I'll Keep You Safe

Chapter Nine

Our first meeting with Lee Blunt came early in our stewardship of Ranish Tweed, and it changed our lives.

We had hoped, when we first bought the company, that Richard Faulkner would continue to weave for us, at least until we managed to get ourselves on our feet.

Along with the business we had bought his order book, which would be enough to see us over the first few months while we sorted through the shambles that was his design archive, and got our two fathers up and running to weave Ranish on their own looms. Not to mention the training of Ruairidh to weave himself, which his father was going to do. Ruairidh had also signed himself up at Lews Castle College in Stornoway for day courses in business-management skills for people new to self-employment.

It was chaos in the beginning, and I was dispatched to go over to Ranish to sweet-talk old man Faulkner into seeing us through the transition.

He was very subdued when I phoned to ask if it was convenient for me to call in and see him. ‘Come tomorrow,’ he said. ‘About two.’

It was July, and we had just completed the complex business of drawing up and signing contracts, making sure there were no loopholes or tripwires before transferring the money from Ruairidh’s redundancy account to make Ranish finally ours. After a miserable dull and damp June, bedevilled by midges and cleggs, the weather had finally turned, and it was a beautiful summer’s afternoon when I drove over the moor to Ranish. A brisk breeze from the west sent what few clouds there were scudding on their way and kept the midges at bay. Unlike that first drive across the island with Ruairidh to see the old man, the moor to the south was green and lush. All those tiny scraps of loch reflected sunlight in shiny fragments, like so many pieces of silver paper strewn across the land. And the mountains of Uig and Harris stood in sharp outline against a crystal-clear sky.

Ranish itself was bathed in sunshine, shrubs and the odd rowan in leaf and flower in these more sheltered east-coast bays. The sea was impossibly blue, coruscating out into the Minch, and peppered by all those tiny basking islands in the mouth of Loch Erisort. The Barkin Isles, Tabhaidh Bheag, Tabhaidh Mhór. And it felt like you could almost reach out and touch the Isle of Skye.

I parked at the road end and made my way down the crooked steps Faulkner had set into the hillside in some distant past. There was no sound of flying shuttles emanating from his shed, and I was drawn towards the house by the barking of his dog. The Land Rover was parked out front where it usually stood, and Tam was tied on a long leash to a ring set in stone to one side of the front door.

He seemed inordinately pleased to see me, barking and leaping around my legs. We had got to know one another quite well during the months of negotiation and to-ing and fro-ing. I knelt down and clapped his head and ruffled his ears. ‘Good boy! Where’s your daddy? Is he in the house?’ Which seemed to get him even more excited.

I knocked on the front door and went inside. Despite the warm summer’s day on the outside, it was cold in here, and still smelled of damp and wet dog hair.

‘Mr Faulkner?’ I called out. ‘Hello, are you there?’ A resounding silence was the only response. I went into the kitchen. A mug of tea stood on the worktop by the sink. Barely touched and stone cold. I brushed my fingers against the kettle. It was cold, too. I went back out into the sitting room and called again. Still nothing. And all the while Tam was barking and barking outside.

I went out again, blinking into the sunshine, and followed the wall around to the back of the house and the long stone outbuilding with its green-painted tin roof where old man Faulkner did his weaving.

There was some sixth sense by now telling me that all was not well. And it was with considerable apprehension that I pushed open the old wooden door. I can remember the sound of it to this day. Wood and hinges groaning in the half-light that crept in through tiny windows along the back wall where the hillside blocked out the sunlight.

I didn’t understand at first what it was that I was seeing. Something dark and heavy draped from the rafters along with all the loops of yarn and bolts of tweed that stood leaning up against them. But with the breeze that followed me in through the open door, the hanging shape revolved a half-turn, and I saw the light catch the old man’s profile. His eyes were open, his mouth gaping, head tilted at an unnatural angle, resting against the rope that stretched under tension from the beam above him to the loop of it around his neck. An old wooden chair lay on its side on the floor where he had kicked it away to let his own weight squeeze the life out of him.

I suppose I might have screamed had my voice not deserted me. I could still hear Tam barking, and the sound of the sea breaking gently all along the ragged coast, like the sound of the breath that had long left old man Faulkner. And I was remarkably calm.

His lifeless form held my gaze for several long moments, before my eyes flickered down to the folded sheet of white paper lying on the warp threads of his loom. I moved carefully across the shed, not wanting to make a sound. Somehow death demanded your silence. As if by showing it respect you might one day avoid it yourself. Though only the deluded might believe that.

I lifted and unfolded the note he had left on the unfinished weave and recognized his big, untidy hand.

The weeks that followed were difficult. It was as if a part of Ranish Tweed had died with its creator, and it was all that we could do to breathe life back into it.

