Page 7 of Meet me at the Seaside Cottages

Also, he has possibly a clearer-eyed view of Colin’s behaviour than Essie, who idolised her dad. Colin’s affair knocked thestuffing out of his mum, completely messed up her confidence, and it felt as though his dad then got annoyed with his mum for making him feel bad. They should have broken up years before. And he wishes Essie hadn’t blamed Mum. She can be a right brat about it, even now.

‘Let’s call Essie,’ he suggests.

They do.

She doesn’t answer.

6

It is three weeks later, and Janey is telling herself yet again that she’s not going to ask her daughter, as she drives home from work to the cottage. She has noticed that a For Sale sign has finally gone up on the crumbling cottages beside her. They’re in a terrible state; it’s partly how she was able to just about afford her tiny place next to them. But these were incredibly dilapidated, even if they looked pretty from a distance, or if you squinted. There was glass broken in the windows; cracks running down the outside of the ancient rendering. Old Mrs MacAleese, the last of the family to live in the cottages, hadn’t had the wherewithal to look after them, and living so close to the sea is hard on buildings; hard on everything, the wind and the water and the salt.

But these days, it seems, housing is all anyone talks about. How much will they go for? Will a developer swoop in, splash some grey paint on them and turn them into short-term holiday rentals, which means instead of three families moving to the area to work and grow and have children and support the school, they will get rented a week at a time from May till September by people who drive up in their Land Rovers full of shopping from Waitrose and sit in the garden playing music, sloshing wine and loudly complaining about the midges and the lack of local amenities.

Janey will have to go online and see what they’re on for. Which is a truly shameful habit that she would not confess to anyone she knows, even though she suspects everyone else does it too and in fact Googling how much other people’s houses are worth might be the default for anyone with an address. She doesn’t mention it just in case it’s her being weird, like that time she said she could see what people saw in Jeremy Clarkson and nobody would speak to her for a week. That was when Lish started making the first noises about how she had to get back out there and brought up the whole dating app fiasco.

Janey gets into her wee car, tucking her dark hair behind her ears and trying to make a mental note to pick up some root dye plus something that will tame the frizz . . . Essie would know. Young people know everything about beauty products now, despite the fact that they don’t actually need them. They know about phone filters too, something Janey wished she did. All Essie’s selfies with her friends look like Bratz dolls, not something Janey had anticipated when she bought the pencil cases.

Still, she thinks. She has her car. It has taken her so long to pay off her debts after the divorce, plus Essie’s university, that this is the newest car she has ever owned, or, well, leased at least, and she loves it dearly, even though it is the blandest, most common car on the road, just a wee Kia. But it is hers, and it isn’t constantly terrorising her as to whether it is going to limp through its MOT, and it is, to her constant secret joy, bright red. Colin would have hated it. Every car he has ever had has been silver.

She pootles home from the T&C – their hospital serves a very large area and is called the Town and Country; affectionately known as the T&C, or the Tired and Cranky if you’ve been on a long Saturday night shift. She tries not to be smug that she specialises in audiology – she doesn’t work on call, or Sundays, something all the others, particularly Lish in obstetrics, love toremind her of if she ever dares to complain about anything, as apparently she doesn’t know she was born.

And it is true, she does love it: she mixes up in-hospital appointments with going out into the community, trying to help people do the best they can with what they have; and lots are grateful, and some not so much, but that’s okay too. Some people get given a tough road. She feels she knows a bit about that.

But tonight, the drive, just as the sun is setting, with everything good ahead – long, light nights are coming; they are further north than Copenhagen and Moscow – and the colours of the hills on the single-track roads – there is an A-road, but it is dull and clogged with tourist campers – is beautiful and ever-changing. And if you get stuck behind a tractor, well, you get stuck behind a tractor, and can slow down and enjoy the hedgerows bursting into life, the early swallows swooping down on freshly planted fields looking for a feast, the copses of hardy trees starting to show their newest greens, or the bursts of pinkening sky throwing dramatic shadows through the immaculately planted geometric shapes of the fir trees.

And the earliest lambs are here! Which is troubling, really, as they are very early indeed. But even so: as harbingers of spring, these little creatures never fail to enchant. Today after rainfall there is a large muddy puddle at the bottom of McPherson’s second field, and three brave ones are huddled, leaping over it, watched over by their attentive mamas standing back, looking exactly like women at a playground waiting for their children to give up on the slide before someone gets hurt.

