Page 46 of The Women at Ocean's End

‘I can. Certainly, if you’ve found a whole set of the books and… why wouldn’t you see if something can be done about managing the estate?’ the woman said. She’d told Heather she was madlyjealous of her, how she’d love to sink into a chair and read one Maggie Macken novel after another, until the whole collection was finished.

‘If your son can hook us up with a publisher, that’s exactly what you’ll be able to do.’ Heather winked at Constance, who was sitting in the wingback chair opposite. Ros was crouching down on the fender before the fireplace. They were all eager to see if something might be done to resurrect the Maggie Macken legacy.

‘Well, what’s stopping you? Give him a call, tell him you were talking to me. I mentioned the books to him weeks ago, but I can fill him in on them more if you want to talk to him first. I’ll lend him my copies so he can get an idea of the books,’ Bea said and she sounded almost as excited as Heather felt. ‘The only thing is, I have to warn you, much and all as I might love to see them in print, he can’t take every client who contacts him, you know?’ She was trying to prepare them for disappointment.

‘It’s okay, I’ve read the numbers.’ They were depressing. ‘They get sent thousands of manuscripts every year and their agency sometimes picks only one or two to represent.’

‘Yes, it’s a tough life for anyone wanting to break into it, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give it a shot and I’ll be rooting for you on this end,’ Bea said in that jolly way that had meant so much to Heather that day she had run into Philip and Charlotte, when Bea – a virtual stranger – had come to her rescue when she’d needed it the most.

The phone call to Gregg Hardiman went straight to his voicemail. Heather left a short, business-like message.

‘You should have mentioned his mother,’ Constance said when Heather put the phone down.

‘Seriously, Constance, have a little faith. He’s going to want to take this on not just because his mother tells him to, but because it’s absolutely worth taking on.’

‘Hmm,’ Constance said and Heather wanted to reach out and put her arms around her and tell her not to worry. Of course, she knew that securing the services of a literary agent, never mind actually getting to the point of having the books republished, was not an easy ride. But, what was it they said, if you’re not in, you can’t win? Well, Heather had every intention of doing her best to make it happen, if she could.

It must have been the longest seventeen hours in the history of mankind, but the following morning, Heather’s phone rang. She was alone in Maggie’s study when it burst into life and almost gave her a heart attack. She had already catalogued the novels and now she was working her way through a box filled with short stories, all stapled together, with rusted edges holding each story in place on thin and faded paper.

‘Hi, Heather?’ said the voice on the other end of the line.

She didn’t recognise the number, but when she’d seen the London code and her stomach flipped, she’d known it had to be Gregg Hardiman. Although, of course, in the next split second she realised it could have been anyone, from Philip to any number of estate agents she’d left her name with when she had been thinking of buying a new flat after the sale of their lovely home.

‘Yes, that’s me, hi…’ She paused, afraid to hope that it might be the call they were waiting for.

‘It’s Gregg, Gregg Hardiman, you rang me yesterday on my mobile. Sorry it’s taken me until now to get back to you, but it was back-to-back meetings yesterday and…’ He waited a beat. Time was money. ‘My mother is very excited about this writer you are trying to relaunch. Maggie Macken?’

‘Yes.’ Was she trying to relaunch her? That made Heather seem as if she knew what she was doing, and truly she had no idea about anything to do with publishing.

‘I readThe Island Homelast night, I think we should talk…’ he said and maybe he continued to speak after this, but Heather was too excited to hear much more, apart from bits of sentences that had words likerightsandpublishers,book fairsandinternational agents.

‘I’m actually helping her daughter.’ Heather needed to explain. ‘Maggie’s daughter? Constance Macken. She owns the whole estate, but she’s quite elderly. I can’t see her wanting to travel to London, to sign contracts or…’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that, Heather, if we end up signing with the right publisher, they’ll travel to the ends of the earth to make sure that everything is just perfect. I have a feeling that the Maggie Macken books could find a home sooner rather later.’ He asked for the full catalogue and anything they had on hand relating to her old agency or her old publishing contracts. As luck would have it, only the previous evening, among the papers in one of the boxes Constance had been going through, she had come across a pile of documents that Maggie had tied together. Each and every contract that she had signed over the course of her career had been carefully filed away.

‘I can email them to you,’ Heather offered, because it was just a question of scanning them on her phone and scooting them off. ‘I can have them with you by tomorrow…’

‘That’s a lot more than I expected,’ he said. Even though he sounded young enough to be just about leaving school, she had a feeling that Constance would like him. If he was anything like his mother, Heather liked him already. ‘I’ll ring you as soon as I get a look at them, yes?’

‘Perfect,’ Heather said and she danced all the way to the end of the garden, where Ros and Constance were watching huge gannets fly back towards land from their morning’s fishing on the water.

31

Ros

Heather had advised Ros not to turn down the job offer on the mainland immediately. Instead, she encouraged her to keep her options open – a true businesswoman, she was so wise; Ros was grateful to call her a friend.

And it was a good thing she hadn’t turned it down, because it was increasingly looking like her only option. She had tried everywhere on the island she could think of –as she had guessed, the hotel would be employing the same kids it had the year before and they hadn’t any spare rooms to give out anyway. She’d tried every single little business on the island. There was nothing she wouldn’t turn her hand to. In the end, one of the bars offered her a few evening hours, but not enough to live on and there was, she had to face up to it, nowhere to rent even if she did decide to stay.

‘You know you’re welcome to move in here.’ Constance had said it more than once. Ros would have loved to stay with Constance and Heather, but without some sort of proper job, she’d feel as if she was just hanging around. It was all very well doing odd jobs about the place, but if Constance came into serious money, all those jobs would be done in a day or two, with a crew of workmen who would bring in big machinery and sort out not just the garden, but every corner of the house too. And anyway, she wasn’t that brilliant at maintenance jobs really: every little task she took on, she had to learn to do fromYouTube. It was amazing what you could learn though. She’d fixed in a pane of glass, replaced a kitchen tile, cleared away the garden with Heather’s help, mended the crazy paving, so many things she’d never realised she could do. Now, she’d done them and the place looked so much better than it had that first day she’d arrived.

‘Two weeks. He’ll be here in two weeks.’

She’d had an email arrive in her inbox as she’d been coming back from a rewetting project that had been started a few years earlier. Today, she recorded that a number of pairs of birds that had been all but extinct on the west coast of Europe had returned for a second year’s breeding. There were, in spite of her own worries, still reasons to be optimistic about life, she told herself.

‘So, I’ll have to have everything moved out by then.’ Not that she had much, not really, but since she’d come here, it amazed her that for the first time in her life, she had purchased things like her own pillows and a really decent frying pan. She had a collection of wildlife books and a painting by a local artist of Ocean’s End, in its glory days. She’d bought the painting – a set of two – at the church fete, giving one to Constance and keeping one for herself. It was momentous, the idea that she’d actually bought something to hang on a wall, as if there was a feeling in her soul that there could be a semblance of permanence about her home here on the island.

‘Anything could happen in two weeks,’ Heather said brightly that evening as she dished out lamb stew into bowls for dinner.

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