The Little Bed & Breakfast by the Sea

by Jennifer Joyce

  ‘She’d love that, thank you.’ Mae plucked a tile and turned it over so they could both see it. ‘One-Three.’

  Frank chose his own tile and turned it over, giving a little whoop of victory when he saw the pips he’d uncovered. ‘Five-Six. Me first.’ They both returned their tiles to the collection on the table and gave them another quick shuffle.

  ‘The vet was in here last night,’ Frank said as they drew their tiles from the collection and placed them in front of themselves, balancing them on their edges so only they could see the value of their own tiles.

  ‘Frank…’ Mae said with a heavy sigh.

  ‘What?’ Frank’s bushy eyebrows lifted and his mouth was agape. ‘I was only saying.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Mae rearranged the tiles in front of her, mostly so she didn’t have to make eye contact with her opponent.

  ‘He’s a fine young fella,’ Tom Byrne piped up, his voice making Mae jump. He’d been so quiet in his little corner of the bar, she’d forgotten he was there. ‘Our Tiddles had a tumour last winter. Thought she was a goner, but Alfie sorted her out. She’s got a new lease of life. She’s like a kitten again.’

  ‘Maybe I should take a trip to see our vet,’ Frank said as he placed his first tile face up on the table. ‘I could do with a new lease of life with all these barrels needing to be lugged around the cellar. I feel like I’m ready for the knacker’s yard some days.’

  ‘Rubbish.’ Mae selected a tile and joined it onto Frank’s. ‘You’ve got more energy than anybody I know, including Hannah. I hope I’m as fit and energetic as you when I’m in my seventies.’

  ‘Ssh!’ Frank’s eyes roamed the near-empty pub. ‘Will you keep it down? As far as everybody else is concerned, I’m not a day over fifty.’

  ‘Tom won’t spill the beans, will you?’ Mae asked and he shook his head.

  ‘What happens in the Fisherman stays in the Fisherman. Ain’t that right, Frank?’

  Frank chuckled. ‘Sure is. The tales I could tell…’ Frank chuckled again and shook his head. ‘It’s like being in a confessional some days.’

  ‘I hardly think you can compare yourself to a holy man, Frank Navasky,’ his wife said, appearing in the doorway that led to the living quarters of the pub. Corinne joined them at the table and dropped a kiss on Mae’s cheek. ‘And I don’t think priests make a habit of mopping up vomit from their confessionals.’ Corinne pulled a face and turned to Mae. ‘Gary King, pissed as a newt, again. I’ve told him he’s on his last warning. Once more and he’s barred.’

  ‘He’s already barred from the Old Coach and the Lion,’ Tom said.

  ‘And no wonder. He’ll be barred from here in no time, no doubt.’ Corinne Navasky was short and slim with delicate features, but she was a no-nonsense kind of woman who had no qualms about chucking even the biggest, roughest blokes from her pub. She was so different from Mae’s granny, who would weep over sentimental films and always, always gave somebody the benefit of the doubt, but they’d become as close as their husbands despite their differences. Corinne and Frank were like family to Mae, almost filling the gap her grandparents had left.

  ‘That vet of yours was in here last night,’ Corinne told Mae. Mae groaned and fought the urge to drop her head onto the tile-covered table.

  Chapter Two

  Willow

  The morning hadn’t started out as a usual Monday for Willow. Her husband usually caught the train from Clifton-on-Sea to Preston for his job and, as Willow worked a couple of streets away from the station, they’d walk together most mornings. But Willow had woken alone that morning and had to follow their routine by herself. She’d popped into the bakery opposite the pier as usual for a takeaway breakfast, munching on a cherry pinwheel and sipping a coffee as she walked to work, but it felt odd without Ethan there to chat to. With her mind free to roam, she found herself latching on to the memory of their argument the previous evening, the air thick with frustration and unspoken accusation and blame. Willow’s hand reached for her phone, her finger hovering over the contact list, but she shoved it back into her handbag without making the call. Ethan would call her when he was ready.

