How to Fall in Love Again: Kitty's Story

by Amanda Prowse

  ‘True! But I like the authenticity of it. That’s exactly what I was like – a bit boisterous, too fidgety to sit still for a camera and always wearing jumpers like that. I was probably eager to get to my pony or to run off somewhere.’

  She delved into the box and pulled out another image of her with her head close to the beautiful broad forehead of a pony.

  ‘Oh, Sophie!’ She sighed, turning the image outwards so her daughter could see. They both laughed. ‘Will you look at that! That is a look of pure love!’

  She had written on the back: Kitty Dalkeith Montrose aged nine and a half with Flynn.

  ‘I love how I’ve given my full name lest there be any doubt!’ She peered more closely at the picture. ‘You can’t see it here, as my arm is hidden, but I had just come out of hospital. I remember being desperate to get back to Darraghfield. I think this was after the fifth operation on my arm. I hated being away from home, the food was terrible and there was a very strict ward sister who put the fear of God into me, put the fear of God into all of us! She was revered throughout St Bride’s – you remember St Bride’s, don’t you? The local cottage hospital up there.’

  ‘The one where Nana went sometimes…?’

  Kitty nodded quickly and continued. ‘Your nana and grandad would come and visit me for an hour every night. That was all they were allowed. They’d take a painted green metal chair from a stack by the door, just the one, mind, as per Sister’s rules, and take turns sitting on it. And they’d try and make me laugh, cheer me up, right up until the five-minute warning bell for the end of visiting time, and then your nana would sob. She cried so easily…’ Kitty paused, close to tears herself now, at the memory of her mother.

  ‘She’d weep and go on about how I might have been killed that night, when I was seven, but I always thought she was exaggerating. I do know I hurt my arm so badly that it took six operations over about four years to get it to this.’ She held out her arm, which was far from straight, far from perfectly fixed.

  ‘Funnily enough, the thing that bothered me most was that I’d been promised a shotgun for my tenth birthday and I was so looking forward to it, but I knew that with my wonky arm I wouldn’t be able to shoot straight. The idea of not being as good a shot as Ruraigh and Hamish… God, that was more than I could bear. They teased me so much.’

  ‘Even then?’ Sophie smiled.

  ‘Yes, even then.’ Kitty shook her head and was surprised by how maudlin she felt. ‘Just talking about the hospital takes me back to that room – I can smell the antiseptic in the air and remember the layout of the ward.’ She ran her hand over the bone that was permanently bent. ‘I’ve been told that if I’d been taken to a bigger hospital, with specialist surgeons and all that, you’d never be able to tell I’d hurt my arm.’

  ‘Instead you were probably sawn open by a rank amateur at the cottage hospital who was over the moon to be dealing with something other than frostbitten fingers, haemorrhoids and babies with croup.’

  ‘Probably something like that.’ She smiled.

  ‘I rather like your wonky arm, Mum. It’s just another thing that makes you unique.’

  ‘Oh God, Sophie, is that the kind of cliché you offer your students?’

  ‘Only the shit ones who need a bit of bolstering.’

  ‘You are funny.’

  ‘I’ve got to go.’ Sophie glanced at her watch, then back at her mum. ‘Do you know, I’ve never seen you this happy. It’s wonderful.’

  Kitty looked up at her. She was overjoyed that her daughter approved of this new beginning. ‘Thank you, Soph. I love you.’

  ‘Love you too. Don’t bother coming down, I’ll see myself out. I expect you’ll sit here for some time working your way through those.’ She nodded towards the box of photos.

  Kitty pressed the one of her and Flynn to her chest. ‘I wish I had time, but this old house isn’t going to pack itself up.’

  ‘Will you miss it, Mum?’

  Kitty took a second or two to formulate her response. ‘I will miss the happy memories that I have of you and Olly being little, and I’ll miss Blackheath’s lovely shops!’ She smiled, briefly. ‘But I think I’m overdue this change and it will be good to live free of all the ghosts that lurk in the drawers and cling to the curtains.’

  ‘But you don’t regret everything, do you? I mean, you can’t, it’s too much of your life.’

  ‘Oh, Soph, not only do I have so much to feel thankful for, but I try to regret nothing. It feels pointless. I do wish I’d had more courage at times. I wish I’d listened to my instincts. But regrets…? Not really.’

