Forgive Me

by Lesley Pearse

  ‘I am right now with this big job in Hampstead, but I think that will be done in another five or six days. I’ve got holiday due to me and I’ve never been to Scotland. I really want to see the Highlands.’

  He had a funny look on his face, as if he wanted to say something more and couldn’t get it out.

  ‘I’d love to see Scotland with you,’ she said. ‘I doubt it will be much fun roaming around on my own. You could come up by train when you’re ready, and I could meet you at the station.’

  His face lit up. He moved closer to her and put his hands either side of her face. ‘I don’t only want to see the scenery. I also want to make sure you don’t run off with some wild Scotsman.’

  ‘I’d rather run off with some lovely Londoner,’ she said, looking right into his eyes.

  He kissed her on the forehead, but she sensed he really wanted to kiss her lips. She didn’t know why she didn’t just slide her arms around him to give him some encouragement, but she supposed she was afraid of taking the initiative.

  ‘Phone me in the evenings and let me know where you are,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile, I’ll sort it at work.’

  Thinking of that moment warmed her, and if he did join her up here, then maybe they could both stop being bashful.

  He’d been very happy for her that she’d met Patrick and that they were getting along so well. She wanted Patrick to meet Phil; she was sure they’d like one another. Perhaps after the holiday?

  Reaching over to the passenger seat, she picked up the directions to the guest house she had booked into for the night. It was in a place called Wetheral, which didn’t appear to be too far from the motorway.

  She had never been further north than Blackpool before. Although she’d heard hundreds of times that the scenery in Cumbria was breathtakingly beautiful, she was still astounded by it. She remembered when she was small having a tin box of Lakeland coloured pencils for Christmas one year. The picture on the lid was of mountains with a purple tinge which Flora had said was heather. She’d seen that majestic view today: tiny white dots that were sheep grazing at seemingly precarious heights, and only a few tiny stone cottage houses nestling here and there to prove it wasn’t complete wilderness.

  She guessed that in sunshine and away from the motorway the scenery would be even more spectacular, and she hoped that if Phil joined her they could explore it together.

  The rain stopped and the sun came out just as she got to Wetheral. To lift her spirits even more she was thrilled to find it was a real village, with a village green and pretty cottages all around it. The Briars, the bed and breakfast she’d booked into, was amongst them.

  Before checking in she took a short walk to stretch her legs and found a wide, fast-flowing river just a hundred yards below the green. With the late afternoon sun shining on the water, and green hills all around, it looked beautiful.

  The Briars was equally lovely in a slightly old-fashioned flowery way, spotlessly clean and smelling of lavender polish. Eva’s room overlooking the green was pretty, with peach Laura Ashley wallpaper, a matching quilt on the very comfortable double bed, and frilly curtains. The bathroom was minuscule, but there were fluffy peach towels and an array of mini toiletries.

  Mrs Hobbs, the middle-aged landlady, gave her a warm welcome, suggesting that Eva come down after seeing her room to have some tea in the guests’ sitting room. There she met a couple in their thirties who had also just arrived. Like Eva, they were breaking their journey before driving on to Scotland in the morning. Mrs Hobbs said they could have dinner, if they wished, and that tonight it was roast chicken.

  By ten that evening, Eva was more than ready for her bed. Dinner had been absolutely delicious, with a choice of three different puddings afterwards. It had been served at one large table, and aside from Eva there were three other couples. It had been a jolly evening, as all the guests were very chatty. One of the things which had worried Eva about coming away on her own was that she would feel lonely, but if this bed and breakfast was anything to go by, she wouldn’t be.

  After a huge fried breakfast the next morning, Eva packed her bag and paid her bill. It was such a lovely morning that she went for a walk before driving on to Scotland. As she walked along the river bank she thought how lovely it would be to buy a house somewhere like this village to turn into a guest house. She wondered if Mrs Hobbs had enough guests all year round to earn a decent living or if her husband, who Eva hadn’t seen, had a job that provided the real income and they only earned pin money from the guests.

