“For heaven’s sakes, I’m not being kind! Don’t demean yourself! I’m being ‘kind’ when I go to visit my granny in her sheltered accommodation in Welwyn Garden City. I’m being ‘kind’ when I scratch the tummy of the smelly old spaniel that my parents dote on, even though I’d rather guide it out of the house with a boot. You’ve got a long way to go before I start being kind to you.”
Jackie said nothing and looked away.
Stephen drained his glass. “I can take a hint.” He moved close to Jackie, and placing his hands on her shoulders, planted a loud, brotherly kiss on her forehead. She closed her eyes and Stephen could sense by the way her head tilted back that she would probably be a willing recipient for something a little more intimate. But he left it there. If anyone was to make the first move, it had to be her. He turned and walked across to the door and opened it. “Use your days here well, Jackie. While you’re happy and relaxed, which I know you are, just try to work out exactly what it is that you want to do. You’re a beautiful, clever woman with a wonderful sense of humour, and I love being with you—as would any man. So please don’t spend the rest of your life in discontent and bitterness. It would be such a waste.”
Jackie stood where he had left her, her arms crossed as she looked down at the floor and traced the point of her shoe around the pattern of the carpet.
“I’ll give you a call, say about nine o’clock, and we can go out to get something to eat, all right?” Jackie seemed not to have heard him. “All right?” he repeated.
She looked up at him and nodded.
Closing the door behind him, Stephen thrust his hands deep into his pockets. Dammit, maybe he had pushed it too far at the end. There was no way of knowing whether her silence was out of contempt for his forthrightness, or whether she was already considering what he had said. He felt a momentary frisson of guilt, knowing that he had been playing an uncompromising game with her own deep vulnerability. He let out a sigh and started off along the corridor towards the lift. He pressed the button and watched as the lift lumbered its way down towards him. As it pinged to a halt, he heard a door open at the end of the corridor.
“Stephen?”
Jackie stood in the open doorway, her arms still crossed, and he felt the butterflies rise once more in his stomach when he noticed that it enhanced the deep cleft of her breasts into which he had played the reflected light of his cufflink days before.
“Yes?”
She did not reply immediately, but raked back her blond hair with her fingers.
“You don’t need to go yet.”
She turned and walked back into her room, leaving the door open and ready for him.
11
During the past twenty years, the life of a banker had taken Dan to many far corners of the world. He liked to think of himself as a seasoned traveler, flying in the relative comfort of business class to America and Europe, to Russia and Australia, to the Middle East and the Far East. Over the years, he had worked out how to combat jetlag so that he was able to get off a plane and go straight into a meeting without feeling that his brain was swimming in syrup. But never, in all the time that he had been circumnavigating the globe, had he experienced quite such an uncomfortable journey as the one that he was undertaking now, as the overnight sleeper from Euston rocked and juddered its way northwards towards Scotland.
By three o’clock in the morning, he had all but given up trying to get any sleep. The coarse linen sheet and meagre woollen blanket that were his allotted coverings for the night seemed to be drawn magnetically towards the floor, and he had had to get up at least five times (twice thumping his head on the extremely hard wooden edging of the upper bunk) to try to work out yet another way of getting the bloody things to stay on his bed. If the stifling heat in the compartment had been consistent, then he wouldn’t have bothered, but every now and again the heating system would go into reverse thrust and the temperature would drop sharply to a level that would render a sealskin-clad Eskimo incapacitated with frostbite.
His traveling companion, a rotund tractor salesman from some market town just outside Glasgow, was having no such problems in sleeping. He had engaged Dan in lively conversation from the moment that he had entered their shoebox-sized compartment and Dan had understood absolutely nothing of the guttural soliloquy that had been imparted to him. It had been even more disconcerting when the man had started to undress himself in an area that only allowed for one foot to come into contact with the floor at any one time. Dan had wedged himself into the corner of his bunk, watching in trepidation as the man’s huge, boxer-shorted backside came ever closer to him. It reminded him too much of a film in which an unfortunate Mafia victim came to a grisly end inside a giant hydraulic scrap metal press. The man had then heaved himself up the ladder to his bunk (Dan had averted his eyes at that point as the boxer shorts left nothing to the imagination), turned off his light, thumped his pillow twice, broke wind loudly, and immediately fell into a deep and sonorous sleep.
