Encounters

‘It would. I’m more mature now.’ He smiled wickedly and left the envelope on the table.

‘It wouldn’t.’ I got up to make the toast. ‘So, when are you leaving?’ I bent down to light the grill pan. It meant my face was hidden and he couldn’t read my expression.

Ten years, or so?’ He sounded hopeful.

I laughed. And in spite of myself my heart leaped. ‘We’ll try it until lunch,’ I said.

Cabbage à la Carte

Kate pulled the mini thankfully into the parking space and switched off. For a moment she rested her forehead against the cool rim of the steering wheel, breathing deeply. Her hands were shaking. The first, The lesser, part of the ordeal was over – driving the borrowed car through the overcrowded streets on market day and finding a meter. She leaned over to glance in the mirror and check her hair. Her face was pink and shiny again, her lipstick had turned too red.

She grabbed for her tapestry bag and applied a new layer. It looked artificial and hard. She wasn’t used to bothering with make-up. She never usually dressed up. She had never owned her own car. But today she was endeavouring to be someone quite different. Kate Millrow, painter, recently – very recently – of St Agnes’s School of Art, would never dare to try and sell her paintings to a smart town gallery.

Miss Rowmill (she was especially pleased with the name), artists’ agent and talent spotter would be able to do it every day. Think yourself into the part, Kate, think yourself into the part,’ she muttered desperately as she climbed out of the car and groped for the money. The coin, so carefully hoarded for this occasion, slipped from her fingers and rolled away towards a gutter. Frantically she leapt after it and caught it up before it disappeared down the grille. Even putting the money in the parking meter once she had recaptured it was something of an ordeal. She studied the thing intently, reading the instructions. The slot seemed to be the wrong way round. She couldn’t get the money in. Then at last the needle buzzed across and she found herself with two whole hours in which to carry out her mission. She pulled out the portfolio, locked the car and made her way slowly towards the gallery. She knew it didn’t open until ten so she made her way slowly towards a coffee shop, clutching the cardboard folder awkwardly. Its sharp edges at the top cut into her armpit, at the bottom they sliced into her fingers.

Sitting down thankfully with an espresso she set down her burden. By rights she ought to be at college now, settling into her final year. What had possessed her to think she could make it on her own? The offer of the cottage in the country? Somewhere where she could really paint? There’s nothing much else to do there, Kate. It’ll keep you at it. Then we’ll see what you’re really made of,’ John had said as he handed her the key before setting off on his trek to Katmandu. For a year at least she had the place, rent free, to herself. It was a dream come true. Only John hadn’t mentioned the fact that the rain came through the roof, there was no electricity and the nearest neighbour was half a mile away.

She had been shocked, afraid and then angry in that order when she first saw the cottage. Was it for this that she had thrown up college and antagonized her family? Then eventually she had begun to see the funny side. Perhaps fate had presented her with a challenge. Anyway it was too late to go back. There was nothing to do but weed cabbages (‘You won’t starve, love, help yourself from the kitchen garden’), eat cabbages and set up her easel.

And surprisingly she had painted. She had painted non-stop day after day, as long as there was light. But the moment had come when she realized that she could not live on cabbages for ever, and even if she could she had to pay for the calor gas to cook them, and oil for the lamps.

Nervously she had painted a board, ‘Millrow Studios’, and hammered it to the gate, thinking someone might come and buy at the cottage. She had waited heart-thumping for half an hour for a car to come down the lane and then she had run out and torn down the notice before anyone could see it.

Her only visitors had been her nearest neighbours from the form up the lane. They had been kind and helpful and once brought her a chicken and often eggs, and now today she had borrowed their mini. They had looked at her pictures, made noises of polite incomprehension and suggested the gallery in town. They knew it opened at ten (‘Lazy devils; don’t know the meaning of the word work’) and directed her to the coffee house. (‘The pubs aren’t open then, but if you need a stiffener, that’ll be the next best thing.’)

It was ten past ten. Her knees wobbling, she paid her bill and crossed the road.

The girl in the gallery had round moon glasses and an expression of disdain. Kate forgot she was Miss Rowmill, agent and became shy and diffident Kate Millrow, beneath the girl’s supercilious gaze.

‘Are you the owner of the gallery?’ she asked in a strained falsetto, totally unlike her own voice.

