Chapter 20
Alice was not happy. She’d rocked up at the repair shed doors (not even thinking to take a peek round the side at how the garden landscaping was going), absorbed in the printout she’d read all the way along the high street from her flat.
‘Cary! This one’s for you,’ Sachin announced as soon as she got inside. He’d pointed out she might have a long wait, since it was another ‘hoaching’ repair Saturday (which is a braw word for when Scottish places are swarmingly crowded).
Cary’s head had sprung up over the other clients’ when he heard his name called, and Alice made her way through the throng; people queuing for repairs, others huddled in the café chatting and not minding the noise or the heat from all the bodies, and the triage line that just kept growing longer as the doors slid open and shut, open and shut, and everything was tinged in a gaudy pink light from the neon sign on the wall.
She found Cary sitting at an antiquated machine, a wooden frame with what looked like a potter’s wheel of stone turned on its side which spun smoothly whenever Cary pressed down on the wooden chock with his foot.
A rigged-up black metal bag with a tiny spout dripped water right onto the top of the turning whetstone, and Cary, his eyes fixed on the job of sharpening a full canteen of kitchen knives for a woman wearing a ‘Cairn Dhu Hotel and Restaurant’ branded shirt, held a blade flat against the stone, razing its edge to surgical sharpness.
The woman must be one of the hotel chefs, thought Alice.
She was young and very pretty with long black hair tied in one shiny braid down her back and it was obvious from the way she was trying to entice him to talk that she fancied the vintage pants off Cary Anderson.
And why wouldn’t she fancy him? Even if she was probably a little too young for dating him.
Assessing his looks now, she guessed Cary was probably in his mid-thirties. Somehow he didn’t seem the type for chasing girls fresh out of catering college, although Alice knew it was na?ve to make assumptions.
Still, as he worked steadily, rhythmically powering that wheel, face fixed in concentration, peering down the blade, finding just the right angle, she witnessed again the thing she liked about him most: that he seemed to have the manners and composure (not to mention the skills) of a man from an earlier time.
Today he wore a cream-coloured shirt with a collar ever so slightly wider than modern shirts and a well-fitted, buttoned coffee-coloured waistcoat which matched baggy retro trousers with a dark brown belt.
The trousers were rolled at the ankles, giving a glimpse of thick woollen boot socks and he had on chunky brown laced boots of buffed and shining leather.
The things she really couldn’t drag her eyes away from, however, were his hands.
Good strong woodworker’s hands with the sheen of lotion and neat nails, telling her he took care of every part of himself. His rolled shirt cuffs revealed a vintage watch worn on his left wrist and there were strappy leather bands on the opposite one. Something in Alice wanted to sigh at the sight.
The chef girl was blethering on at Cary (a phrase Alice had picked up from Gracie at the surgery) telling him he should ‘nip in one day’ for some of her Cullen skink, which she promised would warm him up after a hard day’s work.
‘I’ll keep that in mind, thanks,’ Cary told her, standing up now and bundling her knives safely in their wrap, rolling them up together and fastening the strings. ‘Come back when they’re dulling again,’ he told her across his workbench with a polite, straight-lipped nod.
Possibly to conceal how crestfallen she was at his lack of interest in anything but his work, the woman gave him an unbothered, winning smile before reluctantly leaving.
Cary, however, had a genuine smile to greet Alice, and she was surprised to recognise how rewarded she felt by it. ‘Good morning,’ he said, his voice cheerful.
‘That looked intense,’ she said.
‘Hmm?’
She pointed to the sharpening wheel and his face showed his sudden understanding, but he clearly didn’t feel the need to elaborate on the machine or its use. He only smiled, placidly waiting.
Although this was only their fourth encounter, one thing she was learning about this man was it didn’t take too long an absence to make him fall wordless again when next they met, like he reverted to factory settings every few days and forgot they’d spoken before.
‘So… I got the message you left at the surgery for me,’ she told him by way of a prompt.
‘Ah, yes.’ He turned to rummage for something on the shelves behind him. ‘Did you bring your stethoscope?’
He’d asked her to, so she had. She presented him with it and watched as, without any unnecessary explanation, he swapped the worn-out rubber tubing for a brand-new set, fresh out of the plastic packaging.
It took Cary a while, but when he handed it back she verified it worked by listening to her own chest. He looked away while she did this, and something in the sweet way he averted his eyes made her feel like she was doing something improper. He really was a curious man.
