Page 40 of A Summer Scandal

Barty lifted the lid to peep, and his eyes lit up. ‘Did you really make this?’

Violet nodded, pleased with herself as he sniffed the box and closed his eyes, smiling.

‘Takes me back, that does,’ he said, then opened his eyes and unexpectedly kissed her on the cheek.

‘None for me then?’ Keris said, her mouth downturned for comedy.

‘I ate it all,’ Violet said. ‘Breakfast, lunch and dinner.’

‘You’re not even joking, are you?’

Vi shook her head, trying not to laugh.

‘I hope you break out in a plague of cake-related spots,’ Keris grumbled, handing her the newspaper. ‘Look at this though.’

Violet scanned the headline. ‘Pier opens again after forty years!’ Nothing too worrisome there. There were several shots of the pier, one black and white from the pier’s yesteryears, another that looked to be from the seventies and one of Cal and Beau struggling through the open gates carrying her sewing machine with Lucy trying to offer direction. She looked closer at the image from the seventies.

‘That’s my grandmother,’ she said, bringing it closer to her face. Monica was standing proudly outside the pier, one of quite a few people in the busy seaside image. She wasn’t looking at the camera; in fact she didn’t look as if she knew the shot was being taken. She had one hand on the sea wall, laughing up into the face of a man beside her. His face was turned slightly away from the camera so you couldn’t see him clearly, but even from that angle it clearly wasn’t her Grandpa Henry. Oh God. Was this the mysterious T?

‘Is it?’ Keris said, leaning over to peer at the picture. ‘Bloody hell, Violet! You’re her double!’

Violet couldn’t take her eyes from the grainy image. ‘I know.’ Holding the paper towards Barty, she frowned. ‘Do you know who that is with her, Barty?’

She passed him the newspaper, and he obligingly took it and peered at it for a moment. ‘I’m not wearing my specs so I couldn’t be sure darling, but it looks like your grandfather to me.’

Vi sighed. ‘You think? His hair wasn’t that dark, I don’t think.’

Barty looked nonplussed. ‘Cameras back then weren’t as sophisticated as today. Could just be a trick of the light.’

Taking the paper back, she studied it again. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ Belatedly, she felt that she’d spoken out of turn to question Monica, especially to someone old enough to remember her grandparents.

‘Thought I’d walk over there with you, see what you’re all up to,’ Barty said. ‘I might be able to stick my oar in, as they say.’ He winked, always the joker.

Violet scanned the rest of the article and then laid the paper down on the hall table. She’d look at it more closely again later.

‘I’ve got someone coming to see about fitting a fancy coffee machine just inside the birdcage tomorrow,’ Violet said a week or two later, pouring Barty a coffee from the Thermos she’d found underneath the sink back at the Lido. ‘Thought people might like to come and sit on the benches and look at the sea for a while.’

They were sitting half way along the pier on one of the ten benches set into the ironwork side-barrier. Barty smiled, his eyes on the horizon.

‘It’s been a long time since people have been able to come and go on this pier. I didn’t realise how much I’d missed it until now.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘I ran up and down here as a kid, and I shared my first kiss with Elizabeth Robertson a few benches that way.’ He jerked his head towards the birdcage. ‘Scandalous it was. Older woman.’

‘Really?’ Vi’s eyebrows lifted towards her hairline.

Barty nodded. ‘She was fourteen. I was twelve.’

Vi laughed softly, imagining how it must feel to have lived your whole life in such a small community, for your every memory to be woven around a place and its people.

‘You must love it here to have never been tempted away,’ she said.

He sighed, heavily enough to indicate that she’d hit a nerve. ‘Oh, I was tempted. Once or twice I came close, but then I met Florence and had a reason to stay.’

Violet knew from Keris that Barty had lost his wife Florence about a decade previously.

‘Did you come here to the pier together?’ she asked, hoping that they had.

He drained his coffee, standing up. ‘Stories for another day,’ he smiled. ‘I should get on. Hot yoga this morning at the parish hall.’

Violet found she wasn’t surprised. Zumba, ballroom dancing, yoga …Please let me be like Barty when I’m old, she thought.Please let me be here in Swallow Beach, a beloved resident rather than an outsider.

---