To her surprise the girl gave her a friendly smile. ‘No, but he’ll be back any minute. Take a seat.’

Kate sat numbly, the portfolio balanced against her knees. The paintings on the walls of the gallery were to her eyes mannered and uncomfortable. But they were good and very professional. And, dear God, they were framed! Perhaps she should have tried to frame hers before she brought them in? She started to shake again, wishing she hadn’t come.

Then the door opened and the owner appeared. He was a young man, tall and arrogant-looking. His lips, she decided instantly, were mean beneath the thin moustache.

Her only concern now was to get out as soon as possible, with the least embarrassment for everybody, especially herself.

The other girl had her coat on as soon as the man appeared. ‘Here’s Mr Chambers now,’ she announced and she was gone without a word to him.

‘Ask her to watch the place for five minutes and she acts as if I’d told her to swim the channel, the silly bitch,’ he muttered angrily at her retreating back. ‘Now, what do you want, young lady?’ He sounded irritated.

He didn’t seem to realize that she was Miss Rowmill, artists’ agent. Nettled, she told him.

He was not impressed. ‘We’re fully booked well into next year,’ he said coolly. ‘But let’s see what you’ve got.’

He leafed through the paintings and sketches casually, taking hardly any time to study them. Occasionally he muttered ‘humph, not bad,’ or ‘weak, weak,’ or ‘very derivative’. Kate was mortified.

‘They’re all by the same girl?” he asked, not raising his eyes.

‘Yes.’

‘Where did you find her, art school?’

She was furious. ‘No. She’s a local girl. I think she has great talent, a great …’ She hesitated, trying to think of a word.

‘Potential?’ He glanced up at her, smiling suddenly.

‘Exactly.’ She felt she wasn’t playing her part sufficiently convincingly. ‘I like to watch out for up and coming new names, and so,’ she added pointedly, ‘do most of my clients.’

‘Indeed.’ She did not like the way he raised one eyebrow.

He reached the end of the pictures and began to shuffle through them again. ‘Did she have any oils, this Kate Millrow?’ he asked casually.

‘Oh yes.’ Did she sound too eager? ‘I didn’t bring any today, but I could arrange to collect some.’

‘No, no,’ He held up his hand. ‘I’ve seen enough. I’m afraid, Miss …’ he hesitated over the name. ‘Rowmill was it? I’m afraid these are not really suitable for this gallery. However,’ he glared at her as he saw her about to speak, ‘however, I do believe like yourself in giving an encouraging help to the young occasionally, so,’ he pulled out a watercolour and looked at it closely, ‘I will take a couple of these if you agree. I’ll have them framed and hang them in my next show. I’ll take framing expenses plus ten per cent, agreed?’

Kate was speechless with joy. It wasn’t the praise, the one man exhibition she had dreamed of, but it was something. Excitedly she gave him the address of the cottage.

‘And now your address, Miss Rowmill. I generally prefer to deal through an agent direct if there is one.’ He looked at her closely and waited, his pen poised. It nearly stumped her. She thought fest and then gave him her sister’s address in London. It seemed to impress him.

It was not until she was nearly home that she realized that in real terms she had achieved very little. The condescending acceptance of two pictures by a stuck up opinionated gallery owner, out of charity rather than anything else, and a lot of quite unjustified rude remarks. ‘Horrible prig!’ she muttered to herself as she turned up the lane. And what was worse she realized, she still hadn’t actually earned any cash, and her desire for some rather more exotic food than eggs and cabbage was increasingly daily, if not hourly.

Reluctantly, nervously, she rehung the notice on the gate before she changed and took the car back to the farm. If Miss Rowmill could hang the notice up, she hoped desperately that she could persuade Miss Millrow to leave it there.

Once more dressed in jeans and barefoot, she selected the paintings Mr Chambers had made the least derogatory noises over and put them prominently round the room.

Then she sat back to wait. No one came. She left the notice on the gate, refused to be discouraged, went to dig some potatoes and then at last settled down to paint again.

‘Derivative indeed,’ she snorted. ‘The man was an ignorant fool.’

It was on the Saturday afternoon that a car drove by, slowed and backed to the gate. Two people got out and wandered up the path, exclaiming at the honeysuckle and roses, pointing up at the fields behind the cottage.

Kate felt sick.

They knocked and she let them in, wishing she wasn’t quite so shabbily dressed and that her toes weren’t quite so grubby from the garden.

