Page 51 of Meet me at the Seaside Cottages

Wee Jim comes up the stairs with a full bag of sausage rolls, whereupon the tiny dogs start yipping. He gives some to Smokey and the rest of them go bananas.

‘You wean them on Weetabix, not pasties,’ says Janey.

‘We have to move them,’ says Essie.

‘Has he even been in to see them?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘A dog-hater.’

‘A dog-hater with a big garden,’ says Essie.

‘Yeah, maybe he doesn’t want dogs digging anything up,’ says Janey, and Essie makes a confused face. ‘I’ll go and see him.’

‘Did you not swap numbers? Are you, like, one hundred?’

‘We just forgot,’ says Janey, refusing to mention that actually Lowell had offered to give her his number and she hadn’t had her glasses on and had been too vain to pull them out as her nice ones were in her handbag and all that was in her other bag were the 1970s serial killer ones she’d bought in an emergency one day at a petrol station, and she really didn’t want him to see her in those, so she’d faked taking down his telephone number, assuming she’d get hold of it later, then completely forgetting to do that. ‘You’re right, he’s got plenty of space in his garden. I’ll talk to him. You coming?’

Dwight has taken his shirt off to shovel crap out of the kitchen into the big black bin outside. Goodness, thinks Janey. Wee Dwight. It feels rather indecent to be looking at someone she knew as a boy, but this doesn’t seem to have stopped Essie. He isn’t large, but he is wiry, and his muscles are firm and incredibly well defined. He’s brown from being outdoors; a thin trickle of sweat is running down his hairless chest.

‘I’ll just go myself,’ says Janey, but Essie hasn’t heard a word she just said.

*

In fact Janey finds Lowell outside too, in the beautiful scruffy wildflower garden. His early azaleas are out and they are big and red and glorious. He isn’t topless, though. Janey finds herself wondering idly what that would be like. The opposite of Dwight, probably. But broad; she likes that in a man. Colin’s shoulders had sloped. She’d kidded herself he had other qualities. She wonders if Lowell is hairy, considering how much hair he has on his head. She likes a hairy chest, even though Essie thinks they are an offence against all that is holy, like all of her generation. Hmm. She tries to find something neutral to say that won’t betray what’s on her mind.

‘Nice azaleas,’ says Janey, just as he stands up, wearing a rather tattered old straw hat and says, ‘What?’ and she wishes she hadn’t.

‘Oh, hello,’ he says, blinking slightly and rubbing his hands on a very old holey gardening jumper. Possible ex-rugby player, although his eyes both point in the same direction, so possibly not.

He mistakes Janey’s distracted imaginings for disapproval. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m wearing gardening clothes.’

‘You should see what some people turn up to my surgery in,’ says Janey, truthfully. ‘So. We have to talk about . . . ’

‘Oh, my God, the dogs. Of course. Sorry. I meant to get down and check on them and then . . . work . . . and . . . ’

He doesn’t sound terribly convincing and they both know it.

‘Well,’ he says, looking around his lovely wild garden. It isn’t, Janey is realising, the mess she’d thought when she first approached it. In fact it has been allowed to grow in its own distinct order: flowers, rows of vegetables, with ratcheted green leaves; some strawberry plants under nets. The field beyond the grey stone rear of the house has been left to run as a wild meadow, and Janey can see deer cropping away at the end of it.

‘Wow,’ she says.

‘I know, aren’t they beautiful?’ says Lowell, following her gaze towards the deer. ‘They’ll come and eat fruit out of your hand.’

‘Ah,’ she says. ‘You do know I’m Alasdair Munroe’s mother?’

His eyebrows rise. ‘I was not aware of that, no. The deer-killer.’

‘Culler,’ says Janey. ‘There’s a difference.’

A young stag bucks around the green grass, revelling, Janey thinks, in simply being alive on such a beautiful day; in being able to tear around so fast and jump so high. It feels like nothing but joy.

‘Well, anyway,’ says Janey, ‘we have different animal problems to talk about. I need to move the pups over here.’

Lowell stretches out his back, then nods.

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘This is all my fault.’ He looks around his garden. ‘Well, I should probably say goodbye to all this. They’ll ruin it, won’t they?’

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