Chapter Twenty-Three
On Boxing Day, Ezz gave Barnaby breakfast while Valentina took a shower and dried her hair. Ezz heard her voice once and wondered if she was on the phone to Gary.
Barnaby, getting ready to attack his third slice of toast, asked, ‘Can we go to the beach?’
‘Probably.’ Ezzie topped up his apple juice. ‘I expect we need to confer with your mum, Thea and Dev.’
‘Daddy says that word …confer. Is he coming back from Grandpa’s today?’ Barnaby’s hair stuck up as if he’d been doing headstands in his sleep.
‘I’m not sure. Maybe Mummy will tell us.’ Ezz sipped her coffee. She couldn’t blame her nephew for wanting to know what was happening in his life. She supposed she’d have to think about her own life soon – post-Mats.
‘Will Astrid and Alvin be on the beach again?’ Barnaby demanded.
For a second, Ezz let her skin prickle pleasurably at a vision of meeting Astrid, Alvin and their lovely dadamongst the rock pools and Mats taking her hand. She wiped her imagination clean. Whatever the Inger situation, Mats would still be returning to Sweden shortly. ‘It would be a coincidence if they were. But I bet your mum will want to look at the cottage.’
Valentina entered in time to hear this. ‘You read my mind. Keith’s fitted the new front door and says he’ll drop off the key in the next hour. I just caught him before he went off to relatives on the mainland.’
‘So, we’ll be near the beach?’ Barnaby queried hopefully.
‘We will.’ Valentina gave him a big hug and tried to flatten his hair.
A quick telephone conference with Thea resulted in them all meeting an hour later on Harbour View, complete with new key. ‘That looks amazing,’ said Ezz, as they approached along the curve of the bay. The door was a tasteful navy blue – very Valentina.
‘There are two new upstairs windows at the back, too.’ Valentina turned the key and the new door opened smoothly in its frame, so they could crowd in behind her. They admired the new windows but, other than fresh plaster boarding and wiring, there wasn’t much more to inspect. They walked along the beach, exhilarated by the rushing wind, though Barnaby was the only one who ran round in circles, screaming back at the gulls circling above, probably hoping for a human to discard food.
Thea held back her hair with a gloved hand. ‘Have you shown Valentina the letter, Ezz?’
Ezz shook her head. ‘She’s had enough to … think about.’ She’d been about to say ‘worry about’, before catching Barnaby’s enquiring brown eyes gazing her way.
Thea obviously understood. ‘Barnaby, shall we look in some rock pools? Coming, Dev?’
So, while the waves whispered on the beach, Ezz told Valentina about hearing from her birth sisters. ‘I haven’t really been able to update you,’ she finished, regretting anew the recent estrangement.
Valentina slung an arm around her. ‘Oh, Ezz. You decided not to find your birth family, but they found you. Even if your s-sisters’ emails were brief, having come so far to search for you, your family won’t just lose interest.’
Ezz burrowed her hands into her pockets, unhappily aware how Valentina had stumbled over the word ‘sisters’, and how odd it felt that her birth family, all her life a vague shadowy backdrop, had formed into real human beings. ‘How do you feel about it?’
For several seconds, Valentina stared out to the mouth of the bay, where moored boats slithered about as if the surface of the sea was oily. The mainland had its head in the clouds. Then she turned back with a smile. ‘As long as they don’t hurt you, then great. If they do hurt you, I’ll beat them up.’
Tears pricked in the backs of Ezz’s eyes. ‘That’s against the law, and you’re a lawyer.’
Valentina’s hair was loose for once and flew around her head in the wind like the gorgons’ snakes. ‘Even the law isn’t more important to me than family.’
They spent the rest of the day together, lunching on soup then playing a board game Barnaby had received for Christmas on the floor – though Thea got up onto the sofa after a while and napped.
Then Gary rang, and Barnaby chatted excitedly about the new front door, the beach, the dinosaur car and Thea falling asleep. Watching the love and light in his eyes as he poured out all the important stuff Gary had missedin Barnaby’s life in just a couple of days, Ezz understood Valentina saying she might have to try again with her husband. Children grabbed you by the heart.
The next day was Friday. Once again, Thea had come down to Ezz’s cottage in Chapel Row, leaving Thistledome to Dev, who was working from home. Barnaby watched TV in the lounge so his mother and aunts congregated in the kitchen, comparing schedules.
Thea said, ‘I see my GP a week today, the 3rd of January. If everything’s OK, I expect she’ll say I can return to work on Monday the 6th. I’ll be seventeen weeks.’
‘As long as the doctor’s reasonably confident the danger has passed.’ Ezz consulted her electronic calendar. ‘I told Grete I might go back on the 28th, but that’s a Saturday, so I could leave it until Monday the 30th. But that’s nearly New Year, and with the 1st and 2nd being public holidays in Scotland, I could stay off until the 3rd or even the 6th. I’ve enough annual leave, Grete says she never expected me to be constantly on duty while the family visited, and we’re not open to the public over Christmas and New Year.’
Valentina eyed her shrewdly. ‘And Mats would be gone by the 6th?’
‘I think so,’ Ezz agreed with a sigh. Then her phone began to ring in her hand, and whenMatsflashed up on the screen, she nearly dropped it into her coffee. ‘Hello,’ she answered shakily.
‘Hi.’ Mats’ voice was low and warm. ‘You have visitors at the hall. It’s Rick, Kay, Julia and Iona. They’re asking whether I can put one of them on the phone. But it’s entirely up to you,’ he added.
