Kate picked up the notebook: their recipe for success. She felt better with a plan; she needn’t worry about anything beyond the last bullet point on the final page, and that was comforting. Emily grabbed a bin liner from the kitchen and chucked the detritus of their lunch inside.
‘I have a hire car outside,’ Kate said, slipping the notebook into her bag. ‘I have to return it in three days. The nearest branch is just outside Glasgow.’
Emily called over her shoulder as she carried the rubbish into the kitchen. ‘That’s fine, I can follow you up in the Land Rover. We can make a day of it, scout around auctions or something.’
Suddenly it seemed too final. As if returning the car meant she was committed for the summer. Kate quickly pushed her uncertainty to one side and focused again on their plans for the shop, and sorting out Emily, who was clearly in just as much need of repair. ‘Not the same Land Rover, surely?’ She remembered a green, lumbering brute of a vehicle, mud spattered and temperamental; Lena ferrying them all down from Edinburgh in it all those times Kate gatecrashed the Cottons’ holidays, escaping the loneliness of the tenement. Every Easter and summer they would all pile in and chunter along the scenic route through Moffat and Dumfries, past the swooping valley of the Devil’s Beef Tub.
Emily returned from the kitchen, ducking beneath the strap of an old suede shoulder bag, her jacket over one arm. ‘Jasper? Yep, he still runs like a dream.’
Kate snorted. ‘He never did before.’
‘Don’t be mean about poor Jasper. Do you remember when Lena told us she’d named him after one of her old boyfriends? She said they were each as ornery as the other.’ She grinned at this memory; Lena was a woman who spoke openly of errant past lovers to her grandchildren, who smoked fulsomely and cursed and was generally considered (by Emily’s mother) to be a bad example. When in fact she was the best example of all; an example of how to be oneself in a world where all too often one was expected to twist and contort and conform to fit in.
Kate remembered being fourteen, squashed in the back of Jasper with Emily, Fergus and Ally; she and Em reading Just Seventeen and giggling over the problem pages, fascinated by sex. Dan and Fergus had come to blows over the front seat and were nursing their wounds and lingering tempers. Kate was eyeing Dan surreptitiously when she didn’t think anyone was watching, a strange, new fluttering of longing in her belly that summer – for what she didn’t know. Willing him to notice her that way. Lena was singing badly to The Kinks and the dog was stinking out the car with his breath.
That was the summer Kate met Luke Ross and everything changed.
‘Come on, let’s go home to Lena,’ Emily said, cutting through Kate’s reverie. Kate flushed with the heat of her remembered crush on Dan – fading in the face of her greater obsession with Luke. It had been one of the best times of her life and they had repeated it year on year, those hot, languid summers on the Solway becoming synonymous with love, and Luke.
Bluebell Bank had never grown old or lost its appeal. They kept coming back long after most kids gave up on family holidays, especially with a curmudgeonly old grandmother. Lena understood young folk, never patronised them or interfered, and they loved her for it.
Every year they’d gathered, right up until Emily went off with Joe and Kate left for New York. They’d convened at Bluebell Bank, place of peace and beauty, and relive those blissful younger days.
She was nervous and excited now in equal measure. Bluebell Bank conjured up nostalgic images of corniced rooms and patterned carpets, of salads on hot summer days and net curtains blowing into the garden on the breeze; of paddling pools and rope swings and gnarled apple trees and children’s shrieks carried on warm currents of air; a place where time slowed and stopped and real world problems could not touch her. Bluebell Bank was a parallel universe; it had always seemed impossible to her that the same old life was continuing unabated whilst she was there; far easier to believe she had slipped through a crack in time, into a new world altogether. A world where she didn’t have to worry about her mother, or where the next meal was coming from.
Kate pictured the indomitable Lena, with her penchant for wearing men’s work trousers and battered sandals on her leathery feet, overseeing the Cotton family chaos, her wild, white hair sticking up around her face and shrewd blue eyes seeing to the heart of them all. She was always ready to listen to childish woes and her puckish sense of adventure kept the children coming back for more. Kate could not wait to be reunited with the Cotton matriarch, a woman who had been more of a mother to her than anyone. Emily’s mother, Melanie, was always supremely kind, but she was so polished and perfect that Kate had never quite got over her awe of her.
They locked up the shop, inserting a heavy, rusted key into a door warped by damp. The small yard and corkscrew path were overrun with lush, rain-drenched foliage. A wet, summery smell wrapped itself around them as they squeezed between the dripping bushes, heading up the lane towards the high street.
‘Tomorrow the hard work starts,’ Kate said, shooting a warning look at Emily. She didn’t want Emily to lose sight of the road ahead, the hurdles they must vanquish along the way.
