Not Likely? A Port Brokeferry Truth.

(This piece was thought too unlikely for inclusion in the collaborative project it was originally written for. The editor did not think it 'true' enough; thought that Huntly's wife would not love him as she does if she knew what she says she knows about her husband - but history is littered with examples of this kind of love... just another reason for all my characters coming to Port Brokeferry!)

 THE THOUGHTS OF HUNTLY’S WIFE

Huntly thinks I don’t know. He thinks I don't see him looking at Eileen in the café over the lip of his morning coffee cup. Or snatching sight of Pamela who runs the length of the beach on alternate mornings. Or smiling at the girls coming home from school chirping like birds. He’s a man. That’s what men do: looking. Like Guthrie spit-polishing his tables, and stopping to watch the running-girl taking off her t-shirt, every other morning the same. And Edwin on the bridge of The Silver Herring, his face turned to 15 year old Corinne walking the harbour front with her books pressed to her chest as though she is hiding something. Even Mad Martin, screaming at seagulls, screaming at the sky, loses sight of where he is sometimes, as he steals a look at Mhairi sketching the sea.

Huntly looks too. He thinks I don’t know, but I do. Bless him and God love him. Married for longer than not, and there’s no secret he has that I can’t fathom. I know when he is coming down sick, even before his temperature rises. I know when he’s hungry or when a sadness is near, or when Huntly will see the funny side. You don’t love a man this many years without knowing the tick-tock inner working of him.

And I know about Alice, though Huntly thinks that is a bigger secret than all the rest. I know about the letters he writes and burns in the grate before I see them. Except sometimes he keeps the new-written page hid in the drawer of his desk, so he can read it one more time before setting it to the flames.

He loves me, does Huntly. I know that, too. I have the best of him. It is my bed he sleeps in, and me he turns to when he needs. But he loves her as well, loves Alice, and yes I know that. It stretches way back that love, back to before we was husband and wife, me and Huntly. And I know all about Alice, then and now. I’ve seen her standing in nearly no clothes at her window, and I know Huntly sees what I have seen: Alice with her hand to her face, her fingers touching her own lips, touching, like kissing, the tips. Her heart is elsewhere, and I know all about that too.

Dear dear Huntly. Men are always the fools in love. I kiss him sometimes, and I know it is not me he kisses. I can tell. It makes me love him more. Does that make me the bigger fool, I wonder. And I laugh at that. Like Dodie laughs, at nothing, or at something that nobody else knows.

Ah Huntly. He won’t ever leave me. Not ever. Nothing is more certain. He is kind and thinks of me, and there is a place in his heart that is mine, only mine, and that is enough to put a song in my mouth.