Where Have All the Boys Gone? Read online

  ‘Hurrah!’ said Katie as she passed into the building.

  Then, she lost her breath completely. The ballroom where she’d scared Iain so long ago was exactly as she’d dared to imagine it could be. The wooden floors were gleaming with dark walnut oil. The two great chandeliers sparkled like diamonds. Now, the ancestral portraits lining the panelled walls looked fresh and clean, an absolutely enormous fire was roaring at the far end, and a huge polished mirror reflected the scenes of people having a wonderful time, in smart suits and kilts and beautiful dresses, back into the room.

  In the corner was a pretty young man playing the harp, accompanied by someone Katie recognised as the local fireman, on the fiddle. They didn’t seem to be playing any one tune, more improvising up and in and out of traditional airs; it sounded beautiful.

  Scared-looking black-tied waiters were darting here and there with drinks (banners proclaiming the kind donors of the aforementioned drinks hung down from the ceiling) and, amazingly, tiny hors d’oeuvres – the most perfect miniature baked meat pies, with ketchup to dip them into. Katie couldn’t help smiling to herself; she was so amazed at how it had all come together.

  The room was absolutely crammed with people everywhere, talking, laughing and drinking champagne in the slightly nervy over-the-top way people do when they find themselves all dolled up for something. There were almost more women than men there, in the most startling interpretations of the instructions ‘evening wear’, ranging from matronly black and silver embroidered box jackets over magisterial bosoms, to split pink feathery fandangles more suited to Nancy Dell’Olio at a Cher concert. But there were plenty of men too, Katie was overwhelmingly relieved to note, including two obvious circles that had celebrities in them.

  ‘Wow,’ came a voice beside her. ‘Roight fancy, innit?’

  Katie turned around to find Star Mackintosh at her elbow. Star was wearing a spangly yellow Kyri dress that completely ignored the ‘either bust or legs, but not both’ rule.

  ‘Hello,’ said Katie. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘Great publicity, innit?’ said Star. She leaned up to Katie’s ear and whispered confidentially, ‘I made it look for the photographers as if my boob fell out of my dress accidentally. But, actually, I did it on purpose!’

  ‘Clever old you!’ said Katie.

  ‘Thanks!’ said Star. ‘I’m aiming for the front of the Daily Record. I like your dress too. It looks handy for cold weather.’

  Katie wasn’t quite sure how to respond to this.

  ‘Do you think I could get a crack at Dougray Scott?’ said Star, frowning and patting her gigantically over-lipsticked mouth.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Katie. ‘Put your best tit forward.’

  ‘I will!’ said Star, and sashayed merrily into the throng.

  Katie wished she could help this reflexive scanning of the crowd for Iain, but she just couldn’t. This was ridiculous. Stop it, stop it, stop it, she told herself. Only a minute ago she’d been mooning about Harry, and anyway he was, a) in hiding, and b) she was giving up Scottish men for ever. Cold turkey. Cold haggis. Whatever. They were done for.

  Louise entered the room in her gorgeous gold dress, stood outlined in the double doors, stretched out her arms and yelled ‘ta dah!’ Instantly, several of the men who’d been hovering around the walls made a beeline for her.

  ‘Ah, my insecure, sad, troubled little friend,’ said Katie, grabbing two glasses of champagne and taking her one.

  ‘Isn’t this amazing?’ said Louise. ‘Olivia’s outside answering questions about fashion designers to Hiya magazine.’

  ‘Ladies!’ said Craig the Vet, looking redfaced and bluff in a pair of dark blue tartan trews and a waistcoat. He ought to have looked ridiculous, but in fact they rather suited him.

  ‘Are you not by far the most beautiful things in here?’

  Louise sniffed the air. ‘Craig the Vet,’ she said accusingly. ‘You don’t smell of cow.’

  ‘Not unless Paul Smith for Men is made frae cows,’ he said, sniffing his shoulder dubiously.

  ‘You look nice,’ decided Louise, after looking him up and down for a few more seconds. He bowed. ‘Are you going to chat up all the ladies?’

