by Liz Eeles
‘OK. Let’s give it a go.’ I give a thumbs up and smile to show that I’m up for this latest adventure which is my last hope.
Kayla starts getting to her feet when Roger heads for the bar but I pull her back onto the window seat.
‘You’re not going anywhere until you tell me what the Lake District was like. We haven’t had a chance to chat since you and Ollie got back and I want all the gossip.’
Kayla sniffs. ‘It was all right, I s’pose. Lots of lakes and tea shops and appalling weather. I didn’t know rain could hit you horizontally and it’s hard to appreciate a view when you can’t see further than your nose. And that’s in the summer! If people up there have got any sense, they hibernate through the winter.’
‘It can’t have rained all the time so what did you do when it stopped?’
‘Ollie made me climb up what the locals call a “fell” which turned out to be a freaking mountain. Halfway up, I thought I was gonna die. But the view from the top was pretty awesome. Do you want to see my photos?’
She shoves her phone in front of my face and starts scrolling through pictures. There are jagged peaks fading to grey in the distance, huge lakes surrounded by trees, and selfies of Kayla looking sweaty, puce and close to death.
‘And this is Keswick, pronounced “Kezzick”, where Ollie was looking at flats to rent.’ She scrolls through multiple pics at high speed. ‘It was quite a nice town actually and it has an actual pencil museum. Like, a proper museum that’s all about pencils!’
‘Hang on, backtrack a bit. Ollie was looking at flats to rent?’
‘Yeah,’ says Kayla, wrinkling her nose. ‘But it’s all part of his ruse to make me think he’s adventurous and about to leave his beloved Cornwall.’
‘Or it’s not a ruse, he really is moving to the Lake District in October and you’re in denial.’
Kayla shakes her head but starts scratching her neck which is what she does when she’s anxious.
‘So let’s say for the sake of argument that Ollie definitely is leaving’ – I hold up my hand when Kayla goes to speak – ‘and he’s going to be five hundred miles away. Are you going with him or staying here?’
Kayla keeps on scratching at her reddening skin. ‘I don’t know, Annie. Tell me what to do. Would you miss me?’
And suddenly it hits me just how much I will miss Kayla if she leaves Salt Bay. She took me under her wing and made the village bearable when I first arrived from London, feeling angry and lost. And though we’re different in lots of ways, she still helps make life bearable when people like Toby disappoint me – or I disappoint myself.
‘Of course I’d miss you horribly.’ I take a deep breath. ‘But this isn’t about me and you’ve been talking about moving on somewhere else ever since I’ve known you. So why are you holding back?’
‘Because if I follow Ollie up North it’ll send all the wrong signals, like I’m totally committed to him and then he’ll start talking about getting married again and, before I know it, I’ll be just like the Smug Marrieds – hitched, pregnant and terminally boring.’
‘Is this what all the angst is about? You’re worried you’ll end up like your sisters?’
Kayla nods, red curls tumbling around her face. ‘They say I’m missing out ’cos I’m not married to some tedious accountant with two-point-four children and a pointless career. But they’re so scared of life they’ve never been outside Australia yet they still look down on me and think I’m weird ’cos I want to travel and be free. They’re just narrow-minded and provincial and… and…’
‘Smug?’
‘Yeah, hideously smug. And I’m never going to be like them,’ she declares, folding her arms and pulling her mouth into a pout.
Oh, where do I start? I rest my head in my hands for a few moments, not sure how best to unpick the tangle Kayla’s got herself into. It seems we’re not so different after all – I can’t wait to marry Josh and she can’t bear the thought of matrimony but we’re both great at getting ourselves into a muddle.
‘You’re so different from your sisters, Kayla, that you’ll never be like them whatever you do. So if you don’t want to leave Cornwall with Ollie, that’s fine – plenty of people have long-distance relationships and some of them even work. Look at Prince Harry and Meghan.’
‘Who have loads of cash to spend on transatlantic travel and don’t work for a slave driver like Roger.’