They drove in convoy out of town, past the Bladnoch Inn and distillery and along narrow, tree-lined roads. Bluebell Bank was a mile from town, sitting atop a small rise with its gardens spilling down towards the river. A twisting drive led through a thicket of steadfast old trees.
Turning off the road, negotiating the bumps and turns of the track in her too-pristine car, Kate had a sudden vision of these woods filled with children. She could see herself and Emily darting through the long grass, barefoot, hair flying, grabbing the old gnarled trunks to peer out and glimpse their pursuers. She could hear their gasping laughter, feel the twigs and rough grass catch at her feet; Fergus, cursing as he stumbled gracelessly through the woods in pursuit, while Dan laughed complacently, calling out that he was wasting his time, they’d be better off lying in wait for the girls to risk a final flight towards the house – Lena’s protection being the only safety net in this ferocious game of chase and catch. Kate had wanted Dan to catch her; she had longed to feel the crush of his arms as if in embrace, to be swung off her feet. Dan had seemed so tall and handsome and brave, everything her girlish soul could desire.
The garden opened up before Kate as she took the final bend and pulled the hire car to a stop on the square of gravel out front. The house, backlit by late afternoon sunshine, radiated all the warmth and happiness of those perfect childish interludes.
She felt a fresh flood of nerves as she stepped out of the car. There were birds singing in the trees and the air smelled of summer: honeysuckle and manure-fields and rain-soaked vegetation. Here I am, she thought. I am here. They were two distinct sentiments, representing both what she had come to offer and the absolution she hoped to receive.
The front door opened and a figure hovered on the bowed step. Long white hair formed a cotton-wool halo around her head and her expression was curious, eyes squinting in the afternoon sun. Her sinewy frame was familiar, clad in an over-large blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up over gnarled forearms.
‘Lena,’ Kate cried joyously, and hastened across the drive as a russet brown dog squeezed around Lena and limped down the steps, wagging a feathery tail: an old man now, with greying muzzle and stiff legs.
Emily called Kate’s name softly: a warning. That, and some other instinct, made Kate stop short before she reached the steps. Lena stared at her, unsmiling. ‘Who is it?’ she asked querulously, looking past Kate to her granddaughter. Kate turned to glance at Emily who was still dragging her suitcase out of the boot of the rental car, then bent and wound her fingers in the dog’s fur for comfort.
‘Lena,’ Emily said softly. ‘This is Kate. She’s my friend. She’s come to stay for a while.’
Kate stared at Emily. Why on earth would she introduce her as a stranger? She turned to Lena, who was searching her face, a veneer of polite friendliness replacing her former suspicion. That scared Kate more than anything – Lena was rarely polite. Gruff, unrelentingly honest, fiercely loving, but not polite. ‘Come in,’ Lena said. ‘Would you like some tea?’
Emily pushed gently past Kate, who was frozen on the drive, and set her suitcase on the step. She stretched and kissed Lena’s weathered cheek. ‘I didn’t know Kate was coming until the last minute,’ she said.
‘I should have called,’ Kate began, baffled, floundering. ‘I wanted to surprise Em …’
‘There’s plenty of room,’ Lena said laconically. She took a step back and her tone turned petulant. ‘Where’s my hat?’ She shuffled off down the hall muttering, the dog at her heels.
Emily met Kate’s questioning gaze fiercely; the answers she sought would have to wait. ‘I’ll find it for you,’ she called out, hurrying after Lena, bumping the suitcase behind her. Perplexed, Kate followed.
The downstairs hallway had not changed in all the years Kate had been away. The walls were apple green and covered with framed pictures of Cottons through the ages: Emily and the brothers, their parents, Jonathon and Melanie, photos of Jonathon and his sister Val as children, a sepia snap of Lena’s brother Austin in military uniform, a smiling couple on their wedding day some eighty years ago, Lena’s own wedding to James, now twenty years dead. Kate traced the dusty generations along the wall with a wistful fingertip.
Then she spotted a photograph of herself. She and Emily were squeezed onto a rock with Rigg Bay resplendent behind them, squinting and staring at the camera and dangling their dirty bare feet. Their arms were wrapped around each other, heads pressed close – Kate’s honey-blonde plaits and Emily’s wiry curls intermingling. Emily was grinning into the lens; Kate looked unrelentingly serious. She stopped short and stared at the picture and suddenly Emily was beside her, unhooking it from the wall, carrying it into the kitchen. Kate stepped over her abandoned suitcase and followed.