Ruairidh spent days and days with his father, learning the arcane skills of the weaver. There were courses in how to work a loom, but they were mostly now for the Bonas-Griffith double-width loom that nearly all Harris Tweed was being woven on. And we were determined to maintain the uniqueness of Ranish by sticking with the single-width.

Tam found his new home with me and Ruairidh in the half-restored old whitehouse on the Macfarlane croft, and there was something reassuring in his presence. Almost as if he were keeping a watching eye over us on behalf of his master. I’m sure he missed him, but I think he also took comfort from the sound of the Hattersley in Mr Macfarlane’s loom shed. He found himself a spot there to curl up and sleep while Mr Macfarlane taught his son how to weave.

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.

They listened mutely to my explanation of Ranish’s financial imperatives, and no matter how reasonable it all sounded, I knew that everything about it would seem unreasonable to them. When I had finished, my dad slapped his palms on his thighs and eased himself to his feet.

‘Ah, well,’ he said. ‘Can’t sit here chatting all day. Things to do.’ His way of avoiding conflict or expressing emotion. I watched him walk stiffly to the door, and felt ashamed of myself. When I was young he had always seemed such a big, strong man. Now all I could see was the old man he had become. Diminished in so many ways.

When he had gone my mother looked at me very directly and spoke for the first time. ‘As if it’s not enough that we lose a son to that family, now we’re losing our daughter to them as well.’

It was then, like a gift from the gods, that Lee Blunt came into our lives.

It was Ruairidh’s idea that we weave what he called pattern blankets. A selection of samples in a single length, each blending one into the other every twenty centimetres. It would make for a unique presentation. Half a dozen pattern blankets, a rainbow of colours and choice. We would take them, he said, to the big international fabric fair in Paris. Première Vision.

I had been spending all morning on the phone, calling old contacts in Italy and Germany from my days at Johnstons, when he came in with the first of his pattern blankets. It looked stunning, and felt like silk to the touch.

‘It’s amazing,’ I said. Then let reality in to cloud my enthusiasm. ‘But, Ruairidh, we can’t afford a stand at PV. Not even the share of a stand.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ He was grinning, and glowing with that enthusiasm he always seemed able to conjure out of even the darkest moments. ‘I’ve been talking to some folk at the mill. Apparently there’s a kind of side bar that takes place along one end of the sales hall at PV. Like a fringe fair, just off-piste. All sorts of private deals are done, without any need for a stand.’

‘And the organizers are happy about that?’ It seemed to me unlikely, since renting stands was how they made their money.

‘Ah, well, not exactly.’ There was mischief in his eyes now. ‘We’ll have to sneak our samples in.’ And he grinned again. ‘But what’s life without a little risk?’

And so we ended up in Paris that September, the two of us, staying in the cheapest hotel we could find, and taking the RER to the Parc des Expositions on the first morning of the fair, all of our samples crammed into a couple of rucksacks.

We were nervous as kittens as we followed the crowds from the station along the covered walkways, past the various exhibition halls. Design. Manufacturing. Accessories. Until finally we saw Fabrics, and followed the red path up to a wall of glass doors. We had bought our tickets online, and dressed scruffily, hoping to pass ourselves off as students so that our backpacks wouldn’t raise any eyebrows.

We had passed the ticket check when to our dismay a large dark-suited security man drew us to one side and asked us to put our rucksacks on a table. It is hard not to look guilty when that’s exactly what you are, and I was sure that my face would be a dead giveaway. To my amazement Ruairidh was smiling and seemed quite relaxed. He even managed a joke in his bad school French, and the security man cracked a smile for the first time.

Wearing white gloves, he went through both of our backpacks very carefully, laying our samples to one side on the table during his search, and then repacking them when he was finished. Which is when I realized that, of course, he was looking for explosives, not fabrics. He waved us through.

From a mezzanine level with coffee bars and restaurants we looked out over the hall itself. Hundreds, maybe thousands of stands, all closed off by opaque white plastic walls, shimmered away into a breathtaking distance. Each open-topped stand was illuminated by a rectangle of fluorescent light that hovered over it. A long way above that, rows of lights set into the roof illuminated the vastness of the hall itself. It seemed as if we were gazing down on to some small futuristic city, divided and subdivided by streets and alleyways crowded with people, like ants scurrying about an underground labyrinth. It was hard to believe that this was the breeding ground for the clothes that would adorn the models strutting their stuff on the catwalks of the coming winter collections. What we wanted to do was make sure that at least some of those models would be wearing Ranish Tweed.

Along one end of the hall there were coffee shops and restaurants set against the angle of the only windows in the entire building to let in natural light. Tables and chairs ran the length of the wall of stands that backed on to them, and it was here that people sat drinking coffees, making deals and phone calls, cementing friendships and swapping contracts.

