Summer at the Highland Coral Beach (The Port Willow Bay series Port Willow Bay)

by Kiley Dunbar

  Summer at the Highland Coral Beach

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  A Letter From Kiley

  Acknowledgements

  Books By Kiley Dunbar

  Copyright

  Summer at The Highland Coral Beach

  Kiley Dunbar

  This book was written with all my love for my babies, Robin Valentine, and Iris Eden.

  My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here,

  My heart’s in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer;

  Chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,

  My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go.

  (Robert Burns, 1789)

  Chapter One

  January and the Big Fat Positive

  Two pink lines. Beatrice was sure of it.

  She took the test apart and held the little strip up to the light to make sure, and there they were, faint, barely there, but there all the same. What they call in the pregnancy and baby magazines a ‘BFP’: A Big Fat Positive.

  At first, when she saw it, she had screamed, then had a cup of tea to calm down and immediately started to worry whether you’re allowed tea when you’re officially, incontrovertibly WITH CHILD.

  The warmth of the knowledge spread through her and she found herself in front of the living room mirror peering at her face and wondering what the magazines were talking about when they said the first things you noticed in pregnancy were the sore boobs and the morning sickness. Beatrice felt great, better than great, and she looked to see if she was glowing yet, wondering when it would kick in.

  She hadn’t exactly glowed recently, and not at all during the recent few miserable months of doing not very much, other than eking out her redundancy pay, searching for work, and trying to chase away the feeling she was probably being a bother to her sister. Angela was in her own baby bubble, enjoying the last few weeks of her precious maternity leave with little Clara, and was, Beatrice worried, possibly too polite to tell her that the daily visits might be getting too much.

  She wanted to let Angela and her partner, Victoria – Vic for short – know the good news first, but told herself she had best wait until Rich knew. He was, after all, the daddy.

  She smiled to herself, wandering around the house that afternoon. Unable to settle to reading her book or to concentrate on job applications, she started clearing out a bottom drawer to pass the time and let her mind wander back to all those years ago when she and Rich were straight out of college and intent on double incomes and exotic travel and had spent years trying not to get pregnant. Then there had been that period after the wedding where they were constantly dodging everyone’s questions about when they were going to start a family and she’d grown used to hearing the remarks about how she wasn’t getting any younger – mainly from Rich’s dad, to be fair. And Beatrice couldn’t forget last year, the one leading up to her thirty-ninth birthday – the awful year in which she had lost not only her job but her lovely mum as well, a year she couldn’t think about without her chest tightening and her breathing growing shallow and quick – when certain work colleagues, friends and Rich’s dad had unanimously stopped enquiring about her plans for her uterus as though it were everyone in the world’s business and started looking at her either sympathetically or like she was some sort of baby-avoiding witch. You guessed it, that last one was also Rich’s dad.

  ‘Well, aren’t we going to surprise them all?’ Beatrice said to herself as she cleared the drawer of clutter, making a charity shop pile and a recycling pile, trying not to glance at the clock and count down the minutes until Rich got home.

  Only just back to work after the New Year, poor old Rich had another late meeting and another stressful, cramped commute on the eight o’clock train back from London where he worked in distribution rights for big screen movies, which sounded more glamorous than it actually was, to their two-bed new-build in the sprawling Warwick suburbs.

  She couldn’t account for the little prickle of nerves that buzzed up her spine at the thought of telling him tonight. He’d be made up. How lucky can one couple get? A baby on their third month of trying. That is, if you don’t count that week in Madrid back in September when Beatrice forgot to pack her pills and they got a bit reckless after a night of rebujito cocktails and a touristy flamenco show that had ended in a drunken conga line through the beach restaurant’s kitchens. They’d had to have the whole conversation on the plane home about how maybe it wouldn’t be a disaster if they actually had made a holiday baby, and since they were both approaching forty it might be a case of ‘now or never’.

  There had been no holiday-cocktails baby after all, but its brief hypothetical existence had kick-started an intense few months of Really, Actually Trying, which, although she didn’t admit it to anyone, was accompanied by a big sigh of relief at the end of what could only be described as an embarrassingly long dry spell.

  In the quieter, lonelier moments during her days at home scouring the Guardian arts jobs pages and mailing out CVs to every arts organisation within commuting distance, she would get to thinking and could admit to herself that Madrid hadn’t been the start of it at all.

  Beatrice had known at least two summers ago that she had begun to change her mind about not being all that fussed about babies; around about the time she’d detected a slight hollow tone in her jokey, deflective answers to questions from those nosey enough to ask why she had been married for so long (eight years at that point, ten years now) and still didn’t have kids.

  Yes, she had first heard it two summers ago, the persistent little voice she’d tried to ignore for the sake of their careers and her busy, exciting working life, which had been nothing but fun and fulfilling and which she wouldn’t change a thing about – apart from her recent redundancy, of course.

