The Beach Café Page 2

  ‘Hi,’ I said pointedly now, as neither of my sisters had actually greeted me yet in a remotely conventional fashion.

  Louise recovered herself and came over to kiss my cheek. ‘That’s quite a look you’ve got going there,’ she commented, her mouth twisting in a smirk. ‘What’s that in aid of ? Midlife crisis? Homage to Samson?’

  I huffed a sigh, feeling irritable and petulant. ‘For crying out loud! Is that all you lot can talk about, my flaming hair? What’s wrong with you?’

  Silence fell. Mum, Ruth and Louise all exchanged glances, and I folded my arms across my chest defensively.

  ‘Flaming hair,’ Thea whispered to herself in glee. ‘Flaming hair.’

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Dad said, ever the diplomat, as Ruth scowled at me across her daughter’s flaxen curls.

  We drank tea and talked about Jo, and Mum cut us all slices of crumbly fruitcake. ‘Oh, I shouldn’t,’ Louise said with a sigh, but managed to get through two fat wedges of it nonetheless. Then Dad produced a bottle of Merlot and we polished that off too, as the memories of Jo kept on coming.

  After a while – I had lost track of time by now, but we’d somehow emptied a second bottle of wine – Ruth’s husband, Tim, arrived with their other two children (perfect Isabelle and angelic Hugo) in tow, then left again with Thea. The rest of us stayed put around the table in what felt like a bubble.

  ‘Do you remember that Christmas we stayed at Jo’s, and there were reindeer prints on the beach on Christmas morning?’ Louise said dreamily, her face flushed from the wine. ‘And those marks she said were from the sleigh runners?’

  Mum smiled. ‘She got up at the crack of dawn to make those prints on the wet sand,’ she said. ‘But that was Jo all over, wasn’t it? Anything to make the day extra-special.’

  ‘I loved it when we were there for my birthday one year, and she did a treasure hunt all around the beach that led to my present,’ I said, remembering the delicious excitement of racing across the sand in search of clues, before finally finding a wrapped parcel tucked behind a tumble of black rocks. I’d ripped it open to find a new doll and lots of clothes for her that Jo had made herself. Bella, I’d called her. Bella the Beach-Doll. Suddenly I wished I’d still got her.

  ‘She was amazing,’ Mum said, her voice wobbling. ‘A one-off. And too damn young and lovely to die.’ A tear rolled down her cheek. ‘God, I’m going to miss her.’

  Dad held up his glass. ‘Here’s to Jo,’ he said.

  ‘Jo,’ we all chorused.

  Chapter Two

  The funeral was the following Friday, down in Carrawen Bay, and I felt conscious of just how long I’d been away as I struggled to remember the turn-off I needed for the village. ‘Um . . .’ I faltered, slowing to a crawl and peering through the windscreen.

  ‘Do you want me to check the map?’ Matthew asked. It was a four-hour journey from Oxford and he had driven the first leg to the Taunton Deane services, where we’d switched. I’d confidently said I’d drive the rest of the way, but somehow the lanes were becoming confused in my memory, and all the fields of grazing sheep looked exactly the same.

  ‘No, I think it’s just a bit further,’ I blagged, feeling guilty for having forgotten. It wasn’t all that long ago that I’d known these roads like my own face; had been back and forth to Jo’s all the time from Plymouth, where I went to drama school, especially when I’d fallen in love with gorgeous Ryan, the sexy surf-dude who had captured (and then broken) my heart.

  I pressed my lips together as I thought about him now. He had shaken me up, all right, Ryan. Ryan Alexander, that was his name. I was nineteen, and he and I had spent the most perfect, romantic summer together in Carrawen Bay, me supposedly working for Jo to earn a few quid, but actually spending quite a lot of time sneaking off with lover-boy for romantic trysts and secret knee-tremblers in deserted spots along the coastal path and in the steeply shelving sand dunes. Oh yes. Nothing like the gritty sensation of sand in your nether regions to make you feel desired. And in need of a bath. Happy days! Well, until he buggered off travelling with his mates, and I never heard from him again, that was. Whenever I thought about Ryan now – which wasn’t often, honestly – he remained young and god-like in my mind, tanned and muscular, forever nineteen. He was probably shacked up in Australia or Hawaii, I reckoned, still chasing the surf, still hoping to catch that elusive perfect wave.

