Page 5 of Meet me at the Seaside Cottages

‘NOSE-GARDENING!’

‘You can’t be too picky.’

‘Tellhimthat.’

Lish smiles, but moves on.

‘Is that Radge Jack?’

It is indeed the famously grumpy local groundsman. He is posing with a dog, which obviously someone has told him is the right thing to do for a dating profile, except that the way the photograph is angled, the dog is enormous and he looks absolutely tiny, as if he’s going to ride the dog like a horse.

‘I didn’t know Jack was looking for a girlfriend,’ says Janey. ‘I thought he hated all humans. That’s how he behaves, anyway. My God, these are slim pickings. Please. Please just show me somebody I don’t know.’

‘Everyone is famous in a small town,’ says Lish. ‘And Carso is such a very, very, very small town.’

*

Amsan and Milton spot them and appear with their trays. ‘Why are you hiding over here?’ says Amsan immediately, putting down her passive-aggressively large bowl of salad and oversized Stanley water bottle. ‘Are you doing something weird like going on dating apps or something?’

‘No,’ says Janey hastily.

‘Good,’ says Amsan. ‘Because my Yasmin put a profile up on one,against my advice, and she wrote as her last line in her description, “Also I have a tail.”’

Janey is confused.

‘She just wanted to see if men read to the end of the bios or just went by the photos.’

‘And . . .?’

Lish blinks and says, ‘Don’t tell me. Not a single man asked her if she actually had a tail.’

‘Not a single one,’ says Amsan smugly, and cracks open her Tupperware as if this settles the matter.

‘Oh, God,’ says Janey. ‘This just gets worse and worse.’

‘You said—’ begins Lish.

‘I know what I said!’ says Janey. ‘That’s before I got so old!’

‘You said, in the depths of divorce misery, during which we were all extremely patient and sympathetic, you may recall . . . ’

‘I do,’ says Janey. She does.

‘ . . . that once you were properly in your new house, we could do this . . . Has Essie seen the house, by the way?’

Janey shrugged. ‘Oh, you know Essie. She’ll probably send me something expensive and tasteful.’

Lish nods sympathetically as if she understands, but she doesn’t really. Her kids still live in Carso; Willoughby is the pharmacist; Emma is expecting.

‘She never tells me anything,’ says Janey, trying to make a joke of it. ‘She talks to Al more. I am glad she’s happy. I am. Honestly. It’s only my repulsive old neck that’s giving me all the grief. And being fifty-five when every bit of me that isn’t the mirror is absolutely convinced I’m thirty-five.’

‘Write that you have a tail,’ instructs Amsan. ‘Yasmin got all the no-strings guys.’

Janey groans and lets her head slip to her desk. She gets salad cream in her hair and decides it counts as a conditioning mask.

5

It has been a long day, and Janey is happy to get home to the row oftiny stonecottages, which look as if they were built like an afterthought, a sentencepetering out.

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