Chapter 12 #2
‘You need me to blob pink paint?’ Was this what Ally had meant about getting involved?
‘Not quite. We were… I was wondering if you’d help with that.’ Florrie followed the point of a pink paint-stained finger to the Scot’s pine in its pot by the door.
‘Ah! I see.’ Something wilted within Florrie, but the hope in Rhona’s eyes told her there really was no polite way out of this. She was decorating a Christmas tree today and that was that.
Rhona wouldn’t have known what to say if Florrie had made excuses or refused.
From what she’d seen of the girl she was skittish, but she’d correctly identified a little streak within her that reminded her of herself.
It was a shared impulse to be helpful and to please others.
It was, Rhona knew, a way of showing kindness.
But Rhona also knew others could weaponise your kindness against you.
‘You don’t have to, but I hoped you’d enjoy it,’ she told Florrie who was standing over the big plastic storage crate of decorations. ‘You said you had a granny who loved Christmas traditions?’
‘That’s true,’ the girl said, considering a set of fairy lights neatly wound and taped to a long cardboard tube.
‘McIntyre’s work. He likes things stored away just so,’ Rhona told her. ‘My lights come out the loft in December tousled in a ball of knots. Senga’s always cross but she hates putting the decorations away come January, leaves that job up to me, so she’ll have to lump it.’
Rhona flew her eyes to where Senga served repair clients behind her café counter. She hadn’t overheard thankfully. A defiant streak was just another small thing she kept to herself where she could possibly help it.
‘Some of these are really old,’ Florrie was saying, picking baubles from the moulded trays that cradled them. ‘Like, these are vintage.’
‘We’re all vintage round here,’ Rhona chuckled.
‘I have one a little like this.’ Florrie held up to the light a glass tulip-bulb-shaped pink decoration with a long elegant finial leading to the satin hanging loop attached to its delicate tip. ‘I travel with it. It was Omma’s.’
‘Sounds risky? Travelling about with a glass Christmas decoration in your luggage. Do you want to go and get it, to hang on our tree?’
Florrie looked to the bare branches, seemed to consider it, but shook her head.
Rhona didn’t push it, but it seemed a shame.
What was the point of a beautiful glass decoration that never gets its day of being admired on the bottle-brush bristles of a braw Scot’s pine Christmas tree?
She tried not to compare herself to this hidden bauble of Florrie’s, and she tried not to sigh.
Roz brought over two more angels to make-up and Rhona loaded up her sponge with paint. Rhona was happy over here, out of the way, keeping busy, and with the strange, gentle young lassie to talk with.
‘Was it as you’d feared? The ski centre job?’ Rhona said softly, hoping the girl would intuit her meaning.
Florrie had strands of tinsel draped over her neck, layering them up like Hawaiian leis. There was a concentration forming in the set of her features. She turned the tree in its pot, looking for its best side.
‘Um, well, you know…’ Florrie began. ‘It wasn’t without its difficulties, but I had to stick to my brief.’
Rhona thought about what this must mean.
She’d heard some of the gossip on the high street that said the girl was here to decide the slope’s future, and how she hadn’t been impressed with the place at all.
Big Kenneth’s mother had put it about that the girl was ‘sour’ and ‘an outsider with nae business interfering in the town’.
Rhona knew the attitudes of others could well have seeped into the girl’s perception of herself since she arrived in Cairn Dhu.
Something she also knew a bit about. She didn’t want her young friend suffering.
‘You’ve conducted yourself with courage and fortitude, I’d say. Be proud of that.’
Florrie tested the lights with their tiny glass flower-petal shades, bringing them to life in a gleaming rainbow of vintage pink, turquoise, red, blue and yellow, and she frowned in a way that said she wasn’t so sure about self-pride.
‘Is there a specific reason you took this job?’ Rhona knew it was risky, but the girl seemed too young to be taking a wrong turn. She watched Florrie wrap the strand of lights in a spiral from the wide skirt of the lower branches to the top of the tree. Rhona waited, letting her stall.
‘Well,’ Florrie said eventually, her hands dropping to her sides. ‘I work for my father. He sent me.’ She turned her back on Rhona, pulling tinsel strands one at a time from round her neck and draping them in a way that covered the electrical flex. This girl was a tree-decorating pro.
‘And your dad’s approval means a lot to you?’ Rhona went on.
This stopped the girl’s hands entirely. She was quiet for a long time before saying, ‘I hadn’t seen him in five years. When he asked me to help him, I jumped at the chance. He’s never needed me before.’
Rhona had been right all along about this lost lassie.
‘You mentioned your grandmother, but is there a mum too?’
‘Uh-huh. Divorced, and remarried, and… happy, I think.’ There was more behind the girl’s eyes but she wasn’t giving it away.
Rhona dabbed paint on a smiling snowman and baited her line. ‘I’d have done anything to make my dad happy,’ she said, knowing it was too true.
‘Oh yeah?’ Florrie adjusted the tinsel strands.
‘Aye, and I never minded it. A good man, he was. A grafter. There was nothing we wanted for.’ Rhona conjured her dad in her mind’s eye, when he was retired and the sawmill was sold on, when there was a tasteful blue china urn newly upon the mantel and Senga had taken their mother’s place running the household.
He’d finished with his dahlia growing hobby and the autumn flower shows, the allotment garden was getting too much, and he was living for his next cup of tea and a chat with his daughters in his armchair.
One day he’d held Rhona’s hand and asked her, doubt in his voice, ‘Did I get it right?’ and she’d known he’d meant fatherhood, but also always wondered if he’d meant not approving of Eric, and she’d squeezed his hand as hard as the squeeze upon her heart and told him, ‘Yes, Da’, of course.
You got it all right,’ and maybe he didn’t notice her eyes flooding because she’d quickly gone back to turning the pages in the newspaper and talking about the football pools and the funeral notices and all the other little details of their narrowed down lives.
She’d tell him the same again now, if she had the chance, to save him pain or regret.
‘The thing is,’ Rhona was compelled to say. ‘The menfolk can be, in the nicest way possible, awfully dim when it comes to their daughters’ inner lives.’
She checked that Florrie was following her meaning.
‘And they can stomp on new shoots just as they’re peeping out of the ground, without ever really understanding what they might be thwarting.’
Florrie was holding two plastic teardrop baubles and listening in a frozen posture like her brain was working very hard indeed behind her eyes.
‘You can, I’ve heard, make a stand without tearing down your family relations,’ Rhona went on.
She’d arrived at this knowledge mainly from reading the women’s mags and novels and watching the soaps, but Florrie didn’t need to know that.
Learning is learning, even if it was too late for Rhona to apply it to her own life.
‘You can balance your happiness with family expectations these days.’
Florrie turned back to the branches, loading them with coloured ornaments, a new haste in her movements.
Rhona had gone too far. Just like she always did. “You always have to push it!” Senga would say.
‘There,’ Florrie said in a shaky voice, standing back as if to admire the tree but not really seeming to see it. ‘I’ve… uh… got a report to get back to,’ she said, and before Rhona could think of anything smart to say, she was gone, dashing through the shed and scurrying up her ladder.
‘But you haven’t added the star,’ Rhona called after her feebly. ‘Oh dear.’ For all her years of trying to be a good and helpful person, she had never quite mastered it without bringing distress and pain to those she cared for most. ‘Silly, Rhona.’