There was another silence where both of them seemed to let what had just happened sink in.
Peaches hadn’t shown any sign whatsoever she liked this Euan lad, so wasn’t it better to let him down gently than have him hanging on, hoping for Peaches’ favour? And if he meant to make himself a distraction, that wouldn’t do either. No boy had ever called here, brazen, like this, and a daft lad like Euan Sparks? He had to be keen if he was willing to risk Carenza’s wrath again.
‘Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there we are,’ she concluded.
Down the line came the sound of the boy sucking in air then blowing hard with a heavy sigh. ‘It’s OK. Tell her I called?’
The request caught her off guard and she found herself hesitating before deciding on a hasty ‘Goodbye,’ as though she hadn’t heard him, and hanging up. These were not tactics she would usually stoop to, but he’d rattled her.
The phone in her hand felt suddenly small and delicate, and illicit; a reminder it was not hers to pick up.
And yet, there played on her mind a new worry. Had Peaches and this boy been sneaking around, calling one another? The possibility was too strong not to investigate. She opened the call registry and scrolled through, looking for evidence.
Nothing. And no texts from him either.
‘Was that my phone ringing?’ Peaches’ footsteps grew louder as she came down the long flight of stairs from her studio attics.
As though guided by some external power, Carenza’s finger and thumb flicked through the call log, blocking the number and deleting the phone’s record of Euan Sparks’ insolence.
She stealthily placed the phone on the table, screen downwards, and reached for the bottle and glass once more.
When she turned to greet her daughter, padding into the kitchen with her eyebrows raised in what looked like hope and curiosity, a lie flew from Carenza’s lips.
‘No, darling.’ She smiled, all innocence. ‘I was just about to make some popcorn. Join me?’
For the briefest moment Carenza had considered telling the truth. Lies destroyed relationships, she knew, and she had never before lied to her daughter.
She held up a second glass, a desperate burning feeling gnawing inside her at the thought of the two of them contentedly curling up on the white sofa in the white den, watching a film and relaxing like they used to. ‘You can choose what to watch on Netflix.’
Peaches looked past her mother to her phone and, skirting round the pristine kitchen to reach it, she pocketed it immediately into her white robe without looking at the screen.
‘I’m heading to bed. Early night,’ Peaches said, and Carenza couldn’t miss the little note of defiance in her voice.
‘You’re sure you’re all right?’
Peaches made for the door again, not meeting her eyes. ‘Just tired.’
If her daughter hadn’t overheard her putting Euan in his place, then Carenza couldn’t account for the strange mood the girl seemed to be in, but, Carenza consoled herself, perhaps if she herself had a dream date arranged for her with an eligible, handsome young man and she had a lifechanging showcase coming up in a matter of days, she too would naturally feel a little shy and withdrawn.
‘It’s the excitement, lucky girl,’ Carenza called at her daughter’s back, feeling her confidence return.
‘Hmm,’ she heard Peaches muse on her way upstairs.
Carenza listened until her daughter’s bedroom door closed, ever so gently behind her, and the townhouse fell utterly silent again. Then she drank the wine without really tasting it, standing alone in her beautiful kitchen and telling herself that she had done the right thing, only not quite as convincingly as she’d have liked.
Back in the little bungalow Euan stared into the gaping suitcase, weighing up what leaving right this minute might cost him, against what going home to Glasgow in defeat would mean.
Was Clyde right, and this simply wasn’t his time and if he could find some patience things might still work out? Or should he cut and run from his supposed ‘fresh start’, going back to his uncomfortable old life where, he hated to admit it, he had been a darn sight more successful than he’d been here?
11
Life in Cairn Dhu went on, and for a few days the gossips made their rounds, and even though Euan Sparks’s name was briefly on everyone’s lips, not a soul had seen him, and his grandfather’s bike stayed under its cover at the side of his house. When asked whilst queuing to pay for his morning newspaper what his grandson had been getting up to since frazzling Carenza McDowell, Clyde Forte had snapped that it was ‘nane o’ your concern what the laddie does!’
The town folks soon concluded that Euan had ‘done a midnight flit’, a particularly salacious way of saying someone’s run away in disgrace, and soon he was forgotten about in favour of discussing the imminent Beltane celebrations.
Over in Cairn Dhu’s Repair Shop there was a kind of happy chaos playing out as, after many days spent missing or distracted, McIntyre was present once again and attempting to scale the mountain of repair jobs that had piled up on his workbench. Only just this morning he had fixed one vacuum cleaner, one coffee machine, one desk lamp, one toaster, and (with the help of horologist-repairer, Dr Bonnet) one ancient clock radio that now lived to tick another day.
It must have been Roz’s losing her temper that had done it, because he’d been sure to bring home to her a lavish (for McIntyre) bouquet of tulips and hyacinths, and they had tried their best to sit through the first two parts of a particularly good murder mystery on TV together the evening before (and only been interrupted three times by repair clients knocking at the mill house door out of hours to check up on when their fixes would be ready). It wasn’t perfect, but at least he was trying, and he’d even turned off his phone to stop the message notifications going off all the time, as they had in recent days.
