Summerwater by Sarah Moss (top 10 motivational books .txt) 📕

ponds and bronze bells set for raindrops to ring. You could make an orchestra of a Scottish valley, or even a holiday park, set up bells and chimes and drive everyone crazy with it. Next door’s gutter is overflowing, dripping onto their metal picnic table. He should have taken care of that, Peter, just because he lets out his cabin all the time doesn’t mean someone else is responsible for looking after it. They’d always agreed about that, on the Management Committee, no need to go wasting money on janitors and caretakers and what-have-you, the men were all perfectly capable of looking after their own properties. Well, some more than others. Always better to leave before things go bad, you’d think David would have learnt by now, you’d think those last years at work would have taught him that at least. He and Mary can still go out, anyway, over to the other loch, a nice drive and then a ride on the ferry. It used to be all right to go out for a drive, just to feel the wheels on the road and see the hills rewind in the rear-view mirror, to play the gears fast up the hills and glide down, before everyone had a carbon footprint, or at least before you kept being told about it. It’s a good road, up that way. Mary will be awake by now, he thinks, or nearly, and he puts down his empty mug and gets up to make her tea.

Mary makes the breakfast. She doesn’t like him to do things in the kitchen, goes round sighing and wiping the surfaces as he uses them, taking the salt out of the cupboard where he’s just put it and moving it to the shelf, rearranging the knives when he puts them in the block. They eat muesli, which neither of them likes much and can be hard on the gums but it’s good for you and doesn’t generate a mess, with fat-free yogurt and lumpy orange juice that tastes remarkably nasty if you forget and drink it after the yogurt. Then Mary stacks the dishwasher and cleans whatever she wants to clean while he takes a crap. He leaves the window open for her, presumably, to do the same, though since he retired it has crossed his mind that Mary appears not to shit at all. He picks up his book while he waits – one thing about retirement, he’s reading a lot more – and when at last she appears, face done, lipstick, he asks her if she’s still wanting to go out today. Aye, she says, why would we not, we’ll be dry on the ferry and it’s a nice wee café, I can sit in the warm and sketch. That’s what I was thinking, he says, and I’ll take my waterproofs, have a bit of a walk.

She takes his arm as she crosses the threshold, and with the other hand he reaches across to hold the umbrella over her head. She’s nervous, he knows, about the wet wood, though it’s not slippery, and about the three steps down to the gravel. She’s worried she’ll fall, and that when she falls she won’t get up again, and that there will be indignity and pain. Or maybe it’s not that precise, maybe she’s just worried that ‘something will happen’ and there’ll be no help, no cheery paramedics in green. He conducts her to the car, matching her slow steps, swaps hands with the umbrella while he opens the door for her, swaps back while she grabs his arm to lower herself into the passenger seat and position her handbag cat-like on her lap, shuts the door on her, for her, and goes back to lock up the house. Rain blows under the umbrella. Somehow it matters if she gets wet and not if he does. Just walk, he thinks, this performance of frailty became self-fulfilling months ago. Put some proper boots on your feet and stand on them. They’re at the age where you lose what you don’t use, even more quickly than what you do.

He shakes raindrops off his coat, gets back into the car. The windows are already steaming up from Mary’s warmth and although this car clears the condensation before your eyes, like magic, he leans forward to wipe the windscreen with his sleeve. This is what he doesn’t have time for, waiting for a demister, running the engine and not going anywhere. He starts the engine, drives too fast up the gravel track to the barrier. Beside him, Mary sighs, tightens her grip on the handbag.

It’s not too far to the café, not as the crow flies. They used to walk it every summer, sometimes more than once a week; nine miles each way but you can take your time, no risk of running out of daylight this time of year. If you walk the trail up the shoreline to the river, the old road takes you through the woods over to the next loch, to the big house on the shore with the converted out-buildings and the jetty. The café is there, in the old boathouse, one wall made of glassed-in arches where once the laird’s rowing boats would have bobbed. In the sitting room at home there’s a photo of Mary and sixteen-year-old Melissa sun-bleached on the old road, turning back to smile at him – he remembers the tender aftermath of one of those rows between mother and daughter that echoed around that summer like thunderstorms in the mountains, never so far away that you stopped thinking about them – and in one of Mary’s photo albums a whole series of the kids messing around on the shore, you could almost say playing, in a way that they had long outgrown everywhere but the lodge.

But those crows don’t fly any more, not for Mary. He takes the road fast. Well, he’s been driving it thirty years, hasn’t he, knows it the way he