Having eventually sorted out his cover problem by wrapping both sheet and blanket tightly around him, Dan had contorted himself back onto the bunk and eventually fallen into a fitful sleep. It seemed like only ten minutes before there was a sharp rap at the door. The tractor salesman slept peacefully on, so it was left to Dan to reach up and open the door to the attendant.
“Glasgow in half an hour,” the thin, waistcoated man said, his breath staled by cigarettes, as he thrust a small tea tray into Dan’s hand.
“It’s not for—”
But the attendant was obviously working to a tight schedule because he was already banging on the next door before Dan could finish his dozy remonstration.
There could be few more awkward situations in life than to be starved of sleep, then handed a tray that contained boiling hot tea whilst lying prostrate on the bottom of two shelves and wrapped in swaddling clothes. Fixing his sandpapered eyes on the level of the tray, Dan first tried sitting up, but his upper body had only reached an angle of forty-five degrees before his head came into contact with the top bunk. He then tried lifting his legs but only managed to hold the position of a bent banana for a few seconds. After a moment’s intensive thought, he decided to attempt a rolling action, but again was thwarted when the teapot slid precariously to the edge of the tray. It was only that near disaster that shot a bolt of adrenaline into his befuddled mind and enabled him to engage a small measure of lateral thought. He found beside him the small shelf that was specifically designed for the purpose of holding the tray, and having rid himself of the element of danger, he was able to unravel himself from his bedclothes and stand up.
Dan gave the man a friendly shove. “Excuse me, but it’s time for you to get up.”
The tractor salesman grunted and somehow managed to turn his overweight body around on the plank-sized bunk. Had Dan not ducked to retrieve the tray at that precise moment, he would probably have been knocked senseless because the man’s arm flailed out across the open floor space.
“Whassamatter?”
That was when Dan lost his cool. He stood on the bottom rung of the ladder, unclipped the shelf above the man’s head, and thrust the tray upon it. “It’s time for you to get your fat arse out of that bed, mate. The train will be stopping in Glasgow in five minutes.”
The man woke immediately and stared wide-eyed at Dan. “All right, laddie. Keep your hair on,” he whined defensively.
Those were the last words that passed between them. Dan lay on his bunk, head turned towards the wall, as he listened to the man hurriedly wheeze his way through his dressing routine. He then thumped his suitcase off the luggage shelf, opened the door, and was gone. Dan reckoned that it was a good twenty minutes before the train eventually stopped in Glasgow, and with a satisfied grin on his face, he fell into a deep sleep.
“Fort William in half an hour.”
Dan had been ready for the attendant this time. He had swung his legs off the bed and stood up as the door was opened so that when he received the tray, he was able to place
it straightaway onto the tractor salesman’s bunk. He closed the door and stretched out his cramped limbs, then turning around, flipped up the blind on the window. He blinked twice. “Bloody hell!”
The sky was the colour of dirty washing-up water and the dark hills were only just visible through a curtain of sleety rain. There didn’t appear to be any sign of life forms. No roads, no houses, no animals. Nothing. It was a complete wilderness. This train was taking him to the ends of the world. For at least five minutes, he kept looking out the window, hoping, almost praying that he could find solace in seeing one twinkling light, one smoking fire, one moving car. But all that he witnessed were the hills getting higher and the day getting darker. Just before he turned away, he did manage to spot a huddle of sheep, crammed up tight together in the shelter of a stone wall, and he thought that their expressions of abject misery must have matched his own.
