by Kiley Dunbar
She wasn’t sure how, but her hands were suddenly clasped together in his soft, familiar grip and they’d turned their bodies to face one another.
‘I came to tell you that I loved you and I loved our baby and I’m so sorry it didn’t work out for us. And I miss you. And I miss looking forward to being a daddy, and… I don’t even have anything to remember our baby by—’ At this, he broke down again. Tears streamed down his face.
Beatrice slipped off the chair and onto her knees, wrapping her arms around her husband, crying too, weighed down with his sadness, her hands gripping his clothes. Neither of them heard the rattle of teaspoons inside mugs outside the door and the sound of a tray being set quietly down, and footsteps retreating.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Checking Out
The fumes from the car exhaust billowed into the reception through the open inn door. Rich swung Beatrice’s suitcase into the boot and gave her an assured, gentle smile which she returned before he made his way to the driver’s seat and closed the door. In his hands he held a folded bundle of soft fabric, embroidered with rainbows and clouds, his baby’s blanket.
The passenger door remained open as the car idled and Beatrice, wearing Richard’s jumper from the night before, turned back to the inn. Atholl watched from behind the reception desk.
‘Chilly this morning,’ she said as she approached him, feeling as ridiculous as she had on the day she’d first arrived at the inn. She tugged the sleeves of the jumper down over her hands and added with a shrug, ‘I’d only brought summer clothes.’
Atholl smiled, conjuring all his reserve and formality into his face. She was leaving and they were going to have a decent farewell. ‘Last day of August’s here. September’s on its way,’ he said, and Beatrice scanned his face.
‘I’m sorry about last night,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know he was coming.’
Atholl waved a hand. ‘He looks brighter this morning. Ten years younger, in fact.’
Beatrice paused before saying, ‘He had a lot to get off his chest, I think. Anyway, there was no point in me spending nine hours on trains when he’s driving back to England, is there? I’m going to…’ she pointed a thumb feebly towards Rich’s car without turning away from Atholl or breaking their stare. ‘And I’ve got to clear my things out of the house now it’s sold…’ Her voice shook.
Atholl looked past her to Rich sitting in the car, the windows misted with condensation from the cool, dewy morning. He was nodding his head to the radio, the music escaping the car.
The whole of Port Willow was asleep; even the fishing boats were still moored by the jetty. Beatrice looked through the door into the bar room and saw that Atholl had cleared all the glasses and rearranged all the chairs and tables overnight. The ceilidh decorations were pulled down and crumpled in a black recycling sack on the floor.
‘We put on a good party,’ she said weakly.
‘That we did.’
A long moment passed where they swallowed down words and Beatrice’s hands fidgeted inside her sleeves. When they spoke, their words came out at the same time yet again and they laughed, wry and abashed.
‘You first,’ Atholl insisted.
‘I was going to say I’d better get going. Long drive and everything.’
Atholl didn’t see the little stamp of her foot and the frustrated twitch at her brow as she replayed her weak words. He was too busy lifting a small box from the reception desk drawer. Tentatively he came round to stand in front of her on the threadbare tartan rug near the door.
‘I, uh, I have something for you.’ He surrendered the box to her hands.
It took her a few moments to get it open, her hands shook so much, but when the lid released her eyes widened at the sight of the large, faceted, teardrop-shaped object and the long silver ribbon threaded through a hole at its pointed end. ‘A crystal?’
‘Made here in the Highlands. Crystal’s another thing we crafty Scots are good at.’
Atholl reached inside the box and released the jewel, letting the heavy glass drop to the end of its ribbon where it twirled and swayed. The morning light from the inn door caught it and sent a hundred glittering, dancing rainbows across Atholl’s face and chest and over the walls and ceiling behind him. Beatrice couldn’t conceal the gasp she made.
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘You said you were dreading the winter months and the dark nights. You said you weren’t sure how you could face them. So I got you this. Hang it in your window, wherever ye may be, it’ll catch the winter sunlight and scatter it in rainbows, lighting up even the darkest corners.’
