Page 69 of A Summer Scandal

Taking a deep breath, she reached for the canister for a second time, and this time she didn’t pull back. She closed her fingers around it, and then something unexpected happened. She burst into tears.

‘Oh Gran,’ she said, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. ‘This is all so hard. I wish you were here for me to talk to, I feel as if you’re the only person in the world who’d understand what I’m feeling. Thank you for the apartment. It’s given me a place when I didn’t know where mine was, but I don’t know if I belong here in the way that you did.’ She pulled in a deep, shuddery breath. ‘I love the pier, but it scares me. Did it scare you too?’

Far from feeling wary of the ashes now, Vi clutched the black canister to her, wrapping both arms around it and folding her body over it protectively, because this was as close as she’d ever be to Monica.

‘I know about T. And I have a good idea of how awful you must have felt too, because I’ve somehow managed to get myself into the same position. I love a married man too, Gran.’

As her mouth formed the words, her heart began to race. She hadn’t acknowledged out loud to either herself or anyone else that she loved Cal. She’d only known him a few months. Was it too soon? Even as she asked herself the question, she knew the answer. The truth was that she’d been a little in love with Calvin Dearheart from the first moment she met him, and now, after all they’d shared, she was a whole lot in love with him. He made her laugh, and in that moment he made her cry her heart out.

Violet sobbed for her grandmother, left unclaimed here for forty years like a mislaid coat. And she cried for herself, because she’d come here to find out who she was and she’d ended up feeling more, not less confused. And most of all she cried over Cal, the man she loved and couldn’t be with.

Handing the black canister back to Stuart was more difficult than she’d imagined it would be. She’d dried her eyes and tried not to look like a weepy mess before she returned to reception, but then when he held his hand out for Monica’s ashes Vi clung to them, fresh tears in her eyes as she lifted the canister to her lips and pressed a kiss against the lid.

‘I’ll come back for you,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll put things right.’

Violet threw her overnight bag into her beloved Morris Minor Traveller early on Friday afternoon, then paused to look out at the pier, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand. Keris was going to lock up for her that evening so she could get on the road in the hope of stealing a march on the Friday rush-hour.

‘Going somewhere?’

Vi turned and found Barty standing watching her on the promenade.

‘Home,’ she said.

He was dressed for Zumba, splendid in turquoise. ‘Ah. I rather thought that was here now.’

She half smiled, half shrugged. ‘I miss my mum, thought I’d go back and see her for the weekend.’

‘But you’re coming back?’

That much she was certain of, even if she didn’t know for how long. ‘Yes. Sunday evening.’

Barty looked relieved, touching her cheek briefly before leaving her alone.

Violet watched him stroll off towards town, his back ramrod straight. He was another part of Swallow Beach she’d miss if she decided not to stay here after the summer. In the absence of Grandpa Henry, and of her mum too while she was here, Vi had unofficially allocated him as her elder, because she’d never not had someone to defer to or lean on.Maybe that’s what this is, she thought.Perhaps it’s time I stopped looking for someone to lean on and stood on my own two feet.

‘Mum?’

Violet called out, dropping her overnight bag on the hall floor as she let herself in. She hadn’t called ahead to let her parents know she was coming, partly because she wanted it to be a surprise and a little bit because she didn’t want to hear anything that prevented her trip. She badly needed to get away from Swallow Beach for a few days, to clear her head of all things pier, Lido or Dearheart related. She’d taken the risk of banking on her mum being at home, and she was heartily relieved to find herself in luck.

‘Violet!’

He mum came running from the kitchen, her face wreathed in delight. Vi threw herself into her mother’s arms like a five year old at the end of school, breathing in her familiar scent, clinging on until she felt fortified enough to let go again.

Setting her daughter at arm’s length, Della scrutinised her face. ‘Is everything okay? You look peaky.’ She brushed Vi’s fringe aside and laid her palm flat on her forehead to check her temperature. ‘You should have called ahead, I’d have made you something special.’

Vi shrugged, feeling a stone lighter already for leaving Swallow Beach. ‘Just fancied a change. It was a last-minute thing.’

Della didn’t look entirely convinced but didn’t press for details as she sat her daughter down at the kitchen table and made them both a cup of tea. Violet drank it all in. The comfort of the home she’d grown up in, the place and the people she knew so well. That was what was missing in Swallow Beach, she realised; history. The place was steeped in it for everyone else around her there, but Vi was very much the new girl still and felt the pressure to fit in, to be accepted – a difficult enough task for anyone, and an impossible one for a blue-haired girl the Lady Mayoress had taken a dislike to. Sitting around her mother’s pine dining table, Vi felt her shoulders inch down from their perpetual spot close to her ears, and her jaw ached because it was the first time in weeks she hadn’t had her teeth clenched.

‘So what’sreallybrought you home?’ her mum asked. They’d chatted about surface issues whilst her mum made the tea; how the garden was coming on, a weekend trip Della was planning to surprise Violet’s father with on their wedding anniversary, how work was progressing for Vi in her new studio.

Vi cradled her hands around her cup, looking for comfort in its warmth, even though it was a shorts and T-shirt kind of day. She thought about attempting to brush her mum’s question under the carpet, but even as she tried she knew she wasn’t going to be able to.

‘Oh Mum,’ she said, and however much she tried, she couldn’t stop her bottom lip from trembling.

Della sighed and shuffled her chair close enough to pat Violet’s arm. ‘Come on, out with it. What’s going on?’

Vi really didn’t know where to start. ‘Well, things are going all right at the pier, pretty much, except for the way Gladys keeps trying to interfere,’ she said, looking for positives first. ‘She’s having a bit of a meltdown because I’ve agreed that the pier can be used for an awards evening. She’s telling anyone who’ll listen that it’s going to be an orgy.’

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