Edie Browne's Cottage by the Sea Page 5

  ‘Put it this way, if he’d asked me to dance thirty years ago I wouldn’t have said no.’ Her wicker chair creaks as she settles back into it.

  I can’t believe what I’m hearing. ‘But you’re grieving.’ And she’s also my aunt who’s into ballet and wheat grass juice and rubs on Estée Lauder Youth Dew body lotion morning, noon and many times later on. Every day. How can a guy whose idea of a meet-the-client outfit is a ripped T-shirt and is hunky enough to have jumped off the pages of GQ magazine even register on her radar? He’s totally nothing like, you know … the one who looks like he wants to snog Margot’s face off every time he snatches her out of the air. Or smooth old Uncle Harry, come to that.

  ‘Don’t be so frumpy, Edie, I’ve lost my husband, not my eyes.’ It’s another one of those times when her snap is so sharp, arguing is pointless.

  I fix my gaze on the ferns in the room beyond the door. ‘We really need to do something about this wallpaper.’ This is me, and I’m taking back control. A few minutes’ break from the riot of black and purple has been bliss. At home Dad repainted my bedroom and the pale grey walls and soft light filtering through the muslin nets worked wonders for clearing my head. We’ve got to make a start somewhere and Edie Browne, site manager, knows the cottage is the place.

  ‘You could be right. If we’re having regular visitors we don’t want to come across all dark and gloomy, do we?’

  If Mr Awful-Neighbour got an upgrade to visitor status, even if it’s only in her head, we need to get this quest up and running. The sooner we do, the sooner I’ll be back to civilisation. And normality. And after today I could really do with some of that.

  8

  Day 139: Tuesday, 20th March

  Calligraphy at The Deck Gallery

  Epic Achievement: Remembering that word I keep forgetting. But mostly getting Aunty Jo down the hill.

  ‘Don’t worry, Aunty Jo, it’s only a bit of lettering – what can possibly go wrong?’

  I’m power walking a reluctant Aunty Jo down the narrow winding streets of St Aidan, hoping I’m not about to answer my own rhetorical question. For starters, I can’t remember the name of the cottage let alone the postcode. Worse still, it’s going to be like the stroke department revisited, and everyone will be ancient.

  It’s funny how my life has flipped; when I remember that most days I’d be toughing it out with contractors at site meetings it’s hard to align that person with the one who’s about to sit at a table with a load of dreary people doing loopy writing. Truly, if someone had told me I’d be going to an after-lunch Care in the Community class I wouldn’t have believed them either. But this is for Aunty Jo not me, so I’m happy to do it.

  We’ve eaten a compromise lunch of pasta tubes made from split peas, which was way worse than it sounds, with lettuce leaves, followed by prunes. We stopped at the cash machine outside the Spar shop on the way down, where Aunty Jo barked prompts over my shoulder and I punched in my 1111 pin all by myself. I’ve now got a bundle of notes, so from here on I can pay with cash. As we push our way into the gallery there’s a wall of huge paintings of the sea that feel so real I can almost hear the crash of the waves on the canvas. Further down the space there’s a group of women around a large table, their laughter bouncing off the high white ceiling.

  As their heads all turn I feel Aunty Jo go rigid. She’s growling through her teeth at me, ‘If we leave now, they might not notice?’

  ‘Hang on.’ She’s not getting out of it that easily.

  The tug I give her is so hard that we speed down the gallery. Then, just before we reach the group, she locks her knees but I keep on going. My body’s miles ahead and my legs are running to catch up. As I make a grab for the table edge my thighs crash into it too and set the ink bottles rattling and send a pen rolling off onto the floor. I ignore the gasps around the table and pull out my best sparkly smile. ‘We’re here for the class?’

  Whatever I was expecting, it wasn’t someone my age in a daisy print jumpsuit bounding towards me around the table in duck-egg blue Converse.

  ‘Josie and Edie? And I’m Beth – we were hoping you’d come.’ Her bleached pixie haircut shows off the cute dents in her cheeks when she smiles. Better still, she’s almost as breathless as me. ‘It’s more of an informal workshop actually, we all work on different projects but we help each other along.’

