‘He really is,’ he confirmed, earnestly. ‘Listen, Alice, you go do your party. I’ll wait out in the Merc. Maybe, if you’re not too tired afterwards, we could talk, yeah?’
She looked at him, crumpled and forlorn, obviously frazzled from the dash up the motorway.
‘Did you eat?’ she huffed in surrender.
‘Not one bite since Manchester.’
‘Come on then,’ she sighed, shaking her head. ‘We’ll see if Carenza can fit you in at the top table. But then you have to go home.’
‘Fine, one wee bitty o’ haggis and I’ll leave yee in peace.’ He was doing the silly accent again.
Alice led the way back to the ballroom, not at all pleased, her arms folded over her dress, wondering what on earth the town were going to make of the new doctor bringing a gatecrasher to their special party.
Bastian skipped to catch up with her, trying to slip an arm around her shoulders which she repeatedly shrugged off, just as the lobby’s revolving doors spun and Cary Anderson, dressed head to toe in his Highland outfit and clutching a homemade posy of purple heather, a peace offering for Alice, spilled into the grand hallway, his kilt swinging.
Staggering to a halt, he had to squint to confirm that what he was seeing was real. Alice, beautiful in white, and a guy in tuxedo evening dress slipping his arm around her as they went into the ballroom together.
‘Alice,’ he breathed in defeat.
He was out of time and out of luck, and he really ought to hurry home and change before anyone spotted him.
27
Bastian had ‘accidentally’ accepted the offer of a glass of Talisker during the toasts and downed it before he realised his mistake, or that’s what he told Alice when they’d eaten the really very delicious food and heard all the toasts and poems and songs, and now it was impossible for him to get behind a wheel safely.
She’d groaned in frustration at his pleading face as he’d said, ‘Let me borrow your sofa?’ and she’d dragged him out before the dancing began, a real shame because she’d wanted to try this Scottish country dancing that everyone talked about. Gracie had taught her how to do a St Bernard’s Waltz one night after clinics, ‘just in case’, and it hadn’t actually been all that hard. Well,thathad been a waste of time.
She gave Bastian the spare blanket from the cupboard and told him he’d better be gone by morning, and she stomped to her own room and wrestled herself out of the dress and into her pyjamas, before throwing herself onto the bed, furious with Bastian, her father, and most of all, furious with herself for being far too bloody nice to him.
Maybe it was the whisky’s fault – she’d taken one too, and then another – but she was fast asleep by eleven, or was it the having someone else there, making her feel, if not safe, exactly, justnot alonefor the first time in ages?
Whatever it was, sleep claimed her fast, and as she drifted off she dreamed about the steps of the waltz she’d learned, picturing how nice it would have been to move across that ballroom floor once the cranachan desserts were eaten and the lights had been dimmed.
She remembered hearing the local women making wild cries of ‘heee-uch!’ as the music started up, just as she was making her way out into the night, picking up a lovely bunch of heather that someone must have dropped on their way to the party and which Bastian almost trod on. The posy was by her bedside now and maybe it was the wild mountain scent making her dream about the music and the lights, filling in with her imagination what she hadn’t witnessed with her own eyes, and the whole dream became a vivid cross between aBridgertonball scene and the wedding ceilidh inFour Weddings and a Funeral.
In the dream, she wasn’t dancing with Gracie on the Dettolled floors of the surgery’s waiting room after hours, and it wasn’t Bastian in his tuxedo either.
There was a man taking her hands, Cary Anderson, all dressed in lovely old-fashioned clothes, smelling clean and woody, and he was pressing a flat palm to the base of her spine, turning her around and around like a doll in a jewellery box.
Cary fixed her with his lovely darkest brown eyes and it was so easy to gaze back at him, and they turned and they turned, and everyone stepped aside until they were the only ones on the dancefloor, and the big clock in the corner, Cary’s clock, was ticking down to midnight, only they were spinning too fast, and Cary was saying something about it being time to go, he was tired of Highland life, he really should be leaving, and Bastian was there with Mum and Dad and all their friends from her graduation party and they were all pointing at something and shouting, but she couldn’t hear them. Suddenly Cary, who had always felt somehow ephemeral to her, unreal, and impermanent, probably because men like him couldn’t possibly be true, had danced himself right up into the air, his heels up over his head, and it was all Alice could do to hold onto his hands to stop him flying away entirely. The clock started striking and its case sprang open and even though she’d held on with all her might, Cary was sucked into it, disappearing with a scream of her name.‘Alice!’
‘Alice, wake up, you’re having one of your nightmares. Alice.’
She couldn’t open her eyes, didn’t want to face the night, so she stayed still under the covers, flexing her hands, trying to regain the sensation of dream-Cary’s touch.
‘Go back to sleep,’ said Bastian, climbing onto the bed and lying down beside her. ‘It’s OK. I’ve got you.’
* * *
The morning brought a headache the likes of which Alice had never felt before. Whisky, she told herself, was not something she’d acclimatise to, and neither was – she jumped up in the bed – sniffing the air, Bastian’s cologne, and, she sniffed again, cooking smells?
Padding to the kitchen, hand shielding her eyes from even the weak light from the cooker hood, she stopped at the sight.
‘You’re awake!’ he said, smiling brightly.
‘You’re still here.’
‘I didn’t want to leave you. You slept so fitfully. I needed to know you were OK.’
