Chapter 10
You are not very good at this, Meg chided herself. She turned away from the door and studied the noticeboard, which was fastened to the wall, trying to distract herself from the strange pang of regret that she hadn’t taken up his offer of a lift – but to where? Helen’s little car was waiting for her only a few hundred yards away, and she could hardly ask him to turn around and take her back there. Plus – she scrutinised a poster about a fundraising bake sale with as much focus as she could muster – you just didn’t hop into the passenger seat of random strangers, even if you were in the deepest depths of the Scottish Highlands. Even if – she wrinkled her nose and screwed her mouth to one side – they were literally tall, dark and handsome. Well, tall, dark grey and handsome.
It was funny really. In the same way that she still couldn’t quite get her head around being forty-nine, she’d been surprised to discover that growing older meant you didn’t notice that the movie stars and musician you’d swooned over as a student had aged in the same way you had. Now she watched actors in charming little Netflix romances and wondered why on earth she was watching people who looked young enough to be the same age as Phoebe, Helen’s daughter, and therefore completely alien to her.
Pilates, Yoga, Book Club, Village Improvement Meeting… English Classes available, (contact Rilla at Applemore House for a lift if needed).
She carried on studying the signs, feeling increasingly uncomfortable that she’d been hovering in the store for so long, not that the girl behind the checkout seemed to mind. She’d been chatting away all this time to the two women who’d come in earlier, but now they’d finished up and were heading straight towards her. Meg tried to look as if she was particularly interested in the poster about Pilates Classes starting this Thursday at 7pm.
‘The more the merrier,’ said the smaller of the two women, tapping Meg on the arm so she turned and was greeted with a friendly smile. ‘Will we be seeing you there?’
‘Oh –’ said Meg, automatically. ‘Oh no, no, I don’t think so. Thank you.’
‘Oh, don’t worry, you don’t have to be any good,’ said the other woman, in what Meg assumed was supposed to be a comforting manner.
The girl behind the checkout snorted with laughter. ‘Aunty Dolina, for goodness’ sake. For all you know she could be a world class Pilates instructor.’
The woman looked Meg up and down with one eyebrow raised and her mouth pursed. ‘I think that’s highly unlikely.’
Meg’s mouth twitched with amusement.
‘Pay no heed to her,’ said the other woman, putting what she clearly thought was a comforting hand on Meg’s arm and patting it again.
‘Oh for goodness’ sake Greta, I didn’t mean the lassie wasn’t the right shape to be doing Pilates –’ (she pronounced it Pilots, which made Meg want to burst into fits of giggles) ‘– I meant she’s more than likely a newbie like the rest of us.’
Meg smiled at her and said, ‘Well, I’m definitely that.’
She’d long ago accepted that she was in shape - as the saying went - because round was a shape. She was more amused by the fact that she’d been pronounced a lassie at the age of forty-nine.
Just as she was trying to work out what on earth she was supposed to say next, a woman of about thirty-five rushed into the shop, folding up an enormous dark green umbrella as the door closed behind her, dripping water all over the floor. She was carrying a little plastic envelope and had a worried look on her face, her brow furrowed.
‘Greta, Dolina,’ she said, giving them a quick nod of greeting. ‘I’m looking for one of our lads, Gabe. You haven’t seen him, have you? He’s a big bloke.’ She measured the air with her hand, looking at Meg hopefully. ‘Bit o’stubble? Dark hair?’
‘He was here a wee moment ago, Una,’ said the girl behind the counter. ‘He left with a load of what looked like maps wrapped up in some black bin bags.’
‘Well, that’s something,’ said the girl, pursing her lips and looking heavenward as if for inspiration. ‘At least they’re no’ going to get soaked in the rain. I forgot to give him something, and I was hoping I might still have caught him. Now I’ve come out in the rain for nothing.’
‘Typical man, Una,’ said the woman called Dolina, shaking her head in sympathy. ‘They’re never where you want them, are they?’
‘Story of my life,’ said Una, shaking her head. ‘Trying to keep all these forestry lads in order will be the death of me.’
‘You need some nice relaxing Pilates,’ said Dolina cheerfully. ‘That’ll get your blood pressure down.’
