Chapter 8
EIGHT
‘A man’s been staring at you since we arrived,’ Heather murmured in a low voice to Sorrel as the three sisters sat down at the last free table in the Balhennie Castle Café.
The café sat in the castle grounds and was an eatery run by staff who worked for Uncle James. It provided hearty Scottish breakfasts, lunches and snacks every day to the tourists who came to the castle.
‘What man?’ Sorrel looked around the café, frowning.
‘I don’t know him. Wait, I can’t see him now. The queue’s in the way, and I’ve got my back to him.’
It was busy in the café and a long queue of American tourists, all dressed in colourful rain jackets and walking boots, wound its way between the tables. Sorrel craned her neck to see beyond the snake of people, but it was too crowded. She shrugged.
‘Probably one of Mum and Dad’s friends that we haven’t seen in a long while,’ she said, dismissing it. After all, almost the moment she’d driven back over the bridge and onto the island, it felt as though a whisper campaign had reverberated around Skye that Sorrel Balhennie was home.
‘I don’t know. I felt something was off.’ Heather looked pensive. ‘Bad vibes.’
‘Bad vibes, like, how?’ Bluebell frowned.
‘I don’t know. He had a dark aura.’
Heather, as well as being the most emotional and sensitive of the Balhennie sisters, had always claimed to be psychic. Sorrel wasn’t sure what she thought of all that, but she had faith in Heather’s feelings about people; she was rarely wrong. And that gave Sorrel a disquieting feeling.
‘Oh.’ She didn’t want someone with a dark aura staring at her.
‘It’s nothing. Let’s eat our lunch.’ Bluebell’s tone was flat; Sorrel knew that she still wasn’t forgiven. Her youngest sister took a knife and fork from the pretty ceramic jug on the table, then extracted a paper napkin. She speared some chips onto her fork and ate them slowly.
‘You’re right. I haven’t had haggis potato skins in forever.’ Sorrel cut a piece of the haggis-stuffed baked potato. ‘Remember when Dad used to bring us all here? And buy us, like, two pieces of cake to share between six?’
‘Yeah. Or three toasties to share. Half a toastie each. The tight bugger.’ Heather rolled her eyes. Bluebell just smiled thinly.
‘I don’t think they had much money then.
’ Sorrel chuckled. ‘But yeah. I remember being hungry a lot when we were young. Like, we never went without, but it was small portions, not many treats.’ She was trying to be chatty and approachable, warm, so that Bluebell would melt her iciness and let her in. But Bluebell was not melting.
‘Yeah. I mean, we had enough, but I guess we were also pretty energetic kids. We probably could have done with more calories.’ Heather picked at her quiche and salad. ‘But we were all right. We were happy.’
‘I guess so.’ Sorrel ate her lunch, then looked up thoughtfully. ‘Were we? Happy, I mean.’
‘Is that a real question? Of course we were,’ Bluebell retorted.
‘I know we were never deeply unhappy. Like, nothing desperately awful happened. No one died. No one had a deadly disease,’ Sorrel explained.
‘But Blue… there are ten years between you and me. That’s ten years you don’t remember.
More than that, really, if you count the years that you were too young to know much about what was going on. ’
‘So, you’re saying I don’t know anything?’ her sister shot back.
‘No, just stating a fact, Blue. You don’t remember everything that I do. Or even what Heather does,’ Sorrel said, gently.
‘I think we were happy, in the way that most families are happy, which is to say, not happy all the time,’ Heather said, slowly.
She had hunched a little in her seat because of the people thronging around their table: Sorrel and Bluebell sat with their backs to a wall, but Heather was in a natural throughway in the café.
‘Heather. Switch with me.’ Sorrel stood up and gestured to her sister to take her seat. ‘I don’t mind it as much as you do.’
‘Really? Oh. All right. Thank you.’ Relief washed over Heather’s delicate features. ‘Sorry. I just… with crowds of people…’
‘I know. You’re sensitive to it all.’ Sorrel swapped their plates around on the table as they both sat down in their new seats.
‘But what I was saying… about families,’ Heather continued. ‘I think… I’ve always felt happy. But there are layers of happy. There are feelings… in our family… like clouds. That’s how I’ve always seen it, in my mind’s eye. Clouds of unsaid words.’
‘What unsaid words?’ Bluebell asked.
‘I don’t know. It’s more of a feeling thing.’ Heather shrugged, forking salad into her mouth. ‘All I can say is, I feel it. There’s a sadness in our family. Always has been.’
‘There is,’ Sorrel replied shortly. She certainly knew what the sadness was from her point of view; perhaps there were other sadnesses too, other clouds.