  Craig looked a bit nonplussed. ‘Um, why, yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘Good for you,’ said Louise, patting him on the shoulder. ‘You need a good woman.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Craig the Vet, ‘I was wondering if you’d dance with me later.’

  ‘For sure!’ said Louise. ‘I know all the dances brilliantly. Katie and Olivia taught me this afternoon. Didn’t take long. I can dance with everyone!’

  ‘OK,’ said Craig.

  ‘There’s loads of totty here,’ said Louise. ‘You’re going to have a great night.’

  ‘Uh, yes,’ said Craig. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better…’ He headed back into the crowd.

  ‘What does that man have to do?’ said Katie.

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘He’s obviously nuts about you.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Louise. ‘He hasn’t tried to get into my knickers once.’

  ‘Perhaps, Grasshopper, asking you to dance and to come to look at his lambs is a different way of trying to get into your knickers.’

  ‘Nah,’ said Louise, considering it. She looked at Katie again. ‘Do you really think so?’

  Katie rolled her eyes. ‘Durr.’

  Louise flushed then. ‘I thought…I mean, you know, it’s fun up here and stuff.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Katie dubiously.

  ‘But…well, Craig…he’s a vet.’

  ‘I had noticed.’

  ‘I mean…he couldn’t live in London, could he? What’s he going to treat, rats?’

  ‘There are vets in London,’ said Katie.

  ‘Not real ones.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure they’re quite real.’

  ‘Oh, you know what I mean…it’s just…I mean, do you think he really wants me for a proper girlfriend?’

  Katie looked across at Craig the Vet, who had been cornered by a woman wearing an enormous pink corsage popping out of her considerable cleavage. He looked miserable, and kept sending glances towards Louise.

  ‘Hello Lachlan,’ said Katie, looking down. He was wearing a blue velvet frock coat and matching bow tie and sniffing a glass of wine nervously. ‘You look lovely.’

  ‘I know,’ said Lachlan. ‘I’m fighting them off with a shitty stick. Sorry – a, ehm, smeared stick.’

  ‘You know, you never have to use that special ladies’ language with me,’ said Katie. ‘It’s only me.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ He leaned closer. ‘Thank you again for bringing in all the chicks,’ he confided.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Katie, resisting the urge to pat him on the head.

  Katie passed through the room – Olivia appeared and dragged them around her various London friends too, and they did get to meet Ewan McGregor, who was a delight, plus numerous slightly batty women who wanted to share with Katie their joy at finding Fairlish, as if they’d turned up to Battersea Dogs’ Home. The conversation levels were rising, punctuated by squeals of girlish laughter. It began to grate on Katie and so she followed Olivia and Louise outside onto the lawn.

  Underfoot was still a morass, but the sun setting into the sea behind the hills was breathtaking. Katie stood for a while, enjoying the relative quiet after the noise and heat of the ballroom. Suddenly, she saw a strange, yet oddly familiar sight at the far end of the lawn. Seconds later she heard it – the mournful sound of bagpipes came floating up through the gloaming.

  ‘Oh my God!’ said Louise. ‘That’s Harry!’

  Katie screwed up her eyes. Sure enough, looking very serious, there was Harry advancing towards the house, blowing a plaintive lament.

  ‘It does sound like a cat,’ she insisted.

  ‘LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,’ shouted Lachlan at the door in a surprisingly loud voice, ‘WE WILL NOW BE PIPED IN TO DINNER. P
LEASE TAKE YOUR partners!’

  Harry took the head of the queue at the door.

  ‘I can’t believe he can blow that and walk at the same time,’ said Louise. ‘Makes you wonder how talented he is in other areas.’

  Behind them they could hear an anxious shuffling.

  ‘What did he mean, partners?’ asked Louise, but it became increasingly obvious, as couples, most notably the larger-breasted women with the scrawnier of the techies, started lining up behind Harry and following him in through the entrance to the tent.

  ‘Ah,’ said Olivia. She grabbed onto a very camp PR acquaintance of hers who’d come up from down South. ‘You’ll do.’

