Faith - Lesley Pearse [47]
Knowing that none of the others were up yet, he climbed down and waited for the car to reach him.
As it came nearer he saw there was a little boy of about two kneeling up on the back seat. And the woman driving was beautiful.
Everything seemed to go into slow motion then, every detail of the scene in front of him so clear and bright. The long waving grass in the fields either side of the track, the intense blue of the sky, a row of tall fir trees down by the road, the sound of birdsong, and the heat of the sun on his bare shoulders.
The car stopped. The door opened, and she got out, but leaned on the open door.
‘Is this Ewan’s place?’ she called out.
She had an English accent, long, shiny auburn hair, and wore a little suntop with no bra. He was struck by how brown she was, a deep golden colour that he rarely saw up in Scotland, especially on redheads. When she moved away from the car door he saw her legs. Long and slender, equally brown as her arms, and the smallest pair of denim shorts he’d ever seen.
‘Yes, it’s Ewan’s place,’ he said, hardly able to get the words out because of how she looked.
‘Thank God for that,’ she said and smiled. ‘I was beginning to think I was lost without trace.’
The fact she had a car and a child suggested that she was several years older than him, but the warmth of her smile, and the appraising way she was looking at him, was all he cared about.
‘I want a drink, Mummy,’ the little boy shouted from inside the car, and she leaned back in and moved the seat so he could get out.
‘May we have a drink?’ she asked, coming closer to Stuart, holding the little dark-haired boy by the hand. ‘This is Barney. We’ve been driving all night and I’m just about wiped out.’
Stuart pulled himself together then, and rushed into the house to get some water and put the kettle on for tea.
She sat on the bench outside, the boy beside her, and it was only when he handed her the water that he saw how tired she was. She could hardly keep her eyes open, and though she rallied enough with the water to explain that she was Laura Brannigan, and that she’d driven up from London because a friend had told her Ewan would put her up, it was clear she really was all in.
Barney wasn’t a bit tired, for he’d been asleep most of the way. He drank two glasses of water, then asked where the toys were.
‘Toys?’ Stuart said stupidly.
‘I told him there would be lots of other children because it’s a commune,’ Laura said.
‘It’s nae a commune,’ Stuart said. ‘Just a bunch of hippies and there’s nae weans.’
To his surprise she laughed. ‘Your accent is so lovely,’ she said. ‘I thought I wouldn’t be able to understand anything anyone said to me. But your voice is like music.’
She told him she’d left her husband, Gregory Brannigan, because he was carrying on with another woman, and that she’d gone down to stay in Cornwall for a while. ‘I couldn’t find anywhere there to live,’ she said, her lovely face clouding over. ‘Then I met Rob, Ewan’s friend, and he told me about this place. He said that he thought I could get my head together here, and that the women all helped one another with the children. I thought it sounded perfect for us.’
Stuart guessed that Rob, who was well known for his tall stories, had spun Laura this yarn in the hope that she’d be sufficiently grateful to go to bed with him. Perhaps he hadn’t thought she was desperate enough to drive all this way, but it was wrong to have misled her and Stuart didn’t think Ewan or any of the others would be happy about having such a young child here.
He couldn’t bring himself to tell her this, not now she was so tired, so instead he asked if she’d like to have a sleep in his room and offered to look after Barney for her.
∗
As Stuart walked on into Cellardyke, images from that day kept coming back to him. He