Ruairidh installed me at a table with the rucksacks and a coffee to keep me going, while he went off to solicit trade. How he intended to do that I had no idea, and didn’t want to know. I sat for a long time, watching the faces that drifted past, picking up snatches of conversations in English, French, Italian, Japanese. No one paid me the least attention. Eventually I put in my earbuds and turned on my iPod. An hour passed. An hour and a half. I’d gone through three coffees, and was beginning to think I was going to have to find a loo when Ruairidh reappeared, walking briskly through the tables towards me. Following him was a tall young man inclining to plumpness, who looked like a refugee from an art school diploma show. He was wearing a pair of Alexander McQueen bumsters, a torn T-shirt and scuffed sneakers.

I stood up as they arrived at the table. Ruairidh said, ‘Niamh meet Lee. Lee this is Niamh.’ Lee smiled shyly, revealing crooked teeth that were a little too prominent, and shook my hand. His face was unshaven, with the hint of a goatee clinging to his chin, while the sides of his head were cut to the wood and topped by a mess of tousled red hair like fusewire. It was only in that moment that I realized, quite suddenly, that this was the designer Lee Blunt, the new darling of British fashion. I had seen his photograph often enough, but he looked different in the flesh, and much taller than I had ever imagined. It was quite a bit later that Ruairidh confessed to me his certainty that the only reason he had managed to persuade Lee to come and see our samples that day was because Lee fancied him.

But it was Lee and I who hit it off when Ruairidh went to get coffees. Lee sat opposite me and cocked his head a little to one side, casting an appraising eye over me, head to toe.

‘Take a photograph,’ I said. ‘It’ll last longer.’

He laughed. ‘I’m sorry, I’m just dressing you.’

My turn to laugh. ‘Really? Most men want to undress me.’

‘Well, I can understand that,’ he said solemnly. ‘Beauty should always be high visibility.’

‘Flatterer!’

He grinned. ‘I love your accent.’ His was pure London East End.

‘It’s what comes from being a Gaelic-speaker.’

‘Gaelic? Irish?’

‘Scottish. We’re both from the Isle of Lewis.’

His eyes lit up. ‘Oh. My. God! My grandmother came from the Isle of Barra. She was a McNeil. We could be related.’

I shook my head, still laughing. ‘I doubt it, Lee. There are about twenty-six thousand people in the Outer Hebrides. And anyway, Catholics on Barra, Protestants on Lewis. Oil and water.’

He waved a hand dismissively. ‘Bloody religion!’ He nodded towards my iPod lying on the table. ‘What are you listening to?’

‘Pink. I’m Not Dead.’

His face lit up. ‘I loooove Pink. I listen to that album all the time. ‘Stupid Girls’. And, oh, ‘Fingers’! I mean, who else could write such a blatant song about masturbation and get away with it like that? It’s sooo sexy. I’d almost turn straight to spend a night with Pink.’

I laughed. ‘I love ‘Mr President’,’ I said. ‘Not many pop stars with the courage to go political these days.’

‘Not like in the Sixties.’ Lee clasped his hands. ‘Me? I was born in the wrong era. I’d have loved to have dressed the Sixties.’ His eyes sparkled and he sighed. ‘And all that free love, without an AIDS virus in sight.’

Ruairidh returned with the coffees. ‘What are you two laughing about?’

‘Oh just sex,’ I said.

‘My eternal obsession.’ Lee grinned. ‘After fashion, of course.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Speaking of which, you have samples to show me, you said.’

‘Yes.’ I stood up, taking over, and lifted the rucksacks on to a couple of chairs. ‘We call them pattern blankets. It was Ruairidh’s idea. Basically to weave one sample into the next to give a sense, side by side, of the range of tones and colours and patterns available.’

I pulled them out and draped them over all the available chairs I could draw around our table, and literally watched Lee Blunt’s jaw drop. He stood up and walked around the chairs, running the flat of his hands across the surface of the tweed, and then feeding it through his fingers. His eyes were burning with what I understood only later was raw inspiration.

‘I want this,’ he said very quietly.

‘Which one?’ Ruairidh said.

‘Not one, mate. All of them. Just like this. All woven together. Yards and yards of it. Bolts of the bloody stuff.’ He turned shining eyes on me. ‘It’s perfect. Just what I’ve been looking for. All my bloody life, I think. I’m going to make it the centrepiece of my next collection.’ He grinned then, turning his big wide infectious smile on Ruairidh. ‘And I’m going to build the whole show around the Highland Clearances. We Scots can all relate to that, right?’ And I loved the way that suddenly he was Scottish.