Lena stood at the counter heaping tea bags into a pot, her immediate need of her hat forgotten. ‘Look, Lena.’ Emily tapped her on the shoulder, pushed the picture in front of her and gestured from the photograph Kate to the real life version lurking anxiously in the doorway. The dog wagged and weaved between them, tongue lolling.
Lena looked from Kate to the picture version, recognition dawning like an opening bud at first sun. ‘It’s you,’ she said, wonderingly. Something changed in her face and she was the Lena Kate remembered. ‘The bangle girl.’ The realisation brightened her immeasurably, but there was strain there still, a moment of uncertainty, a veneer of lingering pretence.
For a second, Kate was baffled, then Lena pointed to the picture and held it out to Kate with a grunt. When she looked more closely, Kate noticed them: numerous plastic bands in fluorescent pink, yellow, green, looped around her wrist. Emily gave them to her for her twelfth birthday and she refused to take them off, even when she slept. They were just pocket money toys from the paper shop in Wigtown, but they were as precious to Kate as diamonds. The first piece of jewellery anyone ever bought for her. ‘Oh yes,’ she cried. ‘I’d forgotten those. I still have them somewhere.’
‘Sit down. Sit down.’ Lena flapped a big, bony hand, directing them both to the scrubbed refectory table in the midst of the big, untidy kitchen. She sounded more resolutely herself.
Kate sat. Emily took the chair opposite her and set the photograph between them. ‘Thanks.’ She accepted a cup from Lena and sloshed in some milk, took a sip, winced as it burned her tongue. ‘Kate’s come to help me set up the bookshop.’
Lena banged a tin of biscuits down on the table and gave a grunt which might have been encouragement. Emily continued, describing their plans. She was eager, a child spinning dreams, and Kate felt the weight of her impending success or failure resting squarely on her own shoulders. Several minutes into the conversation, Lena’s eyes clouded over and her face changed, adopting a baffled smile, nodding politely. At the next mention of the shop, Lena said; ‘A bookshop? How lovely.’ As if it was the first she’d heard of it. Kate’s anxiety ratcheted up another notch.
They finished their tea and custard creams, then Emily pushed back her chair. She plucked Lena’s ancient hat from the dresser where it rested on a hook meant for cups and handed it to her. ‘Why don’t you go and potter in the garden with Bracken? I’ll show Kate to her room and then make dinner.’
Lena put on the hat, the wide brim of it almost concealing her face entirely. She stood up obediently, whistled to the dog who was curled up under the table waiting hopefully for crumbs, and they both departed through the back door. Kate could hear her voice as she proceeded down the path, a gruff, comforting hum, and through the open door she could see the dog wagging his tail in response as he trotted faithfully at her side. Emily got up and started to clear the tea things. ‘I guess you remember Bracken, he was probably just a pup last time you saw him.’ Her tone was guarded, overshadowed by words she didn’t say.
Without warning Kate found herself overwhelmed by exhaustion, the flight catching up with her at once; she was in no mood for Emily’s prevarication. ‘What’s going on, Em?’
Emily dumped the cups into the sink with a jarring clatter of china. ‘All right. Not here. Let’s go upstairs.’ Between them they lugged Kate’s suitcase up the creaking stairs and sat side by side on Emily’s bed in a room almost entirely overlooked by time. Emily had yet to make the mark of her adult self on a room that still anchored her securely to her childhood.
‘So?’ Kate prompted, kicking off her boots and drawing her legs up beneath her, feeling the jet lag tug at her like the pull of a strong current as soon as the softness of the bed embraced her.
Emily stroked the seams of her patchwork quilt and took a deep breath, looking as if she was about to make a dire confession. She fixed Kate with a solemn, grey-eyed gaze. ‘Lena has Alzheimer’s,’ she said.
The thought of Lena being sick was a blow to Kate, and she reeled from the impact. Lena was one of the formative pillars of her childhood, the foundation upon which she had crafted herself. Six lost years … so much of Lena gone, and continuing to be lost – moment by moment, slipping away.
‘Mostly, she’s frightened about forgetting,’ Emily said softly. ‘It’s little things: beginning a sentence and forgetting the end, losing words for ordinary things, forgetting the names of people she knows, or recent conversations. Older stuff she’s better with. It was easier to introduce you as if she’d never met you because she’d be upset if she thought she should know you and didn’t. Sometimes photographs help her to make the connections. And sometimes you just have to accept that she doesn’t remember, and ride out the episode until she comes back. She always comes back.’ Emily met Kate’s eyes with a fierce flare of defiance, then dropped her gaze to her hands, knotting them into fists. ‘So far she has, anyway. Suddenly, there she is … and then gone again.’ Emily’s voice was careful and controlled now, but Kate could hear the pain flexing beneath the surface.
