Luke lifted his beer bottle to his lips and drank slowly. Kate leaned her chin on her hand and watched him, distracted by the beads of moisture forming on his lips, the trace of stubble he had missed while shaving; the stark, navy outline of his brilliantly blue eyes as he stared back at her. ‘So,’ he said, clearing his throat, setting the bottle down on the picnic table. They were sitting out the front of the Bladnoch Inn in the cooling evening, with occasional cars driving past and the river burbling gently beneath the bridge. ‘You and Emily went to university together like you planned.’ He was trying to get a feel for all those lost years.
Kate traced a drop of condensation. The sky had the clean, bright hue of lilac that preceded twilight and, despite the butterfly nerves zinging in her belly, she felt relaxed and comfortable in Luke’s company. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We lived in the same hall of residence. We were firm friends right through to graduation.’
If Kate had believed her friendship with Emily solid when they were children, it had been unbreakable during those university years, cemented by history and heartbreak. Until Joe.
‘But you lost touch? How on earth did that happen?’
‘I moved to the States after I graduated, after Emily …’ She hesitated. The marriage wasn’t exactly a secret, but it still felt wrong to talk about it. ‘Well, Emily was all set to start teaching. She’d had this mad idea to switch courses in third year and begin teacher training, which no one really understood. But there was a guy … Joe. No one really approved of him. She ran off and married him. That was the last anyone heard of her for a while.’
‘Wow,’ Luke said. ‘I never heard of anyone actually doing that. Eloping.’
‘She was obsessed with him. It was a kind of madness.’
‘I assume it didn’t work out.’
‘They’re divorced.’ She decided not to mention Joe’s full name, or the band; Emily was managing to keep that to herself round here.
When Luke had arrived to collect her from Bluebell Bank in his truck for the date that wasn’t a date, Kate had been peering out the net curtains in the dining room – no matter that it was just friends, no matter that she had spent two hours yesterday messaging back and forth with him, and the rest of the night worrying about Ben. She wondered if Emily’s reticence about the whole thing was down to her not wanting Kate to be hurt again, or disapproval over Ben.
Kate disapproved herself. This felt like a date. All the hallmarks were there: the anticipatory butterflies; the indecision over what to wear.
Kate felt light as air as she tripped across the drive – she’d eventually settled on jeans, a yellow vest top and her hair in its trademark ponytail – and climbed into the passenger seat beside him, inhaling the clean, mint scent of him, meeting his nervous smile with one of her own.
Now, Luke clasped his hands on the scarred wood of the picnic table and looked at her – the butterflies went crazy. ‘It’s sad you guys lost contact at all; you were always thick as thieves when we were kids.’
Kate nodded. ‘I hadn’t heard a thing from her until a few weeks ago. Emily sent me a message, asking for my help with the shop. I came.’
‘I’m really glad you did.’ He reached across the gulf of the table and touched her hand, tracing his fingers over her knuckles. Kate raised her eyes to his, hesitated a beat, a breath, unfurled her fingers and wound them around his.
‘I guess I wasn’t entirely settled in New York,’ she said, admitting it for the first time. ‘I was ready for change and maybe the timing of it was right.’ She paused and shrugged, felt the goosebumps stir on her bare shoulders.
Luke met her eyes. ‘Maybe it was,’ he agreed softly, tightening his grip.
‘But tell me about you. I want to hear everything.’ Kate leaned forward.
He shook his head. ‘There isn’t much to tell.’
‘Everyone says that, but it’s never true. I don’t only want to hear the big stuff. Just the everyday. I’m curious. I haven’t seen you since we were eighteen and you’re telling me nothing noteworthy has happened to you in all that time?’
Luke’s eyes crinkled when he smiled. Kate studied the slope of his dark lashes, how they bled into the creases at the corners. His brows were black and straight, hair so black as to appear blue in some lights. She wanted to reach out and trace the plane of his nose as it flared and narrowed, press her finger against the cleft of his full top lip, feel the hard, square edge of his jaw and dip into the dimple to the left of his mouth, slide her lips just under his ear, tracing the blood vessels and feeling the pummelling of blood beneath his skin, against her lips. She wanted to press and coorie and nuzzle and feel his arms tighten round her.
Kate blushed and took a gulp of beer to quell her longing.
Was his reserve because he didn’t want to confess to some all-consuming love affair? Had she read his signals all wrong? Perhaps this really was nothing more to him than old friends – catching up.