  All the way to Pitlochry her thoughts kept returning to the idea of owning a guest house. She assumed property would be a great deal cheaper than in London, and it would be fun to do up a big house room by room, each one with a different theme. Perhaps she should forget the idea of becoming an interior designer and instead go in for something in the hotel trade to gain experience? Or get the guest house up and running, and then train to be an interior designer?

  But even as these thoughts came to her she smiled, knowing this was only a pleasant daydream. She could bet that half the people who visited Cumbria and Scotland had such thoughts while on holiday. And of the few that actually opened a guest house, most would find it wasn’t anywhere near as rewarding as they imagined.

  Pitlochry was surrounded by mountains and built above the wide river which ran through a wooded valley, but the town was bigger and busier than she expected. Essentially Victorian, it had a gracious charm with many fine, big houses. The main street was lined with shops and pubs which catered for the thousands of tourist, who passed through it on their way to the Highlands.

  Eva thought Flora might have intended to do the same, but ended up staying here because she realized she wasn’t actually cut out for isolation.

  Sadly, Brae Bank hotel was not what she imagined from its name. Not a pretty hotel perched on a riverbank, but a rather forbidding grey stone building which looked as if it had once been a public house. Extensions had been added without any thought to the overall look of the property. Inside, the tartan carpets were worn and the wood panelling in the reception area was scuffed and dusty-looking.

  A coach pulled up just as she was signing the register and disgorged about eighteen elderly people who appeared to be touring around Scotland. Eva guessed that this was the usual clientele, and she wasn’t likely to find any soulmates here. Yet the receptionist was very pleasant, giving her the breakfast times and pointing out the bar. Then she asked a lad to escort Eva to her room, and said if she needed anything more she only had to ask.

  It was a small drab room on the top floor in the oldest part of the building. The double bed was covered in an orange candlewick bedspread – the kind she remembered Andrew’s parents having in their home. But whatever the room’s shortcomings, the view from the window was superb. She could see right over the town, to the river and the mountains beyond. The bathroom was almost as big as the bedroom, very stark with old-fashioned black and white tiles on the walls and grubby-looking lino which was peeling back in the corners. But there was a television in the bedroom, tea-making facilities and even a small fridge. She thought she could be quite content here for a week, and it was very cheap.

  After she’d unpacked her clothes and put them away, she walked down into the town to explore.

  The shops had only just closed and the cafes and restaurants were quiet, as people hadn’t yet come out for an evening meal. She saw a shop selling artist’s materials which looked as if it had been in the same hands for several decades, and made a mental note to call in there the next day. Most of the shops were the souvenir kind selling china Highland cows, tartan scarves and the like. But there were a couple of art galleries, with good displays of hand-thrown pottery, locally made jewellery and paintings. Eva realized that back in 1969 Pitlochry had probably been far less sophisticated, and yet she was getting a strong sense of what had attracted Flora to stay here.

  Back in her room that evening, after fish and chips in a cafe, Eva got out Flora’s diaries
and found the one which she thought was written while her mother was up here. It was infuriating that the entries weren’t dated, because it was impossible to know whether two entries were on consecutive days, or weeks apart.

  ‘Such a long, weary drive,’ she read. ‘Stopped in M too tired to go any further.’

  Was ‘M’ Manchester?

  ‘Too grim to stay another night. Worse bed I’ve ever slept in.’ That sounded as if she was still in ‘M’, and the next entry appeared to be on the same day. ‘Band playing, I love bagpipes, and the sun is shining. Scenery inspiring, if the B&B wasn’t so awful I could stay here for days.’

  Eva doubted she’d encountered a pipe band in Manchester, and the views there would not have been inspiring, so she had to be in Scotland. She made a mental note to buy a more detailed map of Scotland in the morning.

  ‘Scotland is bigger than I imagined,’ Flora had written next. ‘Couldn’t drive any further so stopped in P.’

  That could be Perth, but Eva felt it was more likely to be Pitlochry, because she didn’t mention any further driving after that, only that another bed and breakfast had no hot water.

