Page 10 of Meet me at the Seaside Cottages

‘Everyone did!’

‘And because it was strapless, all the wedding photos of us that are head and shoulders look like I’m completely naked.’

‘There was quite a lot of . . . hoiking,’ remembers Lish, who’d been chief bridesmaid and had had a sensational time. Janey had been young to get married and all their friends had dressed up as grown-ups who went to weddings – it wasn’t until wedding four or thereabouts that it had stopped being a novelty and could become a bit of a drag – and everyone had got completely steaming but it had still been totally hilarious.

Looking at the dress go up in flames into the autumn sky, with everyone cheering and clinking glasses, Janey had tried to think back and remember the warning signs, the bad portents. But she couldn’t. They had been young, and madly in love. Everyone was happy for them. They knew each other well; they came from similar backgrounds and families. Everything was set up for them to succeed. But they hadn’t.

*

Janey had at first been terrified of living by herself; she had never done it.

But, to her amazement, she’d found that she loved it. Being able to buy food that wasn’t immediately scoffed the second she walked out of the kitchen; having clean, dry towels to hand, and a phone charger that stayed where she left it. Oh, she missed the kids, of course; she still feels sad, some nights, coming home alone, lighting the lamps all by herself.

But when the lamps are lit, and the peat fire is burning merrily in the grate, everything is quiet and peaceful and she cankick back and chat to a friend and decompress her day, or have a couple of people over on the weekends to share a glass of wine. She has taken up knitting and has lively WhatsApp groups watching television shows together, and she cooks for herself or, sometimes, can’t be arsed to cook at all and eats toast on the sofa. She takes long, foaming baths with novels, and avidly follows dog rescue social media.

Apart from Lish haranguing her to date again, for the first time in a very long time it feels as if she is sailing in peaceful waters. After the stormy seas of marital breakdown, children’s adolescence, a ruinous divorce, Colin’s new family . . . all of that.

Okay, she wishes with all her heart that her relationship with her beloved daughter could be better. And there is the menopause being an absolute arsehole at every conceivable moment, and her ever-wrinkling face, dried-out hair and broadening hips. But sometimes Janey feels this is a small price to pay for – at long last – a modicum of peace.

‘Of course, come home, darling!’ she had trilled to Essie on the phone that afternoon. ‘Stay as long as you like!’

9

It’s a chilly morning, as Essie grabs two huge suitcases. How and why did she accumulate so much stuff? Connor has agreed to store the rest of it, which would have been more impressive if he hadn’t snuck the boxes into the cave under the dropped basement under cover of darkness and refused to mention it to Tris. But even so. He’d done it. And here he is.

‘You’ll be back,’ he says, holding her close.

Waverley station is bustling as always, including the Flying Scotsman, the great burgundy steam train, which is leaving on one of its regular tours. A piper stands at the top of a tartan carpet that has been placed for the lucky travellers to walk up. Essie glances at them, feeling envious for once. That train would get her more than halfway home. There was a tiny plane that landed on the local airstrip, but with her bags it would be prohibitive, so the long train journey it was.

‘I know,’ she says. ‘It’ll be good to chill for a bit.’

‘I’ll keep my ears open,’ he says. ‘And I’ll come up soon.’

She looks up into his frank, sweet face. ‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘My mum likes you.’

‘All mums like me,’ he says, and she laughs, because it’s true.

‘Okay, back to my evil capitalist ways,’ he says.

‘Alright, off to chase the wild haggis running one-legged round the glens.’

‘Don’t forget to find a flannel-shirted woodcutter to teach you the true meaning of Christmas.’

She laughs, and kisses his adorable nose one last time, then hauls her bags on to the Inverness train to start the long journey to fifty-eight degrees north. It is a gloomy morning as the train pulls out of Edinburgh, the grey stone of the buildings and the rearing castle above her reflected in the monochromatic sky, so the world resembles a black and white photograph. But as they speed through the tram cuttings and past the Jenners furniture depository and hit the open country the grey starts to dissipate, and soon they are flashing past the lamb-dotted fields on the way to Dunkeld and Aberfeldy, the beautiful towns steeped in the Perthshire countryside, as pretty as a patchwork quilt, and on up as the looming slopes either side of the track grow steeper and the countryside rawer and more expansive, until there is nothing, it feels, but huge looming mountain ranges and dotted farmsteads and the train, piling onwards under a huge northern sky.

Essie meant to spend the journey hunting down job opportunities, and writing humiliatingly chirpy emails to friends in other firms who might hear of any openings, but it is dispiriting work, as every single kilometre sweeps her further and further away from the city she loves, from everything in the life she’s worked so hard to build, and she can barely stop staring out of the window. She checks her messages and it’s her mum asking her if she’d like square sausage casserole for her dinner, which had been her absolute favourite when she was about twelve, and Essie can’t believe, genuinely can’t believe for a second that she is going back. She could have gone and stayed with her dad . . .

She bites her lip awkwardly. She can’t, not really. Lori, the blip who turned out not to be such a blip (she had overheardJaney talking to Lish over a bottle of cheap wine one day), is nice enough, but it’s a very surface kind of nice, lots of smiles showing her very small, neat teeth in a way that her dad thinks is charming – oh, Lori loves everyone, but Essie can see Lori’s constant reckoning of exactly how much time and attention her dad is spending on her: a tally. Anything she and her dad might do just the pair of them – walking the dog, watching science fiction films – Lori now joins them, or insists Logan go too ‘otherwise he fusses’. Fussing is the family word for Logan screaming and punching stuff for hours while everyone desperately tries to placate him.

Her half-brother Logan is cute and everything – he’s a hearty six now, and she and Al had expected they would be very into having a new sibling – but Logan got everything designer and expensive and Lori clearly looked down her nose at anything they brought, and ever since he turned five he has been a football-kit-wearing thug in the making who was liable to go for your shins and doesn’t seem to have grown out of his toddler tantrum stage quite yet. No, staying with her dad would not be a good solution, even if they did have a hot tub. Their new build looks fancy on the outside but on the inside has been badly finished and the walls are paper-thin. And she doesn’t really want to sit in a hot tub with her dad anyway; it’s hardly dignified behaviour. Especially since he complains a lot about his mortgage – hardly encouraging vis-à-vis Essie’s own financial situation – and makes surreptitious efforts to find out how her mum is, and Essie certainly isn’t going to be the go-between.

The train putters along through Aviemore, where all the hearty climbers and the very last of the optimistic spring skiers get out, leaving the carriage nearly empty. It is beautiful, but Essie can’t help feeling sad. She changes at Inverness and goes to get a very large Starbucks, her last chance to have onefor a while, she thinks, glumly contemplating an overlarge cinnamon bun she doesn’t even really want.

The Inverness-to-Thurso stretch, while one of the most picturesque rides in the world, is also extremely long. The train takes four hours to travel eighty miles, so it is a little quicker than it used to be by horse, but not by that much. It is, technically, quicker to fly from Edinburgh to the island of Orkney then to catch the ferry back south to the mainland, but only if you don’t have quite so much luggage.

Oddly, though, the fresh air blowing through the window vents, and the rattling of the old diesel carriages – there are only two – and the changing landscape as they skirt lochs, seaside and mountains, which she had thought would make her more anxious, actually has the opposite effect. As she passes through the familiar, lulling litany of stations – Dingwall, Invergordon, Tain, Lairg, Brora – and, after the many, many sleepless nights of worry and regret, Essie finds herself, quite to her surprise, falling asleep.

10

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