Luke exhaled. ‘All right. I’ll give you the summary. Um, so I went to university in Dundee, studied architecture. Got a job up near Perth my last year, then after I graduated I went travelling for a bit – had to get it out my system before I signed up for a lifetime of work, you know? I’ve worked part-time in construction since I was eighteen; my uncle Davy was in the building trade, so it made sense to combine my skills. I can design and build houses. Cut out the middleman.’
‘That’s impressive.’ Their hands were still clasped, but loosely now and he was absently tracing the shape of her fingernails.
Luke’s face softened into a guilty smile. ‘I exaggerate a bit. I can’t actually build an entire house from scratch. But I am doing most of the renovation on my father’s cottage. I did the plans myself. I’m adding an extra bedroom and an en suite, trying to make it blend a bit better with the landscape. I’m really doing as much of the work myself as I can to save money.’
Kate nodded; it used to be skateboarding, now his passion was for buildings. ‘Like Grand Designs,’ she said brightly. Emily had been making her watch late-night episodes of her favourite programmes since Kate returned.
He laughed. ‘Similar. But way, way less expensive.’
‘So the life as a fisherman wasn’t for you then?’
Luke shook his head. ‘Definitely not. I was mad to think it. I s’pose I was just trying to find some common ground with my old man, trying to make him respect me.’ He shrugged. ‘Considering I spent the whole of our first trip leaning off the back of the boat hurling into the waves, that didn’t work so well. I didn’t last long. Then I applied for uni, started working with Uncle Davy to raise the funds and went to college part-time to get my maths grade up.’
‘And where did you go travelling?’
‘South-east Asia, New Zealand, Australia, America. That was fun. I spent a few months in Italy with my mother. When I came back to Scotland, Dad was sick. Lung cancer.’ He let go of her hands, picked at the label on his bottle with a thumbnail, loosening a corner of the condensation-damp paper. His brow creased. ‘I hadn’t seen him in a long time. I came home, but by then he was already in the hospice. The cancer spread fast and he died earlier this year. I inherited the cottage so I decided to set about renovating the place. It needed a lot of work; Dad had never really done anything to it. I basically ripped everything out and started again.’
‘Where do you live now if the house isn’t habitable?’
Luke grinned. ‘A caravan in the garden. It’s not so bad. I work pretty hard though. This is my first night off in a long while.’
‘I’m honoured.’ She smiled. ‘I’m really sorry about your dad.’
‘It’s fine. I’m doing OK.’
Kate realised then that in all his narrative he hadn’t mentioned anyone significant. He had painted a picture of a solitary existence, but that couldn’t be the case, not for all these years. ‘You went travelling alone?’ she asked, probing discreetly.
Luke’s eyebrows arched, then compressed firmly in an anxious furrow: he had an honest, expressive face. He knew what she was asking and it was the same thing he wanted to ask of her. ‘I did,’ he said. ‘But I was with someone before I went – a girl I met my third year of uni. We had a flat together. It was kind of serious for a while, but when we split up, I decided it was as good a time as any to travel while I still could.’ He fixed her with an profound look. ‘I’m single now,’ he said, as if these words needed to be laid on the table between them like a hand of cards. He looked up at her, expectant.
Kate cringed. ‘I’m not … exactly.’ She wanted to tell him that she could be, he had only to say the word, but then the old hurt reared up and she remembered the pain of his desertion, after all their plans and promises, how she’d analysed every inch of herself to find what was wrong, how Luke had never explained … ‘It’s not serious,’ she couldn’t help saying, dismissing Ben so easily.
With Ben, she could easily cut herself out of all of those prospective images – the fancy restaurant proposal, the champagne celebrations, the engagement party in his parents’ country club, the socialite wedding pictures – and paste anyone else in her place. Any old face, so long as it was pretty.
His parents wouldn’t be exactly disappointed either, Kate thought. They had been polite enough, but Kate knew she fell below the mark of their expectations. Next time he’d find someone with money and family: equal footing. She had never told Ben about Lily – certainly hadn’t mentioned her to his parents. Instead, she had invented a fantasy family – not too well heeled but not too poor either – and killed them off in a tragic accident when she was nineteen. She had posed as an orphan, which was how she considered herself sometimes. This was not, Kate knew, the best basis for a lasting relationship, but, in her defence, she had never presumed the affair with Ben would be anything more than a passing fancy.
