Chapter Sixteen
Sariah stared at the group messages, trying to take in what Evelyn had posted, but it made no sense.
When she’d built the website, she had deliberately left off the cracked teacup to avoid something like this.
And yet, somehow, her mother had found out.
The family past she’d tried to outrun was rushing in like a rip tide, ready to drag her back down.
She had a rare Friday night off, but wished she was downstairs working because it would be a welcome distraction.
She would be kept busy with the usual complaints about faulty TV remotes, pillows deemed insufficiently plump or the peculiar smell in Room Six’s carpet that seemed impervious to Febreze.
Even dealing with the ongoing feud between the two Italian waiters or giving the chef a final warning about his whisky habit would be preferable to the task in hand: facing the fact that her mother had come to see Evelyn.
Sariah typed several draft messages before settling on: What did she say?
Evelyn’s reply read: She seemed to want the cup back.
Well, that sounds about right, thought Sariah. Her mother Grace had always felt short-changed by life. Whether the house was a mess, rain was forecast or the milk had gone sour, she’d look for someone to blame – and Sariah had always been first in the firing line.
Next was her dad, Clint, but he had shipped out not long after Sariah left.
Her brothers, Jamie and Liam, were the golden boys, but eventually they too had flown the nest, moving to Penzance where they had their own roofing business.
She followed their company’s page on Facebook, so she’d seen glimpses of her brothers growing older and caught the odd snippet of family news.
Jamie had married Shona, a woman who everyone described as ‘bubbly’.
Liam soon followed, marrying a Jenny and going on honeymoon in Ibiza.
In the past few years, Sariah had noticed that both brothers were starting to sport a small paunch apiece.
They were only in their late twenties while she, somehow, was thirty.
She hadn’t spotted their mother in any of the wedding snaps, which mostly focused on the happy couples: Jamie and Shona cutting the cake; Liam and Jenny embracing under a magnolia tree, the sky behind them retouched an unlikely blue.
Sariah had coped with so much during the past fifteen years and there had been plenty of times when she had wished for a mother to turn to, even hard-as-nails Grace. But now, Grace had come to Portheast searching not for Sariah but for that cracked cup, of all things.
How pathetic was that? But her mother had always prided herself on never giving an inch.
Occasionally, Grace’s rage at the world meant standing up for Sariah, like when she’d let rip during a school parents’ evening: ‘What do you mean she’s “easily distracted”?
’ she’d bellowed across the desk at Sariah’s form teacher.
The school hall had fallen silent and heads turned.
‘If my daughter is messing about, you lot need to teach better,’ her mother had said.
It became a catchphrase for a while, other kids shouting out in class: ‘You lot need to teach better!’ Sariah had laughed along, but it would have been nice if she, and her mother, had stood out for different reasons.
There was no way she was going to put any of this on the WhatsApp for the others to read: Jacob, who would always be cushioned by his family name and a trust fund; Della with her secret stellar career; and Alison with her perfect little estate house and baby.
But maybe she could talk to Evelyn, whose foundling past was common knowledge in Portheast. She was curious, too, to hear what her mother looked like these days.
Did she still dye her hair that fearsome shade of black and smoke like a chimney?
Most of all, she wondered if Evelyn had detected the smallest hint of regret in her mother’s eyes.
The next morning, Sariah’s work schedule included a meeting with a wedding planner, chasing a late laundry delivery and talking to a cleaner who was never on time.
But all the while, she kept flicking back to the WhatsApp chat, wondering how her mother had come to hear about the museum campaign.
By lunchtime, she couldn’t wait any longer.
@Evelyn How’s things with you? she messaged. Evelyn replied with the spurt of water and wind emojis, probably thinking it a weather report. Sariah would need to have a word; older people and emojis were a lethal combination.
@Evelyn I am coming down, she replied.
Evelyn had been right, though, the quay was windy and wet and the museum was as quiet as ever. As she walked into the cavernous dark shed, Sariah could barely see the top of Evelyn’s head behind her wall of books. As she got closer she saw Evelyn was absorbed in a guide to nautical flags.
‘Recent acquisition?’ Sariah asked.
Evelyn snapped the book shut. ‘Unfortunately not. Several years old, but I’m trying to make a dent in my cataloguing backlog.’
Sariah surveyed the piles of objects and boxes that surrounded Evelyn’s desk and wondered if it was humanly possible to finish the task. ‘Just out of interest, where do you pick all these things up?’ she asked.
