Chapter 5
In spite of her expensive Italian quilted ski jacket – a gift from a particularly grateful host family, the Sciò-Borromeos, whose kids she’d safely guided through their YLE English exams – the freezing rain still funnelled down the wide neck, designed to accommodate a ski helmet, and made her flinch as it soaked her merino layers underneath.
‘This town!’ she squealed, dragging her case up stone steps to take shelter under the porch of an old bank which, according to the sign, opened only on Thursdays. ‘Ridiculous!’
From up here between grey stone pillars she could catch her breath and survey the high street for somewhere to buy an umbrella.
Amid the torrential stream, a double-decker school bus trundled through puddles.
Over the engine and splashing noises came a sound of singing accompanied by a plodding pianist. It was coming from a gated cottage school a little way off. ‘Go Tell it on the Mountain’.
She knew that song from somewhere way back in her own barneskole years and from her Faroese Omma, her mum’s mother, who’d lived with them in the Norwegian Fl?m valley.
Something about the sweet little building and the swell of innocent voices emanating from it made an achy leak spring from the place where she kept the memories of that happy, brief time before her family disintegrated.
She stoppered those feelings with just as much determination as she was summoning to locate either a place to stay or an umbrella, whichever she stumbled upon first. Her phone was no help, it was still buffering.
Out on the pavements once more, the wet tarmac picked up the rainbow glow from the store windows.
The library had just closed for the afternoon, so she couldn’t make any enquiries in there.
Florrie recognised the ‘Post Office’ signage and turned to look at the red mailboxes fixed to its walls outside.
‘Postcards and international stamps available here,’ a poster read.
She toyed with how it might feel to send her father a picture postcard from Cairn Dhu modestly announcing her early departure having done in record time what the Regional Authority had given her two weeks to finish, and he’d instructed she complete in one, but she somehow couldn’t picture him reading it, postmarked and dog-eared from the airmail process.
And she couldn’t very well send one to her mother.
Florrie had deliberately kept her in the dark about how she was running this errand for Maxim.
As far as her mum was concerned, she was still paying a rare visit to her father’s place in Aspen.
She hadn’t the courage to tell her the truth, not with how things stood between her divorced parents.
Moving on, Florrie encountered a wonderful old red telephone booth like the ones in the movies, but the sign over the metal door read ‘defibrillator’ and inside hung the familiar yellow lifesaving kit she’d seen on any number of slope-side emergency stations in mountain resorts.
This mark of modernity felt oddly out of place in front of the ‘Kilt It’ formal-wear shop which had filled its windows for the festive season with what must pass for evening wear around here (curiously dated stuff on bare-headed, pouting mannequins that had seen better days).
A sign on the door said ‘closed for lunch’ even though it was almost two thirty.
Next there was a charity shop – she knew from TikTok that’s what the British call thrift stores – displaying all kinds of Christmassy clutter. There was no one inside but a woman reading a newspaper behind the counter.
A red and white barber’s pole jutted out over a steamy window where, inside, men hung around chatting in big black chairs. The air around the place smelled of cologne and coffee.
There were other businesses too, an accountant, a counsellor, and an estate agency, but no more stores. She wondered where people bought their groceries around here, or what they did for fun?
Aspen, the town where her father had established himself, had everything a visitor could dream of.
She’d indulged in all of it in the last fortnight, only a little guiltily, taking in the spas and skiing, galleries and boutiques, bars and restaurants, and all on Maxim’s credit card, at his insistence.
“Knock yourself out, sweetheart. When do you ever visit your old man in Colorado, eh?” he’d said, smiling expansively and smoking his elegant European cigarettes like the clean mountain air was offensive to him.
He’d missed every dinner appointment she’d made with him.
He was the same old ‘business first’ Maxim.
She’d resisted the urge to get revenge by treating herself to her favourite skincare products on the company card while she’d had it – now it was safely back in Empressa’s possession – and told herself it was OK; daddy-daughter days had never exactly been Maxim’s style.
Had she really expected anything to have changed just because they hadn’t seen one another in five years?
The sound of a chugging vehicle speeding by was replaced by the sound of an icy jet of water as a tractor tyre hit a puddle, sending the torrent straight towards her.
She screamed in the red tractor’s wake as it bounced and puffed away, leaving her drenched in gutter water and inhaling great clouds of diesel stink.
The driver, a scruffy old man in a flat cap, glanced back from his high seat behind the wheel and raised a hand like any normal passerby might greet a person, ignoring the fact she was dripping and fuming, and it was his fault.
She shouted after him, ‘What the fu-!’ but he had already run the red light and was disappearing out of sight at the town limits.
‘That is absolutely it!’ she yelled, feeling the feebleness of her outburst and wanting to slip down between the bars of the drain where all the gutter rain was running.
What happened to the legendary Scottish men she’d read about?
The huge, handsome, secretly tender brutes who knew just as many ways of wooing a woman as they knew how to avenge those who’d done her wrong?
She’d read a whole series following one Englishwoman who’d fallen through an ancient Scottish standing stone and ended up in the clan war torn Highlands somewhere in the mists of times past and even she’d got a friendlier welcome than this!
There was nothing for it but to march on and wish for a magical portal of her own to open up and whip her straight out of here.
She was reaching the far end of town now and finding the high street petered out into a police station, an unlit Christmas tree by a bus stop, an A-frame for a carpentry business run by ‘master restorer’ Cary Anderson, and a brown tourist sign with a purple thistle pointing up a track to the ‘mountain ranger station and hiking trails car park’.