“You girls should all move to London,” he muttered to himself as he turned away from the window. He let out a short, manic laugh. God, he thought, is this what happens when you come up to Scotland? You start talking to sheep?
Dan was quite heartened, yet somewhat amazed when at least thirty other fellow passengers disembarked from the train at Fort William. He also noticed that every one of them was much better equipped than he for the current weather. A jolly group of climbers, dressed in hooded anoraks and breeches and gaudy coloured socks, strode towards him along the platform, making light of their weighty rucksacks, and even less of the freezing sleet that blew about the unsheltered station. As they passed by, they shot amused smiles at each other as they saw Dan struggle with already numbed fingers to do up the zip of his trendy but totally inadequate leather bomber jacket. He was glad that they weren’t around to witness his next move. He started out towards the station exit, with head bowed against the icy blast, and immediately stepped into a puddle that was deep enough to fill one of his Gucci loafers with congealed water. It was at that point that he almost felt like crying with frustration and misery. He stood on the platform, holdall in hand and leather shoulders sagging, wondering to himself what the hell he was doing there and wishing that he was back in the warm, familiar surroundings of good old Clapham.
He found a moderately sheltered bench in the lee of the ticket office and there took off his shoe and poured a rivulet of slush from its soft tan interior. He dried it out as best he could and then changed into his only spare pair of socks. By the time that he had finished, he was the only person on the platform, save for one extraordinary figure that stood by the exit, looking in his direction. He or she was dressed in a pair of black Wellington boots and a long red anorak with an attached hood, the drawstrings of which were pulled so tight about the face that it looked as if all necessary sensory functions were carried out by means of one rather large, red nose. Dan picked up his holdall and walked along the deserted platform towards the figure, and it was then that he was suddenly struck by its uncanny resemblance to the murderous Venetian dwarf in the film Don’t Look Now.
“Are you Dan Porter?” a voice mumbled deep within the hood.
“Yes.”
“Come on quickly, then. The van’s outside.”
There were no introductions, no pleasantries passed on how he had fared on the journey, no lighthearted apology for the state of the weather. At that precise moment, he almost felt like walking in completely the opposite direction to the obtuse, red-coated figure, seeking out a good hostelry, and staying there until such time as he could crawl, pissed out of his tiny mind, back onto the train for London.
He found consolation in the fact that the van was a brand-new Ford Transit with the word Vagabonds written in a wavy, multicoloured line along its side. At least that reassured him that he wasn’t going to be taken off to some dank hovel on a remote hillside and tortuously cut into little pieces with a blunt bread knife. He waited at the side of the passenger door while the figure got into the driver’s side and reached over to unlock it for him. He climbed in and felt immediately the comforting warmth of its interior. The engine was started and then the figure undid the drawstrings of the hood and pushed it back. For the first time, Dan was assured that his driver was a woman, and as she ruffled her spiky brown hair, he recognized her features from the photograph in Battersea Gran’s magazine.
She turned to him, a smile on her bright, scrubbed face. “Hullo, Dan. I’m Katie Trenchard,” she said, holding out a hand. “The weather’s so bad that I thought I’d come to meet you rather than wait for your telephone call.”
“Pleased to meet you,” he replied. Shaking her hand was like gripping an icicle.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t introduce myself earlier. You just looked so cold and miserable standing on the platform that I thought it would be best to get you into the heat before we started having any conversation. Anyway, how was your journey?”
“Interesting.”
“Let me guess. You got no sleep, the heating blew hot and cold, and you shared your compartment with someone who snored.”
Dan was amazed. “That’s a bit too accurate. You didn’t arrange it, by any chance, did you?”
Katie laughed. “No. It’s just par for the course. The secret is to slip a tenner into the attendant’s hand before you set off. They’re usually very good at juggling around with the berths.”
“Thanks for the tip. I’ll make sure I do that on the way home.”
Katie revved up the engine, engaged gear, and moved off towards the exit of the station car park. “Are you returning to London tonight?”
