The Beach Cafe
To Mum, Dad, Phil, Ellie and Fiona
for all the happy memories of childhood holidays in Cornwall.
Contents
Chapter One
Family legend has it that on the day I was born, when my elder sisters, Ruth and Louise, came tiptoeing in hand-in-hand to see me for the very first time, my mum said to them, ‘This is your new baby sister. What do you think we should call her?’
Ruth, the oldest twin, thought hard, with all the wisdom she’d gained in her mighty three years of life. ‘We should call her . . . Baby Jesus,’ she pronounced eventually, no doubt with a lisping piety. Ruth had taken the Goody Two-Shoes role to heart from an early age. Either that or she was angling for extra Christmas presents.
‘Mmm,’ Mum must have replied, probably in the same I-don’t-
think
-so way she did throughout my childhood, like the time I told her I had definitely seen the tooth-fairy with my very own eyes, and no, it absolutely wasn’t me who had wolfed half the chocolate biscuits – it was the others.
‘Louise, how about you?’ Mum asked next. ‘What should we call your new sister?’
Obviously I was only hours old at the time, so I don’t remember anything about this touching bedside scene, but I like to imagine that Louise made the little frowny face she still does, where her eyebrows slide together and the top of her nose wrinkles. According to Mum, she said with the utmost solemnity, ‘I think we should call her . . . Little Black Sheep.’
Little Black Sheep indeed. I’m not sure whether this was a ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ reference or something to do with the fact that I had remarkably springy black hair from the word go. Whatever the reason, you’ve got to love my sister’s astonishing foresight. Because guess what? That was pretty much how I had ended up at the ripe old age of thirty-two, with not a mortgage, full-time job, husband or infant to show for myself – the quintessential black sheep of the family. Spot on, Louise. Uncanny prescience. I was the freak, the failure, the one they muttered about in patronizing tones, trying not to sound too gleeful as my shortcomings were discussed.
Oh dear. What ARE we going to do with Evie? I’m worried about her, you know. She’s not getting any younger, is she?
Hey-ho. I wasn’t too bothered by what they thought. It was better to be an individual, surely, someone who had dreams and did things differently, rather than be an anonymous, ordinary . . . well,
sheep
, obediently following the rest of the flock without a single bleat of dissent. Wasn’t it?
We have photos from that day, of course, grainy, brown-tinged photos with the rounded-off corners that seemed to be all the rage back then. There I was, cuddled in Mum’s arms, wearing a teeny pink Babygro, with Ruth and Louise leaning over me, both in matching burgundy cord dungarees (this
was
the Seventies, remember), their eyes wide with what I like to think of as wonder and awe. (No doubt Ruth was already plotting her pocket-money scam, though, which went on for several years.)
I can’t help thinking that there’s something of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale about the picture. You know, when the fairies come to bestow their gifts on the little tot and they’re all really excellent bequests, like how clever and talented and pretty she will be – until the evil old fairy (who hasn’t been invited) rocks up, bristling with malice, and wrecks everything with her ‘She shall prick her finger on a spindle and DIE!’ contribution.
This image tended to come back to me every time I sat in a hairdressing salon, until I began to wonder if Louise’s ‘Little Black Sheep’ remark had somehow been a curse, straight from the realms of finger-pricking voodoo. Because throughout my entire life my hair had been frizzy, woolly and black, with a mad, kinky curl to it. Just like your average black sheep, in fact, albeit one who appeared to be immune to the powers of miracle hair conditioner and straightening devices.
And so it was that on a certain Saturday morning in early May I was sitting in a big squishy vinyl chair at a hairdressing salon on the Cowley Road, the scent of hairspray and perm-lotion tingling in my nostrils, as I pondered whether I had the bottle to get the sheep sheared into a radically different style. ‘I think your face could take a short cut,’ the stylist said enthusiastically. ‘You’ve got the cheekbones for it – you could totally rock an elfin look. Maybe if we add an asymmetrical fringe – yeah. Very cool.’
‘You don’t think it would be too . . . boyish?’ I replied hesitantly. I stared at my reflection, unable to make a decision. I’d come into the salon fired up with brave plans to request a head-turning Mia Farrow crop, but now that I was here, I couldn’t help wondering if such a cut would make me look more like Pete Doherty. I wished for the thousandth time that I had hair like Ruth and Louise – long, tawny, Pantene-advert hair, which swished as they walked. Somehow I had missed out on that particular gene, though, as well as the perfect-life chromosome.
