28
E ssie has worked so hard to stop seeing Dwight so much. It’s Saturday morning and Connor is coming. Her lovely, gorgeous boyfriend will be here in just a few hours. She doesn’t need some hard-bodied, rough-handed scruffbag with the neatest, tightest—
No. She needs to concentrate on the next stage of the refit.
The problem is, they need more manpower, they need people, and the people they have, like Wee Jim and his mate, aren’t specialists.
The electrics are going to be next, now that everything is more or less cleared out, and she doesn’t really know anyone she trusts not to blow them sky-high. She needs a specialist.
Janey is very anxious even making the offer, but she has to. Essie is back to being at home all the time, which isn’t doing anyone any good, not least her electricity bill.
‘I told Lowell you might puppy-sit,’ she says. ‘He’ll pay. It’s only pin money but . . . ’
Essie looks up, and Janey steels herself for a sarcastic refusal.
‘What does Lowell do for a living?’ she says. ‘Isn’t it something buildery?’
‘Well, he’s an architect.’ Janey frowns. ‘Is this for next door? Because, you know, I did this place mostly by myself.’
‘Who did you get to do the electrics?’
‘No one; the electrics were okay.’
‘What about the plastering?’
‘Johnson did a lot of it.’ Janey frowns again. ‘Oh, lord, I shouldn’t have had him lifting his arms above his head.’
‘How is he?’
‘They’re putting a care package together,’ says Janey. ‘It’s slow-going. He wants to be completely back to normal straight away and that’s exactly the kind of thing that makes people fall over. But he’s going to be fine.’
She doesn’t mention Lish, who she found yesterday crying in the linen closet. Lish finding things too much was incredibly unsettling. She takes everything in her stride. If Lish is under too much pressure . . . She decides not to talk about her abortive night with Lowell right now.
Essie leaps up. ‘Yes!’ she says. She has a lot to ask this guy. Her dad has not been remotely helpful, although he did ask if she would come over and babysit Logan while he took Lori away to New York for the weekend.
‘Okay,’ says Janey, surprised. ‘Well, let me know how you get on.’
‘Give me his number.’
‘Ah,’ says Janey, ‘I still don’t have it.’
‘Oh for heaven’s sake!’
‘Just walk over there.’
‘No way!’ says Essie. ‘What, just turn up out of the blue? God, Mum, you are so Gen X.’
Which feels not remotely fair, as Essie had adored every Friends rerun when she was a tween, and had always said she was envious of the way people just turned up at each other’s houses without a hundred and seventy-five WhatsApp messages needing to be sent first.
‘It’ll be fine.’
‘A strange girl turning up on his doorstep. No way. Come with me?’
Janey was going to tell her not to be daft, she’s a grown-up, but oh, how often does Essie want to do things with her?
Plus, it might be ridiculous but . . . she wants to see Lowell.
She isn’t young; she’s certainly far too old to have a crush.
She thought she’d grow out of it. She thought, when she was younger, that surely only the young felt terrible yearning.
Grown-ups couldn’t possibly feel it. And she doesn’t, for the most part.
She can appreciate a nice-looking young man, but this is different somehow.
It’s the smell of him, the gentle timbre of his voice; the way he thinks deeply before he speaks; his beautiful house, and the clear reflection of his character drawn upon it; his deep love for his daughter.
She has it bad. Not that he would be looking at her.
But she has it far too bad not to traipse past his house, like a teenage girl going out of her way to get on at a different bus stop.
‘Sure,’ she finds herself saying. ‘Plus I want to see Bute.’ She quickly amends this to, ‘All of the puppies.’
‘Has her arse gone back into proportion with the rest of her body yet?’
‘She’s the Kim Kardashian of dogs,’ says Janey. ‘Only a bit hairier.’
*
Outside in Carso it is a day to make you sing.
The birds are everywhere, chattering with excitement, and everything is yellow and bright; the grass, after the long winter rains, as green as a jewel, and, if you look closely, buzzing and humming full of life.
Clematis bursts like slow-motion fireworks from hedgerows, and the streets are full of Saturday people; early tourists, excited to have beaten doom-laden weather reports: locals just going for a stroll, feeling the luxury of being able to discard their big winter puffas; considering leaving the house without one of Gertie’s knitted berets on.
Unfurling their instinctive hunches against the north wind; embracing its sweeter, sunnier cousin.