  I make a grab for my sunnies, then push them back up on my head again as I realise there’s nothing flashy or jarring about the light. It’s seeping in through a series of frosted slit windows and, instead of dazzling me, it’s washing the room with softness. It’s as if a lot of the places I’ve walked through in my mind the last few months have come to life again here. As the people sit back in what look like fabulously funky chairs for a backwater and let go of the pens and ink pots they’ve grabbed hold of, even if I can’t read what it says, I have to admit there’s some pretty cool work going on.

  As Beth’s words sink in I whoosh around to Aunty Jo. ‘Projects! That’s what I was trying to think of – the one I can never get.’ It’s days ago now, but I can’t let it pass. Projects Manager. For the South-West. That’s my job at Zinc Inc.

  Aunty Jo’s eyes are open very wide. ‘I see why you said getting out would be good, Edie.’

  Beth pulls some spare chairs in our direction. ‘It’s not all hard work – we do a lot of chatting too. Drinks and snacks are on the side, come and help yourselves. Then settle in, and I’ll get you some practice sheets.’

  I dangle a fruit tea sachet from my fingers in front of Aunty Jo. ‘This one for you?’ I recognise the strawberry and exotic flowers as the one she has at home when she’s not insisting on green. Which would be another good sign if we were looking for them.

  Aunty Jo picks up a muffin. ‘Are these double chocolate?’

  Beth nods. ‘And vegan too, homemade in the Little Cornish Kitchen just beyond the harbour. They’re great for creativity.’ She’s talking so fast she could be nervous blurting herself.

  By the time I sit down with my mug of hot chocolate I’m definitely warming to community classes. ‘Can we pay?’

  ‘Or shall we fill in any forms?’ Aunty Jo’s slipping her coat onto the back of her chair so I take it we’re staying.

  Beth hands us a blank sheet of paper. ‘Don’t worry about cash, your first time is free, so just jot your names and contact details on here. You’re at Periwinkle, aren’t you? The views are lovely from there. Loella and I are practically your neighbours – we’re in the cottages just along the road to Rosehill.’

  ‘Fabulous views,’ I agree. Neither of us has a clue where the hell she means, but whatever.

  ‘Best writing.’ Aunty Jo might have made a joke there. A moment of scribbling and my name and number are down there too, then she hands them back to Beth. Easy as that. No one even noticed the cheat.

  Beth whisks the addresses away then hands us some paper with sets of lines on and a mug of pens and pencils. ‘I’ll show you some basic letter forms. It’s no big deal. Calligraphy is only handwriting but a bit more careful and well thought out.’

  Although the little pots of ink, and brushes, and jars of water and scraps of different coloured paper scattered across the table look interesting, this isn’t the best place for me right now. I can still write, but it usually ends up all over the paper and looks like someone else did it – blindfold, using their wrong hand. Keeping anywhere near the lines is going to take a massive effort. But a few minutes later we’ve been shown how to hold our pens at the right angle, done a – very wavy in my case – row of little straight lines, then watched Beth tracing out the curves of an ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’ and ‘d’ a few times on our papers.

  Now Aunty Jo and I are trying on our own I’m finding it hard to keep my mind on the job. I take one bite of muffin then do a stroke of a letter. A bit of staring at the very white ceiling. Another bite of muffin. In the time it takes me to do my first ‘a’, Aunty Jo has filled a sheet and is onto the next. She’s hittin
g this with the same high-impact energy she uses for her Keep Fit and Look Ten Years Younger routines in the mornings.

  For me, my full attention is going to the sponge. It’s so dark and sticky – if I’m going to taste anything, it’ll be this. So far I’m not, but you can’t win them all. Not straight away. In between times, I feel like I’m back at junior school. I can’t say I’d ever have put myself at a calligraphy class, unless I was intending to write my own wedding invitations of course. In which case Bella and I would definitely have pulled in one of those lovely Pens and Prosecco Workshops for Brides at Paper Moon in Bristol, and we’d have spent an entire Saturday inhaling our bodyweight of delicious canapés and teensy macaroons. Which I might have dreamed of fleetingly, in passing, maybe one time. Well, maybe a bit more often than that if I’m being completely true to myself. But which definitely won’t be happening now, not since Marcus and I had our discussion, where we talked totally honestly and openly for the first time ever about where we saw ourselves going as a couple.

