by Kiley Dunbar
After that she had stopped talking about it, and Rich, his face grave and set like a white mask that Beatrice couldn’t bear to look at, had let her, and she hadn’t uttered a word about their little lost son ever since. In fact, she had found there was very little else to say about anything. Their little sticking plaster was torn away leaving them untethered, slowly drifting apart again.
Now Beatrice made her way back up the ladder in the dawning light, drawing the bed curtains closed around her and letting herself sink into the pile of mattresses where she wept silently until sleep came again.
Outside in the bay and on the hazy horizon, the fishermen cast nets and pots over the sides of bobbing boats. The sea had settled into its gentle summer flux once more and Port Willow awakened to a calm morning after the storms.
Chapter Six
Directions to the Coral Beach
‘Excuse me, what’s this?’ Beatrice asked, suspiciously eyeing the speckled brown discs.
She’d emerged from the princess room tired-eyed and yawning and surprised herself by making it to the breakfast room with ten minutes to spare before service ended for the morning. The unfortunate Gene Fergusson, wearing chefs’ whites, big floppy hat and all, had just set her plate before her on the white linen tablecloth.
‘That is the full Scottish. Whit ye ordered.’
He’d presented her plate with a little flourish of the white cloth in his free hand. How different to the ineffectual, flustering man she’d met yesterday. He was clearly in his element making breakfasts. Presumably his runaway wife hadn’t been responsible for the morning food service with him, or doubtless he’d be unable to look at a frying pan ever again.
Beatrice worried momentarily she was about to spoil his composure. ‘No, I mean these things?’ She nudged the unidentified food items with her fork, separating them from the crisp onion hash and curiously square slices of sausage on her plate.
‘That’s yur haggis.’
‘Oh! Right.’
‘Something wrong?’
‘Nope! Nothing wrong. I love a bit of haggis at…’ she peered at her watch, ‘five past eight in the morning.’
Gene chose to be happy with this reply and strolled back to the kitchen, whistling.
The breakfast room windows opened onto the inn’s back garden enclosed by a low stone wall where red crocosmia heads bobbed in the light breeze, scattering the last of the night’s raindrops.
Beatrice gazed out at the dewy, bright morning. She had never been one for breakfast. Even when she’d left home at seven o’clock every morning to get to the Arts Hub across the country in Oxford she had only needed a coffee or three to get her through until lunch but today the plateful in front of her looked so delicious – excepting the haggis – she determined to make a valiant effort with the streaky bacon and buttery field mushrooms.
Gene was back again, pouring her coffee and setting down a rack of hot granary toast, which she set upon immediately with the salty Scottish butter.
‘I’m not normally a breakfast person,’ she remarked to the retreating cook between mouthfuls, but he didn’t seem to hear her, so she looked around at the other diners, all preparing to leave for a day of crafting and summer sightseeing, but there was no sign of Cheryl and Jillian. Beatrice registered a little pang of disappointment before dismissing it as silly. She was, after all, leaving in a few moments. They’d likely never think of her again.
Swirling her spoon in the cup she ran through the journey she would be embarking on today, a reverse of the humid, cramped, seemingly never-ending trek of yesterday beneath grey English clouds and Scotland’s rain-soaked rails.
A splash of coffee spilled in her saucer and the question arose again in her mind, the inevitable, awful question she had been putting off answering for weeks. What exactly was she going to do now?
Slicing into a juicy grilled tomato, rich with the heady scent of the summer greenhouse, she tried to think of the future but found it impossible to picture. There seemed to be very few options open to her. Instead a series of ‘if onlys’ queued up to darken her mood. If only she had a job to go home to. If only she hadn’t hired Helen Smethwick. If only she’d listened to Rich’s warning that her small area of expertise in the arts sector – the place where creativity met with community and charity – was desperately under pressure and would soon collapse in on itself with the weight of underfunding and corporate greed. But she had pressed on, telling him the Arts Hub was her home and she couldn’t imagine working anywhere else.
She sighed, making a start on the delicious triangles of golden fried bread, so greasy and so satisfying as she mopped up the runny yolks of the fried eggs.