  There was nothing left of Willow’s breakfast by the time she reached her shop, bar a few flaky crumbs she quickly brushed away before she unlocked the door. Willow’s shop was a treasure trove of other people’s junk: furniture and household items rescued from skips, junkyards, charity shops and the local tip, all lovingly restored or upcycled to breathe new life into the once-loved items. Willow’s eye was immediately drawn to the dining table and chairs she’d finished the previous day. The piece had been commissioned by a local family who’d wanted a fun and quirky table for their playroom and Willow had risen to the challenge, decoupaging the tabletop with banknotes from old, unusable Monopoly sets and adding shallow drawers underneath that were perfect for storing board games and jigsaws without getting in the way of knees and legs while sitting down. The chairs had been painted in vibrant colours, with each of the children’s names – plus Mum and Dad, of course – spelled out in old Scrabble tiles on the backs. Willow was proud of the effect and couldn’t wait to see the reaction from the family when she dropped it off later that day.

  Closing the door behind her, Willow switched on the lights and moved across to the shop’s counter, which had been recrafted from an old oak sideboard. Her assistant would be there soon, allowing Willow to get creative in the workroom, but until then she would remain in the shop, catching up with admin and smaller jobs between customers.

  The morning’s second irregularity occurred when nine o’clock rolled around and there was no sign of her assistant. Gary didn’t have Willow’s eye for detail, but he was handy with a paintbrush and always willing to help her shift hefty items. Plus, he made a cracking cup of coffee, perfecting the milk-to-coffee ratio like an experienced barista. He’d been working with Willow since leaving college a few weeks ago and hadn’t been late once in that time.

  Another hour passed and there was still no sign of Gary. Willow had sold a pack of mini, spiral-bound notebooks she’d made using the property cards from the Monopoly sets as covers to a tourist looking for gifts for her grandchildren, and had arranged a house clearance for the following week, but her assistant hadn’t arrived. She dragged the planters she’d made from wooden pallets, which were filled with a rainbow of fragrant blooms, out onto the pavement in front of the shop to attract passing trade and ran a duster over the furniture, but still there was no sign of Gary.

  Her phone beeped with a new message mid morning as she was painting jam-jar lids at the counter. Wiping her hands on the apron she’d thrown over her dungarees, Willow grabbed her phone from her handbag, expecting it to be an explanation from Gary. But it was a message from Ethan. While Willow had been hoping for a phone call, desperate to hear her husband’s voice, she was relieved he’d got in touch to let her know he was okay. She replied to the message, asking him to phone her as soon as he was able to.

  While she had her phone in hand, she scrolled through her contacts and called Gary’s number. The phone rang and rang until Willow was about to give up and return to her jam-jar lids.

  ‘Hello?’ Gary’s muffled voice said as she moved the phone away from her ear.

  ‘Gary? It’s Willow. I was just wondering where you are as you haven’t turned up for work.’

  ‘What time is it?’ Gary asked, his voice raspy and sluggish.

  Willow glanced at the clock she’d created using driftwood and shells from the beach. ‘It’s after ten. Are you okay? You sound terrible.’

  ‘I feel even worse,’ Gary said. ‘I must have slept through my alarm. Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Willow pulled her diary from one of the counter’s drawers and flicked through it until she found that day’s page. ‘You don’t sound well at all. Go back to sleep – I can manage on my own for the day.’ She was due to deliver the Monopoly table that evening, but it wouldn’t be too much of a problem closing hal
f an hour earlier just this once. Moving the table from the shop to the van solo would be a challenge, but she’d faced bigger obstacles before.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Gary asked.

  ‘Of course. Rest up and I hope you feel better soon.’

  Willow said goodbye and hung up the phone, but it beeped almost immediately, alerting her to a voicemail. She pounced, pressing to listen to the message and placing the phone against her ear, anticipating the sound of her husband’s voice.

  But it wasn’t Ethan at all.

  ‘We have a problem. A pretty major one. Call me back as soon as possible.’

