Low Road of Marigolds

I was a long way from home when I heard her voice. She had a Scottish accent, and I listened to it for a while remembering how close we'd been and how I'd left her all those years ago. But I wasn't sure the voice was hers. I listened again, she was distant, the sound was coming over a public address system. At the time I thought I must have been dreaming or imagining things and then her voice stopped. I mixed in with the crowd, the normal Sunday morning gathering of people at the local markets. Tables full of home made products, jams, conserves, freshly picked fruit, free range eggs, the smell of someone cooking bacon. Babies jackets for sale, hand knitted gloves and flowers, lots and lots of marigolds.

A fence stretched along the road separating the markets from the occasional vehicle passing by. I tried to get my bearings. I'd never been here before. I'd spent a month travelling, and I was simply filling in time before I went back to my hotel and left this place forever.

And then I saw her. She looked the same, except her hair was a lot longer, past her shoulders, blonde all the same. But her eyes were bluer than I remembered, far more intense. She walked towards me as she'd done a thousand times before. I could smell her warmth. Apart from those blue blue eyes she appeared unchanged. I wondered what I must look like. Aged, wearing glasses, hair greying at the temples. I couldn't bring myself to tell her I was married and that my life hadn't worked out so well.

We started talking like it was yesterday. She gave me the impression she had been waiting for me. Oh I was still in love with her, everything about her. It was her accent that wrapped me around any finger she cared to hold up. But I couldn't bare to disappoint her again. I was too old, too useless and too full of lies to be trusted. I wished I hadn't come to this lowland town, but I'd always had a love affair with all things Scottish for as long as I could remember. When I turned ten my mother had given me a book called In Scotland Again. But curiously I'd never been to Scotland until a few days ago.

She'd worked in the same office I did, she'd come down to London for training, it was her first time away from her family. Mine was a different story, I'd travelled overland from Australia running from the sunshine to the sleet and what I thought would be a year gaining my stripes in the world.

It's hard to say why or how we fell in love but we did. Rose MacDonald was quiet and smiling and at first I paid her little attention. She was way too good looking as far as I was concerned. Every male in the office found every reason they could to help her with her training. I watched it all from the comfort of the filing cabinets where I spent most of my time chasing up old debit or credit receipts. Through it all she appeared unaffected by their endeavours. Chatting to them and ending every conversation with a polite shake of her head, a collection of definite no's.

But then one morning I woke up and realised that I was looking forward to going to work and seeing Rose. It was quite frightening really, it was a revelation. I couldn't work out what it was, but something in me had started to take delight at the sound of her voice, the way she walked, the clothes she wore, the look of her face. I found myself staring at her, trying to tell if she wore makeup. I was stupid, I was twenty six. I wondered if it wasn't some sort of strange crush, the sort of thing I used to get as a school boy on trainee school teachers. But they, of course, though desirable were unobtainable. And that too is how I thought of Rose.

On the tube train at night, back to my Fulham bedsit, I wondered where she was and what she was doing. Where was she living in London? I hadn't spoken to her, there was no need, she was being trained for greater things while I was filling in time working at a temporary job in a corporate building in Oxford Street.

It didn't seem possible that all these thoughts and memories could flood simultaneously through my mind as I stood next to her in that market place, people stepping around us and nodding hello to her and probably asking themselves, who is he? I didn't know if there was the smallest tear in her eye. The wind was blowing.

“My mother would like to see you again.”

And I imagined her mother, who I'd only met once, when she'd come down to London and Rose and I had fish and chips with her in a local shop. I'd never met her father who had the grand Scottish name of Donald. Donald MacDonald. I often wondered, all I knew was that he was a highland farmer. His youngest daughter Rose was making good setting out for a career in London.

I didn't say anything. It wasn't as if I had come back to find her. At best I remembered she was from the highlands, not a small market town down near Edinburgh where I found myself reaching across the years puzzled by her still girlish good looks and figure. She may as well have been twenty three again. I would have loved to have stayed, started up what we once had, lived together again, nights in London and in bed, laughing at the world, singing pop songs and drinking brown ale.

“I need to get back on the P A and make some more announcements.”

I watched her walk away in a pair of jeans, a greyish coloured jumper. I could easily have gone with her but my mind was set on flight again. I needed to leave her, she was much too good for me, besides I'd promised my wife I'd be back at the hotel by lunchtime. I didn't have the courage to abandon her, leave her alone and bewildered with the God awful Scots while I ran off with the apparently still single Rose MacDonald my one true love. I bought a bunch of marigolds and left.