Chapter 24
Roz didn’t want to be the first to say something.
McIntyre throwing himself over the wall and the sound of his heavy landing had alerted Wayward, and stopped Roz in the act of hauling three decades’ worth of clutter from the space under the mill house staircase. McIntyre was surveying the mess now.
He wanted to ask what on earth she’d been getting up to, and why wasn’t she at the Knowe like everyone else in town, and had she really been crying? Because she sure looked like she had.
Instead, he gulped, guiltily. Even he understood these scenes were definitely his fault.
‘Sorry I missed the procession setting off,’ he tried as an opener. Usually something like that would be enough to quell any unrest at home. An acknowledgement. An apology.
She only looked at him, her shoulders rounded with disappointment, her chest heaving, standing in a spill of old coats and hats and gloves, some of them toddler sized.
Twenty-eight years of wintry weather gear, school shoes and PE trainers, and enough to restock Cairn Dhu’s only charity shop for a month.
‘Having a clear-out?’ he said with an awkward attempt at a smile. One last effort at making a feeble joke.
Still she didn’t soften.
‘Who’s Maddie?’ Her voice was starkly pained.
‘Oh!’ The question sent a shock down his body and into the tiles beneath him. ‘You know?’
‘Who is she?’
The game was up, and this was not how he intended it all to end. Only a full confession would work now, and he would have to hope for forgiveness later.
‘She’s a seamstress.’ His words were almost swallowed with his need to gulp down nerves. ‘Lives above the Garten Arms.’
‘A seamstress? What? Like me? Not even someone different?’
‘Different? I—’
‘And that’s where you’ve been sneaking off to these last few weeks?’
‘Well… aye. Among other places.’
She seemed to be folding in on herself, shutting down. His wife was disappearing before his eyes and he couldn’t account for it.
He took a glance behind him towards the open door. Couldn’t they get this bit over and done with quick? He’d had other plans for the evening, big plans, and nothing had gone right so far.
Roz took a step closer. ‘And this Maddie, you… like her?’
‘Ehh.’ He shrugged as he considered this. ‘She’s no’ bad, I suppose.’
He could have sworn Roz’s eyes flashed red in the light from the standard lamp. For a second he thought she might launch the lamp at his head.
‘I’m sorry I’m late, all right? Maddie took ages finishing. I was desperate, honestly!’
Roz staggered on her feet. He ran to catch her but she slapped his hands away. ‘Rosalyn, what’s got into ye? I’m here now!’
This elicited an angry animal sound in his wife. He tried to guide her into a chair by the dinner table. He noted with alarm that she was holding her hand to her chest.
‘Are you ill? Should I phone Dr Alice?’
‘Ill? Ill? You tell me you’ve a mistress and I’m the one that’s sick?’
Somewhere in the space between his wife’s blanched cheeks and the way she was scrunching her eyelids tight shut and the throb in his knee and blank confusion in his brain, something clicked awake.
‘A mistress? Naw, lass. A seamstress, I said.’
Her mouth was open, and only short breaths escaped.
‘Wait there,’ he said, wishing he could laugh, but feeling himself very much wanting to cry. He limped right out of the door before dragging his boxes inside.
‘They’re a bit bashed,’ he said, hauling them before her. ‘But I so wanted you to have them for tonight, and Maddie’ – at least Roz didn’t flinch at the name this time – ‘had to unpick it all, or something like that. She told me it was a harder job than she’d thought it was going to be.’
Roz still wasn’t in command of her words and her whole body seemed to be shaking, her eyes searching his face, roaming down to his hands where he worked to pull at the twine around the dented packages.
Wayward wasn’t helping one bit in all this, wagging and nudging at him.
At least someone wasn’t mad at him. Even Maddie had given him a mouthful as he loaded the boxes into his van, calling him ‘a right pain’.
‘I was having this fixed,’ he said as he pulled his gift free from the first box and straightened up, a rush of creamy fabric flowing from his hands, a great poof of chiffon and diaphanous lace falling around him.
Roz jumped back, her face a picture of dismay. ‘My May Day dress!’
