by Hilary Boyd
Flora frowned. ‘When was that?’
‘When you took that week off at Easter? Rene was fine with it. She knows how much the old lady loved her cats in the past.’
‘Oh, thank you, Mary. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this.’
The night nurse smiled. ‘All in the cause of true love. Give me a chance to have a bit of a tryst with the good doctor too.’
*
‘Dorothea, I’m going away tomorrow for a few days,’ she told the old lady that Thursday morning as she got her dressed.
‘Going away?’ Dorothea stared at her. ‘Where are you going to?’
Flora pulled her patient’s trousers up into place and pushed her back gently so she was sitting on the edge of the bed. She bent down and reached for her shoes.
‘I’m going to Scotland with my boyfriend.’
Dorothea’s eyes lit up with interest. ‘So you have a young man now. Was there a problem … something not quite right … you were telling me?’
‘I didn’t know, because we’d been apart, how he felt about me.’
‘If he has any sense … he will love you a great deal.’
Flora was touched, Dorothea spoke with such sincerity.
‘He says he does.’
‘But?’ The old lady raised her eyebrows.
‘Nothing really.’
Dorothea didn’t reply at once. Then she smiled, almost a girlish smile. ‘Love is … so marvellous, isn’t it? You feel so … alive.’
For a moment Flora had a glimpse of what she must have been like as a younger woman. Her enthusiasm lit up her face, temporarily masking the drooping lines of old age.
‘It is marvellous,’ Flora agreed. But her voice must still have held a noticeable reticence.
The old lady’s eyes were upon her. ‘Although things didn’t work out … as I had hoped … I never doubted him.’
Flora remembered the story of the man ‘falling’ to his death from the bridge. The ultimate betrayal in her eyes, yet Dorothea had never doubted him. And she realised in that minute that it wasn’t Fin she doubted – she really did believe he loved her and meant to do the best by her this time – it was herself she was unsure of.
She finished tying Dorothea’s shoe laces. ‘Mary will be here when I’m away.’
‘Mary …’ Dorothea seemed confused suddenly. ‘Mary?’
‘The night nurse? The Irish lady who looks after you every night?’
Dorothea nodded. ‘Oh yes.’ Flora began easing her to her feet, positioning her frame so she could grasp it easily. ‘I hope you won’t be away for too long,’ the old lady said.
CHAPTER 13
9 November
The terraced house stood just across the road from the River Ness. They had taken a taxi from the station in the pouring rain, and as Flora opened the door of the cab, the wind tore at it, snapping it back. She struggled out, dragging her backpack after her, stiff from being bent up in the short bunk on the sleeper. Fin had insisted on sharing with her and neither of them had got any sleep. She looked over at his late father’s house. From the outside, it was an attractive red-brick terrace, with a white gable window.
No one had lived in it since Angus McCrea had died the year before. Only Jimmy, the man next door, who was using Angus’s ancient Vauxhall, dropped in to check once in a while and remove the piles of junk mail from the mat to the hall table. As they opened the front door they were met by an overpowering smell of mustiness and damp. Flora shuddered.
‘Better get the heating going,’ Fin said, and went off to the kitchen to light the gas boiler while Flora peered cautiously into the sitting room. As she remembered it from the few occasions she’d visited with Fin, it had been a cosy room, tidy and warm, filled with the reassuring presence of Angus McCrea. She could recall the tea tray and the battered Scottish shortbread tin full of digestive biscuits; the knitted, striped tea cosy over the brown teapot; the pile of local papers, the scattering of yellowing Ordanance Survey maps – collecting them had been his hobby. Now, stripped of Angus’s personality, the room seemed sad – and a little creepy. She wandered in and sat gingerly on the brown sofa, trying to imagine living here with Fin. In her mind she stripped the faded wallpaper and painted the walls a light, clean colour – white, pale blue? – took up the swirly-patterned beige carpet, replaced the furniture with her own … But it wasn’t happening. He said we don’t have to live here, she thought, and prayed he had meant it.
