Page 81 of A Summer Scandal

He took the ashes and pressed his lips to the lid. ‘I love you, Monica,’ he said. ‘Safe travels, my darling.’

Tears slid down Vi’s cheeks as he handed the ashes back with a shaky, heartbroken smile.

‘Let her go, child. It’s time.’

He put an arm around her shoulders as she twisted the cap off, and that was how they stood, side by side under the starlight, as Violet upended the ashes and let them scatter towards the sea below on the warm summer breeze.

‘Goodbye Gran,’ Violet whispered. ‘Thank you for everything.’

‘Goodnight my love,’ Barty said. ‘You’re part of Swallow Beach forever now.’

Violet replaced the lid on the empty container, not even surprised that Barty had chosen the exact same phrase as Cal. Her romance with Cal had been an echo of Monica’s romance with Barty all of those years ago; unexpected, life-changing, but ultimately doomed to fail.

‘Come on,’ she said, linking her arm through Barty’s. ‘People will be wondering where we’ve got to.’

They walked slowly back towards the party, leaving Monica Spencer’s spirit free to turn cartwheels, laughing, her dark hair tumbling around her face.

At the same time as Violet and Barty were scattering Monica’s ashes into the sea, the final scenes of Cal and Ursula’s marriage were playing out on the promenade beside the pier gates.

‘What do you mean, over?’ Ursula said, her blue eyes flashing. ‘You don’t get to say when it’s over, Cal. I say when, I say how. I came back for you.’

Cal stared at her. ‘You left me a long time ago, Ursula. You left me here, and I had to find a way to make my life work without you in it.’

‘And a shit job you made of that,’ she said, her voice rising. ‘Carving a penny-living from making sex toys and screwing every woman in town? You’ve hardly been pining, have you?’

He didn’t want to argue the toss. He wasn’t making a penny-living. He didn’t say as much though, because Ursula had been rubbing shoulders with movie-makers and millionaire businessmen for the last few years in LA, a fact she loved wheeling out to belittle his choice to stay in the small town they grew up in and run his own one-man business.

‘What did you expect me to do?’ he said, weary of her. ‘Put my life on ice?’

‘You love me,’ she said.

He looked at her, and although she looked undeniably stunning, her spray-on white dress split to her thigh was too much for Swallow Beach and her red lipstick too bright against her ever-lasting tan.

‘I loved you,’ he said. ‘I loved you on our wedding day, and I loved you for a long time afterwards. But I don’t love you any more.’

‘But I came back for you,’ she said again, looking almost confused, as if he should be grateful for the crumbs she’d thrown him.

‘Did you?’ he said, loosening his tie. ‘Because I don’t think you did. I think you came back because your luck ran out over there, because you realised that you weren’t going to find the fame and fortune you thought would fall into your lap, because waitressing for the money guys wasn’t working out, and because you heard on your family grapevine that I might have finally found someone else.’

She shook her head as he spoke. ‘You seriously think I’d come all the way back here because I was threatened by some blue-haired nobody?’

Cal shrugged. ‘I’m glad you came back,’ he said.

She flipped her eyes as if that was a no-brainer. ‘You’ve done a bad job of showing it,’ she said. ‘Two weeks in Portugal and you barely laid a finger on me. I get that you want to take it slow, but Jesus Christ Cal, this is stupid.’ She stepped close and tugged his tie, reeling him in. ‘Take me home, Cal. Take me home and screw me. Man the fuck up, I’m sick of waiting.’

If she’d expected her speech to turn him on, she’d played it all wrong.

‘I’m glad you came back, because now I know for certain that I don’t love you any more,’ he said. He didn’t enjoy saying it, but honesty was his only weapon. ‘Our marriage meant more to me than it did to you. Even when you weren’t here, I wore my wedding ring for years, because I was a married man. And yes, after a while, I started to see other women; I’m a man, Ursula, not a monk. But I didn’t offer them anything, because in the back of my head there was always you. You, my wife, the woman I thought I still loved. I’d sleep with other women, knowing you were somewhere else sleeping with other men, and I’d feel like a liar, an adulterous low-life cheat. I don’t think you were troubled by those same worries, were you? Because you always had the upper hand with us, you always knew I loved you that little bit more than you loved me.’

She stared at him, and as he looked at her, unflinching, he watched realisation finally dawn in her perfectly made-up eyes; she didn’t have any hold over him any more. Taking a few steps backwards, she half laughed, an ugly, self-defensive sound.

‘You’ll die here in this town,’ she said. ‘You’ll live your days out here, watching the sea come in and out, making tat from leather, never being any more than you are today. How is that enough?’

He looked back at her steadily. ‘I don’t want what you want. I love this town, and I’m proud of what I do.’

‘I never thought of you as dull until now,’ she said, spiteful.

He shook his head. ‘And I never thought of you as shallow or unkind, but you’ve been both of those things and worse since you came back. I’ve officially outgrown you, Ursula.’

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