The next few months passed in a blur. Lee flew up to the islands and spent long hours with Ruairidh’s mother picking out the patterns and colours he wanted for the blankets. He and Ruairidh and I went off to the bar at the Doune Braes Hotel and got roaring drunk, laughing endlessly at his irreverent and often blood-curdlingly crude sense of humour. We really cemented our relationship with him that week.

And then it was down to work. Making those blankets was no easy task. It was a complex business managing the transition from one set of warp and weft yarns to another, as the weave bled from one pattern into the next. Single-width Harris Tweed would use just over 600 threads because of the thickness of the wool. Ranish, with its finer threads, used more than 800. So it was a labour-intensive and time-consuming job. We had to employ additional weavers so that we would make the deadline Lee had set for us. He needed the cloth in time to prepare for his show at London Fashion Week in February.

In January we got an invite from Lee to attend the show. Money was still tight. He hadn’t paid us yet, and we had devoted all our time and energies to fulfilling his order, subsidized by money from the sale of the Macfarlanes’ property in Stornoway. We got the bus down to London the following month, the day before the show. I had booked us into a student guest house in South Kensington for a little over £30 a night, and we intended to stay just the two nights.

The evening we arrived Lee picked us up in a big black Merc driven by a punkish girl with a face full of metal who took us to an apartment somewhere in St John’s Wood. ‘Pre-show party,’ Lee said. He was sitting up front with the punk girl. ‘In case the post-show party is more like a wake. You never know with these fucking fashion critics.’ He turned his back on us then, and getting conversation out of him during the rest of the drive was like getting blood from a stone. He seemed nervous and distracted and not at all like the crude and outrageous character we had got to know during his stay on the island.

It was a rainy, miserable, dark winter’s night and the street, when we arrived, was packed full of shiny wet Audis and BMWs and Porsches. Taxis were arriving, and a constant stream of strange-looking people under umbrellas were running into an elegant apartment block through a portico’d entrance.

‘So,’ I said, ‘I suppose everything’s all set for the show, then?’

‘Christ, no!’ Lee turned and growled at me. ‘It’s all a fucking mess. Nothing’s finished. It’s going to be a goddamn fucking disaster.’ He got out of the car, slamming the door behind him, and walked briskly up the drive towards the front door.

The punk girl turned and grinned at us. ‘Don’t worry, he’s always like this the night before a show. He’ll pull it all together, he always does. Just go in,’ she said. ‘And enjoy.’

The apartment was on the second floor. We followed the noise up the stairs and wondered what the neighbours made of it. The door of the apartment stood wide, spilling light and music out into the landing. I followed Ruairidh in as he weaved his way through crowds of people who stood about on white carpets spilling red wine and cigarette ash. In amongst the smoke I smelled the distinctive musky reek of cannabis, with which I had become acquainted during my student days. But that was a long time ago. Ruairidh half-turned and pulled a face. This was definitely not our scene.

A large sitting room with open-plan kitchen and tall windows looked out over the road below. A congregation of mostly young people sprawled on sofas and chairs or stood in animated groups shouting conversations above deafening music. I had never seen such an array of outlandish clothes all in one place outside of a theatre dressing room. A maelstrom of mannequins, a thrum of thespians. Hats and boots, frock coats and dresses, flares and bumsters, skirts and tops that left little to the imagination. There were men kissing men, women kissing women and, incongruously, even the occasional man and woman exchanging kisses.

A group of people knelt around a glass-topped coffee table, cutting and accumulating lines of white powder that they took it in turns to snort through rolled-up fivers.

Someone thrust glasses of red wine into our hands, and we looked around for Lee. But there was no sign of him. We found seats instead, and sat together sipping our wine and watching as the circus unfolded around us. We made those drinks last, feeling distinctly out of place, although in truth no one seemed to notice our existence. I don’t know how long we sat there. An hour, maybe more. But finally it was long enough for me. I pressed my lips to Ruairidh’s ear. ‘Let’s go.’

He nodded. ‘We’d better tell Lee, though.’

I thought he wouldn’t even notice if we were gone, but Ruairidh was anxious not to offend him. We pushed through a group of dancers in the kitchen area and out into the hallway. There was no sign of him anywhere. A couple of doors led off the hall and Ruairidh opened one of them.

It revealed a bedroom awash with red light. A TV screen fixed to the ceiling above the bed was playing some kind of porn video that we couldn’t see from where we stood. But the soundtrack was explicit enough. A naked man on the bed was hunched over on his knees, an equally naked woman with enormous breasts thrusting her hips towards his bare buttocks, flesh slapping on flesh. She turned and moved back a little as the door opened, and I was shocked to see her very large erection swinging towards us. She smiled, and in a strangely masculine cadence said, ‘Hello, darlings. Join us.’