But they obviously liked to see her like that. She saw suddenly through their eyes a glimmer of the so-called glamour of the artist in the garret, and glad that for once she had got rid of the smell of cabbage from the house, she was content to let them wander around the room she used for a studio.

She crossed her fingers, praying they would buy something, but they completed a round of the paintings without seeming to see anything in particular.

Then the man turned to her hesitantly. ‘Is anything for sale, Miss Millrow?’ he asked.

Anything! He must be joking.

She smiled politely. ‘Well, some of my best work is away on exhibition,’ – was that Miss Rowmill talking? – ‘but most things here are for sale, yes.’

She desperately tried to think of prices. Too high and they would be scared off; too low and they would think her valueless.

‘I’ll give you ten pounds for this, I love it.’

She could not believe her ears. Ten pounds for a tiny painting of a posy of spring flowers. It wasn’t even modern in style.

‘That seems very fair.’ She smiled as graciously as she could.

She sat for a long time after they had gone, gazing at the two fivers on the table. Could it be true that at last she was earning her living by painting?

Two hours later she was chopping vegetables in the kitchen when there was a knock at the door. She opened it to find Mr Chambers standing on the doorstep. Her heart sank with embarrassment but he held out his hand blandly with absolutely no sign of recognition on his face.

‘You must be Miss Millrow. How do you do.’

Had her make up been so good then? She stammered a greeting in return and showed him at his request into the studio.

Reaching into his pocket he produced an envelope. ‘I’m glad to say I’ve managed to sell one of your paintings, Miss Millrow.’

‘Already?’ her voice came out in a squeak.

‘Already.’ He grinned at her amicably. ‘It was lying on my table after you, that is your agent,’ he corrected himself quickly, ‘had left it with me and I had a buyer almost at once. It seems my initial judgement may have been a little harsh.’

‘I’ll say it was,’ she muttered under her breath, and then out loud she asked. ‘How much did you get?’ She took the envelope with shaking fingers.

‘There’s thirty-five pounds there. I’ve already taken my commission.’ He grinned again. ‘I imagined that under the circumstances you would rather pay your agent her commission yourself.’

Kate felt herself blushing crimson. ‘You must think I’m an awful fool.’

‘Not at all. You’d be surprised how many people come in with pictures they say a “friend” has painted. Mind you,’ he looked her up and down pointedly. ‘Not many of them go to the lengths you did for a disguise.’

She blushed again. ‘I’m afraid I’m rather a mess at the moment. I was cooking.’

He nodded. ‘Cabbage. I had guessed.’

She smiled ruefully. ‘I’m afraid I live on it.’

‘Why don’t you go and continue while I poke around here for a bit and investigate your,’ he paused and winked, ‘your potential.’

She fled.

It took only a few minutes to throw the vegetables into a pan and scrub her hands and then she ran upstairs to comb her hair and change her skirt. When she came down he had piled several canvases on the table.

‘I’ll take these next,’ he said without preamble. ‘Sale or return of course, and I’ll buy this one myself …’

Again it was flowers, she noticed amazed.

‘… if it’s not exorbitantly priced. Now,’ he looked at her again. ‘Could that concoction you were making wait do you think? If you were to transform yourself, not into that hard hitting woman Miss Rowmill, but perhaps into a slightly tidier version of yourself I could take you out to dinner to celebrate your sales.’

She looked at him amazed. She had got the firm impression he despised her and her kind, and she certainly disliked him. So why ask her out? And anyway he was insufferably rude. A slightly tidier version of herself indeed. She curbed the desire to stick out her tongue at him. Instead she lowered her eyes meekly to the floor. ‘That would be nice,’ she said. ‘Much better than cabbage.’

She had a Laura Ashley dress upstairs and pretty Venetian sandals. Her hair beneath its gay scarf was at least clean. Oh yes, Mr Chambers. She could be tidier when she tried.

She debated over lipstick for several minutes in her bedroom and then decided against it. Miss Rowmill might wear lipstick, but she did not. She clipped on the silver bangle her parents had given her for her eighteenth birthday and gazed at herself in the stained old mirror. The image, she had to admit, was rather attractive.

Mr Chambers evidently thought so too, for he stopped being rude, told her his name was Derek and ushered her out to his car with exaggerated care. He even helped her with the seat belt.

