APRIL
1
Just outside St Aidan, Cornwall
Sequins and a following wind
Wednesday
Wouldn’t you know it? After three hundred miles of trouble-free driving since London, half an hour before St Aidan I opt for the short cut down the lanes, and now my trusty Mini convertible is at a standstill, stuck behind a line of cars.
I groan at Shadow the dog, who lifts his big brown head briefly, then settles back across the back seat, buoyed up by the bags I couldn’t fit in the boot. ‘It’s only April, it’s not even warm enough for us to have the hood down. Surely the holiday hold-ups can’t have started already?’
As I smack the flat of my hand on the steering wheel, even singing along to Miley Cyrus’s ‘Flowers’doesn’t help any. I hope this first snowflake of doubt about moving back to Cornwall doesn’t become an avalanche of all the downsides I’ve forgotten in the decade since I left. As I look over the hedge to the expanse of pale blue sea beyond the fields, and catch my first glimpse of St Aidan, its picturesque pastel-coloured cottages stacked across the hillside in the curve of the bay, I hang on tight to the wave of wild optimism that brought me here.
When my mum rang me at the end of January to ask if I would like to buy the beach hut her friend Ivy was selling for a knock-down price, it felt like serendipity. True, a dilapidated shack on the sand dunes in a village at the edge of the world wasn’t anywhere on my radar at the time, but with my life in London crumbling around me, it felt like the lifeline I’d been waiting for.
Four years earlier I was in my late twenties and everything I’d ever wanted had finally clicked into place. I was a team manager at a buzzy post-industrial bar called The Circus, where the only things loftier than the drink prices were the high-wire performers. I was in love with my adorable boyfriend, Dillon, a hot-shot engineer and childhood friend with whom I’d reconnected with in St Aidan town centre the New Year’s Eve I was twenty-three. Home was a swanky rental in N16, and we were sure enough about our future to have secretly made our own wedding rings. There we were, researching honeymoon destinations, debating whether to spend the savings on a flat deposit, a fabulous elopement or the wedding of the decade. Speeding towards the public announcement of our engagement. And then one routine cervical smear test result blew all that out of the water.
Except that’s not entirely true. My cancer diagnosis knocked the breath out of us, but after that I threw everything at it, and Dillon was with me all the way. When I wasn’t able to work, I couldn’t have asked for better support. When I went back to waitressing and it wore me out, I even managed to reboot my career, and started doing audio-book narration instead.
But it was as if that battle used up an entire lifetime of love. Before I was ill, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. But by the time I had the tentative all-clear, our relationship was over too.
Dillon took the fabulous promotion in Dubai he’d been holding off on and paid a year’s rent on our flat to give me some breathing space. For spending money, I let out the spare room to an Estonian PhD student called Elise, who was mostly out at the lab. Then I threw myself into my work.
And for a few quiet months it felt like I’d cracked it. Then one minor surgical procedure left me with a throat rasp from the breathing tube, which means my voice now gives out a few pages into the manuscripts I read, so working my new job wasn’t possible. And sadly, however big the tips, I’m way past picking up my old job, because I’m simply not that extrovert, life-of-the-party woman who persuaded revellers to buy round after crazily priced round. As I feel now, I doubt I couldgivecocktails away.
When I first arrived in London in my late teens, I vowed I’d stay for ever, but lately my luck has run dry, which is why, when the beach hut came up, I jumped at the opportunity. A place so sleepy that nothing ever happens might once have been my private nightmare, but it’s the perfect refuge for where my life is now. Four walls and a roof are all I need; they might be a million miles away from the fifth-floor luxury living with a basement gym I’m giving up, but at least they’re mine. If I hide myself away and live very quietly, I should be able to make my savings last until I’m able to ease back into my audio-book work again.
There’s a sympathetic snort from Shadow in the back seat, but before I can thank him for his doggy solidarity on traffic issues, I catch sight of the signage on the car in front of mine in the queue and my sinking heart gives a skip.
The Little Cornish Kitchen! Delicious afternoon teas and events, Seaspray Cottage, St Aidan!
My fairy godmother must be looking down on me more than I know!
The Little Cornish Kitchen is run by Clemmie, one of my older sister’s besties, whom I’ve known my entire life. As a figure in a blue flowery dress appears around the back of the car, pushing back a mass of auburn curly hair, I’m already out on the road and grinning.
‘Clemmie! This is the best surprise ever! What’s going on?’
Her cheeks are flushed as she nods at the child asleep in the back seat of her vehicle. ‘Bud and I were out delivering a tray-bake order. Everyone stopped because a dog was out in the road, but a driver in front caught him and now they’re all zooming off.’
I tense as I think of Shadow running loose in traffic, then relax again as Clemmie’s arm flops onto my shoulder. Since Shadow and I rescued each other, he’s done a great job at plugging the gaps that opened up in my life when Dillon and I parted. Who needs a partner when you’ve got a large hairy dog who sneaks on the bed the second the light goes out, and shares your addiction to custard creams?
Clemmie’s beaming. ‘You’re the surprise here!! Who’d have thought we’d ever see London devotee Florence May moving back to St Aidan?’
Definitely not me, that’s for sure. But I keep that to myself, go in for the hug then pull back when I collide with her bump. ‘Nice work, Mrs Hobson! You’re already bigger than when you had Bud!’
Clemmie clutches her stomach. ‘It’s a boy this time. He’s due in a month, which is why I’ve been having these practice contractions all week.’ She blows out a breath and leans back on the car wing. ‘Between us, Flossie, when the traffic in front stopped, I was pleased to get out and rub my aching back.’
Clemmie, my sister Sophie, Dillon’s sister Plum and a lovely woman called Nell are a group of friends who go all the way back to when our pregnant mums met at the Mums and Bumps group thirty-six years ago. Obviously, Dillon was already there, and I came along a bit later, but even as we’ve moved elsewhere, we’ve always all met up back in St Aidan.
Wall-to-wall weddings go with our age group, and some summers there was one a month. Around the time I was turning up here bloated from the steroids, having lost every bit of hair including my eyebrows with the chemo, Clemmie and her partner Charlie were trying for a baby and being endlessly disappointed. And Nell was another one who thought kids were never going to happen for her and her partner George.
When you’re thirty and struggling to conceive you’re right on the outside, especially at parties, and as my own chances of ever having a family of my own dwindled too, Nell, Clemmie and I stuck together. Being alcohol-free, we couldn’t even console ourselves by necking the free booze and getting off our faces. We sat through so many receptions, waving our mocktails and rolling our eyes at those lucky women who’d stopped taking their pills and caught on the first try.
But eventually Clemmie got lucky. Her and Charlie’s last-chance IVF baby, Bud, arrived last year. The whole village had shared their struggle to become parents and was equally delighted when Clemmie’s surprise second pregnancy turned up out of the blue last Christmas.
Clemmie brightens and pushes herself upright again. ‘Nell’s baby’s due around the same time.’
