Chapter 27
Meg flopped down onto the sofa beside Eliza, who’d been pacing back and forth looking at the door since Stanley left.
‘You and me both,’ she said to her, laughing.
Eliza circled around and collapsed on the crochet cushion with a sigh.
This was ridiculous. She was swooning like a teenager over a boy, except she was forty-nine and should be far too old for that sort of thing. Her phone buzzed and she picked it up, smiling to herself as she saw Helen was sending photos – probably more beautiful shots from her exploration of Santiago.
But no, the photos were of an exhilarated, damp haired Phoebe holding a tiny, scrunched up little pink bundle.
Look at my amazing girl!
Meg felt tears rising in her eyes, surprising her. Tiny Phoebe, with her My Little Pony obsession and her stripy tights and love of jumping in puddles, was a mother.
Proudest granny in the world, said the next message, accompanied by a picture of Helen with her arm around Matteo, Phoebe’s partner. Matteo was holding the baby, and Helen looked as if she might burst with joy. The baby looked – as babies tended to – like a small cross thing who’d rather be somewhere else, but everyone was so full of happiness that it didn’t seem to matter.
Huge congratulations, wrote Meg. She’s beautiful. And you all look so happy!
Oh – I forgot, another message came through from Helen, she’s called Rosa.
What a gorgeous name! Give them all my love.
I will! Huge love and hope everything is going well!
Meg put down the phone and looked out of the window. The sun was shining, and she was sitting on the sofa looking at web design ideas and reading about the history of the lighthouse in Britain. She could be doing that in the evening instead of watching something on television, and taking advantage of the lovely weather to get Helen’s garden into some sort of order.
All of Helen’s gardening things were stacked in the disused building next door. Given that it was about to be turned into a visitor centre imminently, she decided that maybe clearing out the bits and pieces – old easels and boxes of art equipment, canvases which had been stacked against the wall and goodness knows what else – would have to go on her things-to-do list for the following week. If that meant she happened to be floating about casually while Gabe was busy working on the fencing, well, that was just a happy coincidence.
She rolled up her sleeves, pulled on a pair of gardening gloves, and got to work.
The soil was sandy and easy to work, which made weeding a pleasure. She worked methodically, pulling out dandelions and chickweed, giving the perennial plants in the border space to grow and breathe. The roses were already coming up, so she dead headed the dried-up hips which were hanging on from last autumn, throwing everything into the compost bin in the garden at the back of the cottage. By the time she’d finished one long bed which ran parallel to the wall she was ravenous, not to mention baking hot. The unseasonal weather was promised to last another week, and everyone in the Highlands was soaking it up. She stopped for a lunch break, taking off her shoes and popping upstairs to change into an old, faded T-shirt she’d had for years.
Taking her sandwich out into the garden, she sat down on the step and surveyed the work she’d done so far.
There had been a fair few walkers passing by that morning, most waving a hello or calling across as she worked, and as she ate she saw the teenager from the other day hurrying past. Intrigued – and wondering why she wasn’t at school – Meg stood up, casually strolling into the back garden as if putting something else into the compost bin, and watching as the girl looked left and right then popped another letter into the library.
After she’d gone, Meg took a stroll down to the library to have a look. Sure enough, tucked between a rather dry looking literary novel which had remained untouched for the last few weeks and one of her brown paper-covered books was an envelope. Meg smiled to herself. Whatever was going on, it was very sweet. She hadn’t expected being the keeper of the library would come with so much more than books.
By the end of the day, she’d finished the garden. Stiff as a board, her knees grumbling, she straightened up and assessed her handiwork. The garden had good bones, and Helen had worked hard to make it pretty over the years. All it had needed was a bit of a spruce up to reveal the beauty that was hiding underneath a layer of overgrowth and weeds.
It all sounded horribly familiar. Meg made a face as she looked at her reflection in the sitting-room window. She was filthy, her hair had come loose from the ponytail she’d tied it back in earlier, and she had dirt on her nose. Meg brushed it off, remembering with a jolt of longing in her stomach how she’d felt when Gabe had brushed a smudge of flour off her cheek. She turned away, shaking her head. This was – no, she was – beingcompletely ridiculous.
She ran a hot bath and sank into the lavender scented bubbles, thinking back to the day she’d handed over the last of the furniture to the removal men. Back then she’d picked a piece of her own lavender and thought how long it had been since she’d had a decent night of sleep. Now, hiking miles every morning on the footpaths around the coast with Eliza, she was sleeping eight hours every night without fail and waking feeling completely rested. It was funny how things had changed. She hadn’t heard from Janey in a while – she really ought to send her a message and see how things were going back there. It was strange, though – she still wasn’t sure where she was going next, but the one thing that was certain was that she missed nothing about Heatherby.
“Shining a light into the darkness, the lighthouse is a beacon of hope that brings a feeling of safety to sailors at the point when they need it most,” she read, curled up on the sofa beside Eliza later that evening.
That was a lovely thought. It was funny how this place had given her something like that – a feeling of hope where she’d had none.
There was something magical about the lighthouse. She got up and wandered through to the kitchen, looking out of the window and far across the inky black sea. Night had fallen, but the last pale streaks of light still lingered like a halo across the shoulders of the far-away islands. When she’d visited Helen years before, it had been in midsummer, and it had been as bright as day at eleven o’clock, darkness only falling for a few short hours before daylight returned. Those were the easy months for the fishermen who worked out of the harbour.
In winter, though, when the nights were long and stormy, the lighthouse guided them home, warning them to beware of the rocks which curved around the natural harbour of Applemore. She’d been delighted to discover the history of the lighthouse. In the last days of the nineteenth century a tiny croft house had stood on the land, occupied by another Meg – wife of a fisherman called John, who had been lost at sea. After he died, every night she lit a lamp and set it at the window to act as a guide to his fellow fishermen.
Meg closed her eyes, imagining how it would have felt to go to bed every night longing for your love to return. Her chest rose and fell with a heavy sigh of longing. In all her married life, she’d never felt that sort of passion. She’d married Michael because he’d been a route to escape from a lonely family life where she’d never felt good enough. Her mother had been angry and critical, so it hadn’t really seemed unusual that her husband had treated her in the same way.
Meg looked at her reflection in the window. Objectively speaking she wasn’t bad looking. She had a nice, open sort of face and eyes that crinkled when she smiled. She had – perhaps, if she was lucky – another fifty years. Meg could live her life all over again. Not everyone got that chance.
Tucked up on the sofa again with a hot chocolate in hand and Eliza snoozing on the rug by her feet, she stayed up far too late typing up the information she’d been given and making it as interesting as she could for the website. Greta – true to form – had emailed through the notes, and a striking set of photographs which had been taken of the exterior of the lighthouse, as well as some scans of faded black and white pictures of the workers when they’d lived in the cottage. It was such a strange feeling to sit in this spot, knowing a century ago there would have been the lighthouse keeper and his family in her place.
Somehow she found herself down a rabbit hole on the internet, trying to search for some facts and figures about the Applemore area and the population over the years. The next thing she knew she was reading a report into the increasing problem of rural poverty in the Highlands, and then staring into a long-dead fire as she tapped a pen against her teeth. It was clear there were things being missed in Applemore – and important ones, at that. The chance that Laurel was the only person in the village who was struggling to get by for one reason or another seemed unlikely.
There had to be something she could do to make a difference while she was there – but how?