Her heart and lung sounds came through perfectly. ‘All working!’ she told him. ‘How much do I owe you for the replacement tubes?’
‘Your donation last time covered it,’ he said, with a wave of his hand. ‘Umm.’ He seemed to be shuffling his feet, not at all like the softly assured Cary Anderson she was used to.
Without saying more, he presented her with a box, placing it on the workbench between them. It was made of polished wood and was the size of a pencil case with brass hinges for its lid. Something was carved on the top in a smart hand. Dr A. H.
‘I didn’t know if you had any middle names,’ he said, his eyes cast down at the object. ‘And I wasn’t about to ask Gracie at the surgery.’
‘What is it?’ Her hands fell to the box, smoothing its varnished sides, lifting the lid to reveal nothing at all. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘You said you’d lost your good stethoscope and the clip it hung from. Now you can keep that one safely on your consulting room desk, if you wanted to.’
‘You made this?’
He nodded.
‘For me?’ She hadn’t been given a present quite this nice in… well, ever. ‘Why would you do that?’
Cary looked a little blank and skittish for a moment, as if he might have made a mistake, before saying, quite plainly, ‘Because we’re friends.’
A wave of something difficult to pinpoint washed over her. Was it shyness? No, not quite. A feeling of overwhelm? Because someone was being kind and gentle with her? It had made her suddenly shaky and emotional.
She considered hugging him, which is what she really wanted to do, but he was all the way behind his bench and seemed planted there, so instead she demonstrated how her stethoscope fitted perfectly inside the box and closed the lid, turning the gift in her hands, having to hide the burning feeling behind her eyes.
She hadn’t actually cried since she got here, not even when things felt very bleak, which they still often did, and she wasn’t going to cry now in front of her first and only friend in Cairn Dhu.
‘I absolutely love it to bits!’ she said, and he seemed very happy with that.
An intrusive little thought piped up. Bastian would hate Cary making her this beautiful, special thing. Good! she told it right back.
‘Did you get your clock fixed?’ she asked, gesturing to the long case that had been pushed against the wall out of the way.
‘No.’ Cary shook his head sadly. ‘Plenty of time, though.’ Then he sniffed a laugh at what he’d said. ‘It needs some new parts for the mechanism. Dr Bonnet’s making them herself. Is it weird to you, hearing her called doctor, when you’re an actual doctor?’
Alice thought about this. ‘Nope, not really. Doctor isn’t solely a medical title. In fact, Physician is probably more accurate for me. I’m guessing Dr Bonnet has a doctorate in clocks?’
‘Horology, aye.’
‘There you go then. She earned the title like anyone else who uses it.’
‘Do you want to see her properly?’
‘Dr Bonnet?’
Cary laughed, just at the same moment Alice was realising her mistake. He’d meant the clock.
‘God, sorry, of course.’ If she hadn’t become almost immune to mortified feelings during her medical training, she might have wished the ground would open up and swallow her. ‘Show me. I’d like that.’
The first thing Alice noticed about the clock was the beautiful simplicity of its case.
‘My grandfather was a cabinet maker,’ Cary told her as the pair stood before it.
‘He built this?’ Alice ran a tentative hand down the glossy wood, which had a honey darkness and even darker rings when viewed close up.
‘He did, but the dial and mechanism were made in Barbados, we think, where Granny was born. Nobody seems certain how long it was in the family before it came to Scotland in nineteen sixty.’
‘She brought it here?’
Cary nodded.
Alice searched her brain, trying to work out what it meant. ‘She was part of the Windrush generation?’
‘Well, personally she didn’t call herself that because she didn’t emigrate on that exact ship, the Empire Windrush; she travelled overland, through Italy then France, and arrived in England by ferry before the NHS posted her in Scotland. Nursing.’
‘With your grandad?’
Cary paused, like he was debating whether to go on.
‘It’s OK, forget it. I’m just being nosey.’
‘No, it’s not that. There’s a bit of a family legend…’ His words trailed away.
Alice decided to be more like Cary and stay silent, letting him decide if he wanted to say more. She deeply hoped he would, even if it only meant she could listen to his lovely voice for just a little longer.
‘Granny married twice,’ Cary began. ‘Her first husband stayed on in Barbados. He was going to follow her later. When she emigrated, she left with her sister. They both ended up working their whole lives at an infirmary in Glasgow.’