Fraser was the next to stand up, taking out another couple of notes and slipping them beneath one of the glasses still standing on the bench.
‘Really,’ Anna began. ‘Please don’t—’
‘Ahh,’ Fraser said, holding up a finger to stop her. ‘Your poster says I should pay what I think is appropriate, and I think this is what’s appropriate. It’s probably worth a darn sight more, to be honest. Look forward to eating here again – my wife Emma would love it. Wouldn’t your mum love it, Jamie?’
‘Yeah,’ said his son. ‘She would! Can we come again next week?’
Fraser raised an eyebrow in question but Anna shook her head with a weary half-laugh. ‘Oh, I don’t think I’ll be doing this again.’
‘Why not?’ Fraser protested. ‘Ach, because of one grumpy old man? He’ll not be trying that again, that’s for sure.’
Anna smiled, but said no more. She knew, though, how very important word of mouth was to a venture such as this one. However understanding and friendly Kate and Nathan had been, it was inevitable that if they spoke about eating at the Fishergirl’s Luck, what had happened would come up. To them, who did not know the history that had led to Old Robbie’s words, it would seem as if a frail old man with a stick had been bullied right there in front of them. Besides, someone had already tried to prevent her from opening the lunch club at all. Together the two incidents would doubtless sour things far beyond her current embarrassment. Not to mention that, were Anna to attempt it again, she would now always be reminded of that sharp look of shock and humiliation on an old man’s face as he’d turned away.
Fraser rounded up the two boys and the three of them headed for the harbour, where the Cassie’s Joy was waiting. Robert MacKenzie hung back, helping her clear the last bits from the table.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, once they stood in the kitchen.
Anna kept her back to him, adding her load to the sink of dishes. She leaned against the rim briefly, looking out of her little window onto the sea. ‘You knew that he was planning to make trouble,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you?’
There was a second of silence from behind her. ‘I heard something in the pub last night. That he’d seen the poster was up again and had been on the phone to a few people about it, wanting to shut you down.’
She nodded and turned around. ‘So that’s why you came?’
He looked away. ‘I thought… that if I was here, he might think twice. But I’m sorry. I should have gone to his door sooner, or taken him away from the table.’
‘I’m an adult. I don’t need anyone to fight my battles for me. You should have told me and let me deal with it.’
He looked at her, his eyes dark. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’
She nodded. ‘What was all that about his house?’
‘After the landslide, he refused to move – he was born there, it’s all he’s ever known. But the place needed a lot of work that he couldn’t afford. He’d never had a mortgage, but he had to take one out. Then he couldn’t keep up with the payments. So I took it on.’
Anna watched him. ‘That was good of you.’
He shook his head. ‘I do what I can. It’s what Cassie would have wanted. We’re all related around here, us locals, in one way or another.’
She turned to look at the pile of washing in her sink. ‘You’d better go,’ she said. ‘They’ll be waiting for you and I should get on with this lot.’
There was a moment of silence. She didn’t turn around.
‘Thank you for lunch,’ he said.
Then he was gone.
Selkie lass,
I’ve done something daft. I thought I was helping, but I only made things worse. You would have told me it was a bad idea before I’d even done it. You’re good at that, seeing what should be done and the right way to do it.
I don’t know why it bothers me so much. I don’t even know her, really.
If you were here, you could tell me how to fix it. If you were here, you would have done the right thing in the first place.
Why aren’t you here?
Eighteen
Heavy fatigue crept into Anna’s bones. She couldn’t shake the melancholy that settled on her after Robert MacKenzie had departed. She cleaned down in silence and declined Pat’s offer of a drink, unable to bear the thought of having to detail the humiliation of her latest run-in with Douglas McKean, assuming that Pat hadn’t seen it all from her window anyway. Anna racked her brains, trying to work out what she could have done differently, but drew a blank.
‘This isn’t on you,’ Cathy told her, once the kitchen was spotless and Anna was curled on the sofa with the phone to her ear. ‘Some people are simply like that. I’m glad this MacKenzie bloke put him in his place.’
