Chapter 3
Chapter Three
NINA
Mum’s café is called Truro Tides Café, which she’ll tell you is ironic given that Truro is about as far from the actual beach as you can get while still technically being in Cornwall.
She chose it because she liked the sign, which was already there when she took on the lease, and because – and this is a direct quote – it seemed like the kind of place that should have a name like that.
This is how Gina tarot-reading, crystal-healing, aura-cleansing Ellis makes most of her decisions.
They work out more often than they should.
It’s a Sunday, which means she’s been open since ten and is already on her third batch of scones and her second argument with the coffee machine, which has a personality disorder and responds unpredictably to barometric pressure.
I am sitting on the wrong side of the counter eating the scone that didn’t make the grade because it came out lopsided, which is Mum’s threshold for rejection and my gain.
‘You could be doing this,’ she says, without looking up from the tray she’s sliding into the tall oven behind the counter – another batch of sausage rolls. ‘You have a whole café. That you own. That your grandmother left you because she thought you’d do something with it.’
‘I am doing something with it,’ I say. ‘I’m resting it.’
‘Resting it.’ She closes the oven door with a distinct snap and turns around. ‘Like a tendon.’
‘Exactly like a tendon.’
‘You’re not a tendon, Nina.’
‘How do you know?’
She picks up the cloth and wipes down the counter, which doesn’t need wiping, and I eat my lopsided scone, and this is most of what our time together looks like.
Mum and I do better at a certain distance.
Not far. Just enough. Living in the same town for three weeks has been a daily experiment in recalibrating that distance.
We only returned to Sea Salt Bay when I was turning seventeen and my gran died, leaving Mum the café.
Mum left Sea Salt Bay a couple of years later, when I was grown and didn’t need her to stay.
Even when I’ve wandered myself, I’ve always returned to Sea Salt Bay, to my gran’s café that feels like home.
Except now.
Now, the thought of Sea Salt Bay is like poison. One sip and it will end me.
I guess coming to Truro and putting myself in close quarters with Mum was my way of testing what life could look like without the Bay. Without the cove and the harbour, without The Ship and quiz nights.
And, most importantly, what life might be like without Peter.
Peter’s ghost, really, I suppose. Haunting me at every turn in the street, every scatter of pebbles on cobbles, that deep and desperate ache that has lived in me since the day he went into the sea and never came back out.
‘Brynn called,’ Mum says, and I’m pulled back to the present.
‘I know. I spoke to her.’
‘She says the café looks sad.’
‘The café is shut, Mum. It’s supposed to look sad.’
She makes a sound that is not quite agreement. ‘Your grandmother’s fuchsias—’
‘Are fine.’
They are not fine. I know they’re not fine.
I have been not thinking about the fuchsias with some energy for three weeks.
The thing about the fuchsias is that Nan planted those fuchsias in their hanging baskets and I water them religiously every spring and summer without fail, ensuring new shoots thrive, deadheading the buds that aren’t going to make it to the summer months so they don’t ruin the summer display, and I am aware that this is not actually about the fuchsias but about what the fuchsias represent, which is a can of worms I am keeping firmly shut on a Sunday morning with a lopsided scone.
‘Tom said they looked all right,’ I say. ‘When he walked past.’
Mum shoots me a brief look, tucked away before I can examine it. ‘Did he? I didn’t know you’d talked to him.’
‘He texted. Last week.’ I pick at the scone. ‘He said Mrs Penrose’s cat had got into someone’s engine again, and that the fuchsias were holding up, and that Dot has started ordering extra pasties for the summer tourists and one of them was apparently a Scotch egg, which nobody has explained yet.’
She’s smiling. Facing the back counter where the sandwiches and baguettes get made, so I can only see the edge of it. ‘And how is Tom?’
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘You know Tom. He’s always fine.’
This is true and also not quite true. Tom is fine in the same way the café is fine – structurally sound, operational, not obviously damaged. Whether fine is the same as all right is a different question and not one I’m asking on a Sunday morning with a lopsided scone.
Mum puts down her cloth, and then I get the full scale of her ‘look’. ‘Nina, I really think it’s time for us to talk. Properly, not you just sitting there, in denial and avoiding.’
Well, that’s one way to ruin my enjoyment of the scone.
