Chapter 24
For a moment Hamish thought he was fainting too, because surely that could not be Florrie gingerly stepping down the mezzanine ladder all in soft pink and with her hair in a plaited crown round her head? She’d left this morning on the early flight!
Then, recovering himself enough to recognise her struggle on the ladder and remembering the plaster cast, he dodged the people crowding Rhona, prone on an armchair, so he could meet the miraculous Florrie at the foot of the ladder.
‘You’re still here?’ he said as she tried to push past him to join the shrieking crowd.
‘She’s all right,’ Dr Alice was saying, ‘step back, everyone.’
‘You’re still here,’ he said again, like her presence was still up for debate.
Florrie let him detain her behind the counter in the café.
‘It turns out you can’t fly after having an accident,’ she said. ‘Though I’ve seen skiers in full body plaster on route to Chambéry Airport who’d disagree.’ Florrie peered over his shoulder at Rhona, now sitting upright and shakily sipping water. ‘Is she really OK?’
Hamish didn’t even look round. ‘She’s fine.’ He didn’t mean to sound heartless, but Florrie remanifesting before his eyes felt like Christmas morning when he was in primary school. ‘I wanted to see you. I wasn’t happy how we left things. I know you feel bad about all this.’
‘Of course I feel bad! I’ve just listened to you breaking the news to the whole town. It’s awful. I hate that you’re going through this.’
‘It’s a big change, sure.’ He couldn’t deny it.
‘And yes, it hurts, but I have a whole community behind me. I’ll become something different, eventually.
’ He wanted to say that he’d be fine if she stayed right here with him but that was impossible and ridiculous, and probably a bit manipulative too.
He didn’t want her feeling obliged to be kind to him out of guilt.
Still, he said hopefully, ‘How long are you staying for?’
‘Doc said I’m grounded until tomorrow.’
Behind them, the crowd was helping Rhona to her feet and progressing slowly towards the spot where the toboggan lay unveiled beneath the tree.
There was a hushed silence, and only the sound of shuffling feet now.
Hamish wanted to ask Florrie if she’d still come to the lights switch-on tonight but he didn’t dare in case it felt like pressure.
She’d set a clear boundary last night when she sent him away.
She seemed to be searching for words. He’d be patient and wait.
‘Listen,’ she told him after a moment. ‘I’m sorry about last night. I was crazy. I shouldn’t have snapped at you, and I shouldn’t have mauled you like that either.’ She was blushing. It was beautiful.
He wanted to say it was all right. He wanted to say she could maul him any time she liked, but he knew better than to follow up her sincerity with glib remarks that’d make it sound like he only wanted one thing.
‘Since I’ve got another night in town, can I… could we go to the switch-on tonight, like you said? I’d love to see the lights I lived with all week fulfilling their Christmas glow-up destiny.’
Hamish felt as though someone had pushed a lever and lit him up inside. ‘Sure. I’d love that.’
‘As friends,’ she added.
‘Right. Obviously. Friends at the lights switch-on.’ He had no right to be wounded. She was leaving tomorrow. They were grown-ups in a strange situation. He could hope for nothing more, and he had no intention of turning down the gift of a few extra hours with her.
‘Actually,’ a thought occurred to him, ‘will you be ready for pick up at seven o’clock? Wrap up warm.’
Florrie smiled and the atmosphere in the shed seemed to shift.
‘We should probably check on Rhona.’ Florrie’s words brought him round fully and they drifted towards the rest of the gang over by the tree.
Rhona finished telling her story about Eric and their secret, and the break-up that came when Eric moved out of town and how she’d never seen him since the awful argument with her father at their door after she’d stopped out all night.
Everyone had listened, and Senga had remarked repeatedly how she’d had no idea, though Rhona couldn’t fathom how that was possible. She’d been there in the same house and witnessed it happen, hadn’t she? How could her sister not have known her silent struggle all these years?
There was one part of her story that she didn’t tell her concerned friends about: the phone call.
Even with her mother and father watching her fretfully for the rest of that month and into January, nineteen seventy-nine, she’d taken the sharp turn down by the police station when out running errands and jumped into the phone box.
She’d done it repeatedly, in fact, dialling his number that she still held memorised.
No one had picked up, until in the depths of that dark snowed-in January, Eric answered after one ring and he’d broken the news.
He’d found a new job down south and he was leaving.
She’d cast off her very last vestige of pride and begged him to stay. If they were to elope, she’d pleaded, her father couldn’t say anything about it. She’d go with him wherever in the world he was headed. Her pleading only grew more desperate as he told her all the reasons that was impossible.
