‘I’m sorry,’ he told her, showing her the time on his phone.
‘I know,’ she said, urgency in her eyes. What was she going to say to him?
‘I’ve loved every second of this,’ he said.
‘Me too.’
‘I’ll go smash the fitness test, with any luck, attend the new intake day tomorrow and…’ he spread his hands, ‘Ta-da! Regular Officer Beaton at your service! Hopefully.’
She smiled. It looked like pride and sorrow mixed together.
‘And you go get ’em in Zurich! Show them some of that Ally McIntyre go-getter magic! Change the world.’ Like you’ve changed mine, he thought.
There was only time for a hug, a kiss to her cheekbone. No I’ll miss you or I’ll call you or anything. Just goodbye.
He let go of the woman he’d wanted to hold to his heart from the first second he’d laid eyes on her, and somehow he walked away.
Mhairi Sears, with Jolyon by her side holding his mum’s hand and eating a great big chocolate cookie, came up behind Ally and caught her just in time before the tears started to fall.
‘I’ve got you,’ Mhairi told her old friend, and they hugged in the courtyard while the visitors kept arriving in their droves.
It was the biggest, most successful day of Ally’s life to date, and all Ally could do was break down as the best, sincerest, most supportive man she’d ever met walked away to begin the next chapter of his life without her.
25
As the alarm clocks sounded early on Monday morning in the mill house, the Cairngorms National Park was waking up to another day of late-summer dew. An early wave of migrating swifts swept southwards across the clear sky, the first to answer nature’s message and seek out softer weather, knowing what was coming to the Highlands: cranreuch cold and all the spartan wonders of autumn at this elevation.
Planes criss-crossed high above them, meeting barely a cloud. On late-season dawns like this, the sun is drowsy in its rising, the summer-warmed soil cooling with every passing hour as the worms dive deeper, crab-apples and russets fatten on their branches in the mellowing valley, and, as afternoon rain showers make their return, the Nithy waters swell a little fuller, flowing beneath the old mill house wheel.
Murray was up early, and sitting at the kitchen table, wearing a gigantic old fleece onesie Ally hadn’t laid eyes on in years. He was typing on his fancy tablet.
‘I didn’t know you were coming to the airport too?’ said Ally, dragging her case into the kitchen and pouring herself a coffee from Murray’s moka pot. Another of the perks of having him home; his expensive new coffee-making equipment and monsooned malabar beans.
‘I’m not. I’m finishing this funding application to expand the repair shop,’ he said.
‘But you worked on it all weekend too. You missed the skills share event.’
The event had run on early into Saturday evening, and when the locals had left, Ally had hosted Jo and Gus, Brodie and Luce, Mhairi and Jolyon, and all the other kids, for fish suppers with the McIntyres at the kitchen table.
Murray had been conspicuously quiet through that dinner, preferring to watch Batwheels cartoons with Jolyon on his tablet than chat with the grown-ups.
Murray stopped typing. ‘I’ve never been all that handy with repairing, you know that. At least I can do this. I’ll have it ready to send by lunch.’
Ally came round to look at the screen. Murray scrolled to let her glimpse every one of its forty pages. What she saw made her gasp.
‘When you said you were asking the council for some of their development money for an extension, I didn’t think you were planning on converting the whole place into a… what is that, an eco barn?’
‘Go big or go home, right? I’ve got the funding bid-writing experience, why not put it to good use? Make a watertight application?’
Murray was constructing an appeal for funding for not only another thirty feet of floor space at the back of the shed, expanding its wooden walls and adding, not a corrugated iron roof to the new part, but glazing, so the repair shed could rely more on natural light and less on electricity. He’d also factored in costs for ‘planet-friendly’ wool insulation as well as solar thermal panels to cover the south-facing side of the old roof and things called ‘ground and air source heat pumps’, whatever they were, and a small wind turbine which, according to Murray’s plan, would go on the little drumlin at the deepest end of the McIntyre garden where, as kids, the twins would play ‘I capture the castle’ and Ally always had to be the knight and Murray always the lovely, bougie prince in the tower.
Murray was keen to explain. ‘With the bid comes my promise to spread carbon literacy using the repair shop’s new networks. I’m proposing to hold monthly meetings at the shed on the topics of renewable energy, recycling, that kind of thing. It’s all here, page eleven. And I’ve listed all the other repair sessions and social groups the shed will be hosting too.’
Ally couldn’t help but be impressed. No wonder Murray had found work in Zurich straight out of college if he could write such compelling reasons for why people should part with their money to help good causes.
She held his shoulders in both hands as he sat over the screen. ‘Sure you’re not coming with me?’
It took him a moment to answer. ‘Like I said to Barbara, I feel like I’ve closed the door on that part of my life.’