‘You didn’t see his face, though,’ Anna said. ‘He looked as if his whole world had ended.’
‘Don’t feel sorry for him. He doesn’t deserve it.’
‘I don’t. Not really. But it made me realize… there are so many things here that I don’t know. Whole histories that I’ll never understand, connections that I’ll never be able to make. I thought I was settling in but… I don’t know how I’ll ever really be a part of this place.’
‘Don’t think like that,’ Cathy told her. ‘You’ve only been there a couple of months. Think of all the positives – all the friends you’ve made.’
Anna thought about Robert’s face as he’d left. She’d been annoyed by his interference, by the unspoken suggestion that she couldn’t look after herself. But he’d only been trying to help. Had she even accepted his apology? She couldn’t remember.
‘I’m not sure I’ve done a great job of that, either,’ she sighed. ‘Look, I’m going to go. I’m so tired. I need to sleep.’
‘That doesn’t sound like you,’ said her friend. ‘It’s still early. You’re not sickening for something, are you?’
‘Just want this day to be over as soon as possible, that’s all.’
Cathy hummed in sympathy. ‘Tomorrow will be better. Call me?’
* * *
On Sunday morning Anna woke before the sun had faded up the ocean waves from black to green and felt so nauseous that even sitting up was an effort. She cursed herself – it was a stress reaction she’d battled when she was first at catering college, and then every new job she had taken afterwards, and she had no intention of having to conquer it again. Anna forced herself to get up, made tea and then sat cross-legged in front of the window of her bedroom with the muslin drawn back and her duvet around her shoulders. She watched the improbable colours of dawn change as the light swelled over the horizon, hyper-real stripes of colour that looked more like the glaze on one of Rhona’s plates than the reality of a northern sky. To her right the cliff and the houses of Crovie looked one and the same in the early morning glare: part and parcel of each other, never to be separated, much like its people. We’re all related around here, us locals, in one way or another.
She left that thought where it was and went downstairs to shower.
Shortly after 9 a.m. there was a knock at the door. Anna assumed it was David and Glynn stopping by as usual with Bill and readied an excuse – the very thought of walking the clifftops was exhausting – but instead she opened the door to two small, familiar boys.
‘Anna! Today we’re going to follow the dolphins as far as they go to see exactly how many of them there are because Jamie and me still can’t decide and that meant we had to come right past Crovie because it looks as if they’re on their way out to Fraserburgh and so I said to Dad could we please stop and ask if you wanted to come with us. He said no because you’d already seen the dolphins now and would probably rather have a nice Sunday lie-in, but I said I don’t think you have seen them, not really properly, and anyway Uncle Fraser and Auntie Emma thought it was a good idea. So here we are and do you want to come with us? But you have to be quick because otherwise we might lose them.’
Young Robbie MacKenzie finally paused to draw breath and push his glasses
up his nose. Anna opened her mouth, first in surprise and then in an attempt to give the boy an answer, but instead what came out was a question. ‘Auntie Emma?’
‘That’s my ma,’ Jamie supplied. ‘So you won’t be the only lady.’
‘Oh, right. I see.’
‘Come on!’ Robbie urged her. ‘I told you, we’ve got to be quick!’
‘Boys,’ said a woman’s voice, floating along the path mid-laugh, ‘we told you to ask Anna politely.’
‘We are being polite!’ Robbie said fervently, as the owner of the mystery voice came into view. ‘But we want her to hurry up, too!’
‘Ssh,’ said the woman, as she rested one hand on the boy’s head. ‘Hello, Anna – I’m Emma, Jamie’s mum. I’m sorry to disturb you on a Sunday morning.’
‘You’re not,’ Anna said, holding out a hand with a smile. Emma shook it in a warm, strong grip. ‘It’s nice to meet you. Thank you for stopping by and the offer. But I’m not feeling one hundred per cent this morning, so I think it might be better if I stayed here today.’
‘No!’ Robbie moaned. ‘But you’ll miss them all! Pleeeeeeease come!’
