Now this was Mark’s safe place, talking about something he loved. ‘Played all my life. I joined my father’s club when I was eighteen, and my twins joined too when they were old enough.’
‘Ah, aye, you’ve children.’
‘They’re grown now, and left home. Stuart and Adam. Beautiful lads they are. It’s not the same without them out on the links with me on a Sunday morning.’ Something in Mark’s eyes shifted, and Atholl saw right to the core of the taciturn businessman. He was more than just his stoic work ethic, he could tell.
Atholl fed another whip into the brake and, now that Mark was getting into the rhythm of it, he let him take control of the action.
‘Where are they now?’ Atholl pressed, wanting him to open up more now he knew the man’s weakness.
‘Adam’s gone off travelling around Asia with his friends now that he’s finished his doctorate, and Stuart’s only recently moved into a residential home. He was ready for some independence away from me and Ruth.’ Mark nodded to himself, falling silent again, his eyes dulling.
Atholl took his time. He knew all this, of course. Beatrice had shown him the competition entries and he too had agreed it had to be the Firths. ‘That must be strange, seeing them go off into the world.’
Mark stopped working and raised the back of his hand to his brow, which was beading with sweat. ‘The house is certainly quiet without them both. Adam’s been gone for years, but without our Stuart, I…’ Mark checked his emotions. ‘I know Ruth misses them both terribly.’
Atholl refused to fill the silence and he wouldn’t work the brake either. Instead, he watched Mark with soft eyes and waited for him.
After a while, Mark spoke, directing his words to his busy hands working the willow alone. ‘It’s funny, you want your children to grow up and be able to look after themselves – that’s the dream, isn’t it?’ He glanced at Atholl, who nodded. ‘And for a long time we thought our Stuart wouldn’t ever do the things he’s doing now. It’s wonderful really, as much as it’s sad he had to move away. Yet when they’re finally off on their own, it’s… it’s…’ Mark didn’t have the words to finish the thought, and Atholl nodded again.
‘I can imagine. I’ve all this to come.’
‘You’re going to be a dad?’ Mark’s eyes shone softer than Atholl had seen yet.
‘I am.’ He inhaled deeply, the excitement gripping him again. ‘I’m guessing you were a young faither, though. I’ll be forty-two when this baby’s born.’
The two men exchanged looks, Atholl’s slightly worried and as though he was voicing something he hadn’t dared to before, and Mark’s surprisingly understanding.
‘I was twenty-five when the twins came, so not all that young. Ruth and me, we’d been happy just the two of us, going out, seeing our friends, living together for a couple of years. It was still a shock, though, I can tell you. We weren’t even married.’
Atholl grunted a laugh.
‘The boys were our pages when we eventually tied the knot, they were nine then, and it seemed nicer that way. Anyway, I had three other people to provide for at the age of twenty-five and there I was working for my father in his office, not making all that much money. I took over the company when he retired and grafted day and night for years to get food on the table before I felt that weight of responsibility lifting from my shoulders and things got more comfortable, and by then we were thinking Stuart might never live independently and I started squirrelling away for his future. My boys turn thirty-five next year.’ He shook his head at the very idea.
Mark seemed to get lost in his thoughts and in the motion of the willow work. Again, Atholl only watched him until he spoke, the motion of rocking the willows seeming to somehow soothe the married father. ‘I remember the shock of them being born like it was yesterday. I didn’t even know how to hold them. Ruth was only twenty-one. She had it a lot worse.’ His eyes glazed and something a little guilty and sorrowful sneaked across his face.
Atholl let him stay with his thoughts. He untied another bundle of willows.
‘Ruth and I were young, but you’ve already lived a life,’ Mark said eventually. ‘You’ll be better prepared for fatherhood, I reckon. And you have all this.’ He gestured all around him with a sweep of his arm. ‘Any child growing up here will have everything they need.’
Atholl accepted this thoughtfully. ‘When this bairn leaves high school I’ll be sixty. Will I still be stripping willow then?’ The same worried look returned; the look he’d never let Beatrice see, not when it was his job to soothe her worries, not add to them.
‘You’ll have the inn. Take it from me, I see it all the time in my line of work; the things youthinkwill be a problem somehow resolve themselves, or they turn out better than you’d feared. The things that willreallyoverturn a person, well, you couldn’t anticipate those.’
‘You’re in the money business, aye?’
‘Financial planning.’
‘It’s your job to help people secure their futures?’
‘When it comes to money and property, yes. Life has a way of surprising you though, no matter how secure you make yourself.’
Atholl didn’t reply. He was thinking of Beatrice and the sudden changes her life had gone through only a few months ago. She’d been on a completely different life path and suddenly she was diverted into his lane. Had he been alone at the brake that morning he might have said a few words of thanks to the sky and the sea and the wild rolling hills for that blessing. Instead he worked quietly at the willows until Mark asked him how he came to have the cottage school business.
‘You said you were apprenticed here? And now you own the place?’
‘I do, thanks to Beattie. Oh, that’s what I call her.’ He smiled a little shyly, watching the willow sawing back and forth in the brake. ‘She taught me not to live my life as though my dreams meant nothing to me. It was her that told me to buy this place if I loved it so much… if I was afraid of losing it. So I did. I started building my workshopping business in earnest after that.’
‘Good for you,’ Mark said, pulling the last stripped whip free and adding it to the pile.
