by Debby Holt
Sheila smiled. ‘Tess does love Scotland.’
‘She obviously has excellent taste.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’d better get on. I’m supposed to be in Edinburgh for lunch. It’s been very nice to see you both.’
They watched him run across the square. ‘That was interesting,’ Sheila said. ‘He was very keen to say hello.’ She looked across at Maggie and frowned. ‘You’re quiet. Should I not have mentioned Tess’s plans for the summer?’
‘I’m glad you did,’ Maggie said. ‘It meant that I didn’t have to. If Jamie does call on Tess…’
‘And he will,’ Sheila said. ‘I guarantee it.’
‘If he does,’ Maggie continued, ‘and Tess asks how he knew she’d be there, I can look her in the eye and say that you mentioned it.’
Sheila sighed. ‘Do you ever think it might be a lot simpler if you just talked to Tess about all this?’
Maggie picked up a piece of shortbread. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but I’m rather keen that Tess wants to keep coming up here.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The supermarket was busy today. The schools had broken up and parents were buying extra rations for the long summer holiday. Freya, negotiating her trolley round children and harassed mothers, came to a halt when she reached the magazine aisle. The covers were like siren voices: pick me to find out what Tom Cruise thinks about love; choose me to discover the secrets of a perfect complexion; buy me to learn the ten steps to lasting happiness.
Now her eyes were caught by a children’s magazine. It was the price that shocked her: £4.99 for what was essentially a comic. The cover had a picture of an obviously female mouse since it had a pink tutu, a pink ribbon between its ears and big vertical eyelashes. The magazine promised One hundred stickers inside! It exhorted children to Make a cake-stand! Who would have thought that all these years after The Female Eunuch and a female prime minister, there would be girls’ comics for sale, busily encouraging their small readers to make a cake-stand?
A little girl and her mother turned into the aisle. The mother was in her mid-thirties, Freya judged, an attractive woman with light brown hair caught up in a ponytail. She wore faded blue jeans and a sleeveless floral tunic. Her daughter had neatly plaited blonde hair; she wore red trousers and a matching T-shirt and her eyes went straight to the mouse magazine.
She picked it up and looked up at her mother with pleading eyes. ‘Can I have this?’ she asked. ‘Please, can I have this?’
Her mother gave it a quick glance. ‘No way,’ she said, ‘it’s nearly five pounds!’
‘Please!’ her daughter begged. ‘I want this so much! I really, really want it! I love it!’
‘I’m sorry, Chloe,’ her mother said. ‘We can’t afford it and anyway it’s a lovely day. You don’t want to spend it doing sticking and stuff. We’ll go to the playground later.’
‘I don’t want to go to the playground,’ the little girl cried. ‘I want this!’
The woman stared impassively at her. ‘No, Chloe,’ she said.
‘I hate you, Mummy. I really hate you!’
For a moment her mother glanced at Freya and rolled her eyes. Then she looked down at Chloe and said, ‘The only way I can afford to buy that magazine is if I don’t buy Friday treats this week and if I don’t buy them you’ll have to explain why to Martha when we pick her up from playgroup, and then Martha will be quite justified in wanting to share the magazine with you…’
‘I don’t want to share it with Martha. She always puts the stickers in the wrong places!’
‘Fine. So the choice is clear. You either get to share the magazine with Martha and she gets to put half the stickers wherever she likes, or we don’t buy the magazine and you both get your Friday treats. It’s quite simple. The choice is yours.’
‘That’s so unfair!’
‘No, it isn’t. I’m trying very hard to be fair to both of you.’
‘Oh all right.’ Chloe threw out her arms in a gesture of tragic surrender. ‘We’ll get the Friday treats!’
Freya was impressed. The mother’s tactics had been exemplary: calm, rational arguments followed by careful negotiations. The woman should be in the diplomatic service.
