When I found her at Inchfort that morning I gave her my pearl. I didn’t need to tell her where it came from and she didn’t have to ask. She closed her fingers around it and smiled.
‘Pinkie will miss you,’ she said.
‘Oh, Nell.’ I wanted to cry.
‘I suppose I might miss you too,’ she admitted softly.
I was damned if I’d cry.
‘There’s pearls in the Dee up at Craig Castle,’ I said, rather desperately. ‘And the oats and tattie harvest when the summer’s done. You’d be welcome.’
‘Your dad invited mine already.’
‘But I’ll be in school,’ I mourned.
‘Not always,’ she pointed out. ‘And I might find another lad like your brother and forget about you.’
She said that. As if I might, in her imagination, be an alternative to finding a lad.
‘You think so?’ I challenged.
‘Would you mind?’
‘I want you to be happy.’
‘Och, away wi’ you, Queenie.’
‘I do,’ I said stubbornly.
She cocked her head, and gave that little appraising hnnph.
‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘you’re better at giving than you were.’
Then softly she sang a part of the song she’d sung to me at the ceilidh at Inchfort, Burns’s ‘A Red, Red Rose’: ‘Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
and the rocks melt wi’ the sun:
I will love thee still, my dear,
while the sands o’ life shall run.’
She stopped. She was waiting for an answer.
I started to sing the rest, and she joined in.
I so loved singing with her.
‘And fare thee well, my only love!
And fare thee well awhile!
And I will come again, my love,
tho’ it were ten thousand mile.’
She opened her hand. The pearl gleamed for a moment on her open palm. And then she put it in her mouth and swallowed it.
She met my eyes, waiting for my reaction.
For a moment I was stung and blinded by tears.
Then we both burst out laughing.
The kisses don’t matter.