A Risk Worth Taking

by Robin Pilcher

  Millie wiped the sleeve of her T-shirt across her dripping nose as she shook her head. “Not here. School. We hate school so much, Dad. We just didn’t want to go back, and that’s why . . .” She didn’t finish, but once more burst into tears, her action being copied to a T by her younger sister.

  Dan was glad of the unscheduled break in their conversation. He suddenly realized they had been talking at cross-purposes. He pulled out a chair from the table and sat down. “Why did you not tell me?” he asked, concerned.

  Millie instantly stopped crying and turned to face him with an expression of fury. “What do you mean? We are always telling you, Dad, but you never, ever listen. You just go on about making the best of things and that it will only be for another few years of our lives. But what you don’t understand, Dad, is that every day at the place is like another year.”

  Dan covered his mouth with his hand. His misunderstanding of the situation went much deeper than just getting the wrong end of the stick during their recent talk. They were not the ones who were at fault here. It was he. He had been stupid, blind, and pigheaded enough to think that he could just mess around with his daughters’ lives. If he had gone out and found himself a job, as Jackie had always been telling him to do, then this would never have happened. But he had to have his principles, didn’t he? He had to have his own way. All that business about “being around for a family who needed him.” It was all a load of crap. They hadn’t needed him around. They had needed him working.

  He leaned forward in his chair and sat pressing the nails of his thumbs together, not wishing to look up at his daughters’ faces. “It really is that bad, is it?”

  “Yes, Dad, it is,” Millie said quietly. “My work is really suffering, and I know that Nina isn’t being given a chance at all. And we just have no friends there, even though we’ve tried hard to make them.”

  Dan let out a long sigh and scratched his fingers at the back of his head. “This is just so stupid.”

  Millie’s shoulders slumped despondently. “I knew that’s all you would say.”

  “No, I didn’t mean it that way. I’m going to send you both back to Alleyn’s.”

  Millie looked up and glanced across at her sister. “But you can’t. It would mean . . .”

  Dan shook his head. “No. There’s no alternative. You’re going back to Alleyn’s. I have no right to make your lives such a misery. If I wanted to give up work, that was my decision. If you wanted to stay on at Alleyn’s, then that should have been yours. I should never have taken that privilege away from you.” He laid his hands, palm-down, on the table. “I’ll speak to your mother when she gets back from Italy, or wherever she is, and tell her what we’re going to do, all right?”

  “But, Dad,” Nina said, her blue eyes taking on a brightness that he hadn’t seen for ages, “how can we afford it?”

  “That is not, and never again will be, your problem, Ni. As soon as I finish up here with Seascape, I’ll come back down to London and get a job. Maybe not in the City, but I’ll make sure that it pays enough to keep you both at Alleyn’s for as long as you need to be there. But one thing I ask is that you never go off and do something as stupid as that ever again.”

  The two girls nodded solemnly, and then slid off their chairs and put their arms around his shoulders. “Thanks, Dad,” Millie said, pressing her wet cheek against his neck. “You’re the best.”

  Dan let out a self-deprecating scoff. “No, Millie, I certainly wouldn’t describe myself as that.”

  “Dad?” Nina said from the other side.

  “Yes, Ni?”

  “I think I’m going to be sick again.”

  22

  Josh was fairly disgruntled with Dan when he heard the outcome of the stern lecture that he had given his sisters. He had always had the notion that Millie and Nina could twist their father around their little fingers, and here was the proof. If he had done exactly as they had and gone off and got drunk to prove that he hated his school, the reaction from his father would have been totally different. Dan had gone soft. He had totally capitulated to them.

  However, despite Josh’s opinion on the worth of the talk, it seemed to have had an immediate effect on Millie. That evening, of her own volition, she went into Josh’s bedroom where she spent over an hour talking with him behind closed doors. Finally, they appeared, white-faced but united, a new understanding having been forged between them. And when the two girls left on the train to London the following evening, after a successfully riotous family day-out to Mallaig, when hands had waved like octopus tentacles out of the open-topped Saab, the fondest farewell on the platform at Fort William Station was between the two eldest siblings.

