Already laden with carrier bags, Roz offered them up so he could shove the Tupperware inside.
McIntyre shook his head. ‘No. Sorry. Uh-uh.’
‘What is it?’ Roz looked down her body. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Follow me, Mrs McIntyre,’ he told her as he opened the door, letting the sweet summer air inside. The sun was hot, even at this time of the morning, and the gravel drive kicked up dust as he led her to the repair shop doors.
Inside, the big barn was silent and sawdust-scented. Dust motes sparkled in the sunbeams from the long windows at the back.
He walked his wife to his own workbench, steering her by the shoulders, stopping before the object concealed with a cloth.
She knew better than to ask ‘what’s this?’ This was how the repair shop experts always made their big reveals of a special restoration or repair, like a magician whipping a cloth away to reveal some breathtaking transformation or another. But here, they didn’t rely upon magic, but craft skills passed down over generations, some ancient, some on the brink of being forgotten entirely, preserved only by a handful of people determined to keep the old ways going in a modern, throwaway world.
Roz nodded, knowing McIntyre was waiting for her signal, not a clue what might be under there.
‘You’ll be needing this…’ He pulled away the fabric.
Slowly uncovered, smartly shining, red inch by inch, was a thing she’d forgotten she ever owned, but now could not imagine how she’d ever lived apart from it.
‘My satchel?’
McIntyre nodded. ‘The very one.’
She set the carrier bags down and took the bag in her hands; weighty, sturdy, stiff and smelling of old leather, and embossed on the front with her initials. This was the bag she’d treated herself to with her very first teaching pay packet, back in the nineties. She’d carried it to and from the school every day for years.
Nothing more than clasping it to her chest like an old friend seemed right.
‘It’s been in the attic all this time. Soon as you said you were going back to school, I thought of it. It’s got a new strap, not that you’ll be able to tell, and the latch needed repairing, but it’s the same type as before.’
She squeezed the golden clasp that released the tether, opening her satchel to reveal the fuzzed leather of the insides. Spotlessly clean, and not quite as good as new, and still very much her faithful schoolfriend. McIntyre slipped the sandwiches he’d made for her inside the satchel.
‘Are you feeling more ready now?’ he asked, and all she could do was smile with gratitude.
‘Look who I see!’ Jolyon’s dad said suddenly, waving his hand in the air and smiling in a wobbly way that Jolyon had never seen his dad doing before.
Over the school gate, like she’d promised, and waving back, leaned Mrs McIntyre. The three of them made their way over to her, Jolyon carried in his mum’s arms. Even if it was not the usual kind of school drop-off, for this family and their teacher, it felt absolutely right that they all hugged over the school gate, and maybe Mhairi did have a wet face, and maybe even Dan did too, but Jolyon had no idea because he’d clambered into Roz’s arms and she’d lifted him right over the gate and down onto the playground where the hopscotch lines were, and the two of them had hop, skip, jumped along the numbers, right up to the doors, and Jolyon didn’t even think about looking back, and neither did Mrs McIntyre. They only held hands and went through the open doors.
Their first day of school had begun and all Mhairi Sears could do was hold on to one of the many things her son had taught her: that every new day had the potential to surprise you and sometimes it could go all right, actually.
31
For Peaches, it had been a long summer of waiting, accompanied by the slow realisation that no fashion scout was going to reach out to her, no internship land in her lap, and no dazzling future open up for her without some kind of readjustment. Willie had gone back to uni to restart his showcase year, now that he’d finally fought off the glandular fever, and Peaches had been starting to feel like the world was moving on without her.
The last straw had been her mum, who’d absolutely tried her best to hold fast to her boundaries, even welcoming Euan round for Sunday lunches every week, and movie nights on Wednesdays with Clyde Forte in tow. She’d stood firm about her no-smoking rules, but they’d all gathered on the white sofas in the white lounge and been introduced to all manner of old movies with expert commentary from Euan’s grandad, and it had been lovely, actually.
But now, Carenza was gone. Off on a solo travellers’ coach trip round Italy. Three weeks of wine tasting, sea swimming and pasta eating. The postcards had been arriving for days. She was making girlfriends, she’d said, and she was getting a bit of a tan, and she was happy, and she wasn’t thinking about work at all. She’d stood down in her committee roles, taking lower positions and allowing other townsfolk to try their hand at being the big boss, and this new pace of life, it turned out, rather suited her. Peaches could tell from the slope of her pen on the postcards that her grip was loosening; she was learning how to flow through life once more, rather than clasping at it.
Yet this had left Peaches in more of a quandary than she’d anticipated. Yes, it was nice not to have a watchful, fretful mother making her anxiety, guilt, and shame spike on a daily basis, and it was divine to have Euan sleep over in the big empty townhouse most nights, and they’d definitely proven themselves a solid, gentle sort of couple, but there was something a bit directionless about it all now. Not something she was used to.
Round about the time she was realising her dreams for fashion world domination were stalling, and that maybe that wasn’t what she wanted at all, she’d seen the advert appear on social media and it had stood out to her like a Walpurgisnacht fire beacon against a dark sky.
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