‘Aye,’ he sighed. ‘I found Maddie online. Said she did alterations, but, my God, she was slow! I was forever chivvying her along. There’s nobody does mending like you, Roz, but there’d have been no surprise if I hadn’t asked someone else to do it. You see?’
‘Surprise?’ The word left her lips, barely audible.
‘Aye.’ It was too soon to laugh, though he wished he could. It was dawning on him what terrible things his wife must have been thinking about him, and it was all his fault too.
‘You do so much for everybody else around the town, and for me, and the twins. I was determined to do something good for you, for a change.’
He put the dress into her hands for her to examine and she gripped it by its freshly re-padded shoulders where the ruching had been re-sewn and the little loops of seed pearls hung in half-moon strands over the puffy cap sleeves. Even McIntyre knew it was beautiful, and it was so clean now.
That had been another bother, having it all dry cleaned out at Stranruie when the drycleaner’s only opened two hours a day for collections. This whole venture had been a bigger undertaking than he’d known.
Still, his wife held the dress to her body in stunned silence and she looked down to where the rips around the hem – the product of years and years of past Beltane nights when she’d manned stalls and helped out while he’d overseen the bonfire lighting – had been invisibly mended and the missing glass bar-beads replaced.
That’s what had delayed its finishing in the first place; vintage beads being harder to source these days, or so Maddie had informed him in one of their many sneaked phone calls.
These bothersome details were all things he hadn’t factored in when his bright idea struck him a month ago and he’d stolen the dress out of the shed under cloak of night.
He had hated all of it, truly. Clandestine drop-offs and running here and there, and sweating over delays, and Roz growing less and less inclined to forgive his absences.
‘And there’s this an’ all,’ he said, remembering himself, stooping to the second box and removing a crown.
‘I fixed this myself, in the shed,’ he told her, presenting her with the papier-maché coronet in gilded paint with its paste jewels, only he’d taken it to the florist at Nithyburn, a half hour’s drive from here, and the florist had enwreathed the whole thing with fresh ivy, baby’s breath and clusters of blaeberries.
‘I know it’s not quite the same as it was that first night you wore it, but the whole thing was fit to fall apart and needed a deal of patching and fortification.
It ought to last another twenty-eight years now.
’ He smiled at this, a glow of pride at a job well done refusing to be dampened within him.
‘And the wummin promised me those leaves and flowers will dry and stay in place, if you store it properly.’
‘Oh…’ Roz took the crown too, holding it in a frozen posture against the dress. ‘Mac!’
He smiled to see her coming round.
‘Charlie,’ she said, her eyes misting.
‘And these…’ he said, not finished yet, kneeling again at her feet and reaching for the other, smaller box ‘…needed new soles after years of traipsing about after the twins down the Knowe.’ He pulled a lid from the shoebox to reveal two shot-silk court shoes of the nineties’ bridal variety.
The shoes she’d worn as she walked down the aisle to him, and which had become part of her Beltane costume ever since.
She’d waltzed their children to Beltane songs a hundred times wearing those shoes, while the twins took it in turns to stand on top of her feet.
His eyes welled at this memory, making it harder to see her reaction, but he could feel that she was smiling.
‘Come on,’ he said, wiping his tears and shifting aside the lengths of the dress so he could tap at her foot, which she immediately lifted. He discarded the fleecy slipper-boot there and replaced it gently with her white May Queen shoe, newly cleaned, resoled, re-heeled and lined with a new inner.
‘It fits,’ she said, sheepish and laughing, still clinging to his gifts.
‘You shall go to the ball!’ he said, smiling up at her, all his fondness for his wife making his insides glow warm and fuzzy, the way they always did when she was smiling at him, though maybe he’d forgotten to show it.
‘One last thing,’ he said.
‘Another restoration?’ she asked, wonder in her voice, and not far behind it the familiar look of a woman not used to getting much in the way of gifts lavished upon her and not quite knowing what to do with herself when it happened.
Stuck to the fridge doors a little way off were displayed the kind of gifts she’d been used to receiving over the years.
Painted handprints, scribbly family drawings, crayon hearts and Mother’s Day paper flowers.
On the kitchen shelves rested the cookbooks and pocket money knick-knacks and the framed photos of children growing taller and a couple growing older together.
