Page 93 of Meet me at the Seaside Cottages

‘I brought you something,’ says Essie as clearly as she can.

Verity doesn’t pause the TV. Lowell looks up, but doesn’t interfere, in case, no doubt, he makes things worse, which is entirely possible. He is wearing a towel on his trousers, which means, Essie knows for a fact, that he still has a dog secreted about his person. Well, if he gets Argyll, she thinks, she’s going to find Bute. Although Bute’s arse is already too big to fit in any of her pockets.

She holds up the box and peels back the corner. The colours of the polish and the UV dryer sparkle in the light. Verity blinks a few times.

Essie shows Verity her nails, then says clearly, ‘I’m going to do mine. Would you like me to do yours?’

Verity darts a glance at her dad, who nods. She signs very quickly.

‘Mum says it’s toxins,’ Lowell interprets.

‘Well,’ says Essie, ‘we shan’t eat it.’

She pulls out another towel (‘I see now,’ says Lowell, incomprehensibly, ‘what your mother meant about all the towels’) and spreads it on the low wooden coffee table.

Verity willingly puts her thin little hand out and Essie starts with her; they choose a light pearly pink. Essie explains carefully what she’s doing at each stage, and although Verity nods solemnly, she finds it very difficult to stop her fingers from moving instinctively every time she wants to say something.

Lowell stops working and comes over.

‘You don’t really need me,’ he signs, and says to Verity at the same time. ‘You can speak.’

Verity gives him a look and signs something even Essie can understand.

‘It’s not stupid,’ he says. ‘It allows you to talk while you’re getting your nails done.’

Verity stares at the floor where she can’t see him. Lowell puts his hand on her shoulder and she flinches; he heads back to his desk, looking defeated.

Essie finishes the job in silence, apart from gently telling her what she’s doing. When it’s finally finished, Verity stares at her beautiful new nails in rapture, holding them up to the light and turning her fingers round and round.

‘They look lovely,’ says Essie, grinning. The child has beautiful hands: long fingers, smooth muscles made longer by constant motion. ‘You have lovely hands,’ she says, simply.

Verity stops looking at them for a second and turns to Essie, and she smiles, puts a flat hand to her chin, and pulls it away. And Essie smiles and does the same thing in return.

*

Essie goes in every day that week with a will – it feels good just to get out of the house, and Lowell has pressed notes in her hand that will at least feed her when she gets to Edinburgh, and Verity is taking her job of teaching Essie sign language very seriously, and the pair of them roam the woods, and Bute does not exactly fit in Essie’s pocket but she is the pup Essie pulls close in the evening. The best thing is, it keeps her away from Dwight and out of trouble. Every day she asks Lowell more questions about project management and he has been explaining to her, more and more, the importance of using local staff who understandthe buildings and even the way the land lies, and local materials that suit the territory and the climate, even if, he says wryly, no local people will ever live there, which makes her frown and change the subject. She is going to finish this project brilliantly and on time, prove to Connor and his bunch of lads that she isn’t some hysterical moron, take a brilliant job back in the city and get everything back to normal.

So she sends emails, and books flooring, and sends samples to Dwight, all of which he okays. It’s even better than that: Verity helps her pick out tiles and, as it turns out, has an extremely good eye for colour and pattern. Essie wonders if it comes from her world being so very visual; she’s intensely in tune with which colours go together, so much so that they sit down with a colour wheel and work out everything from curtains to doorknobs. Meanwhile, Lowell kindly offers to cast an eye over her building and completion estimates and announces himself surprisingly impressed by how well she’s done – she’s thorough and realistic and has a talent for project management. They could probably do with someone like her at the practice, he says; they have the same retention issues as everyone else in the Highlands. Nowhere for young people to live.

And Janey – she is incredibly relieved. They haven’t made up, not exactly. But at least Essie is busy, and distracted. One night she even brings Bute home, which Janey completely realises is cold-hearted bribery, when the dog hasn’t even had its vaccinations yet, but she is such a – well, it would be nice to say such a beautiful puppy and also something along the lines that all puppies, just like all babies, are beautiful, but the fact is that Bute, with her narrow deerhound face and very long schnozz plonked on top of her round, supersized Westie chonk, looks like nothing more than A.L.F. the friendly alien in dog form.

On the other hand, she is unusually sweet-natured (unlike Smokey, who appears to be all unreconstructed terrier feistiness in the body of a horse, much to Dwight’s delight), and Al comes over too, and they all eat fish and chips and let Bute have a chip, which bodes very badly for how spoiled the dog is going to be if Janey is ever going to keep a dog which of course she one hundred per cent is not, and the evenings are lengthening out, spilling over the sides of nine p.m.; the world is a dazzling array of shades of green. Johnson is limping up and down the high street when they bring him in, unable to go more than two steps before being greeted by someone he knows. Amsan’s daughter Yasmin has met someone through an app. They illegally breed alligators in their spare time, Amsan has mentioned, almost casually, but apart from that they’re very nice, and Janey has put her foot down and insisted Yasmin at least meets Owen; he would always keep her in fax machines, and he’s punctual and knows a lot about the Second World War.

Essie concentrates hard on trying to keep everything steady. On Good Friday she has to go by the cottages and check they have the fire safety regulations in, and measure up for curtains. Dwight is standing there, leaning cockily against the newly installed sliding windows at the back, looking smug.

‘Hey,’ he says. Essie flushes immediately and he smiles, as if this is a totally expected thing to happen. He follows her over to the back wall and puts his arm up so they’re face to face. She feels herself go weak at the knees.

‘Missed you round here,’ he says.

Essie feels her breathing quicken. But she’s off to Edinburgh.Focus, focus, focus, she tries to tell herself.Focus.

‘You have to stick to the plan,’ she says. ‘I’m seeing Tris and everyone next week; they’ll want to know it’s all going ahead.’

‘With you I can get it sorted, yeah?’ says Dwight, moving in closer. ‘We’re a good team.’

She shoots out from under him. ‘I don’t think . . . I think this should be professional. I don’t think we should mix business with pleasure.’

‘Well.’ Dwight thinks about this for a moment. Eventually he says, ‘I’m very glad there was pleasure.’

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