Page 26 of Christmas at Sturcombe Bay
But she didn’t want to acknowledge that.
Sitting down at the small dressing table she dragged a comb through her long wet hair. Maybe she’d get it cut — it would be easier to manage. Wasn’t that what women did when they left a long-term relationship? Reinvent themselves?
What a cliché!
She didn’t need to reinvent herself to leave Glenn behind. It was her future she needed to figure out. But there was no rush for that. If the hotel closed, which the rumours suggested it might, that would be time enough. For now, drying her hair and getting some breakfast was as far ahead as she wanted to plan.
Forty minutes later saw her strolling over to the Ellis’s house. She found Julia in her office. She glanced up from her desk with a smile.
“Hi, honey. How are you?”
“Oh . . . fine.”
She wandered listlessly round the small room, reading the labels on the files stacked on the bookshelves, admiring the child’s drawing — Ben’s, of his mum and dad. Hobo, the three-legged grey Lurcher, was reclining on an old pink blanket in the corner. Jess hunkered down and scritched the magic spot behind his ear.
“You’re a handsome chap, aren’t you?” she murmured to him. “Are you a good boy?” The dog stretched out his long pink tongue and licked her wrist. “How did he lose his leg?”
Julia smiled grimly. “Remember that Alan Cowan we told you about the other night?”
“The one they went camping with, when they all got soaked?”
“That’s the one. He got him as a puppy, but he never took proper care of him. Poor Hobo hurt his leg on some barbed wire, and instead of taking him straight to the vets, he just wrapped a bit of old cloth round it and left it. By the time he did take him in to Diane’s surgery it was really bad — the infection had got into the bone, and the only thing she could do was amputate.”
“Oh, that’s awful. Poor Hobo.”
The dog seemed to appreciate her sympathy, resting his head heavily on her hand.
“Cowan got really stroppy about it, refused to pay for the treatment — told her to put him down. Diane just about blew his head off.” She laughed dryly. “I’d have loved to have seen it. She doesn’t look it, but she can be quite a force to be reckoned with when it comes to any kind of animal cruelty.”
“I can imagine.”
“Anyway, she threatened him with the RSPCA, and made him sign Hobo over to her.”
“Ah, bless.” She fondled the dog’s whiskery grey head. “So now you have a nice cosy home and a blanket to sleep on, and lots of treats. He does seem to manage pretty well with only three legs.”
“Oh, it doesn’t bother him at all. Would you like to take him for a walk?”
Jess glanced up in surprise. “Would that be okay?”
“Of course. Take him down to the beach — he loves the sea.”
“Oh, right. But if I let him off the lead, will he run off? What if he won’t come back to me?”
Julia laughed, taking a packet of dog treats out of her desk drawer. Hobo heard the rustle and was instantly alert. “Take these and he’ll be your best friend forever.”
A walk on the beach was exactly what she needed to blow the cobwebs away. Jess felt her steps lightening as she strolled through the Memorial Gardens.
The trees were beginning to shed their leaves, but the grass was neatly mowed, the flowerbeds all weeded. Some of the rose bushes were still in bloom, and so were the pansies, chrysanthemums and pretty mauve asters, asserting their bright colours against the slow creep of autumn.
She paused by the War Memorial to read the names engraved on the weathered brass plaques, of the men killed in the Boer War, both World Wars and even the Korean War. Some of the surnames told that they were from families who still lived here in Sturcombe: a couple of Channings, three Cullens, three Crocombes.
The dates showed they had almost all been young men — nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. Now they would have been great-grandfathers, great-great-grandfathers, but they had never had that chance.
But Hobo was quickly bored, so she let him tug her out to the concrete ramp down to the beach.
The sky was a pale misty blue above a silvery sea, but the October sun gave just enough warmth to take the edge off the cool breeze blowing in across the bay. She paused for a moment to breathe in the fresh, salt-tanged air, feeling it chase away the last of that lingering restlessness.
The beach was almost empty, just a few elderly couples in deckchairs, a young mum with a toddler looking for shells to collect, a few dog walkers throwing balls for their pooches to chase.
