Wildflower Bay

by Rachael Lucas

  ‘You city types don’t go in much for that sort of thing, do you?’

  She laughed. ‘I’ve been known to “nurture the goddess” in my dad’s back garden, but only under duress. I’m not exactly a gardener.’

  ‘You didn’t fancy “nourishing your surroundings as an offering to the goddess Kali”?’

  Isla flashed him a genuine smile. ‘You mean painting the hall of Meadowview House? Whilst listening to whale music? Or making herbal tea from cowshit?’

  ‘Or dancing naked under the moon whilst playing the drums? Or wrapping yourself in ribbons and offering yourself to the sea goddess?’

  Isla burst out laughing. ‘No. None of the above.’

  She shook back her hair as she spoke, so it fell back into place. He noticed that it shone like a fresh conker, perfectly cut – somehow, despite having lain on her back in the middle of a field, she still looked immaculate.

  ‘Lily isn’t stupid, is she? She’s got them paying for a retreat and doing her house maintenance. I might try something like that at the salon.’

  Underneath that prickly exterior was a sharp sense of humour. He liked her. Staring into her eyes, he’d found himself wondering what was going on inside her head – despite the closed-off impression she gave, there was a depth of emotion there beneath the surface that fascinated him.

  ‘D’you fancy it, then?’

  Isla recoiled in surprise. ‘Redecorating? No, I think I’m all right for that this weekend, thanks.’

  He shook his head briefly, frowning. If Roddy could see him now, he’d be pissing himself laughing. All the usual well-worn lines he’d worked over the last however many years (and, God, he realized, it was a lot of years) – they were deserting him, and he was clutching at straws like a clueless fifteen-year-old, tripping over his words.

  ‘I meant that drink.’ He shifted the steering wheel slightly, avoiding a huge rut in the driveway. ‘The Fisherman’s Arms in Port Strachan. It’s quiet this time of day.’

  Why on earth had he said that? It made him sound like he was on the pull and he was definitely, absolutely not on the pull. Not this time. He didn’t quite know why but what he wanted to do was sit down and talk to her, find out more about what made her tick, find out what she thought of the island—

  ‘Oh.’ She looked flustered, eyes darting from side to side, back stiffening. She was searching for an excuse not to come: he recognized the signs clearly enough.

  ‘If you’re busy, it’s fine, don’t—’

  ‘Yes, yeah – I – just—’

  He killed the engine. They’d reached the halfway point where Isla’s car sat tucked neatly to one side in the lay-by.

  ‘Another time, perhaps?’ She turned, the car door half open. Her eyes darted up to meet his for a second, and then she slipped out of the Land Rover and was gone.

  Finn pulled back and waited, watching as Isla’s little convertible bumped cautiously down the rutted track. He ran a hand through his hair, heaving a sigh of irritation. He’d no idea what had just happened there, but he was in no mood to go home. Roddy wasn’t around, he didn’t fancy a drink on his own, and all Lily’s hippy-dippy shit had left him feeling decidedly weird. That circle meditation thing had made him feel like he was on another planet and he’d found himself thinking about childhood, and memories of Shona, and things from another life – things he’d kept locked away safely for years. And the eye-gazing thing had been completely freaky – maybe Isla felt the same way he did. Seven minutes in silence, looking into her eyes, had left him with more questions than answers. Behind that guarded mask she wore there was so much lurking – Lily had been right about that, saying Isla had so much to offer.

  It was insane that he was even thinking about all this stuff. He still couldn’t work out why on earth he’d hung around when Lily had offered him the chance – he shook his head. No, all right, he knew exactly what was the reason – or who. What he couldn’t work out was why he felt like this.

  Maybe spending the rest of the afternoon down at the workshop would clear his head – yeah, that was it. He started the engine, turned on the radio loud enough to blast out the unwelcome thoughts that were crowding in, and headed back. It was probably all this stuff with Roddy and Kate and the baby, messing with his head.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘Sit yourself down over there, Netty, I’ll be with you in a moment.’

  Shannon waved her next client in the direction of the two chairs, speaking with two hair grips pursed in her lips (unhygienic, thought Isla, reminding herself that she must point out to Shannon that it wasn’t acceptable practice).