She’d thrived on the work. Every week day, and plenty of Saturdays too, for the last nineteen years, there she’d been, at her desk, delegating tasks, calling the meetings, running the joint.
It had started as a graduate job, and it had all felt so easy, walking straight out of uni and into a junior role. Her first task had been helping an alms houses charity write a funding bid so they could run a local food festival in their grounds. Her bosses had been so pleased when she actually won the money and the festival had gone ahead she had been promoted by the end of the year and had bought her first car to celebrate; a second hand, shiny red Fiat, her pride and joy.
Success had come easily, at first. Then, after a couple of years and an ever increasing workload, there was a sudden restructure and she found herself at the head of the organisation: manager of the Oxfordshire Arts Hub, bringing communities and arts practitioners together to put on cool, worthy and creative community events.
Looking back, the Hub had been visionary, inclusive, and wonderful. Back then, the lottery money and the government initiatives felt never-ending and Beatrice had revelled in her team’s successes. They had been a happy bunch. Barely a weekend went by when they weren’t photographed grinning for the local papers opening fetes, helping out at coconut shies and coffee mornings, or dressed up in swanky clothes for community theatre premieres or down at the mall for the opening of artisan pop-up shops – all very much unpaid extras they did for the love of it. They’d supported countless projects, social enterprises and start-ups and Beatrice had managed the whole show, calm and competent, thriving on the buzzing energy of the creative networks around her. It had been great for a long time – until it suddenly wasn’t.
The last thing she’d done in her role was hire Helen Smethwick, her new assistant with HR responsibilities. Her arrival was long overdue; they’d been running on a skeleton staff and goodwill for years. Beatrice hadn’t realised Helen was married to the new head honcho at the council and he had new ideas for money-saving strategies which Helen had every intention of helping him see through, advising him from the inside on what – or who –could go.
Six weeks after Helen’s arrival the council announced the cuts. The Hub was to lose half its office space and all senior staff were invited to apply for voluntary redundancy. The trouble was, Beatrice was the oldest and longest serving person there. When the cuts came in, her nineteen years of dedication and hard work were rewarded with a long tussle to keep her job, a month’s notice and a four grand payoff last September.
Helen Smethwick had Beatrice’s job now and as far as she could tell from the social media campaigns it was business as usual, only money was tighter and funding harder to come by than ever before. Nothing about it felt fair, but at least the younger staff, people she considered friends, even if their texts were now few and far between, had been protected. That had been some comfort to Beatrice.
Beatrice wasn’t aware she was gulping her coffee and devouring her plateful at an unusually fast pace for her. She was licking her lips and buttering another slice of toast and wolfing the smoky, salty bacon and the herby, savoury sausages, loving every bite, but in her heart she was back at the house she had shared with Rich for so long. She was thinking about the recent endless afternoons at home when there were no job interviews and no emails, no matter ho
w many times she clicked ‘refresh’, and there wasn’t much to do but potter around the house. All her friends were at work at the Hub and they were unlikely to call during the day – at least none of them had yet. So she’d read anything and everything until it was time to cook Rich’s dinner.
It was during these lonely afternoons she wished she had a dog. Dog owners were never stuck for something to do. But Rich was afraid of dogs. He always said he was allergic to them but she knew he was terrified of even the tiniest Chihuahua. She thought for a second that even though she was at The Princess and the Pea Inn in the back of bloody beyond and the Wi-Fi was atrocious, she might have another coffee and try scrolling through slowly buffering pictures of abandoned puppies on the Warwick shelter’s website, something that had become a daily habit back at home lately, but she gave up the idea when she saw the greyed-out bars on her phone.
Every one of those poor mutts had a story sadder than the next. It was the old ones she felt sorriest for, those that were greying and leggy with lumpy hips and slow saunters; the kind of big old dog that still ate its way through a fortune in food and was ancient enough to rack up the vet’s bills. Nobody wanted a dog like that, except maybe Beatrice.
She was sighing and setting down her cutlery on her plate when Gene appeared again.
‘Are you finished there?’