  Don’t ask me how we got seven years into the rosy land of living together before we had that talk. However it happened, we can’t undo it now. And, due to complete fucking mismatch of expectations of the most epic proportions, we had a humungous and hugely fierce argument. Followed by a calm after the storm week of realisation, then a very tearful rethink, where I think I was supposed to back down, but for the first time in seven years, I didn’t. Which was the point we both knew we weren’t going to agree on some of the most important decisions in our lives. So we realigned our pathways to go in different directions. He kept the house, which was only fair because it was his to begin with. And I headed off, leaving years of heartfelt renovations behind, feeling this was all my fault for not getting things straight to begin with.

  As she reaches for her next sheet, Aunty Jo looks up. ‘You always had lovely writing on the letters you sent us.’

  When we were younger, probably because they didn’t have kids of their own, Harry and Aunty Jo never missed a birthday and my mum was a stickler for ‘thank you’s so we never lost the habit. Marcus always poked fun at my family’s obsession with gratitude. All our quirky ‘thank you’ cards propped behind the toaster and cluttering up the magnetic steel noticeboard drove him wild because they wrecked the minimalist lines of the kitchen. Mostly he saw thanking anyone for anything as sign of weakness.

  I smile as I remember school. ‘My writing was neat.’ That bit was easy. Everything else was where I lost it. For me school was simply a chance to have fun with my friends, and my life only took off properly once I’d left. Put me in a room of people and I’m straight off making besties and having a ball, which is why it’s hard to adjust to how I am at the moment. The truth is, with my non-stop chatter on temporary go-slow, even my good friends find me strangely quiet. I don’t want to go out with them either, because it’s just too weird not being the noisy one. It’s fine, we’ll make up for lost time as soon as I’m back to my old self. But it’s strange to think this afternoon is the closest I’ve been to a social event in ages.

  ‘So, as a newbie, how are you finding St Aidan?’ A woman with a wide grin and a tumble of dark curls falling over the shoulders of her chunky cardigan is pulling up a chair next to me.

  I focus on the flowers rioting across her dress, ignore the sweat prickle on the back of my neck and scramble around my brain to find a reply. Any will do, ideally nothing too insulting or unfiltered. ‘It’s … er … quiet.’ What else is there to say about an empty village where the sand blows in your eyes so hard you can’t see the sea, even when you’re not on the beach?

  From her laugh she finds that funny. ‘You won’t say that in July. At least when it’s not busy we get to meet here.’

  Beth chimes in. ‘Without us, Plum, the owner here, could go right through the winter and never see another human.’

  ‘So which one’s Plum?’

  The dark girl nods at the distant staircase. ‘She’s upstairs painting her seascapes, she lets us put on craft workshops in winter to keep the place alive. I’m Loella, by the way.’

  Beth’s smile is hopeful. ‘There are actually lots of other sessions you might like to dip into.’

  ‘Yes?’ They sound great for Aunty Jo.

  Loella carries on. ‘I do patchwork, quilting and anything creative with fabric.’

  I sense Aunty Jo sitting up in her funky chair, so I smile at her. ‘You enjoy sewing, don’t you?’

  Aunty Jo sits up even straighter. ‘Actually, life drawing was always popular in Harpenden.’

  ‘WHAT?’ I’m picking my jaw up off the floor, desperate to move this onto anywhere that’s not here. ‘Or how about r-r-rings and things?’

  Loella’s beaming and jumping to her feet. ‘We do have an occasional life class, when we can get a model. I’ll put you down for that, upcycled jewellery making when we do it, and quilting? I’ll email you with the times. You will still come to calligraphy?’

  Aunty Jo’s flicking through her pile of sheets of perfect swirly letters, but she’s looking doubtful so I jump in before she can refuse. ‘Absolutely.’

  Loella turns and nudges me. ‘And whatever you said before, what’s coming now is going to make you think again about St Aidan being quiet.’ She checks her watch. ‘Any second the kids will be back from school and all hell will break loose.’

  Beth’s hurrying round with a tray and what looks like an urgent expression. ‘Hand over your ink pots everyone.’

  There’s a whoosh of air all the way down the gallery as the door opens, then the hammering of feet and the kind of whooping you’d expect from those Americans who ride horses, do cattle drives and shout ‘yee haw!’ as they wave their ropey things around. There’s a blur of colour as more kids than I can count come stampeding down the gallery, waving their coats in the air. Then my stomach sinks because there’s a skittering daxi too. And, coming up the rear, with a couple of littlies hanging off each arm, there’s a horribly familiar faded denim jacket.