That night, after a supper of fish and chips, cramped together in one of the single beds in the spare room, under the faded blue floral sheets – probably bought in the Seventies and smelling stale and dusty – neither of them could sleep.
‘What are you thinking?’ Fin asked. The river, swollen with the rain, sounded loud outside the window.
The house had warmed up slightly – physically at least – during the day. But the atmosphere was still cold and dead, as if the four walls were resisting them, reluctant to let go of the previous occupant and allow them to be at home there. Flora snuggled closer to Fin.
‘I’m thinking I don’t like being here,’ she said. All day she’d pretended it was fine, that it only needed a small amount of polishing up and clearing away to make it habitable. She didn’t want to hurt Fin’s feelings about his father’s house, conscious that he was still sensitive about not having been there for Angus when he was dying. But now, tired and dispirited, the dream of their days alone together marred by this drear and ghostly house, she could no longer hold her tongue. She heard Fin chuckle, the sound reverberating in his chest as she lay against him.
‘Pretty grim, eh?’
She laughed too, relieved. ‘It’s horrible.’
‘What shall we do then?’
‘We could stretch to a B and B perhaps? Can’t be very expensive in Inverness at this time of year.’
‘It seems so stupid, when we can stay here for free. But I get what you’re saying.’
‘Maybe it’ll get better … in the morning. When it’s had time to warm up properly.’
‘I doubt it. Could we camp?’
‘Ha, ha.’
‘No … OK … maybe not. We’ll think of something when we wake up.’
He began stroking her shoulder, bringing his hand up under her arm to cup her breast, trailing his finger to and fro across her nipple, and within minutes they were making love, everything outside the immediate vicinity of their tangled bodies suddenly irrelevant.
The bed springs, rusty with age and disuse, shrieked alarmingly. There was no room to move and the sheets came loose almost immediately, rucking up under their bodies, but Flora was hardly aware of it until Fin suddenly pulled away, flopped back on the pillow.
‘Condoms,’ he muttered. ‘I forgot the bloody condoms.’
Breathless from their lovemaking, her whole body crying out to have him inside her again, Flora groaned.
‘We don’t need to worry. There’s almost no chance I’ll get pregnant from one night, at my age.’ She wasn’t even sure when her last period had been, they’d been erratic since her depression, when they’d stopped altogether for a few months.
‘You sure?’
‘At this moment? Yes, I’m sure.’ She laughed, pulling him towards her again, covering his skin with a line of kisses which slowly reached down the length of his body until he was hard again.
But at his moment of climax he withdrew, coming against her stomach, and part of her was disappointed.
She woke early the next morning, before it was light. She padded through to the bathroom for a pee, hurrying back to the warmth of bed.
‘Hey,’ Fin said sleepily, gathering her close. ‘Did you sleep?’
‘I did … surprisingly. It’s still early.’
‘That was beautiful last night,’ he said.
‘It was …’ She hesitated, loath to ruin a moment. ‘You were … really careful.’
‘I thought it’d be risky.’
‘Yeah, I get that. But … but has your feeling about children ch
anged?’
‘Children in general, or children in particular? Can’t stand the little blighters in general.’
She dug him in the ribs. ‘You know what I’m talking about.’
He didn’t reply immediately.
‘It’s sort of not really the right time, is it? What with me still off sick, not a bean between us and neither of us with a place to live.’
‘I have got a place to live. We have. The flat is my home as long as I want it to be. Prue’s always said that.’
‘Yes, but a small basement in the middle of London? You can’t bring a kid up there.’
‘That’s not really what I asked.’ She shifted to lie on her back, her head perched uncomfortably on Fin’s outstretched arm. She realised her heart had suddenly upped its beat.
‘Umm, well … we always said we’d have children one day, didn’t we?’
‘Still not answering my question.’
She heard his long sigh.
‘God, Flo. I don’t know. Aren’t we too old for kids? They’re bloody hard work, if other people’s brats are anything to go by. And, as I’ve always said, I’m away all the time. You’d virtually have to bring it up on your own.’
