Page 14 of Meet me at the Seaside Cottages

‘Oh, darling. You loved that place,’ says Janey.

‘I did,’ says Essie.

‘You made it lovely. Was Persephone not more understanding?’ asks Janey.

‘No!’ says Essie. ‘She wasn’t understanding at all! Which is odd, considering I was never there, did all my washing up, and never made a mess. It was a bit mean,’ she adds.

‘It was,’ says Janey. ‘I thought she was meant to be the glamorous laid-back hippy type.’

‘Me too!’ says Essie, suddenly sounding about fourteen years old. ‘Apparently I was interrupting her yoga practice.’

‘Well, you won’t be interruptingmyyoga practice,’ says Janey. ‘Because I think it’s boring and keep forgetting to do it,’ she adds.

‘And you don’t have any space to do it,’ sniffles Essie, as Janey feels in her pocket for a tissue. Like all ENT specialists, she gets through an extraordinary amount.

‘Well, exactly,’ says Janey.

Essie tries to stop crying. ‘It’s very good for your mental health,’ she says.

‘So’s a good cry,’ says Janey, wiping her daughter’s face. ‘Come on, we’re too late for me to cook. Chips it is.’

11

They both set out with such good intentions. They really do.

Janey wants to wrap her baby girl up in a blanket of love; protect her from the world until she’s ready to take it on again. She buys her favourite foods (‘full of additives’ apparently), digs out their old favourite Meg Ryan films – problematic now – and is as soft and gentle as she can be.

But there is a fundamental misunderstanding between them: Gen X Janey has always worked in an environment where they are short-staffed and desperately in need of more people, terribly overstretched. She can’t really envisage what it’s like to not be able to get a job, not really. She doesn’t understand why Essie can’t just apply for a few things or do something else for a bit. She doesn’t understand about internships and who you know, and Essie has given up trying to explain.

Essie is still begging Connor to help her, but his firm is very hush-hush high net worth and she just doesn’t have the experience – or, she suspects Tris thinks, the background to work there. Also Essie is trying to keep from her mum how little money she has, which was to say, negative money: huge credit card debts. She is completely and utterly skint, despite having been making double her mum’s salary plus bonus.

Janey tries not to ask why Essie appears to be so skint, in case it elicits a huff, which it will. She isn’t sure what else to do, and feels as though she’s panicking as Essie sinks from view into her phone and her laptop, an endless black hole that never ends, scrolling and typing; every time Janey asks if she wants to go out/take a walk/go for a drink she is greeted with ‘I’m BUSY’ and some noisy typing in a way that is impossible for her to refute. Meanwhile, all the towels have vanished. Also Essie has messaged her dad on the off-chance that he’d say,Don’t worry, darling, come over whenever you like, I’ve got a room for you and here’s the deposit for a new flat in Edinburgh for you to get back on your feet.But he hasn’t. He’s muttered about things being very busy and Lori’s mum (who isn’t much older than Colin) wanting to move in, and Logan going through ‘a bit of a stage’. It’s tough on Essie to not be able to think of her dad being the good guy all the time. The idea that her mum might have been right has exactly the opposite effect than it might have; it makes her even more trapped and resentful.

‘I am doing mybest,’ Janey says at lunch, as everyone eyes her up expectantly for a mother–daughter update. She pokes depressingly at the salad bowl she has chosen. It’s too cold outside for salad. Salad is for being drenched in lemon juice sitting outside under an umbrella somewhere. She hasn’t been overseas since the pandemic; she doesn’t know anyone living in a one-salary household who has. What she really wants is a pie.

Lish, who is having a pie, can think of nothing nicer than having her kids round all the time; they only live half a step away. Janey sometimes thinks if Lish could tuck her kids back inside her womb, she would be okay with that too. Milton’s children are mostly in London, and one back in DCR doing wonderful work as a doctor, something which makes him incredibly proud. Few are the hospital doctors who don’t stop,every so often, to pass on some new research or ask the quiet porter how his daughter is doing, and whether there is anything she needs. Much of the NHS is famously wasteful: at the T&C, every unused set of crutches, every nearly out-of-date packet of plaster makes its way to the porter’s lodge, no questions asked.

Amsan understands: as well as the unlucky Yasmin, she has a son whose wife spends a lot of time with her family, who are rather wealthier and have a swimming pool, of all things, in Perthshire, which is ridiculous as basically the whole of Perthshire is more or less an ice rink and it’s just showing off. But it’s undoubtedly the case that when it comes to where the grandchildren want to spend their time, the swimming pool beats, unfortunately, any number of nice nature walks by the water in Carso. Amsan tries to keep her swimming-pool-based bitterness out of her voice, but it’s hard.

‘. . . but she just mopes about the place like she’s fifteen again. And when she was fifteen at least I could give her some advice.’

‘Essie listened to your advice at fifteen?’ asks Amsan.

‘No, of course not,’ admits Janey. ‘Obviously not. But theoretically I knew what the problemmightbe. Whereas I don’t know how you get a job in super-weird clever-clogs finance in Edinburgh!’

She looks around the table but everyone shrugs.

‘I don’t know what anyone in an office does,’ says Lish. ‘I mean, hauling babies out of people – that makes sense as a job description, right? And pushing people about on trolleys?’

‘Exactly. You can see an ambulance in Richard Scarry books,’ says Janey. ‘It’s driven by a cat wearing Lederhosen.’

‘Yeah. But being in offices looking at computers . . . I don’t know what that is.’

Amsan holds up her hazelnut yoghurt. Someone had told Amsan once that hazelnut yoghurt would help you lose weight. Even though this can’t possibly be true, and they work in a building full of scientists who could bear this out, she refuses to believe them. And she really loves hazelnut yoghurt; it’s delicious. Which should have been an obvious clue in the first place, Janey likes to point out, but doesn’t, after the whole ‘Let’s Have a WeightWatchers in the Hospital It’ll Be Fun’ débâcle of 2019.

‘It’s just . . . moving paper about?’

‘I think so,’ says Janey. ‘Only the pieces of paper they move are somehow worth millions, and, if they don’t move them right, the country can’t afford hospitals.’

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