It was only when Freya had loaded her boot with her groceries and was sitting in the car with the key in the ignition that the memory arrived in her mind like the ping of an email. She was in the garden making a den underneath the rhododendron bush. She had swept up the leaves and was serving out tea to Lady Arabella who sat on the ground in her beautiful dress with red roses, her stiff legs splayed out diagonally. Freya passed her a plate with three rhododendron flowers on it. Lady Arabella said they were delicious.
Freya heard her mother calling her and she yelled, ‘I’m over here!’
She saw her mother’s feet first. They were encased in white sandals and her toes were painted with gold nail varnish. ‘Freya,’ she said, ‘it’s time for your bath.’
‘Lady Arabella and I are having tea,’ Freya said. ‘You can join us if you like.’
Her mother didn’t want to join her. Her mother wanted her to have a bath right away and when Freya demurred she became very cross and told her to stop being naughty. And then Freya got cross and said, ‘I hate you! I want Daddy to bath me!’
And then her mother did something quite extraordinary. She burst into tears and ran away and Freya sat frozen and scared and didn’t dare move. A little while later her father came out to collect her and he bathed her and put her to bed. Later still, Freya heard her mother come into her bedroom. Freya pretended to be asleep and when her mother kissed her cheek she could feel the salty tears on her skin. When Freya’s mother left the room, all that was left of her was her rose-scented perfume hanging in the air.
And the next morning, she had gone. Her father told her she’d left them, it was just the two of them now and they’d never see or mention her again. And Freya had nodded and said nothing because she knew it was her fault they were on their own.
Freya blinked and, as she did so, saw the mother come out of the supermarket, a basket in one hand and her daughter’s hand in the other. The little girl was skipping. The mouse magazine was clearly forgotten.
Stepping down from her coach after a long, weary day of travel, Tess sat waiting for Grandma in the centre of Melrose. Two boys – and they were boys, they had to be a good five years younger than her – came up and started chatting to her. Tess was impressed by their confidence. One of them had acne and the other had a very unpleasant stye by his left eye. But they seemed quite undaunted by their physical blemishes and began firing questions in fast Scottish voices that were difficult to understand. She was relieved when Grandma showed up in her car.
It was only a ten-minute journey to the Commune by car and at least half of that time was spent in an argument as to whether Tess should pay rent during her stay.
Grandma was adamant. ‘Our house has its rules and one is that we share our guests. If any of them are irksome to at least three of the residents, then we ask them to go.’
‘I bet that’s never happened,’ Tess said. ‘I can’t imagine you standing by the door, demanding someone leaves.’
‘It happened a few months ago when Robert’s brother, Angus, came to stay. He is one of those men who are so sure they know the answer to everything that you almost believe they do but the longer you talk to them – or rather the longer they talk to you – you know that they don’t. And the reason why Angus knows so little is because he is so keen to air his own views that he never listens to those of anyone else. We could cope with that most of the time, but then we caught him upsetting Linda, telling her she should make more of an effort to exercise her brain. You may recall that Linda has trouble remembering things these days and she’s sensitive about that. So we called a special meeting and the first resident to call for the ejection of Angus was his brother.’
‘How did you tell him to leave?’
‘Robert told him we didn’t like the way he treated Linda and he t
ried to dig his heels in and insist that he’d been cruel-to-be-kind which is always such a dubious argument, I think. And then Sheila told him he had to go as her children were coming up for her seventieth birthday and there would be no room for other guests. That put Sheila in a good mood for weeks because Angus never even questioned the fact that she was nearly seventy when in fact she is fully six months older than I am.’ Grandma turned into the drive of the Commune. ‘Now here we are!’
‘Grandma,’ Tess said. ‘Before we go in, can I point out I’m up here for well over a month? I can’t – I really can’t – stay here so long without making some financial contribution.’
Grandma turned off the engine and fixed Tess with steely eyes. ‘When we settled here, my main worry was that we would see less of our children and grandchildren. So it is an undiluted joy to have you staying here. It only becomes diluted when you go on about paying rent. Do you understand?’
Tess’s father had always been easy-going where his children were concerned. Just occasionally, he would look at them in a way that made them understand there was a line beyond which they could not cross. Grandma had that same look now.