He’d been lucky to get this other job, now that he was so infamous as a picketer.
Plus, he hadn’t a penny saved up, having been out of work so long.
How would he ever get a mortgage? He would never marry a girl he couldn’t support, especially a girl used to such a comfortable life, who’d never known what it meant to have nothing at all.
She didn’t care about any of that, she’d wailed. She’d do whatever it took. She’d help support both of them. Why did everyone think she was incapable of hard work?
After a while, she heard his tone switch from consoling to cruel. He was trying to break her affection for him. It wasn’t going to work.
‘But you love me, I know you do!’ she’d howled into the receiver. He’d only replied that he was sorry. He should never have toyed with her in the first place, and the line went dead.
After that day his number seemed to be cut off, and even though she sneaked out and dialled it for weeks afterwards, they never connected again.
The gathering dispersed once Dr Alice was happy with Rhona’s blood pressure, and only Cary, McIntyre, Hamish, Florrie and Sachin remained, huddled over the toboggan, mulling over how – with a wee bit of tinkering – it might be brought back into a useable state.
Roz, the twins and their partners had gone back to the house to get changed before the lights switch-on, and the Gifford sisters nursed cups of sweet tea at a table for two in their café corner.
Eric’s original toboggan, Rhona had managed to glean, had somehow become the model for the ski centre’s shiny new fleet, back in the day, and she had never known about it, never feeling inclined to return to the ski centre, the bittersweet site of her first date.
The toboggans had been the star attraction of the slopes for years, as attested by some of the photos Hamish had found that morning and brought with him to show the volunteers.
As the fleet aged out of safe usage, some had been broken up and used for firewood, some were sold, some no doubt got nicked.
McIntyre thought he remembered having one in his own shed for a long time which the twins had played with when they were wee, but he’d no idea where that had ended up.
All this settled Rhona’s fears that she was losing her marbles, but it seemed a shame that so many duplicate sleds had existed when she’d thought Eric’s so unique to their story.
She’d told her sister that, as Senga sat repentant across from her at the café table.
‘I promise I didn’t bring it here to confront you with,’ Senga cried.
‘I had no idea what it was doing in our coal bunker, only that you’d probably put it there.
And it was so broken I thought Mac and Cary might look it over, see if it was fixable.
You know what they’re like. I’d never have done it,’ she placed a hand over Rhona’s, ‘if I thought it was going to distress you.’
Rhona accepted this, because Senga rarely felt she had much to apologise for. When she said she was sorry, she meant it.
‘But how do you not remember Eric?’
‘Oh, I remember Eric!’ Senga said this in such a way, Rhona knew it meant she remembered how good-looking he was.
‘And I remember you coming home wearing my new knee-high boots in the knee-deep snowdrifts that day. Ruined they were! And I remember Dad giving Eric such a thump, and Mother scolding Dad for doing it on the doorstep where anyone could have been passing by, but I never gave it much thought that you liked the fellow, not in any serious way.’
‘How is that possible when we’ve lived in the same house all these years?’
‘Maybe because you don’t tell me anything.’
Rhona risked pulling a face that asked who could blame her for that, when Senga loved to gossip so.
‘I’d never have said a word about him to anyone,’ Senga objected. ‘I swear I wouldn’t.’
‘If you had understood what he meant to me, would you have helped me get to him, back then?’
‘What? Help you run away with him?’
Rhona gave her sister a frank look.
‘No, I don’t think I would,’ Senga admitted sadly, letting go of Rhona’s hand, dropping her eyes to her lap. ‘We couldn’t argue back with Dad, even though he was so… mild, usually. It just wasn’t possible. Things were so different in those days.’
Rhona nodded and her eyes brimmed with tears. She held her body still, refusing to give way like a teenage girl in her first heartbreak.
‘But if I had my time again,’ Senga went on, her chest rising, ‘now that I’m seeing you like this, I’d have packed your bags myself and taken you straight to Eric’s door.’
Forty-seven years of restraint and secrecy threatened to shatter as tears tracked down over Rhona’s cheeks. She nodded and reached for Senga. ‘I appreciate that, sister.’
The women dabbed their eyes and finished their tea, and both of them sank into their memories of that winter long ago, piecing it all together, and wishing they’d acted differently, Senga wondering aloud how things might have been different if they’d actually talked about all this, if there’d been no secrecy, and if they’d combined their voices to stand up for Eric and the other strikers.
Rhona, however, was already in a place of accepting that it was all much too late for wishing.