The same words were repeated again in what she guessed was Scottish Gaelic.
The next sign read ‘You are leaving Cairn Dhu’.
‘That’s it?’ she said, looking with tired eyes at the route ahead diminishing towards its vanishing point in the distance where the mountain valley closed in and swallowed the road.
She refreshed the search on her phone, having to swipe at her dripping lashes with the back of her hand to make out the fact its buffering had miraculously stopped and it was now offering up some search results.
Wiping the screen of moisture, she scrutinised the Highland FlyBnB webpage as she crossed over the rainy road devoid of traffic.
‘Two results match your search criteria,’ she read under her breath, and then, with sinking heart she saw the first hit was the Cairn Dhu Hotel where she’d just been turned away.
‘This…’ she reached for a suitable word in her frustration ‘…bloody town!’ just as the street lamps overhead were coming on and the rain and glare got in her eyes and, all at once, she hauled her case over the high kerb and thump, she walked straight into a solid body travelling directly towards her.
‘Oops, mind yersel’,’ it said in a deep voice.
‘Mind myself?’ she yowled, pulling her case safely onto the pavement. ‘You walked into me.’ She looked all around her. ‘In a completely empty street!’
‘Sorry. Ur you hurt?’
No, she wasn’t, but that wasn’t the point. ‘Mind myself?’ she repeated. ‘In a town where I’m completely invisible, and where reservations just…’ – she chose to lie to herself here – ‘disappear into thin air, and so, apparently, do good manners!’
‘Ur you all right?’ The man was staring at her like she was crazy. ‘Maybe you’re lost?’
‘I am trying to find somewhere to stay, and have a hot bath, and food, and for that matter, a decent coffee, and Wi-Fi, and, and…’ She was resolutely not going to cry in the street just because she was tired and drenched and done with rude, smirking Scotsmen.
Though, now that she was getting a grip on herself, she supposed maybe this guy wasn’t actually smirking.
He was, in fact, surrendering his umbrella while watching her through cautious blue eyes.
‘Take this. And I’m sorry I bumped into you.
The tourist information desk’s inside the hotel along the road, if you’re looking for it. Do you know it?’
‘The Cairn Dhu Hotel?’ she said with a sniff, her hand reaching reflexively to take the umbrella. ‘Yeah, I know it.’ She didn’t want to be hostile, but her day was rapidly turning into a washout and the rain had made its way inside her socks and was now flooding her waterproof mountain boots.
He seemed to want to say something else but he sealed the words behind a taut, straight-lipped expression, the kind she was beginning to realise British people made all the time when passing someone who they didn’t want to ignore but didn’t want to talk to either.
She’d seen it at Heathrow and Edinburgh airports already today.
Raindrops were beginning to collect at the ends of the guy’s jaw-length black hair where it showed under his black beanie. ‘Best of luck, then,’ he said, skirting around her suitcase and going on his way with his head down and hands stuffed into his pockets so his elbows jutted out.
‘But, your umbrella?’ she shouted after him.
He didn’t look back, only waved a hand over his shoulder.
Maybe Scottish people shared out umbrellas like relay race batons? It was all so odd. This place was going take some getting used to. If she was forced to stay here long enough to have to get used to it, that was.
She rolled her case further away from the roadside, right up against the darkened window of the Cairn Dhu Fryer, also closed, of course. The smell of cooking oil and the very idea of the ‘speciality deep-fried haggis’ blazoned in white calligraphy across the glass made her stomach turn.
While the rain battered the umbrella, she fixed her attention on her phone and found there was a second property nearby.
The entry had the words ‘new’ and ‘just listed’ next to it.
‘Only 0.3 kilometres away,’ she read aloud.
There were no photographs, other than a picture of a smiling group of people of all ages wearing aprons lined up in front of the doors of a massive warehouse or barn of some kind.
‘No description?’ She scrolled the listing in vain.
There was only a price, and a very modest one at that, for the whole week.
She hit ‘reserve’ before anyone beat her to it.
She would cancel later if the owner turned out to be yet another weird guy – which the town seemed to be populated with – or if it just didn’t feel safe.
Though, somehow, looking back along the dreary little high street that didn’t even have Christmas lights up – what kind of small town has no lights in December?
– she reckoned it probably wasn’t a hotbed for criminal activity, and hadn’t a complete stranger just parted with his umbrella as though the gesture were nothing at all?
She searched the guy out in the sheeting rain but couldn’t see him anywhere.
A tiny pang of guilt came to her, now that her frustration and panic were subsiding. If she’d been met with rudeness here, she had been just as rude in return (though nothing would bring her to think charitably about that oaf driving the tractor).
What would her mother have said if she’d witnessed her arrival in town? Gentle as you go, probably. Her favourite phrase. Or her father? You are my eyes and ears on the ground. Act accordingly, most likely, or some similar words of warning, none of it gentle in the slightest.
She opened her Maps app and pasted in the address of her accommodation and a reassuringly short walking route of only five minutes materialised.
‘OK, Mr and Mrs McIntyre, Mill House, Cairn Dhu. Let’s see what you’ve got.’
Wheeling her case, now safely protected from the rain beneath a gifted umbrella, she realised to her shame she hadn’t even thanked the startled, blue-eyed man who’d appeared as if from nowhere just when she needed help.
She just had to hope she’d have no more undignified run-ins with Scots in the streets.