Wildflower Bay (22 page)

She tapped away at the spreadsheet. She’d brought in a version of the same computerized booking program they used back at Kat’s salon. Once it was in place, it was pretty much
foolproof, but she just had to get it set up exactly so . . . The hum of Shannon’s hairdryer lulled her into a meditative state as she clicked away, completely absorbed in the task. Jinny was
pottering around out of sight. The salon was a hive of quiet industry.

‘Isla?’ Shannon turned away from her client, who was an old school friend of hers.

Isla looked up from the desk, putting down her pen.

‘Seeing as we’re not busy, and Netty doesn’t mind being a guinea pig, can you show me how to do a chignon?’

Shannon really was throwing everything she had into her job now. She’d stopped pretending not to be interested in what Isla was doing, and now that they were starting to get younger, more
experimental clients in – the ones who’d previously have visited Glasgow, but who’d realized that with Isla in situ, they could have their hair done for a quarter of the price
– she was soaking up every piece of knowledge she could.

‘Go on then.’ Isla pushed her chair away from the desk. She smiled into the mirror at Shannon’s friend. ‘Hi, Netty. We prefer to think of you as a model, rather than a
guinea pig . . .’

Thirty minutes later, with a delighted Netty striding out of the salon transformed and glowing with the confidence a new hairstyle can bring, Isla returned to the desk.

‘Hi.’

‘What?’ Isla looked up, startled, at the customer who’d just come in. ‘Sorry, would you mind giving me two seconds, I’m just –’ she clicked save, hoping
that she’d made the right adjustments to her spreadsheet – ‘fixing something. Can I help?’

There was a thud from the back room as Jinny jumped down from the folding steps she’d been standing on. Following that, a small squeal of excitement. Following
that
, Jinny appeared
as if by magic at Isla’s side, where she stood, virtually vibrating with silent excitement.

‘Yes, hopefully.’ The woman had a fuzz of dark hair that looked in desperate need of some taming serum. ‘I’m Kate – Kate Maxwell.’ She held out a hand, rather
uncertainly. Isla, disguising a look of surprise, shook it. Prospective clients didn’t usually start off on
quite
such formal terms.

Isla clicked on the mouse, opening up the booking page. ‘Are you looking for an appointment?’

‘Well, yes and no.’ Kate ran a self-conscious hand over her dark curls, making no appreciable difference to the unruly mop of hair. Isla smiled to herself – as a hair stylist,
one grew accustomed very early on to people apologizing for the state of their hair. It was the first thing everyone did as soon as they walked in. She’d see girls who’d swear blind
they hadn’t cut their own fringes (which hung unevenly at jagged, kitchen-scissored angles) and women who’d come in with disastrous home colour jobs that they’d swear blind had
been done at a salon elsewhere. It didn’t seem to occur to any of them that she was there to do a job, and the job was making their hair look the best it could.

She’d always wondered if dentists got the same thing with teeth. She gave the woman a reassuring smile and waited patiently for her to stop fluffing up her curls with an apologetic
expression. Shannon had paused with comb in mid-air, trying to look as if she was contemplating the work she had just begun, but Isla could see that her ears were pricked up and her gossip radar
was activated. The client didn’t seem to mind. She too was looking on with interest, and another woman in the waiting area had put her magazine to one side and was sitting examining her nails
with an innocent expression.

‘I live up at Duntarvie House?’

She sounded English – southern, and quite posh. Still none the wiser, Isla looked at her and then up at the clock on the wall, slightly pointedly. She had another quarter of an hour before
her next client came in, and at this rate she wasn’t going to get the computer sorted.

‘Right . . .’ Hands poised above the keyboard, eyebrows raised, Isla looked at her expectantly.

‘I’m, um –’

God
, thought Isla,
spit it out already
.

‘We’ve been having weddings up at the house and I – well, we – well, I really – thought it might be a good idea to come and have a chat with you?’

The house
. Not just any house: the big house. The castle-like Duntarvie that the girls had mentioned in awestruck tones – the one that Shannon and Jinny had shown her the
photographs of in the much-thumbed copy of
Hello!
magazine.

