Faith - Lesley Pearse [252]
‘How resourceful of you! And after that?’
‘I’ll go back to London on Monday when you go off to Oban.’
He looked down at her, and she could feel his anxiety. ‘And then?’ he asked.
‘Whatever you want,’ she said, reaching up to trace around his lips with one finger.
‘I want you here, with me, for ever,’ he said, taking her fingertips and kissing them.
Other men, both before she first met Stuart and after they split up, had said such things after lovemaking, but invariably she sensed they said it to all their lovers. She believed Stuart meant it, though. He never said anything he didn’t mean.
‘That’s what I hoped you’d say,’ she laughed. ‘I’ll give you a cooling-off period first, but if you still want me, then I’ll come back. I expect we could rent a little place in Oban for the winter, couldn’t we?’
‘You’d better buy some warm clothes in London then,’ he said, excitement in his voice. ‘Next spring we’ll come back here with a caravan and live like a couple of hippies while we do it up.’
Laura glanced around her, saw the bushes lit up by the candles and the fire, and she could imagine how lovely it would be in summer. She would love to learn to lay bricks, to mix concrete and study the mysteries of plumbing; it would be the greatest challenge of her life to help make their own paradise.
‘I think we’d better go now, before we turn to blocks of ice,’ she said. She got up and tipped the pail of water over the fire to put it out.
Stuart handed her one candle, but blew out all the others, and picking up the box of remaining food led her back to the cottage to lock it up.
She waited outside while he went in to collect a bag, and she turned to look at the loch again. The moonlight on the water brought a lump to her throat for it looked like a beautiful silver path, and it seemed to confirm that she had finally found her right road in life. The past was no importance, she could let it go and look only to the future.
Stuart had told her to have faith in him. It had wavered sometimes, but she knew now, without any doubt, that if you had enough faith, all dreams could come true.
She could hear Stuart shuffling about in the cottage and a bright beam of light came on as he found his torch. She knew with utter conviction that she loved him and belonged with him, and that she was prepared to go with him anywhere he wanted to be.
It was a defining moment for her, for she’d never had that kind of certainty and faith before.
He came out of the cottage and locked the back door.
‘Ready?’ he said.
‘For anything,’ she replied.
Epilogue
1997
Laura paused as she came out through the French windows into the garden with a tray loaded with a bottle of wine, a jug of fruit squash, glasses and a platter of nibbles for her guests.
It was a glorious August morning, warm and sunny without a cloud in the sky. Jack and Harry, her two nephews, were out on the loch in the rowing boat with Stuart. The boys’ shrill, excited voices carried clearly on the slight breeze as they struggled with learning to row in tandem. Stuart was seated in the stern and every now and then his much deeper voice could be heard giving instructions.
Meggie and Ivy were sitting on steamer chairs down by the small jetty, but Laura thought Ivy looked a little tense as she kept a close eye on her sons.
‘They are perfectly safe,’ Laura called out as she came down the garden with her tray. ‘They’ve got life jackets on, and they can swim, but Stuart won’t let them fall in, so you can relax.’
Ivy looked round, flipping her sunglasses up on to her head. ‘It’s the mother’s curse, always thinking our kids are in permanent danger,’ she said with a grin.
‘That curse must have missed out on our mother then,’ Meggie said drily. ‘I don’t remember her ever worrying about us.’
‘That’s because she rarely came out of the house to see what we were up to,’ Ivy retorted. ‘Anyway, it’s one thing to learn to row on a pond in a park, quite another to be out on a vast loch. I’d just feel happier if Derek and James were here too.’
‘They’ll be back soon,’ Laura said, putting