Chapter 2
2
I had dithered so much before making my final decision. Most of the very small number of friends I did have thought I was mad to sell up and move to the seaside; they said that just because my life had changed so drastically lately, from being a busy parent of two and wife of one, and now there was only me to consider, rash decisions still shouldn’t be made. My two girls were completely and utterly horrified that I was even considering moving from the village they’d been brought up in. The place where they said all their memories of their family life together were made. The place that they’d both visited just once in the last two years because they were too busy with their own lives to fit in a visit.
But Mum was right, they did have their own lives. Melissa had not long qualified as a doctor in a city hospital in Manchester and worked all hours and Lucy had become a vet in a country practice in Derbyshire, recently engaged and in the throes of planning the wedding of the year. Even though neither were far away in miles, they were never around and I’d found recent times really hard and had honestly never felt so alone and so adrift in my life. But those days were over. I was fed up of wallowing.
It was in fact time for me to grab life with both hands and move on. The fact that this was where all our memories were made was exactly the reason why I had to move away. After all, memories were in your heart, not within the walls of a building. It was time for me to grab life by the short and curlies and have an adventure of my own. Time to make new memories that no one could taint.
And after Mum had declared that she was, in her own words, going to be shacking up with Bazza from the crib club, it felt like the final sign that I should make a move.
‘Close your mouth, darling,’ she’d said as I sat there, stunned. ‘I have a right to a life too, you know.’
‘I’m happy for you, Mum, I’m just surprised, that’s all.’
‘Well, the fact that I’ve moved in with Bazza means that I’ll be selling my house too, and I’d like to gift you fifteen thousand pounds of your future inheritance. So you can put it towards creating a new life for yourself.’
Mum was making an amazing gesture. I’d been forking out money on the forthcoming wedding like it was going out of fashion. Whilst fifteen thousand pounds would come in incredibly handy, this was an offer that I wasn’t comfortable accepting.
‘I can’t take your money, Mum, that’s yours. You should be spending it while you can.’
‘I’m not asking you to take it, Joanna. I’m telling you that you are taking it. I have a little set aside for the girls but I’d rather you have it while I’m here so I can see you enjoying it and living your dream. You deserve this, darling. I am doing it anyway, so it can either sit in your bank, or it can go towards your house by the sea.’
I wasn’t sure whether her telling me about the money was to throw me off the story about Barry. But the more I thought about it, the more she was right. Life was short and maybe we did all deserve a second chance at life. She was pretty inspirational turning her own life around after my father had died years ago.
‘Are you sure, Mum? This seems awfully generous.’
‘You are my one and only daughter. I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.’
‘Well, in that case, thank you.’ I threw my arms around her as tears rolled down my cheeks. I’d longed for a house by the sea for years. I’d been within touching distance of a holiday home that Michael and I had found, before it was all snatched away. Now finally, my dreams came first and were coming true. While it was a good thing, a great thing even, I felt totally and utterly overwhelmed.
When Rebecca Farringdon phoned me back as promised, I said that I would love to take her up on her offer. I’d never done anything so spontaneous and at the same time as being exciting it absolutely scared the living daylights out of me.
And that was how I ended up in Cornwall, in the cottage that I’d always adored.
The memories that flooded back to me were quite mind-blowing. The years we’d spent there with the children when they were growing up. Our picnics on the beach in all weathers, determined to enjoy our holidays. Our last time there had been for our twentieth wedding anniversary. Getting Michael away from the business was a trial in itself. He worked longer hours at that point than he ever had, telling me that I didn’t understand that in this day and age it was needed to keep up with the competition. In return, I had told him that if he didn’t try and get some time away now, he’d be dead before our long-planned twenty-fifth wedding anniversary trip-of-a-lifetime holiday to the Maldives that we’d been saving for. The one that never happened.