She looked down at her plate, surprised to find that, yes, she was finished, and every tasty morsel was gone, apart from the haggis which Gene was peering at with a forlorn expression which Beatrice chose to ignore.
‘Yes, thanks. Do you know when the first train leaves this morning?’
Beatrice didn’t have high hopes for an early start; the station had one platform and one rail which carried the single carriage train along the cliffs and off to Fort William, where she’d no doubt have another long wait for a train to Glasgow or Edinburgh before finally finding a train to Warwickshire.
‘You don’t like haggis, then?’
‘Well, no, but everything else was delicious, thank you.’
Gene swooped away to the kitchen with the plate, calling for Echo, who presumably was going to be the recipient of the rejected haggis.
‘Oh come off it, you can’t be put out by someone not fancying a mouthful of unidentifiable brown offal first thing in the morning,’ she muttered, hearing the sound of a plate being scraped.
She glanced around. The breakfast room had emptied at some point, Beatrice wasn’t sure when. Had she been lost in thought again? That happened a lot recently too, and she didn’t like it.
‘Eugene? Mr Fergusson? You didn’t answer me about the trains?’ Beatrice called out, peering at the swinging kitchen door. No reply came, but Echo bounded into the room and pushed his way into the kitchen for his treat.
‘Well, that’s not very hygienic, is it? Dogs in the hotel kitchen,’ she muttered again as she stood and reached for the handle of her suitcase.
‘You wanted to know when the train leaves this morning?’ came a deep voice from the breakfast room doorway. Beatrice cursed her stomach for flipping at the sound. This wasn’t dopey Gene, but Atholl.
Taking a deep breath, she found she was bracing herself for the sight of him. And it was just as well she had. There he stood, hair towel-dried and fresh from the shower, the deep red of his curls even darker now, his skin pale and cheeks ruddy, and wearing a thin bottle green jersey over a checked brown shirt and soft-looking summer cords with the chunky tan boots she’d seen him in yesterday.
‘That’s right,’ she raised her jaw as she answered him, meeting his blue eyes without flinching. In spite of his smiling eyes, his pale pink lips were set straight. He really is so vexing, thought Beatrice.
‘It doesnae.’
‘I’m sorry, what?’
‘It doesn’t leave this morning, or any other time today. It’s Sunday.’
Gene suddenly swung through the kitchen door and greeted his brother with a firm pat on his arm before setting about clearing the other tables.
‘And?’ said Beatrice.
It was Gene who answered her. ‘My mother used to say if God wanted folk to gad aboot on the Lord’s day he’d never have allowed Sunday matinee movies on the telly.’
Beatrice swallowed, letting her eyelids close, ignoring this little insight into the Fergusson matriarch who sounded as barking as Gene and as irritating as Atholl. ‘So I’m stuck here?’
‘Train at nine the morra,’ Gene added matter-of-factly, whipping the white linen cloths from the cleared tables.
Beatrice looked down at her repacked suitcase by her side. She’d made up her mind to go and now she was thwarted. She didn’t know what felt worse: the sense of being trapped in an empty home in Warwick, fretting and fed up, longing for an escape of any kind, or being stuck here after a failed attempt at escape with the Highland cast of Fawlty Towers.
‘Is it your room that’s bothering ye?’ Atholl pitched in calmly, now leaning on the doorframe with Echo sitting obediently at his feet. ‘I’ve already asked Mrs Mair if she’ll give it a thorough going over today since ye were so displeased wi’ the inn. And besides, you’ve got yur willow-weaving classes startin’ the day. You’ll no’ want to miss them.’
‘No, no, I already said, what with the mix up and everything, I’d really rather not do any class at all. I wasn’t even that keen on the Gaelic lessons, if I’m honest, and willow-weaving seems…’
‘Whit?’ Atholl probed, sharply.
Too quiet, she thought. Willow-weaving seemed too quiet and too still, and she didn’t want time for introspection. What she wanted was to blast all thoughts out of her head. Perhaps that was why she’d booked this wretched trip in the first place. Learning Gaelic in a classroom full of beginners might have been lively and challenging and all those long vowels, rolled r’s and ‘lochs’ with guttural, curling ‘och’ sounds would have filled her mouth and her head and chased away some of the fidgeting, unsettled feelings she couldn’t seem to switch off these days. But willow-weaving? Faffing about with bits of twig didn’t sound engrossing or diverting at all.