Una, who was about to head back into the rain, looked confused.
‘She means Pilates,’ explained Greta.
‘Whatever,’ said Dolina, airily. ‘Will we be seeing you on Thursday?’
‘If I live that long,’ said the girl, rolling her eyes. She brandished her umbrella as if it was a jousting sword and headed back outside.
‘It looks like it’s clearing up,’ said Meg, to nobody in particular. ‘I think I’ll make a run for it.’
She grabbed the two heavy bags of shopping and set out into the rain. It had in fact lessened quite a bit and she was only soaked by the time she got back to the car, rather than drenched. That was some consolation, she decided, turning on the engine and heading back to the lighthouse cottage where hopefully Eliza would still be snoozing peacefully.
So he was called Gabe. She unpacked the shopping, dumping it all onto the space on the kitchen table she’d cleared that morning. Eliza pottered around the kitchen, sniffing chair legs and inspecting the inside of cupboards as Meg found spaces for everything.
By late afternoon, the weather had changed again, as everyone had said it would. A bright rainbow climbed from beyond the rocks on the shore up into a towering, still-grey cloud. The sunlight through the windows showed it had been quite some time since Helen’s artistic mind had been focused on anything as pedestrian as window-cleaning.
She’d made a start on the sitting room, piling things into plastic crates as she cleared the table and the contents of the second sofa, which had evidently become a sort of storage unit at some point in the past. Boxes of things were piled up in one corner – she wasn’t going to start going through Helen’s online shopping orders – but she could sort books by genre and neatly stack craft projects and the innumerable balls of yarn in a crate and pile up the countless sweaters and cardigans which must have been discarded here and there with the intention of being taken upstairs.
Books?She’d sent a message to Helen, who was now at the airport waiting for her delayed flight.
If they’re fiction, they can go down to the library, Helen replied.
We’re going to need a bigger library,Meg messaged back, sending a photograph of the plastic crate which was stacked full.
Yikes. All that from the sitting room?
No, that’s the kitchen as well,Meg replied. She didn’t add that she’d already noticed several more towering heaps in other parts of the cottage.
You are an angel to do this,Helen wrote. You don’t have to, she added a few moments later.
I know. But I love you and I like doing it. Simple, thought Meg, and true.
She carried on methodically, sorting and stacking and clearing and occasionally popping a log into the log burner more for the look of it than because she needed the heat. She’d changed when she got back and had discarded the sweatshirt she’d put on, hot from the hard work of bending up and down and going back and forth to the kitchen for cleaning cloths and black plastic bags for the random rubbish which seemed to have hidden itself behind sofa cushions.
She’d always loved order and keeping things tidy, a result of growing up in a chaotic house where she’d realised early on that if she wanted to get to school on time or have clean kit for PE she’d need to sort it herself. It had rolled over into her life with Michael – she’d been responsible for cooking and cleaning, and everything in the house as well as working, so she’d never found it particularly easy to stop and do nothing. Helen would always insist on ordering a takeaway when she’d come to visit, something which Michael muttered about being a waste of money and which Meg suspected was another way for Helen to push back against his micro-managing of every aspect of life.
Anyway. She shook herself – that was enough ruminating on the past. She stood up, stretching out her back with a little groan. It was going to ache in the morning. Maybe she’d run a hot bath and have a soak while the frozen dinner she’d bought was heating in the oven.
‘Yes, I’ll feed you in a moment,’ she said to Eliza, who was at the door in seconds, looking hopeful.
She’d never been a joiner-in. All the time she’d lived in Heatherby, she’d never taken a class or gone to the gym or anything like that. As she tipped some of Eliza’s dog food into her bowl, Meg was lost in thought.
What if she went to the Pilates class? If Greta and Dolina were going, it clearly wasn’t going to be some high-impact thing with loads of weights and an instructor barking at them… not that she’d even really mind that. But she’d never in her life signed up for so much as an evening class – it wasn’t the sort of thing she did. Maybe now was the perfect opportunity to have a rehearsal. Nobody knew who she was up here. What’s to say she wasn’t the sort of person who turned up to a Pilates class because she happened to be house-sitting for a friend?