by Karen Swan
‘Wow, so . . . he got off a torpedoed boat, was thrown onto the rocks, broke his leg, survived exposure, and pulled through from Spanish flu? He sounds the luckiest man alive.’
‘Not that lucky. He stayed here for four months, recovering. But as soon as his leg was mended, he was sent to France and killed nine days later.’
‘Oh God.’ Alex’s jaw dropped open. ‘That’s so awful.’
‘Everyone here was deeply upset when they heard. My mother spoke of it often. She said he had made many friends during his recuperation and was fondly remembered by the folks round here.’
Alex looked back at the photograph. ‘Clarissa must have taken it really badly, surely, having saved his life and nursed him back to health?’
‘Aye. She became very reclusive after that. I think it was too much after losing her sweetheart and brother as well.’
‘That’s understandable. I suppose it must be awful to be the one who keeps being left.’
‘I suppose so, yes. She left the island for a time. I think it was too painful for her to stay in a place where no one ever came back.’
Alex sipped her tea. ‘But she came back eventually?’
‘Aye, when she adopted the boy, she came back to her roots. After all, there’s no place like home, is there?’
Alex suppressed the shiver that ran up her spine. There was certainly no place like her home. ‘Exactly so,’ she murmured. ‘No place at all.’
Chapter Fifteen
Twenty-four. Twenty-five. Twenty-six . . .
She burst up through the water, panting but feeling clean at least. She dropped her head back against the salmon bath, her stiff muscles softening at last in the Epsom salts, and examined her toenails. Ordinarily she would be due a pedicure this weekend but clearly that wasn’t going to happen. Would the polish hold for another week? she wondered, looking for chips.
The knock at the front door made her jerk in the water and stare at the wall in alarm. What time was it? She and Mrs Peggie had been looking at the photos downstairs for well over an hour, but she hadn’t been up here for long; surely she had more time? She stretched over to check her phone on the wicker laundry basket, water drops splashing all over the floor. Seven forty. She frowned, certain he’d said he’d collect her at eight.
Scrambling out of the water, she had just wrapped the fresh lilac bath towel around her when she heard Mrs Peggie’s distinctive voice at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Miss Hyde?’
Alex stepped out of the bathroom. ‘Yes?’
‘You have a gentleman visitor.’
‘Dammit,’ she hissed below her breath, feeling a growing sense of panic. ‘Er . . . I’m not ready. Could you tell him he’s early?’ Didn’t he know it was rude to show up before time?
There was a pause and then . . .
‘You’re early,’ she heard Mrs Peggie say in a prim voice.
‘No, I’m not. We need to be there for eight,’ replied a hoarse one.
Alex straightened up. What? She tiptoed down the corridor and peered her head round the corner. She looked down the stairs – just as Lochlan looked straight up.
‘Oh!’ she said, recoiling quickly and holding the towel even tighter, wondering what to do next. She wanted to stay hiding behind this wall, but that would be farcical; besides, she wasn’t showing anything in this towel besides her shoulders and legs; strangers saw more on the beach. With a deep breath, she came downstairs, her most dignified smile on her face. Mrs Peggie made a discreet exit, but not before looking mildly scandalized by Alex’s attire. ‘Lochlan, I wasn’t expecting you.’
‘Why not? Bruce asked us all to meet at eight.’ He appeared not to notice that she was wearing just a towel and to her surprise, she felt mildly offended by the fact.
‘Bruce?’
His eyebrows hitched. ‘The tasting? The potentially most exciting discovery in the company’s history?’
Alex’s jaw dropped. ‘You expected me to go?’
‘Well, he did say “everyone”.’
‘Yes, but he wasn’t including me. I’m not . . . I’m not a connoisseur of whisky.’
The look that came into his eyes then told her he was remembering that she had at least been an enthusiastic amateur the week before. ‘Well, trust me, you’ll know this one’s good.’ His eyes caught on something. ‘Is that . . . my suit?’ he asked incredulously, taking a step back and fingering the dark grey wool flannel currently dangling from a hanger on a coat hook in the porch.