‘True. But I’m sure you could both make it work if you wanted to. Just make sure if you stay in Salt Bay that it’s for the right reasons and not because you’re a wuss when it comes to commitment. Ollie’s a lovely bloke and moving to the Lake District would be an adventure.’
‘Not so much an adventure as a cold and rainy challenge,’ mutters Kayla. ‘And I don’t appreciate Ollie putting me under pressure.’
‘All he’s doing is taking up the chance of promotion in the Lake District and he’d like you to go with him. The only person piling on the pressure and making it any more than that is you, you eejit.’
‘Kayla!’ bellows Roger across the packed pub. ‘There’s people here who need serving if you’ve finished your little chinwag.’
‘Duty calls,’ she sighs, getting to her feet. ‘Thanks for the chat, Annie.’
Kayla wanders off towards the bar, deep in thought, as I realise I’m a prat. Kayla’s the woman who keeps me sane when Storm’s kicking off and Barry is being… Barry-like, and here I am persuading her to move away.
But friendship is wanting each other to be happy – and Ollie makes her happy, even if she’s too pigheaded to recognise it. Salt Bay won’t be the same without her but nothing stays the same forever. However much we might want it to.
* * *
Josh is surprised by the news that we’re having a Frenchman to stay but remarkably unfazed by my bombshell about Toby.
‘Lying to us and planning on carving the house up into flats is typical Toby. I knew his proposal was too good to be true,’ he says, hitting his stapler extra hard with the heel of his hand. He’s photocopied some musical scores for the choir and is fixing the sheets together.
‘But I feel so stupid for believing him.’
‘Did you really believe him, though, deep down? You must have had some niggles to come up with the idea of running a B&B.’
‘Maybe I wasn’t sure about him letting us stay on in the house but I never thought he’d start ripping out walls and changing the whole character of the place. You’re right. I am horribly gullible.’
Josh stops stapling and pushes the music scores to one side. ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself, Annie. It’s Toby who’s at fault here, not you.’
I sigh, unwilling to let myself off the hook because disappointment is coursing through me. Disappointment in my cousin for turning out to be the weasel Josh said he was. And disappointment in myself for letting Alice down. How could I have ever considered letting the house fall into Toby’s avaricious clutches?
‘What upsets me the most is that he’d like to knock this place down.’
‘You’re kidding me.’ Josh’s composure is starting to slip. ‘He wants to knock it down? Converting into flats is one thing but wanting to bulldoze this house when he knows what it meant to Alice and how much it means to you is downright cruel.’
‘He wouldn’t get permission to knock it down, but he made enquiries about it.’
‘Unbelievable! Just when you think Toby Trebarwith has scraped the bottom of the barrel, he sinks even lower.’
The muscles in Josh’s jaw have tightened and I see a flash of the man I first met early last year. Back when he was angry and resentful and stressed out by the demands of looking after his family. Before we fell in love and brought out the best in each other.
‘I’m going to ring him,’ he announces, standing up so quickly that pieces of photocopied paper flutter to the kitchen floor. He marches into the sitting room with me scurrying after him and starts flicking through Alice’s address book, which gives me my chance.
‘Please don’t ring him.’
Spreading my arms wide, I shuffle backwards towards the phone feeling faintly ridiculous. I’m not on a protest march or protecting royalty. I’m simply asking my fiancé not to call my awful cousin. So quite why I’m adopting this position is beyond me.
However, it does the trick. Josh frowns – or it might be a suppressed smile; I’m not sure. But he puts the book down on top of the bookcase and folds his arms.
‘Why shouldn’t I ring him?’
‘Because it wouldn’t make anything better.’
‘It’d make me feel better,’ says Josh, dark eyes flashing.
‘Which is exactly why you shouldn’t call him. But we won’t ever sell the house to him.’
‘Hang on. Are you saying that you’d sell to someone else instead?’
‘No, I’m definitely not saying that.’
‘So you won’t sell to Toby and you won’t sell to anyone else and the roof needs a thirty grand makeover that we haven’t got.’ Josh sighs and rubs his eyebrows with the heels of his hands. ‘Can you see that’s not going to work, Annie?’
