Chapter 10
Rhona might have wondered if this dreamy feeling was some kind of déjà vu, but she chose not to question it. That drink she’d been enjoying all evening had been so creamy and delicious. What had Eric called it? A Snowball.
She was nicely tipsy and so she wasn’t all that worried when they left the party in the dark and found Eric’s Vauxhall Chevette wouldn’t start.
He’d turned the key and sworn and banged on the steering wheel while she shivered in the passenger seat, but there was nothing to do but admit it. They were stranded out of town.
‘I’m assuming you never told your old man you were going to a party with me?
’ Eric said, clearing the mist on the driver’s side window and looking up at the dancing figures silhouetted against the orange curtains of the house they’d just left.
The street lights were on but with the wipers frozen into place, the windscreen was obscured with snow and rapidly accumulating more.
Rhona shook her head and pulled her mother’s fur coat around her. It smelled of cigarettes, having been left piled on the bed with all the others in that smoky house.
‘Still,’ she shrugged, ‘it was a braw party. Thank you for taking me.’
‘No’ too shabby for a second date,’ he said, his moustache broadening as he smiled. If he’d been brooding about her keeping him a secret at home, he wasn’t going to hold it against her. ‘We willnae get a taxi this late and in this weather,’ he said, eyes on hers.
‘Don’t care. What does it matter?’ She almost believed her own bravado.
Maybe she’d feel differently if she hadn’t spent the evening dancing in the crowded living room in her new corduroys, tight across her tummy, wide at the ankles, clinking glasses with Eric’s pals’ girlfriends and wives, cooing over engagement rings displayed on twinkled fingers while the sausage pastry plaits and pineapple and cheese cubes on cocktail sticks were passed around and all the men were telling stories and jokes, competing for laughs.
It had been warm from the fire and she’d grown hot-cheeked.
Eric had wrapped her in his arms and boasted about how bonny she was and she’d shushed him shyly while, inside, revelling in his praise.
No one had ever called her bonny, before or since.
Every time one record finished, another had dropped from the stack and crackled into life under the stylus and the women had dragged their fellas up to dance.
There’d been a greyhound and a long-haired Afghan hound sleeping on the hearthrug and every now and then the coals had cracked and spattered the fireguard with sparks that made the dogs jump awake.
What with the firelight and the fairy lights and the lametta glittering in silver strands on the tree, combined with the music from the speakers in their brown teak cases, it had felt like attending a party inside a pulsating rainbow.
Nothing at all like her parents’ quiet, calm house.
‘We’re no’ going anywhere tonight, Rhona,’ Eric said now as snow cocooned his car by the roadside and the noise from the party house dampened under the weight of it.
‘Should we head back inside ’afore Jack Frost gets us?
’ He nipped her nose between two knuckles and his fond smile crinkled the sides of his eyes.
Rhona thought of the glacé cherries pierced through with plastic cocktail swords and the lemonade and Advocaat that would be flowing back inside the party. She thought of how his friends would take pity on them and offer them the sofa or maybe even a bed for the night.
She’d been on the brink of thinking about tomorrow and imagining the consequences of telling her father where she’d been all night, and worse, who she’d been with, but she shut all of that out in the only way she knew how, by pressing her lips to Eric’s.
‘OK,’ she’d said, barely drawing away. ‘But let’s stay here a while.’
They’d clambered into the back seat, not easy in a Chevette with Eric’s long limbs and jaggy knees and elbows jutting everywhere.
They’d laughed and she’d swept his lovely dark hair off his brow, and soon they’d discovered how warm breath and body heat can cast curious, feathered frost patterns on the inside of car windows and they’d held one another tightly, feeling the earth move and never knowing it was the fates shaking the romantic snow-globe world Rhona had determined to seal herself up in with the man she loved.
‘I should have told him when I had the chance! Why? Why didn’t I say something?’
Rhona awoke with a start in her bed, and a light clicked on in the room next door.
‘Is that you shoutin’, Rhona?’ Senga called out, her usual mix of terse and vigilant, but caring with it.
‘Just a dream,’ Rhona called back, the glassy bubble of her nineteen-seventies’ memories burst entirely. ‘Go back to sleep.’
She hadn’t dreamt of Eric Shaw these forty-seven years, and didn’t dare slip back into slumber, even if she’d been able to, in case he was waiting there for her again, demanding to know why she’d returned the best Christmas gift she’d ever been given.