‘Looks like the rain’s off,’ Niall says. ‘Think I’ll take a walk down to the loch.’ He pauses. ‘Dinner’s around seven, Michael said? Is that still okay with you?’
‘Yes, absolutely.’ Lena smiles confidently. ‘Um… you did let him know what you wanted?’
‘Oh, yes. I just picked from the menu on the website and emailed it through to him. He said it’s a lot easier to know up front?—’
‘Yes, it really is. Thanks for doing that.’Sothere’s a menu on the website!Three intelligent and resourceful women – yet they hadn’t thought to look.
Pearl gets up and strolls to the utility room, as if there is something she needs to check in there. Out of sight from the others, she takes a quick photo of Michael’s notes on the chalkboard, and then grabs a waterproof jacket from the heavily laden hooks on the wall.
Back in the kitchen, Niall drains his coffee and gets up from the table. Pearl pulls on the man-sized jacket that drowns her diminutive form and slips her phone into a deep pocket. ‘’Scuse me a minute,’ she says, beaming round at everyone. ‘I’m just going to pop out and check on the hens.’
19
Michael strides into the arrivals hall at Stansted Airport and stops suddenly. He realises what he’s done. But he doesn’t want to believe it. He checks his jeans and jacket pockets, frantically patting and delving and cursing under his breath.
He sets down his rucksack on the floor while all around him joyous reunions are happening. There are Santa hats and sparkly reindeer antlers and many, many hugs. Several bored-looking men are holding up name signs. A baby is crying and somewhere a man is calling after a child. ‘Amelie, come back here right now!’ All of life is here, milling around him. But whatisn’there is his phone, because his flight was delayed, and in his eagerness to disembark, Michael had sprung out of his seat the instant the seatbelt signs were switched off.
No, he can’t blame the fact that he left his phone in the seat pocket on the delay. He can’t even blame it on the life he has now; that it had been years since he’d flown anywhere, and that he has clearly become deskilled at travelling further than the hour-long round trip to his nearest sizeable supermarket. Michael likes to think he’s on top of his life, and that the running of Shore Cottage is as smooth as one of his freshly ironed sheets.But pluck him out of his natural habitat – drop him onto a plane and ping him out at the other end – and he turns into an idiot.
That’swhy Michael left his phone on the plane. Because he’s an idiot. This single thought burns neon-bright in his brain as he looks around wildly for some official person who can help him. He spots a tall woman in a bright blue skirt and jacket and teetering heels, her blonde hair scraped back severely from her face. He hurries over to her.
‘Excuse me,’ he starts. He waits for the woman to make eye contact but she seems to be scanning the hall. ‘Erm, I’ve done a stupid thing,’ he explains. ‘I’ve just arrived from Glasgow and I left my phone on the plane?—’
‘Sorry, you can’t go back and get it.’ Briefly, she flicks her gaze at him.
‘No. No, I realise that…’ As if he was considering fighting his way back through security and onto the aircraft. He might live in the middle of nowhere with only Harry and Pam from the nearby farm for neighbours but he’snota bloody fool. No, he is! He is a bloody fool!
‘If you go to lost luggage you can fill in a claim form,’ the woman states in an automated voice.
Michael rakes at his hair. ‘Yes, but you see it’s not actually lost. It’s just there in the seat pocket on the plane. Seat 17b…’
‘That’s the best thing,’ trills this woman with an unseasonal tan and thick black fringes for eyelashes that surely must be glued on. Despite his phone emergency, Michael can’t help but marvel at their size and density. He never sees eyelashes like this back home.
She turns away and trots away on her heels, and Michael thanks her, even though she has gone now. He inhales deeply and looks around at all the people pulling their luggage along, or standing guarding it, and for a moment, he thinks yes, he’ll do as he’s been told and go to lost luggage. However, that would meanwaiting around. And Michael hasn’t abandoned his B&B guests and Pearl and her friends and travelled 500 miles to fill in a form and for nothing to happen. He is running late already, and that would make him even later. So instead, as if being pulled along now by an invisible cord, he heads down the escalator towards the Stansted Express.