I want to yell: Of course I can because I’m not an idiot but selling this house wouldn’t work for Alice and it doesn’t work for me. And then fall into Josh’s arms and snivel into his polo shirt while he rocks me like a baby.
But I don’t because that won’t help in the long run and there’s one last hope for the Trebarwith ancestral home – a Frenchman who sells croissants for a living.
‘Will it be all right if Monsieur Bouton comes to stay and we see how that goes?’
Josh shrugs. ‘And if it doesn’t work, will you give serious consideration to selling to Toby? He’s got the money to replace the roof and, if the house is split into flats, at least it’ll still be standing – now he knows he can’t knock it down. Honestly’ – he scrunches up his nose as if he’s just sniffed a dead rat – ‘what a moron.’
When I nod, Josh says: ‘We’ll push ahead with the B&B option and hope it works, seeing as Toby’s living up to my expectations.’
Then he picks up the scattered music on the kitchen floor and staples the sheets with such force, I’m worried he’s going to punch a hole through the table.
Seventeen
Cooking lunch, shovelling clothes into the washing machine and scrubbing the bathroom until it’s gleaming helps to work off my agitation. And by the time I’ve washed up our plates and the omelette pan, I’m feeling more confident that our B&B plan might work. Knackered too, but exhaustion is a price worth paying for calm and clarity.
Josh disappeared straight after lunch and I find him in the garden, digging the hell out of the vegetable patch. He’s so busy he doesn’t spot me and I sit for a while on the bench where I used to sit and chat with Alice.
It’s lovely watching Josh work out his frustration. He’s taken his shirt off and the muscles in his lightly tanned back ripple and glisten under the sun. I’m starting to feel rather hot myself when Storm and Emily wander into the garden and plonk themselves down either side of me. It’s quite sweet that they’re spending so much time together these days – especially as they hated each other at first. Back then, they were chalk and cheese: sweet, naïve Emily with her old-lady fashion sense and bolshie, streetwise Storm with her bellybutton ring. But they’ve forged a firm friendship.
‘Isn’t it a bit hot to be digging, even if you are half naked – which is totally inappropriate?’ Storm shields her eyes against the glare of the sun. ‘Mate,’ she calls out, ‘do us all a favour and put a top on!’
Josh ignores her but pauses briefly to wipe his damp fringe out of his eyes.
‘Don’t blame me if he gives himself a coronary at his age. Or if a photo of his chest mysteriously appears on the school Facebook page,’ huffs Storm, pulling her phone from her jeans pocket. There’s a huge expanse of skin above the waistband because her tiny black crop-top finishes just under her boobs. ‘What’s he in a mood about anyway?’
‘Nothing. He’s fine. Actually, it’s good you’re both here because I wanted to run something by you.’ I take a deep breath. ‘We’re thinking of running this place as a B&B and we might have a bloke called Jacques Bouton staying with us for a few days as a try-out, to see if it might work.’
‘That’s a weird name,’ says Storm, snapping photos of Josh.
‘He’s from Paris.’
‘So let me get this straight. Some random bloke from Paris is going to be sleeping here. Some random bloke who’ll probably go mad in the night and slaughter us in our beds.’
‘Monsieur Bouton is actually the chief executive of a bakery business who’s visiting Cornwall on holiday for a few days. So, unless he’s going to batter us to death with croissants, I think we’ll be all right.’
‘That’s outrageous! You go full-on mental about me eating too many burgers but you’re happy to let some weirdo you’ve never met before sleep next to my bedroom.’
Storm’s mouth sets into a thin line and my heart sinks. I know that look, and if Storm launches into full passive-aggressive mode while our guest is staying it’ll be a disaster. He’ll return to la belle France deafened by all the door slamming.
‘Look, Storm, we have no choice. This is something we have to try.’
‘Is that ’cos you’re having trouble keeping this house going?’
I give Storm a sideways glance. She’s usually teenage-oblivious to anything that doesn’t directly affect her. Although I guess losing the roof over your head is pretty much the definition of ‘directly affected’.
