her head. ‘I can’t tell you more than I know, Robert dear.’
Robert ran his stubby fingers through his hair. ‘I told Lord Andrews we didn’t need his contract. I’ve signed the papers for the tractor. I told the lads down the pub.’
Maggie touched her husband’s shoulder. ‘You must ring them, Robert. Tell them there was a mistake, that you can’t be buying these new things.’
‘I’ll be breaking the contract. The finance company will make me pay.’ Robert sat heavily on the couch. ‘And I’ve nothing to pay with.’ He looked at her. ‘We’ll be ruined.’
‘You must blame the Australian law, Robert. That good Mr Levi will help us.’
‘It was him that told us it was a done deal.’ He covered his face with his hands. ‘I’ll never be able to show myself again. I’ll be the laughing stock of the North.’
‘No you won’t be, Robert. People will understand.’
Robert squeezed her hand. ‘I’ll do you right, Maggie. I’ll find out the cause of it and set our family square again.’
Maggie kissed her husband lightly on the cheek. That was exactly what she was afraid of.
Maggie took the box from the seat of her car and tucked it under her arm. There was a sleety mist coming in from the east and the halo around the waxing moon was a transparent white. She slipped around the corner of the pub and turned on the torch. The tourist signpost was instantly illuminated some feet away and she quickly found the trail and began the walk to the ruin. Her lace-ups slipped in the dewy vegetation as she slid towards the stream and then she was crossing the rocks, climbing the stile and trudging uphill to where everything had begun. The moon shadowed her progress as she mounted the incline, her torch beaming a path through the springy turf until the scent of the ocean was in her nostrils and the outline of the ruin rose starkly against a void of blue black sky.
At the entrance to the ruin Maggie sat on a crumbling block of stone, cradling the box in her lap. Propping the torch up, she untied her laces and removed her shoes. She lifted the lid and tipped out the running shoes. They were beige and yellow. At the time she’d had her eye on a pair of white and black ones, however these ones were the very best and although she was almost a whole pound short, the shopkeeper in Thurso let her buy them. Even he’d heard that Maggie was going to be a great runner.
Maggie put her feet into the running shoes, squeezing her heels in so that the skin bulged uncomfortably around the top. She ran her finger around the inside, pulling at lining frayed by time, and then tested her weight. The shoes pinched her and shortened her, so that her toes curled under like a hermit crab backing into a shell. Lifting one foot and then another she ran on the spot, briefly lifting her knees as high as possible. She laughed, breathless, at the folly of her exertions.
The running shoes were worn every day by her for two months. She had left off practising in the hills and took to the dusty roads. Every step she pounded went some way to ameliorating her guilt. Every mile run convinced her of her actions. As her strength grew and her pace quickened, she argued less with her sickly mother and ignored her more. How could she be expected to cook and clean for the young ones and work two jobs when she was training to eventually stand on the winner’s dais in Edinburgh? There was just enough time in her self-imposed training schedule to cook up the oatcakes for breakfast, see to her mother’s morning cuppa and send her younger siblings off to school. Maggie spent her lunchtime practising her starting technique outside the general store where she worked, tucking her skirt in her knickers and heading straight as a die down the centre of the bitumen road. She left her job carding wool in order to chop vegetables for tea, leaving the cooking to her poorly mother. The rest of the time she ran. Maggie ran so fast that she overtook the post boy on his bicycle and the milkman in his chugging truck. She even passed Robert Macken in his clapped-out utility, carting sheep back to Lord Andrew’s estate. When the day came that the storekeeper reluctantly agreed to time her with his fancy