On Monday, Tess borrowed a bicycle from the Commune and set off to work. If she were in London, she would be boarding an overcrowded bus now, trying to find an empty seat and avoid breathing in other people’s germs and stale sweat. Instead, she was cycling along roads lined by trees, with the company of a buzzard soaring in the sky above her. She’d been given careful instructions by Dr Knox, which were hardly necessary. All she had to do once she joined the main road was cycle in the direction of Peebles until she came to Gasterlethen.
It turned out to be an odd sort of place. Perhaps early American frontier towns had been like this. There was a wide main street, edged on either side by sober grey terraced housing interspersed with the odd shop. It possessed an equally sober church, a grim-looking primary school and very little else. The place seemed to be deserted apart from two elderly men coming out of the newsagent who gazed open-mouthed at her as she cycled past.
It was not difficult to find Mrs Talbot’s shop. It had a bright red door, its glass window frames almost obliterated by posters advertising various entertainments: a production of Oklahoma! in Peebles, a meeting of the Horticultural Association in Galashiels and an excursion to Scotland’s oldest private house in Traquair. Presumably, interesting events and places were few and far between in Gasterlethen.
Mrs Talbot’s shop window had a couple of mannequins who looked like they’d been modelled on the young Doris Day. Certainly they wore clothes that might appeal to the old Doris Day: well-cut slacks, sensible skirts and cashmere twinsets. Scattered around their feet were slim packs of fifteen denier stockings. Tess had no idea that women still wore them and wondered if this was an example of the North/South divide. She must ask Grandma.
She parked her bicycle, as instructed, in a little courtyard behind the shop. She took off her mac and put it over the bicycle while she tried to tie her hair back, a task that took some patience since her curls had become more Medusa-like than ever during the ride from the Commune. She wore the black skirt and white shirt she had always worn when working at the Italian restaurant in London and she smoothed them into shape, collected her mac and went round to the front of the shop.
Mrs Talbot was a small, thin, bird-like woman with grey hair and a soft Scottish voice that rose and fell along with the hand gestures that accompanied it. She had just made a pot of tea, and after checking Tess’s particular requirements – milk and no sugar – disappeared behind a brown door, giving Tess a chance to inspect the shop.
The wall to the left of the high counter was covered in shelves on which the knitwear was stacked by colour. On the other side, clothes rails on castors were packed with skirts and trousers. There was a small stiff armchair by the changing room which looked hideously uncomfortable. Tess noted with pleasure the high counter with the burnished wooden surface. There was a pleasing smell of wax polish about the place and the wine-coloured carpet had been newly vacuumed.
Mrs Talbot came back with a tray on which sat two cups and saucers. She directed Tess to one of the two stools behind the counter and set the tray of tea in front of her, before pulling out the second stool for herself.
‘So,’ she said, ‘Dr Knox speaks very highly of you and that’s more than good enough for me. I should tell you that your employment is a trial, not for you, of course – at least, I’m sure I hope it isn’t – but it is a trial for me. My husband retired a year ago and wants to see more of me, which is very nice, but I have to tell you, I’m not completely convinced that I would like to spend more time with him. Don’t get me wrong; he’s a very good man. But I’ve had this shop for nearly nineteen years and I said to Archie – Archie’s my husband – “Archie,” I said, “I just can’t hand it over and say goodbye, I need to feel the water before taking the plunge,” and that’s why you’re here, Tess. When Doctor Knox told me about you, I thought you would be just what I need and I shall endeavour to stay out of your way and see if I like spending more time at home. As regards our customers, Tess, I have always believed my job is to be a peaceful presence amongst the bustle of everyday life. I am ready to offer advice if asked, but otherwise I sit and I smile and I do not push myself forward. Quiet discretion is what I do, Tess, quiet discretion. Do you have any questions before I continue?’
‘Well, I did wonder,’ Tess said with a fleeting glance at the empty street, ‘how busy you are.’
