Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
TOM
The heat has been building for three weeks and the village has given up pretending it’s temporary.
Gardens are dying. Tempers are fraying. The ice-cream van has extended its hours and Dot has extended her Greensleeves campaign to anyone within earshot. The harbour shimmers like a mirage by midday, and even the gulls seem to have lost their enthusiasm for screaming.
‘Unnatural,’ Dad says, for what must be the hundredth time this week. We’re in the surgery waiting room, three fans running and achieving nothing. He mops his forehead with the handkerchief he’s carried every day since 1987. ‘This isn’t weather. This is provocation.’
‘Provocation from whom?’
‘The universe. The sun. The general concept of summer.’ He peers at me over his glasses. ‘You’re picking up this friend of yours today, aren’t you? The girl from university?’
‘Cara. Yes. She’s not a girl, Dad. She’s twenty-seven.’
‘Everyone under fifty is a girl to me. It’s a perspective issue.’ He folds the handkerchief with surgical precision. ‘And she’s staying how long?’
‘A week or two. She’s between jobs.’
‘Hmm.’ Dad’s hmm is a family heirloom. Mum has one too, slightly different frequency, same devastating payload. ‘And she’s just a friend, is she?’
‘She’s a friend.’
‘Because your mother has questions. About friends. About the specific nature of this particular friendship. About—’
‘Dad.’
‘I’m the messenger. I don’t write the messages.’ He stands, creaking. ‘I’ll be in the garden. Watching the roses surrender. If you need me, I’ll be the one arguing with the hose.’
He leaves. I check the clock. Half twelve. Cara’s train gets in at two-fifteen. That gives me time to finish the morning’s paperwork, drive to Truro, and remember how to be a person who has a plan and is executing it.
The fete was three days ago. Three days, and I can still feel the weight of the bear, the look on Nina’s face when I handed it to her – confused, pleased, something else I couldn’t name flickering underneath.
She’d tried to say favourite again and the word had stalled, and something had moved across her face that I’ve been turning over ever since, examining from every angle like a slide under a microscope, looking for evidence of something that probably isn’t there.
Her mother had hugged me goodbye like I was already family. That had been worse, somehow. The kindness of it. The assumption.
I’d got home that night and found more texts from Cara – cheerful, counting down the days, the exclamation marks of a person who knows what she wants – and felt something complicated settle in my chest. Not dread.
More like the sensation of walking into a room you’ve committed to entering while your body is still trying to turn around.
Tom Darcy is moving on.
The sentence used to feel like a plan. Now it just feels like something I say.
Truro station is a furnace.
The platform shimmers. A woman fans herself with a newspaper. A child is having a meltdown near the ticket barriers and I sympathise entirely.
The train pulls in. Doors open. People spill out, already wilting.
And there’s Cara.
She spots me before I spot her – waving from three carriages away, her face breaking into a grin so immediate and uncomplicated that something in me loosens despite itself.
Considering the last time I saw her was weeks ago, rumpled in bed and clutching her head while groaning and promising to never drink sambuca again, she looks damn amazing.
Cara has always been put together; even when we were students, she dressed to make an impression – not on us, the other students, but on the lecturers.
She once told me that her mum had whispered words of wisdom to her at five years old: Always dress so people take you seriously.
It seemed an ominous thing to say to a child; my own mother would have been sticking plasters on my knees at that age from where I’d slipped on seaweed-covered rocks.
Guess we are all different though, and who am I to judge?
Cara’s blonde hair is casual glamour, soft waves that shine regardless of the lighting.
She’s slim, wearing dark jeans and a shape-hugging vest top, paired with gold sandals.
I’m more than aware that she’s pulling stares from passing men.
‘Tom Darcy.’ She stops in front of me, hands on hips, assessing. ‘You look deliciously melting.’
‘So do you.’ What? ‘I mean, you look lovely.’
Cara snickers. ‘Liar. I look like I’ve been slow-cooked on a train for four hours.
’ She pulls me into a hug – longer than I expect, her arms pulling me in properly, holding on in a way that isn’t quite hello.
The scent of her perfume, something woody and warm.
When she finally steps back, her hands don’t quite leave – they slide to my elbows and stay there a beat, and she looks at me with an expression that isn’t the easy grin.