  That was way back when her sister Angela and Vic had started the process of finding a donor service and embarking upon what turned out to be a long, expensive journey involving seven rounds of assisted intrauterine insemination, Angela’s hopes for a growing family coinciding fatefully with their mum’s cancer diagnosis.

  Beatrice slid the empty drawer shut, flinching at the resounding bang it made.

  ‘I’m not moping today. Here I am, a whole day late and with a BFP!’ she announced to the empty house, gathering up a bundle of old payslips for the recycling bin.

  Earlier that afternoon, she’d tried out an online due date calculator, which had told her that this baby would be making its appearance around the twentiet
h of September, just days after the big birthday she’d been dreading for months. But all that trepidation had melted away at the sight of those pink lines.

  September would be beautiful this year, a time for long walks with a pram, lattes in hand. Rich would take paternity leave and they could plan a Welcome to the World party with cake and bubbly and look forward to introducing baby Clara, who’d be a wobbly toddler by then, to little baby Halliday.

  September didn’t seem very far off at all. There would be so much to do before then. Rich’s Audi would need upgrading to a five-seater with room for a baby carrier, and she didn’t fancy broaching the subject of converting his gym into a nursery quite yet but maybe in a few weeks she could plant the seed in his mind, get him mulling it over.

  She wasted no time in getting straight online and ordering a Your Pregnancy: Week by Week book, remembering how her mum had given something similar to Angela when she was having Clara and how they had all pored over it together. Beatrice had the strongest recollection of the discovery that Clara was the size of a sesame seed at four weeks.

  ‘A sesame seed. Imagine that!’ Beatrice had said to her phone as she watched the book appear in her online shopping cart and she made the payment. She hadn’t let herself think for too long about how her mum wasn’t going to be around to look through this baby book with her, instead letting herself be distracted by the appealing buzz of shopping online for cute little things.

  There was a whole bewildering world of baby accessorising opening up to her and it was all only a click away. She ordered a teensy tiny white baby hat and matching blanket with little clouds and embroidered rainbows all over. It was expensive but, she told herself, you’re only newly pregnant once, and she wanted to celebrate.

  That was what the empty drawer was for: squirrelling away sweet little things. Her body tingled at the idea of all the research she’d get to do and lovely long lists she’d get to draw up during her pregnancy. Beatrice was a long term devotee of list-making and had, in fact, already started drafting her first baby list. So far it included white newborn sleepsuits and those muslin cloth things Angela and Vic said they had to have hundreds of. God knows what for. It was still all a wonderful mystery and she couldn’t wait to find out all about it.

  ‘Oh come on! Is it only six thirty? Are you actually going backwards?’ she accused the kitchen clock as she folded laundry, warm from the dryer. She’d grown used to talking to herself these last few months of job-seeking. Soon she’d have a bump to talk to and she’d feel less like a crazy, pyjama-wearing shut-in. Talking to a sesame seed whose existence she’d only just had confirmed felt a little peculiar but she resolved to keep giving it a go over the coming days until it felt more natural.

  Rich would be all right, wouldn’t he? Once he got over the surprise. She recalled reading that some men take a bit longer than women to adapt to the idea of being a parent. It’s biology and the fact they don’t have the whole BFP hormone spike and the sense of a tiny bundle of living cells bedding in for a long stay. They’re less invested, at first. ‘He’ll be all right,’ she said, glancing down to her stomach. ‘I hope he will, anyway.’

  Wondering if shaking hands were an early pregnancy symptom, she resolved to go and wait in the lounge and drink some water until she could research the whole tea thing properly. She carried the dismantled test with her, mentally rehearsing how she’d show it to Rich when he walked in the door, and hoping he’d had a good day at work and would be in the mood for surprises. She clasped the test to her chest.

  ‘Maybe I do feel a bit sick, actually,’ she told the little seed.

  Chapter Two

  Seven months later. The middle of nowhere.

  ‘You may well think you’ve booked in for Gaelic lessons, but that’s no’ whit the computer’s telling me.’

  Beatrice let her shoulders slump and forced out a long breath through her nose, crumpling her lips to stop herself telling this flustering Scotsman exactly what she thought of his customer service.

  ‘Warm Highland welcome guaranteed,’ the online brochure had read. ‘Sweet summer escape,’ it said. So far, Beatrice’s first and only experience of Scotland in her thirty-nine years on the planet had been disappointing, to say the least.

  ‘But my name is on your booking system? Beatrice Halliday?’

  ‘Aye. Nine nights, checking out on Monday the thirty-first of August, dinner, bed and breakfast, single room. Willow-weaving lessons included.’

  The man was staring at the screen, his glasses reflecting its harsh blue light. The computer looked as old as the hills surrounding Port Willow, but it was still by far the most modern thing in the reception of The Princess and the Pea Inn.

  ‘Willow-weaving?’

  Beatrice pinched the bridge of her nose. It had been a long day, and now this. She found herself glaring down at the threadbare tartan carpet, sandy from the beach just across the road from the inn’s heavy oak doors.