  The woman collapsed onto the chair with a grateful sigh, tucking her shopping bags to one side. She closed her eyes for a moment, rubbing circles on the skin of her temples.

  Not waiting to be asked, Isla fetched a cup of tea from the pot Jinny had just made a few moments ago.

  ‘Oh, thanks, hen,’ Netty looked up with a smile. ‘You read my mind.’

  ‘All part of the service.’

  Isla returned to the desk. The salon was quiet this morning, probably because the sunshine was pulling the usual pop-in clients away from their day-to-day routine. Everyone seemed to be out in their gardens, making the most of what had so far been a pretty dull, grey start to the summer – which was unusual, everyone kept telling her. Jinny was busying herself with a stock-check of supplies, planning to make an order. Isla, meanwhile, was attempting to make the computer booking system as simple as possible, in the hope that when Aunty Jessie returned she might make use of it, rather than ignoring it and scribbling everything down in pencil in the scruffy-looking diary that sat on the reception desk. It was covered in doodled flowers and patterns courtesy of Jinny, and the pages were curled and dog-eared – it was hardly the most professional piece of equipment.

  As the weeks passed it was becoming clear to Isla that the salon, which had previously just ticked along nicely, could in fact be bringing in a lot more money. Both Shannon and Jinny were keen to learn, worked hard, and had some good ideas. Of course, there was always the possibility that Jessie would get back and be appalled by the changes that had taken place, but if they had everything in order and could show the results . . .

  She tapped away at the spreadsheet. She’d brought in a version of the same computerized booking program they used back at Kat’s salon. Once it was in place, it was pretty much foolproof, but she just had to get it set up exactly so . . . The hum of Shannon’s hairdryer lulled her into a meditative state as she clicked away, completely absorbed in the task. Jinny was pottering around out of sight. The salon was a hive of quiet industry.

  ‘Isla?’ Shannon turned away from her client, who was an old school friend of hers.

  Isla looked up from the desk, putting down her pen.

  ‘Seeing as we’re not busy, and Netty doesn’t mind being a guinea pig, can you show me how to do a chignon?’

  Shannon really was throwing everything she had into her job now. She’d stopped pretending not to be interested in what Isla was doing, and now that they were starting to get younger, more experimental clients in – the ones who’d previously have visited Glasgow, but who’d realized that with Isla in situ, they could have their hair done for a quarter of the price – she was soaking up every piece of knowledge she could.

  ‘Go on then.’ Isla pushed her chair away from the desk. She smiled into the mirror at Shannon’s friend. ‘Hi, Netty. We prefer to think of you as a model, rather than a guinea pig . . .’

  Thirty minutes later, with a delighted Netty striding out of the salon transformed and glowing with the confidence a new hairstyle can bring, Isla returned to the desk.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘What?’ Isla looked up, startled, at the customer who’d just come in. ‘Sorry, would you mind giving me two seconds, I’m just –’ she clicked save, hoping that she’d made the right adjustments to her spreadsheet – ‘fixing something. Can I help?’

  There was a thud from the back room as
Jinny jumped down from the folding steps she’d been standing on. Following that, a small squeal of excitement. Following that, Jinny appeared as if by magic at Isla’s side, where she stood, virtually vibrating with silent excitement.

  ‘Yes, hopefully.’ The woman had a fuzz of dark hair that looked in desperate need of some taming serum. ‘I’m Kate – Kate Maxwell.’ She held out a hand, rather uncertainly. Isla, disguising a look of surprise, shook it. Prospective clients didn’t usually start off on quite such formal terms.

  Isla clicked on the mouse, opening up the booking page. ‘Are you looking for an appointment?’

  ‘Well, yes and no.’ Kate ran a self-conscious hand over her dark curls, making no appreciable difference to the unruly mop of hair. Isla smiled to herself – as a hair stylist, one grew accustomed very early on to people apologizing for the state of their hair. It was the first thing everyone did as soon as they walked in. She’d see girls who’d swear blind they hadn’t cut their own fringes (which hung unevenly at jagged, kitchen-scissored angles) and women who’d come in with disastrous home colour jobs that they’d swear blind had been done at a salon elsewhere. It didn’t seem to occur to any of them that she was there to do a job, and the job was making their hair look the best it could.

