Питер Мэй - I'll Keep You Safe

It was my job to replenish the diminishing order book. I persuaded my father, who was good with figures, to decipher the codes old man Faulkner had used for his cloth patterns, and he turned them into recipes that we could all make sense of. We cut samples from the bolts of cloth that we found in Faulkner’s weaving shed, and produced a few ourselves from new designs that Mrs Macfarlane had been working on, and I was sent off to London to solicit fresh orders that would get the business up and running again.

The trip was a disaster.

I had a list of the names and addresses of all of Ranish Tweed’s customers in Savile Row and elsewhere. Tailors, mostly, producing bespoke suits and jackets for exclusive clientele. I had decided not to phone or write to ask for appointments in advance. It is too easy for someone to turn you down at a distance. So I went cold-calling instead. But fashion is a fickle friend. It can change direction and colour and taste in the blink of an eye.

Since Isabella’s death, old man Faulkner had let the business slide. Although there were still orders on his books, he had not gone chasing others to replace them. And this was at a time when Harris Tweed was rising from the ashes of its own demise. Old mills at Shawbost and Carloway, and in Stornoway, were being revived. Fresh capital invested. Suddenly Harris Tweed was in demand again. Which made Ranish a very hard sell for me.

Everyone in London was very kind. They spoke with great fondness of Richard Faulkner. Of their trips to the island to meet him, to discuss patterns and orders over copious amounts of whisky and wild salmon. But they had moved on. Customers were looking for something more traditional, and Harris Tweed had a history and reputation that we couldn’t begin to match. I returned from the Big Smoke empty-handed, and the whole enterprise, along with most of Ruairidh’s redundancy money, looked all but lost.

Then our hopes were raised, unexpectedly, when I managed to secure a place for Ranish on a Scottish Development International trade trip to Japan. I already knew that there was a huge textile market in Japan, culminating each year in the JITAC Tokyo Fair. Hitching a ride with SDI could give me the opportunity to introduce Ranish Tweed to a whole new marketplace. Ruairidh was dead jealous, but we couldn’t afford for both of us to go.

Sadly, it failed to provide the breakthrough we were looking for. I returned from the trip having learned that selling to the Japanese was a long and complex process. If you are lucky enough to establish a relationship with a Japanese buyer, he will only ever kick-start it with the smallest of orders. A gesture. If things go well, eventually he will take you for a drink and the order will increase in size. The next step is karaoke, and at some point you have to get up on stage with a microphone in your hand and sing. Finally, if you are very lucky you might get invited to his home. Which is when you know you have really made it, and big orders will follow.

I returned with a contact book full of names, having sung not a single song, nor obtained a single order.

Ruairidh was waiting for me at the airport in Stornoway. I had rarely been so glad to see him, grabbing his face and smothering him with kisses, while people stood around the carousel waiting for their luggage and trying not to look. Japan had been an experience, but I was more than happy to be home. ‘I never want to do a trip like that again without you,’ I told him.

He grinned. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not ever letting you out of my sight again.’

But in the car as we drove down Oliver’s Brae to the main road, his first flush of pleasure at seeing me wore off. A dark shadow fell over him and he glanced at me with an ominous gravity. ‘We’ve got money problems, Niamh,’ he said. ‘We just don’t have enough working capital to see us through to the point where Ranish is even going to start washing its face. And we have no idea how long that might be.’

The optimism I had tried to maintain through all the long hours of the flights home deserted me then. I stared grimly through the windscreen at the slate-grey Minch as our wipers smeared dead flies across the glass with the first of the rain. ‘So what are we going to do?’

There was an anxiety now in what seemed like an almost furtive glance. ‘My folks have got a proposition,’ he said. ‘They’re waiting for us at home.’

My heart sank.

The sky was closed, a turmoil of dark clouds gathered low out over the water, sending showers in waves across the bay on the edge of a stiffening wind from the west. It somehow matched the mood of our little gathering in the front room of the Macfarlane croft house. Gloomy.

I listened in silence, gazing from the window and wishing I was anywhere else but here, as Mrs Macfarlane outlined their plan. They had an inherited property, she said, in Stornoway, which was currently a letting concern. But she and her husband were prepared to let it go to raise operating capital, since I had failed to bring in any substantial new orders from either London or Tokyo.

I didn’t miss the barb, but clenched my teeth and let it go. I flicked her a look, and supposed that she might once have been a good-looking woman. But her face had fallen with the years, and her downturned mouth seemed a reflection of the bitter old biddy she had become. Hair dyed chestnut was more red than brown, and the silver it was meant to hide seemed always to show at the roots. Her husband was a tall thin whip of a man and said nothing, as usual. He had long ago given up any pretence of wearing the trousers in the Macfarlane household. And it had occurred to me more than once, that this was probably why he spent so much of his time out in the loom shed.

‘We have a buyer interested. An offer on the table. All we have to do is accept. But, of course, we’ll want our share of the company in return.’

My eyes wandered towards Ruairidh, but he was avoiding mine. I could see why he was prepared to go along with it. He had invested virtually all of his redundancy money in Ranish. If we let it go he’d have wasted the lot. Although the prospect of sharing the business with his parents filled me with dread, I didn’t see how I could object. Then came the bombshell.

‘One other thing we’d have to insist upon.’

When I swung my gaze back towards Ruairidh’s mother, I could see in her eyes a glint of something almost malevolent.

‘We can no longer employ your father as one of our weavers.’

I could feel anger burning colour on my cheeks. But she quickly pre-empted anything intemperate that might come involuntarily from my mouth.

‘The mill tells us his work is substandard. The darners are spending all their time repairing the flaws in his weave. We can’t afford passengers, Niamh. Not if we’re to make a success of this.’

I noticed how Ranish was now being referred to in the collective ownership of we . As if it were all a done deal. I glanced at Ruairidh again and he shrugged. These were the terms under which his parents would bail us out. If I didn’t go along with them, he and I would lose everything.

This was probably the most difficult moment I’d had with my parents since telling them that I was going to marry Ruairidh. We sat in silence in their little back room, which had seemed so big to me as a child, listening to the ponderous tick-tock of the old clock on the mantel. The smell of peat smoke from an early-season fire filled the room, bringing back mixed memories. Rain, like tears, ran down the window, and the pervasive gloom I had brought with me from the Macfarlanes’ owed more, I think, to the darkness inside us than to the lack of light offered by the day.

They proffered no comment to the news that Dad would no longer be required to weave for Ranish, although I saw spots of red appear on his pale cheeks. I felt so sorry for him. He was at heart a good man, and he didn’t deserve this.