  Willow and Ethan had spent the first five years of their marriage renting a sweet but tiny cottage on the outskirts of town, but when the opportunity had come up to buy one of the Georgian, three-storey houses on the seafront, right in the heart of their seaside town, they’d jumped at the chance. From the outside, the house was beautifully grand with a dove-grey rendering and rows of tall windows either side of a porched front door. Yes, the rendering was starting to crumble, the windows needed a restorative touch and the front door looked as though it would fall off its hinges in a gentle breeze, but the asking price had been an unbelievable bargain and Willow was used to making neglected things shine again.

  The inside of the house had been much worse, with rotting floorboards in every room, warped doorframes and damp throughout, but still Willow and Ethan had been undeterred. They’d gutted the house and started again with a clean slate. This way, at least, they could put their own stamp on the place and make it their own.

  ‘What is it?’ Willow asked now as she returned her builder’s call, the jam-jar lids still abandoned on the counter. ‘What’s happened?’

  Willow was thinking the worst: a burst pipe flooding the house, or the foot of one of the builders coming through a newly plastered ceiling, or, most heartbreaking of all, the bathroom tiles she’d sourced online from a reclamation yard being dropped from the van and shattering on the pavement.

  Willow’s worst wasn’t even close.

  ‘There’s a problem with the foundations. I think you’d better come down here.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Willow said. ‘I’m in the shop on my own today so there’s nobody to cover for me.’

  ‘What about Ethan? Can he get over here?’

  Willow scratched at a small, still-wet blob of pastel-pink paint that had splashed onto the counter. ‘He’s gone away for a few days. Working. I’m not sure for how long.’ She wiped the paint from her thumb nail onto her apron. ‘Can’t it wait until this evening?’

  ‘Willow…’ The builder’s tone was firm. ‘You need to come down here. We can’t carry on with the refurb until this is sorted.’

  Willow straightened, the fingers on her free hand moving to rest on her chin. ‘What exactly is the problem with the foundations?’

  ‘We’re not entirely sure yet. It needs investigating properly. But what I can tell you is that the whole structure of the house is unsafe.’

  Willow’s eyes widened and she had to put a hand down on the counter to steady herself. ‘It’s that serious?’

  ‘It’s that serious.’

  Willow snapped her diary shut and shoved it roughly into the nearest drawer. ‘I’m on my way.’

  This was bad. Very bad. Willow and Ethan had sunk their savings into this house, had taken out a massive mortgage and loans for the refurbishment. If this went wrong, they’d be up to their eyeballs in debt. And worse – they’d be homeless. Although the house was nowhere near finished, Willow and Ethan had already moved in, living among the rubble as best as they could. Living onsite while the work was being carried out wasn’t ideal, but at least the money that would normally pay their rent could be redistributed towards the refurb. But there was no backup plan. If the house was unsafe, where would they live?

  Her quarrel with Ethan the previous evening filtered into her head.

  Maybe we shouldn’t have bought this house. We should have thought about it more. Thought about us, our future.

  But that’s what we were doing. This house is part of our future.

  Is it? At the moment, we don’t even know what’s in the future for us.

  Willow pushed the memory away and scuttled out from behind the counter, throwing her apron in the general area of a chair and grabbing her keys from the pocket of her dungarees as she barrelled towards the door. The house was only a ten-minute walk away, so Willow usually walked to and from the shop, leaving her van parked on the side street next to the shop, but she jumped inside now, slamming the door shut, tugging on her seatbelt and starting the engine in quick succession. The van rumbled into life and she pulled out of the side street and headed down towards the seafront, her heart hammering above the hum of the engine. Within minutes, she was pulling up outside the house. You couldn’t miss it, trussed up with scaffolding as it was, but Willow was glad it was still standing upright. Part of her was expecting to see the house in a heap, bricks tumbling out of the garden and towards the promenade, her hopes and dreams of her future with Ethan buried beneath the rubble.

  ‘I’m here!’ she called as she sprinted across the garden. The front door was open and she found the builders milling around the foyer, sipping cups of tea and working their way through a packet of custard creams. ‘What’s going on? I need to know everything.’

