As Ruaridh and his date approached, Alec stood and shook his hand.
‘Hello, Alec. Mairi. Bridie.’ Ruaridh nodded towards the girls. ‘This is Wendy. And that’s my sister, Flora. Wendy’s a Wren, too.’
‘Pleased to meet you all,’ she beamed. ‘I’ve heard lots about you.’
Flora wondered briefly when the pair had found time for such discussions. Ruaridh seemed to have been very busy of late, at his post at the signal station on the hill beyond Tournaig Farm at all hours, relaying directions to the mass of ships manoeuvring in the loch below.
‘Wendy’s a meteorologist,’ he explained. ‘She has to take the weather readings up at the signal station. That’s where we met.’
Flora smiled, the penny dropping.
The band struck up a dance tune and Alec held out his hand. ‘Would you honour me with the first dance, Miss Gordon?’
‘Why, I’d be delighted to, Lieutenant Mackenzie-Grant,’ Flora replied, laughing at his formality.
They joined the general surge on to the dance floor, which was quickly packed with couples. Flora smiled over at Mairi and Bridie who were dancing with a pair of officers. Following her glance, Alec bent close to her ear and whispered, ‘Good. Now I don’t have to be polite and ask them, too. I’d much rather spend the evening only dancing with you.’
Flora hoped that the flush on her cheeks would be attributed to the dancing and the heat in the crowded hall. She’d found herself thinking about Alec a great deal lately, looking out for him at the camp when she was ferrying personnel back and forth to the jetty and hoping that one day he might turn out to be the passenger she was collecting. There was no one else she wanted to dance with, either. He held her hand a little more tightly as the current of the dance carried them along in its flow.
The noise and the heat reverberated in the tin-roofed hall as the evening wore on and midnight approached. Then the band leader stopped the music and everyone shouted out the countdown as the hands of the clock ticked towards 1940. And then there was cheering and kissing as a piper joined the band and struck up ‘Auld Lang Syne’。
‘A good new year,’ Flora whispered to Alec.
Without a word, he drew her close, his arms a quiet haven in the midst of the voices raised in song and celebration, and for a moment she imagined them to be alone, the pair of them marooned on their island of silence in a sea of sound.
‘Come and look at this!’ came a shout from the door, and the partygoers tumbled out from the loud lit interior into the frost-stilled night. Out beyond the shore, on the darkness of the loch, lights flashed from every ship moored there. It was a fleeting display – they couldn’t risk giving away their position, even on New Year’s Eve – but a brilliant one.
Although it needed no deciphering, Ruaridh translated their message. ‘Happy New Year.’
In the hall, the band continued to play and some of the revellers went back again to dance on already tired feet. Others began to drift away.
‘Would you like to stay on?’ Alec asked Flora.
She shook her head. ‘I can’t. I promised Dad I’d be home. I know he’ll be waiting up so I’d best be getting off.’
‘Come on then, I’ll drive you back. I know, let’s first-foot him together!’
Flora laughed. ‘He’d love that. But we have neither cake nor coal nor whisky so it’ll not be much of a first-footing.’
‘We’ll stop off at my house on the way past and pick some things up. We’d better do it properly if it’s to bring luck to Keeper’s Cottage for the year ahead. Come on, let’s go!’
Ruaridh, Bridie and Mairi all declined the offer of a lift home, preferring to stay on at the party, which was showing no signs of ending just yet, and so Flora and Alec climbed into his car and sped along the empty road to Ardtuath House.
Even though the gates to the big house were rarely closed, their formal grandness was a stark reminder that it stood apart from the whitewashed cottages that were its nearest neighbours. Towering pines lined the drive, blotting out the night sky with a darkness of their own, concealing the house from the community surrounding it.
At the top of the drive, Alec killed the engine, glancing up at the windows, which to Flora’s eyes seemed to brood behind their blackout coverings. ‘Best not wake my parents if they’re in their beds already,’ he whispered.
They crept in through a side door, stepping from the crispness of the clear night air through a darkened boot room and into the warmth of the vast kitchen. From across the hall, the faint sound of music made them both pause. Putting a finger to his lips, Alec beckoned Flora to follow him. She hesitated before stepping through the doorway into the more formal part of the house. It felt strange being there with him now that their relationship was changing. He was so confident, so self-assured in his grand home, while the ornate cornicing and heavy antique furniture in the hall seemed to press in on her from all sides, stifling and constraining her usual sense of ease. But she took a deep breath and crossed the divide, the green baize door swinging shut behind her with a soft thud.