“Probably. I left the return open in case I needed more time up here.” As they turned out onto the street, he looked out of the window at the people scurrying from shop to shop with their umbrellas angled in protection against the driving sleet. He let out a rueful laugh. “But I think that I’ll try to get back there as soon as I can.”
“So you don’t think much of our wonderful weather, then?” Katie asked, her voice lilting with amusement.
“I can’t believe that there could be such a change over five hundred miles. It was like summer when I left London last night. Is September always like this up here?”
“No, not at all. This is just a bit of a freak. The forecast is quite good for tomorrow.” She glanced across at him. “So if you do stick around for another day, you won’t be needing to invest in an unglamorous article like my anorak.”
Dan looked down at his attire. The sodden leather jacket was now beginning to steam in the heat of the van and his damp jeans felt warm against his skin. Only his foot inside its greasy loafer refused to give any indication that it was thawing out. “I had no idea what to expect,” he said quietly.
“Obviously not,” Katie laughed.
Dan bit at his lip. “Okay, point taken.”
“Sorry. I shouldn’t laugh. It was just that you did look quite out of place on the platform back there.”
“Just as you would have done if you had arrived at Euston with nothing but your nose revealed to the world.”
“Maybe. I could have been taken for some eccentric Muslim woman, though.”
Katie accelerated the van towards a set of traffic lights that had just changed from green to amber. She thought about crossing them, but at the last moment slammed her foot on the brakes, skidding the van to a halt. Dan felt a crashing blow on the back of his head and a millisecond later found himself hemmed in by long rolls of brightly coloured fabric.
“Heavens, are you all right?” Katie asked with concern as she pushed back the rolls into the rear of the van. “I hadn’t realized that they were still there. They should have been taken into the factory last night.”
Dan decided against passing comment about how his head felt. The dull thumping simply blended itself into his overall feeling of sheer discomfort. “Are we going there now?”
“Yes. It’s on a small industrial estate just outside town. It’s not very far away.”
Ten minutes later, they crossed over an unmanned level crossing and drove thro
ugh a set of gates beside which stood a large white sign announcing that they were entering the Cruach Industrial Estate. The road weaved through a line of long, low prefabricated units, the majority of which had untidy stacks of fish boxes and pallets outside their large blue doors. These were slid closed against the bite of the wind blowing in across the choppy waters of the sea loch, on the exposed shores of which the industrial estate was situated.
Katie pulled the van to a halt outside an unmarked building and switched off the engine. “This is it then. Home to my empire.”
“Looks good,” Dan replied, trying to sound enthusiastic as he surveyed the rusting pillars that supported the ineffectual porch above the glass-paneled entrance door, its paintwork weathered and peeling.
“Come on, then. We’ll go inside and I’ll make you a warming cup of coffee.” She picked up a large canvas bag from the floor of the van and opened the door. She stopped halfway out and turned to him. “Heavens, it’s just occurred to me that you’ve probably not had anything to eat. Would you like me to get you a bacon sandwich?”
“That would be great—if it’s not too much bother.”
“Not at all. I’ll get Hilary to go round to the café for one.”
As soon as Dan opened the door of the van, his nostrils were invaded by the overpowering smell of fish. Even though the wind was blowing in fresh across the loch, the odour had an irrepressible permanence about it as if it were deep-set into the fabric of the buildings and exuded through every warped crevice. Katie led Dan through the entrance door and into an open-plan work area, and immediately he could hear the hum of sewing machines from beyond the room. He spied, through the glass panel of an adjoining door, a line of women sitting intently at work.
The room in which he was standing was cluttered but businesslike with multipinned progress charts and Vagabond photographs lining every wall. The reception desk was manned by a young girl who had smiled broadly at him as he entered. Behind her, two women clicked away on the keyboards of their computers, talking as they did into hands-free mouthpieces. He heard one say in a lilting, friendly voice, “Good morrrning! Vagabonds. This is Maggie speaking. How can I help you?”
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