Flora sat up, pulling the thin duvet over her shoulders. She turned to face him.
‘So you’re saying you don’t want them? Be honest, Fin. I’d rather you were honest.’
He looked flustered, shaking his head. ‘Please, don’t give me that look. I’m just saying it won’t be easy, that’s all. If you want a baby, then we should have one.’
‘If I want a baby?’ She crawled over his body and began to get dressed.
He grabbed her arm. ‘Come on, come back to bed. That’s not what I said. I just said that we have to think this out carefully. Wait till we get somewhere to live that’s ours. Wait till I know if I’m going to be away so much. I might not be able to climb again, not professionally. In which case I’ll be around more. But we don’t know yet.’
Flora sat down on the bed in her knickers.
‘Obviously, right now would be stupid, I totally agree. But Fin … perhaps you haven’t noticed a small but significant fact: I’m in my forties. I don’t have time to wait for everything to be perfect and in place. If I don’t get pregnant in the next year or so, it’s over. Even now it might be too late, and it’s already dangerous … for the baby and possibly for me.’
‘Dangerous?’
‘Potentially, yes. Down’s Syndrome, premature birth …’
He looked horrified. ‘Well, why risk it then?’
She sighed. ‘Women do have babies well into their forties, always have. And these days, if they’re healthy and get good antenatal care it mostly works out. Anyway, the risks are irrelevant if you don’t want children.’
Fin reached for her, pulling her down onto the bed and grabbing the duvet. He wrapped it round her tenderly.
‘You’re freezing.’
Flora felt suddenly tearful. ‘Please, Fin. Can we just clear this up once and for all? You don’t want children. Right?’
‘No … no, not right. Not right at all. I love you to bits, Flora Bancroft, and a little version of you running around the house would be the most beautiful thing on the planet …’
‘It might look like you.’
‘Even better! But seriously, if it was just me and my life that I had to take into consideration, children wouldn’t be a priority. But that’s not how it works. I don’t want it to be just me and my life, I want a life with you. And if that means a baby, then I will love every inch of it for as long as I live.’
Flora lay very still, shivering slightly, despite the duvet. The passion with which he spoke touched her heart. And in the moment he said those words, she was sure he believed them utterly. But what would he do, faced with the relentless demands of a small baby?
*
‘Cousin Tommy!’ the caption read, as if there were something intrinsically funny about being Tommy. But the man in the picture looked far from amused or amusing, his shoulder-length Seventies hair framing a heavy, almost sullen face as he stared at the camera.
‘Not sure who he was … perhaps a cousin of Mum’s.’ They were sitting on the brown sofa later that morning, looking through a pile of albums Fin had found in the bottom drawer of his father’s desk.
Fin seldom spoke about his mother. She had been a teacher in a teacher-training college in the Lake District, where Fin was brought up. But when he was thirteen, he’d told Flora, she had gone into hospital for a routine operation to remove a small, benign tumour in her neck. The operation went well, apparently, but two days later she collapsed and died from a pulmonary embolism.
Flora peered at a photo of her, standing with her hand on Fin’s shoulder beside a tarn, a picnic rug spread out under their feet. He must have been about eight at the time. She was tall, slim, her blonde hair in a ponytail, with an open, laughing face. She looked very young.
‘Where were you when she died? You’ve never said.’ Flora asked.
‘At school. I was dragged out of a maths lesson.’
‘It must have been so dreadful.’
‘To be honest, I can’t remember much about that day. I remember the funeral … and everyone asking me if I was alright, and me saying I was because I didn’t know what else to say.’
‘How did your father cope?’
Fin sat back against the sofa. ‘Oh, you know Dad. Didn’t say much. Just went on as if nothing had happened. So I did too.’
‘Not good for either of you.’
She felt Fin’s hand rubbing her back. ‘No, well, probably not. But it’s a long time ago.’