Kate was silent for a long time, thoughts and questions spinning too fast; everything she knew about the condition – admittedly, not much – was depressing and inevitable. A slow, indecorous decline: was that to be Lena’s future? ‘When did you find out?’ she asked, when she couldn’t think of anything more helpful to say.
Emily picked at her bitten, unloved fingernails and heaved a sigh. ‘She was diagnosed about a year ago. She was living alone and my parents were worried it might not be safe in the long term. There were other options, such as selling the house and taking her to live with them in Edinburgh, or … a home. But …’
Kate raised an eyebrow. ‘I can’t imagine Lena being very happy with either of those options.’
Emily shook her head. ‘We didn’t even suggest them to her. I had just quit teaching – I was terrible at it! – and had no idea what I was going to do and I needed a place to stay. It was convenient for me too – I wasn’t being entirely altruistic. It puts Mum and Dad’s minds at rest having me here keeping an eye on her. And we rub along together all right. We play scrabble and do crosswords and keep her garden going and sell her vegetables at the market. Just trying to keep everything normal for as long as possible. We’re lucky, at the moment she’s mostly still Lena. Sometimes it feels like there are bits of her missing, but mostly she’s the same. And she’s physically very well. We have to accept that will change in the future, though. She will get worse, and when she loses her sense of self entirely … I guess it’s something we have to be ready for.’
Kate frowned; Emily might have resigned herself to Lena’s illness, but this was all new to Kate and it eroded some of the joy of reunion. ‘How do you prepare for something like that?’
Emily’s mouth wobbled in a pale smile. ‘I don’t know. I’ll tell you when I have it figured out.’
Kate studied her closely. ‘Do you think it will confuse Lena more having me here? I wouldn’t want that.’
‘Sometimes it confuses her having me here. She forgets I live with her. Forgets she has children, or grandchildren. I don’t think having you around will make things worse. It’s more company for her and talking to people is good. Plus, I need you here.’
Kate pictured again the Lena of her childhood, tough, rough around the edges, desperately caring in her own unorthodox way, and was haunted by regret. The sense of loss was too big, too impossible to wrap her mind around. How she wished she hadn’t lost those years. ‘It was very good of you to do this,’ she said. ‘Really, Em. Lena’s lucky to have you.’
They had all been lucky to have had Lena.
Emily stopped pacing and pulled the cuffs of her jumper down over her hands to hide her ruined nails. She nodded. ‘I needed somewhere safe to go. After—’
‘Joe.’ His name, once again, shaped the very air, changing its texture and altering Emily, making her shrink. She turned to her dresser and began rearranging items in the film of dust that covered its surface.
She shook her head quickly. ‘Look, I don’t want to talk about him. Not yet.’ She sounded brittle, as if she might snap at any moment, fracturing along old fault lines like an ancient piece of china. ‘Why don’t you tell me about Ben, and your life in New York. It all looks so wonderful.’
Emily thought about the pictures she’d ogled on Kate’s Instagram: the fantasy perfection of Ben, with his designer suits, model-esque physique and artfully scruffy hair. How could a relationship with such a man be anything less than perfect? She’d studied every photo Kate posted online in minute detail, when that were all she had left of Kate: the skiing holidays and nightclub posing, the fancy restaurants and gallery openings, the whole rich, luxuriant life Kate had immersed herself in, slipping into a new persona like a new skin. Emily was just one of hundreds of thumbnail friends to grace her page – a fragment of memory clinging steadfast as a barnacle to a rock. Ignored, just another insignificant face. Until now.
Kate must have reasons for coming beyond old loyalty and the desire to rekindle their friendship. She couldn’t have been altogether happy with her life if it was so easy to shed that glossy new skin and leave it all behind.
Kate played with a strand of hair. ‘I will tell you,’ she said, ‘but not now. I don’t really want to talk about Ben yet either. It’s complicated. He’s there … and I’m here.’
‘At least you didn’t marry him.’ Emily’s habit of saying the first thing that popped into her head without a thought was in some respects an admirable trait, but it didn’t always win her friends.
Kate was used to it. ‘No, not yet.’ She gave a shaky laugh. ‘So, the subject of men is off the table for us both.’
Emily gave her a rueful smile. ‘I suppose so. What do you mean not yet?’
Kate gave a languid wave, deftly dismissive. ‘A question for another time. When I don’t feel like I’m drowning with tiredness.’
Emily nodded. ‘Of course, sorry. Actually now would be a good opportunity for you to have a rest while I make dinner. I was thinking after we eat we might take a walk over to the farm and visit Dan.’
