‘I’m not quite ready to make you a nursery room, yet, but they say a baby comes into the world with everything they need. I hope that’s true. There’ll certainly be enough love to sustain you, and warmth too.
‘Your Uncle Gene will keep making you any tasty thing you ask him for, and your Auntie Kitty – she knows the Gaelic word for everything there is, and the steps for every Scottish dance. She’ll be a good teacher until you go to the little school.’
Atholl didn’t even try to hide his tears as he took over, sniffing and smiling as he spoke.
‘There’s so many good things here waiting for you. The taste of chocolate, the sound of the sea, the smell of lavender and willow, the sunset over the coral beach, and the way your mummy looks when she’s getting sleepy and fighting it. I hope you’ll have that same look too.’
Beatrice’s voice shook, but she wasn’t sad. ‘Life is full of surprises and comfort. And there’s some unhappy things too, but they’re all part of being alive, and you can’t have happiness without some of the sad stuff as well.
‘You have an older brother who none of us got to know. I’ll miss him every day until I get to meet him. But grief is what is left of love when the person is gone, it’s not always the dark, terrible thing you think it is, not all the time anyway.
‘I’ll tell you all about him one day, and he won’t be kept a secret. Maybe if we talk as a family about him, if it ever happens to you one day or to someone you love it might not come as such a horrible shock as it did to me, and you’ll know what to do, better than Richard and I did. If it hadn’t been an off-limits subject we might have coped better, talked more, shared the pain, and our friends and families might have been better able to comfort us. Instead nobody said anything, and we bottled it up, keeping it inside. A terrible mistake.’
Beatrice let her tears fall, holding the letter closer to Atholl’s eyes so he could take over while she caught her breath.
‘So, here we are,’ Atholl read. ‘Your mum and dad, not keeping any secrets inside, telling the world we love you and we want you, and asking the universe to bring you to us when you’re ready to come.
‘We are so happy you chose us. We’ll do our best to be good parents. We’ll make mistakes, I’m sure, but we’ll say sorry and try to carry on. As long as we keep sharing, we’ll be all right.
‘We love you. See you soon, Mum and Dad, kiss kiss.’
Atholl took the letter in his hands and folded the paper lengthways until it was as thin as a ribbon, then he tied it. ‘It’s a love knot,’ he said, handing it back to Beatrice, who slowly bent over the sea wall and placed the twisted paper on the surface of the dark water.
Atholl held her as they watched their message of hope floating out to sea where somewhere there bobbed a willow bassinet full of Beatrice’s love, all bound with Highland forget-me-nots.
When they returned to the inn, Atholl made hot cocoa and they went to bed, deeply tired but calm too. Atholl slept with a protective hand on Beatrice’s stomach where, safe and warm, their baby swam and danced all night long.
That same evening, before the letter and before Polly turned up, Ruth had determined to talk with Mark, but because he’d spent most of the day away from the inn and come back exhausted having been who knows where, they had eaten together in the bar restaurant and the words Ruth had wanted to say wouldn’t come.
Mark was still just as smiling and affable as he’d been at the ball the evening before, only perhaps a little soppier after their night under the canopy of the princess bed.
She’d determined to do it after dessert but when Ruth had come back from the bar with Gene’s lavender ice cream and raspberry meringues and the cafetière, she’d found Mark poring over some documents, reading glasses on his nose, utterly absorbed.
‘You go up, I won’t be long,’ he’d told her, but he hadn’t climbed the ladder until after midnight and by then Ruth had exhausted herself with furious tears and fallen asleep.
He’d passed Nina in the reception area when he eventually headed upstairs to bed. She’d been sneaking towards the bar in her pyjamas to see if Mutt was still with Polly, but she’d been in her own world and hadn’t said goodnight to him.
The Princess and the Pea Inn was utterly silent when Nina checked out at four o’clock, her taxi idling on the roadside, a great cloud of exhaust fumes illuminated in the dark of the winter’s morning by the brake lights.
She’d pressed her ear to Mutt’s door as she left, half wanting to hear nothing at all – which is exactly what she heard – and half dreading she’d hear him in there with Polly.
Nobody came out to say goodbye to her; it was, after all, the middle of the night, so she left her key on the reception desk beside the little willow tree that she wouldn’t get through Customs. It had hurt her to leave it, the only gift she’d had that Christmas.
Chapter Thirty-five
The Pitch
It was colder walking through the streets of New York City than it had been back in Scotland. Everything she loved, everything she was familiar with, was all around her, but now it didn’t feel like home at all. Nina couldn’t comprehend it.
Maybe it was the jetlag and the fact she had barely slept? Maybe it was because she’d booked herself into the Holiday Inn and she wasn’t looking forward to spending the night in a sparse room by the elevators where all her worldly possessions were contained in three suitcases now that she’d retrieved her baggage from the airport lockers.
She had no appetite for the bagel she’d bought herself for breakfast and the ten-dollar Vietnamese iced coffee did nothing to comfort her either.
Feeling flat and exhausted, she’d styled her hair and carefully applied her make-up, putting on a black cropped jumpsuit with the harness-style straps Luke had told her he loved. Her hands were numb, she noticed, as she rode the elevator up to the top floor.
Mitch had greeted her in amazement, saying she looked so ‘healthy’ and Nina really didn’t know if it was a compliment. ‘They’re all waiting for you,’ he told her. ‘You got this.’
‘I think I do too,’ she told him, but instead of feeling triumphant and charged up ready to pitch like she used to, there was something missing and she didn’t know what.
