The Skylark's Secret, стр. 24
The brisk breeze smells of seaweed and the recently passed rain; it blows Daisy’s curls every which way where they escape from beneath the woollen tammy that I’ve pulled down firmly to keep her ears warm. She chuckles and reaches her hands towards the boat, enthusiastically repeating her favourite word: ‘Bat.’
‘There’s the clever girl,’ Bridie coos. ‘D’you hear that, Davy? She’s starting to talk now.’
He reaches to shake her hand, her fingers looking like a tiny starfish as they clutch his broad, weather-worn thumb. ‘Well, one of these days when the weather’s a bit gentler I’ll take you out for a turn on the water, maybe. If you’d like to?’ He glances at me, uncertain.
‘We’d love that.’
‘Lexie was just telling me she’s longing to get out a bit more now that she and Daisy are settled,’ Bridie chimes in enthusiastically.
I try to refrain from shooting her an irritated glance at this rephrasing of my recent admission to her that cabin fever has been setting in up at Keeper’s Cottage.
‘Aye well, there’s surely nothing like an hour or two out on the loch to blow away the cobwebs,’ Davy says. ‘I’ll let you know when there’s to be a calm window in the weather.’
Bridie issues her order for a couple of nice fresh mackerel for each of us and Davy nods and waves as he casts off.
‘There now,’ Bridie says, evidently pleased with her morning’s work. ‘Well, I’ll be letting you get on to the shop. And I’ll see the two of you on Thursday, like we said.’
‘Thanks, Bridie, I’m looking forward to it.’
As I turn to open the door of the shop, I glance back along the road, and can’t help noticing that instead of continuing towards her house, Bridie Macdonald has turned in at a neighbour’s gate and is hurrying with purposeful steps up the path to knock at the yellow-painted front door.
I arrive promptly at three o’clock on the Thursday, as arranged, with Daisy in her pushchair. But as I turn in at Bridie’s gate, I realise that I’ve been outmanoeuvred. Sitting at the front door is another pushchair. I should have known: we limpets don’t give up our secrets easily. I knock, and Bridie flings the door open.
‘Come in, come in! And look, Elspeth and wee Jack are here too. I thought it would be nice for Daisy to have a pal of her own age to play with. And, of course, you and Elspeth go way back. I remember seeing the two of you getting off the school bus and standing chatting for ages at the stop, rain or shine, before you went your separate ways home to your mammies. Such great friends, you always were.’
Looking at the politely bland expression on Elspeth’s face, I wonder whether she’s been press-ganged into this jolly afternoon play date or whether she came willingly. Because we were good friends, once. We sat next to each other in the little primary school in the village, the only two girls in our year group. We held our own against the bigger kids when the going got boisterous and we moved on to the big school together, sharing the morning and evening bus journeys as well as our packed lunches and the answers to our homework. In the school show, she was always there in the chorus behind me when I sang my solos and it was her encouragement, in the form of a dare, that had made me try out for one of the main parts in the first place.
At seventeen, our lives took us on to separate paths, though. Mine was the road to London and a scholarship place at a performing arts school; hers was the lochside road that was already so familiar to us both. She got a job behind the bar at the hotel and did a correspondence course in bookkeeping in her spare time, working her way up to a better-paid administrative position behind the reception desk. We lost touch soon after that, although I’d heard from Mum about her engagement and marriage a few years ago to Andy McKinnes, who’d been in the year above us at school, and the subsequent arrival of little Jack.
Seeing Elspeth now, kneeling on the yellow-and-brown swirls of Bridie’s sitting room carpet as she shows her son the pictures in a book of nursery rhymes, I feel guilty in all sorts of ways. I feel guilty that I left and she stayed. I feel guilty that I haven’t been a better friend – I never once invited her down to stay with me in London. I feel guilty that I was the one who stopped writing, responding to her lengthy letters with briefer and briefer notes, and then just occasional postcards depicting Big Ben and Carnaby Street, before our correspondence dwindled and died altogether in the absence of any common ground. Remembering our encounter in the shop a few weeks ago, I feel guilty, too, that her calm, competent mothering skills put mine to shame. And, as the tiny solitaire diamond in her engagement ring catches the light when she turns a page of the picture book, I feel guilty that she’s done the whole engagement–marriage–baby thing in the socially accepted manner, whereas I’ve succeeded in making a complete mess of it.
She smiles up at me, tucking her hair behind her ear in a mannerism that I remember vividly from our teenage years, her coolness thawing just a tad at the sight of Daisy balanced on my hip.
‘Hello, Lexie. And hello, Daisy sweetheart – would you like to come and look at this book with Jack?’
Daisy surveys the pair of them, round-eyed and serious, before arriving at the decision that this looks like the opportunity for some fun and reaching her arms towards the floor. I kneel on the carpet, too, and Elspeth turns the book so that Daisy can