There was a little silence while Grant met his cousin’s eye. She knew that he could not fly; and why.
‘Give it up, Alan,’ she said, in a kinder tone. ‘There are much nicer things to do than being stood on one’s head in the middle of the Minch in March. If you just want to get away from Clune for a bit why don’t you hire a car—there’s a very good garage in Scoone—and go exploring on the mainland for a week or so? Now that the weather is soft it will be getting green in the West.’
‘It isn’t that I want to get away from Clune. Quite the contrary. If I could take Clune en bloc with me I would. It is just that I have got bitten with the idea of those sands.’
He saw Laura begin to consider the idea from a new angle, and he could follow her thought quite well. If this was what his sick mind wanted, then it would be wrong to try to dissuade him. The interest of a place he had never seen before should be an ideal counteraction to self-conscious brooding.
‘Oh, well, what you want is a Bradshaw, I suppose. We do have one, but it’s mostly used as a door-stop or a step for the top bookshelf, so it’s a little out of date.’
‘As far as the services to the Outer Islands are concerned, it won’t matter what the date of it is,’ said Tommy. ‘The Laws of the Medes and the Persians are not more unchangeable than MacBrayne’s schedules. As someone has remarked, they don’t exactly encroach on eternity but they very nearly outlast time.’
So Grant found the Bradshaw and took it to bed with him.
And in the morning he borrowed a small case from Tommy, and packed into it the bare necessities of existence for a week or so. He had always had a passion for travelling light, and it always pleased him to be getting away by himself, even from people he loved (a trait that had done much to keep him single) and he caught himself whistling under his breath as he put the few things into the small space. He had not whistled to himself since the shadow of unreason had reached out and taken the sunlight from him.
He was going to be foot-loose again; foot-loose. It was a beautiful thought.
Laura had promised to drive him into Scoone in time to catch the train to Oban, but Graham was late in coming back with the car from Moymore village, so that it was touch-and-go whether he caught the train at all. They made it with thirty seconds to spare, and a breathless Laura pushed a bundle of papers into the open window as the train pulled out, and gasped: ‘Enjoy yourself, my dear. Seasickness does wonders for the liver.’