‘I have a ten per cent interest in you, my dear Miss Millrow,’ was his only comment when she protested.

They drove back into town and he took her to the most delightful French restaurant she had ever been to. He almost talked her into having something called Dolmas Maigre, but the suppressed glee in his expression led her to guess it might have something to do with cabbage and to his chagrin she checked with the waiter before she ordered. Once that hurdle was over the evening continued fairly well. She found herself telling him about art school and John’s offer of the cottage and her parents’ anger when she had ‘dropped out’, as they of course put it. To her surprise he threw his head back and laughed.

‘Dropped out, a prim little miss like you? Nonsense. Besides, they ought to be proud of you. You have a great deal of talent. And not only for painting. If you ever get bored with that, you could go on the stage.’

She looked at him to see if he was taking the micky, but his expression was all innocence. He quickly topped up her wine glass. ‘Yes, Miss Millrow, you have a great deal of talent.’

To her annoyance she found herself blushing although she was quite sure he was teasing. His fingers had strayed towards her own on the blue table-cloth and as they so very casually, almost by accident, made contact, she snatched her hand away. She was not going to be that easy to placate. She took a gulp of wine.

When they parted that evening, however, it was on the understanding that they would meet again the following Saturday and that, if she could face the bus ride into town, she would go to see him at the gallery even before then.

‘Now,’ he said, looking up at her mischievously from the driving seat as he started up the engine. ‘About what you wear when you come. Shoes, yes. Lipstick, no. Jeans, yes if decent. Right?’

She grinned. ‘And next weekend?’

‘Next weekend, if you’re cooking for me, a large plastic apron, which I will personally provide.’

‘Nothing else?’ Her eyes widened.

He laughed. ‘That, my sweet Kate, is up to you. But I’ll live in hope.’

She stood waving as he drove off down the lane and then slowly she made her way back into the shadowy cottage where he had lit the oil lamp for her and left it, flickering slightly on the table. She was unbelievably happy.

‘Damn cheek,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Who does he think he is?’

Metamorphosis

She couldn’t remember how she came to be on the train. She knew the station had been huge and echoing and she had walked through it as through the rib cage of a dinosaur, to find the tiny womb of the compartment where she was to sleep. It was safe there; warm and dark and alone. When the man knocked and called out the different sittings of meals she hid her head beneath the blanket and he went away and then she still lay listening, as the wheels beat the rhythm of a foetal heart.

She who had been afraid to walk the streets of London, afraid of unknown lurking terrors, afraid of men and dogs and children and women like herself, somehow she had managed to change trains and between them she had bought herself a tea from an anonymous uncaring man who slopped the liquid across ranks of cups and watched it gurgle, stewed and wasteful through a grating. She dared not ask for a spoon, but she was well pleased with herself for the tea. It was hot and good to drink. The station had been alive with people and pigeons. Brisk sunshine streamed through dirt-encrusted glass. She realized that she was already no longer so afraid as she climbed aboard the second train and waited for it to travel north.

There was a taxi to find at the other end. She stood on the esplanade looking across at the fishing boats and sniffed the glorious sea. It gave her strength. She felt in her pocket for the key; a large cold key; the key to sanity.

Her driver had the soft-spoken gentle ways of the west. He made her welcome and gentled her as he would a doe come down from the hills in the snow. She had the great dark eyes of a doe, he thought. And the unnamed terror. Was it life she feared, or herself? She sat beside him, her fingers clutching the purse she needed to pay him and he knew she dreaded the moment she must pay, for the human contact it involved. He told her the names of the mountains and the lochs and he soothed her with softly-aspirated vowels.

Skies as wide as for ever opened now above her head and she felt light and free again. There were no more buildings. The taxi was bumping and swerving away from yesterday and carrying her inexorably with it. There would be no more hospitals now, no more drugs, no more fears. But memories; there were still memories.

‘What you need now is a holiday, Miss Tansley,’ the psychiatrist had said, briskly misunderstanding. ‘Is there somewhere you could go, by the sea perhaps; someone you could go with?’ and he had looked at his watch. She wanted to cling; to stay; to come again. But he had finished with her. Her case was closed.

The sun reflected on a silver loch dazzling her eyes with its beauty. ‘There is Appin,’ she had said. ‘I can go to the cottage in Appin.’

