Питер Мэй - I'll Keep You Safe

As she got closer she saw that it was a big Mitsubishi four-wheel-drive Shogun, and a figure in a long black coat and homburg hat stood leaning against the driver’s door smoking a large cigar. He pushed himself away from the vehicle, turning as he heard her Jeep approach. A small man, dwarfed by the size of the Shogun he was driving. Niamh’s humour improved immediately as she saw who it was.

She had barely pulled on the handbrake before she jumped out of the car and threw her arms around him. He laughed and clutched his hat to stop her from knocking it off, then held her close as she laid her head on his shoulder. When, finally, she stood back to look at him, his hand shot to his hat again, this time to stop it from blowing away. His smile faded, then, and she saw sadness in his dark eyes.

‘I’m so sorry, Niamh. So, so sorry. I arranged flights as soon as I got your email.’ He looked around with mock despair. ‘Not the easiest place in the world to get to from New York.’

Jacob Steiner was probably in his late sixties or early seventies by now, although he looked no older to Niamh than when she had first met him the better part of ten years before. And she had thought him old then.

He had a long, lugubrious face, with a large, bulbous nose veined from too much good living. The remains of his hair beneath the hat were shorn to a silver stubble. A goatee grew in salt-and-pepper profusion, providing definition to a collapsed jawline. Born of Jewish Holocaust survivors who had found their way to America after the Second World War, his corpulence bore testimony to their success in the aftermath of horror. He was one of the nicest and most genuine people Niamh had ever met.

‘I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you came,’ she said.

He took her hand with one of his and raised his other to his mouth to take a pull on his cigar. Smoke whipped away in the wind. ‘Young lady,’ he said, ‘there ain’t nothing in this world that could have kept me away.’ Then he turned a wry smile on the track that wound down to the house from the ruins of Bilascleiter. ‘Except maybe this goddamned road. If you could call it that.’ Another puff of his cigar. ‘You know, I had a rental car all lined up at the airport till I asked them directions to this place. Goddamn! The young guy nearly snatches the keys out of my hand. “Sorry sir,” he says. “Can’t let you take that car up there, you’d rip the underside out of her.”’ To Niamh’s amusement, he managed a passable Stornoway accent. ‘They drove me into Stornoway to another rental place which gave me this.’ He jerked his thumb towards the Shogun. ‘Couldn’t understand why I would need a brute like that till I actually got here. Damn, Niamh! What possessed you and Ruairidh to build a home away out here in this godforsaken place?’

‘I’ll show you,’ she said. And still holding his hand she led him into the house. He tossed his cigar into the wind as he passed through the open door.

‘Jees,’ he said. ‘If I’d known it wasn’t locked I’d have been inside like a shot, instead of hanging about out there in the cold. Did you forget?’

Niamh laughed, and realized how good it felt to be doing just that. Only half an hour ago she couldn’t have imagined ever laughing again. ‘No. No one locks their doors here.’

‘You’re kidding?’

She shook her head. ‘No need.’

‘Hell, I gotta come and live here. In New York City you need deadlocks and bolts and chains, state-of-the-art security systems and God knows what else. Every other schmuck wants to break into your house and steal what you got.’

He stopped and whistled softly as they stepped into the living area, eyes scanning the panorama from the windows. ‘Take it back. I see exactly what possessed you to come and live out here. If only I could take a view like that back to Manhattan.’ Then he turned to hold her other hand. There could have been little more comfort than the refuge she saw in the soft sympathy of his dark eyes. ‘How you doing, honey?’

She dipped her head a little. ‘Not great, Mr Steiner.’

‘Jake,’ he corrected her. She pulled a face and he laughed. ‘I know, I know. Must be a generational thing.’ His smile faded again. ‘Helluva thing, Niamh. Helluva thing.’

She nodded and chewed her lower lip.

‘At least you have friends to rally round. Lee tells me he saw you in Paris, just after it.’

She was surprised. ‘You’ve been speaking to Lee?’

‘Bumped into him at the airport. His private charter landed just after my scheduled flight. You know, anyone who’s anyone in the world of fashion was on Lee’s plane. Some big-name models. It’s gonna be quite a send-off. Lot of folks thought a lot of Ruairidh.’ But not her own family, Niamh thought. Steiner said, ‘The Press are arriving in force, too, from what I could see.’ And Niamh felt a wave of despair wash over her. What she had hoped might be a quiet, sombre farewell seemed to be turning into a two-ring circus.

‘You’ll have a drink,’ she said, dropping his hands and crossing to the kitchen.

‘I will,’ he said. ‘Scotch on the rocks. Splash of soda if you’ve got it.’

As Niamh prepared his drink, he took off his coat and hat, and slipped on to a stool at the breakfast bar. ‘I’m staying at a hotel in town. The Cabarfeidh. Any good?’

She shrugged. ‘As good as you’ll get in Stornoway, I guess. You should have tried Lews Castle. They do rooms and suites there now. Very luxurious.’

He smiled sadly. ‘Next time. Other circumstances.’ She had prepared two drinks the same, except that only one had whisky. She pushed it across the counter to him. They chinked glasses. ‘To Ruairidh,’ he said. ‘One of the good guys.’

Niamh couldn’t bring herself to speak.

‘And speaking of castles, Lee tells me his party has taken a whole castle to themselves on the Isle of Harris.’ He raised his hands in confusion. ‘Which I’m told is the same goddamned island as the Isle of Lewis. Who knew?’

‘What castle?’

‘Oh some unpronounceable place. Avan... Avin... something.’

‘Amhuinnsuidhe?’

‘Yep. What you said.’

She nodded thoughtfully as he sipped on his whisky soda.

‘You know,’ he said, almost lowering his voice, ‘Ruairidh should never have mentioned the Tony Capaldi shooting in that interview he did for the New York Times .’

Niamh raised her eyebrows in surprise. The paper had carried the interview earlier that summer in an article on the success of Ranish Tweed. They had described it as a cloth derived from a weaver’s hut on a remote Scottish island, rising to become one of the world’s most sought-after fashion fabrics . Ruairidh’s story of the shooting in New York had been a throwaway line in passing. ‘What do you mean? Why not?’

‘Jees, Niamh. You don’t fuck about with these people. I gotta tell you, I’ve been keeping my own head pretty low ever since it came out.’

It was the first time either of us had been in New York. At the time it felt like the most extraordinary adventure. And of course it was.

It came in the aftermath of that first Lee Blunt collection which rocketed the name of Ranish Tweed to international stardom. It was a name on the lips of fashionistas everywhere, and we were having to pick and choose which orders to accept, because it would have been impossible to fulfil them all.

It was dizzying. There we were, tucked away in an old croft house on the Isle of Lewis, with half a dozen weavers in tin sheds churning out cloth to our own designs, and people in America and Japan, Australia and Europe were clamouring for the stuff.

Ranish had become famous overnight. Magazines like Vogue and Elle and Cosmopolitan were featuring clothes in our tweed. Models we had only read about or seen on TV, or on the covers of Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair , were wearing it on the catwalks of Paris and Milan and New York. Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista.