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Therefore, when she arrived at the care home, even though the journey had been uneventful, it took Carrie ten minutes to calm down, sitting in the car park and taking deep breaths until she stopped sweating. By the time she walked up to Gretchen, though, she felt reasonably normal again.
‘Ah, Carrie, dear! So lovely to meet you!’ Gretchen turned to her with a beaming smile. ‘Isn’t it a delightful day? I’ve just been watching the squirrels in the trees. Look!’ She pointed at a flash of grey fur as two squirrels circled the trunk of a nearby oak at lightning speed. ‘Scatty little varmints, they are. But most entertaining.’
‘They’re cute.’ Carrie watched the squirrels with interest.
Gretchen shook her hand and gave her an appraising look. ‘So. Settling in at the cottage okay? Thanks for coming out to see me. I like to meet my old cottage’s tenants at least once during their stay. Of course, technically, it isn’t my cottage – it belongs to the Laird, but he hasn’t got the time to do all the admin to rent it out, so I do that for him.’ Gretchen lowered her voice conspiratorially. ‘Confidentially, the Laird is to the internet what I am to calisthenics. Not terribly enthusiastic.’
‘And you’re online a lot, then?’ Carrie smiled. She liked Gretchen’s bright eyes and clipped way of speaking; she didn’t have a Scottish accent but rather one of those old-fashioned voices that sounded rather like she was a lady detective in a book. Carrie could tell immediately that Gretchen was very sharp, despite her age. She doubted Gretchen missed much.
‘Oh, yes. Not much else to do, except the endless bridge and canasta tournaments, of course. And I do like to have my hair done, get a manicure, pedicure, that kind of thing. You might as well take advantage of being held hostage in a place like this.’ She rolled her eyes theatrically and Carrie snorted a laugh. ‘Otherwise, I like to be on social media. Stay up to date with what people are talking about. Follow various celebrity animal accounts, read the news, see what all the publishers are spending their money on these days. I’m even on TikTok. Young people are endlessly inventive, you know.’
‘Goodness. It sounds like you’re far more involved online than I am.’ Carrie smiled. ‘Shall we sit? I could get us some tea.’
‘Yes, why not? There’s a sunny spot there.’ Gretchen pointed to a free table and chairs on a sunny patio that was getting the best of the autumn sun, even though it was October. ‘Can you get me a cappuccino, dear? And some pastries, perhaps. I’ll go and bag the table, and then we can have a cosy chat.’
‘Will do.’ Carrie made her way back inside to the self-service cafeteria and selected some pastries and muffins, and poured two coffees from a machine. She took them back to Gretchen on a tray.
‘Now, then.’ Gretchen stretched her arms in a catlike way which made her various bracelets jangle. ‘Tell me about yourself, Carrie. Why you’re here.’
‘Oh, just getting away from it all for a while,’ Carrie said, evasively. Though she liked Gretchen, she had no desire to disclose everything that had happened to bring her to Loch Cameron. ‘You know.’
‘I do.’ Gretchen sipped her coffee and stared out at the lawn, which was surrounded by woodland. ‘You know, you’re the third young woman to come and stay in that cottage since I left. I had to come and live here because I had a fall, living on my own. The doctor thought it was best.’ She raised an eyebrow and met Carrie’s gaze. ‘Oh, I don’t mind it. It’s nice enough here. But I do miss the cottage. I grew up there, you know.’
‘I didn’t know. It’s a lovely old place.’ Carrie picked at a muffin. ‘Very cosy. I—’ She broke off, not sure whether to mention anything about coming to Loch Cameron as a child. If Gretchen Ross had lived in that cottage all her life, then she would probably have been there when Carrie and Claire visited.
‘Yes, dear?’ Gretchen took a bite of a Danish pastry. ‘Hmm. Apple.’ She frowned, but took another bite anyway.
‘Nothing, really. I was just going to say…’ Carrie sighed. She didn’t want to talk about what had happened to Claire, but she found that she still wanted to talk to someone. And, she liked Gretchen. There was something unshockable about her. Perhaps it was her age, but Carrie could feel something else about her too. A kind of trustworthiness. For some reason, the idea of talking to Gretchen, who she had only just met, wasn’t as terrible as talking to her father or her friends.
