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‘Och, aye. I wouldnae hold back wi’ the chocolate when a young lady visits,’ he chuckled. ‘I didnae know if ye wanted sugar, so I brought the bowl.’
‘Thanks.’ Carrie helped herself to a spoonful of brown sugar and stirred it into her coffee.
‘So what prompted the visit?’ Angus asked.
‘Well, I guess I was wondering if you could tell me anything more about my great-aunt,’ Carrie confessed. Since reading Maud’s diary, she had so many unanswered questions. What had happened to Maud’s baby? And to William and Clara? What had Maud done about being pregnant and single at the end of the 1950s? How had she coped? And had she and William carried on seeing each other – or had he gone back to Clara and never gone into the post office ever again?
‘Oh. I expect so. I hope you’re enjoyin’ the choir, by the way. I find it fun.’
‘Yeah. It’s really good, I love it.’ Carrie sipped her drink. ‘It’s cathartic. Like you said.’
‘Aye. Glad ye think so.’ Angus nodded at the guitars. ‘I was always into music. When I was younger, I was in a band. Still got the long hair,’ he chuckled. ‘Used to plait it, have it shaved up the sides like a Viking. The ladies liked that.’
‘I bet they did,’ Carrie laughed. ‘When was that?’
‘Oh, the seventies. It was a wild time.’ He took a biscuit and crunched it. ‘Toured most of Europe. Not that I remember half o’ it.’
‘Wow. So were you famous?’ Carrie asked, looking at the rows of CDs.
‘For a while, aye. No one remembers us much now.’ He named a band that Carrie had vaguely heard of. ‘We supported some big bands. It was my life for a long time.’
‘Bonnie Tyler. That’s how you met her.’ Carrie remembered that day at choir, after she’d belted out the chorus to ‘Alone’ by Heart.
‘Aye, that’s right. Nice woman.’
‘Any stories about her?’ Carrie raised an eyebrow. ‘Come on, Angus. You must have a lot.’
‘A gentleman never tells.’ He gave Carrie a smile that suggested there were definitely stories he could tell about his former life.
‘You played the guitar?’ Carrie pointed to them hanging on the wall.
‘Aye. Axe man. But the choir’s about as much music as I do nowadays. I keep ma hand in, but nothin’ much.’
‘Do you know if Maud was musical? Did you know her well?’ Carrie asked, keen to bring the conversation back around to her great-aunt. ‘I’ve been given some of her old diaries and it’s made me want to know as much as I can about her.’
‘Oh, we were good friends.’ Angus nodded. ‘In fact, when I moved here, we were a bit more than that, for a while.’
Carrie looked up, surprised. ‘What do you mean?’
‘We were a bit of an item, on and off. She was a bit older than me, but when I moved here in the eighties she was about fifty or so and I was – what – early thirties. She was a fine-lookin’ woman. We got on well.’ He shrugged, smiling. ‘Boy meets girl. You can imagine the rest.’
‘Maud and you…?’ Carrie was flabbergasted.
‘Aye. Dinnae look so surprised. Middle-aged people have sex, ye know,’ he chided her.
‘No, it’s just more that…’ Carrie trailed off. ‘I didn’t know Maud had any boyfriends. I found out some stuff from her diary, but later in life, I just assumed…’
‘You assumed she just waited for death, like a nun or something? No. Maud was a sexual woman. I wasnae exactly her boyfriend, but we had an arrangement. Nowadays you might call it “friends with benefits”. She used tae make me dinner once or twice a week, which I appreciated, because I’m not a cook. An’ usually we’d end up in bed. We were never in love, but it was nice, ye know. Company.’
‘Wow!’ Carrie took a biscuit. ‘I had no idea.’
‘No, well. You wouldnae,’ he laughed. ‘She wouldn’t exactly tell her young great-nieces what she was up to. That would have been inappropriate.’
‘Oh, of course,’ Carrie agreed. ‘No, it’s just more that… I feel like I didn’t know very much about her at all, and I wish I did.’
‘Ach, well, that’s how she was. We had that arrangement goin’ fer years, but she never really told me much about herself. She’d had a child, that I know. She told me one night when we had a couple o’ glasses of wine wi’ dinner. Told me putting the bairn up for adoption was the hardest thing she’d ever done.’ He gave a sad smile.
‘Do you know anything else about the baby? Did she ever have a relationship with the baby’s father?’ Carrie was desperate to know more about what had happened to Maud.