Emma smiled and glanced along the path towards the far end of the village. ‘Sure you don’t want to blow away a few cobwebs?’
Anna was about to say yes, she was sure, but then she remembered the mantra she’d adopted when she moved in. Say yes. Say yes to as many things as you can. Besides, now that she’d been standing in the fresh air for a few minutes, she was feeling better.
‘Well,’ she said, wavering, ‘I suppose it is a beautiful morning…’
‘Yes!’ crowed the boys in triumphant unison, followed by Young Robbie’s, ‘Hurry up!’
‘Can you give me five minutes?’ Anna asked Emma.
‘Of course we can – it’ll take me at least that to herd these two terrors back to the boat,’ Emma laughed. ‘We’ll see you at the pier – whenever you’re ready.’
Anna left the door open, hearing the shout and chatter of the boys as they headed down the sea wall. She grabbed an extra layer and her coat before pulling on her walking boots and following. The hubbub from the waiting boat floated towards her, but to her surprise it wasn’t the outline of the Cassie’s Joy that she saw. Instead a larger pleasure craft with a sleek, shining white hull and chrome rails crouched beside Crovie’s pier. Fraser was at the helm, a ridiculously small skipper’s hat perched precariously on his head: Anna had a hunch it belonged to his son. Emma was towards the rear of the boat, busily wrestling the two boys into life jackets that they were vocally protesting as being ‘for silly bairns!’ A new uneasiness rattled in Anna’s gut as she realized this wasn’t Robert’s boat.
‘Ahoy there, landlubber!’ Fraser shouted, catching sight of her. ‘Ready for an adventure on the high seas?’
‘If you’ve got room for one more,’ Anna said, as she finally saw Robert MacKenzie. He was crouched on the deck beside Fraser, his back to her, tying down a folded tarp. He didn’t even turn his head at the sound of her voice, which only caused the growing doubt to sink even deeper into her bones. The substance of his son’s excited words as he’d stood on the doorstep of the Fishergirl’s Luck came back to her, their meaning finally and far too late marked out in the flow.
Dad said no.
Robert hadn’t wanted her to join them – why would he, after their awkward parting the day before? But it wasn’t his boat and he’d been overruled by Fraser and Emma. Anna wished she’d stuck to her original conviction that staying at home would be a better idea.
‘Of course there’s room,’ Fraser said. ‘Come on, get yourself aboard.’
Old Robbie finally got up, turning around as Anna stepped onto the boat. He gave her a smile that was slightly reserved and came closer as Fraser began to pull out into open water.
‘Morning,’ he said quietly, beneath the roar of the boat’s engine.
‘Hi.’
‘How are you?’
‘Fine, thanks.’
There was a slight commotion from the other end of the boat. Anna looked past Robert to see Emma wrestling with Young Robbie, as if trying to stop him from coming towards them.
‘Robbie said you didn’t want me to come.’
‘I didn’t want you to feel put on the spot after I offended you so badly yesterday.’
Anna sighed. ‘You didn’t offend me. It was only… I’ve had quite a few years of not being able to do things the way I would choose to for myself.’
He nodded. ‘I get that, and I’m sorry.’
‘And I probably owe you an apology for yesterday,’ Anna added. ‘I know you were trying to help.’
‘There’s nothing to apologize for,’ he told her. ‘Unless, that is, you let what happened with Dougie stop you from trying again. That really would be something to be sorry for.’
Anna looked away, out towards the open ocean before them. The boat picked up speed as they cleared the bay and the coast stretched out before them, cliff and shore and wave undulating together in perfect curves of earth and water.
‘Dolphins ahoy!’ Fraser shouted from the shelter of the boat’s protected helm. ‘We’ve found them, boys! We’ve found them!’
The two children whooped and ran forward, leaning over the rail.
‘I’ll think about it,’ she told him. ‘Let’s concentrate on the dolphins for a while.’