  After they had left, Dan tried to ring Jackie on her mobile to tell her about his plans to send the girls back to Alleyn’s, but once more he found himself being patched through to her voicemail service. He felt that what he wanted to say to his wife was too long for a text, so while Josh headed off to meet up with Maria José, he went straight to the Seascape office to send her an e-mail, asking Josh to pick him up in an hour’s time.

  It took him time to write the e-mail. He had always found it difficult to admit that he was wrong about anything, let alone his own family, and he had never been that eloquent with the written word. He wasn’t entirely content with the final draft, but nevertheless sent it off to Jackie’s home e-mail address, hoping that she would get to read it before she went to meet the girls the following morning.

  He still had twenty minutes to kill before Josh was due to come to pick him up, so he went onto the Internet and opened up his own mail server to see if he had any unread e-mails. There were two. The first was from Nick Jessop, giving him the latest news on how he was surviving in his new job with Broughton’s.

  “Things are not the same, Dan,” he wrote. “Everything has changed since 9/11. The fun seems to have gone out of the City. I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t have been better just trying to get that idea of the child’s car seat off the ground. At least if I had done that, I’d have been able to spend more time with Tarquin.”

  The rest of the e-mail was a running commentary on the successes of Chelsea Football Club that season. Dan wrote only a few words in reply.

  “Stick to what you’re doing. Tarquin will be the winner in the long run. Anyway, you would only be spending time with him in hospital if you went ahead with that damned car seat! Turning into a wild Scotsman up here. You won’t be able to understand a word I say when I get back! Dan.”

  The other e-mail was from Debbie Leishman in New York.

  “Dear Dan,” she wrote. “I really don’t know how I can thank you for continuing to be such a wonderful friend. Without your support, I could never have afforded to stay off work so long with the baby. He continues to do well, and very soon I shall send you a real long update on how he is progressing and a photograph so that you can see for yourself just how like his daddy he is turning out to be. I still have wonderful memories of that weekend we had up in Maine. Oh, that we could wind back the clock and make it all happen over again. With my love, as always, Debbie.” He wrote back, “Dear Debbie, thanks for your e-mail. Don’t give the money another thought. I’m so glad that the baby’s doing well. I’ll look forward to getting the progress report and the photograph. Remember to get in touch whenever you want. With love, Dan.”

  The next morning, when he arrived at the Trenchards’ house to pick up the Mercedes, he found a note stuck in behind the driver’s windscreen wiper. It was from Katie, asking him to come into the kitchen before he left.

  She rose from her customary seat in the window as he entered and pushed her arms high above her head in a long stretch. “Morning, Dan. You got my note, then.”

  The strain of Patrick’s “bad patch” over the past few weeks had taken its toll on his wife. Her face no longer glowed with rustic health but had become pale with fatigue and worry. Yet, in a strange way, the change seemed to accentuate her attractiveness, and the vulnerability that w
as now displayed in one usually so capable brought out an ethereal beauty in her.

  “Everything all right?” Dan asked.

  “Fine. Did you get the girls onto the train all right?”

  “Yes. They went off a great deal happier than when I first picked them up, at any rate.”

  “Maybe things needed to reach an all-time low before they got better.”

  “I think you’re right. Talking of which, how’s Patrick?”

  Katie let out a laugh of frustration and shook her head. “He wants to go with you this morning.”

  “Really? Is he up to it?”

  “He thinks he is, and try arguing against that.”

  “Do you want me to have a word with him?”

  The smile slipped from Katie’s face. “No, it would be no use.” She closed her eyes. “If he wants to go on like that, I can’t stop . . .” She faltered and Dan watched as she gulped to control her emotions. A large tear broke free from each of her tightly closed eyes.

