September

She smiled to herself. 'I don't know. You could ask him.'

'It's been a good party.'

'I'm impressed by your reeling.'

'If you can do a square dance, I guess you can do anything.'

'Just needs guts.'

'Do they still have Saturday-night dances at the Leesport Country Club?'

'I expect so. A whole new generation smooching around the terrace under the stars.'

'We're not doing too badly right now.'

She said, 'I'm not coming back, Conrad. I'm not coming back with you.'

She felt his hand, against her rib-cage, moving, gentle as a caress. She looked up into his face. 'You knew already, didn't you?'

'Yeah,' he admitted. 'I guessed.'

'Everything's changed. Henry's home. We've talked. It's different now. We're together again, Edmund and I. It's all right again.'

'I'm glad.'

'Edmund's my life. I lost sight of him, but he's back and we're together.'

'For you, I'm really glad.'

'Right now isn't the time to go away and leave him.'

'He's a lucky man.'

'No, not lucky. Just special.'

'He's also a nice guy.'

'I am sorry, Conrad. Whatever you feel, I don't want you to think that I was just using you.'

'I think we used each other. We levelled off with our mutual need. At exactly the right time, the right person was there. At least, for me it was the right person. It was you.'

'You're a special man, too. You know that, don't you? And one day, sooner or later, you'll meet someone. Someone just as special as you are. She won't fill Mary's place, because she'll have a place of her own. And she'll fill it for all the right reasons. You've got to remember that. For your own sake, and for the sake of your little daughter.'

'Okay. A positive approach.'

'I don't want you to be sad any longer.'

'No longer the Sad American.'

'Oh, don't remind me! How crass I was to blurt that out.' 'When will I see you again?'

'Oh, soon. We'll come out to the States, Edmund and I. Sometime. We'll all get together then.'

She laid her head on his shoulder. 'Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered, am I.' The last notes of the song trickled away off the piano.

He said, 'I love you.'

'Me too,' Virginia told him. 'It's been great.'

Noel drove back to Corriehill. With the wind pouring in through the open window, the Golf headed back into the hills, and he took his time and did not speed. Being on his own was strangely peaceful, a small breathing space in which to collect some of his thoughts and let others wander. Leaving Croy, he had toyed with the idea of putting on a tape for company, and then decided against it because, for once, quiet was what he craved. Besides, it seemed almost blasphemous to intrude on the infinite darkness of the night by letting loose a blast of rock.

The countryside, all about him, was obscured, desolate, and scarcely habited, and yet he felt that his passage, in some inexplicable way, was being observed. This was an ancient land. The hilltops thrusting up into the sky had held those shapes since the beginning of time, and his immediate surroundings had probably looked for hundreds of years much as they looked now.

Ahead, the narrow road twisted away from him. Long ago, when its course was first laid, it would have followed the boundaries of a farmer's land, circumvented the drystone dykes of a crofter's small holding. Now, others owned these lands, and tractors and milk-floats and buses came this way, but yet the road wound and climbed and dipped, to no apparent purpose, just the way it had always done.

Unable to shrug off the sensation that he was being watched, he thought about those long-gone crofters pitting their energies against the cruel climate, the stubborn land, the barren soil. Ploughing the thin soil behind a horse, harvesting, with sickles, the meagre crops; braving blizzards in search of sheep, cutting peat to stack for fuel. He imagined just such a man making his way home, as Noel was now, headed up the empty glen, on horseback maybe, but more likely on foot. Slogging up the hill, bent against the wind that blew from the west. The road, then, would have seemed very long, and the labours of survival endless.

He found it impossible to imagine such hardships, such a tenuous existence. Safe in the twentieth century, taking both necessities and luxuries for granted, the problem of surviving was not one that Noel had ever contemplated, let alone had to deal with, and in comparison his own uncertainties seemed so unimportant that he felt diminished by their triviality.

And yet, it was his life. You only have one life, Pandora had told him. You don't get second chances. Let something really good slip through your fingers and it's gone forever.

Which brought him back to Alexa. Alexa was gold. Pandora was right, and he knew she was right. If you have to hurt her, then you must do it now… That was old Vi, sitting on the hill above the loch and opening her heart to him.

He thought about Vi, and Pandora, and the Balmerinos and the Airds. Together they constituted a way of life that he had never before truly experienced. Family, friends, neighbours; involved and interdependent. He thought about Balnaid and once more was assailed by the reasonless conviction that here was where he belonged.

Alexa was the key.

Now, taking him by surprise, his mother joined in the argument. Happiness is making the most of what you have. Penelope's robust and certain tones rang clear in his head, brooking no argument, laying down the law as she always had when she felt strongly about some issue.

So what had he got?

The answer was painfully straightforward. A girl. Unsophisticated and not particularly beautiful. In fact, the very antithesis of every woman who had gone before. A girl who loved him. Not to distraction; never nagging him with demands. But with a constancy that burnt bright as a steady flame. He thought about the last few months, during which he had lived with Alexa in her little house in Ovington Street, and a series of random images floated, unsum-moned, into his mind. And these took him by surprise, because for some reason his subconscious did not come up with any of those rich and material possessions which had first caught his attention that evening, so long ago, when Alexa had invited him in for a drink. The pictures, the furniture, the books and the porcelain; the handsome coasters on the sideboard, and the two silver pheasants which stood in the middle of her dining-room table. Instead, he saw delicious and domestic objects. A bowl of fresh apples, a loaf of newly baked bread, a jug crammed with tulips, the gleam of evening sunshine on the copper pans that hung in the kitchen.

And then the other good things which they had shared together. Kiri te Kanawa at Covent Garden, the Tate Gallery on a Sunday morning. Lunching at San Lorenzo. Making love. He thought of the peaceful feeling of walking home in the evenings, back from the office, turning into Ovington Street and knowing that she was there, waiting for him.

That was what he'd got. Alexa. There. Waiting for him. That was all he wanted. That was all that mattered. So what the hell was he dithering about? What the hell was he looking for? All at once the questions were of so little importance that he didn't even bother to attempt to think up the answers.

Because the prospect of a future without her was unimaginable.

He knew then that he was over the watershed and on the path to commitment. For better, for worse. Till death us do part. But the daunting words no longer rendered him shit-scared. Instead, he found himself filled with an unaccustomed and unexpected sense of purpose and elation.

And urgency. No more reason to linger. Instead, a new impatience. He had wasted enough time. He took a deep breath, accelerated. The engine responded and the car sped up the hill. Along the road that led to Corriehill.