  I braked sharply, just in time to make the turning. ‘Bloody hell, watch it!’ said Matthew, jerking forwards in his seat.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Here we go. Carrawen Bay, one mile. Nearly there.’

  I fell silent as I steered into the narrow lane and drove slowly along, mindful of Jo’s accident in this very road, tears seeping from my eyes for what felt like the hundredth time since I’d heard the news. It didn’t seem possible that she wouldn’t be in the village when we got there, wouldn’t be waiting for me with one of her huge, tight hugs, her cheerful smile, that twinkle in her eye.

  ‘It’s very pretty,’ Matthew said politely as we rounded a corner and caught our first glimpse of the sea, a bright luminous blue, stretching out into the horizon. There was the familiar golden sweep of the bay, the dunes, the piles of rocks with their seaweed-fringed pools full of treasures to be discovered. Jo’s café was a timbered building with huge windows and a deck, just visible on the far left.

  ‘Mmm,’ I said, my voice trembling as I fought back the tears. It struck me as absurd that Matthew had never accompanied me down here. He’d always preferred walking holidays to beach ones, was never happier than when climbing a huge bleak mountain, buffeted by gale-force winds. Me, I was in my element with my feet in the waves, the sun on my face, the screech and flap of seagulls in the sky. ‘I’d call it beautiful, rather than pretty,’ I said after a moment as we reached the village’s first straggle of whitewashed cottages and old stone farm buildings, their slate roofs speckled with yellow lichen. ‘Devon and Dorset are pretty. Cornwall’s too wild and rugged to be anything other than beautiful.’

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Matthew raise his eyebrows at my nit-picking, but he didn’t say anything.

  Matthew and I had met five years ago. I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar . . . No, not exactly. I was working behind the bar of The Plough, a so-called gastropub in the centre of Oxford, although a gastroenteritis pub might have been a more fitting description, given Jimmy the mad chef ’s lack of basic hygiene. A cocktail bar it was not. (The owner, one florid-faced Len Macintosh – or Big Mac, as everyone called him, due to his darts-player physique – was from Doncaster and thought that cocktails were for poofs, as he so charmingly put it.)

  Big Mac clearly had a fetish for girls in stupid costumes, which was why throughout the whole of December he had the female bar staff in ridiculous elf outfits, all seemingly designed for maximum discomfort and embarrassment. Mind you, it wasn’t just us girls who suffered. The male members of staff had to wear furry reindeer antlers with jingling bells on. Not the most masculine get-up, as my colleague Lee kept moaning bitterly.

  So there I was one night, in my elf combo, which consisted of a nasty pea-green dress of purest nylon, a bright-red belt and, to top it all off, a daft green-and-red hat. I was feeling a prize prat and heartily glad it wasn’t Christmas every day, or even every month, when in came Matthew with an office-party posse, there for their annual knees-up.

  The romantic in me would like to say that our eyes met across the beer pumps and I melted like an advent-candle under a burning flame after one soul-searching look from his deep-brown eyes. In all honesty, I was so frazzled with the massive bar order, and the fact that my elf dress was bringing me out in a sweaty rash, that I didn’t give him a second look. It wasn’t until he swung into heroic action later on that I did a double-take.

  Yes – swung into heroic action! You read that correctly. Now we’re talking proper romantic stuff, right?

  Matthew’s group were quite pissed when they came in. There were sixteen of t
hem, all working for the same IT firm. (You got it. Mostly geeky blokes with bad dress sense and even worse complexions, pontificating earnestly about complicated computer stuff as they shovelled in their disgusting turkey risotto. I’m not selling Matthew very well so far, am I? Bear with me.)

  I went to collect their crockery once they’d finished and had to reach across the table to collect one guy’s plate. He was being particularly unhelpful by not passing it to me (I suspect he was hoping my breasts would fall out of the elf dress) and I had to really stretch to pick it up. As I was already balancing a stack of plates on my left arm, I had a blind-spot on this side, which was why I leaned right over one of the Christmas candles Big Mac had put on the tables to make the place look cheery and festive.

  Whoomph! went the bright, hot flame as it roared straight up my nylon dress.

