‘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 how shehadfelt 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’thaveto 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’tmove back out, then? Maybe… come live with me? And,uh… we could try again? Try beingusagain, 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.’