As the train rattles towards London, he starts to reconcile the fact that he is currently phone-less. That’s okay, he decides. He knows which hotel Krissy is staying at, out at Heathrow. He too has booked a room there for two nights (he didn’t want to take anything for granted). He can locate Krissy through hotel reception, and later he can call his landline at home just to check that they’re managing okay up there.
Of course they are, he tells himself. He left them with clear instructions – hethinks– and it’s not rocket science, making breakfasts and heating up dinners and keeping on top of the place. It’s not that he’s ungrateful. Far from it. Michael is still bowled over by their generosity. This force of nature, in the form of three women who clearly needed to escape the pressures of Christmas, have made this trip possible for him. He doesn’t know how he can possibly thank them enough. However, if he can run Shore Cottage single handedly, those three obviously smart and resourceful women can probably do a far better job.
Feeling calmer now, he looks around the carriage, spotting more of those fringed canopies (is this what eyelashes are like now?). He also notices that some of the women’s faces look very different to the faces he’s used to seeing back home. It’s their lips, he thinks. He knows from his young nieces that having lips ‘done’ is a thing now, but he has never seen any out in the wild. As a kid, Michael loved those sci-fi movies where people were frozen for decades in canisters. He wonders now if this is how it might feel to have been finally thawed and released into the modern world.
Michael meets people, of course, in the normal course of his life. He meetstonnesof people. Most evenings they’re sitting there at his kitchen table and he’s eating with them, topping up their wine and answering their questions about walks and the landscape and what it’s like living so remotely – ‘And don’t you getlonelyup here all by yourself?’ People ask that a lot. The women anyway. And he assures them that he’s never lonely, that he’s fantastically happy up here, looking after his guests and maintaining his property and doing his garden until, mercifully, they head off to bed.
Michael never admits that some nights, when there are no guests, he calls Stan through to his bedroom and lets him sleep on the bed beside him, just for the comfort of having another living being close by.
Mostly, though, he is too busy to dwell upon the fact that, at forty-seven years old, his life is chronically empty. Because for most of the year, people are coming and going at Shore Cottage and it’s his job to take care of them. However, they are not like the people he sees all around him now. His guests tend towards the hearty and robust, clad in big sweaters and waterproofs and woolly hats. And here, on this softly rattling train, everyone seems to be in dazzling colour.
Michael doesn’t stare at anyone. He’s not going to behave in a way that could have him arrested. However, as his heart rate settles to something approaching normal, he sits there absorbing it all. A young man is wearing a purple velvet coat with a fur trim, and the elderly lady sitting next to him is sporting leopard print trousers and glittery platform shoes. A teenage girl with blue hair is carrying a live chihuahua in a backpack. Another dog – fluffy, white – is being carried by a shaven-headed man in a front-facing carrier, like a baby.
Don’t dogs walk any more? Michael muses, fascinated. Is he being terribly old-fashioned in expecting Stan to trot around onhis legs? Michael grew up in a small but thriving Cheshire town, and he’s visited plenty of cities. In their early days he and Rona Interrailed all over Europe and travelled around India. For her thirtieth birthday, hoping it would make things better between them, he took her to New York. Gamely, his parents came up from Cheshire to look after the B&B for five days. He’s been to London too, several times – but the last time must have been twenty years ago. And now Michael is on his way to meet a woman he knows only through a screen and their chats, which go on for hours sometimes. A flight attendant called Krissy who is waiting for him.
Thankfully, he checked out the route from Stansted to Heathrow while he was waiting to depart back in Glasgow. So he knows what to do. He’ll get off the train at Liverpool Street, and then he’ll take the Tube to Paddington where he’ll catch the Heathrow Express. For a man who left an iPhone on the plane, Michael is remarkably sanguine now. He is sure that this bright, sunny Saturday will only get better when he meets the woman with whom he’s besotted, if it’s possible to be besotted with someone you haven’t yet met in real life.
As the elderly leopard print lady catches his eye and smiles, and Michael smiles back, he is entirely certain that it is.
20
‘Do we do food?’ the man repeats. ‘Yes, we do lunches here. I can see what’s left if you like?’
