Read Veil of Time for Free Online Page B

“A purification rite from Ye Olde pagan times. They used to make their animals go over it, too, to ensure their safety through the coming winter. Most of the cattle, though, they’d have to slaughter, because there wasn’t enough feed to keep both man and animal alive. It would be a lot of meat to salt, and innards, what have you, to preserve for winter, guts and sinew, they used the lot. Anything they couldn’t preserve they’d stick in a sausage, including the blood, which is why we have black pudding to this day. And haggis.”
    I laugh. “Would you like to write my dissertation for me?”
    “No,” he says, clearly pleased, “I don’t know that much at all, never did go to the university.”
    I retrieve the dinner from under the grill and set it down between us.
    “Sardines on toast,” he says. “I thought you were joking.”
    I shake my head. “I never joke. It’s against my nature.”
    I don’t know if he thinks I’m joking now, but I don’t think I am.
    He forks a fish into his mouth and follows it with a bite of toast. I remember now half a bottle of red wine in my fridge and offer it to him.
    “Could you warm it up?” he says. “I’m not one for cold drinks, right enough.”
    I go into the kitchen, pour the unlikely red brew into a pan, and flick the gas on under it.
    “Is that what you do over here,” he says, “drink wine by yourself?”
    I pour the sizzling red wine into two cups and return to the table with them.
    I say, “I would call that prying. How does it taste?”
    “Awful,” he says. “Still, it takes the edge off awkward conversation.”
    I try my hot wine and wince. “Blah. I didn’t think it was awkward.”
    “Not until I started prying.”
    “What do you want to know?” I ask. I take another sip of warm wine and try to gather strength.
    He leans back in his chair, which creaks a little under the strain. “Well, here you are, divorced and without your children. I doubt the farmers around here are going to be of much interest to you, and you’re a bit young to be giving up on life.”
    I’m glad at least that he’s putting himself on the other side of the fence from my romantic interests. Maybe he’s waiting for me to say I prefer older men. But there is too much to explain about my reasons for wanting to be lonely.
    I sigh.
    “Are your children with your husband?”
    Here we go. I empty my cup of wine. It stings my throat. “No.”
    “If you don’t want to tell me,” he says, “that’s fine.”
    “It’s just that you will probably ask again.”
    He laughs, quite unaware of what is about to come out.
    “Look,” I say, “there’s no secret about it. Oliver Griggs, my husband, teaches history at Glasgow University.”
    I sense that Jim is beginning to see, probably by the look or lack of look on my face, what he has got himself into.
    He says, “Posh,” in an effort to lighten the mood.
    The wine is doing a better a job. “We have two children, as I said: Graeme, who is seventeen and at boarding school in Edinburgh. Ellie was eight years old two years ago when she died, so that’s the story.”
    Jim leans back over the table. He doesn’t say anything, and for that I’m grateful. I go back to my kitchen, rummage in the bread bin while I try to put myself back in order, and come up with a box of Jaffa Cakes. Jim stops me on the way back to the table with a hand to my arm.
    “I’m sorry for your troubles,” he says. “My mother used to say, Cha do dhùin doras nach do dh’fhosgail doras .”
    I offer him a Jaffa cake. “My Gaelic’s not good enough for that one.”
    He takes one. “No door ever closed, but another opened.”
    I sit across from him and try to size up this saying of his mother’s, whether he thinks he is the door I’m looking for. “Well, if there’s any other door, I’ve still to find it.”
    “So go on looking then.”
    I bite into my cake. I haven’t been looking for doors. I haven’t been looking for anything. There