Page 10 of The Women at Ocean's End

‘Oh, sorry, forgive me, what terrible manners, here I am sitting in your kitchen, drinking tea, and we haven’t even been properly introduced. I’m Rosalind Stokes, Ros for short, I’m what most of the islanders would call a blow-in. For now, I’m staying in the ranger’s cottage while Max is having his treatment on the mainland.’

‘Of course, Jay told me about you. You came last summer with a bunch of students and then, when they all headed back to college, you offered to take up the post to help out…’ Constance said, tapping the table because sometimes the little things she remembered gave her the greatest pleasure.

‘That’s it in a nutshell.’ Ros smiled. ‘And this is the famous novelist’s villa, isn’t that right, but you’re not Maggie Macken, are you?’

‘Dear me, goodness no, that was my mother – if she was alive now, she’d be heading towards a hundred and twenty years old. I’m not even nearly that age!’ Constance replied. ‘No, I’m Constance, just Constance,’ she said with a little pride, because it was nice to hear a young person had heard about her mother.

‘It must be a wonderful place to live.’ Ros sighed and she glanced towards the huge kitchen window that looked out across the Atlantic. ‘That’s some view.’

‘Sometimes, but you never forget, the ocean has two sides to it. It’s picturesque all right but it’s bleak and savage also…’ she had seen both sides of it.

‘In summer it has to be stunning from here.’ Ros craned her neck to look out across the garden again. ‘This place must have been wonderful for summer gatherings; I can just imagine it filled with people all talking about books and sipping champagne while the sun set.’ She smiled dreamily and Constance wondered if they weren’t both in similar boats even if the choppy seas had always convinced her that hers was the only single manned craft on the water.

6

Heather

It was the worst possible timing. Heather looked at the envelope on the table before her. She had folded the letter which confirmed her decree absolute and placed it inside. There was no point reading through those words again, she knew them off by heart now.Final Judgement, marriage contract, set aside, altogether unconnected– that was the bones of it. The divorce had been an age ago, her solicitor had only now got around to sending out the paperwork. He might not even have sent it out yet, had it not been for the fact that the second letter was far more pressing. Her mother’s will; there’d be no surprises there, but still she couldn’t open that today, there was only so much anyone could take in one day. Later. She placed it on the table, standing to attention, as if there was any danger she might forget it was there. Heather wiped a tear from her cheek. It was senseless to cry over something she knew was the right thing for both her and her now ex-husband.

Today, even if it made absolutely no sense at all, she wanted more than anything else the arms of her parents around her. It was ridiculous, she couldn’t remember the last time her mother had comforted her; as a child, all of that had been from her father, a gentle bear of a man who smelled of cigarettes and hard work. Now, on the air, she thought she caught a whiff of lily of the valley. She found that comforting in a way: Constance Macken’s scent.

Old Constance was probably long gone now and that gorgeous house they had by the sea. Funny, how she remembered it so clearly. Of course, if they were on Pin Hill, it was down to Constance to make everything better with a kiss and a hug. Suddenly, Heather craved a soothing voice and the feeling that she was unconditionally loved by one person in the world. It was crazy; she had never had a bond like that with her own mother. If anything, she always felt Dotty only tolerated her, never that she actually loved her. It was the drink, she’d always known it. As the years had crept past, Heather had found herself building up a relationship with her mother that succeeded best in short bursts, in steering conversations only through trivial topics and never making requests that required any real emotional support. It seemed to Heather that Dotty had long ago sunk into an all-absorbing bitterness, so it was hard to last for much longer than a half an hour in company that required anything approaching kindness.

And yet, for all the shallowness of their relationship, today, with her divorce papers in her hands, Heather felt as if she needed her mother more acutely than she’d ever needed her before.

