Page 17 of Meet me at the Seaside Cottages

And she digs out the baklava Abdul’s grateful parents had pressed into her hands as she’d left, and boils the kettle, and puts Kirsty and Phil on the television, and they pretend everything is fine, though the ways in which they both feel they are failing are like pins in the sofa.

12

It is a sweet-scented, settled evening in Carso, after a winter full of towering storms, great sweeping gusts of snow and rain pounding them relentlessly from the west, gathering fury over the Atlantic. There is a bleak excitement to it, Janey always feels: to watch the waves leap up, higher than the walls of the esplanade; to see the ocean boil in fury – it’s fun if you’re properly dressed, and on your way home to your nice wee cosy house from which you can already see the woodsmoke coming; then it’s nice to marvel at the extraordinary power of the sea, as the windmills out in the water whizz endlessly, harnessing power under noisy skies. It’s exciting, when it has a nice hot cup of tea and a biscuit at the end of it. Not so much when you have to go and fish in it for thirty-six hours, as Janey’s father had done, once upon a time.

But tonight it feels as if the winter gods have blown themselves out, at least for now: the evening is soft and gentle, with just a breath of chill beneath it; there is a sense on the air that summer will come, a promise often made in Scotland, in its ravishing springtime, even if this is not always fulfilled in its rainy July (as many a bride, telling everyone it really didn’t matter, it was the people who were there that counted, could attest).

Janey has made a decision. She can’t keep on like this with Essie; they will end up rerunning her teenage years, and surelyneither of them wants to do that. Even though they are theoretically both adults, she knows it doesn’t feel like that to Essie, holed up in her room with Pot Noodles and wearing her dressing gown all day.

And it is the night of the Carso quiz. They have ditched the unreliable needle gauges after a fight nearly broke out, and the rounds about identifying aeroplanes and airports by their codes after Morag MacIntyre and her grandfather Ranald, who run the tiny planes that hop around the local islands, gleefully cleaned up every single time. It is a very popular village event, but not without its controversies.

Suggesting Essie just come along to the quiz worked precisely not at all, so Janey is going to have to bring in the big guns: Essie’s beloved brother Alasdair, who takes life lightly, who is always fun and popular, and who is just, in general, easier; absolutely not, as Essie screeched at her mother many times during her adolescence, her mother’s favourite, but he is certainly easy to get along with. It is almost impossible to say no to him.

And so it proves. When Janey gets home from work that Thursday, she hears something she hasn’t heard in a while: Essie is laughing.

‘Come on, sis,’ Al is saying, both of them hanging out in the tiny kitchen in an easy way that makes Janey’s heart soar. ‘Come on. It will be the formidable triumph that starts us on the road back fromPyjama Land.’

‘Maybe I like Pyjama Land,’ Essie is grumbling, clutching her cup of tea.

‘No, you don’t,’ says Al. ‘You think you look like a cute American college student in a television show. But you look like a depressed person who’s nearly in their late twenties.’

If it were Janey saying that, she’d have had her head bitten off, Janey thinks, as she sticks her bag down in the kitchen.

‘That’s what I’mgoing for!’

‘Hey, you guys!’ says Janey. She always thinks, with secret pride, that the fact that her children get on means she couldn’t . . . it couldn’t have been all bad. Of course they’d had to rely on each other maybe more during the divorce . . . no, she wasn’t going to think like that. They had a lovely relationship. Maybe, just once, she could stop exhausting herself with everything she’d done wrong and enjoy one of the few things that had gone well.

Al turns to her with a grin. ‘Hello, Janey.’

‘Just call me Mum, thanks. Mummy is also acceptable.’

When they’d been younger they had thought calling her by her Christian name was utterly hilarious, and Al has never quite shaken the habit, even though he’s here in his work clothes, looking like a proper grown-up. He works for the council, managing the deer populations, which is a euphemism, he has to point out quite often, for killing all the deer before they strip every last leaf in every last forest and decide to move on to eating babies.

‘Is Zara not coming?’ she asks pleasantly. She tries to keep a handle on Al’s posh girlfriends, and knows Jacinta has passed by the wayside, but they come and go so regularly. Sometimes she worries about Al messing about too much with his busy ‘hot kilted woodman’ internet nonsense (thank God Lish had set the parameters firmly out of his age range); sometimes she thought it was amusing, and sometimes she thought it was his own way of dealing with the divorce, which, while worrying, wasn’t quite as bad as Essie’s territorial warfare.

‘She’s in Klosters,’ he says, then adding, ‘That’s in Switzerland?’ for Essie’s benefit.

‘Too soon,’ says Essie, frowning.

‘Well, you can’t come to quiz like that,’ Al says decisively to Essie, simultaneously kissing his mother on the top of her head.

‘Good,’ says Essie. ‘Because I’m not actually coming at all?’

‘Yes, you are,’ says Al. ‘We need you on young person stuff. Everyone else going is a gazillion years old.’

‘Oi!’ says Janey. Then she wrinkles her nose. ‘I just feel like a gazillion years old. That’s not the same thing at all.’

‘Well, if it helps, you don’t look more than a billion, billion and two, tops.’

Essie sighs.

‘There’ll be wine,’ says Al.

‘There’ll be the kind of wine pubs stock up here,’ says Essie.

‘You are such asnobnow. Oh, my God, I knew it!’

‘That’s not fair,’ says Essie. ‘It’s not being a snob if the wine literally says, “Product of Several Countries” on the label.And “Do Not Feed to Livestock”.’

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