Chapter 4
The spare room was slightly less chaotic than the rest of the house, which was a relief. The first of the two drawers in the scrubbed pine chest were empty, and Helen had emptied almost all of the wardrobe, which smelled of her perfume. All that remained on the hangers were a couple of very dated and tiny dresses which looked like they hadn’t seen the light of day since the 1990s. Shoeboxes filled the floor of the wardrobe, along with a noticeable layer of dust. Meg closed the door on the problem and decided she’d deal with it once Helen had set off on the long journey to Santiago.
She left her things in the van and brought in a change of clothes and her toilet bag, leaving them on the end of the bed before heading back down to find Helen cuddling Eliza on the sofa, the two of them snuggled up on a rainbow-striped crochet blanket.
‘I wish we’d timed this a bit better. I should have arranged the flight for a few days later so we had some time to hang out.’
Meg sat down on the sofa beside them. The room itself was incredibly pretty – pale walls the colour of thick cream were set off by solid dark stained wooden beams. A thick wooden mantel stood atop a fireplace which held a sturdy black log burning stove. Two comfortable sofas sat against the walls, one facing the fire and the other looking out of a wide window which faced out to sea. A chunky wooden coffee table sat in the middle of the room, piled with heaping mountains of books and magazines as well as countless colourful crochet projects and skeins of yarn.
‘We’ll have it when you get back. You’ve got a new baby to wait for. When is Phoebe due?’
‘The eighteenth. I’m working on the assumption that she’ll be late going into labour, because I was a week over with her, but I want to get there and get settled and get some time with my baby before we welcome her baby. I still can’t believe I’m going to be a granny.’
‘You can’t?’ Meg laughed. ‘I’m still coming to terms with you being a parent. I remember the time you nearly killed us cooking a saucepan of boiled eggs for three hours when you passed out fast asleep drunk on the sofa after that quiz night when we were students.’
‘Fifty is quite young to be a grandma, to be fair. I never expected Phoebe to take after me in that regard.’
‘She’s like you in lots of ways. She’s sweet and kind and she’d do anything for her friends.’ Meg gave Helen’s knee a squeeze.
‘Fortunately she’s not like me on the organisational front.’ Helen raised an eyebrow and inclined her gaze towards the chaos on the table.
‘It was going to go one way or the other. She turned out to be a neat freak.’ Meg laughed.
‘I’m trying to think of all the things I need to tell you before I go. I was going to write a list but life sort of got in the way, and I was so busy focusing on making sure I had everything packed and triple checking I had everything I needed for the travel documentation that it kind of slipped my mind.’
‘I’m sure it’s quite straightforward. I’ll be here, hanging out with Eliza, watching the baby lambs skipping about in the field outside and enjoying my own company. I probably won’t see a single soul the whole time you’re gone, apart from when I drive to the supermarket. That’ll suit me perfectly. I take it the big store is still that one in the town on the way towards Inverness? I’ve forgotten what it’s called.’
Helen’s eyes had widened in surprise. ‘Yes, there’s that one, but there’s also a little mini supermarket in town now – that caused a bit of a drama, but that’s another story – and we’ve got a farm shop in the grounds of the big house, and…’
‘Are you okay?’ Meg watched as Helen stood up and went over to the window, peering outside and then turning back again.
‘Me? Yes, fine. I remembered there’s one minor detail I forgot to mention.’
Eliza hopped down from the sofa and pottered over to the stove, sniffing it thoughtfully.
‘Go on?’
‘The library. Well, it’s not so much a library as a – well, it’s a little free library. More of an exchange, really. Hang on, I’ll show you.’
Meg followed her friend through the back door of the cottage and out into the garden. The grass was shaggy and sprinkled with daisies and dandelion flowers. An early bumble bee, warmed by the first of the spring sunshine, was sleepily buzzing between the flowers, trying to find the choicest nectar.
‘What do you mean when you say library?’ The sky might be azure and the sun bright and high in the sky, but the wind off the sea was biting as she followed Helen through the little garden gate and onto a path that led down to the beach. There on a wooden post stood a glass-fronted box with a sign above it on which someone – if she had to hazard a guess, she’d say Helen, from the familiar curled lettering and pretty flowers that decorated the sign – had written THE LIGHTHOUSE LIbrARY.
‘It completely slipped my mind. I’m so used to doing it that it didn’t even occur to me it would be a problem, but when you mentioned not seeing a soul, I realised you’d get the fright of your life if I didn’t explain.’
Meg opened the door to look inside at the shelves. ‘Go on,’ she said, leaning in to see that there were – inexplicably – two cartons of eggs on the bottom shelf, along with a jumble of slightly tatty looking paperbacks.
‘You might not remember, but we had a little bookshop in the village – it limped along for years, but it never really did very well and when the lease came up, the girl who ran it decided to give up and move back to be near her family in Glasgow. Anyway, what with the mobile library service stopping because of cuts in funding, we decided it would be an idea to set up a little free library here in the village.’
Meg’s eyebrows, which were already well on their way skywards, raised a little bit further. She looked around at the lighthouse, and the cottage, and down towards the white sand of the beach.
‘This isn’t exactly in the village.’
‘It’s not as far as you think – it’s only a five-minute walk along the beach path. It only takes longer by car because of the way the road goes. So there’s always someone passing by, walking their dog or taking their children for a run about on the beach down here, because we get the best rock pools after high tide. Anyway, it doesn’t take long. All you have to do is keep an eye on the books and make sure nothing untoward is being left in there.’
‘Nothing untoward?’ Meg looked at the shelves once again. ‘Like eggs?’
‘Oh no, the eggs are fairly standard. Kathleen along the road has a very bad chicken habit – she can’t stop buying them, so she has far too many eggs, so she puts them in the library for anyone who might need them.’
‘Do they leave the payment in the library?’
‘Oh no, they’re free to whoever needs them. Food’s expensive these days, especially if you’ve got lots of little mouths to feed. And it’s not always easy finding work up here in the middle of nowhere in winter when the tourists aren’t around.’
Meg’s heart squeezed in empathy at the thought. ‘Oh that’s such a kind thing to do.’
‘Yes, Kathleen is a sweetheart. I’m sure you’ll bump into her when she’s doing one of her egg deliveries.’
‘Maybe I won’t be quite as isolated as I was thinking.’
Helen pursed her lips and widened her eyes in an expression that Meg knew of old meant there was more to the situation than met the eye. ‘Possibly… not.’
Meg followed her back towards the cottage, her love of Helen battling with the vague sense of unease that she’d been sold a pup and this idyllic eight week break in the middle of nowhere was going to be something very different indeed…