  “Hey, come on. It’s all right.” He moved quickly over to her and put his arms around her. She responded immediately, pressing her face against his chest and holding hard to him. “He’ll be fine, Katie. I won’t let him overdo it.”

  “I just don’t know what I would do if something happened to him.”

  “I’ll take care of him.”

  Katie pushed herself away from his hold. “What can you do that I haven’t done already?” she snapped at him.

  Dan grimaced. “Look, what I meant was . . .”

  Katie sat down on the edge of the window seat and covered her face with her hands. “I know what you meant. I’m sorry, Dan. It’s just that I can’t control him. I’ve tried, but his will to keep going is just too strong.”

  “In that case,” Dan said quietly, “maybe you just have to let him keep going.”

  Katie looked up at him and smiled bravely. “I know. I’m only thinking of myself, aren’t I?”

  “No, you’re not. You’re being wonderful. I don’t know how the hell you cope.”

  “Kate!” Patrick’s voice boomed along the passageway from the small downstairs bedroom. “Is Dan here yet?”

  “Yes, he is,” Katie called out. She walked across to the sideboard and took a wodge of kitchen towel from the roll and blew her nose. “He’s just coming.”

  “Well, tell him to come and give me a hand, otherwise we’ll be late.”

  Katie shrugged her shoulders. “Well, as you say, I’d better just let him keep going.”

  Putting his hand on her arm, Dan gave it a quick, reassuring squeeze before leaving the kitchen and heading along the passageway to Patrick’s bedroom.

  “Did I ever tell you about the time I bought prawns from Newfoundland?” Patrick asked as they drove past the dark silhouette of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s statue at Glenfinnan.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “What a gas. The most expensive experiment I ever tried, but by God, it was worth doing just for the thrill of it all.”

  “What happened?”

  “I bought live prawns and chartered a plane to fly them overnight back to London. I wanted to see if I could get them into Billingsgate the next morning still crawling in their boxes.”

  “And did you succeed?”

  Patrick shot him a challenging look. “Yes, of course I did.”

  “But it wasn’t cost-effective.”

  “No, it certainly wasn’t. I thought that I’d be allowed to travel with the prawns in the cargo plane, but they wouldn’t let me.”

  “So how did you get back?”

  “Well, I wanted to arrive in the UK before the cargo, so I did the only thing I could do. I caught a flight to New York, then took Concorde.”

  Dan glanced at him and laughed. “And that’s where the profit went.”

  Patrick smiled. “Sort of.”

  Dan signalled to overtake a lorry. “You are bloody mad, Patrick,” he said as he accelerated past it.

  “I’d give any part of my useless body to do it all over again, though.”

  “What? Fly live prawns from Newfoundland?”

  “No, maybe not from there.” He gave Dan’s arm a light nudge. “But I’m thinking about it. If the opportunity arises, then I’m off.”

  Dan turned to look at the man, his face seeming even more gaunt in the eerie green light that shone from the Mercedes dashboard. “How are you feeling, Patrick?”

  “Shit.”

  “I thought so. You have to take it easy, mate. If not for your own sake, then for Katie’s.”

  Patrick grunted out a laugh. “Have you two been conspiring against me?”

  “No, we have not. I just know that she would be lost if anything happened to you.”

  Patrick turned and shot him a wink. “Nothing’s going to happen to me, my friend. Not if I have anything to do with it.”

  No further word passed between them until Dan dropped his speed to drive through the village of Arisaig.

  “What are your plans, Dan?”

  “When I go back to London, do you mean?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Well, now that the girls are heading back to a fee-paying school, I don’t think there’s much alternative for me other than to get a proper full-time job.”

  “Right.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Patrick laughed. “I was going to ask if you would take on Seascape for me.”