‘Oh . . . yes,’ she said, shivering a little as a slice of wind whistled in through a cracked window.
He looked back at her. ‘Please don’t tell me you’re wearing my clothes too now.’
The quip made her laugh out loud. He could be very amusing when it suited him. ‘No! I brought it back here to air after the fire. It’s probably . . .’ she leaned forward to sniff it, grazing him slightly as she did. ‘Yes, it’s almost gone now. The smoke smell, I mean,’ she added, noticing he was looking at her strangely. ‘I . . . I brought your shoes back too, and your trainers,’ she said, pointing to them with one foot but inadvertently highlighting her bare legs.
It was a moment before he replied. ‘Very thoughtful of you, Hyde.’
‘Well, you ran into a burning building. I saved your shoes. I thought it was the least I could do,’ she quipped with a lackadaisical shrug that she hoped covered up more of her awkwardness than the dratted towel.
There was a pause, his look growing impatient. ‘Well, what are you waiting for? You’d better hurry up and get dressed.’
‘I’m really sorry,’ she sighed. ‘Of course I’d have come if I’d known . . . but I can’t make it.’
‘What do you mean you “can’t make it”?’ he asked, in a tone that implied her words didn’t make sense. It was a Thursday night on the isle of Islay. How much could there be to do?
‘I’ve got plans.’
‘So, then, change them. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.’
‘I can’t.’
His eyes darkened. ‘What could you possibly be doing that’s so important you can’t ditch it for this?’
‘Knock, knock, anybody home?’ a voice called from the path outside. The door – pushed to – was opened gently and a blond head peered round. ‘Wahey!’ Callum beamed, taking in the sight of her in her towel.
Alex pulled it tighter again. ‘For God’s sake,’ she muttered under her breath.
‘Oh hi, cuz, how’s it going?’ Callum asked, stepping fully into the porch and finding Lochlan glowering behind the door. ‘Thought I recognized the wheels outside. What are you doing here?’
There was a silence as Lochlan glanced over at her, an anger in his eyes she couldn’t explain.
‘I came to pick these up,’ he said finally, reaching for the suit and scooping the shoes off the floor – only to prompt another coughing fit.
‘You do not sound good, Lochie,’ Callum said, managing simultaneously to frown and smile. ‘Sure you shouldn’t still be resting up?’
‘I’m fine,’ Lochlan muttered, looking anything but. ‘See you tomorrow.’ And with his eyes on the floor, he stalked from the porch, his suit slung over his shoulder.
Callum gave a shrug. ‘So,’ he said, turning to her, delight in his eyes. ‘Please tell me you’re coming out dressed like that.’
He was good company, she’d give him that. And surprisingly well read. Plus, he actually seemed to listen to her, which wasn’t what she’d anticipated at all.
The pub he’d brought her to – the Stag – was cosy to the point of cuddly: giant and ancient stone flags blackened with age clad the floor; the walls were painted a deep Prussian blue and a lively fire in the corner threw out a beautiful amber light. Outside, by the path, a fir tree had been dressed in white fairy lights, from the glow of which she had just been able to make out the low stone building’s grassed roof. It was a ‘black house’, Callum had explained as he’d taken her arm (‘in case of ice’), leading her into the warmth.
/>
The Stag was primarily a drinker’s pub, with a bar at the back and a mix of battered leather chesterfields and tweed armchairs in various groupings in the middle of the floor; tall-backed wooden booths flanked the perimeter of the room and were so small and intimate as to make the knocking of their knees against one another unavoidable and Alex had quickly taken to sitting at an angle.
The journey over had been relaxed. Callum was easy company and whilst she brooded over the calamity of Lochlan’s unexpected arrival – what had he been thinking? Even if she had been planning to attend the tasting, they had never discussed him collecting her – he navigated the icy roads with a local’s ease. The half-moon light was dim, the snow clouds still sitting heavily above the isle, as they had quickly tracked away from the coast, taking her into countryside she hadn’t even begun to explore on her runs: she sat, hypnotized, as the full beam of Callum’s smart Audi R8 swung with every turn to pull from the darkness a fairytale-like pine forest or a heather-clad moor. They’d only passed a few hamlets and the occasional lone croft, so when she saw just one booth was free, it was a wonder to her as to where all these people had come from. ‘You always have to book,’ Callum had said as they’d taken in the sight from the door.