Ruairidh almost stood on my feet as he backed out of the room, and although I wasn’t certain, I thought that the man bent over on the bed was Lee.

The punk girl was still sitting in the car outside listening to music. I rapped on the window and she wound it down. ‘Can you take us back to South Kensington?’

‘Sorry, sweetheart. No can do. I’ve got to wait for Lee and take him to the venue. He’s going to be working on the show all night. But don’t worry, you can get a taxi. And Lee’s asked me to pick you up from your place at six tomorrow morning. So be ready.’ She smiled and wound the window back up.

We picked up a taxi a couple of streets away, and I was shocked when the fare came to almost as much as a night at our hotel. So much for economizing.

We were still half asleep when the punk girl came calling, and took us off on what would be one of the most bizarre, unlikely and seminal days of our lives.

It was another miserable February morning, drizzle falling in the dark from a sky burned umber by the lights of the city. The chill of it seeped into our bones. We had no idea where we were going, but the punk girl sped us through the early-morning traffic heading east. Until we found ourselves cruising along shiny cobbled streets between crumbling brick warehouses.

Finally, she drew up alongside a phalanx of cars and battered white vans in a cul-de-sac surrounded by dark, derelict buildings. Light spilled out from vast open doors and was shot through by streaks of fast-moving white. It was sleeting.

The outside walls were slathered with posters advertising what it described as The highlight and absolute culmination of British Fashion Week. A billboard declared, Fashion Sensation Lee Blunt Re-animates the Highland Clearances in Haute Couture.

It seemed to us the most unlikely venue. British Fashion Week, in our imagination at least, projected an image of class and glamour. It was hard to imagine the great and the good of British fashion dragging themselves out to warehouseland in the East End of London from between their silk sheets in Mayfair and Chelsea. But what did we know? This was the pulling power of Lee Blunt.

The vast interior beyond the open doors was filled with the roar of space heaters fighting to exorcize years of cold and damp. Electricians were constructing a complex lighting rig around a raised catwalk strewn with rocks and heather and seaweed carefully placed along its length by an army of assistants. Where they had acquired heather at this time of year we knew not, but the seaweed was fresh, and the salty smell of it filled the place like the smell of the sea.

The punk girl had told us in the car that many of the young people helping with the show were volunteers, fashion students hoping to learn something, or get themselves noticed. We noticed them now, setting out rows of folding tubular chairs along either side of the catwalk. Beyond the seating and the stage, as the lights came up, the rest of the warehouse receded into a darkness so profound that everything in the illuminated foreground seemed impossibly overlit, over-coloured and quite unreal.

A technician crouched at the end of the runway, fixing a scale model of a nineteenth-century sailing ship to a pedestal. He stood to position a spotlight behind it, casting its shadow large against the far wall and the opening through which the models would come, as if emerging from the hold of the ship itself. Beyond that, the backstage area was screened off by stretched canvas. Everything seemed so unexpectedly makeshift.

We followed the punk girl, picking our way through the debris that littered the concrete floor, and saw huge pools of black water reflecting light in the distance where the roof had let in rain. Up wooden steps and through hanging sheets on to an area of elevated staging beyond the canvas. And therein lay chaos.

This was one giant dressing room. Naked and semi-naked girls with pale and dark skin and bones more prominent than breasts ran around from make-up to fitting and back again. In chairs set around a long scarred table littered with jars and brushes, make-up artists daubed dirt and blood on alabaster and ebony skin, painting beautiful faces, and then defacing them with scars and bruises.

I turned to see Ruairidh gawping open-mouthed. I dug an elbow into his ribs. ‘Watch it!’

He laughed and leaned in confidentially. ‘I’ve never been attracted to stick insects. Ever since I read about the female praying mantis eating her lover after sex.’

I said, ‘Sounds like a fine idea to me.’

A vast cutting table was strewn with Ranish Tweed. There were bolts of it unravelled and cut in short and long lengths. It hung down in folds on to a floor littered with offcuts. Rows of clothes racks hung with half-finished outfits. Jackets and tops and skirts and trousers. Lee, and a small group of trusted accomplices, were pinning them on the girls, cutting and sewing as they went, almost sculpting the clothes to their bodies.

Lee’s cutting shears were like a wand in his hand as he shaped and cut with mesmeric speed, conjuring extraordinary outfits from virgin cloth, examining, re-cutting, re-pinning what his assistants had done

The models — I counted twenty of them — were blue with the cold, and stood around shivering but never complaining. This was a much-coveted gig, a stage on which only a select few would ever get to perform.