  ‘Rent for cottage only four pounds a week,’ was the next entry. ‘A bit primitive, but it’s got good vibes. I need that to get me out of these black moods.’

  She referred obliquely to depression in several entries after that. The effort required to wash her hair, staying in bed all day, and avoiding someone she called ‘D’ who she said ‘analysed’ her. Eva got the idea she was wrestling with depression, wanting to hide away from people, yet knew this wasn’t helping her mental state. As Patrick had said, sometimes her entries appeared to be just random thoughts: ‘I could just walk into the river at night and let the water embrace me,’ was one that sounded very much like the temptation of suicide. But then the very next entry was: ‘Watched dragonflies hovering over the water, so beautiful I found myself smiling again.’

  She must have warmed to ‘D’, as she mentioned him or her quite often, usually to say he or she had called, they’d supper, gone to the pub or visited nearby villages together. There was also a ‘G’. The latter was clearly someone she did like. Eva thought it was a he, as she mentioned him quite a lot and she went camping, hiking and had dinner with him. In one entry she called ‘G’ a ‘soulmate’.

  Could this ‘G’ be Eva’s father?

  If he was, Flora wasn’t inclined to write about any kind of romantic interludes. She wrote about painting views of the river, taking the garden in hand and long walks in the woods. There was not so much as a hint of a love affair, let alone pregnancy.

  Eva’s last thoughts as she drifted off to sleep were that if she could find the cottage Flora had stayed in, maybe the present owner would be able to shed more light on her stay here.

  She found the cottage the next morning. It was on the far side of the river Tummel, a short distance from the dam for the hydroelectric plant. Even if she hadn’t taken the little picture of the cottage painted by Flora with her, she would have recognized it by the old cast-iron latticework forming an arch over the front door.

  In the picture the cottage looked charmingly dilapidated, with straggling roses over the arch, the front door in need of a coat of paint, and a weed-strewn path leading from a sagging gate. But it wasn’t like that now; it was painted a soft pale pink, the door glossy white, as was the latticework arch. Although it was late in the summer, there was purple clematis scrabbling through the carefully trained rose which still had many pink blooms. New windows, a white picket fence and proliferations of hanging baskets and tubs in the tiny front garden gave the cottage a ‘take your snapshots in front of me’ look.

  Taking a deep breath, Eva lifted the brass lion’s-head knocker and rapped on the door.

  A pleasant-faced woman who appeared to be in her early forties, wearing an apron that said ‘Kiss the Cook’, opened the door.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ Eva said, ‘but my mother painted this cottage some twenty-two years ago – I think when she was renting it. She died recently, and I’m trying to find out more about her time in Scotland.’

  She showed the painting to the woman.

  ‘Well I never,’ she said, taking it in her hands and smiling. ‘What a lovely picture. I remember it like that from when I was a girl. How sad you’ve lost your mother, and you so young.’

  The woman had the softest Scottish accent, a smear of flour on her face and more on her apron – all of which suggested she would be very kindly.

  ‘Yes, it was sad.’ Eva had no compunction in getting the woman’s sympathy. ‘Was the cottage owned by your family then?’

  ‘No, my dear,’ she said. ‘But come on in, you don’t want to stand out on the doorstep.’

  The woman introduced herself as Janet Mayhew and proceeded to make tea, urging Eva to sit down at the kitchen table.

  ‘I’ve been baking.’ Janet waved her hand at a cooling tray of buns. ‘I’ve just put some shortbread and some flapjacks in the oven. Now what was it you wanted to know?’

  The inside of the cottage was as attractive as its outside, with lots of pretty china on a dresser, potted plants on the window sill, and a fat ginger cat lying on the mat by the open back door. But the pine kitchen units looked new, so Eva knew it wouldn’t have been the same when Flora lived here.

  Eva gave Janet an edited version of her mother’s death, finding the diaries and the picture of the cottage. ‘Mum didn’t talk about her past,’ she explained. ‘She never even told me she’d been a successful artist, let alone that she lived in Scotland for a while. I want to try to discover why she was here, who with, and just a bit more about her. So do you know who owned the cottage then?’