They went out for a walk in the afternoon, along the riverbank. ‘Wish I could just take off. Spend the day in the hills,’ Fin sighed, looking off towards the mountains. ‘Christ, I miss it.’
‘You’re sure your leg’s not up to it? Even a gentle hike?’
‘Don’t want to risk it. And anyway, it aches even on a stroll like this.’
‘I can’t tell because you don’t limp, and you never say unless I ask.’
‘I’m supposed to be a brave and fearless mountaineer, remember? Able to withstand loneliness, avalanches and frostbite. Whingeing’s not an option.’ He swung her hand as they walked.
‘I reckon by next year you’ll be back on the slopes.’
Fin pulled her to a stop. ‘And how will you be with that, Flo? If I have to be gone for weeks at a time like I was before?’
‘I won’t mind. I never did. As long as I’m not stuck somewhere I don’t know anyone.’
‘Like here, you mean.’
‘Not necessarily. I just don’t know it very well yet.’
They walked on, the winter sun warm on their faces, but an uneasy tension marred her pleasure.
‘You want to stay in London, don’t you? Close to your sister?’
‘No …’
‘So where do you want to live?’
‘I don’t know … we were happy in Brighton, weren’t we?’
Fin gave an irritated sigh. ‘Yeah. But if I’m not doing the grand stuff – the Himalayas etc – I’ll have to do more teaching – local climbs, guiding, that sort of thing. And I’ll need to live in an area with mountains and hills. Brighton’s climbing wall is hardly a career option.’
‘One minute you say you’re going to be away all the time, the next that you’ll be working round the corner. Make up your mind.’
There was a tense silence.
‘I suppose I had this dream … when we were back in London, that you would fall in love with Inverness, with Dad’s house. It would make it so simple, us being here.’
Flora didn’t reply at once. When she and Fin had met again, she had thought it would be simple: either they would be in love, or they wouldn’t. And if they were, then love would be enough. She hadn’t considered the details, how a life together would actually be lived.
‘You said it yourself, we can’t resolve anything until you know what’s happening wi
th your leg. No point in discussing it till then, is there?’
‘You were the one that brought up the kids thing,’ he said, ‘and you’re the one who hates Dad’s house.’
‘That’s not fair! I don’t hate it. You agreed with me that it’s grim as it is at the moment.’
‘I don’t know how to make you happy, Flo,’ Fin said with a martyrish air. ‘I’ll do anything you want, but I can’t live in London.’
‘OK, OK, I hear you. You don’t have to keep repeating it over and over like a stuck record. You seem to think I’m some spoilt princess for not wanting to just up sticks and move to this freezing, dreary town.’
Fin threw his hands up in the air. ‘Look around you! Look at it. It’s beautiful. The sun is shining, the river looks incredible, the mountains are breathtaking. Hardly freezing or dreary.’
Flora had to laugh. ‘OK … but it was yesterday.’
‘And it probably will be tomorrow,’ Fin grinned.
‘Truce?’
‘Truce.’
*
Dominic was back with another cheque for his great-aunt.
‘Nearly five hundred this time … well, four-fifty once you’ve taken off the commission.’ He brandished the cheque in front of Dorothea before handing it to her.
‘What is this for?’ she asked.
‘For the corner chair, Aunt Dot. Remember? I took it last time I was here because you said you didn’t want it any more. Good result, eh?’
She peered at the writing and nodded. ‘Thank you so much.’
‘Bet you never thought I’d get that amount.’
The old lady looked at him with a wry smile. ‘I thought … perhaps you’d get a lot more.’
There was a shocked silence. Flora stopped pouring the tea and looked over at Dominic. He was staring at his great-aunt, a look that Flora couldn’t at first decipher on his plump face. Calculating, she thought, that’s what it is. He looks like a child with his hand in the sweet jar, who has to come up with a good explanation, fast.
‘Heavens, Aunt Dot! Five hundred pounds is a lot for that chair.’
‘Well, I think you said it was George II … didn’t you? My father collected George II furniture, and he always bought the highest quality.’