  She’d always wondered if dentists got the same thing with teeth. She gave the woman a reassuring smile and waited patiently for her to stop fluffing up her curls with an apologetic expression. Shannon had paused with comb in mid-air, trying to look as if she was contemplating the work she had just begun, but Isla could see that her ears were pricked up and her gossip radar was activated. The client didn’t seem to mind. She too was looking on with interest, and another woman in the waiting area had put her magazine to one side and was sitting examining her nails with an innocent expression.

  ‘I live up at Duntarvie House?’

  She sounded English – southern, and quite posh. Still none the wiser, Isla looked at her and then up at the clock on the wall, slightly pointedly. She had another quarter of an hour before her next client came in, and at this rate she wasn’t going to get the computer sorted.

  ‘Right . . .’ Hands poised above the keyboard, eyebrows raised, Isla looked at her expectantly.

  ‘I’m, um –’

  God, thought Isla, spit it out already.

  ‘We’ve been having weddings up at the house and I – well, we – well, I really – thought it might be a good idea to come and have a chat with you?’

  The house. Not just any house: the big house. The castle-like Duntarvie that the girls had mentioned in awestruck tones – the one that Shannon and Jinny had shown her the photographs of in the much-thumbed copy of Hello! magazine.

  Of course, this must be the lady of the house. It was typical that she’d be English, Isla thought. Coming up here, stealing our land . . .

  ‘Well, I’m only here for a few weeks,’ Isla explained.

  ‘That’s fine. I’m really keen that we should try and support business on the island, and I know Jessie’s not the most –’ Isla must have given her a look, because she paused uncomfortably – ‘I mean, I know she’s your aunt, and I’m – well . . .’

  Shannon strolled across, folding her inked arms across her chest and drawing herself up to her full five foot three, skinny-jeaned legs akimbo. ‘You mean, Jessie’s not exactly on trend, shall we say?’

  ‘Mm. Yes, well –’ Kate flushed pink – ‘something like that. But I heard you were around for a while, and I know Shannon is doing great things, because she cut my friend Susan’s hair and it looks amazing.’

  Shannon gave a nod, as if accepting praise where it was rightly due. ‘Aye, she’s got good hair, Susan.’

  This is all very well, thought Isla, but I’m not sure how Jessie’s going to take to having her pet stylist poached by the lady of the manor.

  ‘So what are you thinking?’ Isla laced her fingers together and looked at Kate expectantly.

  ‘Well, the thing is, we’ve got a wedding this weekend.’

  Isla raised her eyebrows in surprise. Mind you, they hadn’t officially agreed to opening the salon on Saturday afternoons yet . . . ‘Right,’ she said encouragingly, and Kate’s words all came out in a rush.

  ‘The thing is,’ she repeated herself, before lowering her voice, ‘they’re a bit of a nightmare – er, I mean they’re a bit high maintenance, if you know what I mean?’

  Isla nodded with feeling. ‘Oh, yes. Yes, I do.’

  ‘Well, they’ve just changed their minds at the last minute. Apparently the bride’s decided that instead of flying up her own stylist from London she wants something simple, and they’ve decided at the last minute that they want everything sourced from the island if possible. Including the people.’

  Given the speed at which things typically moved around here, Isla imagined Kate had her work cut out.

  ‘I know it’s late notice. I am really sorry. And I feel really bad, because – well, at least Jessie’s not here, because –’ Kate lowered her voice – ‘I don’t even get my own hair cut here.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Isla looked at Kate’s hair again, thoughtfully. ‘So who does, er, who is your stylist?’

  ‘Me?’ Kate looked slightly uncomfortable. ‘I, um –’ She pulled her dark curls back off her face, twisting them around her hand, forming a thick rope, ‘I have to confess I haven’t had mine cut for ever. I’ve trimmed it with scissors, but I suspect I’m not meant to say that, am I?’

  Isla shook her head with a wry smile. ‘Not really.’

  ‘The last time I had it cut properly was for the wedding.’