‘Come here a lot then, do you?’ she’d asked, rather more tartly than she’d intended, but if he’d caught the gist of her dig, he didn’t show it.
They’d ordered Old Fashioneds – with Callum specifying the Kentallen 15 for theirs – and he had gone for the venison stew, whilst she’d been very pleased with her black truffle risotto.
Now they were back on the whiskies again, this time just a finger of the amber nectar, and Alex was feeling very relaxed; she was well fed and warm in the drowsy heat of the fire and enjoying the Christmas carols that were on low at the bar. Sitting side-on in her booth, her legs outstretched on the bench, she was watching Callum as he regaled her with a tale about boarding-school antics – lowering a stash of Jaffa Cake biscuits to his friend in the dorm below by tying them in the belt of his dressing gown.
It had been a long time since she’d had dinner with a man that wasn’t a business appointment. Not that this was a date – in a way, it too was work-related: she had struck a deal and was simply keeping up her end of the bargain – but she hadn’t anticipated actually having a good time.
He really was very handsome, she mused, as he laughed at his own joke – so ready to smile and find the light side. There was no darkness in him and seemingly no black-hearted ambition; he was simply the archetypal rich kid: born to money with nothing to prove. Why would he have? He lived in a world where his name opened doors, and his face opened hearts.
He was so unlike his brother and as for Lochlan . . . what was it she detected in him? He had a defensiveness that bordered on chippy, forthrightness that masked an anger, making him blunt, intransigent, closed, fixed. This afternoon had been revelatory on many levels – aside from witnessing his relationship with Skye, it was also the first time she had seen him face to face with Sholto and it was clear the relationship had disintegrated to the point where they would simply disagree with each other on principle. In her experience, once—
She caught herself, realizing she was thinking about him, her client, working again when she was supposed to be having a night off. Focus on Callum, she told herself, sipping the dram and tuning back in. He was talking about – oh, he was talking about her.
‘Huh?’ she asked, straightening up. ‘Fairytale of New York’ was playing quietly in the background.
He smiled, leaning in on his elbows, his concentration trained entirely upon her. It was a flattering technique and something which she advised her clients to do in meetings when they wanted to indicate connection and empathy. ‘I asked, why the devil aren’t you married? You’re successful, ambitious, witty, great company – and if you don’t mind me saying, a stone-cold fox.’
‘Not every woman wants to get married, you know. Believe it or not, the whole white-dress, big-wedding thing is a nightmare scenario for some of us.’
‘Sure, I get that,’ he murmured. ‘You’re a modern woman. What’s marriage really going to give you? You don’t need a man. You’re financially independent, intelligent—’
She laughed. ‘Stop. Enough with the flattery already.’
‘So are you seeing anyone . . . exclusively?’
‘No.’
‘Are you seeing anyone, non-exclusively?’
‘That’s my business.’
He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. ‘See, that’s what I like about you. No BS. Very few women say what they really think.’ He paused and a smile came to hover at his lips. ‘Tell me what you like about me,’ he said in a lower voice.
Your eyes. She arched an eyebrow. ‘Who said I like anything about you?’
‘You are brutal,’ he laughed, shaking his head and looking delighted. ‘But don’t think I haven’t noticed how you deflect anything personal at all. I have, and it only piques my interest all the more. I want to know what makes you tick, Alex, and I do intend to find out.’
Alex smiled – deflecting again – knowing he could never possibly guess; knowing that even if she told him outright, he probably wouldn’t be able to believe it anyway. Some stories were simply too terrible to be true. She began to tap her fingers on the table. ‘So how often do you come over here? It seems a lot,’ she asked, not so subtly changing the subject. ‘Surely you’ve got a life in Edinburgh?’