  Smash! went the plates as I dropped them all over the table. I was screaming, other people were shouting, everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. And then there was Matthew, leaping to his feet, throwing his coat around me and putting out the flames in an instant. (See? Tell me that’s not heroic.)

  ‘Oh my God!’ I croaked, feeling completely hysterical and freaked out by my very own Joan of Arc moment. ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘Are you okay? Are you burned?’ he asked. His arms were still around me, as was his big black overcoat. I felt like a Jane Austen heroine, swooning in his grasp.

  ‘I . . . I think I’m okay,’ I said, weakly. I opened the coat to see the remnants of my costume hanging in black, charred tatters. I closed it again hurriedly, not wanting the pissed geeks to notice that my bra and knickers didn’t match. My hands were shaking. ‘Bloody hell . . . I can’t believe that just happened. Thank you.’ I blinked, then looked properly at him for the first time. He had a smooth pink face, conker-brown hair and grey eyes that were fixed on me in concern. My rescuer. ‘Thank you,’ I said again, still swaying with shock.

  Big Mac had waddled over by then, ice bucket in hand as if he’d been about to chuck the contents over the elf inferno. ‘Flipping heck, love,’ he said, his normally mottled face drained of colour. ‘Are you all right? Are you hurt?’

  ‘Of course she’s not all right!’ Matthew raged, rounding on him. ‘She shouldn’t be wearing a dress like that around naked flames. She’s a walking fire hazard. You’re lucky she’s not been badly burned.’

  Whoa! Hero alert. I’d never seen Big Mac so chastened-looking, so . . . small. Matthew had told him, all right, shooting up even higher in my estimation.

  Still, silver linings and all that. From that night on, the elf costumes were taken away and never seen again. Yes, okay, so we all had to wear the stupid jingly reindeer antlers now, but frankly, even that was progress, despite the dim sensation of tinnitus after a four-hour shift. Furthermore I was in love with – and forever in debt to – the man who’d saved me from hideous third-degree burns. Remarkably, I was utterly unscathed. He’d acted so quickly, so instinctively, that he’d completely extinguished the fire before it had had a chance to burn into my skin. He was my saviour.

  Five years down the line, and . . . Well, things had changed, sure, but that was what happened to all couples, wasn’t it? You couldn’t be a swooning Jane Austen heroine 24/7, just as you couldn’t be a full-time damsel-in-distress-rescuing hero. And so he’d discovered (quite quickly actually) that, unlike him, I was a dreaming drifter with no life-plan mapped out as far as my pension (er . . . what pension?), and I’d realized that he was . . . not tight exactly, but careful with his money, shall we say. And that he was actually quite serious about pensions and ISAs and career prospects, and got tetchy with me for not being interested. He even had spreadsheets charting his finances on our PC at home, which he spent hours laboriously updating.

  There was common ground too, of course. We both liked long cycle rides out of Oxford, we liked pubs and the cinema, we liked each other’s friends and families (well, most of the time) and, for all our differences, we got along pretty well together. Predictably, my parents absolutely adored him. ‘We’re so glad you’ve found someone like Matthew at last,’ Mum had said, almost collapsing with relief after she’d met him for the first time. ‘He’s so much more sensible and nice than those other boys you’ve been out with. He’s just what you need, Evie.’

  Sometimes, very occasionally, I wondered if she was right about him being just what I needed. Sometimes (again very occasionally), I worried in private that we weren’t the perfect match everyone said we were. My parents might not have been crazy about my ex-boyfriends – the conceptual artist who lived on a houseboat near Iffley Lock and took too many hallucinogens; the drummer who had tattoos and a motorbike and was very experimental sexually; the playwright who was so shy he would literally hide behind his own hair – but in many ways I’d felt a kinship with them. They’d been black sheep too, like me. Even if I didn’t fit in with my family, I’d fitted in with them on some level.

  Every now and then I wondered, disloyally, what I would have been doing if Matthew and I had never met. At the time of the perilous elf-meets-Guy-Fawkes incident, I’d been saving up to go to India and Nepal with a couple of mates. They’d gone six months later, and returned with beautiful saris, silver jewellery and colourful hair braids, as well as tales of spliffs on perfect sunset beaches, mountain treks, bustling city adventures, the Taj Mahal and the worst diarrhoea ever. Me, I’d spent that time at secretarial college, learning keyboard skills and Powerpoint. ‘It’ll open up so many more jobs to you,’ Matthew had advised.

