Ice Dancing Episode 6

In fact Louise had left me a thousand pounds, “for Helen to spend on herself,” the will had said, which surprised me since I knew how little she had in the bank. There couldn’t have been much left after the funeral bill had been paid.

The other thing I had inherited, not surprisingly, was Louise’s cat, Siggy. He was a white Persian with a pale grey haze over his fur as though he had brushed up against something grubby, and his eyes in his owlish face were large and green. He was a distressingly high maintenance cat.

You had to brush him every day, otherwise his fur got all matted. Jess, the collie, was afraid of him. He was not like the rest of the farm cats, used to outdoor living but nervous of dogs. Siggy had no fear of dogs at all.

He was a pet, and Jess felt that he was in danger of usurping her privileged place in the kitchen. Siggy missed Louise almost as much as I did. Most nights he would leap up on to my lap and pad himself a bed there, purring like a small engine, demanding comfort.

“So who is getting the cottage?” asked Sandy when he had finished his shepherd’s pie.

“I don’t really know. The solicitor was very cagey. He just talked about the heir but he didn’t say who the heir was.” “And I don’t suppose you asked.” “No. I didn’t really feel I could ask.” “You and your conscience, Helen! Didn’t Louise ever mention this person to you?”

“No. Never. She never really talked about any relatives. Well, hardly ever.”

Louise had been widowed a long time ago. I knew that much. She had told me that she had been born and brought up on the outskirts of Glasgow. I knew there had been a sister, Lottie, because she had once shown me a photograph of the two of them taken when they were children. They were wearing identical shapeless velvet dresses with lacy collars, although Lottie was a couple of years older than Louise.

But Lottie had died while she was still a young woman and Louise hadn’t been very forthcoming about the rest of her family.

Louise possessed an old photograph album and once or twice we had looked at it together. I remember two photographs in particular, lying loose in the front of the album. One was a heavily posed studio portrait of a man wearing an old fashioned suit and a shirt with a high white collar. He had a small moustache and he was conventionally handsome.

The other was a tiny snapshot of a young man who, even at this distance in time, looked... beautiful is the word that comes into my mind. He was not so much handsome as beautiful. Men can be beautiful, the young and the very old, in quite different ways.

He was standing in a garden, smoking a cigarette and smiling at the camera. Or whoever was behind it. He was quite small but almost indecently good looking, with dark hair and a long straight nose, high cheekbones and a wide mouth. He seemed very exotic and foreign and I wondered who he could be. I looked at the back of the snap but there was nothing written there.

Louise had pointed at the first picture, the studio portrait, and started laughing.

“Ah now – that was my Uncle Fred. Frederick Napier. My mother’s younger brother. Much younger. But he liked to be called Freddy. He eloped you know! It was all very romantic. He eloped with an Italian girl called Francesca.”

I had been going to ask her why they had eloped and where to, but before I could do it, she had already set Freddy aside and was gazing at the other photograph. The softened expression on her face silenced me.

Beautiful young man

“Never settle for second best, Helen,” she told me. Just for a moment, she looked sad, as though remembering something that pained her. Then she tucked the picture back into the album and gave a little shake of her head.

Something intervened. I don’t remember what. The phone rang or the doorbell, and Louise put the album away. So I never found out who the beautiful young man was. I meant to ask her, but I always forgot.

It was, I suppose, something more that we had in common, this lack of relatives in a village where everybody seemed to be related to everybody else and could count on a dozen or more cousins.

She had married young, I knew that. One Christmas Eve, when we had both been at the sherry, she told me that her husband,

Malachi Marshall, had been much older than she was.

He had been a mining manager somewhere in Ayrshire. She had done a course at some kind of secretarial college in Glasgow and had been working in the mine office, unusual for a woman back then. I reckon she must have been very clever.

She and Malachi married in the early forties but no children came along and it had not been a particularly happy marriage. Malachi was, as Louise put it, “Not a nice man when he had a drink or two in him.”

He had died some time in the fifties – I got the impression that Louise’s chief emotion had been one of relief – and since the house went with the job, she had to leave her home quite quickly.

Country cottage

Malachi had left her just enough insurance money to buy herself a small place, a cottage or a flat. Louise had no ties and had always fancied proper country living, not the compromise of a small mining town.

“I always wanted a country cottage, like on a chocolate box. Roses round the door, you know? That was what I had in my mind. And me a Glasgow girl, eh? I came to the countryside by degrees!”

And so she had moved south to this village that lies midway between the green pastures of Ayrshire and the hills and forests of Galloway. The cottage had just come on the market. It was called Drumbrethan Cottage, after our farm.

It was handsome rather than chocolate box pretty: a sturdy stone building with two dormers at the front. But it had a rambling rose clambering up the front wall, a garden where hedge sparrows and blackbirds nested, and a fine view from the back windows across fields to the sea. Louise said she had bought it mainly for the potential she had seen in the garden.

I always wanted a country cottage, like on a chocolate box. Roses round the door, you know? That was what I had in my mind

Ice Dancing by Catherine Czerkawska, Dyrock Publishing, £9.99 and Kindle E-reader from £2.99. For more of her books, including The Posy Ring and A Proper Person To Be Detained, see saraband.net.