Christmas at the Island Hotel - Jenny Colgan Page 0,58
to interest them in their own background and keep up their Arabic. Frankly, he was working too hard and was often too tired to remember; he spoke to them in English more often than not.
And Lorna. He hadn’t expected to fall in love. The idea of it was so far beyond his concept of what life would be like. Just surviving had been the priority for so long: making it into Europe, claiming asylum, resitting for his exams, being sent to the end of the world. Then when the boys came home, dealing with that: trying to heal their trauma, even as it meant that their memories of their homeland were dropping behind them like a scene glanced from a passing train.
And now he was staring at something on his computer, shaking, trembling. Because everything was about to get a lot worse.
By the following afternoon, he was in Glasgow, back at the same horrible, horrible Home Office police building he’d been to the last time, when they thought they had found his wife, and it had turned out to be somebody else.
He had told Lorna he’d been summoned but that he didn’t know why, and she had longed more than anything to go with him, although they both knew that that was impossible. So he had gotten on the plane, and she had gone to school, as always.
ONE OF THE good things about being a primary school teacher, Lorna had always thought, and was more grateful than ever for today, was that it left simply no time or mental space for pondering or mulling over things. Children didn’t care what was going on in your private life. Children had absolutely no idea that you actually had a private life in fact. Even though they lived in a small community, the little ones still gawked when they saw her out and about at the post office or the grocery store, as if she lived in the school stationery cupboard.
No matter how upset or worried you were, you had to come in, smile, and you would instantly be distracted by Hamish McGill’s underpants mysteriously appearing on the outside of his trousers after PE, or Robbie’s poster paint incident, or getting everyone to put their hands on their heads, or correcting math while simultaneously preventing a muddy scuffle over the toy elephant, so big you could ride it, that Fintan and Colton had kindly donated the Christmas before last, which unfortunately was so much better than all their other handed-down toys and games that it caused World War III at least twice a week.
So she threw herself into school life as usual, trying not to think about what was going on in Glasgow, two hundred miles to the south.
Except of course Ash was in her class, and every so often she’d look up and he’d be eyeing her anxiously. He sidled up after break.
“My daddy is away.”
“I know,” she said.
She was concerned, always, about giving Saif’s boys special treatment. The problem was, what if, as in Ash’s case, they patently needed special treatment? And it was wrong not to give him a bit of extra fuss, even if she was absolutely terrified of giving herself away or stepping out of line. Why, why, why was it all so complicated?
“But he’s coming back soon?”
Ash nodded. “Soon,” he said. “I don’t like it when he’s away.”
“I know,” said Lorna. “But you like Mrs. Laird, don’t you?”
“I like sausage rolls,” said Ash. Mrs. Laird, their babysitter, was one of the great bakers of the island, and she did indeed make a mean sausage roll.
“Well then,” said Lorna. “It won’t be for long.”
“It will,” said Ash gloomily. “I’ll be sleeping. But. I won’t really be sleeping!”
“I am sure,” said Lorna, putting out the rubber cement, at which Ash’s expression perked up a bit. When you were six and rubber cement was coming out, you knew it wasn’t extra math. Even a downhearted child could be perked up momentarily by some rubber cement.
“I was thinking,” said Lorna, pragmatically changing the subject, “would you like to help me hand out the glitter?”
“Glitter!” Ash almost forgot himself. “Yes, I would.”
“Okay then,” said Lorna, as the bell went for the end of break. “And, Ash,” she said, as he took the little plastic canisters containing the tantalizing shiny dots of silver and gold, red and green, which were going to decorate their Christmas pictures, which in turn would wallpaper the entire entrance of the school.