  Their lighthearted banter was brought to a sudden halt by Patrick’s request. Dan was able to feign concentration as he picked up speed, guiding the Mercedes around the tight bends in the road. In truth, he was thinking back to what Katie had said about her husband. All that bluster and bravado were just a cover. Patrick knew as well as any that there would come a time when he wouldn’t be able to cope with anything much more than lifting his walking stick.

  “What about the guy from Ocean Produce in Aberdeen?”

  “I could put him off. Dammit, I’ve waited long enough for him.”

  “But he’s got the knowledge, Patrick. I don’t.”

  “Keep going the way you are at the minute and you’ll have more knowledge than me in six months.” Patrick paused, flicking his thumbnail against a knot of wood on the handle of his walking stick. “I couldn’t pay you as much as you’d get in London, but it would be a decent enough salary. I’m sure it would be enough to keep the girls at that private school of theirs.”

  Dan noted a tone in Patrick’s voice that he had never heard before. It was almost as if the man was pleading with him to stay.

  “Patrick, listen, I don’t think that I could have enjoyed myself more over these past few months, and I feel really lucky to have had the opportunity of working with you and getting to know you and Katie and the kids. But I can’t work up here forever. I have a wife in London who would never, in a million years, consider moving to Scotland, and you’ve seen the girls for yourself! London is like a life-support system to them all. I can’t split the family up, Patrick. I have to go back.”

  Patrick glanced out of the side window at the pale dawn that glowed red upon the distant wedged slope of the Isle of Eigg. Dan heard him let out a quiet laugh. “You’ll be leaving the cowboy country, Dan. Can you do that?”

  Dan let out a long breath. “There always comes the right time for riding off into the sunset, Patrick.”

  23

  Although the Christmas lights in Fort William were like a pencil torch in comparison to the vast illuminations of Oxford Street, they had twinkled merrily on the snow-covered streets of the town for at least a month before Dan and Josh decided that it was time that the cottage should also be decked out in festive cheer. In his own typically enthusiastic way, Josh arrived home on the appointed evening of decoration with a Christmas tree sticking out at least four feet above the opened-top Saab. It was, of course, impossible to get it into the cottage without severe surgery. So the tree went back into the car and wa
s chauffeured along to Auchnacerie where it was gratefully received. Consequently, the Porters were roped into helping with the decoration of the Trenchards’ house under the slave-driving orchestration of Patrick, who sat at the kitchen table, pointing out misplaced baubles on the tree with his holly-bedecked walking stick. There was a moment of great consternation when the fairy for the top of the tree could not be found, so Patrick suggested that Katie had really nothing much to do for the next few weeks and could easily cope with being a stand-in. With screams of delight, Max and Sooty immediately set about winding tinsel around their mother, and it was left to Dan to hoist her onto his shoulder in a fireman’s lift and climb precariously up the stepladder to put her in place. With a protesting creak of metal, the aluminium ladder gave way slowly under their combined weights, and they ended up helpless with laughter on the ground amidst the prickly branches of the fallen tree. And so the decoration process had to be started all over again.

  As a result, Dan and Josh did not arrive home to their bare little cottage until two o’clock in the morning, and with a good number of Patrick’s Glendurnich malts swirling around in their heads, both slept through the cacophony of their alarm calls three and a half hours later. It was only the crash of the front door opening that woke Dan from his alcoholic slumber.

  He sat up in bed and rubbed at his gritty eyes, then squinted at the figure of Katie standing in the doorway of his bedroom. He glanced at his alarm clock.

  “Oh, bugger!” he groaned as he threw back the bedclothes. “Sorry, Katie. Is Patrick waiting?”

  “I’ve had to call for an ambulance, Dan. I’ve got to get Patrick to Inverness.”

  “Why?” Dan asked, looking up at her with concern as he stuck a finger down the back of his shoe to get it on. “What’s happened?”

  “Patrick had another collapse last night on the bathroom floor, and I didn’t hear him. I found him this morning and he was having real difficulty breathing. I just pray to God he hasn’t got pneumonia.”