‘Fine, fine. Do that.’ His mind had withdrawn from hers. He was already thinking of the next patient.

So she had done it. Slowly and methodically she had arranged it all. The cottage would be hers for a month with the seas and the lochs and the islands beyond the west where men go when they die and stay for ever young. All of it was hers.

But it had all been almost too difficult. The world was still a menacing place; a place of greys and blacks and angry red. She had had to fight to keep the panic away. And she had thought silently in her bed, her eyes fixed on the cracked crazed ceiling which was no ceiling in the dark, but an infinite chasm, of the silver and the blues of the western shore where she had spent her long happy childhood holidays and she grasped towards the healing and the reality which the salt air must bring to her soul.

‘Will you be all right, miss?’ The taxi driver’s face, beaten red by the wind and sun was crumpled with concern. He waved away the shaking hand which held a painfully calculated ten per cent and picked up her case to carry it to the door.

She proffered the key and he took it and opened it for her. The great stone hearth was unchanged. The rocking chair was still there. But the people were all gone.

She stretched her lips to smile at him and stood when he had gone, a shiver holding her in the centre of the floor. She could hear echoes. Echoes of her voice as a girl, pretty, carefree, happy as only the ignorant can be and of her brother, more raucous his and loud, but with the same intonation. And the Fairburn cousins, their two shouts indistinguishable twin from twin, and the gentle remonstrations of her mother; and her father putting his hands to his ears as he sorted out the lines for the sea trout. And the barks of Romany and Diddakoi, the two Battersea waifs, so long ago buried in the garden beneath the apple tree. She shivered again and felt the tears pricking her eyelids.

‘Cry, my child. The day you can cry you will be on the way to being cured,’ the psychiatrist’s level voice echoed in her head. The tears were there all right, but still they would not fell. As they had not fallen since the car had spun out of reality and into nightmare taking mother, father, brother, lover all from her in one clap of thunder.

Slowly she walked into the bedroom which had once been hers. It was the smallest and it overlooked the island, shimmering in the evening waters. She opened the window and looked out, breathing sweet thyme and lavender from the flower below. The stone was cold and hard to her elbows but she leaned there a long time watching for the luminous highland night which almost never came. Then at last she lay down on the bed, her coat still on, her shoes kicked wearily aside and she slept, not hearing the owls, the jumping fish and the hill noises of the night.

Instinct told her she had to walk each day. Exhaustion brought forgetfulness. It brought sleep and slowly appetite and a suspicion of colour to her sallow cheeks. She would take crumbs to the squirrels and sit for hours beyond the great rock gazing at the sky. She took a sketch book and slowly captured the growing beauty as it fought its way into her consciousness.

Once she saw a small boy looking at her from behind the rocks. When she looked again he had gone and she found herself half-smiling, sensing his peeking eyes. To her he was just another squirrel.

She watched the men with their boats, the tourists with their cameras, the children, shadows of her own past, as they crossed her path, but she stayed silent and withdrawn. In the village store they decided she was some kind of a natural, harmless, lonely, to be watched over with gentle unobtrusive care.

Then came the old man from over the hill. He knocked at the door and greeted her with a grin. ‘How are you, lass? I heard you were here. Would you be the same little Josie Tansley who came in my boat with her dad?’

She looked at him frowning, remembering. Strangers’ faces had gone; only the dead were with her. She grasped for a name: ‘Ruaraidh … Macdonald?’

And he shook her hand the harder. ‘You remember an old man, lass. Tell me. How are your family? Is your father well?’

He alone in all the world did not know, had not heard the thunder clap. ‘They’re all dead, Mr Macdonald.’ She felt her lips speak, as her mind receded from the truth. ‘Killed.’

She turned away blindly, but the old man came on. His arm was round her, his faded blue eyes near hers. She saw his spontaneous tears and suddenly her own came flooding. At last the dam in her heart which had held back all things broke and she knelt, her head on the knee of an old highland man and wept.

He knew about broken hearts. He knew about the loss which is too great to bear. He sat all night, her head in his lap, his eyes fixed on the embers of the fire as they died one by one to white ash. The night came through the open windows almost as bright as day, scented, warm, moonlit. Only owls were abroad. His dog lay on the mat, its ear pricked to the night noises, its eye occasionally opening, watching its master and the girl in her grief.

