He wanted to ask what on earth she’d been getting up to, and why wasn’t she at the Knowe like everyone else in town, and had she really been crying? Because she sure looked like she had.
Instead, he gulped, guiltily. Even he understood these scenes were definitely his fault.
‘Sorry I missed the procession setting off,’ he tried as an opener. Usually something like that would be enough to quell any unrest at home. An acknowledgement. An apology.
She only looked at him, her shoulders rounded with disappointment, her chest heaving, standing in a spill of old coats and hats and gloves, some of them toddler sized. Twenty-eight years of wintry weather gear, school shoes and PE trainers, and enough to restock Cairn Dhu’s only charity shop for a month.
‘Having a clear-out?’ he said with an awkward attempt at a smile. One last effort at making a feeble joke.
Still she didn’t soften.
‘Who’s Maddie?’ Her voice was starkly pained.
‘Oh!’ The question sent a shock down his body and into the tiles beneath him. ‘You know?’
‘Who is she?’
The game was up, and this was not how he intended it all to end. Only a full confession would work now, and he would have to hope for forgiveness later.
‘She’s a seamstress.’ His words were almost swallowed with his need to gulp down nerves. ‘Lives above the Garten Arms.’
‘A seamstress? What? Like me? Not even someone different?’
‘Different? I?—’
‘And that’s where you’ve been sneaking off to these last few weeks?’
‘Well… aye. Among other places.’
She seemed to be folding in on herself, shutting down. His wife was disappearing before his eyes and he couldn’t account for it.
He took a glance behind him towards the open door. Couldn’t they get this bit over and done with quick? He’d had other plans for the evening, big plans, and nothing had gone right so far.
Roz took a step closer. ‘And this Maddie, you… like her?’
‘Ehh.’ He shrugged as he considered this. ‘She’s no’ bad, I suppose.’
He could have sworn Roz’s eyes flashed red in the light from the standard lamp. For a second he thought she might launch the lamp at his head.
‘I’m sorry I’m late, all right? Maddie took ages finishing. I was desperate, honestly!’
Roz staggered on her feet. He ran to catch her but she slapped his hands away. ‘Rosalyn, what’s got into ye? I’m here now!’
This elicited an angry animal sound in his wife. He tried to guide her into a chair by the dinner table. He noted with alarm that she was holding her hand to her chest.
‘Are you ill? Should I phone Dr Alice?’
‘Ill? Ill? You tell me you’ve a mistress and I’m the one that’s sick?’
Somewhere in the space between his wife’s blanched cheeks and the way she was scrunching her eyelids tight shut and the throb in his knee and blank confusion in his brain, something clicked awake.
‘A mistress? Naw, lass. A seamstress, I said.’
Her mouth was open, and only short breaths escaped.
‘Wait there,’ he said, wishing he could laugh, but feeling himself very much wanting to cry. He limped right out of the door before dragging his boxes inside.
‘They’re a bit bashed,’ he said, hauling them before her. ‘But I so wanted you to have them for tonight, and Maddie’ – at least Roz didn’t flinch at the name this time – ‘had to unpick it all, or something like that. She told me it was a harder job than she’d thought it was going to be.’
