Faith - Lesley Pearse [246]
‘I cannae think of anyone.’ Molly frowned. ‘You say his name is Stuart Macgregor and he stays in Edinburgh?’
‘That’s right,’ Laura said eagerly. ‘Could you ask for me in the public bar? I’m too embarrassed to go in on my own.’
Some twenty minutes passed and Laura was about to give up and go back to the guest house, when a short, wiry man of about fifty, wearing a woolly hat and working clothes, came into the saloon.
‘You were asking after an Edinburgh man?’ he inquired. ‘I delivered some timber and roofing tiles to a man along in Kilchrenan by the loch. I dinnae ken if he was from Edinburgh, he put me in mind of a southerner. But he did say he had work in Oban.’
Laura established that the man in question was tall, the right age, and she had no doubt that to a Highlander Stuart’s accent was no longer true Scots because of the years he’d been away. But what clinched it for her was that this delivery of timber and tiles had taken place just two days earlier.
Sleep eluded Laura that night. She’d studied her map and discovered that Kilchrenan was only about five or six miles away, and the chances were that ever-practical Stuart would see mending his own roof as a priority and be working on it this weekend.
But now she was so close, she was scared. What if everyone else’s opinions of his feelings for her were wrong? Patrick and David had never given her as much as a hint; all she had was Meggie’s and Angie’s views and they hardly knew Stuart.
Maybe he’d just been acting like a Boy Scout, wanting to help her for old times’ sake and because he couldn’t resist rescuing a damsel in distress. She’d said herself that he would go once his job was complete, she had really believed that. So what changed her mind?
She couldn’t think of anything he’d said or done that had given her reason to think he hoped for a future with her. In fact his manner after the appeal had suggested he was coming up here to avoid any further involvement.
What could be more scary to a man than a woman he didn’t want to see turning up on his doorstep?
What could she offer him anyway? She was fifty, too old to have his child. She hadn’t even given herself enough time to recover from all she’d been through, much less to find out what she really wanted. She was clutching desperately to sweet memories of one summer of love, over twenty years ago. And perhaps that was evidence of how badly damaged she really was.
She woke early to see the guest-house garden sprinkled with frost and the sky an ominous grey. That seemed like an omen and made her decide it was time she grew up, packed her bag and drove back to London.
Her future was there. She could throw herself into the property in Bromley with her sisters. When probate was settled, she would sell Brodie Farm and open a dress shop. She knew fashion, she was good at selling. She’d buy a nice little house somewhere pretty like Downe, Chislehurst or Knockholt, become a good aunt to Ivy’s boys, and perhaps try to make it up with her brother Freddy.
An hour later at eight, having showered, dressed in jeans and a thick sweater and eaten a small breakfast, she drove away from Taynuilt, speeding along the Pass of Brander by the River Awe towards Dalmally. She planned to take the A82 which went down past Loch Lomond and keep right on down to Glasgow and the motorway.
She had gone some twenty-five miles or more and was approaching Crianlarich where the road forked either to the A85 towards Stirling or the A82 to Glasgow, when ‘Layla’, by Derek and the Dominoes, came on the radio.
It was the one record which encapsulated all her and Stuart’s feelings that first summer they’d spent together. It had been in the Top Ten, and every time they turned the radio on it was playing. Throughout the last twenty years it had always had the power to take her right back to Castle Douglas, and tears would spring into her eyes as she remembered Stuart learning to play it. He would laugh and say he was no Eric Clapton, but to her he was a star in his own right. She wondered if he was listening to the radio right now, stopping to