Kate was half consumed by a jaw-cracking yawn. She felt a shiver of trepidation and pleasure at the prospect of seeing Dan again. ‘Fine. Not the resting part. I think maybe a shower instead. If I fell asleep now I’d be out for hours.’
‘OK. You know where the bathroom is. And your room – it’s the same one you always had. Do you need me to show you?’
Kate shook her head and got up from the bed, the soft quilt and pillow doing their utmost to drag her back.
*
As Emily clattered down the stairs, Kate tugged the suitcase across the hall and stepped into the bedroom that had always been hers – stepping back in time. Nothing had changed: not the blue forget-me-knots on the bedspread or the candlewick blanket; not the walls painted the colour of cornflowers or the tarnished silver mirror hanging a little askew above a rickety chest of drawers; not the little, wooden bed beneath the window or the smell of fabric softener and dust, or the windows that could do with a clean, but still revealed the most beautiful, picture-perfect view in the world. However far she travelled, Kate did not think it was possible to top the view from her Bluebell Bank bedroom.
A hard lump of emotion invaded her chest, pushing into her throat and threatening to undo her. A heavy cloak of nostalgia settled around her, shimmering all shades of happy and sad, and every hue between. Knowing better than to let jet lag and wistfulness hook her, Kate made herself keep busy. She unzipped her case and dug around for her toilet bag, which she carried down the hall as she went to take a shower.
The bathroom had gotten an overhaul since her last visit, thank goodness: new shower, fresh paint, pristine white porcelain. The shower itself used to be a trickle of lukewarm water from the rubber tube that attached to the taps, in an ancient, freezing stone bath so scratched and stained it was impossible to tell what colour it really was. Not that Kate had cared back then. She would have made do with a daily dip in the river if Lena hadn’t forced her to bathe occasionally. Now she lined up an array of expensive products and stepped into the steamy cubicle with a luxuriant sigh.
As she soaped and shampooed, she felt the last vestiges of tension from that final fight with Ben ebb away. His incredulity had rung in her ears all the way across the Atlantic (‘You’re going to quit your job to go and run some mouldy old bookshop! Why? You don’t even read books. And who is this girl you never talk about whom you claim is your best friend all of a sudden?’)
Fair points, both. Kate couldn’t adequately explain the inexorable pull across the ocean. The Cottons. Bluebell Bank. Emily.
She had known she would come the instant she opened the email, sitting in the middle of Ben’s big bed wearing silk sleep shorts and a Edinburgh university T-shirt as she waited for him to return, framed by the New York night sky through the picture window: velvet and purple and polluted with the glow of a million firefly lights.
The email was so perfectly Emily that she could hear Em’s voice in every typed word, could hear the Merlot talking, and she wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.
For six years, Emily had been no more than a fragment of memory; a stab of guilt that pierced in the depths of a sleepless night; the unbidden thought that came to mind when least expected – hurrying through Time Square late for work, or boarding the subway and catching sight of a countenance or gesture that tipped her headlong into reminiscence.
No messages, not a single word, save the depressingly formal thank you note. Until that email.
Quitting her job, telling Ben, purchasing the ticket, saying goodbye to her friends – all of those things were items to tick off her list, and she did them all with a brisk, unemotional vigour. It was accomplished quickly, simply. Before she knew what was happening she had a suitcase by the door of Ben’s apartment, a one-way ticket tucked between the pages of her passport and a lot of confused people clamouring for a better explanation.
Kate did not fully understand her choice either, but she knew enough: this was redemption, for both of them; the joy of rediscovering a simpler time, retracing their steps. Emily had been the key to Kate’s salvation, enveloping her in her big, loving family when all she knew was neglect and cold and that sinking feeling accompanying the clink of wine bottles.
Now it was Kate’s turn to do the saving.
Kate hadn’t packed the right clothes, didn’t own the right clothes: she was now a city girl through and through. But now that she was here that didn’t seem to matter. Nothing mattered: not the differences between her and Emily, the way they’d let circumstances come between them or the divergence of their paths; not the doubts and uncertainties Ben had exploited to try to convince her to stay.
Stepping from the shower, Kate still felt bone-achingly tired – neither the tight confines of her airplane seat nor the snoring of her supersized seatmate had been remotely conducive to sleep as they hummed over the vast grey of the ocean - but she was able to push the tiredness aside for a little longer. She rummaged through her suitcase again, seeing the lovely dresses and designer labels with a critical eye. Nothing suitable for Bluebell Bank. In the end she pulled on a pair of jeans and Emily’s hoodie, avoided the bed after one long, yearning glance then set off downstairs in search of Emily.