  ‘Aye, it was the Hamiltons. Old Will Hamilton bought up a few wee cottages in the town after the war. I know this one was rented out to men while they worked on building the dam, but that was finished in the 1950s. When I was a wee schoolgirl there was a crazy old lady lived here. Old Will died sometime around 1967, I think, and his son Gregor took over management of everything.’

  ‘So Gregor Hamilton would have rented this to Mum?’ Eva asked, her mind turning to the letter G in the diaries.

  ‘Aye, he would that. My husband bought the cottage from him in 1975.’

  ‘Do you suppose I could meet him?’

  ‘I’m sure he’d like that. He’s been in a wheelchair since a climbing accident a few years back. Such a shame, he was always so active. My husband used to climb with him and he goes up to see him at least once a week. Gregor puts a brave face on it, but it can’t be pleasant being stuck in a chair all day.’

  Eva had a cup of tea with Janet, and tried one of her buns, and they chatted about general things for some time. Eva was very tempted to tell the older woman the whole story, because she was so nice. But she controlled the urge; she didn’t want Gregor to get wind of anything that might make him wary of talking to her.

  ‘So how old is Gregor?’ she asked. ‘It must be hard for his family if he’s in a wheelchair.’

  ‘He’s around fifty, a bit younger than my hubby. He never married. He’s only got his younger sister, Grace, and her family now. They share the big house with him, though Gregor has converted the downstairs rooms for himself.’

  Eva liked the way Janet pronounced house ‘hoose’. It reminded her of a book she had when she was small that contained a poem about a moose who lived in a ‘hoose’. Flora used to put on a Scottish accent when she read it to her. Perhaps she even thought about Pitlochry as she read it.

  ‘I should go now,’ Eva said as Janet got her shortbread and flapjacks out of the oven. ‘Could you let me have Gregor’s address and phone number?’

  ‘I will, but why don’t you go up to the house just now?’ Janet said. ‘He gets lonely, and a nice wee girl like you stopping by will make his day.’

  Janet gave her the address and drew a little map. It was only two streets from the hotel, further up the hill.

  As it was just on one, Eva
didn’t go straight there in case Gregor was eating his lunch. She wandered along the main street buying some milk, biscuits, tea bags and fruit to keep in her room. The town was really busy, but it had that leisurely, friendly feeling about it that seaside towns had.

  She might have only been there a day, but she really liked it.

  Gregor’s house was a big gloomy-looking Victorian place, three storeys and double-fronted, with stone steps up to a wide porch. The front door had stained-glass panels and was twice the width of Eva’s front door back in London.

  The door was opened by a very attractive blonde woman wearing a floaty blue and white dress. She looked about forty, and Eva guessed she must be Grace, Gregor’s sister.

  ‘I’m sorry to turn up here uninvited,’ Eva began. ‘I was talking to Mrs Janet Mayhew about her cottage, and she suggested I come up here to have a chat with Mr Hamilton, because he used to own it.’

  ‘I’m sure Gregor will be delighted to talk to you,’ the woman said. ‘Do come in, and I’ll just check if everything is alright with him. What was your name?’

  ‘Eva Patterson,’ she said and watched as the woman tip-tapped in her high heels across the parquet flooring to a door at the back of the house.

  The staircase was right at the centre of the hall, very wide with intricately carved banisters and a carved hawk on each of the newel posts. At the half-landing where the staircase turned stood a complete suit of armour, looking as if a man stood inside it, and above it on the wall were two crossed battleaxes. Eva wanted to giggle, thinking that if Gregor was her father, she would have to educate him into going for less intimidating decor.

  ‘Come on in, Eva,’ the blonde woman called out from the back of the hall. ‘Gregor will be glad to talk to you.’

  Eva’s first thought on seeing Gregor, sitting in an armchair by the window, was that he couldn’t possibly be her father, as his hair was as red as her mother’s. She was sure two red-headed people couldn’t produce anything but another redhead.

  ‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t get up,’ he said. ‘I expect Janet told you that my legs are useless now.’