  ‘Darling, with all these gorgeous hunks here, do you really have to limpet yourself onto me?’ smiled the London chap.

  ‘For five seconds I do. Be quiet, it’s bad for your karma to be impolite.’

  Craig the Vet materialised at Louise’s elbow. ‘Um, would you like to, er, go in to dinner?’

  Louise swallowed suddenly and sought Katie’s eye. Katie nodded furiously. Heck, the two of them could sort out geography later.

  Louise, blushing, nodded her head, and Craig offered her his strong arm. She took it.

  That left Katie on her own. She watched everyone else filing in two by two and tried not to mind. After all, she was working here, goddamit. Suddenly, she wished she had a clipboard. That would make her feel less awkward.

  The sound of the pipes grew further and further away as the procession started to leave her behind. Smoothing down her skirts, she prepared to slip in at the back, when she became aware of somebody watching her from the other side of the line. She looked up through the pink and hazy sunlight. The person was wearing a plain grey kilt without a pattern and a plain white shirt and grey tie, and had a camera around his neck. He lifted his right hand very slowly and made a waving gesture.

  ‘Hello, Iain,’ murmured Katie.

  Chapter Twenty

  They waited, looking at each other until the line had gone in, and there was no one left outside the tent except a few of Kelpie’s scurrying army.

  Iain came towards her, and Katie found herself instinctively taking a step or two back.

  ‘You look…ravishing,’ he said, as if he’d searched through all the words in the world and this was the only one that would do her justice.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Katie. She wanted to look calm and collected and dignified, but inside she was shaking, and all she could think of was to holler, Where did you go? You left me! You vanished! Why??? But she kept a grip on herself in an attempt to be rational. Her good intentions to give up Scottish men for ever had evaporated at seeing Iain in his gorgeous grey kilt, faster than 8Ace finding £1.49 behind a hedge.

  ‘How’ve you been?’ he asked.

  ‘GREAT,’ said Katie. She bit her lip.

  ‘You know, I missed you when you went away…I thought…’ Suddenly Iain looked quite hot in the face.

  Classic avoidance technique, thought Katie.

  ‘I mean, after…’

  After what? Katie thought viciously. After you tried to fuck me, failed and never contacted me again?

  ‘After the time we spent together…I didn’t…I mean, when you didn’t want to see me, I quite understood…’

  Katie swallowed hard. ‘What do you mean, I didn’t want to see you?’

  ‘Well, I figured…you know, after the time…and then you fucked off back to London, I guessed that was that…I mean, I know what you girls are like.’

  Katie folded her arms. ‘What? What are we like, Iain?’

  ‘Well, you all sit around in coffee shops and tell each other how rubbish men are in bed, then you don’t see them any more, and that’s it.’ Iain hung his head.

  Katie stared at him. Surely he couldn’t be so dumb. ‘Iain…Iain, did you get everything you know about women from watching television?’

  Iain shrugged. ‘No.’

  ‘Iain.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Katie put a hand up over her eyes. ‘I went to London because I fell out with my boss, and because I felt the job was done, that was all. And you didn’t call, or get in touch, or anything.’

  ‘I…I kind of thought, after everything that had happened, you wouldn’t be interested.’ Iain’s left eye had developed a nervous twitch.

  ‘And you never bothered to find out?’ asked Katie, full of indignation. ‘Oh, then I come back and you’re all over town, squiring blonde bits and pieces up at the caravan park.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Iain. ‘I think we can both agree I needed the practice.’

  They were both silent for a second after that.

  ‘Anyway, you didn’t tell me you were back in town.’

  ‘You PHONE girls you sleep with!’ said Katie. ‘That is absolutely obvious rule number one! EVERYONE knows that! You could ask Francis that and he’d dial a number with his paws!’

  ‘Yes, well, if you’d bothered to let me know you were coming back EVER, I might have done something about it. Anyway, I did leave you a message.’

  ‘I can assure you you didn’t,’ said Katie.

  Iain unfastened his sporran and pulled out a piece of paper. ‘Here,’ he said, looking disgruntled. ‘I thought you’d get it.’