Imaginative, lavish gifts, she was not used to, and she hadn’t expected or wished for them either, at least not until tonight as her husband knelt at her feet holding a very tiny box in his hands.
‘I met you twenty-nine years ago this night,’ he said.
‘And you were wearing that very dress. I thought my heart would stop at the sight of you, and yet you talked to me, you danced with me! I couldn’t believe my luck.
Then the elders picked us out as King and Queen and gave you your crown, and me my cloak. ’
He reached a hand aside to lift the lid on the same large box that had contained her dress to reveal that cloak now, alongside his Green Man mask, another of his restorations, in fresh moss and ivy, just as she must have remembered seeing it that first night.
‘When we jumped the flames of the blessing bonfires,’ he went on, ‘I knew then I’d be holding your hand and taking great leaps with you for the rest of my life.’
He switched his gaze to the box in his hands and lifted up the lid to reveal a gleaming ring.
‘Mac!’ Roz gently placed the dress and coronet on the chair by her side.
‘I know I’m a chore to live with,’ he said, watching her face change from surprise to something dream-struck and soft. ‘I’ve tried smartening myself up a bit for you, for our anniversary year…’
‘The new clothes,’ she said in sudden realisation. ‘The barber’s?’
‘Aye, I think maybe I’ll be taking better care of these things myself from now on. I shouldn’t have left stuff like that up to you all this time.’
He pulled the metal band from its slot between velvety cushions to show her the ring glinting between his pinched fingers.
‘This was my first time trying silversmithing,’ he said, and he was grateful for the gasp and his wife’s hands thrown to her mouth in astonishment.
‘I booked myself in at Malcolm Dunning’s jewellery workshop down at the meeting o’ the three waters, asked him to show me how to fashion a ring for you.
We melted scrap silver ourselves and added a wee drop of silver taken from my wedding band.
See?’ A tilt of his fingers revealed the familiar old ring, now a little smaller, back on his finger where it belonged, safe and snug.
‘The three waters is another long drive away,’ she said, letting her arms fall to her sides in relief and embarrassment. ‘Oh, Mac. I’m sorry. I was convinced the signs all pointed to you cheating, or at least wanting to leave me here alone, removing yourself from our marriage.’
‘Not possible,’ he said. ‘That would never be me. But I understand how it must have looked, and felt. I was dead set on wanting to surprise you, for once; you’d been so quiet lately. I’ll understand if you’d rather not wear this ring, but I’d like it an awful lot if you would.’
Still on bended knee, he slipped the band onto the ring finger of her right hand, mirroring the wedding band on her left. ‘Can you stand another twenty-nine years of me?’
She curbed her smile just for a moment. ‘So you’re going to buy your own underwear from now on?
Book your own hair appointments? Schedule your dental check-ups?
Sew your own buttons? Know when to empty the dryer and when to fill it?
’ She looked like she could go on, but was stopping herself.
It gave him a guilty twinge. ‘Make anniversary plans?’
‘I will,’ he said, solemnly.
‘But you’ll let me do my own sewing from now on?’ she said, with a glance at the dress.
‘No more Maddie.’ He smiled. ‘That wummin’s sick to the back teeth of me now, that’s for certain.’
She laughed unrestrainedly at this. ‘OK, good.’
‘But would you have taken time to fix these things of yours if I hadn’t taken it upon myself? You do so little for yourself.’
This struck home and she absorbed the lesson. She must try and care for herself better. Her eyes fell to the ring and where he still held her hand.
‘Another twenty-nine years of you, Charlie McIntyre?’ she asked, and he nodded. ‘That wouldn’t be enough for me, Mac. I’m hoping that when this one is done, there’s another lifetime for us, so I can marry you all over again there.’
On his feet, because he had to hold his wife right this minute, he spoke softly to her, brushing his lips over hers. ‘I’ll find you there and I’ll be sure to ask you,’ and he sealed his promise with a kiss.
When they pulled a little way apart just to allow them to smile, he spoke again. ‘But no more surprises. Turns out, I’m not very good at them.’
The words seemed to break the spell they were falling under. Roz widened the gap between them.
‘Ah! About that,’ she said, her cheeks flushing. ‘There’s something I need to tell you. I’ve been keeping a secret as well.’