Page 59 of Meet me at the Seaside Cottages

He smiles to see her laughing.

‘Oh, goodness, we called him Bokie Jamesie for ages. Oh, God.’ She puts her hand to her mouth. ‘We were terrible.’

He crouches, letting the puppies squirm over his hands, dropping them when they started to nip.

‘I can’t imagine you as a naughty schoolgirl,’ he says, and Janey is suddenly conscious that the laundry room is not huge, and is very warm, with heated dryer rails – oh, the luxury – and she suddenly finds she has gone pink and begs herself not to have a hot flush, not now, of all times, please.

‘I wasn’t!’ she protests. ‘I was very well behaved!’

‘Were you a big swot?’

‘Well, I wasn’t a big enough swot to go toarchitect school, no,’ she says. ‘Where did you grow up anyway?’

‘St Andrews,’ he says.

‘Oh, my God, that’s swot capital of the world!’

‘Well, quite.’

‘Why aren’t you wearing a diamond-pattern jumper, in fact?’

He smiles. ‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘And your trousers should be red—’

‘Please, please can we not start on my trousers again?’

He looks around then opens a unit in the sideboard, inside of which are piled lots of towels, all a soft grey.

‘That is the most anal thing I have ever seen,’ says Janey, then regrets even referring to the ‘a’ word.

‘What, owning towels?’

‘Owning them all the same colour.’

‘Why would you own different-coloured towels? How does that make you . . . whatever.’

He obviously doesn’t want to say that word either.

‘Well, you have some daft beach towels . . . and some from an old place that are so worn through they’re super-soft and comfortable and dry really well and . . . I don’t think I’ve ever thrown a towel away.’

‘Fascinating,’ he says, pulling two from the bottom of the pile.

‘No!’ says Janey. ‘They’re going to get ruined! The pups will mess them all up.’

‘They’retowels.’

Janey would offer to go home and get some of her old ones – she has some right shockers, it is true, even though she did her best at the clearout. She couldn’t get rid of the dinosaur towel Al wore all summer for a year when he was four, in lieu of actual clothes, his scaly tail swinging behind him wherever he went. Plus it was useful for wrapping your hair in, as long as nobody was there to see, obviously, which generally nobody was apart from Essie, and she wouldn’t notice her mother if she walked down the stairs wearing a Joan Collins turban festooned with diamonds and grew an extra foot.

‘We need newspapers too,’ says Janey. ‘Cor, I haven’t bought a paper for ages.’

‘Not even the Sundays? I love the Sundays.’

Janey realises she used to love the Sunday papers too. Then, recently, they started to get her down: so full of films she will never watch, music she will never hear, recipes she will never try . . . With a start she sees it for what it truly was: a slump, a real slump, when everything seemed so gloomy, when she lost so much fun, so much joy in the normal things of everyday life. Everything must have faded to grey.

‘Oh, yeah,’ she says, quietly. ‘I kind of assumed people just buy them for puppy-training these days; that’s what’s keeping the industry going.’

‘I used to have a paper round,’ says Lowell.

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