The Posy Ring

Episode 62

Donal looks up. “Anyway,” he says, shouldering the oars again, “I’ll give Ben a shout and we’ll be gone for an hour, no more. I’ll leave Malky here, though. Think he’s had enough sea for one day. If you need any help, Daisy, just let me know. I’m pretty good at lifting heavy things, as my wife will tell you.”

Alys grins. “You’re good at a lot more than that. I’ll give Grace her tea and you can give her her bath when you come in.”

Again, Daisy finds herself envying the warm domesticity of this, even though she’s not at all sure about living on the island. Maybe it’s something to do with her age. Maybe it’s the increasingly loud ticking of the biological clock, especially when she lies awake at four o’clock in the morning, as she so often does these days.

She wants the kind of life that Alys seems to be leading, although she’s not at all sure who she might want to lead that life with.

“You’ll need to come for a meal soon,” says Alys, just as she’s leaving. “Don’t be a stranger. I don’t have enough female friends of my own age here. Or not friends with the same interests, anyway. I’m not really WRI material.”

They exchange phone numbers.

“If you need any odd jobs doing, just give us a ring. Donal might be available. Being a handyman on this island is like painting the Forth Road Bridge. He tends to work his way from one end to another, but by the time he’s finished the last job at the north end there’s another job at the south end all over again.”

“Does he do gardening?”

“He does. But I should imagine the garden at Auchenblae will be a huge job for somebody.”

“That’s what worries me. Are there any other gardeners on the island?”

“One or two. All more expensive than Donal. I keep telling him he needs to put up his prices. There’s a lot to do here to keep the gallery going as well. And the boat trips. Which he enjoys and they pay quite well.”

“He’s a man of many talents.”

Alys grins. “He is. He fits in odds and ends of gardening between the building jobs, and people are happy to wait for him. You know what they say?

“Mañana is a concept with just too much urgency about it over here. But the truth is, when you have a portfolio of work, you probably work three times as hard as somebody with a nine-to-five job!”

She has a quiet night at Auchenblae. She leaves the hall light on, and her bedroom window open and the dawn chorus wakes her. The mice seem to have calmed down, the fridge makes no noise at all.

Maybe she was just too exhausted to hear anything, as she fell fast asleep, surrounded by her own and her mother’s clothes.

In the morning, a telephone engineer comes over from the mainland to set up her broadband and the landline. He gets lost on the way and has to telephone her to ask where the turning for the house is.

“God, you’re in the back of beyond here, aren’t you?” he says when he finally turns in at the gate. It would be costing her a fortune, except that he’s been called to do some work on a couple of farms at the south of the island as well.

Cal has warned her about the additional expenses of living on an island, even one with such good ferry connections as Garve; how delivery expenses can rocket, how some companies won’t even deliver to anywhere north of the central belt of Scotland, and have a very restricted notion of where that central belt ends.

“Hell’s bells,” the engineer says, looking at the box where the phone line from the road comes into the house. She hasn’t noticed before but it could be made of Bakelite.

“Haven’t seen one of these since 1970. It’s a good job they sent me. Some of the younger engineers wouldn’t know what they were looking at. I’ll need to replace it. I’m surprised the phones worked at all.”

“The line’s been disconnected, so I wouldn’t know.”

She makes him tea and biscuits to speed up the work, leaves him to it and goes upstairs to sort out her bedroom, laying claim to it, making it her own. But she can’t resist putting the Laura Ashley and the Marimekko dresses back in the wardrobe.

Later that afternoon, she’s down on the beach, contemplating the sea and wondering how many relics of wrecked ships might be lurking down there under the sand.

She still can’t quite get used to the idea that the beach is hers, and in her heart of hearts she doesn’t approve of anyone owning a beach.

Her father would be outraged. Not that she could fence it off or prevent people from walking along it or would even want to.

She hears joyful barking and looks up towards the house to see Hector careering down the path in her direction, leaping up and down through the vegetation. He thunders over the sand, puts both front paws on her knee and grins at her, panting, his tongue lolling.

“Where did you spring from?” she asks him, scratching him behind the ears. He sits down, thumps his tail on the sand, stands up again, grabs a piece of seaweed and shakes it vigorously.

“Hector!” His master is following at a more leisurely pace, picking his way down the track. He’s grinning too, but not quite so ingratiatingly. “He clearly loves you!” he says, nodding at the dog.

“I suspect he’s anybody’s, really.” “Yeah. That’s true. How was your trip?” “Fine. The fair was OK.”

“Busy?”

“So so. I decided to come back here, begin to sort things out, make up my mind about the house.”

“You saw my mum. You went into the shop.”

“Did she tell you?”

“I phone her quite a bit. Just to make sure she’s OK.”

Afterwards she wonders about this rather strange admission, asking herself why Fiona wouldn’t be OK. She seems to be the kind of person who can look after herself. Also, she remembers the expression on his face when he said it.

He’s smiling, as ever, but just for a moment, his eyes are curiously at odds with the rest of him. She has a brief, incredible impression that he’s completely exhausted, but hiding it well.

Or perhaps she’s reading too much into it altogether.

She wants the kind of life that Alys seems to be leading, although she’s not at all sure who she might want to lead that life with

More tomorrow.

The Posy Ring, first in the series The Annals of Flowerfield, is written by Catherine Czerkawska and published by Saraband. It is priced at £8.99.