500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(21)
Jake slapped at his forehead. “Did he not leave you instructions? For God’s sake, what a bampot.”
He jumped out of the car again.
“I mean, there’s lots of wood . . . but . . .”
“But that’s the only way to heat the house,” said Jake.
Lissa sighed. “I was afraid of that.”
“And the water.” He looked at her. “Were you just going to sit in the cold all night?”
Lissa tried to smile and looked rather rueful. “Um, I don’t . . . I hadn’t really thought about it.”
“Because it’s going to be below zero tonight.” He grinned cheerfully. “Just as well I turned up then.”
Lissa bit her lip, nerves returning. “Suppose.”
Jake disappeared and returned with an armful of the neatly chopped logs.
“He’s left you well prepared. Good stuff too.”
He handed her one and she stared at him blankly.
“Smell it!” he said, and she took a tentative sniff. It had a deep, oaky aroma she couldn’t quite place.
“Whisky barrel,” he said. “When they don’t use them anymore. They burn like hell and smell delicious. Right, watch this.”
And he showed her how to open the wood burner and pile the logs up like Jenga, to create a chimney inside the fireplace itself. Then he lit a fire starter, popped it down the middle of the logs, pushed open the flues, and clunked shut the door. The entire thing was blazing merrily in ninety seconds flat.
“You may have to write that down for me,” said Lissa.
“Yeah, best thing is not to let it go out,” he said, showing her the basket of peat to the side, with which she could damp it down through the night like a blanket and let it smolder. “Then you’ll be cozy all the time. Works all right this place, once it’s up and running.”
And he gave her a quick, charming smile, and before she even had the chance to get nervous or offer him a cup of tea—if she had any tea, which she didn’t—he’d bid her good night.
IT TURNED OUT that Jake had been right: the cottage did heat up surprisingly quickly. There weren’t any lamps, just a bright overhead light that reminded Lissa of the hospital, so she just sat as the evening grew pitch dark, staring listlessly into the flickering flames. Then she opened her phone and looked for Deliveroo choices.
Blinking in amazement, she took in the terrible, terrible news. There were none.
Chapter 25
Cormac gave himself an hour to get to the hospital the next morning, not understanding the layout of London at all, and was surprised to find himself there thirty-five minutes later. It was the oddest thing, he’d found, getting onto the packed tube train and, just by habit, looking around for a face he recognized. Did you get over this? Everyone, regardless of color or how they were dressed, had the same expression on their face: a sort of studied disconnectedness, a complete inability to meet anyone else’s eyes. Even the schoolchildren had it. It must be an animalistic self-protection mechanism, he reckoned. Like dogs. Don’t make eye contact, because you don’t know anyone; you don’t know how they’ll react to you. What a strange way to live. Cormac couldn’t really remember an existence where he didn’t know most people and they knew him. How did people cope? Wasn’t everyone incredibly lonely all the time?
He liked Juan from HR at once, the diminutive form in a suit, phone going off constantly. Juan had smiled apologetically, said that it was great he was here, could he fill in a weekly questionnaire that someone would almost definitely not read, and, by the way, if there were another seventy or eighty full-time nonagency NP staff available just like him up in the Highlands, would he mind terribly bringing them with him next time as they were a bit short-staffed? Oh, and 147 midwives.
Cormac had smiled, realizing what Juan was really saying: Please, please get on with things and don’t bother me. Which suited him just fine, if Alyssa Westcott would just get in touch with him. He knew Jake was going around to see she was all right, and even if he hadn’t known that, he would have guessed it, because that was precisely the kind of thing Jake would do, but, rather to his surprise, Jake hadn’t contacted him. That wasn’t like him at all. Normally he had a score out of ten for any woman between the ages of eighteen and about sixty-five, more if you included Helen Mirren. Maybe this Alyssa was just awful.
He opened up the case notes the hospital had sent him—the kind Alyssa was meant to be annotating for him—and thanked goodness for the GPS system.
DRIVING IN LONDON, however, he was not remotely prepared for. Cormac had been driving on his mates’ farms since he was fifteen years old, like most Kirrinfief boys, and he could drive a tractor and had had a go on a baler. And once he hit the open road, particularly for work, it was hills of empty long roads, single-track lanes up to visit farms, vistas of dappled mountain shadows so stunning that sometimes he would simply stop in a lay-by, push open the door of the little car, breathe in the sweet and bracing air, and eat his cheese and pickle sandwiches staring out at the unpeopled view, feeling very pleased with his lot.
None of this was the least preparation for crazed London traffic, with furious cabbies and delivery vans on insane schedules and huge SUVs doing the school run and red buses swaying everywhere; with tourists stepping straight out into the middle of the road while keeping their eyes fast on the opposite way, expecting the traffic to come from the right; with cyclists zipping through every gap in the road like darting birds. The exhaust fumes, the confusing lane system, the vast roundabouts, the endless honking, the stop-starting.