Page 78 of A Summer Scandal

‘And no doubt they told you why, too.’

‘Actually no,’ Vi said. ‘I don’t have any idea why you soldit.’

Hortensia stared down the length of the pier towards the birdcage. ‘Enchanting, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. I love it,’ Violet said, earning herself a sharp look.

‘Henry was a fool not to sell it on, or give it back to the town when it happened. I told him, even then.’

‘What, Hortensia? What did you tell him?’ Vi held her breath.

‘There’s bad luck built into the bones of this place,’ she said. ‘It’s a poisoned chalice.’

Vi almost laughed. ‘You can’t really believe that, surely?’

Hortensia didn’t laugh with her. ‘Your gran wasn’t the first to die here, you know.’

‘I didn’t know that, no,’ Vi said. ‘But it’s a pier, after all. Surely there’s an inherent danger to places like this? It doesn’t have to mean anything as fanciful as a curse.’

The older woman raised her eyes to the skies. ‘Fanciful. Far-fetched. Fairy tales. I’ve heard those phrases all of my life.’ She sighed, resigned. ‘No one listens, even when the facts are staring them in the face. Eight people have died on this pier over the last century. Seven others, beside your gran.’

Okay, so that number was higher than Violet had expected to hear. ‘Eight people have drowned here?’

Hortensia shook her head. ‘Not all of them. My husband didn’t drown; he died fifty-six years ago defending me from flying debris in a storm. Another had a heart failure. A child choked.’

They were horribly sad stories, but in the bright wash of afternoon sunlight, perhaps not all that sinister. Violet wasn’t sure what to say; she didn’t want to give Hortensia the brush-off like everyone else in the town, but she wasn’t going to dwell on the idea of the pier being cursed. She looked back towards the birdcage, a hive of activity as the crew of catering staff buzzed around.

‘I should probably get back to work.’ She gave Hortensia an apologetic smile. ‘Busy one.’

Hortensia stood carefully and Vi handed her her stick.

‘Don’t work yourself too hard,’ Hortensia said, walking slowly towards the mainland. ‘Remember what Monica said about checking your diary. You need to remember to rest in your condition.’

Violet watched her go, thinking about what she’d said, and then she stopped breathing. Literally stopped breathing for a second, holding onto the railings out of necessity rather than choice.Check your diary.Her mind was scrambling through dates, counting backwards, forwards, losing track because she was in a hot panic.

How had she missed this? What kind of idiot was she? She knew she was needed on site to oversee things in the birdcage, but all the same she bolted for the gates, and she didn’t stop until she reached the top floor of the Lido and dragged her keys out of the back pocket of her jeans. She needed five quiet minutes alone to think.

Five minutes turned into half an hour. She was late. Her period hadn’t bothered turning up, and she hadn’t bothered to notice because she’d been in such a state over Cal, Ursula, Gladys, Lucy, and everything else. She’d been worrying about arranging a funeral forty years too late, and not worrying at all about the possibility of a new life unfurling inside her. How had this happened? She’d always been so careful with Simon, but she’d been here just a few scant months and her life had spiralled out of any recognition.

Except she did recognise it. Her life was following a track, one laid out in looping script in the diary in her bedside table. Vi didn’t need to take a pregnancy test to confirm things; the minute Hortensia had suggested it, she’d realised it was true, as if her mind had been holding back on her until it thought she could handle it. Could she?

Vi held her head in her hands. Oh God. She was pregnant with Cal’s baby. Cal, someone else’s husband. And then, sitting there in the silence, Vi felt something she’d never felt before. Laying her hands over her tummy, she felt protective of the tiny, fragile bloom of life in there. She felt the first stirrings of motherhood.

At half past five, Vi stood in her bedroom staring at herself in the full-length mirror. The dress code for the awards ceremony was ‘red carpet ready’, and even though she wasn’t attending the ceremony as a guest, she’d still made an effort to brush up. She wasn’t someone who’d ever really achieve much of a suntan, but all the same the sun had given her the lightest of kisses during her summer in Swallow Beach, making her appear far more rested and glowy than she felt.

Her dress was one she’d found in her grandmother’s wardrobe. She’d barely touched Monica’s things in the drawers and wardrobes since she’d taken over the apartment, but the midnight-blue fifties ankle-sweeping gown was perfect for the awards ceremony and too lovely to languish unloved in the back of a cupboard. Studying herself from the front and then the side, she stepped into the only pair of heels she owned. She was too edgy to ever look like a fairytale princess, but she’d managed to wrestle her blue-tipped hair into art deco waves and pinned it back on one side with the gemstone hair comb from her grandmother’s bedside drawer.

Everyone would be there tonight. She hadn’t enquired whether Cal was bringing Ursula as his plus one, but she presumed as much. Even Barty was coming; he’d invited himself to help out, or hang out, in the birdcage with Keris because he hated the idea of missing out on a shindig. She’d left him with a hug yesterday; no sense in adding to his guilt and it wasn’t actually any of her business what he and her gran had chosen to do forty years previously.

She’d laid her hands over her tummy countless times since her realisation earlier. She didn’t know what was going to happen, it was all too new, but she already knew whatwasn’tgoing to happen. She wasn’t going to do everything in her power to make the situation go away on its own, and she wasn’t going to lie or be pushed around and diminished or frightened into drastic measures. After all, she wasn’t just Monica’s granddaughter. She might have featured her grandmother in looks, and she loved that she’d inherited so many of her artistic traits and her spirit of adventure, but Violet was a different woman, and this was a different age. Their paths might have been eerily aligned up to now, but Vi was determined that this was the point at which they chose different roads.

Heading into the living room, she picked up the black canister containing her gran’s ashes, gave herself a good-luck nod in the mirror, then picked up her purse and set out for the pier.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

‘Are you sure the pier can take this many people?’ Keris said, standing beside Violet in the birdcage at quarter to eight.

‘Don’t even say that,’ Vi said. There were over a hundred people out on the pier, a hubbub of voices, the clink of crystal and cutlery, the sound of laughter as people ate their first course, all warmed by the burnished glow of the setting evening sun. Keris looked like a Greek goddess in a one-shoulder, floor-length silver-grey sheath, and somewhere out there on the pier Lucy looked every bit as glam in pillar-box red as Beau’s date-not-date. It was a good look on her; for the first time since Violet met her, she looked relaxed – the Beau effect again, no doubt.

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