The stylist – Angela, I think her name was – smiled encouragingly. ‘You know what they say: a change is as good as a holiday,’ she replied. She had aubergine-coloured hair in a wet-look perm. I really shouldn’t have trusted her. ‘I’ll make you a coffee while you think it over, okay?’
She clip-clopped off, bum waggling in a too-tight bleached denim skirt, and I bit my lip, courage leaking out of me by the second. She was probably only suggesting an elfin cut because she was bored with trims and blow-dries. She probably couldn’t care less how I’d look at the end of it. And I wasn’t convinced by the ‘a change is as good as a holiday’ line, either. I’d spent two weeks camping in the Lake District the year before, and it was not an experience I wanted repeated in a haircut.
My phone rang as I was mid-dither. I rummaged in my bag for it, and saw that ‘Mum’ was flashing on the screen. I was just about to send it to voicemail when I got the strangest feeling I should answer. So I did.
‘Hi, Mum, are you all right?’
‘Evie, sit down,’ she said, her voice quavering. ‘It’s bad news, darling.’
‘I am sitting down,’ I replied, examining my split ends. ‘What’s up?’ My mother’s idea of bad news was that her favourite character was being written out of
The Archers
, or that she’d accidentally sat on her reading glasses and broken them. I was hardened to all her ‘bad news’ phone calls by now.
‘It’s Jo,’ she said, and I heard a sob in her voice. ‘Oh, Evie . . .’
‘Is she all right?’ I asked, making a thumbs-up sign at Angela as she dumped a coffee in front of me. Jo was my mum’s younger sister, and the coolest, loveliest, most fun aunt you could ever wish for.
Must give her a ring
, I thought, making a mental note. I had been a bit crap about keeping in touch with everyone lately.
‘No,’ said Mum, in this awful, shuddering wail. ‘She’s been in a car crash. She . . . She’s dead, Evie. Jo’s dead.’
I couldn’t take in the news at first. I sat there in the hairdresser’s chair feeling completely numb as memories of Jo deluged my mind. As sisters, she and Mum had been simultaneously close, but worlds apart. Mum, the sensible older one, had gone to university, become a teacher, married Dad, raised three daughters, and had lived for years in a nice part of Oxford. Jo, on the other hand, was more flighty and free-spirited. She’d left school at sixteen to have all sorts of adventures around the world, before settling in Carrawen Bay, a small seaside village in north Cornwall, and running her own café there. If Mum could be summed up as an elegant taupe, Jo was a screaming pink.
I’d loved childhood holidays in Carrawen. Jo’s café was set just back from the bay and she lived in the flat above, so it was the most magical place to stay. There was something so exciting about waking up to those light, bright mornings, with the sound of the sea and the gulls in your ears – I never tired of it. Days were spent with my sisters, running wild on the beach for hours on end, being mermaids, pirates, smugglers, explorers, finding shells, rock-pooling and building enormous castles in our exhilarating-but-impossible attempts to stave off the incoming tide. In the evenings, once we’d been sluiced down in Jo’s tiny bathroom, our parents let us stay up thrillingly late, sitting on the balconied deck of the café with one of Jo’s special Knickerbocker Glories and three long silver spoons, while candle-lights flickered in storm lanterns, and the sea rushed blackly behind us.
Back then, Jo had seemed like a girl herself – way younger than Mum, with her hair in blonde pigtails, freckles dotted over her face like grains of sand, and cool clothes that I secretly coveted: short skirts, funky bright trainers, cut-off denim shorts, and jeans and thick fisherman’s jumpers when the weather turned cold.
As an adult, I’d loved going to stay with her too, whatever the season. Somehow, the bay seemed extra-special in winter, with the wide, flat beach empty of holidaymakers. I was there one memorable Christmas Eve, when what seemed like the whole of the village – from grannies leaning on sticks to babes in arms – congregated on the beach in mid-afternoon and sang carols together. Jo brought along warm, floury mince pies and steaming mulled wine, and everyone toasted each other’s good health, then a fire was lit and children danced around with red and gold tinsel in their hair. It was like being part of the best secret club ever, a million miles away from the frantic, sharp-elbowed crush of Oxford’s High Street and its stressed-out shoppers tussling over last-minute presents.