He put the crystal into her palm, seeming to lean forward for a moment, but pulling back again.
Through tears, Beatrice stepped onto her tiptoes and brushed a soft kiss against his cheek. ‘Thank you, Atholl, for this, and everything else.’
The sharp sound of Rich’s car horn made them both recoil and from somewhere upstairs Echo barked. When Beatrice turned to look at Rich he was smiling placidly and still nodding along to the music.
‘I’d better go.’ Agitated, she pointed her thumb again to the door and this time she turned and followed its direction. She looked back once, smiled wanly, still clutching the crystal to her chest, and Atholl watched her walk through the inn door, climb into the car beside her husband and drive away.
* * *
Half an hour later Atholl Fergusson stalked over the headland at Rother Path and clambered down the rocks to the coral beach. He rarely walked this way now, favouring like everyone else the easy path over the meadows, but this morning he needed the distraction of scrambling down a difficult route. He passed the sleepy cows lazily chewing the long grass that lined the precarious path.
‘Atholl!’
He heard his brother calling his name at the same moment he smelled the wood smoke.
Gene and Kitty had spent the night at the But and Ben and were now bundled in blankets and sitting by a camp fire on the coral, and, since there were sausages cooking, Echo had found his way to them too and was wagging his tail in an obedient posture by Kitty’s side.
‘Come and have some tea,’ Gene shouted as Atholl stepped down onto the beach.
Kitty sprung up instantly, craning her neck for a sign of Beatrice following him down the path and understanding instantly that she really had left this morning as planned.
‘Oh, Atholl,’ she said when he reached them by the fire and the two lovers saw his ashen sleeplessness close up.
‘Her husband came for her. They spent the night in her room and left together this morning,’ Atholl filled them in with a dry monotone.
Gene pulled his younger brother to his chest and wrapped long arms around him. Kitty stepped in to the hug too and Atholl let his tears fall silently.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Going Home to Warwickshire
The mountains hugged the twisting road and Beatrice stared out the window, watching the changing Highland landscape. The morning sun was shining through towering white clouds. Last night’s storm had passed and left the cool, damp feeling of the coming autumn.
The tarns and lochs were full and still. Birds she couldn’t name flitted here and there as Rich’s Audi wound along the narrow road, pulling in every few minutes to allow vehicles travelling back down towards Port Willow to pass. The train tracks ran parallel to the road in the far distance and Beatrice watched a single carriage train engine trundling westward.
‘Bloody caravans,’ Rich was saying over the jarring sounds from the radio and between blasts from his car horn directed at the slow-moving convoy of motorhomes in front of them. Rich usually liked to drive fast. Beatrice thought how she’d grown used to a slower pace recently.
‘Can we turn that off, please?’ she said, screwing her eyes up. ‘It’s giving me a headache.’
‘Too much to drink last night, eh? Were you on the whisky and Irn Bru?’ Rich grinned, over pronouncing the words in a daft Scottish accent.
Beatrice thought h
ow she had felt drunk last night, but it wasn’t the Highland punch that had done it. It was the reel music, the dancing and being held in Atholl’s arms – and her imagination playing delightful tricks on her whenever she thought of the night ahead when she’d be alone with him. All scuppered by Rich’s arrival.
She turned the dial and the blaring music died away.
‘I wasn’t drunk. Anyway, you’re the one who passed out snoring on the chaise, not me.’
‘Sorry about that; it had been a long drive and I was knackered, especially after talking for so long. What time do you think we got to sleep?’
