Page 91 of Meet me at the Seaside Cottages

‘Bute,’ says Janey instantly. ‘I like a bit of booty on a girl.’

‘Don’t say “booty”,’ says Essie, habitually, and there is, finally, a semblance of normality in the room, and still so much unsaid.

34

Essie pulls on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and a jumper and barely stops to put on make-up when she leaves the house first thing the next morning. Did it really used to take her nearly an hour to get ready? It must have been the most ridiculous faff. She doesn’t miss the eyelashes that much, that’s true.

She didn’t think she’d sleep for thinking about Dwight, but she did; she slept well. She supposes she knows the reason. And she wants to get out from under him – literally – to remember where she is. Things are heading along the right track. She has a job interview right after Easter with a nice, respectable firm in the West End. Connor is happy. He’ll be so pleased to see her. Once she’s got the job, she can start looking for a flat, or maybe they can look together – it will all be fine. Yes. She can put the whole of Carso behind her. Maybe she can gift those knitting needles Gertie made her buy.

She wanders up along the hedgerow; she hasn’t seen a car for a while, just old Wull on his tractor, who had slowed down even further just to wave to her and wish her a fine morning, which it is.

She has startled a fawn in a field, and it darts off, white tail the only thing that can be seen by the naked eye. ‘I’m on your side!’ she says, remembering Al is yet another person she has yet to talk to. She wonders if he’s still cross with her. She’ll take him out for a nice lunch in Edinburgh, when she’s back there.

She is eyed up by some fairly belligerent geese as she walks over the small wooden bridge by the burn, which keeps getting washed away in heavy storms and rebuilt by locals, as it had taken the council about nineteen years to do an assessment on what it might be replaced by and whether or not it would displace any precious animal life, at a cost which would have already replaced the bridge about seven times.

In Edinburgh, she muses, she could walk down George Street and dematerialise, and her mum would just think she was hard to get on the phone, and Connor would assume she was at a party and her friends would assume she was just too busy, and Al would just never even think to ring her even though he is mostly happy to see her when she does turn up. In Edinburgh she could vanish and it would be days. In Carso, people are probably discussing where she is headed right now. In fact, she’d waved to her mum’s hairdresser going past, which means that every single person who goes in and out of Jean’s salon today will have a full appraisal. She used to mind a lot. She doesn’t so much now, on this pretty day.

Thank goodness nobody will have thought anything of her coming out of Dwight’s houses yesterday. Even though it is beyond their imaginings. She shivers. No. Focus on Edinburgh. The life she truly wants. And the first step is finishing this project, so everyone can see how efficient she is and wants to work with her and her mum won’t think she’s a failure and her dad will pay her more attention and . . . well, everything will be better. She walks towards the old schoolhouse with renewed purpose.

*

Janey hasn’t told her what to expect in Lowell’s house, hoping her daughter will enjoy the lovely surprise of it as much as she had. In fact, she is rather unflatteringly astonished.

‘Bloody hell, you don’t normally see anything as nice as this round here,’ Essie had rather spluttered. ‘This could be . . . ’

‘Somewhere else?’ Lowell enquires drily.

He is not having a good morning. He was trying to get on with work. Thalia is . . . well, she very much wants to stay longer on her very expensive yoga retreat in Bali, seeing as Verity seems to be enjoying herself so much, so there’s that. He’s not sure what has precipitated the change of heart. For years she has been tricky with visitation rights, one of the reasons, he thinks, that Verity is so suspicious of him; for years, he has believed that if there were a hell, it would be him spending long nights without sleep in the Travelodge round the corner from his ex-wife’s new home, as she insists that the vibrations aren’t right for his visit that day after all, that it would be disruptive and he’d better not try. He would move to Galloway but there is no work for him down there, which would mean a lot less money for the guru retreats. So he is rather stuck.

He has refused to get drawn into a narrative that Thalia is the baddie and he is the goodie. He knows he tried to impose on her the life he had wanted; assumed she would be happy to follow his lead. He had loved that quirky, uncompromising side of her when they’d got together, had thoroughly enjoyed the free-spiritedness, the creative side of her nature, and he feels guilty that motherhood and marriage had squashed her; that he had squashed her, and the internet had fed on her disgruntlement, as it does, and converted it to poison.

He thinks about Janey, desperately trying not to upset her daughter. They are two sides of the same coin.

But this is new. He has done what he had sworn he wouldn’t do. Gone and looked at Thalia’s Instagram. And sure enough, there was a man, a bendy, muscular-looking man with long hair in a bun, just out of focus in the distance of the shot. Could be anyone.

Of course he had known she wouldn’t be single forever; she is young, and gorgeous. He doesn’t love her any more. It’s completely to be expected.

He feels as if he’s been punched in the stomach.

And now there is someone on his doorstep being rude about his house.

‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ Essie says, in a tone of voice with enough penitence in it to make him realise he’s been sharp.

‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m a bit distracted.’

He pays more attention. It’s funny: Essie looks like Janey, he realises suddenly, but as if she isn’t finished yet. It’s odd; there’s definitely a resemblance. Essie is pretty, certainly, but fuzzy round the edges, undefined, whereas you can see everything about Janey the second you look into her open face. Funny, that. Mind you, everyone under about forty looks fuzzy to him these days, he finds more and more, and every female younger than that makes him think rather uncomfortably about his daughter. Essie looks like a copy, Janey the original.

‘I’m not surprised,’ says Essie, who can hear, in the hushed cathedral space of the beautiful house, the excited yips of puppies who can sense someone has just walked through the door and like the scent of who they think it is.

Lowell indicates where they obviously are, and she goes in, instantly bursting out laughing, crouching on to the floor and being entirely engulfed by a clutch of small, frantically wagging lunatics who recognise her smell as the first secure thing they learned about on this earth, and are patently delighted to be reunited with something they recognise in this whole wide, confusing universe. The tiny breaths pant and there is some yipping from Argyll, who as the runt of the litter as usual finds it a problem to get to the front.

‘Come here, baby girl,’ says Lowell over the top of her head, scooping up the tiny scruffy pup, who licks his face off.

‘You seem to have taken to her,’ says Essie.

‘Absolutely not,’ says Lowell, absentmindedly tickling Argyll’s tummy. ‘I really don’t have time for a dog. That’s why you’re here.’

Essie smiles knowingly.

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