Faith - Lesley Pearse [254]
In May of the previous year, Stuart had finished his work in Oban and was ready to start work on the cottage. They bought a caravan and tucked it down amongst the trees at the side of the garden, and with two local men, Stuart began to dig the foundations for the extension to the cottage.
Around that time all the legalities of Jackie’s will had been finalized and Laura and her sisters put Brodie Farm and Kirkmay House in the hands of a lawyer in Fife for them to be sold.
All through that summer Laura was away in Glasgow for three days a week, staying overnight in a small guest house. Along with her volunteer work at the centre, she got herself on a counselling course and studied hard. The other four days of the week she was home with Stuart, helping to mix concrete, collecting building materials, and tending the areas of the garden that weren’t part of the building site.
In October Brodie Farm was finally sold, and Laura passed her counselling course with flying colours. The cottage was coming on in leaps and bounds, and Stuart predicted they’d be able to be in there by Christmas. Laura got back from Glasgow one evening to find the plastering had been finished and the bathroom suite installed. Nothing was more exciting than their first bath, even if the floor was still rough concrete, for the shower in the caravan was tiny and the hot water erratic. They lit dozens of candles and lay either end of the bath drinking wine, and she told Stuart how clever and hard-working he’d been, and he said she was his inspiration.
It was just before Christmas in the drop-in centre, as she listened to a group of addicts talking amongst themselves, that she suddenly realized she wasn’t entirely committed to the work there.
Maybe, as several friends suggested, she wanted to be at home looking at paint charts, watching Stuart painstakingly build their kitchen, or choosing curtains and furniture, but she didn’t think so.
While it was true she didn’t like being away from him, it was more than that. She could see so clearly that in five or ten years from now, some of the group she heard talking would be dead. The rest would have slid even further down the slope, and she doubted that any of them would have recovered and be leading useful, happy and healthy lives.
She felt ashamed that she couldn’t be more optimistic, but the statistics of recovery amongst addicts from deprived backgrounds proved she was right. It struck her that she should put her energy into some project that dissuaded youngsters from taking that first step on the rocky road to addiction.
They moved into the cottage for Christmas. The newly plastered walls were all white, they had the wood floors Laura had suggested, and the kitchen and sitting room, now the cottage had been extended at the back, seemed vast because they had so little furniture. They bought a huge Christmas tree, adorned the mantelpiece of the lovely old fireplace with green garlands, and laid a big shaggy cream rug in front of it, on which they made love on Christmas Eve by the light of the tree lights. There were no curtains, but then they didn’t want to shut out the view of the moonlight on the loch. And later that evening, as Laura lounged on a bean bag while Stuart played his guitar, she thought she was the luckiest woman in the world.
In the New Year they went down to Edinburgh for a few days to buy furniture and see some old friends. They took a trip out to Crail to visit Barney’s grave, and while they were there they met Ted Baxter for lunch in St Andrews. It was good to find him much happier: he and Peggie were getting along much better, she was cooking again, going out with Ted in the car, and their first grandchild was expected in a few weeks’ time.
They had only been back at the cottage for one night when Meggie rang to say June had been taken to hospital with a heart attack but died on the way there.
They drove down to London, and though Laura believed she would feel very little sorrow at losing her mother,