‘What?’ Gretchen’s eyes were sharp. ‘If you’ve got something on your mind, I can be trusted. Don’t worry.’
‘No, it’s just… my great-aunt was one of your neighbours, up on Queen’s Point. Maud McKinley,’ Carrie said. ‘Me and my sister, and our parents, we’d come up every summer until I was about twelve.’
‘Oh, what a small world!’ Gretchen exclaimed. ‘How old are you? In your thirties, somewhere? So about twenty years or so?’ She frowned. ‘Yes, I lived in the cottage then. I grew up there and then moved away to Edinburgh to work for many years. My daughter and I lived there for a while when she was older, but mostly it was just me by the time you would have visited… Of course, when I was young, there were two bedrooms. I merged them into one when my daughter left home; the rooms were unimaginably small, before… Maud’s great-nieces? I do remember you, of course! You were the apple of her eye!’ Gretchen laughed and banged the table vigorously. ‘Who would have thought?’
‘I don’t remember you.’ Carrie tried to think of a time when they had ever really visited any of Maud’s neighbours, but her memory failed her. ‘I don’t think we ever did much apart from play outside or down on the loch. Maud used to take me and my sister into the village, but we mostly helped her cook or played in the garden.’
‘No, she wasn’t that sociable.’ Gretchen nodded. ‘We had a friendship, because we were of an age, but she was quite a quiet person. But when we did speak, she always talked about you. It was nice for her, having you all there. She never had that kind of family experience for herself.’
‘That’s nice to know.’ Carrie thought about Maud: about her comfortable cardigans and the fact she always seemed to be wearing an apron. ‘We stopped coming up when I was twelve.’ She didn’t explain why. She’d blurted it all out to Dotty the other day, and that felt like enough for now.
‘Oh, I know. I remember that.’ Gretchen frowned. ‘She wasn’t happy with your father. He kept you away, didn’t he? Of course, he was a bit of a one, according to Maud. She never liked him, that I do remember.’
‘Didn’t she?’ Carrie frowned. She had known that, to some extent, Maud and her father weren’t close. Maud was her mother’s aunt. But she hadn’t known that they specifically hadn’t got on at all.
‘Oh, no. Didn’t approve of his drinking,’ Gretchen tutted. ‘Your poor mother, putting up with it. She was a saint.’ Gretchen paused, and frowned. ‘She passed away, didn’t she? I do remember now. I’m sorry, I’d forgotten. It’s been a long time since Maud passed, so I haven’t been in the headspace to remember your family for a while.’
‘Yes, she did. That’s all right.’ Carrie leaned forwards. ‘His drinking?’
‘Oh, yes. He was a drinker, that one. Every time you all visited, Maud had to get rid of all the drink in the house – not that she ever had much around, just a bit of brandy in the cupboard for cooking and a bottle of whisky for cold nights. Even so, he’d just go straight down into the village and bring back some bottles as soon as you all got here. I remember that because Maud started emptying them in the night, and then there was a huge row when he found out. He stormed out, went to stay at the inn for a few days,’ Gretchen chuckled. ‘Of course, Dotty overcharged him for everything until he came back, his tail between his legs.’
‘I had no idea,’ Carrie said, thinking about her father. She’d known that he drank, and she’d assumed for a long time that it was part of the way he dealt with the grief of losing her mum. She didn’t remember him being drunk when she was younger, but, on the other hand, she also remembered the fact that her mum and dad had argued a lot. She’d just thought it was normal.
‘Ah, well. It’s not for children’s eyes.’ Gretchen shrugged. ‘Still. You turned out all right, I can see. And I’m sure your sister did too. What is her name again?’
‘Claire,’ Carrie said, quietly.
Gretchen gave her a look. ‘What happened?’ she asked, gently. ‘I can tell by that tone of voice something’s wrong. Is she ill?’
