“I know that wasn’t always true,” she added. “For the first year, I did blame you. I blamed you because blaming you was easier than blaming the breakdown, and blaming the breakdown was easier than blaming myself, and blaming myself was the truth, and the truth takes longer to reach than the easy versions.”
“I’ve thought about you every time I danced since I was twenty-two,” I said. “Not with guilt. More like – I owed you a debt I could never repay because the debt was a career that might have been yours.”
“It was mine to lose,” Cat said. “The audition was fair. Isobel was fair. You were better. The loss was mine and the response to the loss was mine and neither of those things was your fault.” She drank her tea. “I needed six years to say that sentence. I’d like it to count.”
“It counts.”
The kitchen was quiet. Two cups of tea. Two women. The morning light beginning to show through the window. This was not forgiveness – forgiveness implied a wrong, and the wrong had been done by circumstance, not by either of us. This was acknowledgement. The acknowledgement that our lives had been shaped by the same event and the shaping had sent usin opposite directions and the directions had, after six years, brought us to the same kitchen table.
The garden.
The manor’s garden was not beautiful. It was functional – hedges that served as windbreaks, a lawn that was more moss than grass, a stone path that led to the cliff edge and the view of the Clyde. The garden existed not as an amenity but as a space between the house and the sea, and the space was cold and the sea was grey and the wind was constant.
We walked. That was the important part – the movement that allowed conversation without the pressure of eye contact, the side-by-side arrangement that was easier than face-to-face for two people who were building a connection from the ground up.
The path curved along the cliff edge. Below us, the Clyde moved – grey, flat, constant, the river that was the spine of every story in Cairndhu. The dock cranes stood in their rows. A fishing boat was heading out – small, white, leaving a wake that the wind erased in seconds.
“Tell me about Glasgow,” I said.
She told me. The community centre – the one funded by Mackie’s shell company, though she hadn’t known that at first. The children she taught – ages four to eleven, two classes a day, the morning group who were chaotic and joyful and the afternoon group who were quieter and more serious. She described one student, a girl named Flora, who had no natural ability and absolute determination, and who Cat had workedwith for three years until the girl could hold a relevé for thirty seconds without wobbling.
“She reminded me of myself,” Cat said. “Not the talented version. The stubborn version.”
She told me about the choreography she had done – small productions, three nights each, audiences of forty or fifty, the kind of work that nobody saw and that mattered entirely to the people doing it. She told me about the friends she had made – people who did not know the Syndicate existed, who did not know she had a brother in Cairndhu, who knew her as Catherine or Kate or whatever name she was using that month.
“Did you miss it?” I said. “The real dancing.”
“I never stopped dancing. I stopped performing.” She paused. “The distinction took me four years to understand. Dancing is the body. Performing is the audience. I needed the body. I didn’t need the audience.”
The observation was precise and it was the kind only a dancer could make – the distinction between the private act and the public one, the understanding that the movement itself was the purpose and the audience was an addition, never a requirement.
“Isobel would have understood that,” I said.
“Isobel did understand that. She told me. She said: ‘The dancing is for you. The stage is for them. Make sure you know which one you need.’” Cat’s mouth moved – the small, private smile of a woman remembering a teacher who had been right about everything. “I needed the dancing. I didn’t need the stage.”
We walked. The path was cold. The wind was off the Clyde and it carried the salt and diesel smell that was Cairndhu’s permanent atmosphere. The dock cranes were visible from the garden – tall, still, standing in their rows against the grey sky.
“Are they good to you?” Cat said.
“Yes.”
“Ewan especially?”
“Especially all three of them.”
Cat looked at me. The looking was not judgement. It was assessment – the assessment of a sister who needed to know that the men surrounding the woman her brother loved were worthy of the position. The assessment was conducted with the same precision Cat brought to everything – the dancer’s eye, the forensic attention, the willingness to see the thing clearly rather than comfortably.
A tension released in her face. The settling was acceptance – not of the arrangement (the arrangement was not hers to accept or reject) but of the quality of the people involved. She had met them. She had watched them. She had seen Lachlan’s strategy and Al’s steadiness and Ewan’s warmth and she had assessed the architecture and found it sound.
“Good,” she said.
We walked in silence for a while. The garden was cold. The sea was grey. Two women who had been each other’s ghost for six years walked in the cold and the walking itself became the friendship – not easy, not comfortable, but honest and precise and built on the understanding that easy people were somewhat uninteresting and that the interesting thing was to be difficult together.
“You dance differently now,” Cat said. She said it without looking at me. “I watched you through the studio window yesterday. Your turnout is better than it was at the audition. Your extension is longer. But the way you use the barre has changed – you lean into it. You didn’t used to lean.”
“I trust the support more than I used to,” I said.
She looked at me. The looking said:I know we’re not talking about the barre.The looking also said:I know.