  2

  ‘And where are you off to, if I might ask?’ Marjorie said as she wiped the grill pan dry after its scrubbing.

  Kitty looked down at her flat, fourteen-year-old’s chest, her skinny, purplish chicken legs and her sorry-looking bathing suit, turned grey from having been thrown into the wash with the navy towels. She bit the inside of her cheek, remembering what her mum had said about being sarcastic and how it was most unappealing. ‘I was going to go for a quick swim.’ She nodded in the direction of the pool, beyond the side garden and behind the hedge, as she draped the large, rough-textured beach towel over her shoulder.

  The one good thing to come out of the riding accident back when she was younger was the advice from the doctor at St Bride’s. After the second or third failed operation on her wonky arm, he’d suggested she take up swimming to help with dexterity, muscle tone and all the rest. And Kitty had loved the idea straightaway. Seven years on and swimming had become an important part of her life. Something no one could deny her, not even Ruraigh and Hamish.

  ‘A quick swim?’ Marjorie did this, repeated nearly everything she said, which irritated her. Her dad had explained that Marjorie was no spring chicken and was probably doing so to ensure she had heard correctly. No matter, it still grated.

  ‘The sun’s out.’ As if proof were needed, Kitty pointed to the light flooding through the wide sash window and onto the worn wooden countertop, highlighting the bleach marks left by Marjorie’s overzealous scouring. ‘I don’t want to miss it.’

  Having lived all her life in the notoriously unpredictable climate of the Scottish Highlands, Kitty was well used to it being summery in the morning and wintry by the afternoon, or vice versa, and she wasn’t about to give up on this glorious window of opportunity. It was Easter and the weather was unseasonably good.

  ‘Patrick has cleaned the pool out and I’ve been waiting for a dip. I shan’t be too long.’

  ‘Waiting for a dip? They’ll be here any minute! I’d advise that rather than messing about, you go and wash your face and clean your teeth.’

  ‘Wash my face and clean my teeth?’ Maybe this repetition thing was infectious. ‘I don’t see why I have to, it’s only Hamish and Ruraigh and I know for a fact they don’t clean their teeth when they’re going to see me! They hardly spoke to me last time they were home.’ She toyed with the edge of the towel and pouted in the indignant way that only a fourteen-year-old girl could.

  It had been a hard thing for her to accept that in the four years since her two cousins, brothers by any other name, had started at the prestigious Vaizey College, hundreds of miles away in southern England, they had stopped including her as much, if at all. Each trip back to Darraghfield had seen a slow but undeniable erosion of their closeness. Gone was the rough and tumble of their playful holidays, and no longer was she confident of being able to make them laugh or challenge them to a kick-about. It was as if they no longer found her good company, and she wondered what about her could have changed so much. ‘Oh no, not Kitty!’ she overheard Ruraigh moan when Hamish had suggested inviting her for a muck-about on the river. ‘She’ll only slow us down!’ Her cheeks had flamed with anger and her eyes had sprouted tears. Suddenly she’d found herself relegated to the status of a baby. She also heard Ruraigh remark to Hamish that she was ‘the most boring girl in the world’, and that hurt.

  The changes were subtle at
first; they began asking Patrick the gardener’s sons to make up a four with them for tennis, Monopoly or golf, even though she and Isla, her friend in the village, would have happily stepped up to the plate. They made private jokes about people and places she had never heard of: ‘Aye, Twitcher! Twitcher!’ they bellowed, before rolling around on the sofa. She sat, excluded and awkward, staring at the TV and trying not to care, wondering who or what Twitcher was and why it was so funny.

  Their bodies had changed too, the soft pouches of boyhood replaced by hard muscles and wiry hair. When they’d arrived at Darraghfield for the summer holidays after their first year at Vaizey, she’d thought they looked yucky. She was nearly twelve, but at thirteen and fourteen, they were like alien creatures. Their voices had altered too, becoming deeper, with less of a crackly edge, and their vowels had got more rounded, the burr of their Highland heritage much less distinct. Words like ‘grass’ and ‘bath’ were elongated in a way that made them sound like royalty or the presenters on the BBC.

  ‘Stinky old school, stinky old boys!’ had been her conclusion when they’d finally left for the start of the autumn term.

  ‘What’s that?’ her dad had asked over the top of his newspaper.

