Close Knit by Jenny Colgan

Author:Jenny Colgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

There was one thing Jean Mooney knew. Gertie had been perfectly happy, until she’d spent the night with the staff of MacIntyre Air and come home furious and drunk. And now it was the next morning and Gertie wasn’t answering her phone. Before she knew what she was doing, Jean got dressed and marched off to Ranald’s to give him a piece of her mind for whatever was upsetting her darling daughter, who’d been absolutely fine until she’d started at this wretched airline of his. Those girls were bullying Gertie—she knew it. And if the helicopter pilots had been giving her grief, she’d move on to them next.

Ranald MacIntyre was working less these days, but he still enjoyed it immensely. Morag taking over had been the most wonderful thing, more than he’d ever dared hope for, even if she’d moved out.

Jean Mooney, likewise, wasn’t scared of much. She had been through, more or less, everything life could throw at her: a husband who hadn’t worked out, raising a child alone, enduring poverty and cold, and always working. She was tough, deeply loyal, and up with much she did not put.

She had tried to raise Gertie the same, but her vulnerabilities sometimes seemed so on display, her face so scared-looking all the time. She was her dad’s absolute double.

Jean, on rare occasions, suspected that she smothered Gertie a little. But there had been times, Elspeth notwithstanding, that they felt they only had each other to love, to cling on to, a tiny island in the great sea of the world. That was why the KCs were so important. Both of her sisters lived far away—one in London, one in Korea of all places, somewhere Jean had trouble even imagining—and rarely got home.

She had never expected her family to be so small; never hoped for it, the day she was wandering over Ben Eiris, and the sun was low and golden in the sky, lighting the amber fields with the heavy colors of a tired summer, and she had seen him, tumbling down from his parents’ croft, in his old patched cords and his untidy hair and a shy smile he could not hide in the glorious evening of the beautiful day. He asked her if he might walk her into the village if she was going that way and she said she was, and he pretended he hadn’t been waiting for her to walk that way with a basket full of gorse and she pretended not to know exactly what he was doing as they walked over the old stone arched bridge at the foot of the town, past the field of Highland coos with their elaborate hairdos, keeping the flies off them in the sweet air of harvest season.

They went to the Young Farmers’ dance, which was so loud and sweaty that they could barely speak to one another, which suited Robert absolutely fine, but, had Jean only realized, should have been a warning sign that sitting and having long conversations and joining in might not be the kind of thing the lad did best.

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