‘I’ll just stay here in the village today, if that’s all right? Give the class a miss.’
‘Well there’s no shops open,’ said Atholl. ‘And Reverend Park’s kirk service isnae ’til ten, so you’ll have a quiet day ahead. Besides yur teacher will be waiting for you, and there’s no phone at the But n’ Ben school to ring them.’
‘Surely they won’t mind one absentee?’ Beatrice found herself brushing invisible toast crumbs from her navy palazzo trousers and striped Breton top. She’d dressed for comfort and for a long train journey home, wondering all the while what she’d find when she got there.
Atholl watched her, his eyes narrowing and the bright light in them dying. ‘It’s only yourself that’s booked in. It’s a one to one class and they’ll be waiting for ye. If you don’t get walking now, you’ll be late.’
‘That’s ridiculous. No phones?’
‘No signal, even if there was a phone. The But ’n’ Ben’s a fair way doon the headland.’
Beatrice steeled herself with a deep breath. ‘Why must everything be so complicated here? I suppose I’ll just have to walk doon, I mean, walk down! I’ll cancel the classes and ask the teacher for my refund, throw myself on their mercy! I think mine is a pretty reasonable request, don’t you?’ She flashed Atholl a wry smile which he didn’t return. ‘Just point me in the right direction, please. Can I leave my case here? I’ll be back within the hour and I’ll have some tea in my room or something.’
Atholl shrugged his shoulders. ‘Eugene, can you give Beatrice directions to the But ’n’ Ben, please? She’ll want to see the headland and the top of Rother Path on the way.’
Gene met his brother’s eyes before shrugging and walking Beatrice through the inn to the door. When they were outside and breathing clean, salty sea air, Gene raised a bony finger and pointed Beatrice’s way along the street.
Everything looked so different this morning –
blue instead of grey in the sky, sandy dust drying on the road instead of the petrichor of yesterday’s rain, and tourists exploring the freshly exposed shore as the tide retreated.
‘You’ll walk all the way along the front, past the chippy and up by the school, follow the pavement and keep climbing the hill ‘til you’re out of breath. Stop at the stile in the fence and climb over intae the field. Follow the clearing through the corn ’til you come to the muddy path.’
‘How do you know it’ll be muddy?’
Gene snorted his amusement and carried on. ‘Keep to the edge o’ the path all the way doon tae the rocks, then ye need to get on your hands and knees and climb doon until ye see the coral. The But ’n’ Ben’s up above it.’
‘The coral?’
‘The coral beach?’ He threw her an uncomplimentary look. ‘It’s famous, I’m sure of it. Cannae mistake it, it’s like nae other along this stretch o’ coast. But mind tae keep tae the rocks.’
Beatrice was shaking her head, astonished. ‘OK.’ She’d never heard such odd directions.
‘If ye get lost, call for Echo; he’ll come and find ye.’
‘Echo?’
‘The inn dug?’
‘I know who he is. Is he the fourth emergency service round here, then?’
‘He’s got better hearing than any man and he’ll come runnin’.’
With that Gene swooped back inside the inn, leaving Beatrice free to laugh. For the first time in a long time, she really laughed and the convulsive motion loosened her knotted shoulders. This was it. It was happening. She had known her laughter would come back to her one day. She laughed all the way along the road by the sea wall, glancing at stranded boats on the sand and as she walked on past rows of parked cars and the tiny picturesque terraced cottages, she couldn’t stop. Gradually, she felt her throat tighten and her eyes stinging. She was laughing, at last, but crying with relief and sadness at the same time.
How could a woman get herself into such a state? All alone in a strange village with tears on her cheeks, laughing like the gulls on the lampposts while shattering deep sobs forced their way through her throat. She reached for the little red post box on the sea wall to steady herself. A few breaths and she’d be fine, she reassured herself. She’d grown used to giving herself comfort. And besides, she had come this far.
