‘Ooh, I willnae. I’m no paying a tinker’s bus fare! It’s you that’s gasping for him.’
Ellen didn’t try to stop me.
‘Come on, then, Florrie,’ I said.
I crossed the road, still grinning like the Cheshire cat. Well, I’d practised on Frank Dunbar, hadn’t I? Florrie had a lot to learn from me about playing this game.
She tried to dodge me. Brenda, tipsy with laughter, held her by the shoulders so she couldn’t escape. Florrie was a little bit taller than me, but not so tall I couldn’t reach her mouth when I stood on tiptoe.
‘You said you were gasping!’ I accused, as she turned her face away.
‘Go on, Florrie. He’s bonny as the day.’
Florrie turned back very quickly, and gave me a peck on the lips.
I didn’t move. ‘Call that gasping?’ I scoffed.
Bold now, challenging, she did it again, and then let her mouth hesitate over mine. For a second the tip of her tongue explored the space between my lips, intimate and secretive.
And this is so strange: it was just as nice as kissing Frank Dunbar.
But in a completely different way.
At this point the bus came rumbling over the hill.
‘Oh!’ Florrie cried, stepping back suddenly as if I’d stung her, and cracked me a bone-shaking wallop across the face with the flat of her hand.
‘Cheeky devil,’ she said primly, as I bent over one knee with my face in my hands, seeing stars.
The bus pulled up in a cloud of dust and Ellen vaulted across the road in front of it to pinion me, instinctively guessing I’d turn murderous the instant I recovered from the shock of being attacked. As I straightened up she grabbed my arms from behind and clamped them to my sides as if I were about to be shot from a cannon. That snake Florrie was escaping, hustled on to the bus by her still tittering friend Brenda. I fought Ellen in fury, quite ineffectively.
‘Let me go!’
Ellen held me in a grip of iron. She murmured softly in my ear, ‘Julie.’
I stopped struggling, breathing hard.
‘Whisht. Hush. Now, Julie.’
The bus pulled away, and she let me go.
I stood staring after it, raging with impotent anger, one hand pressed to my burning cheek.
‘This is how it always goes,’ Ellen said. ‘You have to play-act. You have to bite your tongue and pretend you dinnae care. If you’d hit her back you’d have had the bus driver jump out and knock you silly. And if you ever tell my mammy or daddy I let you kiss another girl while I watched, I’ll knock you silly myself.’
She gave her characteristic snort of disgust, and added, ‘You should have let her gasp.’
From somewhere in her skirt Ellen pulled her tobacco pouch, the exact shape and colour of a river mussel, and her little clay pipe.
‘Have a draw. Witless scaldies. Forget about them.’
She got the pipe alight and handed it to me.
She’d smoked her pipe in front of me more than once before, but she’d never let me share it.
Something had changed between us. I wasn’t sure what had made it happen. The car ride, the song on the moor? Or me having to take a slap in the face as if I really were one of her kind?
Whatever it was, I thought, she had finally called me Julie and offered me a smoke. I thought it was probably worth it.
‘Thank you,’ I said, feeling dragon-like, my face still burning with the sting of Florrie’s slap, my mouth full of smoke.
‘All right?’ Ellen asked me.
‘Nae bother,’ I answered, trying to be stoically Euan-like, and got a sardonic snorted laugh out of her.
We set off towards the car. I gave Ellen back her pipe.
We didn’t say anything else for a while, but as we came to the wonderful view of the Tay Valley, Ellen observed in the neutral tone of a policeman making an accusation, ‘You just take anything you want when you want it, aye, Lady Julia? Just take and take. Born to it. You need a gift for my mam so you pick your gran’s roses. You want a motor car so you help yourself to your mother’s. You were raging at those scaldy lassies and you just thought you could play them for fools.’
I didn’t answer. What was I supposed to answer? Because, uncomfortably, I thought Ellen was right. I thought of how I’d tried on Solange’s pearls, and that kiss I helped myself to from Frank Dunbar, and the pearl in the envelope. Even the way I’d so blithely put my taxi fare to Strathfearn on my mother’s account. And I’d very gladly taken Ellen away for the morning to have her to myself when I knew she and Jamie were … Well, I didn’t know what they were. If anything. But I was childishly unwilling to share her.
Ellen swept her arm towards the river and forest and fields that lay at our feet. ‘You think this all belongs to you just because you’re in it.’
‘So do you! You agreed!’
‘I don’t just take what I want. My folk don’t steal things. We don’t keep things.’
‘It’s not the value of a thing that’s important,’ I said, trying to defend myself. ‘I love the story of a thing. I love a thing for what it means a thousand times more than for what it’s worth. You know the pearl bracelet in the Inverfearnie Library, the one that belonged to Mary Queen of Scots when she was a child? I don’t give a toss what that’s worth. But Mary Queen of Scots’ own bracelet! And the Reliquary – what about that? The price you paid for your willow bank, four hundred years ago? It’s hard to have your happiness tangled up in things you can’t keep.’
‘We don’t mind about keeping things,’ Ellen said. ‘If you give a Traveller girl a ring, she’ll wear it until some other girl admires it, then like as not she’ll give it to her friend. For love. For the pleasure of giving. Because what’s the point in just having? If I give a thing, I’ll remember how happy we both were when I made the gift.’
She handed me her pipe.
‘Here, it’s yours. Keep it. It’s more blessed to give than to receive.’
She never dropped her superior air of queenly command, but suddenly she was warm and fond too.
I took it. I had to.
Then she smiled at me sunnily. ‘And aren’t you happy, now I’ve given you something you wanted badly – something of mine?’
And I was. I really was.
She is wonderful.
9
THE APPEARANCE OF LEGS