  I wished I had gone to India now and not just because I hated typing. But anyway. He had saved my life. And we were happy. We were together. I was living in his house and he was going to put me on the mortgage any day now.

  Concentrate on the road, Evie, I thought, remembering almost with surprise that we were in Carrawen village. Yes. Jo’s funeral, of course. I dragged myself hurriedly back from my wanderings down Memory Lane and slowed to twenty miles an hour.

  There was the tiny old school, the farm where Jo had bought her milk and veggies, the surf shop – Waveseekers – which had a rail of wetsuits outside and gaudy surfboards in the windows, the Tardis-like grocery shop and the gorgeous old stone cottages. I had so many memories of this place and couldn’t quite believe how familiar it all looked, when everything had changed.

  I caught sight of my parents’ silver Golf parked outside the pub, just along from the squat stone church where the funeral was to be held. I squeezed into a space in front of theirs, narrowly missing scraping their bonnet as I misjudged the angle, then cut the engine and took a long, deep breath. And now for the funeral. This was going to be tough.

  I clambered out, feeling crumpled and unkempt after being stuck in the car for so long, and tried to tidy my hair and smooth down my black skirt on the short walk to the church. I put my hand into Matthew’s, wanting comfort, as we walked inside the old stone building. I still couldn’t believe this was actually happening.

  The church was absolutely packed, everyone in black, heads down, tissues to their bloodshot eyes. Mum gave a reading, as did the local vicar, a weather-beaten man with white hair, who spoke movingly about how much Jo had meant to the Carrawen community.

  After we’d sung ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ and, for once, I hadn’t giggled over the line about ‘the purple-headed mountains’, Jo’s best friend Annie stood up to give an emotional speech about what a wonderful person Jo was, and how badly she would be missed by everyone. ‘For her kind heart, her wicked sense of humour and for knowing all the gossip,’ she finished. ‘And don’t get me started on how much we’ll all miss her famous carrot cake.’

  Later, as we stood in the cemetery watching the coffin being lowered into the ground, with a faint breeze bowing the branches of the ancient yew trees, it really hit me that she was gone, gone forever. She’d only been 57; way too young to die. I couldn’t remember ever feeling so sad.

  The village pub, the Golden Fleece, had put on a buffet fo
r the occasion and kept the booze flowing freely all afternoon. It was dark and cosy inside, with low ceilings and small cottagey windows. The walls were decorated with old fishing nets, gleaming horse brasses and paintings of fishing boats.

  Mum and Dad went off to the solicitor’s to discuss the will, but the rest of us – Matthew and I, Ruth and her husband Tim, and Louise and her husband Chris – were there for the duration. Their children had been palmed off on various friends and mothers-in-law for the night, so our conversation was punctuated by several phone calls checking up on them. ‘Could you remind Hugo to practise his violin tonight? He’s got his Grade Two exams next week,’ Ruth said loudly into her mobile, as if hoping to impress the rest of the pub with her infant prodigy.

  Louise, meanwhile, had to sing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ down the phone to her youngest, Matilda, who didn’t seem very happy about Mummy being away. The first two times she sang it quietly, hunched over her phone as if deeply embarrassed by the request. ‘Louder? That was louder,’ she sighed when Matilda wasn’t satisfied. ‘Oh, all right,’ she muttered, rolling her eyes. ‘If I must.’ She drained her glass of wine and belted it out, much louder this time, earning herself several bemused stares from the other punters. ‘Kids!’ she exclaimed comically as she ended the call.

  Louise was plastered within an hour, her cheeks pink, her hair dropping out of her ponytail by the minute, and her gesticulations becoming progressively wilder. She had the hump with Mum, she told us. ‘Can you believe it, she’s only gone and entered Josh in the Cats’ and Dogs’ Home “Pet Lookalike” competition – with Monty,’ she sniffed indignantly. ‘I mean, honestly! How rude is that? Her own grandson – and she’s basically saying she thinks he looks like a flaming Yorkshire terrier!’

  Despite the circumstances, I burst out laughing. Josh was Louise and Chris’s earnest seven-year-old and yes, now that I came to think of it, he did have the same shaggy brown hair and mischievous eyes as Monty, Mum and Dad’s grumpy pooch.