500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(66)
“Well, spray a shitload of Jo Malone perfume around and it will almost be the same.”
“Almost too much.”
“What?”
“Not at all too much! Who is your date with?!”
“Piotr.”
Lissa had to think for a minute. It wasn’t just nurses in the home; it was more a general backup housing facility for anyone who had to work at the hospital and couldn’t quite manage on the wages the hospital paid.
“Piotr the porter? Amazing!”
It was indeed the diminutive porter Kim-Ange had spent the evening dancing with at the ceilidh, who was completely overwhelmed.
“Is he nice?”
“I don’t care,” said Kim-Ange. “There are no men in this town and I haven’t had a proper date in eight months. As long as he doesn’t eat weasels, I’m probably going to let him get to second base.”
“What if he licks weasels?”
“First base.”
Lissa smiled. “I just can’t believe we’ve all got dates!”
“I know,” said Kim-Ange. “Skype me later and I’ll tell you why you’re dressed all wrong.”
CORMAC SENT OVER the last of the week’s notes to Lissa and couldn’t stop himself from adding at the bottom, seemingly innocently, Going to Fordell Fair?
Lissa saw the line and smiled, then frowned. Word got around. She took another bite of her russet apple.
Maybe. What about you? Busy I believe?
Cormac squinted at the message. Oh, obviously she’d heard. Kim-Ange would have been all over it. It felt very odd—were they . . . were they friends now?
Oi! he typed, throwing the core of the russet he was eating into the bin.
There you go, all Eastenders again. Where are you going?
Some hot new restaurant.
You’ll be queueing for an hour and it’ll be full of snotty types and all anyone does is take photographs of the food, and the plates will be too small and you won’t get enough to eat and it will be filthy expensive.
Well YOU might throw up on the big dipper.
Shan’t! AND Kim-Ange has a date! It must be almost summer.
So we all have dates.
Cormac grabbed another apple from the bag.
Good!
Good!
Lissa decided on another apple and bit into it, trying not to betray how cross she was, and went out to feed Neddie Needles.
Chapter 50
The fog rose on the little town of Kirrinfief that Saturday and they had, by noon, one of those days in the Highlands also known as “you should have been here last week.”
It is a fact—sad but true—but please, don’t ever let it put you off visiting our beautiful country; we would be so happy to see you, I promise. Nonetheless, it remains a fairly hardwired truth that if you want to plan a visit to Scotland, or a wedding, or a barbecue, even simply planning it is an act of hubris that upsets the weather gods of Scotland. Lugh, he of the one eye and the ability to summon storms, will be displeased, and at the very least there will be light drizzle and ominous gray skies, and if you are in a place that has a beautiful view, you will have to put up with people telling you there is a beautiful view, because you will not be able to see it.
But take Scotland by surprise and you might just get a day like this, in early June, when the sun warms every nook and cranny, and the breeze gently pootling over a loch as calm as glass will keep you from getting too hot; when the stillness of the air means the cries of the many birds can be heard more loudly than ever, as well as the lightly tapping hooves of the deer in the forest. The sky is a freshly washed blue, the green of the meadows far greener than anything you would expect to find without a heavy filter on it; fat bees buzz merrily among the meadowsweet and long grass, and the evenings last forever.
IN LONDON, YAZZIE had persuaded Cormac to come out with her to a new restaurant and he had said yes, because he didn’t know what else to do and Kim-Ange was mysteriously unavailable.
Kim-Ange was going for a walk with Piotr, who was both excited and slightly concerned about it.
And Lissa Westcott was going to the fair. She was in a blue dress that, for once, she was wearing without a coat or a cardigan. It was a plain dress, but it suited her, and she had left off the makeup apart from a little pink lipstick, and her hair was bouncing down her back, and she felt . . . not fine exactly. But, as Kim-Ange gave her the thumbs-up from the laptop in the corner of the room, she reminded herself again and again, It’s only Jake, it’s only Jake, then she couldn’t feel worse.
They were all of them out, in the warm of a British evening as beautiful as she makes them; hundreds of miles apart, but each with the same combination of butterflies and cheerfulness and a slight aura of dread and considering just canceling the entire thing and never mentioning it again and running away to the sea to be a sailor, which characterizes the process of dating. But they were all youngish, and it was a beautiful evening, and there was potential magic in the air, so you couldn’t be too worried for them, not really. Tonight, even for Lissa, the bad things felt a little further away, warded off by the magical sweetness of the air, a late spring’s caress, a new pair of boots; by expectation, possibilities, aftershave, and checking wristwatches and best earrings and chewing gum.
Chapter 51
The fair was easy to smell, coming in on the old farm track. The normal scents of pine and bracken in the air—with an undertone of cow that at first Lissa had been averse to but now rather liked—had been overtaken by smells that were familiar and strange all at once: the fairground mix of candy floss, popcorn, diesel, and dirty old engines.