‘Mum.’ I sigh and it settles in my stomach like wet sand. ‘I don’t think I’m ready yet.’ My palms start to tingle and are slick with sweat just to prove how unready I am.
Another look, which I return, and then a simple nod.
She turns away and straightens the cake stand, and I let out a huff of relief.
Definitely not ready yet.
I eat the last of the scone and pretend the crumbs don’t get stuck in my tight throat.
I’m washing up when the door goes and Mum does the automatic café-owner scan, clocking the tables, the available seats, the cake stand – and then her lips curve, and she says, ‘Oh, how lovely,’ in the tone she uses when she actually means it and isn’t being sarcastic.
Sometimes the two go together and create a puzzle that needs to be unravelled, but not now.
Now is a ‘mean it’ situation, so I automatically turn to see what is genuinely lovely.
The two of them are standing in the doorway. The older one spots me first – blonde, forget-me-not-eyed, with a smile that gets there ahead of everything else. The mirror image of her brother.
‘Nina Ellis,’ says Meg Darcy, as though she’s just won a treasure hunt in spotting me first. ‘I knew we’d find you here.’
I’m wondering where else she thinks I’d be? Bali? Goa? On some sort of grief- and soul-healing retreat?
Hayley is behind her.
Automatically, I look for Tom.
He’s not there.
An unexpected stone drops inside me anyway, but I ignore it because it’s complicated now and I wish it wasn’t.
‘We were just passing,’ Hayley says, which we both know is a lie.
‘You were just passing Truro,’ I say, arching an eyebrow.
‘You know we come every few weeks,’ Hayley says.
‘There’s the farmers’ market. That candle stall Mum’s obsessed with, and shops that aren’t just Dot’s.
Actual shops that sell clothes we might want to wear.
’ She glances around the café, nodding with approval.
Hayley knows nothing about cafés apart from how good the cake on sale is. ‘This is gorgeous.’
‘It is,’ Mum says, appearing from behind me. ‘Sit down. I’ll get you something. Scones? I’ve just done a batch, still warm. I haven’t seen you girls in a while.’
There’s that awkward pause. It’s the Peter pause. Mum hasn’t seen the girls since she came to stay with me after … after…
I can’t go there.
Don’t want to.
Don’t want to remember the harsh winter and the frost that elbowed its way into my heart and hardened all the things I thought I knew about myself.
The cereal days, as I like to call them, when I allow myself to think back, when all I could do was eat cereal in bed and cry in my mother’s arms.
Meg is already sitting down, elbows on the table, like she’s been coming here for years. Hayley takes the chair opposite and tucks her bag under the table.
‘We invited Tom,’ Meg says. ‘He said he’d think about it.’
I blink.
I know what Tom thinking about something means. It means he has thought about it, reached a conclusion, and is not ready to share the conclusion yet. He has been doing this since we were seventeen and I have never once successfully rushed him and I have largely stopped trying.
‘He had the Treloars,’ Hayley says, helpfully. ‘Yesterday.’
I wince. Tom prepares for a trip to the Treloars like he’s preparing for battle and may never return.
For a long stretch of a moment, the pull to hear him talk about it again, for us to sit, just like we used to, me with my legs tucked up on my sofa, Tom sprawled on the armchair in my flat’s front room while he told me horror stories of the Treloars’ lambing season, washes over me.
The pull is long and hard, painful enough that I wince, because those times, those moments, were before everything, before Peter went, before Peter even arrived and made me his own. Back when it was just me and Tom. It feels like an age ago.
‘He also had the – what was it, Dad said something…’ Hayley trails off, like people often do when talking of Mr Darcy Senior.
You couldn’t meet a less impressive person, what with his vague rambling and incoherent half-muttered thoughts, but he’s a lovely man, kind down to the very marrow of him.
The Darcy siblings lucked out on the parent front.
‘Something about a sheep,’ Meg says, ‘which I think we can agree was a very convenient sheep.’ She bites into the scone and her expression tips over into ecstatic, eyes wide. ‘Oh, this is incredible. Mrs Ellis, this is incredible.’
‘Gina,’ Mum says, already refilling the plate. ‘I’ve been telling you girls for years to call me Gina.’