She slows down – there isn’t another car to be seen for miles; ‘rush hour’ is when a timber truck passes through – to watch for a little while. After some tentative baaing, the bravest takes a leap, and lands, with a comically surprised look on its face, right in the middle of the puddle, its immaculate white coat spatteredwith brown.Your mum is going to be very cross with you, she finds herself thinking, stupidly, before moving on again.

She wonders how Essie is. Al has ascertained that she’s lost her job but maybe she’s finding another one really fast? Or has lots of money saved? She was certainly making enough. Janey has asked her how she was getting on but has got the usual one-word answers. She can’t imagine her parents ever did that with her, did they? They saw her all the time anyway. Her mum worried, of course; she never liked Colin. Did she listen? Did she stuff.

The stupid thing is, she remembers being Essie’s age, not feeling terribly attractive, just a trainee nurse, not one of the fun party girls at all: mousy and awkward. She looks back at the photos now and she can see she was perfectly lovely: she had a nice slim figure – they wore proper dress uniforms in those days with the elastic belts, which were so flattering – and shiny hair and that fresh young skin. She was gorgeous! Why didn’t she know it? She was always hiding what she thought were her big thighs. Honestly, she was insane. She should have worn nothing but slip dresses and heels and miniskirts and swimsuits the entire time. Not that that was incredibly conducive to living on the north coast of Scotland, it’s true, but honestly, if she had that figure now she would run about half-naked the entire time and catch her death, who cares?

Of course she tried to tell Essie how gorgeous she was, all the time, but it never quite seemed to work. Essie complained she was trying to control how she dressed or something, and then she put herself into huge hoodies all the time that made her look as if she was incredibly sad about something.

Her Spotify shuffle in the car throws up an old Deacon Blue song Janey didn’t like very much. It’s the weirdest thing, she thought. The songs you absolutely love, well, you’ve playedthem half to death. You can’t remember where you first heard them; you associate them with all the different times in your life because your desert island songs follow you wherever you go, from LPs to cassette tapes, to CDs to Napster – bloody hell, Napster, that makes her feel old – all the way to Spotify.

But the album tracks she didn’t like, the singles she felt weren’t worth her £1.25 at Woolworths – they’re the ones that hurl her straight back into exactly where and who she was when she heard them; in this case, at the school dance, with big Alan, not to be confused with Wee Alan or the Allan with two ‘l’s. She smiles to hear it again, smelling Impulse Black in the air – they don’t make it any more and Essie used to fall out with her if she bought anything that sprayed. But it took her back anyway. And reminded her just how very long ago it was. And how she hopes Essie is making a better fist of it than she did.

*

‘Babe, you are going to be fine.’

It isn’t Connor’s fault, not really. Life has been mostly kind to him, and, as with many people who find life kind and are sunny in return, it works as a virtuous circle. He is finding Essie’s worry concerning, but if everything went wrong for Connor he’d just move back to his parents’ huge house in Perth, or they’d find him something, or someone from that posh school he went to would give him a job.

Essie on the other hand is looking, frantically; nobody is hiring, and Stirling Capital’s move has had a huge effect on the market, as though the big ship has gone down and everyone is scrabbling for the same lifeboats. There are some entry-level accountancy jobs, nothing at all like the fun, fast-paced investment desk in the West End, with its free Nespresso dispenser and fresh orchids on the desk. These jobs are in greatbig industrial estate behemoths, way out beyond the reach of the tram, on the other side of the bypass, and mainly consist of adding up student loan payments.

Everyone, including Connor, assumes she has some savings from her well-paid job.

Everyone is wrong.

Essie can’t believe it herself. Money had always been tight growing up; she had been so excited to find she actually had some. She had needed new clothes and of course there were the minibreaks with Connor, who assumed her family was well-off, more or less, because she had a nice accent; the nights out at trendy George Street nightspots, the Ubers...

And the rent on her beautiful, if tiny apartment, the little raised colony house down by the Water of Leith – where, if you ignore how tiny it is and just focus on the views, she can imagine herself living the dream.

Her mother had always been much more make-do-and-mend, and Essie has just been so keen not to have to do that any more that she hasn’t put aside enough for a rainy day. She hasn’t put aside a red cent.

Connor heads off to rugby training, kissing her on the head and giving her shoulder an ‘it’ll be alright’ squeeze – which is, she has already ascertained, not at all the same thing as a ‘move in with us for a bit’ squeeze. They are only in their mid-twenties; it’s a bit soon for all that. Plus it’s Tris’s flat and he has a strict bros code.

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