‘That depends whether there are any beautiful women trapped by the storms over here.’
She shot him an unimpressed look.
He put his hands up in surrender and laughed. ‘Fine. Most of the time, I get over every other weekend, but with all the extra family assemblies recently it’s been more frequent than that – luckily for me, or I’d never have had the joy of meeting you last week.’
‘Extra family assemblies?’ she queried, her antennae up.
He shrugged. ‘More than usual. No biggie, though.’ He took a sip of his drink and she refused to acknowledge how golden his hair looked in this light. ‘And how are things going with that cousin of mine? Did the shoot help?’
‘It might have done if the fire hadn’t happened.’ She sighed. ‘No, whatever momentum I may have had went up in flames with the barley loft. What with dealing with the fire service and the police and the press, and the clean-up and trying to get production going again and now this hidden malt, I’d say he’s got the perfect excuses to get away from me.’ She dropped her head back on the booth, exposing her pale throat. ‘Honestly, I don’t know what it is about this job. It feels like I take one step forward, only to take another three back.’
‘That’s how it is with him. Don’t take it personally. He confounds everyone.’
‘But I should be unconfoundable.’
He arched an eyebrow. ‘That’s not a word.’
‘I know,’ she grinned. ‘But you know what I mean.’
‘Yes.’
She wrapped her hands around her glass, lost in thought again. ‘I don’t know. He’s impossible.’
‘Well, what do you usually do with difficult clients?’
‘Sit them down, talk it out.’
‘Talking? Really?’ Callum looked sceptical. ‘Well, look, I’d better put you out of your misery and stop you now then. Lochie’s never going to talk about his feelings.’
‘I mean Socratic talking. It’s a probing questioning method that gets to the root of any issue. The theory is that we all of us know the answers to our dilemmas, it’s just a question of knowing how to access them.’
Callum took another sip of his drink, still looking dubious. ‘Is there a Plan B?’
‘The one-eighty.’
‘What’s that?’
‘When the path you’re on isn’t working and you can’t go forward, switch back and go in the opposite direction.’
‘So with regards to Lochie, that means what exactly?’
Alex was quiet as Skye fl
ashed into her mind. Did getting Lochie to perform a U-turn on his life mean getting him to go back to her? Was jilting her the biggest mistake he’d ever made, as she suspected? Or was there something else he had to revisit? Something worse? After all, Skye had told her he’d been rejecting her for months beforehand. ‘I’m not sure yet, but if I ever get him to do more than insult me, I’ll let you know,’ she said non-committally.
‘Well, I really hope you do. Don’t repeat this but I miss the bugger.’
Alex was surprised. ‘You were close?’
‘You’d never know it now, would you? But yeah, we were more like brothers than cousins – way closer than I was with Tor; there’s only eight months between us so we were in the same year at boarding school, same dorm even. We were inseparable.’
‘So what happened?’ she prompted.
He shook his head and stared into the bottom of his glass. ‘Things were tough at home for him. He was pretty messed up – kept running away from school, acting up. Then his mum died and he didn’t come back after the funeral. I didn’t see him for years after that and when I did, he might as well have been a stranger.’
Alex watched him. His demeanour had changed completely, all his happy-go-luckiness gone. ‘Have you ever tried talking to him about it?’
‘Christ, no. You’ve met the guy! Try talking about feelings with him and see where it gets you. He’d launch me into the loch if I so much as opened my mouth.’
‘So silence is better?’ It was her turn to look sceptical.
He looked up at her, seeing the sympathy shine from her eyes. ‘It’s the preferred option. Lochie can’t help being this way; it’s who he is now. Sometimes, we just have to accept that pain changes people, you know?’
Pain changes people? She nodded, feeling the hairs lift on her arm. Yes, she did know that.
They were both quiet on the journey back and Alex felt that something had shifted between them, almost as though something in her had weakened. That high wall of hers that was usually so hard to scale felt a little lower tonight; ropes could be thrown over the top – and it felt so lovely to just let go a little, just for once, to allow herself to imagine she was like other people, free to play, free to fall.