“You know,” she said conspiratorially, “the kind of people who are going to be up there?”
“Old geezers,” said Nina promptly. “I know, I’ve met them.”
“No!” said Surinder. “No, no no no. I don’t mean that at all. Up there, it’s all guys, you know.”
“Really?”
“Of course! Middle of nowhere. Who’s there? Farmers. Vets. Probably a military base nearby. Hikers. Mountain bikers.”
“I’m not sure I’d get along very well with a mountain biker. Bit too much raincoat action. Also, I don’t like being outside.”
“It’s just a concept. Geologists. Agricultural students. Tree surgeons. Men men men men men! You’ll be hopelessly outnumbered.”
“Do you think so?”
There had been only two men—Griffin and old Mo Singh—at the library, and eight women. And in the media center there were about forty women, mostly young, Nina had learned in the course of a very excitable e-mail from Griffin.
“Course! And there’s none here.”
“You do all right.”
Surinder rolled her eyes. She got asked out constantly, and was interested in almost none of them, complaining that they were all too metropolitan and she didn’t like beards.
“Whatever,” she said, waving her hand. “You’ll see. Boys everywhere.”
“I’m not going for the boys,” said Nina. “I’m going for the books.”
“But surely if a boy or two turns up you’re not going to be too disappointed?”
“I told you,” said Nina. “They’re all a hundred and two and live in a bar. And stop whistling ‘Over the Sea to Skye.’”
Chapter Ten
It was raining. Living in Birmingham, Nina had thought she knew a bit about rain. Turned out she was wrong. Very wrong. In Birmingham when it rained you popped into a café or stayed inside your cozy centrally heated house or went to the Bullring so you could wander around in comfort.
Here in the Highlands, it rained and it rained and it rained until it felt as if the clouds were coming down and getting in your face, rolling their big black way toward you and unleashing their relentless showers on top of you.
Nina wouldn’t have minded, but she absolutely had to get back to the van; it had been sitting out there for five days as it was. She’d packed as much as she could into her largest suitcase, crammed boxes of books into the back of the Mini Metro until she could hardly see out of the rear windshield—it still made barely a dent in the piles in the house, but Surinder was hungover and in a generous mood—then slipped away with many hugs and kisses and a final Tupperware for the road and a promise to visit as soon as she was fixed up, i.e., had finally sold the car and found a place to live.
But first she needed to collect the van. As soon as she’d arrived, she’d asked Alasdair in the bar, ridiculously, if there was a taxi service, and he’d looked confused and asked her if she wanted Hugh to give her a lift on his tractor and she’d said not to worry. He then, kindly, offered to lend her an old bicycle that was out back.
It was incredibly old, in fact, a great big heavy metal bone shaker with a solid frame, three gears, and a withered brown basket on the front. The one thing in its favor was that riding it was so incredibly difficult that she soon ceased to feel the cold as she pedaled ferociously through the rain in the direction of where she thought the van was.
As she approached the crest of the hill, panting, she saw a small crack in the clouds that raced across the sky. Suddenly, and only for an instant, a great beam of golden sunshine flooded through it and she raised her head toward it, craning like a sunflower. At the very top of the hill, she stopped and gazed at the clouds. She never saw them back home, for glass and steel tended to obscure the top end of the weather; you kept your eyes on the pavement, or your phone, and you carried on. Clearing the drops out of her eyes and shaking her hair behind her—it would frizz like crazy, she thought, but who was there to mind or care?—she was rewarded suddenly by the rain stopping, as if on her command, and the golden sunlight splashed down again, illuminating every crystal raindrop, every damp leaf and shiny field of rapeseed all the way down to the little cove, an enormous rainbow cracking through the gaps. The clouds continued to race by as if speeding up, making a patchwork of the field below.
Nina took a deep breath of the incredibly fresh air, then looked to her right, where a red train was running parallel to the road. She knew it wouldn’t have Marek in it—it was a passenger train—but she hopped back on her bike nevertheless and coasted down the other side of the hill, racing the train, watching as it sped on its way: Perth, Dundee . . . maybe Edinburgh, Glasgow and beyond, Britain for once not feeling like the small, cramped country she had always thought it to be, hugger-mugger, that corner of London and the southeast continuously sending out its fingers into more and more of the world around it, trying to swallow it whole, concreting over the entire land into a dark, grimy urban sprawl, with a coffee shop in every street and everyone shut away in highly priced boxy little flats, attached to their WiFi, living through a screen even as another nine skyscrapers were thrown up right next door, blocking out more of the light and the clouds and the air and the view and nobody seeming to care, everyone thinking of it as progress.
She let her feet fly off the pedals and freewheeled faster and faster, watching the train speed ahead, knowing that even though she had no job, no pension, no partner, nothing at all except a rackety old van, somehow, more than ever in her life, she felt free.
Not at all where she remembered it being—and rather farther away; she was starving by the time she reached it—she came upon the train crossing. In the turnoff next to it, completely untouched apart from the police sticker, which, had she still been in Birmingham, she’d have been tempted not to peel off in case it got her free parking, was the big van, looking a lot less daunting in the sunshine than it had the last time she’d seen it, in the middle of the night.
As she dismounted from the bicycle, she saw the red lights begin to flash and the striped barriers making their descent. Immediately she felt tense; how awful that she’d been so nearly caught there, so nearly trapped. That feeling of panicky powerlessness when she’d fumbled for the door came over her again, and she forced herself to watch the train—a small local service, but even that felt huge and noisy—thunder across. She shivered as a cloud passed once more across the sun and she leaned against a nearby tree. It was okay. It was okay. It was fine. She had to tell herself that and not let her imagination run away with her. It was a freak accident, the train had stopped; it would not happen again.