  ‘Which wedding?’ Jinny, who’d been ferreting through the piles of reading material in the little waiting area, held up the copy of Hello! that was her pride and joy. ‘You mean this one? The one your house is in? You know I couldn’t believe you had them there in your house – it was so amazing. Were they really nice in real life? I reckon they were really lovely. My wee sister Rowena reckons that he’s having an affair with Margaret Powell, because she read something in the gossip pages of the Mirror, but if you look at this picture . . .’ She paused for breath. Shannon rolled her eyes.

  ‘Actually, I mean my own wedding. I kept meaning to, and then it was just ages and it got a bit embarrassing, and then the place I went to here in town closed down and—’

  ‘It’s fine.’ Isla was used to this part, too. Sometimes mothers would come in to have their children’s hair trimmed and she’d watch them rushing in, hurrying through the process, clearly feeling awkward about the state of their own hair. ‘Anyway, Shannon is extremely talented, and I think she’d be a perfect candidate for event hair.’

  ‘Oh my God.’ Kate’s eyes widened slightly. ‘Yes, that sounds great. Lovely. I’ll give you a shout.’

  Then she backed out of the salon door, giving the cloud of hair one last – fruitless – smoothing-down.

  ‘Extremely talented!’ Shannon blew on her fingernails and polished them on her T-shirt with a smug expression. She did a little shimmy and then stopped midway, looking at Isla with genuine surprise. ‘You’ve never mentioned that before.’

  ‘You’ve got a real eye,’ Isla admitted.

  ‘Right, well, you heard it here first.’ Shannon turned back to her customer. ‘You’d better take advantage of me before I’m away down to London to work for Toni & Guy.’

  ‘She seems quite down-to-earth, considering she lives in a castle,’ Isla remarked to Jinny.

  ‘Aye, I think she is. She’s not posh – well, she’s got that posh accent, but that’s just English, not proper posh.’

  ‘So how did she end up here?’ Isla was fascinated by the idea of this mysterious castle. She’d been out running past the huge stone entrance gates, with the lichen-covered stone lions that guarded the driveway; but beyond the walls the gardens seemed to be thick with trees and rhododendrons, and despite running all the way round (exploring on foot, Isla called it to herself, knowing perfectly well that she was just having a bit of a no
sy), she hadn’t seen anything else.

  ‘Oh, she got a job working for Roddy Maxwell. He’d been going out with Fiona Gilfillan – her dad owns the hotel up on the hill, near the golf course? – until Kate came along. My mum knows her a bit. She’s nice. Normal.’

  ‘You have to be, to live here,’ Shannon joined in from across the other side of the room. Netty twirled her chair around, the better to take part in the conversation.

  ‘Aye, the thing about living here is, you have to get on with everyone in your own way. There’s no’ a mistake you make that isn’t round the whole island by the next morning, if you know what I mean.’

  Isla, thinking of her drunken disaster the night she’d lost her job, felt a huge wave of gratitude that she hadn’t been on Auchenmor when it happened. ‘I suppose that makes everyone think twice?’

  Netty, Jinny and Shannon burst out laughing.

  ‘No; it means we have to own our mistakes, as whats-her-face from the hippy retreat would probably call it. You can’t pretend you haven’t been an arsehole if you’ve been an arsehole. You just have to take the mickey-taking on the chin.’ Shannon spoke with a fair bit of authority in her voice.

  ‘She’s right,’ said Netty. ‘I could tell you some stories about almost everyone on this island, but we tend to let bygones be bygones. We’ve all got our secrets and our stories.’

  ‘Wouldn’t live anywhere else, though,’ said Jinny. ‘I might joke about getting a big posh job like yours, Isla, but I love this place too much.’

  ‘Aye, me too,’ said Shannon, surprising Isla, as she turned back with comb in hand. ‘You might have your posh shops and your fancy restaurants and all that stuff, but this place gets in your blood.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  The rest of the week passed quickly. Jinny was completely beside herself at the thought of working up at Duntarvie House. Shannon was trying to play it cool, but her every spare second was spent with her head in a hair magazine, brow furrowed in concentration, scribbling sketches in a notebook.