Chapter 25
When I first arrived, I thought the view was bleak, but I love it now. Even though there’s a fine mist of drizzle obscuring the furthest hills, there’s something so peaceful about it, even when peaceful is the last thing I feel.
The plane journey, and then another taxi from Glasgow airport to the train station passes in a blur. Ollie had booked everything in advance to make it as easy as possible for me, and I have over an hour’s wait in Glasgow station before the train I’m booked on departs.
I’m at that stage of crying where every time you think you’ve stopped, you dry your eyes and puff your chest out, and then you think about it again and the tears restart.
I get a few curious looks from passengers who walk past, and one kindly woman who reminds me of Nancy sits on a bench beside me and asks if I need anything.
I feel like I’ve left my heart behind in a cosy castle on the Mull of Kintyre, and no one can help me with that.
I’ll get over it, I tell myself. I’ve never been good at goodbyes. In a few hours, I’ll be back at Mira’s. A few days, back at work. A few weeks, I’ll see Ollie again. I know this is all the sensible solution, and I also know I’ll still be crying by the time the train reaches London.
Eventually, the Euston-bound train pulls in and waiting passengers file on.
I hesitate because it feels like the last chance I’ll have to go back, but ultimately, I get on, stow my suitcase in the luggage rack at the end of the carriage and find my seat.
The train is pretty quiet and the seat next to me stays empty.
Not many people leaving Scotland for London at this time of year, and I wish I wasn’t one of them.
Once everybody’s boarded, the train rumbles into life. There’s some shouting outside from further down the carriages, probably someone who’s missed the train banging on the doors to be let in, but it starts to pull away from the station, and then almost immediately comes to a stop.
And then, we just sit there. The train should surely be moving by now, and the other people in my carriage start checking their watches and phones.
There are mutterings about lateness, and all around me, passengers peer out the windows.
There’s definitely something going on because I can hear stirrings of a commotion somewhere along the platform, and the pounding of boots on the ground as police run past.
Before long, the train conductor makes an announcement over the tannoy. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please bear with us, there’s a short delay due to a person in distress on the tracks.’
People around me are clamouring to see what’s going on, but I’ve got enough distress of my own without needing to witness someone else’s too, so I try not to think about it… until I hear shouting from outside the carriage windows.
‘Just give me two minutes, please! My wife is on that train and if I let her go, I’ll be making the biggest mistake of my life! It’s Christmas, please! Have a heart!’
It’s like all the tears have caused an auditory hallucination because the voice sounds like the same one I’ve spent the past few weeks falling in love with, but there’s no way it’s him.
It couldn’t be…
‘Ollie?’ I say out loud.
Suddenly I’m joining the people peering out the windows, and a woman in the next seat along gasps. ‘Is he looking for you?’
My mouth has fallen open because I can’t work out what’s going on, and the woman starts banging on the windows and frantically pointing to me, just as Ollie is being frog-marched along the platform by a couple of police officers.
He looks over and his face brightens. ‘That’s her! Give me one second, please!’
‘She’s here!’ the woman shouts. ‘You can’t let a man chase down a train at Christmas and not let him on!’
I’m about to go out to him, but the conductor has opened the door to our carriage, and there’s a few looks between the police officers, and eventually one of them pushes Ollie forward.
‘Pardon the interruption, folks,’ the officer says as they board. ‘Not sure if we’ve got a complete walloper on our hands or if we’re witnessing the greatest love story of our time.’
‘Oh, thank God, Lu!’ Ollie moves so fast that he drags his police escort along with him as he skids onto his knees in the aisle beside my seat. ‘Stay. Stay, stay, stay. Please don’t go. I will do anything for you to stay.’
Considering how much I’ve cried so far today, I did not expect to burst into tears again, but those words, and the sight of him, and the fact that he’s here… chasing down my train to stop me. It’s all too much when I’ve already been an emotional wreck all morning and the tears spill over again.
His hands are handcuffed behind his back and a burly police officer yanks him upwards by a painful-looking grip around his bicep. ‘Do you know this man?’
‘I’m married to him.’
Ollie laughs an unbalanced laugh that sounds like he’s close to tears too.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Getting myself arrested, evidently.’ He wriggles his arms around, making the handcuffs rattle.
