gardens beyond and making a ‘fff’ sound.
‘OK, OK, let’s go pick your flowers now. I mean, if that’s OK with you and the other garden project people?’ Mhairi said, turning to Roz.
‘Of course, there’s plenty of nice blooms to pick. Jolly, I’ll go get you some jam jars filled with water to put them in so you can keep them fresh until tomorrow, OK?’ Roz got to her feet.
As Jolyon ran for the door with a happy laugh, Mhairi stopped to say one last thing to Roz. ‘You know, on nights when I’m torturing myself imagining the very worst-case scenarios for Jolly’s old age, I’ll ask myself the same question and it helps shut out some of the worry.’
‘What question is that?’ Roz inclined her head.
‘I ask what if it all goes right?’ Having said it, Mhairi’s usually serious expression melted into a smile and her eyes misted.
She shrugged at the simplicity of the idea before going on.
‘I ask myself, what if things basically fall into place, and maybe we get a few best-case scenario outcomes and a few not-so-bad scenarios, and even some really nice, surprising things happen?’ She shrugged again. ‘Jolly is always surprising us.’
‘What if it all goes right?’ Roz turned the words over, feeling their impact.
‘There you go! You’ve got it now.’ Mhairi went off in search of Jolyon in the gardens.
As Roz filled a couple of empty jam jars with water at the café’s kitchen sink, she spotted a streak of rainbow colour flashing past the big window at the back of the shed. She went outside for a better view.
In the repair shop gardens, around the flowerbeds and under the budding Aspen saplings ran Jolyon.
Every eyelet cut into his cape, front and back, was now stuffed with tiny posies of white daisies and yellow dandelions, pink twin flowers and blue saxifrage.
He wore his paper plate mask down over his face too, only the white disc was now disguised in flowy strips of green crepe paper like the leafy face of a woodland spirit.
Mhairi Sears was grinning, watching her son’s dance and snapping pictures with her phone, as though she’d never worried a moment more in her life than the other mothers.
None of the happy threesome paid any attention to the rising winds whipping around the garden or the spitting rain that was now dotting the shed windows.
Roz knew then that she needed to take a leaf out of Mhairi and Jolyon’s books. They both seemed to have some things figured out about life’s happy surprises which she, at the age of fifty-six, was only just on the brink of discovering.
Popping her head back inside the shed, she called out, ‘McIntyre? I’m heading over to the house for a bit. Sachin, can you log any textile repairs that come in for me?’
Without waiting for their replies, she was gone, absolute determination set upon her brow.