Beatrice just shrugged, thinking of how he’d talked and wept until gone three and she’d tried to comfort him by giving him their child’s blanket to keep. It was only right he have something special of his own to remember their baby by. She had the pregnancy test for one, still secreted away in a drawer at home. And she had all the leaflets the midwife had given her, and the image of their tiny peanut at only a few weeks’ gestation, and the letter from the hospital about the twelve-week scan appointment. And there was the yellow bunny rabbit too, and maternity jeans with the elasticated waistband, still with the tags on. All of that was back at home waiting to be packed up in boxes as she moved her belongings from the house she’d shared with Rich for ten years, the house where she’d been happy at first, back when they’d made love in every room and planned a life together, and before the disappointment, frustration and sadness had slowly crept in, chasing out all the passion and excitement without either of them really noticing or knowing that they minded. Her eyes were fixed on the blanket. He could keep it and she wouldn’t miss it too much.
She thought of how, as the sun came up this morning, she’d climbed up the ladder of her towering princess bed for the last time and sat in the dawn light watching her husband sleeping, swinging between extremes of annoyance that he was there snoring loudly, seemingly unburdened and happy to have cleared the air, and gladness that they had talked and shared stories of how excited they had been at the news of her pregnancy and the devastation that had followed so soon after.
Now she was exhausted, and something else, something prickling and wistful, a tug at her heart that wasn’t grief or sadness, something she was struggling to place over the mess of feelings and thoughts circulating in her chest.
Rich reached a hand to her knee and she watched as he gave it a slow squeeze before withdrawing it again.
‘You know… you don’t have to go to Angela’s,’ Rich was saying, casting a quick sidelong glance at his passenger sitting rigidly in her seat. ‘You can stay with me in my apartment, if you’d like?’
Beatrice wished she hadn’t turned off the radio.
Expectantly, he glanced at her again.
‘I don’t think that’s a great idea, do you?’ she replied. ‘Not when I’d have to find my own place and move everything out again, and who knows how long it’ll take me to find somewhere, and…’
‘Maybe… don’t move back out, then? Maybe… come live with me? And, uh… we could try again? Try being us again, I mean. You and me, Beatrice, we’ve been through too much together to throw it all away.’
She felt the softening inside her, a giving way, and she turned to look at him. ‘We have been through a lot together,’ she said softly.
That’s when it caught her eye, a wild flash in the sky, crossing high overhead.
‘What was that?’ said Rich. ‘An eagle?’
‘No, it was an osprey.’ Beatrice leaned into her seatbelt, craning to see the treetop where it had landed.
‘Same thing, isn’t it?’
‘Do you know ospreys pair for life?’
Rich jutted his chin with a frown as if to say that was news to him.
‘They leave their nests and spend the whole winter apart. But they miss each other and always return to the same mate in the same nest in the spring.’
Rich kept his eyes on the road ahead. ‘Oh, come on! Will you just pull over!’ He rammed the heel of his hand into the car horn starting a string of beeps and headlight flashes all along the slow-moving convoy. ‘Holiday drivers! Sorry, Beatrice, what were you saying?’
‘I was talking about true pairs, mated for life?’ She shook her head. ‘Never mind.’ She scanned the sky again looking for the bird, but it was safely in its nest with its mate. With a flash of sudden awakening, she spoke.
‘Rich, stop the car.’
Chapter Thirty
All Change at Port Willow
Atholl reached for the canopy above The Princess and the Pea bed and pulled it away from the bedposts, disturbing the faded green curtains and a decade’s worth of dust. Coughing, he passed the ancient material to Gene who bundled it into boxes as Kitty opened the windows.
‘Are you sure this wants doing today, Atholl? Can’t we have a day of rest to recover from Harvest Home?’ Gene asked.
‘I want to work,’ Atholl replied, making a start on stripping away the lacy duvet covers. ‘We should have done this years ago. Nobody wants to sleep in a fusty old room. We need to modernise a wee bit. Make it nice for families to stay in. And I’m not fit for sitting around drumming my fingers today.’
‘We’re keeping the princess bed though, right?’ Gene asked.
‘Of course.’
Along the bay a train horn sounded and the rails rattled, heralding the arrival of a new crop of crafters to the village.
‘Some of this lot could be my Gaelic students,’ said Kitty, looking out the bedroom window along the waterfront to the station. ‘I trust you’ve got their bookings right this time, Gene?’
