Epilogue
Freya
Six weeks on, the summer came up the coast like a good service. All at once, and exactly on time.
The café found its rhythm the way boats find theirs.
Mornings were the harbour trade, crab men and the chandler and Tam with his crossword, the pot going round on the honour system.
Then the walkers, then the prams, then the afternoon shift of gossip and lemon trays.
Edith came Tuesdays, with her own cup, and pronounced weekly on the salt, and I adjusted nothing, and we both looked forward to it enormously.
Tam finished his crossword one Thursday in June.
The whole thing. The café observed a minute's silence, and Mum framed it.
The specials board runs on whim and season.
When the mackerel came in heavy, Miles walked a crate up the hill with the light behind him like an advertisement for the sea, and mackerel it was.
Dilys inspects the saffron buns monthly for doctrinal drift.
And there is a mug on the shelf now that is Rhys's mug, unlabelled, untouchable, its position defended by the entire clientele in my absence.
The nest upstairs had annexed half the second bedroom and was frankly beyond parody, four scents deep and renewed weekly by a wool rota nobody would admit to running.
I sleep in the middle of it the way grain sleeps in a barn. Gathered, and kept.
The bond had gone from weather to climate.
I couldn't tell you where my calm ended and Rhys's began anymore.
Miles's squalls of joy still cost me the odd tray of shortbread.
Hudson's warmth ran under all of it like the Gulf Stream.
Rhys and I had stopped needing the stairs to know the other's coming.
Miles claims he can read my baking moods from the quay.
Hudson says nothing, and knows first, every time.
On the bad small days, the ordinary ones everybody gets, one or another of them would simply appear at the pass with no errand, the way the town taught them, and stand near me until the weather turned.
Thursdays we shut at four and kept the long table for ourselves.
Found-family night, though nobody called it anything.
The pack, and Mum, who complained about the walk from next door, forty feet, and came every week.
Maren and Emrys drifting in with garden politics.
Pryce when her rounds allowed. Whoever the tide left.
We ate whatever I felt like making and argued about nothing that mattered.
Mum and Maren ran a standing feud about rhubarb that both would have defended to the death and neither could have explained.
Emrys ate in silence and left verdicts like tips.
Pryce told stories that were all confidentiality with the names sanded off.
Under the table, most weeks, somebody's hand found mine.
A different somebody each time, no rota to it that I ever caught, though with this family I'd rule nothing out.
That's the whole recipe, as far as I can tell.
It took me thirty years to learn it and one spring to cook it.
It was a Thursday when Maren brought the news, over the last of the gooseberry fool.
"I've a girl coming for the summer," she announced, in the tone she reserves for prize marrows and acts of God.
"A grower. Gifted, they say. Hands like nothing on this coast." She helped herself to more fool, entirely satisfied.
"I mean to point her at that polytunnel and stand well back.
Derelict as long as anyone's bothered remembering, that tunnel.
High time somebody asked it what it's for. "
"Poor girl," said Miles. "Does she know about you?"
"She'll learn," said Maren, serene, and Emrys made a sound into his tea that in a lesser man would have been a laugh.
The last bus came down while we were clearing. I saw it through the open door, pulling away from the top of the harbour, leaving somebody behind it the way it left me.
A girl. One bag. She stood at the head of the hill in the long gold light with the whole town laid out below her, and she didn't come down.
She stood the way you stand at the top of a dive.
Reading the street for the price of it. I know that reading.
I could have done it for her from forty feet, every line.
The street, of course, was already leaning in its inch.
Glenys had paused mid-anecdote. The twins had materialised from nowhere at all and were assessing the bag with a professional eye.
One of them relieved her of it with the gravity of a bellhop.
The other named a price for the carrying that would have shamed a London porter, and she laughed.
You could see it surprise her, the laugh, the way it gets out before the guard's up.
I know that laugh. It's the first thing this town takes off you, and it never once gives it back.
Maren, watching from our doorway with her tea, made a small satisfied sound.
A gardener at a seed tray. And down the hill came my mother's voice from the chippy doorway, faint and absolute.
She said the thing her mother said, and hers before that. The thing the whole town is for.
"You're thin. Sit. I'll feed you."
The girl sat. The town closed around her, gently, the way the harbour takes a boat.
I turned back to my kitchen, where three men were doing my washing-up on a strict rota of their own invention.
I lit the range for tomorrow's proof, and set one more chair at the long table.
Just in case. Upstairs the nest waited. Down the hill the workshop lamp was on, hours early, for no reason and every reason.
Tomorrow there was bread to prove, and Edith to disappoint on schedule, and a girl up the hill who'd want feeding once the chips wore off.
And the tide would come in twice regardless, the way it does, the way it always has.
Chairs breed in a warm room, and the room was only getting warmer.
Summer was coming to Violet Bay. You could smell it on the tide, under the salt and the bread and the four of us. Every window in the town stood open to it.
Mine widest of all.