Kate took a sip of her beer and wondered if she had been too presumptuous. It’s not serious. Dismissing her boyfriend, practically offering herself to Luke on a plate; she was certain she couldn’t handle his rejection again. She felt herself flush.
‘Your dad,’ she said. ‘Did you get on better terms with him before he died?’
Luke lowered his eyes. ‘Not particularly. He was stuck in a time and a way of life that made no sense to me. I guess my mother leaving changed him, took all the pleasure out of him. He became a grumpy old man when he was still young. He and I never found much in common. I think I reminded him of her.’ His eyes flicked upwards, full of barely concealed pain.
Kate wanted him in her arms, wanted to press her face against his skin and breathe him in. Her heart thrummed with desire; she felt the blood race to her cheeks and lips again – she must be scarlet by now. She pressed on, distracting herself from the pull of him. ‘And your mum? You said you lived in Italy with her for a time?’
‘Yeah, I lived with her for a bit after I was done with travelling. We get on well.’ He shrugged. ‘I mean, she has a whole new family, a completely different life from the one she lived with my dad. I have lots of little half-brothers and sisters running around the place now. Her new husband is great – laid-back, jovial – very different from Dad, but I suppose that was the point. They have a great life. They’re not rich but they live well, they have lots of friends and extended family popping round, they practically live outdoors, the kids playing and all that sky and sunshine … It’s great, but it’s not for me. Not full time. I don’t really belong there.’ A sense of isolation swirled around Luke, settling on his shoulders; as if he didn’t really belong anywhere, hadn’t discovered his place yet.
Home, Kate was beginning to think, was defined not by the place, but by the people you chose to be with.
‘So are you going to live in your dad’s cottage, once it’s renovated, or will you sell it?’
‘I haven’t got that far yet, I don’t know.’
‘And your brother?’
‘Dad left Nick the fishing business and me the house. He knew we would each do something with our respective inheritances. Nick has some idea to sell the business as a going concern and move out to Italy to work there. I think mainly he dreams of an Italian girl making him pasta, and lots of olive-skinned children running around.’
Kate smiled and propped her chin on one hand. ‘There are worse dreams to have.’
‘True. So how about you, did you not reconcile with your mother?’
How much he knew, how disconcerting that no one in her new life ever got so deep since, so perfectly maintained was her shield. Old hurts were buried and the angry, neglected little girl from the tenement was long gone. But not really.
‘Yes and no,’ she said. ‘We’re civil. Pleasant even sometimes. She’s sober and healthy and I’m glad. But we don’t catch a movie together or meet for coffee and we never will.’ She thought of her dutiful replies to her mother; everything so unemotional and matter of fact.
‘Never is a long time,’ Luke said quietly, peeling at his label again, no doubt thinking of his dad and the things he hadn’t had time to say.
Kate looked down at her splayed fingers; her nails were neat aqua-coloured ovals without a chip or blemish. She balled her fists and dug the nails into palms, gouged deep. Luke noticed, reached out across the table and unfurled her hands. They uncurled for him, like fronds opening to the sun. His fingers on her skin, her knuckles, the pads of her thumbs. He didn’t let go this time. ‘You’re glad you came back?’ He traced the crescent scars across her palms as they disappeared.
‘I always used to dream of one more Solway summer.’
‘And here you are, the fairy godmother of bookshops. Will you disappear in a puff of smoke once your work is done?’ The question was weighty, the answer of great import, shaping everything: the coming minutes and hours, the next sentence or three, and the night to come – the next one and the one after that, next week, and maybe even Kate’s future.
Tonight was magical and full of possibilities. It didn’t matter why he left her, only that he was here now.
She borrowed his words. ‘I don’t know, I haven’t got that far yet.’
‘Do you remember the sunsets out by St Ninian’s Cave?’ Luke asked.
She nodded. They went there many times with Lena, Emily and the brothers. Kate and Luke would sit and watch the sunset from a vantage point on a rock by the dark mouth of the cave: the cold nip of evening, the warmth of his breath and his arms, the hushed whispers and happy silence; and her back pressed into his chest as his body curled over hers. The sun sinking, liquid and luminous, the cliff face towering at their backs, the whispering, lapping waves. ‘So do you want to take a drive there?’
The movie reel of moments continued to play through Kate’s mind, sharp and clear: the dank coolness of Physgill Glen, the stones shifting and clattering beneath her feet, the thick smell of the sea.
