‘Those lassies did, up on Pitbroomie Hill.’
‘When you said, “I like your brother”, just then, you sounded exactly like those lassies. I thought you meant you wanted Jamie to kiss you.’
She laughed softly. ‘I wouldnae mind.’
We lay very quietly for a minute or two, listening to everybody around us being quiet. Then Ellen pulled the covers up over our heads so we were in a little cocoon of privacy. She lay very still. I was just about to free my own nose to avoid suffocating when she whispered in my ear, so softly it was hardly more than her lips moving and carefully shaping words, as though she were talking to Mary Kinnaird – as if she’d do that!
‘What was it like?’
‘What was what like?’
All I could hear of her answer was a click and a hiss.
‘I can’t hear you,’ I whispered back. ‘What?’
‘On Pitbroomie Hill. That kiss.’
‘Oh that.’
I put one finger against her lower jaw and tilted her head towards me. And then I pressed my lips against hers, just softly, and kissed.
‘Like that.’
She snickered silently, the ghost of her scornful snort. Then she cranked her whisper up a notch, so I could hear her.
‘You never. That’s all? And you fooled her, just with that?’
‘Why not?’
‘That’s not how a lad gives a kiss. Not when he means it.’
I am not entirely sure what possessed me, and that is the honest truth. It was part – yes, it was – curiosity, but partly anger at her constantly being so patronising, and also I wanted to call her bluff, to throw her challenge back at her. But … well, and it was excitement. I wanted to know.
‘Go on then,’ I said. ‘Since you know so much about it.’
‘Hush,’ she warned.
‘Go on.’
Just as I’d done, she used the tip of her own index finger to turn my face back towards hers. Just delicately. And then she suddenly closed her mouth over mine, and –
And there was strength in it, and hunger, and control, and it was like standing on the edge of a cliff in a gale, frightening but also marvellous.
Ellen backed off. She lay silent, waiting for my reaction.
I whispered at last, ‘Golly.’
She gave her derisive snort.
‘Do you like it, when a lad does that?’ I asked.
‘Depends on the lad,’ she whispered. ‘It definitely depends on the lad.’
I tried to imagine who I’d like to kiss me like that. My Swiss ski instructor seemed very amateurish all of a sudden. I wondered, feeling the blood rising to my cheeks, what Frank Dunbar thought of me for the prudish little kiss I’d given him last month. I tried to push him out of my head but I couldn’t.
Yes, I could imagine Frank Dunbar kissing me like that.
I wasn’t sure I’d like it. But I couldn’t stop myself imagining it. I’d have to try it to find out whether I liked it or not.
I shivered.
I could feel Ellen laughing even though I couldn’t hear her.
‘Scared?’ she whispered.
‘Not of you,’ I answered.
And then, to prove it, I kissed her back.
When I absolutely had to come up for air or pass out I stopped.
We lay breathless and shaking with suppressed and nervous laughter, both of us suddenly quite overcome with hilarity.
‘You said you’ve never!’ she hissed.
‘I haven’t!’
‘Then how –’
‘You showed me!’
‘Copycat.’
We both shook with mirth again.
At which point we’d become careless about the noise we were making, and Ellen’s mother suddenly told us from across the darkness, soft and sharp, ‘Whisht, Nellie, hush up and go to sleep. You are keeping Lady Julia awake.’
‘Lady Julia is keeping me awake,’ Ellen complained loudly, and I thought I would die trying to smother myself and not burst out laughing.
She grabbed my hand and squeezed it.
And that was enough to shut me up, can you believe it? Being her conspirator like that – lying together in the dark, holding hands, not needing to talk, not needing to do anything else. Just knowing.
Nothing else happened. But we were still holding hands when I fell asleep.
12
ENOUGH TO PAY FOR A ’PHONE CALL
I was awake and restless less than five hours later, and Ellen chivvied me out into an exquisite pearly dawn of gleaming sun-tipped haar mist, grey at the foot of the field and rising to luminous pink overhead. It was burning off fast but still piled like cotton wool in the riverbeds. Jamie and Euan were already awake, and everyone else was stirring too, packing up to move on.
Jean McEwen was red in the face. She and Alan weren’t arguing, but holding a heated discussion in undertones; she angry, he trying to calm her down.
‘I thought the police were finished with us!’ I heard her say. ‘Old clothes strewn halfway down the field – they’ve no business searching our things without asking! And to do it while we’re asleep – what cheek!’
‘It might not be the hornies. Maybe one of those scaldy workers from the Big House. Maybe just a fox –’
‘A fox looking for rags! Aye, that’s likely.’
I’d been nonchalantly folding blankets but Alan McEwen saw me, all ears, and switched into cant.
Mrs McEwen shook her head. ‘They’re no’ Nawkens, but the Strathfearn lad and lassie ken what you’re saying.’
‘Take the horses down to drink,’ Alan McEwen ordered us. Or ordered his children, at any rate, knowing that Jamie and I would follow along.
Ellen and Euan shrugged off the mysterious night-time searching of the rag collection with the same stoic sufferance I’d seen in them so many times before when they met with injustice: in the hospital, in the confrontations with Sergeant Angus Henderson and with Florrie, in being denied high school exams. I tried to imagine Ellen’s lifetime spent enduring such an endless string of insult and violation. You’d have to have such certainty in your own self. You’d have to be so strong.
‘Are you stopping for breakfast?’ Ellen said as we negotiated the narrow path, leading the horses and ponies down to drink. ‘Or do you get poached kippers on silver platters up at the Big House?’
‘Only ever bread and jam,’ Jamie answered. ‘The old women are all French.’
‘And we don’t use the kitchen,’ I added. ‘We make coffee on a portable gas ring in our gran’s sitting room.’
‘Your coffee’s better than ours.’
‘Also because of us being French,’ I let her know. Suddenly, impossibly, I was happy – instantly, blithely, fleetingly happy. Happy for the wonderful ceilidh, for the strange and beautiful morning, for the Procurator Fiscal’s crabbit dismissal of the police inspector’s precognition, for Mary’s unexpected defence of Euan.
‘So you’ll stay here and drink it with us?’ Ellen said. ‘You’ll take anything, won’t you! Pennies for the telephone. Your own gifts given.’