Nineteen
The pod hopped and skipped ahead of the boat, sleek shapes leaping out of the ocean so cleanly that they barely even seemed to trail water while airborne. Anna and Emma leaned against the rail beside the two boys, who were trying to number the pod. It was a difficult proposition with the creatures’ exuberant, here-one-second-gone-the-next movements. Jamie and Robbie pointed and shouted, ducked and whooped, shimmering with excitement and purpose.
Anna caught Emma’s eye and smiled. ‘Do you think they know we’re here?’
‘The boys, or the dolphins?’ Emma asked dryly. The two children did seem to be growing more excited by the second.
Anna laughed, pointing at a singing curve as it leapt through a wave and splashed smoothly down again, disappearing from view. ‘That’s so amazing to see. Why do they even do that?’
Emma shook her head. ‘For my money they do it because they can. Wouldn’t you, if you could?’
‘I absolutely would.’
The two women talked as the day wore on, exchanging histories and becoming acquainted. Emma, as Fraser had already said, commuted to Inverness each day, where she managed a branch of one of the major banks.
‘It’s maybe not what I planned to be doing all my life,’ she confessed, ‘but it’s made us financially stable, and that’s nothing to be sniffed at these days. It’s why I admire you so much, Anna, giving everything up to change your life completely to start over.’
‘Well, it was a bit different for me. I don’t have a family to support.’
‘True,’ Emma agreed, ‘but it’s still such a big thing to do. How are you finding it so far?’ she asked, and then laughed at Anna’s immediate grimace. ‘That good, eh?’
‘Oh, parts of it have been wonderful,’ Anna told her. ‘Meeting people like you and Fraser and Robert and the boys. Spending time in such a beautiful place. But I assume you heard about the run-in with Douglas McKean yesterday?’
‘Give it time, is my advice,’ Emma said. ‘These things don’t happen overnight, and we Scots can find it hard to let anyone in. Especially,’ she said, with a twinkling laugh, ‘an English newcomer.’
As they laughed together the boat’s engine cut out. They both turned towards the wheelhouse, registering a renewed tumult of noise from the two children.
‘Look,’ Fraser said, pointing towards the dolphins. ‘Didn’t you two hear the boys shouting?’
Out in the water the pod had circled on itself and was now leaping towards the boat, dodging waves and the white water broken by the wind. In a moment the animals were alongside, sinuous bodies curling beneath the surface, breaking it,
calling with their unmistakable high-pitched whistle. The two boys rushed past them to the other end of the boat. Anna followed, leaning over as the pod billowed past, almost seeming to look up at the humans as much as the humans were looking down at them. The boys stretched out their arms, palms down. A second later Jamie shouted in astonishment as one of the dolphins dove upwards, slapping its nose against his fingers with a wet thwack.
‘See?’ Young Robbie shouted, pointing to the periphery. ‘I told you there was a baby! I told you!’
There, hovering beside its mother, was a little calf, paler than its elders, with inquisitive eyes that followed its inquisitive nose, watching them with eyes far shrewder than one would expect.
They stayed out on the boat late into the afternoon, until the summer sun finally began to dip lower in the sky. By the time they got back to Crovie, Anna was tired again, but smiling as she climbed back down to the harbour. It was strange to be on solid ground after so many hours of the boat’s chop.
‘Thank you for taking me with you,’ she said, to all of them. ‘It’s been a lovely day – and I’m so glad we got to see the dolphin calf!’
‘You should come out with us again,’ Young Robbie called. ‘We’ll be going out to check on it every day until it’s fully grown.’
‘Oh, will we now?’ asked his father. ‘That’s the first I’ve heard of it.’
‘We have to make sure he or she is safe, Dad,’ his son said, with a distinct air of pressed childlike patience. ‘It’s our responsibility.’
‘Right, I see.’ Robert turned back to Anna with a grimace and his hands on his hips. ‘Nothing like making a rod for your own back, is there?’
Anna laughed. ‘Well, I’m always here if you want some company on patrol.’
He smiled, a wide, relaxed expression that made his face younger and happier than she’d yet seen it. ‘Sounds good to me. Thanks for coming, Anna.’
The House Beneath the Cliffs Page 14
