Page 88 of Meet me at the Seaside Cottages

‘She just . . . she’s out of work and has no direction, and she just . . . she treats me like garbage and I don’t know what to do. I know she’s hurting, but I can’t get through to her and I don’t know what I did wrong . . . well, we got divorced. But I didn’t . . . ’

She swallows hard and says the next thing very quietly.

‘My ex had an affair. I tried to save it, but I couldn’t. Essie despised me for it, for not being able to hang on to her beloved dad.’

‘You were brave to leave,’ says Lowell gently.

‘I didn’t,’ says Janey, frankly. ‘He wasn’t a bad guy. He didn’t hit me or anything. He just...’ She doesn’t know why it’s coming out now. Choking out of her. ‘He just didn’t want me enough.’

There was a long silence, broken only by talkative birds.

‘What happened to us?’ says Lowell finally, in his soft growly voice. ‘What happened to the young people we were, so full of it?’

‘What?’

‘Joy. Hope. Springtime.’

Verity and Felicity are now jumping around at the other end of the glade, Verity holding up a stick Felicity can reach easily. The dog’s great silver tail swishes through the greenery.

‘I don’t know,’ says Janey.

Lowell is still staring at the flowers. ‘They bloom so beautifully, and for such a short time.’

‘Well, I know that feeling,’ says Janey, and for a moment he looks at her, and she feels herself being looked at, and tries to hold it, to not bustle or turn away, or panic, like when she accidentally has her phone camera facing forward. He can’t possibly be thinking what she is thinking. He is perfectly well-preserved – well, perhaps rather stout, but nonetheless he is tall, has a house and has all his own hair, which means he is worth everything on the market, could get any woman he likes, could even have more babies with a hot, yoga-loving thirty-year-old. Whereas she, at the same age, feels like a joke. A stupid, middle-aged, foolish joke, most likely to be found at home sending money to strangers on Facebook who pretend they’re doctors in the American army.

She smiles at him. He isn’t moving.

‘Well,’ she says finally, trying to sound insouciant, running her fingers through the flowers, ‘I know there’s no point in picking them. I know they only last a day, and actually it feels cruel to pick something so lovely and so fragile, and I know in fact that, if I do, the fairies and the hares will come and curse me . . . ’

He smiles. ‘Uh-huh?’

‘But I’m going to pick some.’

She gets up, cursing her own yearning; finds a hidden patch behind a rotting tree that nobody would ever call a beauty spot.

‘And I’ll take them from here so it doesn’t spoil anything.’

He nods. ‘Although won’t you only be upsetting the really malevolent fairies?’

‘Malevolent is an excellent word. You don’t hear it much these days.’

‘Because nobody under forty can spell it.’

They both laugh, and she wanders over and bends down.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘You are very beautiful wild, and it’s selfish to want to carry your scent with me, but that’s how humans and flowers co-exist. And I’m going to pick you and you’ll die but you were going to . . . ’

She stands up.

‘I can’t.’

Both Verity and Lowell look at her.

‘You can’t pick the bluebells?’

She shakes her head. ‘We don’t know, do we? What if they scream when we pick them?’

‘You eat lamb!’

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