Lee spotted us, and abandoned his shears for a moment, opening his arms to hug and kiss us both, and announcing to the world, ‘Everyone! These are the geniuses who made the cloth you are wearing.’ And all the girls crowded around to fuss and kiss and hug and congratulate. Famous faces from the covers of Vogue and Elle, Cosmopolitan and Harper’s Bazaar, naked and unabashed. And I wondered if the flush on Ruairidh’s cheeks was from pleasure or embarrassment. I decided it was probably a mix of the two.

Lee’s face glowed with excitement, shining with perspiration. His eyes on fire. It was the first time I had seen him so alive. An extraordinary talent wholly in its element. He turned towards racks of boots and shoes behind him. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Specially commissioned for the Clearances.’ For that’s what he was calling the show.

They were stunning. Amazing creations that blended leather and Ranish Tweed in startling designs. It made all the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I found Lee watching me with wide, expectant eyes.

‘Well?’

‘Lee, they are fabulous,’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

His grin was infectious. ‘Wait till you see them in the shops.’

‘So,’ Ruairidh said, ‘the show’s still going to be a goddamn fucking disaster?’

Lee threw his head back and roared with laughter. ‘Of course it is. I’ve built my whole reputation on disaster. I wouldn’t want to let anyone down now.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘But go, go, go. I’ve reserved you seats at the front. We’ll be starting soon.’

My turn to look at my watch. ‘Lee, it’s not even eight-thirty.’

He grinned wickedly. ‘We start at nine. I like to get the bastards out of their beds. And they always do for a Lee Blunt show.’ He crinkled his face with pleasure. ‘Lets them know who’s the one with power here.’

To our astonishment, when we stepped back out into the warehouse, the seats around the runway were very nearly full. The great and the good had, indeed, dragged themselves from their beds at an ungodly hour for Lee. A buzz of anticipation rose like smoke from amongst the baggy-eyed, powdered and painted faces crowded all around the stage. Seats at the front, in prime position, had our names on them, and we were aware of all the curious glances turning in our direction as we took our places. A flurry of flashes from the bank of photographers beyond the runway nearly blinded us, before we realized that we were the focus of their lenses.

Suddenly everything went black. Then the distant strains of bagpipes bled into the dramatic opening of a Capercaillie song, ‘Waiting for the Wheel to Turn’. A song all about the Highland Clearances. Three models staggered on to the catwalk, linked by paper chains and driven on by a bare-chested man cracking a whip. The clothes they wore were fantastical creations of Ranish and leather and lace, torn trousers and baggy tops slashed open to reveal breasts and blood.

For thirty minutes the music swooped and soared, pipes and flutes and drums and haunting voices. Skinny, bloodied and dirty models tramped through the heather up and down the catwalk. Sometimes barefoot, other times in knee-high boots, bodies barely concealed beneath extravagant wraps and flowing capes.

While Lee had used a variety of other textures and textiles, leathers and laces, Ranish Tweed was centre stage. I was moved almost to tears by it, and when Lee emerged at the end of it all, to walk the length of the stage surrounded by his adoring models, I stood with the rest applauding until my hands hurt.

After the show everyone involved crowded into a pub in Shoreditch. The first reviews would appear in the later editions of the evening papers, and then tomorrow in the dailies, but everyone knew that it had been a triumph. It seemed that Ruairidh and I were as much the centre of attention as Lee, everyone plying us with champagne. Once or twice I caught Lee watching from afar and wondered if it was jealousy I saw in his eyes.

We were quite drunk, Ruairidh and I, when Lee took us outside, where the punk girl was waiting in the Merc. He opened the door for us to get in. ‘Just wanted to say my own special thank you,’ he said.

We drove to one of his homes, which was an apartment in an end terrace, semi-detached brick and stone house somewhere in Notting Hill.

He let us in by a stained-glass door at the front and led us upstairs to the apartment itself. ‘To be honest, I don’t spend much time here. It’s a place I crash when I want to be on my own, or to bring special friends.’

He waved us into a white leather settee and opened another bottle of champagne. Ruairidh seemed to have an endless capacity for it, but I didn’t know that I could drink any more. My head was already spinning. However, I had no desire to put a dampener on the occasion. It’s not often that I can say I had to force champagne down my throat, but I did that day.

Lee, for all that he had consumed, seemed quite sober. He sat down at a shiny, glass-topped table, and started cutting lines of coke through the reflections. ‘Join me,’ he said.

I glanced at Ruairidh. This really was not something I wanted to do. But I could see from his eyes that he didn’t want us to refuse.

Lee seemed oblivious. ‘I love this shit,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I could get through these shows without it.’ He looked up, that infectious grin of his spread across his face. ‘And I love you guys. I couldn’t have done this without Ranish. It was just perfect.’ He took out and rolled up a £20 note and hoovered a line of coke into his right nostril. Then he passed the note to Ruairidh. ‘I’ll let you into a little secret.’ He leaned in, something intimate in his demeanour. ‘I’m to be the new head designer at Givenchy. They’re going to announce it next month.’

