Page 41 of Escape to Starshine Cove
“I’ve noticed,” I reply, recalling the woodland trail, the little hand-made fairies that seem to pop up all over the village, the Pixieland flag in George’s front garden. If ever there was a place willing to embrace a little girl’s fancy, it would be Starshine Cove.
George rubs his eyes, and shakes his head. I see a slight tremor in his normally steady hands as he picks up his teacup and takes a sip.
“Well, the weather wasn’t great that winter. There’d been some snow, and then some ice, and when they reached the big roundabout near the hospital, a lorry that had been delivering supplies spun out of control and hit Simon’s car. Archie was already there, no clue what had happened, waiting for them in the maternity unit. Even now I can’t get that image out of my head – the thought of that poor man, pacing around the corridors, wondering if that was the day. If that was the day he got to meet his new baby…”
For the first time since I’ve met him, George looks truly vulnerable. Despite his age, despite the fact that we have been talking about him getting tested for a potentially serious condition, he has never seemed anything less than robust and full of vitality. Now, as I look across the table, he carries every one of his years and more. I reach out, take hold of his hand, give his fingers a gentle squeeze.
“You don’t have to talk about this,” I say quietly, “some things are just too hard, I know. I understand.”
He keeps hold of my hand, and replies: “I suspected you might, sweetheart. But that’s okay. I’m okay. Well, I’m not, but I never will be when it comes to this. That’s only right and proper. Life moves on, and you have to move with it – but that doesn’t mean you have to forget them, does it? The people you lose along the way. It’s easier to talk about now, but it’ll never be easy. For a long time afterwards, I wanted to blame someone – wanted it to make some sense, you know? But it was nobody’s fault. It was just an accident. Just one of those sad things you see on the evening news, or read about in the local paper – except this time, it was happening to us.”
The random nature of life is something that never ceases to amaze me. Working in medicine, you see such extreme examples of it – how resilient the human body can be, surviving the most horrific of ordeals, or the opposite, where a simple decision to cross a road or climb a step can end someone’s story without warning. We tell people to eat well, to exercise, to avoid smoking or drinking too much – and all of that is important. All of that helps, but it’s not a forcefield that protects you from all of life’s threats. Nothing does that.
“In the end,” George continues, “Archie did get to meet his baby that day – he did get to meet Meg. They managed to save her, but not Sandy, and not Simon. We all lost so much – for me, two of my children; for Archie, the love of his life; for those two little girls, their mum – Meg never even got to meet her. Connie, the kids…well, you can imagine. It was brutal. I wasn’t sure how any of us were going to survive it.”
I had by that point started to suspect that this story wasn’t going to have a happy ending, and I have been trying to prepare myself for it. To not crumble. To not start crying, because I have no right.
He sees the look on my face, and pushes one of the napkins towards me. I obediently pick it up and dab the tears from my eyes. I have failed, and am embarrassed that George is now consoling me.
“How did you survive it?” I eventually ask. I think about Connie, and the easy way she laughs, her infectious winks, her mischievous sense of humour. I think about those little girls, and their secret fairy forests, and I think about Dan, hiding his sadness with his hair dye and his vaping. I think about George, a man who has lost his wife and two of his children, and doesn’t even seem sure where the third one is. About Archie, creating gardens full of beauty and life while he raises two children on his own. How did they survive all of this? Not only survive, but seem to thrive, to go on living so fully and so thankfully?
“Ah…well, it wasn’t easy. It helped that we had the children to think about. A newborn is a newborn, whatever the circumstances, and they take a lot of looking after. Lilly was only three, and she just didn’t understand. She’d lie in bed at night, asking when Mummy was going to come and read her stories to her – she did that for months, convinced that eventually, she’d just walk through the door and they’d carry on with the Lost Boys and Peter Pan and Wendy… Connie’s kids were all in their teens, and that’s not the easiest of times anyway, is it?”
“It’s really not,” I reply, remembering how awkward and miserable I’d been at that age, even with a loving family around me.
“To be honest, love, it’s all a bit of a blur – the shock, the funeral, all of that stuff. We focused on the kids, and we focused on each other, and the whole village seemed to come together. In a small place like this, it was a loss that hit everyone. It affected the whole community – the pain, the anger, the hole they left in our lives. But that also meant that the recovery was communal – there was always help with the baby. There was always food freshly cooked for us, logs chopped, dogs walked, lifts to school for the kids, someone on hand to open the café… I suppose we just looked after each other, Ella, as best as we could.
“That makes it sound simple, and it wasn’t. It was hard and slow and painful, and we were all at different stages at different times. We still are, truth be told. It’s not the kind of thing that ever leaves you, that you ever get over – you just learn to manage it. To be positive for other people’s sake, and, eventually, for your own. Life is short, and you never know what’s around the corner, and if there’s one truth all of this taught me, it’s what I told you yesterday…”
“I remember,” I reply, “you told me that whatever life throws at you, you have to try and find the fun in it.”
“You were paying attention after all! Whatever you decide to do, Ella, I hope you remember that, at least.”
“I will, I promise. And to be honest, life is a lot more fun when you’re around, George.”
ChapterTwenty-One
By the time we get back to the village, it is late afternoon. George heads home, and I decide that I need to see Connie.
I find her just closing up the café, her hair scooped up in a wild bun that seems to be exploding over her head, a smile of welcome on her face. Looking at this woman, it is nigh on impossible to imagine the pain she has endured, the courage it has taken to continue to greet life head on.
Before she gets a chance to speak, I wrap her up in a huge hug, squeezing her so tight she lets out a small squeal.
“What was that for?” she asks, looking surprised but pleased.
“Just because.”
“Right. Well, that explains everything. Can I tempt you to a cuppa, or a bucket of wine?”
“The former sounds good,” I reply, joining her as we stroll to her house. I’ve not been inside before, and am unsure what to expect. She lives with her children in one of the newer homes – by which I mean perhaps 19thcentury – set back from the green. The pink Fiat 500 is parked outside, and I see that Archie has been at work on the garden. A collection of fairies is arranged in an old chimney pot, surrounded by pale purple Michaelmas daisies and trailing lobelia in shades of blue.
She opens the door – unlocked, obviously – and I follow her through into a hallway that is cluttered with boots and coats and the detritus of family life. I spot a snorkel mask hanging from a hook, an old skateboard, a couple of abandoned backpacks that suggest an infestation of teenagers.
“Sorry about the mess,” she says, looking back at me over her shoulder, “I’d make an excuse, but it’s always like this.”
I join her in the kitchen, and enjoy browsing its quirks as she makes a brew. It is a large room, taking up the whole of the back of the house, and it is clearly both well-used and well-loved. There is an old-fashioned Aga, and a Belfast sink, and copper pots and pans hanging from the ceiling like exotic jungle vines. The island in the centre of the room is adorned with knives in blocks, with bottles of oil and jars of home-made jam, with flour-smudged papers covered in hand-scribbled recipes.
The huge fridge door is entirely coated in magnets and notes and pictures; bright daubs of rainbows and fairies that I can tell have been created by the girls; postcards, receipts, train tickets, letters, appointment cards and scrawled lists. Not a single inch of the actual fridge is visible.