  At least the website was accurate when it boasted that the inn was, ‘Perfectly situated with idyllic sea views’, not that Beatrice had paid much attention to the scenery as she dragged her wonky-wheeled suitcase down the narrow pavement from the train station in the spitting rain, passing by the gently curving row of squat sea-facing buildings that made up the entirety of Port Willow. She’d barely registered the little stone-walled primary school, the various holiday cottages in soft pastel colours, the post office-come-souvenir-shop, or the closed-up chippy, but at the back of her mind she’d thought the place was not at all promising.

  All the while she’d been focusing instead on the bars on her phone and wishing she’d thrown an umbrella into her handbag before her hurried departure from Warwick at bleary-eyed far-too-early-o’clock this morning.

  The road was lined on the pavement side with end to end parked cars and on the other side by a low sea wall with small gardens built into it here and there which jutted out over the beach, but the gathering grey clouds and increasingly heavy rain had meant Beatrice wasn’t stopping to gaze at the blustery beach view. Plus, she’d had to have her wits about her. She’d nearly been swiped off her feet twice by cars’ passenger doors springing suddenly open across her path as she finally gave up her GPS as a lost cause and upped her speed, head down, muttering all the while increasingly desperate, sweary threats to nobody in particular that The Princess and the Pea Inn had better be easy to find.

  It was, as it happened, being the only pub in the village, slap bang in the middle of the little weather-beaten seaside strip. If she’d carried on walking past the inn door’s stone pillars and covered porch she’d soon have come to the village hall, Patrick’s fishmongers, the art gallery (Mr Garstang the watercolourist’s front room which opened to visitors on Saturdays and every second Tuesday during the season), the little church of Magnus the Martyr, and the rambling, miraculously well stocked Port Willow general store where she could have had her pick of umbrellas, from beach parasol, to golfing, to Peppa Pig. But Beatrice felt she had seen enough. To her relief, she’d stumbled into the inn’s reception just as the real downpour started and St Magnus’ was tolling that it was three o’clock.

  The inn doors had been propped open this morning to let the August sunlight in, and were now allowing heavy plashes of cold water to patter onto the doormat.

  Beatrice had read that this inlet was warmed by the Gulf Stream and, as such, unseasonably temperate for Scotland, and it was, after all, August so she’d expected a bit of sunshine – or at least some blue in the sky.

  Glancing past the flustering receptionist and around the dark interior she concluded that nothing about Scotland was as she’d hoped or expected.

  Dry, cracked oak-panelled walls led off to a bar and dining room beyond the reception desk and to a creaking staircase leading up to the bedrooms, while a pair of cobwebbed antlers jutted out from the wall over the dour innkeeper’s head, their points dangerously close to his scalp. The man was exceedingly tall, Beatrice noticed, even when hunched over his comput
er. If she could just get her hands on a hammer and a nail, she’d have those antlers raised and straightened in no time. And that panelling needed a good polish too. Things like that really bugged her.

  ‘I dinnae ken what to tell ye. Perhaps a computer error’s tae blame?’ The man nervously bit his lower lip, betraying that he knew exactly what was to blame – himself – but he wasn’t admitting it, not even for the sake of this poor bedraggled English woman, no matter how pale and short-tempered she looked.

  As she let her suitcase drop to the floor, Beatrice’s handbag slid down onto her forearm, its magnetic fastener pulling open. The corner of a soft blanket patterned with tiny clouds and embroidered with rainbows flopped out. She hastily stuffed it back out of view, securing the clip once more.

  Taking a measured breath, she tucked a strand of her wavy brown hair, now windswept and threatening to frizz up, behind her ear. ‘It doesn’t really matter. Just… just let me into my room and we can sort out the lessons later. I just want my key.’ Horrified, she realised she was close to tears and found herself angrily swallowing away the temptation to just let rip and sob in front of the stranger who was now rummaging painfully slowly in a Tupperware tub full of keys, inspecting each one in turn with slender, nervous fingers and every now and then looking up at Beatrice with cautious bewilderment.

  Gene Fergusson had seen his fair share of single women arriving at the inn since his younger brother had set up the activity and crafting holidays part of the website back in the spring – in fact now it was the height of the summer season they were arriving in a steady stream, but none of them had turned up tearful, clenched-fisted and furious, like this one.

  He’d checked in the new arrivals without (much) incident this morning, including the party of four wool spinners and dyers from Lancashire looking forward to a fortnight’s B&B with tartan-making lessons at the mill nearby. They hadn’t been pleased with the parking situation and demanded he set out traffic cones for them for the duration of their stay to ensure a reserved spot by the inn door. He’d pointed out he didn’t possess any cones but thinking on his feet – and proud of it – he’d offered to put out the inn’s hat stand and a fire extinguisher, and had received four frosty looks and bitter silence as a reward.