‘You would be surprised,’ Mrs Talbot told her, ‘how many people beat a path to this door. We have quite a few foreigners stopping off here and I always like to point out that unlike certain neighbouring factory shops, the standard of our cashmere is second to none.’ She stopped to take a sip of her tea. ‘Now what I suggest is that, after our tea, I show you the ropes as it were and then I’ll leave you on your own. If you have any problems, you can reach me at home and if, by any chance, you can’t reach me you can always rely on Mr McTavish at the butcher’s three doors away.’
Within the next half-hour Tess learnt how to use the till and record sales, how to fold jumpers and lock up the shop. When Mrs Talbot left, it was with visible reluctance and only after she extracted a promise from Tess to ring her in event of even the slightest difficulty.
The next two hours weren’t difficult at all. Tess brought out her much fingered copy of Sir Walter Scott’s journal and marvelled once more at his stoicism and good sense. Here he was in 1827, mourning the death of his wife and crippled by debts he was determined to pay back: ‘Some things of the black dog still hanging about me but I will shake him off. I generally affect good spirits in company of my family whether I am enjoying them or not. It is too severe to sadden the harmless mirth of others by suffering your own causeless melancholy to be seen. And this species of exertion is like virtue its own reward for the good spirits which are at first simulated become at length real.’
She could imagine him greeting his many illustrious visitors, chatting to his daughter or his gamekeeper, all the time concealing the fact that his health and his business were falling apart. What a man he was!
At midday Tess had her first customer of the day, a middle-aged woman in a deerstalker hat and brown corduroy trousers. She bought two pairs of stockings and seemed most put out that Tess had replaced Mrs Talbot. Mrs Talbot rang shortly after to check on Tess’s progress and Tess described the customer.
‘That’ll be Edna Murdoch,’ Mrs Talbot told her. ‘She buys the stockings for her mother.’
‘She was not at all happy that you weren’t here,’ Tess confessed.
‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ Mrs Talbot said, but she was obviously pleased.
At two, an American couple came in and within twenty minutes had bought a total of eight cashmere jerseys and three silk scarves. Tess was thrilled, and when Mrs Talbot rang at three, could barely contain her excitement.
‘Didn’t I tell you?’ Mrs Talbot said. ‘You never
know who’ll come popping by.’
Mrs Talbot was right. Half an hour later, Tess raised her head at the sound of the bell and instantly recognised the young man with pale skin and dark black hair. He appeared not to notice her, focusing with great concentration on the packets of stockings in the window. He wore navy jeans and a navy blue jersey over a white T-shirt, all of which emphasised the slightness of his build. Great-aunt Katherine would probably say that he needed feeding up. Though actually, Tess thought, remembering her strictures on the Lockhart family, she would probably tell Tess to have nothing to do with him. The cuffs of his jersey were beginning to unravel. Tess cleared her throat and said, ‘Hello there!’
He raised his eyes, took one of the stocking packets and went over to the counter. ‘You’re here in Scotland!’ he said.
She nodded. ‘I am. Do you want to buy those?’
He nodded. ‘They’re for my mother,’ he said. ‘So you are here and you haven’t rung me. I gave you my card.’
She had forgotten this about him, the disparity between what he said and the way he said it. His voice was soft and gentle, there were no expressive gestures and yet his words expressed an outraged indignation that made her want to laugh.
She opened the till and took out his change. ‘I’ve only been in Scotland a couple of days. To be fair, it’s not easy to ring a man who once randomly suggested that I ring him some time.’
‘I don’t remember making a random suggestion.’
‘You might have forgotten me and then…’
‘I couldn’t forget you even if I wanted to. Thanks to you, Rollo began his first shift on Thursday and dropped a tray of glasses within twenty minutes.’
‘You did give him a job. I’m so glad.’
‘Well, that’s all right then.’
She folded her arms and stared back at him. ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, you seem very… very truculent.’
‘I don’t mind at all. I like the word truculent. Truculent suits my mood very well. Do you still want to visit my castle?’