‘Well, aside from the beach, I have been going to charity shops, jumble sales and the odd country auction for years,’ Evelyn replied.
‘How do you keep track? I mean, it must be hard to remember where you found every single thing.’
Evelyn frowned. ‘There are some that test my memory. But I can remember most of them.’ She picked up the book of flags. ‘This, for example, was from an RNLI book stall.’
Sariah tried to make her next question sound casual. ‘So, that cracked cup, for instance, the one that woman Grace came about. Do you remember where you found that?’
‘Indeed I do. It was in a school jumble sale a few years ago. I searched for a saucer, but there wasn’t one. Even though it was cracked, the pretty design caught my eye.’
Evelyn closed her volume on nautical warning flags and looked up. ‘Was there any particular reason why you decided to leave that cup off the website?’ she ventured.
Sariah hadn’t been intending to say why, but once she started talking the words kept coming and she realised she’d been holding them in for far too long.
‘I’m pretty sure that cup belonged to my grandmother,’ she said.
Then she explained about the last time she’d seen it, the awful moment when it had slipped and her fear of it being discovered.
‘So you didn’t see any other cups like it at that jumble sale? Or a big wicker picnic hamper?’
‘No, it was just that one, among a box of unwanted crockery. But none of it was as nice as that teacup.’
Evelyn reached for another hardback book from her pile and opened it at its title page. Presently, she asked, ‘So the woman I met yesterday, any idea who she was?’
‘I think you had the pleasure of meeting my mother, Grace. I haven’t seen her in fifteen years, but it sounds like she hasn’t changed. Sorry if she was rude.’
‘Ah,’ said Evelyn. ‘No apology needed. Well, not from you, anyway.’
Sariah picked up a shell from Evelyn’s desk, then put it down again. ‘How did she seem?’
‘Well, a little grumpy. She’d come a fair distance and hadn’t really understood the point of the poster. But underneath all her moaning, she seemed . . . troubled.’
‘Ha, that’s one way of putting it,’ Sariah said bitterly. ‘My mother was always at war with the world, as if she was put upon and everyone else was to blame.’
Evelyn set aside her book and reached for another object, a pewter tankard engraved with a ship. ‘So, tell me about your grandmother, the one who owned the cup – was she any easier to get along with?’
‘Yes and no,’ Sariah said carefully. ‘She was a proper matriarch, so you did as you were told. But Mum always said that Grandma Karensa had lost some of her bite, so maybe it ran in the family. That hardness.’ But even as she said it, she remembered a softer love from her grandma, times when she’d let Sariah stand on a kitchen stool to help make scones; rubbing the butter into the flour and then patting out the dough, her grandma pretending not to see when she popped scraps into her mouth.
In fact, those baking afternoons had been a little escape for all of them, with her mum and even Auntie Rose joining in with the quiet, methodical work of rolling and mixing.
‘So, would you like to be the one that calls Grace to follow this up?’ Evelyn asked.
Sariah shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. In fact, I doubt she has any intention of giving us a story for the museum. All she wants is to get it back. I mean, what’s she going to do with a broken cup? My mum just hates the idea of missing out on something.’
She sat down on one of the fold-out chairs.
‘One summer, I must have been about fourteen, she took me and my brothers out for the day. We came to Portheast, in fact, and there was a woman swimming off the quay. “See her,” my mum said. “Living her best life. Free as a bird. And here’s me, lumbered with you lot.”’
‘I think plenty of mothers must feel like that at one time or another,’ Evelyn said. ‘It’s just that your mum said it out loud.’
Then Sariah felt a pang of guilt, because here she was moaning when Evelyn’s own mother was dead and buried and her birth mother remained unknown.
‘Well, personally, I think you should give her a call,’ Evelyn said. ‘Why not see what she has to say – or what you want to say to her?’ She fixed her gaze on Sariah. ‘Because you have been given a chance to get back in contact with your mother. And you shouldn’t let it go.’
Sariah nodded. ‘Thanks, I’ll have a think.’
Back at the hotel Sariah typed out a message:
Hi Mum, Sariah here. Evelyn at the museum gave me your number – I’m helping the Save Our Museum campaign. I saw the cup too and also wondered if it was Grandma Karensa’s. Funny seeing it again. Evelyn said you wanted it back. Shall I bring it over?
After she’d pressed Send, Sariah sent a second message.
@Evelyn Thanks for the chat. Waiting to hear if she wants to meet up. If she does, would you come with me? Seeing as you’ve already met her. Could do with the moral support, but no worries if not.