Everyone smiled grimly and thought of Beatrice’s arrival ten days ago, but nobody spoke of it.
Gene shuffled out the door with the box of bed hangings saying he’d have them sent to the dry cleaners in Lochalsh and Kitty eyed Atholl from her vantage point by the window where she wiped the condensation from the glass with a cloth and made a show of dusting the ornaments on the sill.
‘Will you be all right?’ she said once Gene had gone.
‘Hmm,’ Atholl concentrated on stripping the silk roses and ribbons from the bed’s ladder, gently pulling at the delicate old wires that hadn’t been untwined since his mother had decorated the room all those years ago. ‘I’ll just have to be. I’ve little right to moan and mourn. Beatrice has a life of her own and a home to sort out… and a husband she clearly isn’t free of. And she has a broken heart for her baby to heal. The grief forced them apart, I think. But now Richard’s come to his senses and they’re on their way back to their home town together. Maybe all she needed was a break here away from her old life to recuperate. And now she’s reunited with her man, making a fresh start. Like Maggie did with her man…’
‘Pfft, that was altogether a different kind of situation. Maggie was out for a fling, for revenge of some kind. Beatrice wasn’t like that at all.’
‘Either way, she was here to escape her old life for a few days, no’ to throw in her lot with a bunch of strangers.’
Kitty turned back to the window, processing Atholl’s words and watching Echo dashing along the pavement down below, barking at the new guests as they wheeled suitcases towards the inn.
‘It’s only right she should have a chance at healing with her own husband,’ Atholl continued. ‘Richard is, after all, the father of her bairn and they must have a long history together that I’ve no right interfering in.’ He settled into the task of hauling the mattresses from the bed and throwing them onto the floor, his brow furrowed with the effort. ‘If I keep myself busy here and at the workshop all winter, seeing through all my plans, all Beattie’s plans, I should say, for the shop and the café and the classes, I’ll survive, I’m sure.’
‘She certainly shook things up around here and for the better. We’ll miss her,’ Kitty was saying, having taken one last look out the window before picking her way slowly towards the door on tiptoe.
Atholl barely noticed her retreating, and he certainly hadn’t seen the sud
den flash of light in her eyes as she stole away to greet the inn guests.
‘Aye, we will miss her. I will. I cannae remember a time before she arrived. It’s as though I was sleeping all these years, letting the inn dwindle, trying to keep Gene from dying away from his grief at losing Lana and letting my own life sit stagnant as though my own dreams meant nothing to me.’ Atholl folded bedsheets against his chest and piled them on the floor, his back to the door Kitty had just crept out of. ‘I never imagined somebody could come into my home and chase away all the obstructions that we’d let lie in our paths all these years, let alone someone so… alive, and so bonny. And yet, I let obstructions get in the way of me and Beattie. If I could go back to the day she arrived, I’d not have let my stubborn pride rule me and I’d have been kinder and not held back when I felt myself falling for her in spite of every rational objection I threw in our path, too afraid to tell her how I felt… Och…’
Atholl’s words stopped in a frustrated cry as he started on the task of pulling the empty drawers from the ancient corner cabinet that had seen far better days. ‘She told me she was dreading the winter, but now that’s how I feel. Even with all the work ahead of me at the But n’ Ben I dinnae ken how I’m supposed to get through it without seeing her, Kitty.’
Met by silence, Atholl looked around the room wondering why Kitty didn’t answer. His eyes fell on the suitcase just inside the doorframe and the woman standing there holding a crystal on a long silver ribbon, the light reflecting off it as it swung in her hand, turning the daylight into rainbows scattering in dancing bands over the worn carpet.
‘Atholl,’ Beatrice said, through smiling lips. ‘I thought we might spend the winter together, here, if you’d like?’
Atholl had crossed the floor and wrapped Beatrice in his arms before she’d finished her sentence. ‘Beattie, you’re here to stay?’