Then the dawn came; rosy, gentle, feeling with hesitant fingers round the undrawn curtains and she slept at last. He picked her up, laid her on the bed and sat beside her, his lined face sad with the knowledge of generations of death and grief, pondering on the words of comfort he alone must give.

When she opened her eyes at last she lay purged and dreamlike, and she listened to his quiet voice telling the stories of the centuries which console and heal and she smiled at him at last and reached for his hand. The pain had dulled; the scar inside her mind had begun to heal of its own. Sadness there would always be, but he gave her resignation and a little hope that day.

When the squirrels came again she looked round for the little boy and seeing him called out. He came, nervous, chubby, a wicked cheerful child and she ran with him down to the water and watched him throw stones that skidded and bumped on the glittering surface and after a while she tried to do it too. And when her pebbles sank with a plop into the water she laughed.

In the store they noticed the change and were glad for her. People stopped to look at her sketches now and she found she could talk again. The world was no longer hostile, no longer viewed behind a wall of thick black glass, against which she beat with bloodied fists. It was sweet and young and she could breathe again.

Slowly she found she believed once more in the future. She went to the phone box and dialled a friend. Once he had been more. He understood; he bore no grudges; he came to be with her and gently took her hand. He would be the first bastion against loneliness. The first positive step. She accepted too a puppy from Ruaraidh Macdonald and together the four of them, the boy, the girl, her friend and the dog ran on the sands amongst the ribbons of emerald weed.

Each night she cried a little less, each day she laughed a little more. The agony was numbed. Her eyes were learning how to shine again; she was beginning to know hope.

The friend saw that she had fallen to the bottom of a muddy pool wide-eyed and gasping, flailing with arms towards the depths of darkness. Then slowly she had risen, inexorably and involuntarily, the will to survive triumphing over the will to die.

He slept in the bedroom that had been her brother’s. Each day he saw her opening a little, like a flower. But he kept his distance, watchful, afraid lest he overstep some faint invisible line which would drive her once more from the sun. For him she was a sacred virgin, inviolable and goddesslike in her bereavement, with her delicate blue-veined pallor of the skin.

By the great rock he would sit, the width of the rock between them, idly throwing pebbles at the setting sun, while she dipped her brush in the carmine-stained waters of a rock pool and traced the scene on her page.

‘Shall we take a boat to the Island?’ he asked at last after many days, screwing his eyes to watch a cormorant flop from its perch on a weed-draped rock into clumsy flight.

She nodded absently. ‘It could be fun.’ Once her eyes might have sparkled. Now they looked at him with quiet detached amusement. She saw him as an overgrown schoolboy, as playful and as harmless as the puppy.

They hired a boat and he rowed her, pulling quietly with the tide towards the dusky island. Trails of light still crossed the rippled water. The cormorant was back on its perch, its wings outspread to dry.

‘The evening is like golden velvet,’ she whispered, her fingers trailing in the cool. She faced him across the oars, watching his corded muscles contracting and expanding beneath the dark plaid shirt. Beads of perspiration stood on his brow. His eyes were over her shoulder fixed on the distance, the pupils small with the glowing sunset.

‘Are you watching where we’re going?’ He had felt her gaze and smiled without looking.

‘You’re doing fine.’ Her voice still cracked when she spoke from a long silence; cracked and hesitated before it sounded true. ‘Don’t hurry; it’s so beautiful.’ Her toes were bare in the warm greasy water which slopped on the bottom boards of the boat. A strand from the fringe of her shawl trailed in the wet, floated and unravelled, scarlet, unnoticed in the oily black of it.

When the boat grounded on the shingle he let the oars go, dead wings in the heavy rowlocks.

‘Shall we walk or sit and watch the sunset?’ he asked, his voice slightly raised above the rustle of the water on the stones and she stood up for answer, her arms out to balance as the boat rocked and she jumped clumsily to the shore.

They watched the clouds of midges dancing on the dusky water and whirling in columns above the beach. He slapped his neck and arms but her cool skin stayed untouched and she watched him, faintly amused again. There was a broch to see. They looked for it in the gloaming, amongst long dew wet grasses and listened to the lonely wail of a night bird echoing across the water. She held his hand over the uneven ground and to climb a fence and together they untangled the damp fringe of her shawl from the rusty wire. Their fingers touched by accident and she glanced up at his face.