  ‘Everything’ turned out to be devastating. Willow didn’t understand a lot of what the builder was telling her, but the gist of it wasn’t promising. The foundations were no longer secure and the house might need underpinning. Willow wasn’t entirely sure what underpinning a house involved, but the builder warned her it could take several weeks to do, eating severely into their budget and extending their timeframe.

  ‘I’d strongly advise you to find somewhere else to live until we’ve made the foundations safe again,’ he told Willow. ‘I wouldn’t stay and, if you were my daughter…’ He shook his head. ‘There’s no way I’d let you either.’

  The problem was, Willow didn’t have anywhere else to stay in the meantime. They’d already given up their rented cottage when they’d moved into the new house, and both sets of parents lived over fifty miles away, which was impractical both for getting to and from work and overseeing the refurb.

  But it would be okay. They would work something out. At least that’s what Willow told herself as she walked away from the house and climbed back into her van. She sat in the immobile vehicle for a few minutes, staring out of the open window at the pier and the sea beyond, listening to the cacophony of seagulls, holidaymakers and crashing waves she’d been drawn to. Pulling out her phone, she dialled Ethan’s number but it went straight to voicemail, as she suspected it would.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Liam asked, wandering towards the van. Her builder’s face was creased with concern, and Willow was pretty sure it mirrored her own.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Willow shrugged and started the engine. ‘But I’ll figure something out.’

  She had to. With Ethan’s absence even more noticeable now, it was down to Willow to sort this mess out. It wasn’t in her nature to crumble, no matter how tempting it was, and she wasn’t about to let herself – and Ethan – down now. She set off in the van, eyes peeled for the nearest B&B. She knew there were several in the seaside town and she managed to locate one easily, further along the seafront. She parked the van, jumping out and rushing along the pavement when she saw a woman and her child leaving the property. She didn’t know whether the woman was the proprietor of the B&B or a guest, but she didn’t have time to pop inside first. If this woman was in charge, she couldn’t miss her.

  ‘Excuse me…’ Willow was breathless from her dashes that morning. ‘Is this your B&B?’

  The woman was in her late twenties but looked as though she’d been plucked from the wrong decade. She wore a red-and-white polka-dot dress, cinched in at the waist, with matching heeled, peep-toe slingbacks, and her dark hair was pinned back in victory
rolls. The style suited her, though, and Willow suddenly felt frumpy in her striped T-shirt and dungarees.

  The woman slipped the quirky red, heart-shaped sunglasses from her eyes. ‘It is, but I’m afraid we’re fully booked for the next few weeks if you’re looking for a room.’

  Willow’s shoulders slumped. ‘Oh.’ Maybe finding alternative accommodation at a B&B wasn’t going to be as easy as she’d thought. ‘It’s just I’m refurbishing a house up the road.’ Willow pointed further up the seafront towards the pier. ‘But there’s a problem with the foundations and it isn’t safe to stay there.’

  The woman’s face softened and she patted Willow’s arm briefly. ‘I’m sorry. That sounds terrible.’ She bit her lip, which was a glossy pillar-box red, and shook her head. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t fit you in. Have you tried any of the other B&Bs? There’s a lovely little one in the harbour that’s a little quieter, being away from the beach and everything, so you might have better luck there. Or there’s the hotel up by the pier, but that’s a little more expensive, or you could try the caravan site?’

  ‘Nanny says we can stay in a caravan when Mummy isn’t so busy,’ the little girl standing with the woman piped up, squinting in the sun as she looked up at Willow. She was cute and had a rather more relaxed look than her mother with her sundress and wellies combo.

  Willow crouched down to the little girl’s level. ‘That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? I’ve never stayed in a caravan before but it sounds fun.’

  The girl nodded. ‘You get to sleep in a little room in a little bed and watch a little telly.’

  Willow gasped and widened her eyes. ‘That sounds amazing! I hope you get to stay in your caravan soon.’ Willow stood up again. The woman had returned the heart-shaped sunglasses to her face. ‘Thank you for your help.’

  The woman nodded. ‘Good luck.’ She turned to her daughter and took her hand. ‘We’d better get going. I need to drop the keys with Mrs Hornchurch and then get you to Nanny’s.’