Heading inside the cottage, he left Beatrice to rummage in the basket and draw out a tall jar of honey with suspended golden blobs inside. Beatrice peered at them and grimaced. More weird Highland food. What could it be this time? She was relieved to find a flask of strong milky coffee, and ham and pickle sandwiches on fresh buttered doorstop bread.
Nothing about the meal was elegant or dainty, in fact it was like Atholl himself: rugged, hearty and wholesome. He reappeared just as this thought was running through Beatrice’s mind.
Atholl placed the wooden toolbox upon the bench and unpacked the strange-looking items; pins, pliers, secateurs, a medieval-looking wheel for punching holes in leather and a series of long metal spikes the use of which Beatrice couldn’t fathom.
‘Are we going to be performing surgery? On an elephant?’
‘You’ll see. It’s all fairly straightforward once you get the hang of it.’
‘And these?’ she said, indicating the jar of honey.
‘Hah! Those are honey buns; heather honey buns, to be precise. My mother’s recipe. Those things inside are cakes. You make them fresh then preserve them in honey, perfect with cream on a sunny day like today.’
Rugged, hearty, wholesomeandsweet, Beatrice thought, though if it showed on her face Atholl seemed unaware. He was busying himself by pulling up a low stool to sit on, a hewn section of a tree’s trunk that someone – Beatrice guessed it was Atholl – had varnished so it gleamed in the sun.
‘Mother’s heather honey buns have become one of Gene’s specialities. Well theywere. I had to beg him to make them for us this morning.’ Atholl cocked an eyebrow and looked up at her through the curls falling over his forehead. ‘Do youapprove?’
Beatrice let out a laugh at the boldness of his question and the mischievous smile on his face as he risked asking it.
She watched him work, tipping her head a little to one side. He had brought a tall bundle of soft willows from the cottage and laid them over his thighs, and was pulling at the stripped willow strap that bound them together.
‘Right, can you pour out the coffee, and we’ll get started? We can eat as we weave. I always work better with food to hand.’
Beatrice found the two mugs and they both watched the steam from the flask as it moved on the warm air. Beatrice inhaled the rich coffee aroma appreciatively.
‘So, what would you like to make?’ Atholl asked.
‘What’s easy?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Oh, OK, what’seasiest? Give me the dummies’ guide to willow-weaving.’
‘How about a simple decorative wreath?’
Perhaps Atholl Fergusson didn’t notice the fraction of a second where Beatrice processed the association between wreaths and mourning. It had passed with the tiniest pinch at the sides of her eyes and the widening of her pupils. Just another of the many million instances where her everyday life was shot through with sad little reminders of her losses, each one passing unvoiced. And yet he was watching her with an attentiveness she wasn’t used to and it made her lower her eyes to his hands as she tried to concentrate on the lesson.
‘Go on then,’ he urged. ‘Take your first willow.’
Beatrice surveyed the bundle he held out to her, at a loss which to choose. Was any one better than the other? Her inexperienced eye couldn’t tell.
‘Don’t be shy. You must choose with decision. Grasp the one that’s right. And once you’ve chosen, stick to your choice. If you want to build a fluent, strong piece you need to be bold.’ Atholl was offering a smile in the calm, steady way Beatrice was coming to recognise as peculiarly his own – at least she had never seen another like it.
‘Fluent?’
‘Aye. You want to make a piece that talks to you, and you talk with it. Working together with the willow to make something… intentional.’
Beatrice didn’t feel intentional when she grabbed at the first willow that seemed to stand out to her. ‘Will this do?’
He placed the bundle by his feet. ‘You tell me.’
‘Well that’s an infuriating answer.’
Atholl laughed again but soon let his attention settle on the single willow he had in his hand. ‘Each willow has a natural curvature of its own. See?’ He held the branch between pinched fingertip and thumb extended at his arm’s length in the air, letting its soft green body bend gently as he ran a fingertip along its middle down to where it touched the ground. ‘This inner arc is called its belly, and this…’ He switched his stroke to the outer curve, running the back of his hand along it in a smooth sweep. ‘This curve is called its back.’
Tracing the slow stroke of his rough-skinned hand somehow triggered a message from Beatrice’s eyes to her own belly, and a burst of something – adrenaline or endorphins – surged through her bloodstream. She recognised the heady, desirous feeling from a time long ago, pre-pregnancy, pre-Richard even, and found she was grasping her willow, pressing her nails into her palms to chase the feeling away.
Far away, it seemed, Atholl was still softly talking and his hands were working, bending the willow before seizing more and setting to work on intertwining them with the first as the wreath took shape. Beatrice found her own hands responding as she mirrored his movements and worked the willow, her mind flitting to the wonderful unicorn and lion sculptures she had seen the day before above the bar.