But now Jo was gone, wiped out in a moment, it seemed, hit by a lorry driving too fast down the winding lane that led to the bay. Never again would I sit at the bar of her café while she tempted me with lattes and sugar-sprinkled shortbread; never again would we chat together while the sun cruised slowly across that expanse of Cornish sky; never again would she drag me into the sea for a bracing early-morning swim, both of us shrieking and splashing each other as the icy water stung our bare skin . . .
No. It couldn’t be true. It simply couldn’t be true. Mum must have got it wrong. Or my imagination was playing weird tricks on me. She couldn’t have died, just like that. Not Jo.
‘Have you made up your mind yet?’ Aubergine-Angela hovered behind me, scissors and comb in hand.
I blinked. I’d been so steeped in memories that it was a shock to find myself still in the salon, with Leona Lewis trilling away from the speakers above my head and the gentle snip-snipping of hair all around. ‘Um . . .’ I couldn’t think straight. ‘You choose,’ I said in the end, my mind blank. Hair seemed very trivial all of a sudden. It didn’t matter. ‘Just – whatever you think.’
Matthew dropped me round to Mum’s later on because I was still too freaked out about Jo’s car crash even to think about getting behind the wheel myself. ‘I won’t come in,’ he said, pecking me on the cheek. ‘I’m not very good with crying women.’
‘Oh, but – ’ I broke off in dismay. ‘Can’t you just stay for a bit?’
He shook his head. ‘Better not. I’ve got to pick up Saul later, remember.’
Saul was Matthew’s seven-year-old son who usually came to ours at weekends. He was adorable, but right now, all I could feel was disappointment that Matthew couldn’t stay with me. I’d managed to keep it together as best as I could at the hairdresser’s – still in massive shock and denial, I think – but had been absolutely bawling my heart out by the time I got home. ‘Bloody hell,’ Matthew had said, his face stricken as he saw me sobbing there in the hall. His eyes bulged. ‘Well, it’ll grow back . . .’ he said faintly, after a few moments. ‘I mean, it’s not
that
bad.’
‘I’m not crying about my
hair
,’ I’d shouted. ‘I’m crying because Jo’s died. Oh, Matthew,
Jo’s died
!’
I’d been with Matthew for five years and I knew he found displays of emotion embarrassing and awkward, but he was really lovely to me then. He held me tight, let me cry all over his shirt, made me a cup of tea with two sugars and then, when I wouldn’t stop weeping, poured me a large brandy too. I felt as if something in me had died along with Jo though, as if a huge, important part of my life had been snuffed out, like a candle-flame.
Guilt and self-recrimination were setting in – a trickle at first, which swiftly became a flood. I hadn’t visited Jo for ages. I hadn’t even phoned lately. Why had I left it so long? Why hadn’t I made time? I was such a selfish person, such a rubbish niece. I couldn’t even remember the last conversation we’d had, and had no idea what our last words to each other had been. Why hadn’t I paid better attention? Why had I let her slip away? Now she was gone, and it was too late ever to speak to her again. It seemed so utterly, horribly final.
After the brandy had burned its way into my bloodstream, I felt an ache to see my mum, and Matthew insisted on driving me there, which was absolutely unheard of, as my parents’ house was only a mile and a half away. Normally he’d have given me a lecture on the evils of short car journeys made by lazy, inconsiderate drivers, if I had dared pick up the car keys rather than my bike helmet.
But now I was here, and he was driving carefully away from me, eyes fixed firmly on the road, hands at an exact ten-to-two on the wheel, just as his instructor had taught him once upon a time. I wished he hadn’t gone. I stood there in the street for a moment, hoping stupidly that he would turn the car round and come back – ‘What was I thinking? I can’t possibly leave you at a time like this!’ – but the sound of his engine grew quieter, then faded away to nothing.
I rubbed my swollen eyes and went up the drive to the house.
Mum opened the door. Normally my mum is what you would call well groomed. She has smart shoes that match her handbags. She has a wardrobe full of tasteful clothes in shades of ecru, cream and coffee, and always accessorizes. She knows how to drape a scarf and how to do big hair, and she smells very expensive. She wears full makeup even when she’s gardening.
Not today, though. I had never seen her in such a state. Her face was puffy from crying, her eyes were red-rimmed and sore-looking, with rings of mascara below them, and her hair was bouffed up crazily where she’d obviously been raking her hands through it. She opened her arms wide as if she was about to fling them around me, then froze and let out a shriek of horror instead. ‘Your hair! What have you done?’