‘And you’ll tell us when you’re ready,’ Heather continued.
‘I know that you will. I had a dream, where we were all together, around a table. And you were telling us something very important. You could tell us about your business, you know. We’d love to know about it.
’ Heather added, ‘Wouldn’t we?’ She nudged her younger sister. Bluebell shrugged.
‘Sure,’ she said, flatly.
Sorrel’s phone lit up: it was a message from Catriona. Seeing it was strange; it had been ten years since she’d got any sort of communication from her mother.
Hope you’re having a nice time with your sisters. We did miss you. Please don’t think we didn’t.
What am I supposed to do with that? Sorrel thought, after she read the message.
Having a nice lunch x she replied, quickly. She didn’t know how to reply to the rest of it. If Catriona wanted to talk about the past, then a quick text wasn’t going to cover things.
‘Um. Okay.’ Sorrel wasn’t enjoying the wall that Bluebell seemed determined to keep up between them, but she supposed that it would just take time for it to erode.
‘Well, I met Simon at a party. He was friends with one of the girls I was sharing a house with. He’d already flipped one house when we met.
I thought that was quite impressive. He wasn’t very old. ’
‘We saw a picture on the company website. He’s good-looking,’ Heather said.
‘He is,’ Sorrel admitted. She’d thought so once, although the chemistry hadn’t ever quite been there for her.
She’d thought that it would grow in time.
She’d been wrong. ‘Well, after the party, he called me up and asked me out. We met for a drink at a London pub. Old men in jumpers drinking beer; football on the TV in the background. He showed me pictures on his phone of his first renovated house, and I was impressed.’ She sighed, thinking back to those first months with Simon.
‘He got me involved in his business quite quickly, now that I look at things in retrospect. He admired my taste in furniture and décor. He used to show me off to his family and friends, almost like a performing dog. He called me “Sorry”. I hated it. Sorry, baby, tell everyone where you found that mirror. Tell my aunt about why that vintage bed goes with that modern lamp. Tell Fred and Vera about that amazing little boutique we found in Paris.’ She stopped for a minute, realising that she might sound mean.
But that had been what he’d said: how he was.
‘No harm in being appreciated for your talents,’ Bluebell said, curtly.
‘I suppose not. I learnt that I was good at managing these big projects, and, actually, I was better than Simon. The first house that I project managed, I brought it in under budget and before deadline, and he was… he was jealous,’ Sorrel reflected.
‘He didn’t like it. He was okay with me working with him, and he was okay with helping, and showing off my great taste and all that.
But then, when I started doing his job better than him, he changed towards me. ’
‘In what way?’ Heather asked.
‘Um. It was subtle at first. He always told me everything I did would fail. He developed this sudden, unpredictable temper. I started to tiptoe around him. There was this low level of constant irritation, like he was a volcano, always waiting to erupt. He stopped giving me compliments. Stopped noticing me. In the last couple of years, it felt like we were just business partners.’
‘Wow. That… does not sound good,’ Bluebell said.
‘No. It wasn’t,’ Sorrel agreed.
Heather stiffened for a moment, looking over Sorrel’s shoulder. ‘Oh.’
‘What? The man?’ Sorrel turned around, following her sister’s gaze.
At a table at the back of the café sat a man with sandy hair, wearing a black fleece with some kind of logo on the pocket. He had a worn face and a scrub of beard, streaked heavily with grey. Their gazes met.
He didn’t smile, but stared at her intensely, just like Heather had said. She thought a dark aura was overstating it a bit, but he was staring. She didn’t recognise him, but at the same time, there was something about his face which seemed familiar.
Sorrel turned away to look back at her sisters.
‘See?’ Heather whispered, leaning forward. ‘He’s really staring at you. I don’t like it.’
‘He probably just recognises us. People know us because of the Inn and Uncle James.’ Bluebell rolled her eyes. ‘Stop being so dramatic.’
‘I don’t think I’m dramatic,’ Heather said, offended.
The queue of people lining up for lunch snaked behind Sorrel again, masking the table from view. She shrugged.
‘Bluebell’s right. I think you’re making too much of it,’ she said to Heather. She wasn’t bothered about the man; they were in a public place, and he looked all right. Not a serial killer – although they were supposed to seem perfectly normal.
However, even Heather’s slight paranoia was something Sorrel had missed. Heather getting freaked out by ‘bad vibes’ in random places or getting ‘funny feelings’ about people was commonplace. It had been a part of their childhood. Sorrel smiled fondly at her sister.
There was so much good in their past; maybe it was possible to move on and fix things, now she was back. Feeling suddenly positive, Sorrel got out her phone and sent another text to Catriona.
I’m happy to chat when you are. Xx