Where Have All the Boys Gone?(61)

“Well, Craig the Vet volunteered, but I don’t think he’s the kind of person we want—he looks like a farmer, and if you were a girl, you’d think he just wanted a hearty pair of hands to get up at four-thirty in the morning and milk the cows.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” said Harry.

“You think that,” said Katie. “And Lachlan, but . . . he’s a bit old.”

“You mean, he’s a midget.”

“He’s vertically challenged.”

“Oh, so you’re the one using the poncey language, but you’re also the one not letting him be on television.”

“I know,” said Katie. “I feel bad about it. But what can I do? I’m a PR person and thus a bit shallow, you know, and stuff.”

“And I’m shallow enough for you?”

“Oh, come on. And nobody else can leave their animals, except for the technogeeks down at the research plant, and there’s plenty of them in London already and every time they get excited they start doing Lord of the Rings impersonations.”

“So, by a process of elimination of every man in a seventy-mile radius, you got to me.”

“Yes.”

“Can Francis come?”

“No.”

Harry sighed. “Oh well. I guess. I’ve never been to London before.”

Katie’s eyes widened. “Exsqueeze me?”

“I mean, I’ve been through Heathrow before. On my way to other places. Places I actually wanted to go to. But London . . . no, it’s just never come up.”

Katie just stared at him.

“I can’t believe you’ve never been to London.”

“Why not? It’s not the centre of the universe you know.”

“Actually, it is, as it happens. That’s why the GMT line is there.”

“Hmm,” said Harry, sounding unconvinced.

“Oh my God. Well, we can show you London.”

“I’ve seen EastEnders, thanks. I’ll probably do without.”

“You big snot!” said Katie. “You never know, you might love it.”





Chapter Fourteen


It is a completely irreversible law that states that if you are really looking forward to showing off about something—your town, a film you love, or a great piece of music—it will undoubtedly appear in its worst possible light. The film suddenly won’t seem half so funny, or the person will get distracted halfway through the music and start talking about something else, or they’ll come to your town and it will piss down with rain and they’ll get mugged immediately.

Harry hadn’t been mugged yet (that was more Katie’s arena), but, annoyingly, when they’d set off on the Monday morning (after a weekend completely Iain-free, not that Katie was frantically checking for his calls or anything), it had been an uncharacteristically glorious day in Fairlish. The sun had glinted off the hills and onto the shining sea, making the whitewashed buildings look clean and fresh, and the painted fishing boats jolly and homely.

“I’m going to miss this,” said Harry sadly.

“You’re going away for three days,” said Katie. “Nothing has changed here for a hundred years!”

“You are joking?”

“Um, why?”

“Well, I mean, look at that tree over there. Notice anything about it?”

Now she looked at it, with some irritation she noticed that whilst the previous week it had been in full pink blossom, now the ground beneath was carpeted with petals, and green shoots were crawling out of the twigs.

“What about it?” said Katie, purely to be annoying.

“It’s got a new single out,” said Harry sarcastically. “You have no soul. The land never stops changing if you bother to look.”

“Ahh, it must be National Pomposity Week,” said Katie.

Then, to make matters worse, as they circled around Heathrow, the rain was coming down in sheets.

“So this is the softy South is it?” said Harry, clearly gearing himself up to a long session of remarks like that. Katie decided the best way to deal with it was to ignore him. Instead, she kept an eye on Louise, who was huddled into the window seat, with some concern. She hadn’t said a word during the journey, just stared out of the window, seeming more down with every passing mile. Katie hoped she wasn’t regretting coming with them. Although they hadn’t packed all of her stuff—Katie could bring it down in the car—there was a sense, unspoken between them, that her time in the Highlands was over. She had a job to get back to, a life to pick up the pieces of. It just wasn’t realistic to play at buxom country lass, as Olivia had repeatedly pointed out.

Katie had had several more wittering emails from Clara, but had kept them from Louise. They were hardly going to help. She had sent back a noncommittal congratulations note, and reassured her mother on the phone that everything was just fine, that she knew Max very well (which was of course true) and that the hospitals in India were first-rate (or the one she’d pay to get Clara into would be, of that much she was determined).

But that didn’t change the fact that Louise was coming back to a town full of ghosts, and it certainly looked bleak this morning.

So, Katie was especially pleased to see a driver and a very petite blonde girl holding a sign up for them at the airport.