Except, of course, it was too late now. She couldn’t even face going back to the house. The last time she was there had discombobulated her completely. She wondered now if her mother had known she was going to die. Certainly, there was a feeling of sparseness to the place, as if she’d tipped every bit of old rubbish that had always hidden in corners. There was no evidence of a lifelong drinking habit to be seen anywhere in the house. She’d rung Carmelita, who seemed to think she was bonkers. ‘Bottles? But there are no bottles,’ Carmelita had said in her broken English. ‘Your mother hasn’t taken a drink in almost a full year.’ Heather couldn’t understand it, her mother had finally given up drinking? That was something she hadnever expected to happen. Indeed, now she was gone, it probably would always feel as if someone had made it up; like a fairy story, she wanted to believe but it was just too fantastical to be true.

She gazed at her reflection in the window opposite. Forty-nine years of age. Lines across her forehead and creases around her eyes had etched themselves into her face without her noticing over the last decade. She hardly knew the woman staring back at her and, this morning, she felt every one of those forty-nine years.

She was too old to procrastinate. She needed to make a plan to get on with her life. It was official now. She was no longer married. Her business was sold. She had nowhere to call home, unless you counted the little terraced house she’d grown up in and, somehow, that had not felt like home in a very long time.

Desperate to find some anchor or direction, she made an appointment with a life coach, pushing aside the second letter from her solicitor for now.

A life coach, no less.

And after Heather had offloaded all her concerns and detailed as much of her life to date as she could, the woman just sat there and looked at her and said simply:

‘So, it’s time to make a plan. It’s time to move forward.’ And she had the audacity to smile as if this was somehow a ground-breaking revelation.

‘Of course I need to move on,’ Heather snapped impatiently, ‘but the thing is, I don’t know where to move on to next.’ And she felt that familiar swell of emotion rise up in her, where she didn’t know if she wanted to cry or kick something with sheer frustration. ‘That’s why I came here…’ she said then, examining the woman as if she might give up some secrets just by close inspection.

‘I think, deep down, you know exactly what you need to do next.’ The woman smiled again and Heather only felt more infuriated with her.

‘Actually, I don’t, I really, really don’t,’ Heather said. ‘That’s why I came here, it’s why I filled out that stupid bloody sheet and it’s why I’m paying you over a hundred quid an hour to give me advice that I can actually use.’

‘The purpose of today is not for me to tell you what to do, Heather, I explained this already. It’s so you can uncover what it is that gives you most joy.’

‘Oh, God, seriously…’ And Heather realised she was going round in circles and this wasn’t helping one bit.

‘Seriously, if you don’t know what to do yet, then just do what you have to and a path will become obvious as you move through life.’

And for that, Heather handed over a hundred pounds and stepped out into the spring sunshine on a London street feeling even more at sea than before. That was when she spotted the bookshop across the road.

It was just a door really, with a very narrow window to the side and a small sign on the footpath: ‘Second-hand Books’. She was attracted to it immediately; since the divorce and selling the flat, she had found herself strangely drawn to other people’s belongings. It was funny, because although she’d been a voracious reader over the years, she’d never been one to hold onto books. There hadn’t been one bookcase in the flat over which to pick out what would be hers and what would eventually go in the huge crates that had finally taken Philip from her home and her world.

‘Hello.’ The old man hardly lifted his eyes from the paperback he was absorbed in when Heather walked into the shop. It was a tiny space, with books old and new in every corner. They were crammed to the ceiling on overflowing shelves and spilling outof boxes haphazardly placed on the floor, what little there was of it, and permeating everything the smell of old books: woody; vanilla; utopia. Heather inhaled it and thought she couldn’t remember the last time she’d smelled that faint aroma since her childhood.

The old man left her to look around without interference. It was that sort of place, a small disorderly corner of London to browse and lose half an hour or maybe more, among books other people no longer wanted. He seemed oblivious to her and even that was strangely comforting. There was no real order to the place, no point coming in looking for the latest thriller, because it was unlikely you’d find it here, unless someone had dropped it in by accident.

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