Something quieter underneath it. Then the grin returns, full wattage. ‘God, it’s good to see you.’
‘You too.’ And I mean it. That’s the complicated part.
‘You’re supposed to say that with more enthusiasm.’
‘I do mean it.’
‘Better.’ She picks up her bag, loops it over her shoulder. ‘Right. Sea Salt Bay. Eight years of hearing about this place. I have expectations.’
The car is staggeringly hot inside. Cara slides in and immediately starts fanning herself with the road atlas.
‘Inhumane,’ she says. ‘This is a violation of the Geneva Convention. How do people survive here?’
‘They complain. Constantly.’
She kicks off her sandals, and puts her feet on the dashboard as we pull out of the car park and onto the Truro ring road. For a few minutes we drive in silence.
Until she says, ‘So.’
‘So.’
‘We’re not going to be weird.’ She turns her head on the headrest to look at me. ‘About what happened. At the wedding.’
I keep my eyes on the road. ‘No.’
‘Okay.’ A pause. ‘You took four days to reply to my first text.’
‘I was busy.’
‘Tom.’ Her voice is gentle, careful. Not accusatory. ‘I’m not naive. I know what it was. I just need to know you’re not going to spend my entire visit treating me like a problem you regret.’
‘You’re not a problem.’ I exhale. ‘And I don’t regret it. It’s—’
‘Complicated?’ She says it without any particular edge.
‘I know. I’ve known since about forty minutes into it, if I’m honest.’ She picks up the road atlas, weighing it in her hands.
‘I’m not here to make claims, Tom. I’m not going to be the woman who arrives with an agenda and an ultimatum.
That’s not me.’ She glances across. ‘But I’m also not going to pretend I don’t know my own mind.
I came here knowing what I was probably walking into.
I came anyway. That says something, doesn’t it? ’
‘It does,’ I say. I mean it, and I feel guilty for meaning it, and the road stretches ahead in the heat.
She nods, satisfied, or at least prepared to be satisfied, and turns to the window. Her hand reaches across and rests briefly on my arm, just a few seconds, before she pulls it back.
‘Right,’ she says. ‘Tell me about the village. Tell me everything. Starting with Dot and the ice-cream van, because that email was unhinged and I need the full story.’
I tell her. The road narrows. The hedgerows press in.
She fills the rest of the drive with questions and laughter and the particular warmth of someone who is genuinely interested in the texture of your life, and when she laughs she tips towards me slightly – her shoulder briefly against mine – and it’s easy, and real, and I’m able to hold both things at once: that I’m glad she’s here and that I have no right to be.
The village appears around the headland – the harbour, the boats, the cottages climbing the hill.
The Lavender Café with its faded purple shutters, lavender-filled window boxes, and the hanging baskets full of fuchsias.
The Ship with its terrace full of tourists.
The surgery on the corner, and above it, the flat.
‘Oh,’ Cara says softly. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘It’s home.’
‘I can see why you never left.’ She’s quiet a moment, and I can feel her watching where my eyes go as we come round the headland. ‘It’s the kind of place that gets into your bones, isn’t it?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Lucky,’ she says. ‘Not everyone finds that.’
There’s no envy in it. Just honesty. I park by the harbour.
Bill spots us from The Ship’s terrace before we’ve taken ten steps.
‘Tom! You’ve got a visitor!’
There’s no point pretending we’re going anywhere else.
I steer Cara towards the picnic benches that serve as the outside area overlooking the harbour, and Bill’s already pulling the table next to his over, with that energy he gets when there’s someone new to talk at.
She drops onto the bench and I sit, and immediately she leans back slightly and her arm settles against mine on the table – not dramatically, just there, easy, like it’s where it lands.
‘Bill, this is Cara. Cara, Bill. He’s on the lifeboat crew and—’
‘You’re on the lifeboat crew?’ Cara’s face lights up. She turns towards me first, grabbing my arm. ‘Tom, why didn’t you lead with this?’ Then she’s focused entirely on Bill, leaning forward. ‘How often do you actually get called out? Is it as dramatic as the TV programmes make it look?’
‘More dramatic,’ Bill says, already glowing, the crinkles on his face getting deeper with his smile. ‘Last winter we had a shout in force eight winds…’