  Aunty Jo gives me a very significant nod. ‘Not just a pretty face. Isn’t it nice to see a man who’s good with the small ones?’ Then she leans in and her voice drops to a whisper. ‘Have you seen how muddy their feet are? I do hope he keeps them away from us.’

  ‘Me too.’ Obviously I love Tash’s little ones, but other people’s kids in large numbers are on my ‘avoid at all costs’ list.

  I should tell Aunty Jo off for objectifying too, but I’m not up to smart replies right now. Luckily a tug on my elbow saves me. ‘Cam …?’ I’m hoping I’ve got that right. It’s acceptable to forget adult names – kids, not so much.

  His frown is accusing. ‘Why are you here, Edie Browne – you hate writing?’

  I lift my arm off my paper so he can see my work and hope he’s remembered the ‘e’ on my name.

  ‘Three! Is that all you’ve done?’

  I nod. That’s three ‘a’s, not three sheets. It’s as if I’m seven again, and I just zoomed straight to the bottom of the class.

  ‘All afternoon?’

  ‘Yes siree.’ It’s my voice, but the accent’s unexpectedly American.

  ‘That is worse than me.’

  ‘See, I told you. And high fives to that!’ I hold up my hand and he smacks his palm against mine before he rushes off.

  Then Loella sweeps by with an armful of papers and flashes me a smile. ‘Cam’s already chatting to you? Well done for that – a lot of us have tried and failed there, so great work.’

  It’s nothing, but for someone who took all afternoon to write three ‘a’s it’s the high point, so I’m going to grab it and enjoy.

  ‘And we’ll see you same time tomorrow for Fun with Fabric?’ I’m trying my best to return the wall-to-wall smile Loella’s sending me when hers suddenly fades. ‘You do want to come? I mean you would like to try sewing?’

  Crap. If I’m bad at writing, needlework will be so much worse, because I could never do that before. ‘Errrr –’ This is not the moment to run out
of words either.

  ‘You look less up for this than your aunt, that’s all?’

  Damn. ‘W-w-whatever g-gave you that idea?’

  Her face cracks into a smile again, but this time it’s rueful. ‘One, the faces you pulled when I mentioned it earlier, two, the way you looked like you wanted to make a run for the door most of the afternoon. Need I go on?’

  I have to admit as I take in her hand-knitted cardi that wouldn’t look out of place on a catwalk, the stylish knitwear and the straight talking have both caught me off guard.

  ‘Two tiny things, you’ve totally misread.’ This time I make sure my smile is dazzling and I’m really over-compensating. ‘Don’t worry, w-we’ll be there. So much fun – how could we not?’

  ‘Don’t worry …’ It’s almost an echo and as she cocks her head her laugh is low and dirty. ‘Your secret’s safe with me, Edie Browne. See you tomorrow.’

  Fuck, fuck, fuck. This time I don’t even try to hold back my groan.

  She’s still there grinning at me. ‘And I’m so pleased you swear. You’re going to fit right in here, I just know.’

  And that was calligraphy.

  9

  Day 141: Thursday, 22nd March

  Back at The Deck Gallery

  Epic Achievement: Getting a different view of St Aidan. (It’s all about the ‘boom’.)

  Fun with Fabric? That has to be one of those oxymoron phrases that totally contradicts itself. As for how I still know about those when I can barely remember that my middle name’s Sara, that’s just another of those pesky anomalies I collide with every day. If I had my way there’d be a law against the words ‘fabric’ and ‘fun’ ever appearing in the same sentence. Just saying. So there’s no misunderstanding. Even if I can’t look at a pin without messing things up, this is for Aunty Jo – she’s like my mum, they could sew in their sleep.

  Up until we reach the gallery, it’s like reliving the last time. Pasta, prunes, lettuce. Speeding Aunty Jo down the hill because, despite the promise of needles and scissors, she’s suddenly very reluctant. But today there is a difference because, even before we push through the tall plate-glass gallery doors, we can hear the whirr of sewing machines. As we make our way towards the work table we’re faced with an explosion of colourful fabric and then, one by one, the bowed heads look up and we’re faced with a sea of waves and smiles, and a chorus of ‘hi’s and ‘hello’s.