At the main gates now, Alice wrangles the padlock and untangles the hefty chain. Beside it, in the dilapidated garage, sits her mother’s car.
‘Held together with sticking plasters and hope.’ She chuckles. ‘But Morag’s made sure I’m insured to drive it, and you can be too if you’re brave enough.’
‘Yes, I can do that.’
‘It’ll be handy,’ she says as we lift the dogs onto the flaking tan leather back seat, and climb into the front of the grey saloon. ‘Like a driving a bus,’ she announces as we set off.
An easy silence settles as I take in the smudgy greens and hazy purples of the landscape. In the distance a loch shimmers, narrowing to a river spanned by a pedestrian suspension bridge. Then suddenly Alice takes a sharp turn – her driving is a little erratic, even gear-crunchy, but perhaps that’s the car? – and we’re parking up in town.
Immediately, I’m thrown back to those camping holidays with Mum and George. The compact arrangement of independent shops and quaint cafés, set around a single high street, is vividly familiar. I clearly remember the ornate town clock and drinking fountain. Local businesses are heavily weighted towards tea rooms and outdoor shops, as if eating cake and walking it off is what really matters around here.
‘There’s a little boutique at the top of the town,’ Alice offers, ‘and a charity shop. That’s your choice for clothes, I’m afraid. It’s not exactly a fashion mecca.’
I smile at that – ‘Honestly, I’d expected better!’ I joke – and Alice laughs, because the town is delightful.
‘I’ll walk the dogs by the river,’ she adds. ‘Shall we meet at noon by the clock?’
‘Great,’ I say, and watch her striding away determinedly in flat boots, her camel trench and a woollen beanie pulled low over her silvery bob, with those ridiculously pretty dogs. I’ve learnt now that her home is a flat in West Hampstead. (‘A shoebox but I like it!’) It’s not exactly surprising. I can easily picture her in the chichi neighbourhood, marching across Hampstead Heath and having coffee or a G&T with friends. It’s trickier to imagine her growing up here, where the community noticeboard is all bowls tournaments, a meeting about ‘the conservation of trout and salmon in transitional waters’ and a raffle to raise funds for the community centre’s roof.
On the train Alice mentioned that she’s seventy-six. (‘All this fuss about ageing,’ she scoffed, ‘like it’s a battle. I lost Ruthie. That’s the alternative, isn’t it?’) Although she might fit the demographic, I can’t imagine her attending ‘soup-and-roll for seniors’ events hosted by the Baptist church. Clearly, she’s something of a powerhouse, keen to have Osprey House ready for sale as soon as possible. That’s why she needs help, and as long as I can get away with this, I’m determined to give as much of myself as I can. Because I’m grateful, I decide. Grateful that she was there at Euston at that precise moment and it all just happened. It hardly seems believable.
I start to explore the town, perusing gift shops filled with local crafts and cuddly Highland cattle toys. There’s a cosy-looking Italian restaurant and a tiny cinema. The old-fashioned newsagent has a postcard carousel in the doorway and a poster in the window advertising birdwatching and salmon-fishing trips. Yet it’s a proper working town too, with a butcher’s – the queue snakes along the pavement – plus a fishmonger, a hardware store, and more cafés and bakeries than I can count.
I spot the village hall, and my heart does a little flip. That last time we came here, when I was fifteen, there was a ceilidh in that hall – a night of traditional Scottish music and dancing. And other things happened that night too. Mum had danced with local men, and I’d had a little adventure of my own.
Smiling at the memory, I check out the town’s sole boutique. As it turns out to be pretty much cashmere and tweed, I switch my focus to the charity shop.
‘That’s you all stocked up,’ announces the cheerful, pink-cheeked woman at the counter as she bags up my selection of jeans, T-shirts, sweaters and a sturdy outdoor jacket. Toiletries are amassed at a supermarket, along with multipacks of knickers and socks, and I buy a leather purse and canvas shoulder bag in a gift shop.
Still with time to spare, I venture down a side street where the sweet aroma of hot chocolate and toasted teacakes drifts out from a café. I pass a fishing tackle shop with an array of fishing flies in the window, mounted and framed like rare butterflies, and an inviting-looking pub festooned with hanging baskets. There’s a short row of single-storey cottages, all with brightly painted front doors and tiny, immaculate front gardens. Then, just as I’m about to turn back, I spot another shop at the end of the street.
It’s a second-hand bookshop, no bigger than one of the cottages, with a bow window and a hand-painted sign above. Clearly, it was a home at some point.Off the Rails Books, the sign reads, gold lettering gleaming against blue.
When Mum whisked George and me to London, I’d only been allowed to bring three of my books. Now here I am in Scotland without any at all. Tiny brass bells tinkle above the door as, with my heart quickening in anticipation, I step into the shop.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Neatly filled bookshelves stretch up to the ceiling. Old-fashioned table lamps glow invitingly in the alcoves. I start to browse, expecting someone to appear from the back. But no one comes. There’s no sign – or sounds – of life at all.
After buying up an entire wardrobe for my stay here, a sense of calm settles over me as I set down my bulging carrier bags. Soon I discover a second room behind the first, and yet another leading on behind that. The place is a treasure trove of unexpected nooks and book-lined corridors linking the rooms.
Objects have been placed on the shelves, in gaps between books, to reflect the different sections. Leather-cased binoculars and a sketchbook of bird drawings, its pages yellowed with age, nestle on the natural history shelf. Victorian ink bottles and antique spectacles are arranged in the fiction section.
‘You museum types,’ Vince often teased me. ‘You say “It’s so beautifully curated” when you mean it’s been set out quite nicely.’Curatedwas definitely on his list of mockable words. Shocked at how quickly I’ve begun to think of him – of us – in the past tense, I carry on browsing. His interest would dwindle rapidly in a shop like this. ‘I’ll wait outside,’ he’d say. ‘Will you be long?’
‘Just go off and do something else, Dad,’ Edie would retort, if she was with us. And she’d catch my gaze, and deliver an eye-roll and we’d laugh. Trying not to think about Edie either – because I’ll have to tell her what I’ve done very soon – I head back through to the shop’s front room, just as the brass bells tinkle again, more brashly this time, and a young woman barges in.
Immediately, the cosy home library vibe evaporates. She shuts the door with unnecessary force, stomps to the counter and plonks herself down behind it with a heavy sigh. She doesn’t acknowledge me. She just pulls out her phone from a pocket and frowns at it.
‘Hi,’ I start. In a little shop like this it’s too awkward not to say anything.
‘Hi.’ It’s brief, reluctant. No eye contact.
‘I love your shop,’ I add. ‘It’s so beautifully, um...’Don’t say ‘curated’, you’ll sound like a prat,‘...set out.’
‘It’s not mine,’ she remarks.
‘Oh, right.’ Still no eye contact, and no further information supplied. Her face is chalk pale and murky shadows lurk beneath tired-looking eyes. I’d put her at late teens, early twenties at the most. Her dark brown hair is piled up on her head and secured haphazardly with a plastic comb. She’s wearing a faded black top with a splodge of something on the left shoulder, and the kind of tight expression that suggests she’d rather be anywhere but here.