‘Wow! Congratulations,’ Ruairidh said, with less enthusiasm than perhaps Lee expected. I think he was distracted by the knowledge that he was expected to snort the next line of coke. I watched as he drew the white powder into his nostril, and nearly choked on it. As he handed me the £20 note I could see in his eyes that the elation had already kicked in.

I didn’t want to do it. But I knew it was what Lee wanted. A celebration of the news he had just broken. An intimation that we were special to him. And for the first and last time in my life I snorted cocaine. I felt it choking and burning in my nasal passages and throat, before suddenly I was floating on a cloud of euphoric self-esteem, and wanted to hug and hold this funny, buck-toothed, talented gay man and never let him go. Even though right then, in that moment of cocaine clarity, I understood for the first time that Lee Blunt was entirely and only about power, control and ego.

The reviews were peerless. Lee’s catwalk rendition of the Highland Clearances was the highlight of British Fashion Week. It received reams of coverage in the fashion pages of all the dailies, and photo features in the magazines and weekend supplements. Ranish Tweed went viral. Suddenly our phone never stopped ringing. Everyone wanted a piece of the cloth phenomenon that was Ranish.

Those Savile Row tailors who had been polite but lukewarm when I went cold-calling were now calling me, asking for appointments, flying up to the island to select their patterns and place their orders. Those contacts I had made in Japan were submitting orders, without a karaoke bar in sight.

It was more work than we could cope with. We were forced to take on half a dozen more weavers, and cut an exclusive deal with the mill at Shawbost to finish our product. And although I wasn’t happy about it, Mrs Macfarlane employed my old childhood friend Seonag Morrison to keep the accounts and run the office, which at that time was still in the front room of our house.

Seonag had graduated from a course in business and computer studies in Manchester, before getting herself married, and then pregnant. And with her kids just recently started school, she was now back on the job market. Relations between us had cooled off in our late teens, and I would have preferred someone else, but I couldn’t argue about her qualifications for the job.

In spite of the orders now rolling in, we continued to have a major cashflow problem, which wasn’t going to sort itself out until we started completing and delivering. It was Seonag who alerted us to the fact that although it was now nearly three months since we had supplied our tweed to Lee, he had still not paid. She had noticed the unpaid invoice and thought it was probably an oversight, so had issued a reminder. Still no payment. Then she had tried phoning Lee’s fledgling company in London, but nobody would take her call.

So Ruairidh called Lee on his mobile. He made no mention of the unpaid bill, but told him that we would be in London next week, and that maybe we could meet up for a drink. Lee suggested the pub in Shoreditch where we had all got drunk together after the show.

Ruairidh and I were both unaccountably nervous when we got the tube out east to keep our rendezvous with him. And before we went into the pub Ruairidh said to me, ‘Don’t you say anything about the money. Just keep him sweet. I’ll do the talking.’

Lee was with a group of friends. A black guy who we had met before and went by the odd moniker of Cornell Charles Stamoran. Cornell wore bumsters and a pork pie hat and was chatting to a couple of strangely theatrical young men who looked as if they had stepped straight from the pages of an Evelyn Waugh novel. They had clearly been drinking for some time, and Lee greeted us with sloppy kisses, and over-enthusiastic hugs that nearly had all three of us on the floor. On the wave of a hand from Lee, Cornell ordered drinks for everyone.

Lee was loquacious, slurred words tumbling from his mouth so quickly they were tripping over each other on the way out, and I knew that he had been consuming much more than just alcohol.

‘Day after tomorrow,’ he said. ‘The Givenchy announcement. Off to Paris to sign the contracts and then a press conference. Gonna be amazing!’ He put his arms around me and very nearly crushed me. ‘Hear things are going great for you up there, darling. You so deserve it, you guys, so deserve it.’

Ruairidh sipped on his beer and said, ‘Yeah, lots of orders coming in. Which is great. But we’re still a young company, Lee, no capital behind us and a real cashflow problem. It would seriously help us out if you could settle up for the cloth we supplied for the show.’

Like a fist beyond your peripheral vision that you never saw coming, Lee’s mood changed. ‘What the fuck? You want fucking money from me? You want money? You’re kidding me, right? I put your fucking cloth in the limelight, I make it world-famous. And you want me to pay for it?’ He stabbed a finger into Ruairidh’s chest. ‘Do you have any idea how much it costs to put on a runway show? Do you? Do you? No you fucking don’t. I have to beg, borrow and steal every fucking penny for it. Cos no other fucker’s going to pay.’ He waved his hand in the air, spittle gathering on his lips. ‘Not until I’m on the payroll at Givenchy. Every fucking farthing’s coming out of my own pocket.’