Of course, this must be the lady of the house. It was typical that she’d be English, Isla thought.
Coming up here, stealing our land . . .

‘Well, I’m only here for a few weeks,’ Isla explained.

‘That’s fine. I’m really keen that we should try and support business on the island, and I know Jessie’s not the most –’ Isla must have given her a look,
because she paused uncomfortably – ‘I mean, I know she’s your aunt, and I’m – well . . .’

Shannon strolled across, folding her inked arms across her chest and drawing herself up to her full five foot three, skinny-jeaned legs akimbo. ‘You mean, Jessie’s not exactly
on
trend
, shall we say?’

‘Mm. Yes, well –’ Kate flushed pink – ‘something like that. But I heard you were around for a while, and I know Shannon is doing great things, because she cut my
friend Susan’s hair and it looks amazing.’

Shannon gave a nod, as if accepting praise where it was rightly due. ‘Aye, she’s got good hair, Susan.’

This is all very well
, thought Isla,
but I’m not sure how Jessie’s going to take to having her pet stylist poached by the lady of the manor
.

‘So what are you thinking?’ Isla laced her fingers together and looked at Kate expectantly.

‘Well, the thing is, we’ve got a wedding this weekend.’

Isla raised her eyebrows in surprise. Mind you, they hadn’t officially agreed to opening the salon on Saturday afternoons yet . . . ‘Right,’ she said encouragingly, and
Kate’s words all came out in a rush.

‘The thing is,’ she repeated herself, before lowering her voice, ‘they’re a bit of a nightmare – er, I mean they’re a bit
high maintenance
, if you know
what I mean?’

Isla nodded with feeling. ‘Oh, yes. Yes, I do.’

‘Well, they’ve just changed their minds at the last minute. Apparently the bride’s decided that instead of flying up her own stylist from London she wants something simple, and
they’ve decided at the last minute that they want everything sourced from the island if possible. Including the people.’

Given the speed at which things typically moved around here, Isla imagined Kate had her work cut out.

‘I know it’s late notice. I am
really
sorry. And I feel really bad, because – well, at least Jessie’s not here, because –’ Kate lowered her voice
– ‘I don’t even get my own hair cut here.’

‘Mmm.’ Isla looked at Kate’s hair again, thoughtfully. ‘So who does, er, who is your stylist?’

‘Me?’ Kate looked slightly uncomfortable. ‘I, um –’ She pulled her dark curls back off her face, twisting them around her hand, forming a thick rope, ‘I have
to confess I haven’t had mine cut for ever. I’ve trimmed it with scissors, but I suspect I’m not meant to say that, am I?’

Isla shook her head with a wry smile. ‘Not really.’

‘The last time I had it cut properly was for the wedding.’

‘Which wedding?’ Jinny, who’d been ferreting through the piles of reading material in the little waiting area, held up the copy of
Hello!
that was her pride and joy.
‘You mean this one? The one your house is in? You know I couldn’t
believe
you had them there in your house – it was so amazing. Were they really nice in real life? I reckon
they were really lovely. My wee sister Rowena reckons that he’s having an affair with Margaret Powell, because she read something in the gossip pages of the
Mirror
, but if you look at
this picture . . .’ She paused for breath. Shannon rolled her eyes.

‘Actually, I mean my
own
wedding. I kept meaning to, and then it was just ages and it got a bit embarrassing, and then the place I went to here in town closed down
and—’

‘It’s fine.’ Isla was used to this part, too. Sometimes mothers would come in to have their children’s hair trimmed and she’d watch them rushing in, hurrying
through the process, clearly feeling awkward about the state of their own hair. ‘Anyway, Shannon is extremely talented, and I think she’d be a perfect candidate for event
hair.’

‘Oh my God.’ Kate’s eyes widened slightly. ‘Yes, that sounds great. Lovely. I’ll give you a shout.’

Then she backed out of the salon door, giving the cloud of hair one last – fruitless – smoothing-down.