‘See,’ says Janey, following Essie and shading her eyes. ‘If it was like this every day you’d get bored. You’d get fed up of all the lovely weather and you’d hate the sunshine. Whereas when it happens like this, it has a rarity factor that brings you far more joy . . . ’
‘Hmm,’ says Essie. ‘Rather than horrible then amazing, can it not just be “not bad”, and average everything out?’
‘No,’ says Janey. ‘I love the horrible too. That’s what the peat stove is for, and the big curtains, and a good book and the telly.’
Essie looks at her, uncharacteristically open. ‘You really love it here, don’t you?’
Janey nods at old Mrs Patterson on the high street, hoping she’s solved her feedback issues. ‘Of course I do . . . oh. Yikes.’
Lowell is in front of them. Janey immediately flushes hot, completely flustered. She hasn’t even had a chance to put some mascara on.
She is so attuned, she had already recognised him, all the way down at the harbour’s edge; the bulky shape of him, getting out of an electric Volvo. An electric Volvo was exactly, she thought, what a stupid architect would drive.
She thinks back to the night before. When nothing happened. When they shared a bottle of wine on a weekday night, and the thought that they were a man and a woman in the same room did not even cross his mind. She feels her body slump. Even more than it slumps normally.
‘Oh, is that him?’ says Essie, craning her eyes and starting forward.
Lowell has gone to the back door of the car and is opening it, and a slight, short figure with long, dark hair is getting out. Janey feels her heart-rate speed up.
‘Ooh,’ says Essie. ‘He’s got a girlfriend.’
Janey feels faintly hurt – not that he has a girlfriend, because she already knows that the figure is not at all his girlfriend; but that Essie might not consider it of the slightest concern to her whether he does or not.
‘Don’t be daft,’ she says, as they squint in the sun. ‘That’s his daughter.’
‘Okay. Well, good.’
‘She’s deaf,’ says Janey.
‘Oh, right. Has she got an implant?’
‘She doesn’t.’
‘Oh, no.’ Essie stares at her hands. Janey had made both her children take basic courses in BSL when they were small, but they hadn’t practised it or kept it up.
‘You’ll be fine.’
‘Don’t make me,’ says Essie, and she makes the one sign she does remember at her mother. It is not polite.
The girl is sallow, and as soon as she gets out of the car stands as far away from Lowell as she possibly can, facing away from him. As they get closer it’s clear that she is about nine or ten; when Janey last saw her she was five.
She glances at Essie.
‘Are you going to say hello?’ Essie says. ‘Can I go and get buns?’
Janey smiles, remembering how hard Essie had always found it when she was small, running the gauntlet of how many people her mother had to stop and chat to on a completely average walk through the town.
Janey ran the hearing tests at school, so every kid knew her and would often shout out a cheerful ‘beep’ as she passed; or people would stop to let them know how their grandparents were getting on.
Essie would writhe with boredom, swearing over and over to herself that she was going to get out of this town the second she was able.
Now, however, Essie spots Gertie, the knitting genius who’d been in her class, and Struan, the cool musician of the school.
She wouldn’t have put those two together in a million years, but Struan is a teacher now and they look incredibly happy together.
They wave cheerfully and Essie looks suspiciously happy about it.
‘I’ll be back in a minute!’ she calls as she darts off.
Janey carries on by herself down to the seafront.
The harbour is busy: a van sells fresh lobster rolls and chips on a Saturday, as fresh as could be pulled from the water, and you had to be quick or they sold out; on lovely sunny days like today, there is even more of a crush.
He’s been lucky to find a parking space so close to the water; people are coming in from miles around for a stroll and a snack on such a gorgeous day.
There is clean salt in the air, and the pleasing aroma of coffee, ice cream, chips.
‘Hey,’ Janey says, approaching with a smile.
Lowell turns round. Instead of a smile, he looks awkward. The child doesn’t turn around at all and is standing at right angles to her father; she can’t hear her, of course. Facing away from her father is a very clear display that she currently has no interest in communicating with him.
Janey manoeuvres herself around to the girl’s left side and signs, ‘Hello.’
The girl stares at her blankly and doesn’t respond. She is very thin for her age, Janey can’t help but notice.
She smiles cheerily and signs, ‘Are you Verity? I saw you in my clinic once when you were very small.’
‘Verity has had quite a long drive,’ says Lowell, coming round. He speaks and signs at the same time. ‘Haven’t you, sweetie?’
Verity stomps away from them, off further up the harbour wall, towards the lobster shack, scowling. Janey and Lowell share a glance.
‘Hey,’ says Janey, and Lowell only winces. She is suddenly glad he told her the situation last night. ‘Is this her first time up here with you?’