I tried to be reasonable. ‘Lee, come on. That order used up all our resources. Buying the yarn. Paying the weavers. Paying the mill.’

He turned on me. His face ugly now. ‘And you’re getting your reward for it now, bitch, aren’t you?’ I don’t know what he was thinking, but his hand came up to my neck, closing around it as if he intended to choke me. In fact there was no pressure in his fingers. They were caressing more than choking. But it was enough to send Ruairidh off the deep end. He lunged at Lee, pushing him back against the bar. Drink and glasses went flying. But for a man so clearly under the influence of alcohol and drugs, Lee’s reactions were swift and unexpected. A fist flew into Ruairidh’s face and sent him crashing backwards over a table. I could hear my own voice screaming above others raised in anger and protest.

Ruairidh was on his feet quickly, blood pouring from his nose, and he hurled himself at Lee. Both men staggered backwards until they fell together to the floor, Ruairidh on top, each trying to punch the other, but too close to land blows of any account.

Cornell tried to pull Ruairidh off and his hat went flying. The Evelyn Waugh boys shrank back into the crowd of drinkers which had gathered quickly around the fight.

I was screaming over and over, ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it!’ It was like a playground scrap between two twelve-year-olds. As Lee got to his knees Ruairidh landed a blow full in his gut and vomit exploded from Lee’s mouth all over the floor.

Then loud male voices cut above the uproar. Two large uniformed policemen dragged the brawlers apart and hauled them both to their feet. A huge, shaven-headed barman slammed a baseball bat on to the counter top and bellowed, ‘You’re barred!’

Everything had happened so quickly, blown up from nowhere to flat-out warfare, that there had been no time for thinking. For considered, rational responses.

Now, after hours to dwell on events in a featureless interview room in Shoreditch police station, Ruairidh was still seething, but silent. At first I had wept, but the time for tears was long past. All I felt now was anger and regret.

It turned out that the police station in Shepherdess Walk was just a stone’s throw from the pub where we had been drinking, which is why police had arrived on the scene so quickly. We had been separated from Lee and the rest, and statements taken. After which we had been left to stew for what seemed an interminable length of time.

The light outside was starting to fade in the late afternoon when a shirtsleeved sergeant opened the door and nodded his head towards the exterior. ‘Okay, you two, hop it.’

I rose uncertainly. ‘You mean we can go?’

‘Yes, go. As in depart. Leave.’

‘But... what’s happening? Are we being charged?’

‘Nope.’ The big sergeant looked less than happy about it. ‘Mr Blunt has already made reparations to the landlord of the pub. No one’s pressing any charges. Though I’d like to throw you all in a cell somewhere for wasting our bloody time.’ He jerked his head again over his shoulder. ‘Go on, go!’ Money, it appeared, could fix almost anything.

Outside we walked down the steps straight into a crowd of reporters and photographers. Flashes popped in the gloom of the dying day. There was no sign of Lee or his friends. Only a clamour of voices punctuated by the flashing of the cameras.

‘What happened, mate?’

‘Who hit who?’

‘Where’s Blunt?’

‘What started the fight?’

I wanted just to go, to push past them without a word and find a taxi at the road end. But Ruairidh was still eaten up by his anger, face bruised and bloody. He was determined to have his say. ‘We’re just a young company from the Scottish islands,’ he said. ‘Ranish Tweed. Trying to make a living. We very nearly bankrupted ourselves supplying Lee Blunt with the cloth he wanted for his Clearances runway show. And now he won’t pay us for it. The man who’s going to be the next head designer at Givenchy!’

I drew breath involuntarily. This hadn’t even been announced yet. Pens scribbled in the dying light. But Ruairidh wasn’t finished.

‘A bloody millionaire. So tanked up on coke and vodka that when we ask him for our money, he attacks us. His hands round my wife’s throat.’

One of the reporters said, ‘When you say coke you mean cocaine?’

‘Yes. And God knows what else.’ Ruairidh snorted. ‘The bastard’s happy enough to pay for the damage done to the pub, but he still won’t pay us.’

The tabloids were full of it the next day. Front-page headlines. About the fight in the pub, Ruairidh’s rant outside the police station. One photograph of his bloodied face was captioned, Lee Blunt’s own version of the Highland Clearances. Even the broadsheets carried the story, and the consequences of it all followed swiftly. Givenchy, the day after, announced a young Italian designer as their new in-house head of design. No mention was made of Lee. And it was clear that the couture giant wanted nothing to do with the violent, drug-crazed British designer, as one lurid headline had labelled him.

It was the end of a short, sweet relationship, and Lee Blunt’s path and ours never crossed again.

Until now.