  She took the crumpled sheet from him.

  ‘Come on,’ came a voice suddenly. Katie looked down. It was Lachlan, looking crossly at them. ‘It’s about to start. If you want your dinner, you have to get in here right away…’

  The marquee looked awesome. Tables stretched away as far as the eye could see, twinkling with little candles and thistle centrepieces. Of the errant donkey, there was no sign. At every turn, Katie was amazed. OK, she happened to know that the tablecloths were mostly paper, and several young techies had ended up requiring first aid after deciding that the middle of the night, after a long session at the Mermaid, was the ideal time to go thistle-gathering, and about sixty of the candles were slowly melting Santa Clauses she’d finally found in one of the gift shops at the last minute, rather than the plain whites…but, with the lights turned down, it was a fairyland.

  Everyone was already seated, with an artillery of waiters standing ready to go. Lachlan led them right into the middle, and everyone fell silent, as if they were about to start dancing or something. Katie felt terribly uncomfortable.

  ‘You’re over there,’ said Lachlan to Iain. ‘Table seventy-nine.’

  Iain looked at Katie and headed off to the left. She couldn’t read his expression.

  ‘And you’re here,’ said Lachlan, as he led Katie to the biggest table, right at the top of the marquee. There was an empty space at Harry’s right hand.

  He was looking at his drink when she approached, then, just at the last minute, lifted his face to meet her eyes.

  It was like a lightbulb going off in her head. From completely out of left field, she knew straight away. His normally brooding, guarded expression had dropped completely. She’d thought the scene in the nightclub was just a drunken aberration; she was so focused on her own loneliness, she’d never even considered his. She just…she was so unused to any kind of male attention, she’d bypassed it altogether.

  And now of course he thought it was all up, all done for, the moment she and Iain had walked in through the entrance together. She blinked, still staring at him. But he’d dropped his eyes again and was staring at his empty dinner plate.

  She had. She’d backed the wrong bloody horse. She’d been blind to what was right under her nose. The crack in the door she’d seen…the glimpse of the desired life. Maybe it hadn’t been Iain at all. Maybe it had been Harry all along.

  Lachlan cleared his throat behind her and, conscious of five hundred pairs of hungry eyes staring at her, she slipped into the seat beside him.

  ‘Busy?’ asked Harry, pain evident in his voice as the chatter around the room started up again and Kelpie’s army leaped into motion, rushing forward to start serving soup.

  ‘Look, Harry…’ Katie started, an
d then didn’t know how to go on. She could hardly say, ‘If you’re in love with me…’ Plus, what if she were wrong? Plus, what was the end of that sentence anyway? She swallowed and looked up at him. He had turned to his left, where a very grand woman Katie didn’t know was sitting looking snooty. He was trying to chat to her whilst looking completely unperturbed. The back of his neck was giving him away though. On Katie’s right was Kennedy, who was talking about the number of his bedrooms to a wide-eyed busty blonde on his other side. Katie concentrated on her broth when it came, and took a few gulps of wine, her mind racing furiously. Louise was on the other side of the room, where she seemed to be engrossed in a very deep conversation with Craig the Vet. Olivia was already up and going around the room, chatting to one and all in what looked like harsh anti-golf course tones. She certainly wasn’t touching any food that might have been made with anything other than soya.

  There was no help at hand. Katie winced at herself. How could she have been so naive? OK, so she wasn’t Beyoncé Knowles, but things were different up here. She could probably have looked like Harry Knowles, and courted a bit of attention. And Harry must have thought she was taunting him all this time. She closed her eyes.

  The posh woman had turned around to talk to someone else, and Katie was suddenly very aware of Harry’s bulk at her elbow.

  He cleared his throat. ‘Well, who’d have thought it, eh?’ he said, in a growly tone of voice.

  Katie sneaked a peek at him. He looked as though he was trying incredibly hard to be Very Brave. Her heart went out to him immediately.

  ‘All this?’ she said. ‘It’s…just great, isn’t it?’

  He nodded.

  ‘And everyone seems to be having a good time.’