Beckie kicked her feet from the stirrups and slid off Hobo’s back.
Pam shook her head. ‘Beckie, sweetheart!’ she yelled across at them. ‘Have a longer go! Don’t let Emma bully you!’
‘I’m not!’ Emma, indignant, yelled back. ‘Beckie wants to be hunted!’
Beckie, grinning, dashed across the grass towards them while Emma waited impatiently for Alec to lengthen Hobo’s stirrups. At eight, Emma was a year older than Beckie and several inches taller, a raven-haired girl with long supple limbs and a dancer’s grace.
Which was where any resemblance to Tricia Fisher began and ended. Ruth would never have let the two families become so close if she’d had any doubts on that score.
This new craze of theirs, ‘Hunting’, involved one of them chasing the other down on horseback. Well, ponyback, and with Alec running alongside and grabbing girl and/or reins at the first sign of trouble.
The paddock was ideally situated between the two cottages. Opposite this gate was another they’d made into the paddock from Pam and James’s back garden, so the girls could nip across it without having to go on the road.
‘Look at him running,’ said Ruth as Emma, Hobo and Alec trotted after Beckie. Alec had an exaggerated, uncoordinated, John Cleese-ish running style, managing to look gawky and stork-like at five foot six.
Pam was trying not to smile. ‘I’d swap James’s athletic ability for Alec’s willingness to spend his whole Saturday morning running about a muddy field any time.’
‘He is pretty good that way.’ Ruth dived in for another handful of crisps. ‘He never really wanted kids, you know, in the abstract. When it was just a generic child we were talking about.’
With most people, she rarely if ever referred to the fact that Beckie was adopted, as if it was something she had to keep a secret, as if one day someone was going to look at her and narrow their eyes and say, ‘Oh my God. They let you adopt a child?’
Pam was different. She’d never had a friend like Pam. For the first time in her adult life, she felt she had a friend she could trust. She had even, in her madder moments, wondered if she would some day be able to tell Pam.
But of course she wouldn’t.
If she told her, Pam wasn’t going to nod sympathetically and say ‘But you’re not that person any more.’ She was going to be straight on the phone to Social Work.
They’d take Beckie away.
Or Alec would leave her and take Beckie with him.
Pam was looking at her now with comically wide eyes. ‘Really?’
‘As soon as he saw Beckie, of course, that was it. Adoration at first sight.’
Pam scrunched up the telltale empty bag and shoved it in her pocket. She linked her arm through Ruth’s. ‘Who could help but adore Beckie?’
Who indeed?
She’d been such an adorable little thing, standing there in the middle of a roomful of toys looking so lost and scared, dressed in a green and pink smock and white tights, a wooden train clutched in one plump little hand. Deirdre had warned them that Bekki might not respond to them at this first meeting and that they shouldn’t be downhearted or alarmed if they ‘failed to engage’ or Bekki appeared ‘distressed or fearful’. For all her training and experience with children, Ruth had frozen, a fixed grin on her face, and it had been Alec who’d hunkered down to Bekki’s level and given her a quick, easy smile before turning away to pick up a wooden carriage.
‘Now then Bekki, I think I’m going to need some help here. Does this fit onto… this?’ And he’d picked up a Duplo brick.
Bekki had just stood there.
Alec had tried fitting the brick onto the carriage. First one way, then the other. He’d sat down and frowned, not looking at Bekki, speaking as if to himself. ‘Hmmm. This isn’t going too well. It’s got a little hook on it, so it must attach to something… Something must go on here…’
‘Thith one,’ Bekki had finally whispered, squatting down next to Alec and holding out the train.
And Alec had turned and smiled at her and said, ‘Oh, thank you, Bekki. Just right!’
Just right.
Pre-Beckie, the idea of Alec running about a field with a pony and two little girls would have been laughable. The idea of Alec at a Family Fun Day at a National Trust for Scotland property, or at a pantomime, or in a soft play area, or doing anything at all, frankly, involving children would have been something Ruth struggled to imagine.
But he was a great dad. The best. It had brought out a whole new side to him she hadn’t even suspected was there. He just loved being with Beckie. He loved everything about her. He even looked forward now to Strictly and Bake-Off, programmes on which he’d previously heaped vitriol, because he loved watching Beckie watching them.
And who knew he was so good at stories?
Ruth couldn’t help being a little bit jealous of this. It was hard not to feel rejected when Beckie sleepily requested ‘a Daddy story’ in preference to the book Ruth had selected. Her favourites were Alec’s stories about the Wanderers, a family who lived on a boat in Viking times. It was, Alec assured them, based on fact, or at least on stories handed down through the generations on the west coast, and from his grandma to Alec and Pippa, and now to Beckie.
‘And I’ll tell my children if I have any,’ Beckie would promise, snuggling down with an anticipatory smile as Alec started the next instalment with a recap.
‘So last time, Fiona and Donald were sheltering in the cave on Wild Dog Island. Left behind when the others set sail.’
‘Their mum thinks they’re asleep in the cabin, but they’re not!’
‘Yep, and Fiona’s really angry with Donald now.’
‘But it’s Fiona’s fault too! She should have said No, it’s really dangerous and stupid. We mustn’t.’
‘Mm. Probably if she had, Donald wouldn’t have gone sneaking out to the cave on his own, you reckon?’
‘No. He wouldn’t. He’d have been too scared.’
Beckie loved playing Wanderers whenever they went to the Loch, pretending that she was Fiona and one of her toys was Donald, and Alec was maybe a Viking chasing them, or their dad, or their annoying older brother Kenneth. She wanted nothing more than to be allowed to have sailing lessons so she could be like the Wanderers. This was good leverage to encourage her to keep attending her hated swimming classes – you can only have sailing lessons, Alec and Ruth had told her, when you can swim well enough for it to be safe.
In the oral histories of the west coast, the Wanderers were families displaced by the Vikings, running from them, or rather sailing away in their boats, but never settling on other shores, always hankering after their own beach, their own turf house, their own lost lives. Their homes had become their boats. They might land on a lonely island or come in to a harbour for a day, a week, a month, but sooner or later they’d be back in their boats and away. Everything had happened in those boats: babies were born, young folk were married, old folk sickened and died and were buried at sea.
Alec had never told Ruth any of his grandmother’s stories.
He had never told her a lot of things – although those omissions hardly even registered on the scale compared with hers. Alec’s weren’t really omissions at all. It was more as if Beckie had made him more completely himself, as if the complete Alec – the whole, rounded, wonderful man he was always meant to be – was only now emerging.
It helped, of course, that Beckie was Beckie. She had proved Alec wrong in his stereotyping of adopted children in that she was very bright, with a particular aptitude for puzzles and games – even chess, at the age of seven! – and shared Alec’s curiosity about life, the world and the Universe. And she was very sweet and good, although Ruth worried a little, still, that she was too eager to please.