  ‘I said, “Stinky old school and stinky old boys!”’ she repeated with clarity and passion, lifting the teaspoon with its smudge of tea residue and smacking the top of her boiled egg with force.

  Her dad had placed the paper on the breakfast table and given a half-smile. ‘It’s not easy being Ruraigh and Hamish. Their mum and dad are far away—’

  ‘Yes, India.’ Kitty was happy to show her knowledge and did so with a tone as dismissive as she could muster, hoping to indicate that she couldn’t care less. So what if her stupid uncle was in the stupid army and they lived a stupid amount of miles away. Why did that make it okay for the boys to leave her out? She could play Monopoly as well as Patrick’s boys. Fact.

  ‘That’s right – India. And that’s why Darraghfield has always been their home, and that means you, Mum and I are very important to them.’

  She sighed, wondering how he hadn’t noticed their rejection of her and if he had, why he wasn’t bothered by it.

  ‘And here’s the thing, Kitty – when you get older, things change, your mind and body grow so that you can absorb everything you see and everything you do. That doesn’t mean you forget what you already know or who you already love, but it does mean that things that seemed so very important in your childhood get a wee bit diluted.’

  I don’t want to get diluted! I want to stay as I am.

  ‘D’y’understand?’ her dad asked earnestly.

  She nodded even though she didn’t. Not really.

  In some ways, Kitty felt differently about her cousins now that she was fourteen – or at least about teenage boys in general. She and Isla gawped and giggled at the pictures of David Essex and John Travolta in the copy of Jackie magazine they bought every week from the village shop. They gossiped about what their first kiss would be like and which of the boys in the village they’d choose if they had to. Kitty secretly suspected that Isla had a bit of a thing for Ruraigh, but nothing had been said yet, much to her relief.

  Marjorie placed the grill pan in the top oven and shooed the dishcloth in Kitty’s direction, sighing affectionately and bringing her back to the discussion at hand. ‘It shouldn’t matter who is coming to the house, you shouldn’t want to greet anyone with mud on your cheek or anything less than sparkling teeth!’

  ‘Ah, well, the mud will be taken care of in the pool.’ Kitty wondered if this qualified as sarcastic or practical. It was hard to tell.

  Marjorie pushed the tight sleeves of her blouse up over her wide, white arms. ‘Tell you what, let’s compromise. You go and clean your teeth, and I agree, a quick dip will take care of the mud on your cheek, but you are not to dawdle in there – a short swim, then back up here for changing.’

  ‘Thank you, Marjorie!’ she yelled as she darted along the hallway to the downstairs bathroom, adjacent to the boot room.

  She raced past the two suits of armour that stood like the shells of soldiers at the bottom of the wide, sweeping staircase, and out of habit she patted the huge tapestries that lined the corridor as she whizzed by – patting them helped stop the dust from gathering, her mum always said. They were ancient, possibly from a similar period to the pikes crossed on the wall above them, talismans from significant battles fought by the Dalkeith Montrose family back in the day.

  Darraghfield was pretty grand, but Kitty, having spent every day of her fourteen years there, knew no different and so never gave it a thought. The Dalkeith Montrose family had lived there for three hundred years, and some of the people in the gilt-framed portraits on the stairs, hallways and half-landings did look a bit like her dad. It was her dad who now ran Darraghfield and its estate, making sure the salmon-rich rivers and grouse shoots were well managed and kept the family’s wealth steady. Despite its history and size, the house itself was homely: in the reception rooms, the furniture was rounded and worn, with thick wool blankets over the arms and rugs brought back from travels far afield on the slate floors. Everywhere carried the residual smell of real fires.

  In the bathroom, Kitty grabbed at the toothpaste tube and squeezed it, stuck out her tongue, licked a blob off the end, then swiped her hand across her mouth. Job done.

  ‘What are you up to in there, Kitty Montrose?’ Her mum leant on the doorframe, smiling at her.

  Kitty was pleased to see her as these days her mum was more often than not upstairs. ‘I’ve just cleaned my teeth.’ She twisted her jaw defiantly.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Her mum widened her eyes, not letting on if she was aware of the lie or not. ‘And you are off for a swim? As if I need to ask.’

  Kitty nodded, looking at her smart, beautiful mum, who knew better than Marjorie what her outfit meant.

