‘Wal… what?’ asked Willie, who wasn’t up to speed with Cairn Dhu’s seasonal rituals.
‘Walpurgisnacht,’ Senga said again. ‘The last night of April. That’s when your showcase is, aye?’
Peaches nodded. ‘The thirtieth, that’s right.’
‘I’m no’ saying it’s a bad time for it, only it’s a wild time for it!’ Senga was enjoying herself immensely. ‘Saint Walpurga’s Night, and cross-quarter day following it, only hours after?’ She sucked air through her dentures. ‘That is the very moment the year crosses from cold and dark to light and warm, a time of curious happenings. Beltane is a strange in-betweeny time. Not a time for taking risks. You remember May Day last year, do you no’?’
This prompted mutterings of ‘How could anybody forget?’ and some of the group – guiltier than others of having let the town’s Beltane bonfire celebrations take a turn towards the hedonistic – shuffled their feet and gazed at the floor.
‘Minister Meikle had doused that spiced apple punch with whisky!’ Rhona Gifford protested, and from the looks on everyone’s faces, the image of Rhona dancing so hard she’d lost not only her good sandals but her varifocals as well was indelibly inked in their memories.
‘I thought you laced the punch with rum, Cary?’ Sachin said, puzzled.
‘Aye, well, that too,’ the carpenter replied.
‘We certainly won’t be repeating scenes of that nature this year,’ boomed Carenza. ‘Not now I’m heading up the organising committee. My Beltane bonfires and sausage sizzle will be a traditional Scottish celebration with music and food, and not a wild rumpus! Got that? And’ – she fired a warning glance in Cary’s direction – ‘you’ll be pleased to know I’ve put myself in charge of the punch cauldrons.’
This prompted an audible groan and many slumping shoulders.
‘Your sandals are safe this year, Rhona,’ whispered McIntyre, and the younger Gifford sister suppressed a cackle.
Evidently, Carenza wasn’t finished yet. ‘I’ll circulate a rota in the coming days with everyone else’s jobs on it. Together we can ensure this is a dignified observance of the spring rites.’
‘Well, here’s to spring, and to moving on,’ Cary said sensibly, raising his glass, and since he spoke so rarely, everyone took this as the last word on the subject and drank deeply.
Peaches and Roz chinked their glasses together as the repairers repeated Cary’s toast.
Outside, the early April sunset was glowing apricot amidst the watery blue, and thick damp clouds snagged the craggy tops of the purple mountains that flanked the Cairn Dhu river valley. The town stood poised on the cusp of a new season, and although its residents couldn’t possibly know it yet, two amongst their number stood on the precipice of new seasons in their lives as well. Roz McIntyre and Peaches McDowell, whose smiles refused to betray how they felt themselves suspended precariously on the brink of unmapped futures, gulped down their drinks, along with their nerves.
3
Someone awfully clever once observed that no one can attempt to tackle the second half of their life using only the tools from the first half.
Roz had been thinking about that all morning, ever since she’d awakened with the sun just before half past five, still processing the bombshell news from that Sunday’s Zoom call with her daughter, Ally, announcing her plans to move in with her police officer boyfriend as soon as she returned from her temp job in Switzerland. Roz had been expecting it, of course, but it still hurt.
When Roz was younger, she’d had the very same endless energy and ambition, a devil-may-care, throw-yourself-into-things attitude. That, combined with a lot of love and dedication, had seen her through to this point in her life at the age of fifty-six. What she needed now, however, was a whole new set of tools, because the future was nowhere near as exciting and appealing as it had appeared to her as a teenager, back when anything felt possible. Whatever was coming next, she was unprepared for it. What new tools she would require for this second act of her life, she had no idea.
She was coming to feel as though she had some pieces missing, like a junk shop jigsaw, and nothing she tried seemed to fill the spaces properly. Not even the hours she’d devoted to helping Peaches with her sewing, not even caring for Wayward, the abandoned puppy her son rescued back in January, and who she’d adopted. Wayward was now a boisterous, teething, tumbling thing intent on destroying her furniture. Fortunately, McIntyre, her husband, had become equally as intent on repairing all the things Wayward damaged.
On days like today, when she awoke fiendishly early, no hope of getting back to sleep, she’d clip on Wayward’s lead and button her ankle-length coat over her pyjamas and walk the riverside path while Cairn Dhu slept, and she’d wrack her brains over how she had managed to lose control of her own life. At what point had she lost her equilibrium, and her courage?
Her parents had adored her, of course, and her grandparents too. Throughout her schooling, where she’d excelled at most things from spelling to sports, she’d still preferred to stay home and do her crafts by the fireside, rather than run around with her pals. All through college she’d helped her grandparents with the upkeep of their big mill house (even then it had been too big for them to cope with). By the time she graduated from college and was working at the primary school down the road, she was caring for them both while her mum and dad were trying to get their bistro off the ground in Marbella, of all places. By the time her parents were letting their business fold to retire in the sun, Roz’s grandfather was gone and Roz was feeling like a permanent fixture at the mill house, keeping the place going for her grandmother.
Roz could have sworn her Granny McIntyre had held on until she’d met Charlie one fateful Walpurgisnacht, and there’d been a whirlwind romance and a wedding only four months later, when Charlie took the very nineties ‘New Man’ decision to take her family name, eschewing his – admittedly unfortunate – name, Charlie Gas. He’d joined the McIntyre clan just at the moment Granny McIntyre was departing it, and Roz’s grief was cushioned in the most surreal way by the discovery she was having twins and that she had inherited the family mill house.
Her parents never did come home from Marbella, and now here she was, having spent thirty of her fifty-six years on earth caring for, teaching, wiving, parenting and repairing those around her, placing her own needs aside in all of it.
As a consequence, nowadays she wasn’t sure where her centre was, feeling herself like a planet hit by a giant asteroid years ago with bits of her broken off and drifting away from her in space: her grandparents, her parents, Ally and Murray, her husband, even, and now she was just a loose accretion of dust somewhere in the middle of them all.
That’s why you’ll find her this morning wandering along the towpath, drinking coffee from her thermos and asking herself the question that was growing louder within her.
Is this it for me now?
Wayward was particularly energetic. Maybe because she was still high on the feeling of having scattered the hissing geese and their goslings all across the surface of the wide River Nithy only moments ago.
Pulling on her lead and telling her off only made Wayward’s game more exciting, so instead of turning for home when they reached the weir across the water – and the point where the outskirts of Cairn Dhu town merged with the start of Stranruthie village – Roz had chosen the cow-parsley-lined path and the long way round, eventually looping back to the end of the high street furthest from the mill house and repair shop.
The coffee in her flask was all gone, Wayward was tiring a little – at least, she was no longer straining at the lead – and the April Monday morning traffic was starting to build as the commuters took to the road.