When I don’t answer, she shrugs. ‘I do hear what you and Josh are saying, even when you think you’re being all secretive, and roof tiles trying to smash my head in is a bit of a giveaway that this house is falling down. You could have told me. How much will the roof cost anyway?’
‘A lot.’
‘How much is a lot?’
‘A new roof will cost about thirty thousand pounds.’
‘That roofer bloke’s having a laugh,’ splutters Storm while, beside her, Emily rapidly blinks her pale blue eyes. ‘That’s it then. We’ll have to leave and I’ll end up back in London where I’ll probably die in a crack den and get eaten by rats.’
I can’t help but laugh at the look of horror on Emily’s face.
‘No one’s going back to London. If we move, we move together but hopefully it won’t come to that. The roof’s fine for the time being and the B&B idea might work and bring in some money to keep us afloat.’
‘Do you want me to move out?’ blurts Emily, long mousey-brown hair falling across her pale face. ‘I’m a dead-weight now Alice’s gone and I’m hardly bringing in any money from temping. I’ll totally understand if you want me to go.’
‘Of course we don’t want you to go, Emily, and Alice didn’t want that either which is why she specifically mentioned you in her will. You’ll have a home with us for as long as you want it.’
‘That was so sweet of Alice.’ Emily wipes away the tear that’s sliding down her cheek. ‘But you don’t have to stick by it now she’s gone. After all, I’m not real family.’
‘What’s real family anyway? Growing up it was just me and Mum and now my family’s grown to include Josh and the people he loves and Barry and Storm and you, and Toby too, for better or worse. Anyway, I was thinking you could head up the B&B business if it comes off.’
‘What, me?’ Emily checks behind her in case some stranger with a shedload of hospitality qualifications has wandered in off the street. ‘You mean me, running things?’
‘Yes, you, if you’d like to. You’re caring and organised and a good cook, and I think you’d be great at it. Though it’s just a plan at the moment and might never happen so don’t get too exc
ited.’
‘Wow!’ When Emily smiles, her eyes sparkle with unshed tears. ‘That sounds brilliant and I’d try really hard to do a good job. You’re so much nicer to me than my proper family and I really don’t want to move out.’
‘You won’t need to move out and, Storm, you’ll always have a home here too as long as we do all we can to keep things going. Which means…’
‘Yeah, yeah… letting random men into the house.’
‘And being polite to said random men.’
‘Whatever. Come on, Ems. I’ll give you a lesson on using eyeliner ’cos the last time you tried it you looked like a panda.’
‘I don’t need to use eyeliner now I’m off men.’
Storm sighs and shakes her head. ‘You still have so much to learn, Emily. Using eyeliner isn’t about attracting men. It goes deeper than that. It’s about enhancing what nature gave you and feeding your soul. It’s about your self-esteem and self-worth.’
Emily frowns, unconvinced by Storm’s cod psychology when it comes to make-up, but she allows herself to be led towards the house.
‘Hey, Storm,’ I call after them. ‘Those photos had better not appear anywhere online.’
‘Whatever,’ drifts across the garden as the girls disappear into the kitchen.
Josh winks at me, his bad mood eased by hard labour, but my own mood is dipping fast. Placing my hand on the sun-warmed bench where Alice used to sit, I look past the cliffs and towards the harbour wall, which is glistening with spray at high tide.
A young woman in a tight scarlet sundress, who’s standing looking out to sea, grabs the hands of her young family so they won’t slip. And even though she’s a size eight with honey-blonde hair and two perfect children, I realise that we have a lot in common. We’re both doing what we can to protect the people we love.
My life has come full circle. As a child, I was the grown-up because Mum needed looking after. Then I fended for myself as an adult in London which was fine – it was all I’d ever known. But all that changed when I came to Salt Bay and met Alice, who cared for me while I watched over her. I relaxed and stopped feeling responsible for everything all the damn time. But now the weight of responsibility is back, even with Josh here to support me.