‘
Extremely talented!
’ Shannon blew on her fingernails and polished them on her T-shirt with a smug expression. She did a little shimmy and then stopped midway, looking at Isla
with genuine surprise. ‘You’ve never mentioned that before.’

‘You’ve got a real eye,’ Isla admitted.

‘Right, well, you heard it here first.’ Shannon turned back to her customer. ‘You’d better take advantage of me before I’m away down to London to work for Toni
& Guy.’

‘She seems quite down-to-earth, considering she lives in a castle,’ Isla remarked to Jinny.

‘Aye, I think she is. She’s not posh – well, she’s got that posh accent, but that’s just English, not proper posh.’

‘So how did she end up here?’ Isla was fascinated by the idea of this mysterious castle. She’d been out running past the huge stone entrance gates, with the lichen-covered
stone lions that guarded the driveway; but beyond the walls the gardens seemed to be thick with trees and rhododendrons, and despite running all the way round (exploring on foot, Isla called it to
herself, knowing perfectly well that she was just having a bit of a nosy), she hadn’t seen anything else.

‘Oh, she got a job working for Roddy Maxwell. He’d been going out with Fiona Gilfillan – her dad owns the hotel up on the hill, near the golf course? – until Kate came
along. My mum knows her a bit. She’s nice. Normal.’

‘You have to be, to live here,’ Shannon joined in from across the other side of the room. Netty twirled her chair around, the better to take part in the conversation.

‘Aye, the thing about living here is, you have to get on with everyone in your own way. There’s no’ a mistake you make that isn’t round the whole island by the next
morning, if you know what I mean.’

Isla, thinking of her drunken disaster the night she’d lost her job, felt a huge wave of gratitude that she hadn’t been on Auchenmor when it happened. ‘I suppose that makes
everyone think twice?’

Netty, Jinny and Shannon burst out laughing.

‘No; it means we have to
own our mistakes
, as whats-her-face from the hippy retreat would probably call it. You can’t pretend you haven’t been an arsehole if
you’ve been an arsehole. You just have to take the mickey-taking on the chin.’ Shannon spoke with a fair bit of authority in her voice.

‘She’s right,’ said Netty. ‘I could tell you some stories about almost everyone on this island, but we tend to let bygones be bygones. We’ve all got our secrets and
our stories.’

‘Wouldn’t live anywhere else, though,’ said Jinny. ‘I might joke about getting a big posh job like yours, Isla, but I love this place too much.’

‘Aye, me too,’ said Shannon, surprising Isla, as she turned back with comb in hand. ‘You might have your posh shops and your fancy restaurants and all that stuff, but this
place gets in your blood.’

The rest of the week passed quickly. Jinny was completely beside herself at the thought of working up at Duntarvie House. Shannon was trying to play it cool, but her every
spare second was spent with her head in a hair magazine, brow furrowed in concentration, scribbling sketches in a notebook.

Isla and Ruth had another walk together, this time along the shore road. They didn’t go too far – Ruth was a bit stiff, claiming she’d slept awkwardly. Isla wasn’t
convinced: Ruth was still wheezily breathless, and leaning heavily on her stick. Isla wanted to talk to Finn about it, but didn’t really feel it was her place. And she hadn’t seen him
since the retreat at Lily’s – it was surprising how easily you could avoid people on an island this small, if you wanted to. Maybe he felt a bit awkward about the gazing ceremony thing
– or maybe because she’d said no to a drink, he’d decided to steer clear. She’d been out running in the evenings after work, but supposed his bike was still out of
action.

On Friday evening Isla lay on the sofa in the flat, messaging Helen. She’d been for her usual run along the shore, bumping into the same couple she met there every night,
smiling hello. She’d paused at the rocky outcrop along from Finn’s cottage, hands on her knees, catching her breath, watching the last ferry sail and smiling to herself as a dog walker
threw sticks into the sea for a determined little West Highland terrier. She’d half wondered if she might bump into Finn – then told herself she wasn’t interested in him in any
case.

The idea of walking in alone was hideous. If Helen didn’t go . . . A reply pinged back.