  ‘Can I plait your hair? It’ll stop it getting so knotty in the water, my little mermaid.’

  ‘Sure.’ Kitty followed her to the stairs and sat on one of the lower steps. Her mum sat a little higher, with her silk nightgown and robe flowing over her knees and down the wooden stairs. Without a brush or comb, her mum raked her long fingers through Kitty’s wild mane of curly red hair, smoothed it from her scalp and unpicked the knots. It felt so special to have her mum tending her hair so lovingly, and she enjoyed the snug feeling of sitting against her legs with the caress of soft silk on her arms. This was the version of her mum she loved best, the one who did these nice things for her, unhurried and interested, in close proximity.

  ‘My mumma used to do this for me each morning and I loved it. When I first met Daddy, I used to get him to brush my hair for me. He thought I was odd, but I loved that feeling, Kitty, of someone looking after my hair while I sat with my eyes closed and let my thoughts wander…’

  Kitty closed her eyes and did just that, as her mum nimbly divided her hair into two bunches and twisted them into fat plaits that sat either side of her head, close to her scalp. She fastened the ends with two elastic hairbands recovered from her robe pocket.

  ‘There.’ Her mum leant forward and kissed Kitty on the forehead. ‘You’ll do.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She stood and turned to face her mum on the stairs. ‘I love you, Mum.’

  Her mum’s face broke into a wide, adoring smile. ‘And I love you too, so much.’

  ‘You can come and watch me if you like?’ She pointed towards the garden.

  ‘Oh…’ Her mum shook her head, a little crease of worry at the top of her nose, as she gripped the neck of her nightgown. ‘I think I might just go back up to bed.’

  Kitty nodded and swallowed the lump of disappointment in her throat. Her mum slowly stood and began her climb back up the stairs; the effort it took, it could have been a mountain.

  Kitty ran into the boot room and slipped on her flip-flops, which were a tad too small, this now apparent from the way the backs bit uncomfortably under her heels. Shutting the stable-door of the boot
room behind her, she sprinted down the gravel path, leapt over the shrub border, raced across the patch of grass and made her way through the narrow gap in the laurel hedge.

  The hedge was the screen around her special place, providing shelter and privacy for Darraghfield’s beautiful Italianate-style heated swimming pool, a fancy addition for the third wife of her great-great-grandfather. Throwing her towel onto one of the wicker steamer chairs, she paused, taking in the perfect sunny vista as she stood on the edge with her long, pale toes curled around the curved lip of the tiles. The sunlight danced on the surface as it shifted in the breeze and the Roman steps at the far end wobbled, distorted in their watery home.

  Kitty bent her knees and angled her back just as her dad had shown her. With her head tucked, arms level with her ears and hands reaching out, she leapt and pushed herself forward, feeling the immediate thrill of breaking the surface as the water rippled from her form. Working quickly, she propelled herself forward, hands slightly cupped, waggling her feet, moving at speed until her fingertips touched the opposite wall. She flipped around awkwardly, lacking the grace of swimmers who had the knack, and headed back, feeling the delicious tensing of her muscles against the resistance of the water.

  Eight, maybe ten lengths later and her breath came fast. She trod water and wriggled her finger first in one ear and then the other, then smoothed the droplets from her face with her wrinkled palm. She felt both peaceful and very much alive. The sun warmed her freckled skin and all was right with her world.

  I could stay like this forever… My happy place.

  She lay on her back in a semi-doze as the water lapped at her ears. Lying like this turned the world into a quiet place, a refuge of sorts. It had been lovely to see her mum up and about earlier and she was grateful for the touch of her fingers on her scalp. It was a reminder of how things used to be. She let her eyes wander to the slate roof of Darraghfield, picturing her mum ensconced in the beautiful turret room, curled up, as she often was, looking small in the middle of the big bed and wanting to do nothing more than sleep. Dad said she was ‘very tired’. Marjorie said she was ‘under the weather’. Neither explanation came close to answering the many questions that flew around Kitty’s head. It was as if life exhausted her mum and nothing interested her, not even the tiny bird skull Kitty had found next to the path up by the stables. She’d rushed eagerly up the many fights of stairs and along the hallways, cradling the tiny, delicate thing in her palms, but not even this remarkable discovery had been enough to draw her mum from her sadness.