Page 99 of Meet me at the Seaside Cottages

‘Sorry . . . ’ she manages, before her entire face crumples once again.

‘Ssh,’ says Janey. ‘Let’s get home and get this sorted out.’

As if. As if there is any sorting it out.

This is a community where memories are long. And this is a community that has lived on the breadline for a very long time. The beautiful hills, the green fields, the rich waters conceal some very poor people indeed. When Janey started her career, it was not at all uncommon to visit homes without electricity. People remember bad harvests, hungry nights. People’s grandparents were crofters, who lost it all, overnight. The wolf is not always far from the door, even now.

She steels herself. ‘Come on.’

She nods gratefully at Lowell, who has his arm around Verity, who isn’t resisting him either, and half-drags Essie, who onlyhas the very faintest idea where she is, out to her car, which is parked half on the kerb at the worst angle, and they drive off, Lowell and Verity visible in the rear-view mirror looking highly concerned.

The radio blares on automatically, an oldies ’80s and ’90s station that normally makes Essie grimace, or keel over laughing, depending on the mood she’s in. Today she just sits there, motionless, as Janey shuts it off, looking at her; her heart full, bursting all the way up to the teeth with how much she loves this wayward, ambitious girl of hers, every single inch of her, remembering the little face contorted in a rage as Al had knocked down one of her sandcastles and she had systematically kicked his bike in a fury while he aggrieved her even more by laughing; her set face as she did her maths homework in the kitchen, even as, God, she and Colin had tried to have their fights quietly in the back room. Who had they ever thought they were fooling?

She sees teenage Essie, thin, determined, opening the website to find her exam results; the smile creasing the face; a dam bursting inside Janey of pride and adoration and love and the bittersweet knowledge that it meant her girl would go; her darling baby girl, who used to cling in the night, beg her to stay in bed with her – which she would often do, if it meant not having to go back to her lonely bed – in case she had ‘mightmaze’.

The little paw hands, holding on to a lock of her hair.

Hadshemade Essie run so far away? Made her change so much; made her try to be completely different from Janey, in every conceivable way?

She’d voiced this deep, awful fear to Al one night, and he had merely smirked and said, well, in that case she could also take full credit for him turning out terrific; and she had laughed then, but she remembered – of course she did – Al being born andarriving in the world, serene, passingly interested . . . and Essie showing up, fists balled up, shouting at it suspiciously, always spoiling for a fight. She finds herself thinking, ridiculously, of the puppies: Smokey, hopping about from the second he opened his eyes, getting into mischief, establishing his dominance; little chunky Bute, fussing about like a big-bummed busybody, a matron among the dogs; timid Argyll, leaning into Lowell as her protector. Felicity hadn’t made them that way, she told herself.

It doesn’t change how she feels. She leans over to her stunned, unhappy girl and, as they turn into Seagate, lays a hand on her arm.

Essie clasps it.

‘It’s a mistake,’ she says, her face still very white. ‘It’s definitely a mistake. They’ve made a mistake.’

‘It’s on the BBC,’ says Janey, gently. ‘They don’t . . . I mean, they will have checked it a lot.’

Essie looks up at her mum, her face terrified. ‘But that means . . . ’

Janey wants to gather her up in her arms but knows that that won’t work well at all.

‘I would love to say . . . I would love to say I know how it can be fixed,’ she says eventually. ‘I’m not . . . I don’t know, Essie. I’m sorry. I really am.’

Essie’s face stiffens even more. ‘I can’t . . . it can’t . . . ’

She jumps out of the car, runs, up the stairs.

*

Janey goes to fetch some food for lunch, but she can tell already from the atmosphere in the bakery that word has got around. Jean the hairdresser is in there.

‘What’s happened?’ she fusses. ‘Is it true Dwight’s lost the cottages? Lost everything?

‘I . . . I don’t know,’ says Janey.

‘Was it those boys that were up with your Essie?’

‘I think . . . I don’t know. Maybe. It’s all confused. Essie didn’t know anything about it,’ she says, quickly and fiercely. ‘She’s in pieces.’

Jean shakes her head. ‘So he handed over everything he had, everything that was invested into this town, into some smart-talking boys from the city and . . . they just made off with it?’ Her lip curls, and Janey can’t blame her. This is, indeed, exactly the size of it

‘What’s going to happen?’ says a man on the other side, with a doleful beagle who is looking plaintively at the sausage rolls in an atmosphere of eternal hope.

‘The bank will take it,’ says Jean, as if she knows everything. ‘If this Tristan Morgan owes people money, they’ll take whatever he’s got and give it to whoever is owed the most. Or who was owed it first.’

Janey realises the truth in what Jean is saying while being simultaneously being annoyed at her for framing the problem so succinctly. The hairdresser runs a small business; she knows how all of this works, only too well.

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