She nodded again. ‘Yes,’ she said, because taking a drive with Luke to revisit one of the most romantic spots she had ever known seemed like an excellent idea, and the only thing to do.
It would mean something. It would take them way beyond the realm of old friends, take them someplace else entirely.
*
The path from the car park to the beach took longer than Kate remembered, weaving in a shady meander through the leafy glades of the glen. They raced the sun to get there before the last embers died. The sky was alive, a-flicker and a-glow, burnishing and enveloping the clouds in fire.
In fact, they had plenty of time, a good hour of daylight left. They would have to make the walk back in full darkness, but Luke had a flashlight and a blanket. Kate was grateful for the flashlight, but the blanket – with its promise of intimacy – made her stomach curl and curdle with delightful anticipation.
Luke’s two Border Collies, Morse and Caber, released from captivity in the truck, ran ahead of them through the wood with a sweeping, lupine trot, happy tails and lolling tongues. ‘If I’d known we were going to do this, I’d have brought a flask of coffee,’ Luke said, smiling at her in the greenish semi-dark beneath the overhanging trees.
‘For a pair of coffee junkies, to be caffeine-less is practically a crime.’ Kate skirted the boggiest parts of the track, hardly caring about the fate of her pink ballet flats. She could hear Emily’s mocking: Ballet flats, in deepest, darkest Galloway. But, in her defence, she had thought they were only nipping to the Bladnoch for a beer.
When at last they stepped out onto the beach the majesty of it stole Kate’s breath. Memory had not done this place justice.
It was a stony beach, the pebbles slithering and scattering beneath their feet. Through the soles of her pumps Kate could feel the bite of every stone. She was not the sort of girl to own hiking boots, but she could have borrowed a pair from Emily if she’d known. But it was the fact that they did not know that made this moment special. The romance was in the spontaneity of it – no clumsy attempt to recreate something, just two people in the right place and the right time. Finally.
Ben. His name was a drum-throb in her head, following the beat of her heart.
She didn’t want Ben. Imagine him here, a fish out of water, an alien in a strange, unknown land, turning up his nose at everything that made Kate feel so alive. She would laugh at his ineptitude and arrogance, she would wonder why didn’t he just piss off back to his big city.
She belonged here. And that was why she could not be with Ben.
Luke’s arm bumped hers as they trammelled along the stony beach, sky and sea opening up before them. Her heart was full and her blood was vital and singing in her veins and everything was just as it should be.
St Ninian, to whom the cave was attributed, was a vague figure about whom history knew surprisingly little. He was the holy man credited with bringing Christianity to Scotland, according to writings dating back to the eighth century. Kate remembered Lena teaching her that on her first visit.
The Catholic Diocese of Galloway held an annual pilgrimage to this spot. What Kate and Luke were doing now seemed as significant as any religious pilgrimage could. His hand touched hers and there was the barest brush of fingers. Smiles exchanged: secretive, intimate, guilty. Is this OK? Yes, definitely.
When they reached the cave, Kate went inside to read the writings on the walls: pleas and prayers stuffed into cracks and crevices and crude crosses carved in the rock or made from sticks and driftwood and placed around as offerings. Luke remained outside. When she emerged into the evening sun, he was sitting on a rock, leaning on his arms, smiling, gazing skyward. Morse lay at his feet while Caber raced off into the waves with a high-pitched yip. ‘What’s wrong?’ Kate said. ‘You don’t like the cave?’
‘I don’t like any small spaces. Nick persuaded me to go potholing in Italy and I haven’t been the same since.’
Laughing, Kate climbed up on the rock beside him. The very same rock they had sat on as teenagers, young lovers. ‘This is lovely,’ she said, sweeping her gaze around the bay, resplendent before them, orchestrated with them in mind.
‘Yeah,’ Luke said. Without realising it, they had entwined their fingers again; their hands remembering and searching out their rightful partners. ‘Is this weird?’ he asked, quiet suddenly in the face of nature’s glory. Pink sky, blue and lilac clouds, light like liquid gold
She glanced at him. ‘Maybe a bit. But let’s just enjoy it, shall we? We’ll worry about the weirdness later.’
There was a seam of gold beneath the clouds, as the sun made its final descent towards the sea, the surface of the water rippling and writhing, golden and glorious. He took her at her word and fell silent and they appreciated the moment: the sunset, the blanket wrapped around them, their closeness.