I wrap my hands around my mug and look at the two of them, and feel a longing I haven’t in three weeks. Not for the village itself, not the harbour or the café or the fuchsias.
But for the warmth of it.
The quality of people who have known you long enough to show up in Truro on a Sunday on a pretext that wouldn’t fool anyone.
‘How’s everyone?’ I ask, and mean it.
‘Reuben had a good week,’ Hayley says. ‘Kit took him out on the boat on Wednesday. He knew exactly where he was. Him and Helen still haven’t spoken though, although Lily’s been down last weekend to see them all.’
I nod. ‘I don’t think Helen and Reuben will be on talking terms any time soon.
’ The catastrophic Harding family rupture rocked Sea Salt Bay a couple of months ago.
The Hardings are the backbone of our village, always have been, but when Brynn Trelawney, whom I instantly loved just for the pure fight in her, turned up, the balance shifted.
Everything changed. Again.
I’ve decided I’m not a fan of change.
‘Jude and Brynn are insufferable,’ Meg says, grin spreading wide. ‘In the best possible way. She’s got the boat doing really well.’
‘Maisie lost a tooth,’ Hayley adds. ‘Left it for the tooth fairy and then apparently couldn’t sleep because she was worried the tooth fairy would struggle to find Sea Salt Bay.’
‘What did Kit tell her?’
‘That the tooth fairy has maritime GPS and is fully RNLI certified.’ Hayley smiles. ‘Tom told him to say that.’
Of course he did.
I smile before I can stop myself. Mum sees it. Says nothing.
They stay for an hour. Mum keeps the scones coming. Meg asks about the café – not how is it, not when are you going back, just are you all right – and I tell her what I know how to say. That it’s fine. That I needed some time. That I’m not ready yet but I’m getting there.
She nods, and doesn’t push, and steals another scone, and somehow that is exactly the right response.
When they leave, Meg hugs me like she’s been doing it for years – which she hasn’t, we have never been huggers, there was always the slight distance of Tom between us, the fact of being his friend rather than theirs – but then she whispers, close to my ear, ‘We miss you. The village misses you. Come home when you’re ready. ’
Home.
I stand on the step and wave them up the street. Meg’s already talking, Hayley tilting her head, listening, and I stay rooted there until they turn the corner and disappear.
Mum appears beside me with a tea towel.
Inside, the coffee machine hisses.
‘I don’t know why I left,’ I say. Not to her, exactly. To the street. To the Sunday morning.
She’s quiet for a moment. Then says, ‘I think you do if you look inside.’
‘I… I… maybe I left for space,’ I say. ‘I left for myself. I needed to—’
‘Nina.’ She lands a gentle touch on my arm, but I can’t stop, not now it’s bubbling up out of me.
‘—to step back and—’
‘Nina.’ She tucks her arm through mine, and I finally grind to a halt. ‘You know why you left.’
The thing is, she’s not wrong.
I have been standing on the outskirts of my own life for long enough that I have got quite good at describing the outskirts and calling it a view.
Sea Salt Bay with the shutters down and Peter’s magnet still on the fridge and the quiz league chalkboard with his name on it, and the constant low hum of almost – the almost half a year of getting through, the almost of being all right.
The nearness of returning to being Nina Ellis every time Tom Darcy sends me a text about Dot’s inexplicable Scotch egg, but still not quite living in her skin.
‘I left because I was tired of almost,’ I say, and it’s a whisper, a whisper of truth that I finally let free to fly into the vivid blue Truro sky. ‘The almost of forever. The almost of being healed. The almost of…’ Being me.
Mum squeezes my arm. Doesn’t say anything. This is, possibly, the most useful thing she has done in three weeks.
Inside, the coffee machine hisses again.
‘That machine needs looking at,’ I say.
‘It has a personality.’ She winks. ‘I’ve learned to work with it.’
I think about Tom’s text. I think about the fuchsias. I think about Meg at my ear – come home when you’re ready – and the way she said it.
‘Mum,’ I say.
‘Mm.’
‘Do we have any more scones?’
She hands me the tea towel and goes inside, and I follow her, and the Sunday carries on being a Sunday, and somewhere down the A39 Sea Salt Bay is doing what it always does – tides in, tides out, boats in the harbour, gulls on the wall – waiting for me to decide what I already know.