Page 24 of A Summer Scandal

Vi’s eyes moved around the room, trying to work out the mood. Thankfully they didn’t seem like a lynch mob; she and Keris were the youngest there by a long chalk.

‘As everyone who has been here for any length of time knows …’ she paused here to look down her nose at Violet, ‘our beloved pier has played an integral part in our community for almost two hundred years.’

She nodded, falling silent to let that grand fact sink in.

‘And again,as those of us who’ve been residents for more than five minutes know, its continued closure has affected our town tremendously.’

‘Ouch,’ Keris whispered, leaning in. ‘I can feel Glad’s barbs and I’m only sitting next to you!’

Vi swallowed hard. ‘Glad?’

‘Short for Gladys. Everyone calls her Glad though. God knows why, because I don’t think anyone’s ever glad to see that woman, she can be a right pain in the arse.’

A woman sitting in the row in front turned round and lifted her eyebrows, but the look on her face suggested that she didn’t wholeheartedly disagree.

‘I can’t remember the pier ever being open, Glad,’ someone down the front piped up. A low murmur of consent bubbled around the room, and the Mayoress raised and lowered her hands like an orchestra conductor appealing for quiet.

‘Well I can,’ she shot back. ‘As can anyone else over the age of fifty.’ She squinted towards them. ‘Barty?’

Keris and Violet turned to look at him, as did most of the heads in the room. Barty lifted his shoulders, for all the world like a schoolboy who didn’t want to tell the truth and land his mates in hot water.

‘I’m not a day over forty-five, as you well know, Lady Mayoress,’ he said, going for humour to diffuse the spotlight, effectively so given the laugh that rippled around the room. Gladys didn’t see the funny side of it, huffing and making a point of opening her file and peering at it over her glasses.

‘Swallow Beach Pier has stood proudly on our shore since 1879,’ she said, clearly gearing up to read an impassioned speech.

After a second Keris raised her hand, interrupting the Mayoress in full flight. ‘That’s a hundred and thirty-nine years, Glad.’

Gladys narrowed her eyes. ‘And?’

‘You said nearly two hundred years, but it’s not. It’s one hundred and thirty-nine so actually it’s closer to one hundred.’

‘I’d thank you not to question my mathematics, Keris Harwood,’ Gladys said, haughty, and Violet looked down at her boots to hide her smile. Glad cleared her throat, banged the gavel once for gravitas, and then started again.

‘Swallow Beach Pier has stood proudly on our shores since 1879, and back in its heyday it was a major tourist attraction, rivalling Brighton.’

‘Steady on, Glad,’ a man across the aisle said. ‘Brighton’s bloody massive.’

‘Melvin Williams, I’ll have you know that our pier once housed a national exhibition of paintings by …’ Gladys paused and consulted her notes, ‘Arthur Bowmore.’

A woman at the back of the room stood up. ‘He was my grandfather!’

‘There you go then,’ Gladys spread her hands. ‘Sue Simpson’s grandfather, a prolific local artist, held a grand exhibition there in the twenties.’ Sensing an ally, Gladys homed in deeper. ‘Have you any idea of the breadth of his work, Sue?’

Sue frowned and held her hands out in front of her as if holding a dinner plate. ‘About like that?’

Gladys stalled, and then rallied. ‘No, no. The number of paintings dear, not the size. Size is irrelevant.’ She let out a small peal of laughter.

A woman with a bubble perm sitting beside Melvin Williams raised her hand. ‘I have to come in there, it’s my area of expertise.’

Keris started laughing under her breath. ‘You’ll love Linda and Melvin. Sex therapists. Make the Fockers look tame.’

‘Linda Williams, this is neither the time nor the place to lower the tone,’ Gladys said, exasperated. ‘If I could just get on.’

Linda shrugged as if to say it was Gladys’s loss.

‘Three,’ Sue Simpson said, still standing up at the back. ‘He painted three in total, all of his dog, Mindy.’

‘Sit down, Susan Simpson,’ Gladys growled, her mayoral chains shuddering on her heaving chest. She looked down at her speech again, and then seemed to think better of it, closing her file.

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