The Museum of Second Chances

Chapter One

Anyone passing by Portheast’s town beach at dawn was guaranteed to see a tall woman dressed in brown and grey taking dainty steps along the shoreline.

Her eyes remained fixed on the sand and if she saw something that glinted, fluttered or shone, she would dip down to pick it up, swift as an oystercatcher.

This was Evelyn Silver on her morning beachcomb and, as curator of the Portheast Museum of Maritime Curiosities, little escaped her attention, be it a colourful shard of sea glass, a silted-up watch or a discarded plastic bottle.

Frustratingly, it was things like drinks bottles that tended to make up the bulk of her daily finds.

‘This is why I carry two separate bags,’ she would testily explain to anyone foolish enough to interrupt her first job of the day.

‘One bag is for treasure,’ she’d say, patting the worn leather satchel looped over her left shoulder.

‘While this bag’ – here, she’d indicate the larger fabric tote bag hanging off her right shoulder – ‘is for common beach rubbish.’

This morning’s haul, for example, included:

A piece of broken china, blue and white, depicting a bird on a branch

One pebble in the shape of a wonky heart

One dog’s lead, its leather hardened and salt stained.

She knew that not everyone would see the beauty in these things, and in fact many might have automatically consigned them to her rubbish bag.

But Evelyn treasured these pieces and added them to her ramshackle museum, whether a piece of cracked pottery, a broken toy boat or an abandoned fisherman’s glove.

Because when Evelyn found such an object, she looked beyond its surface appearance.

She would imagine the stories that might lie behind each lost item, stories of loss and longing and love, and then she acted as a guardian until their rightful owner came looking.

Unfortunately, as Evelyn reached the end of her beach clean that morning, her tote bag of trash far outweighed her satchel of treasure.

It contained three plastic bottles, two large clumps of orange fishing line entangled in rubbery bladderwrack, assorted small fragments of blue plastic and several sweet wrappers.

This disparity gave Evelyn a slightly lopsided appearance as she made her way up the slipway towards the quay and the museum where she had worked for as long as anyone in the Cornish fishing town of Portheast could remember.

Before she unlocked its heavy wooden door, Evelyn rolled her shoulders, breathed in the chill air and cast a last look back at the sea’s horizon.

A line of pale mist hovered over the silty mud of the harbour but, further out, darker squally patches were forming, telling her a storm was on its way.

Through bitter experience, Evelyn had learned that the best thing to do at such times was hunker down and wait it out.

She took the same approach with the dark moods that sometimes wrapped themselves around her, knowing that by and large, they too eventually passed.

Brushing the sheen of sea mist off her dark coat, Evelyn turned the heavy key in the lock and entered her museum, which had once been a 19th-century boat shed. Above the door, a hand-painted sign read Welcome to Portheast Museum of Maritime Curiosities, est. 1988.

Evelyn’s father had made the sign and Evelyn had often wondered if he’d included the Welcome as a daily reminder to her, because even in her youth Evelyn had not been famed for her outgoing nature.

These days, appreciative visitors to the museum were few and far between and Evelyn endured the more casual intrusions with a tight smile.

Rainy days tended to be the worst, when whole families would crowd in, shaking rain off their umbrellas and calling out to each other in what Evelyn’s parents used to call ‘outdoor voices’.

At first, their unruly children would dash from case to cabinet, leaving wet footprints and greasy fingermarks.

Then their exclamations would become more muted as they realised the truth of the matter: this was not a place where fun was encouraged.

If they didn’t get the hint, Evelyn found that a hard stare could go a long way.

Even adults failed to see the point of Evelyn’s collections, despite her meticulous labels. ‘The most boring museum ever,’ read one recent Google review. ‘Full of old junk. Like a day out at the rubbish dump,’ said another.

Yet Evelyn was undeterred. Her cabinets of what she called Miscellanea were her most precious, because one day someone could walk in and spot that special something they had lost, be it a stray earring, a forgotten photograph or a fishing float.

In the meantime, Evelyn kept watch. ‘You cherish everything, except yourself,’ her mother Elsbeth once told her with a worried look in her eyes.

While these occasional visitors might not understand her ethos, they couldn’t complain about the entry price, which had remained the same since her father cut the red ribbon to declare the museum open some thirty-eight years ago. His hand-painted sandwich board read: Admission 20p. Children free.

Evelyn left her tote bag of rubbish by the recycling bins to sort out later and placed her leather satchel beside her desk. Assessing and cataloguing her day’s finds was something Evelyn looked forward to, after her morning coffee.

But first, with 9 a.m. fast approaching, it was time to open up the museum.

Back outside, she propped open the door with a heavy anchor, more rust than metal these days, and then, squinting into the mizzle, Evelyn took in the view that had remained unchanged for so many years.

Several harbour boats were wedged in the claggy mud of low tide, some listing sideways with a sad, abandoned look.

Further along the quay, shops and cafés were starting to open up.

She heard the scrape of wood on concrete as a blond man dragged a chalkboard menu outside his bakery.

She had a feeling his name was Nils or something Nordic and he sold exotic buns laced with cinnamon and rye bread dense with seeds.

Whenever she walked by, the smells made her mouth water, but she made sure to keep her head high and her eyes averted.

Evelyn had a mistrust of anything new, no matter how delicious it smelled.

In the distance, where the slipway met the sea, she could see three elderly men sitting on a bench.

Because they sat there cogitating so often, it had earned them the (generous, in Evelyn’s view) nickname of the Three Wise Men.

Nothing in this scene was out of the ordinary, but Evelyn couldn’t shake a sense of dread that was growing inside her.

It had begun during her beachcomb, and with each step of her morning routine, the ominous feeling had bedded in deeper.

‘Hiya!’ A loud call jolted Evelyn from her reverie and she looked up to see a figure ambling towards her.

It was Della, who ran the ice cream parlour next door to the museum.

Della walked with a rolling gait, as if she’d just dismounted a horse, and was wearing a patchwork jacket she’d bought in Kathmandu, a garment so garish it pained Evelyn to look at it for too long.

But as she got closer, Evelyn noticed her neighbour was waving an official-looking brown envelope and the dread she’d been trying to stave off rose up, swift as nausea.

‘Hiya,’ Della repeated. Della was from Australia and, along with clothes she called her ‘global style’, she liked to dye her hair in bright colours.

Her latest shade was a vivid purple, and several lurid tendrils clung to her pale cheeks, reminding Evelyn of the veiny jellyfish that sometimes washed up on the beach.

Della was looking at her in an odd way. ‘Hey, I got my letter – did you?’

‘Letter?’ Evelyn replied faintly.

‘Yep. From the council. I’m guessing you’ll have one too.’

In that moment Evelyn realised why everything about the day had felt wrong: it was precisely a month since the men in suits had come to inspect their two boat sheds. They had carried clipboards and iPads and talked too fast about revenue and visitor numbers and the need to put Portheast on the map.

Opening her envelope, Della said the words Evelyn had been dreading. ‘They want us gone, Evelyn. The council. They’re kicking us out.’