‘There it is again. Listen!’ Kurt untangled his fingers, stepping away, and Murray felt the loss of his warmth like someone had thrown an ice bucket over him.
Yet neither of them could ignore the whimpering sounds coming from the bushes along the hotel’s stone boundary wall.
‘Foxes?’ Kurt guessed.
‘Light up your phone.’
Together they approached the sound, shining the phone torch into the low branches of the evergreen hedging.
‘Oh my God!’ Murray crouched down.
Kurt dropped to his knees and reached a hand into the moving black bundle of sorry little sounds. He lifted out not one, but two shivering, complaining pups, only weeks old by the size of them.
‘Shit!’ Murray’s heart sank as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, revealing another, adult, dog deep undercover. ‘The mother? Looks like they’ve been dumped.’
Behind him, Kurt was already unlocking his door, flipping on lights, carrying the pups, searching for towels to wrap the shivering creatures in.
Murray leaned in closer to the poor, panting dog, already pulling his phone free to ring the twenty-four-hour vet practice in the next big town, half an hour from here.
‘Don’t worry, mamma,’ he told her gently. ‘I’ve got you.’
Murray (admittedly, reluctantly) stripped off his lovely Moncler jacket and draped it over the dog, knowing as well as Kurt (who was clomping around inside his rooms) that the odds of resuming their date tonight had reduced to zero.
19
The twenty-fourth of January and Cary had left the GP’s surgery’s Saturday morning clinic, relieved not to have bumped into Alice Hargreave. If he had seen her, he’d have had to explain what Dr Millen had just told him (and what Cary had known all along): that there was nothing whatsoever wrong with his heart. The old doctor had found his resting pulse to be just as it ought to be.
It had been Alice’s closeness that had set his heart rate spiking that day two weeks ago when she’d visited him at the repair shed with her broken stethoscope, and she hadn’t sought him out since.
Cary was a man who knew his own body and his own mind. His judgement was rarely clouded by anything. That’s why, even though he’d have loved to pursue what all this might signify with the new doctor, he’d vowed to keep his attraction to himself. She was too distracted, too tired, too busy, to be presented with the inconvenience of some man’s feelings.
If, one day, she ever grew happier and appeared to be more settled, not quite so haunted and chased down by some invisible thing that kept her jumpyandsleepy-looking at the same time, he might consider confessing. For now, she didn’t deserve to hear him say, ‘I like you,’ as though that were somehowherproblem. Men did that to uninterested, overburdened women all the time, he’d observed, and that wouldn’t be him.
Besides, he was a busy man. Business was booming in Cairn Dhu. The paid carpentry jobs kept coming in. Then there were his Saturday and mid-week shifts at the repair shop to do and, added to those, he’d given his up evenings recently to construct the wooden raised growing beds for the social prescribing project.
A few days ago, in the gloaming light, he and Murray (who’d been oddly quiet), along with Sachin Roy and his wife, Aamaya, had followed behind McIntyre’s turf-cutting machine which stripped away patches of the mossy old lawn. They’d delved garden spades and forks into the freshly exposed earth, rotating the compacted soil until it was broken up into sods. Within hours they had turned the large patch of lawned nothingness by the side of the big barn into four large rectangular planting beds. Over each bed the crew set down Cary’s sturdy frames to create elevated beds, each a foot high, ready to be topped with fresh organic compost. They’d also dug out four deep holes between the beds in which to plant the young Aspen trees, which would be arriving any day now from the Snow Road nursery.
There’d been so many rolled strips of rough turf produced in making way for the beds, Cary had suggested what they needed was a composting system, and even though he had enough on his plate, he’d committed to building that too.
Yesterday he’d completed the giant bottomless crates, so now the project could process its own garden waste and grass cuttings into free, useable compost, and he’d asked for Murray’s help in positioning them around the back of the shed where the new glass wall of the extension had been installed. The scaffolding was still in place because the new section of roof still awaited its solar panels.
As they’d wrestled the composting crates off Cary’s truck and into position, the Dutch builder, Kurt, had appeared, offering to help out, but the atmosphere between the two younger guys had been so thick with tension Cary had almost felt himself compelled to make up some small talk to break it. Almost.
Instead they’d worked on, barely speaking. When it was completed, Cary quickly explained how the row of separate bays would work now that they were lined up and ready for use.
The project gardeners would chuck into the first bin any small branches, chipped wood, weeds, torn cardboard, fallen autumn leaves, raw veg scraps and grass clippings, leaving them covered with a tarpaulin until the bay was heaped full. Someone would have the task of turning the rotting material to aid the breakdown of the bigger bits. When there was a good amount of the stuff, it would be turned over into the next bay along, where it would break down further, pulling in the worms and bacteria from the soil beneath, helping speed up the process, and then after a while, the good, brown, sweetly-scented stuff would be transferred into the third and final bay where it could be sieved and used for mulching the growing beds.
‘A slow process, but sustainable, and worth it,’ Cary had concluded. He had a similar, if much smaller, set-up in his yard at home.
Kurt and Murray had nodded along respectfully, not really paying attention, and their awkwardness had soon sent Cary away, bemused and wanting a cup of tea far from any shed drama that might be simmering.
The atmosphere had been like this ever since the pair of them had found the puppies with their mother and the vet had come for them and it had been decided that, since she was likely a stray, undernourished and with no tag or microchip, she’d spend a few nights at the vet’s with her pups.
Sure, there’d been a smattering of thrilled gossip in the shed, in particular from the café corner, about why the two men had been lurking around the back of the hotel late at night to discover the dogs in the first place, but Murray had told everyone to mind their own business and consider themselves lucky anyone had found the pups before the cold got to them, and Kurt had smirked, further fanning the flames of intrigue.
After that, it had somehow been decided – Cary didn’t know the finer details – that since the dogs remained unclaimed by anyone after their discovery a week ago, even after the story in the local paper and a big batch of ‘found’ posters hung up around town, they should come to live at the mill house with the McIntyres, who, rumour had it, had footed the vet’s bill. Roz McIntyre had also coordinated an effort to generate donations, and Cairn Dhu had not let the dogs down. Food, bowls, blankets, towels, beds and squeaky toys had been arriving for days.
Murray, it seemed, had involved himself closely in caring for the pups, and that had generally kept him away from the shed. That and, Cary surmised, trying to put a bit of distance between himself and a certain construction expert.