‘He’s climbed down in front of the train and been messing about on the tracks, madam.’ The policeman fills me in.
‘I wasn’t messing about on the tracks. I’d hammered on the door but the train was about to pull out and the conductor wouldn’t let me get on. I had to stop it leaving the station. How else was I supposed to do it?’
‘Ollie! You could’ve been killed!’
‘The driver was watching my every move and the train had barely started moving. He was always going to stop.’
‘God, you’re an idiot.’ I reach over and stroke his face, and the carriage is filled with ‘awws’ from my fellow passengers. ‘How did you even get here? There’s not another plane until five o’clock tonight.’
‘I paid a guy with a boat in Campbeltown harbour an obscene amount of money to get me across the water to the mainland.’
‘You couldn’t have called? You couldn’t have phoned me and told me not to get on the train? It would have been a tad less dramatic and certainly cheaper.’
‘I… did not think of that.’ He drops his head onto my knees. ‘All I had in my head was catching up with you. I was either going to get here for this train or get on the next one down to London and find you there.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I was wrong.’ He lifts his head and looks me in the eyes.
‘I was so wrong in everything I said earlier. Life can change in a month. You can hire someone to be your fake wife and then actually fall in love with her. And I can’t believe I’m having this conversation in handcuffs.
’ He looks up at the police officer imploringly and receives nothing but a hardened stare in return.
I reach out and rub over his shoulders, bulging from where his arms are yanked behind his back, and he moves his chin until his jaw brushes against my wrist.
‘Yes, I got swept away by Christmas magic, but I want to be swept away by Christmas magic every day, of every year, for the rest of my life. I accidentally let you into my home, my life, and my heart. But they weren’t – it wasn’t my home, or my life, or my heart, until you came along and made everything feel exactly as it should do.
I don’t want life to carry on as it has been – I want you in every moment with your jingling socks and your sparkle and your endless Christmas trees and seventy-eight poinsettias.
I even want us to adopt a pony together. Please stay, Lu.’
‘What about your job? The promotion?’
‘I’ve turned it down. I’ve already emailed my resignation to Dand and Halston and told them everything. The whole truth about us and what you’ve made me realise about myself this month.’
‘What’s that?’ the woman in the next seat along chimes in. She’s watching so intently that the only thing she’s missing is a bucket of popcorn.
Ollie doesn’t look away from my gaze. ‘Fifteen years ago, on a Sunday afternoon in March, three people died in our car, and I was one of them.’
I can’t help the intake of breath even though he, hopefully, means it in a metaphorical sense.
It’s the most heart-rending thing I’ve ever heard, and I only realise my tears had started to dry when my eyes fill up again.
All I want to do is hold him and never let go.
That can’t be an easy thing to admit, especially when we’re not in private.
‘I haven’t been living since then. I’ve been floating around that castle like a ghost, living the life my father didn’t get to live himself, and making myself feel more lifeless every day, until you burst in with an explosion of fountain water and Christmas glitter and made me remember what it feels like to be alive again.
To be me again. The only thing that’s made me happy in years walked into my life a month ago.
The only thing my parents would truly want for me is someone who makes me as happy as you do.
Someone who makes that place feel like home like you do.
I love that castle, and I don’t want to leave it.
’ He swallows hard and meets my eyes again.
‘And I don’t want you to leave it either.
It deserves more. It deserves the love and the laughter it’s had this Christmas, and I can’t do that alone. ’
‘What about everything you’ve said? The sensible option? The daydream for another time?’
‘You were right. I knew you were right and I wasn’t brave enough to admit it.
After you left, I went back inside and sat at the kitchen table, and I was holding it together, staying stoic and telling myself it was for the best. Then Nancy started playing “Coventry Carol” on her phone and casually put it down beside me and I fell apart.
In one second, I realised I’d made a huge mistake, but I was too late to catch the plane. ’
His eyes are welling up and there’s nothing he can do about it with his hands otherwise engaged.
I reach out and hold his face, use my thumb to brush his tears away, and he turns into my palm, his shoulders straining as he automatically tries to reach out for me even though he can’t, and the sight of him so emotional makes more tears fill my eyes too.
