They sat on the stoop, talking about books in the moonlight, passing around the hot, very sweet tea, and Nina could easily have stayed there until dawn; but there was a telephone sound in the cab, and simultaneously a loud honk from behind them somewhere—the impatient sleeper, Nina deduced—and it was time for the boys to go.
Jim hopped into the cabin and fired up the engine, which made a deep throbbing sound that shook the ground. Surinder declared herself absolutely bloody freezing and went and sat in the van to warm herself up. Then Marek jumped lightly onto the plate, and Nina smiled up at him.
“I can’t thank you enough,” she said.
“You can,” he said gently. “Leave me book every now and again. Whenever you think of us.”
“I shall think of you every day,” said Nina, coloring a little.
“Well, every day it shall also be good,” said Marek, blushing slightly, too.
“I liked your book of poems,” said Nina. “I liked it very much.”
“Poetry is good for people who are in strange lands,” said Marek.
“Yes,” said Nina. “Yes, it is.”
The train gave out a long honk and then slowly, gracefully began to move away beneath the starry sky.
Nina turned around and saw that Surinder, obviously exhausted from her long day, had curled up in the front of the van and fallen fast asleep. Nina herself stayed by the track as the noise from the train faded away, followed in short order by the long and beautiful burgundy and navy blue sleeper, with its busy bar full of strangers meeting and passing by; its hard recliner seats where the cash strapped and the shift workers tried to get some shut-eye; and the mysterious, dimly lit windows of the first-class compartments. As the train slowed, then slid smoothly through the train crossing, nobody aboard was the least bit aware of a girl standing alone in the dark, staring straight ahead.
And then at last the track stopped humming and all was silent once again, and the wide dark Highland valley belonged once more to the owls and the scurrying squirrels and the gentle deer and the wind rustling in the branches and the bright moon overhead and the sense of a world completely and utterly at peace, and Nina, even though she felt chilled, also felt profoundly touched and grateful for her good fortune; and she could not have said how long it had been since she felt that way.
Chapter Fourteen
Surinder slept all the way back to the farm, waking briefly as they went into the barn to squeak, “Seriously? You get this? It’s all yours? There’s nobody in the bathroom or anything? How is this fair?” then immediately falling on the sofa and passing out again.
Nina, however, felt wide awake, even though it was well after one o’clock in the morning. She looked out of the small back window and noticed the light still on over in the farmhouse. Someone else wasn’t sleeping. As she watched, she saw another light come on, and another, then the door banged hard as Lennox stalked out of the house. He appeared to be swearing. Nina jumped up. She pulled her coat and wellies back on and slipped out of the door.
“Jesus CHRIST!”
She hadn’t meant to creep up on Lennox as quietly as she did and scare him out of his wits, but it was too late. He whirled around as if she was holding a spade poised to whack him on the head.
“Sorry! Sorry!”
“What . . . what the hell are you doing out here? It’s the middle of the bloody night!”
“I know! I know! I’m sorry! I wondered what you were doing.”
“What the ruddy hell do you think I’m doing?”
Nina thought this might be a rhetorical question, because she absolutely didn’t have a clue.
“Um. I don’t know. I thought maybe you might have heard an intruder.”
“I did,” said Lennox shortly. “It turned out to be you.”
“Oh,” said Nina.
Lennox sighed. “You’re a townie, aren’t you? What do you think, that farming is a nine-to-five job? Well, it’s not. If you must know, Ruaridh thinks we’ve a lambing gone wrong in the upper field, and I’m going to check it out and see if we need to call Kyle out. He’s the vet. Vets are like doctors for sick animals.”
“Yeah, yeah, all right, I’ve got it,” said Nina. Lennox had stopped by the Land Rover.
“Are you still here?” he said.
Nina didn’t know what to say, but she felt emboldened by her night’s adventure, and not at all ready for sleep. She simply shrugged.
Lennox paused.
“Do you want tae come? We might be able to use a small pair of hands.”
“Sure,” she found herself saying, barely able to recognize herself.
As she jumped into the Land Rover, she was surprised, but then not really surprised, to find the dog in there, too. He licked her hand.
“What’s your doggie’s name?”
Lennox looked appalled. “He’s a dog, not a doggie. He’s a professional working farm dog. Very valuable, too.”
“So does he have a name, or just a bar code?”
Lennox’s hand strayed to the dog’s head, as it often did, seemingly unconsciously.
“Parsley.”
This was so unexpected—she had assumed it would be Bob or Rex or something equally to the point—that Nina grinned.
“Hello, Parsley,” she said. “What a lovely name!”
Parsley snuffled a little and licked her hand.
“It’s a silly name,” said Lennox.
“Well I think it’s lovely,” said Nina. “A lovely name for a lovely doggie. Dog, I mean.”
For once, as the Land Rover bumped over the muddy track up the hill, Nina didn’t care about saying the wrong thing, didn’t feel embarrassed. There was something quite liberating in Lennox being so rude. She could tell he was like this with everyone, and it gave her license to be slightly bolder than she might have been otherwise. She turned in her seat to look at him. He had a solid jaw, blue eyes creased from squinting across the fields, a strong nose and chin, a sprinkling of wiry stubble across his cheeks, and thick hair poking out from under his cap. He didn’t look like a man who had ever been inside; even the car seemed too confining for him. He was made to stride across the moors on long legs, the wind behind him. There wasn’t a soft edge to him anywhere; he was all lean angles.
Suddenly, seemingly in the middle of nowhere—there wasn’t a light to be seen—Lennox stopped the Land Rover. He got a hurricane light from the backseat and turned it up to full.