‘Please take a chance on us – on this. The most risky thing I’ve done in fifteen years is place an ad looking for a stranger to decorate the castle, and it was the best decision I’ve ever made.
I know this is a risk. I know you’ve got a steady job to go back to, but I am so preposterously in love with you, Lula.
Even if you go back to London right now, you deserve to know that. None of it was pretend for me.’
‘None of it was pretend for me either, you know that.’ I lean over until I can press my lips to his briefly, not nearly as deeply as I want to kiss him, but the woman in the next seat is practically vibrating with anticipation and I fear she might shake the train right off the rails if we don’t get on with it.
‘I fell for you so hard, probably from the moment you held your cardigan out to me on that first evening, but I thought… I don’t know, it was all about the promotion. ’
‘I wanted to save the castle. I thought that was the only way.’
‘And now?’
‘What’s the point in saving it as it is now?
All the money in the world won’t change the fact that it’s a ghost. A shell of its former self.
At least, it was until a few weeks ago. You are proof that putting an effort into it is what will really save it.
So let’s do it properly. Let’s turn it into what it was meant to be.
Let’s keep breathing life into it. But I can’t do it without you.
I don’t want to do any of it without you. ’
I’m crying again, tears streaming because I’ve spent the past few weeks dreaming of hearing him say those words, and never thinking he’d be brave enough to take that chance.
I lean forwards so I can kiss him again. One hand holding his face, the other rubbing the back of his neck, and he bucks up like he can shrug the handcuffs off through sheer willpower, kissing me harder than usual to make up for the lack of touch.
I’d almost forgotten the other passengers exist until they erupt into applause, and my cheeks burn as red as Ollie’s are.
‘Do you know how difficult it is to kiss someone properly when you can’t use your hands?’
‘Whose fault is that?’ the police officer grumbles back at him.
‘We really are quite late and other trains are backing up behind us.’ The conductor clears his throat and appears from behind the policeman. ‘Are you staying onboard, miss?’
‘Good lord, no!’
Ollie cheers and struggles to his feet. The police officer is kind enough to collect my suitcase from the luggage rack, and the three of us file off the train and stand back as the doors close and the engine starts up.
The other passengers wave from the windows as it pulls away, and I have never been more glad not to be one of them.
‘Now what?’ I take my suitcase from the policeman and look between them.
‘When I have use of my arms again, the longest hug you’ve ever had in your life. Until then, I think you might have to wait for me in a police station for a while…’
The policeman looks at us and then at the colleague waiting for him on the platform. ‘Oh, go on, it is Christmas, after all. I’ll let you off with a warning this time. Been married for forty-three years and my wife would murder me for standing in the way of true love.’
He undoes Ollie’s handcuffs and as promised, he immediately bends until he can lift me into his arms and spins us around on the platform.
I cling onto him, my hands curling into his shoulders and running over his back, trying to prove to myself that I haven’t fallen asleep on the train and this is nothing but a lovely dream.
Crowds are building around us now the next train has arrived and Ollie reluctantly puts me down. We’re giddy and neither of us can stop grinning as we sidle away hand in hand, Ollie pulling my suitcase, just like he has from the moment I met him.
‘How do we get home?’ I ask.
‘We’ve got a few hours to kill in Glasgow. The plane doesn’t leave until late afternoon.’
‘I can think of a few ways to pass the time.’
He laughs as he kisses me again, the softest and sweetest kiss, and I still can’t believe he’s here.
I can’t believe he did that, and my heart is bursting with happiness and love and sheer excitement about what it will be like to have a real relationship with my pretend husband.
I don’t want to take my hands off him in case letting him go is the trigger that wakes me up from this dream.
‘This won’t always be easy, you know,’ I say when we tear our lips away from each other’s.
‘It’ll be easier than the job in London. I know that.’
I know that too. No matter what the future holds, it’ll be better than grovelling at Patricia Calloway’s pointy-toed shoes and installing window displays that I had no part in creating.
We’ve got an amazing family around us – pretend and real – and the most beautiful castle that people will want to visit, and more importantly than anything, we’ve got each other… and no one can ask for more than that.