Page 7 of Eden's Comfort Kitchen
Closing her eyes, she let the sound of the waves rolling in soothe her. Already, she felt more at peace than she had in a long time.
CHAPTER THREE
Breakfast the following morning was non-existent. And it would have to remain that way until the food delivery Eden had ordered the day before arrived. She’d slept well enough, the rhythmic booming of the waves against the cliffs morphing into a comforting white noise as she’d dropped off. The sound of the gulls at dawn was a different matter. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have suspected some kind of conspiracy to wake her with the sunrise, so insistent were their cries. Once she was awake, she decided she might as well be up and ready for the day, even if that meant having to wait for her breakfast to arrive.
The taps in the bathroom were inexplicably the wrong way round on the bathroom sink, so the cold was where the hot ought to be and vice versa. She supposed that would take some getting used to; thankfully the boiler wasn’t efficient enough to produce water that would scald her when she got it wrong.
At least she had coffee in the kitchen cupboards – perhaps left by a previous guest – and though there was no milk, she didn’t mind drinking it black. It would wake her properly if nothing else, and she only had to wait a couple of hours for her online shop to arrive.
It was quickly becoming apparent to Eden how impractical life at Four Winds Cottage was going to be. While the beautiful, windswept and romantically remote location was everything she needed right now, for everyday considerations like getting deliveries and shopping up there, the spot was less than ideal. Her first taste of this was a phone call from the driver who was meant to be bringing her online delivery, who – like the taxi driver the day before – had refused to take his van down the path right to the house.
It was also becoming apparent, by virtue of this inconvenience, why the cottage had been the only one on the rental site. It was likely that the more accessible ones had been taken already, leaving only the remote and difficult Four Winds for a last-minute request such as the one Eden had made. Anyone with any sense would have rented something in the main village or down at the foot of the cliffs rather than on a windswept perch that might look like something out ofPoldarkbut was about as well serviced as any home from that century would have been too.
On a more positive note, the weather was doing its best to be on her side. This June day was as glorious as the one before. Much as she needed to sit down and plan how she was going to make the next six months work, having quit her job at a property development company and sold just about everything she owned to come here, she decided it would wait. The beach, the balm for her soul, was calling. And then maybe she’d take a walk into the town to see if that was still as comfortingly familiar as the clifftops had been on her arrival the day before. She recalled the ice-cream parlour that had been a favourite – not even a parlour so much as a window opening on to the street with a jumbled collection of old tables and chairs outside.
‘There! There it is!’ Ten-year-old Eden bounced up and down as the parlour came into view, candy-striped awning shading painted wooden furniture, families filling every table as they sat in the sun with their banana splits or knickerbocker glories or tubs with mini mountains of different coloured ice cream. It was the first holiday she could recall where Caitlin wasn’t with them, but she was twenty now and preferred to escape to some Spanish costa with friends than join her parents and little sister in a British seaside resort. Eden had loved being the only child that week and all the attention that had come with it. ‘Can we get one?’
‘Eden, wait, we have to?—’
‘Please! Please, Dad! Can we get one now? It will be closed when we come back!’
‘It’s not going to close in the next half hour. I promise we’ll come back just as soon as we’ve had lunch.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
Eden’s mum had let out the most beautiful laugh at this. Years later, it would still play in Eden’s mind when she thought of the moment, like a tape recording. ‘You’re not hungry? Then you can’t want ice cream.’
‘It’s different,’ Eden pouted.
‘Is it?’ her dad asked wryly.
‘I promise to eat my dinner.’
Eden’s mum shared a look with her dad, and at that moment Eden knew she’d won.
‘All right,’ he sighed. ‘I suppose we’re on holiday, after all. To hell with it – who needs nutrition anyway? Let’s all get ice cream for lunch.’
Trips to the ice-cream parlour had invariably been followed by a visit to the shop that sold beach toys, or, as she grew older,the souvenir shop that sold bead necklaces and bracelets and seaside-themed trinkets. She recalled now a fish and chip shop that her dad was fond of, and the pub where she’d sat in the beer garden with her mum and sister, a bottle of pop with a straw bobbing about in it on the table in front of her, while her dad went and rubbed shoulders with the locals inside. Her dad would talk to anyone – still would, even now – and the thought of him sitting at home, lonely and bereft without her mum, forced the ever-threatening knot of emotion up into her throat again.
Part of her longed to call him to see if he was OK, but she was the last person he needed or wanted. Caitlin would be there for him, and her support would be far more welcome than Eden’s was. Caitlin always knew what to do and what to say, while Eden always managed to put her foot in it. At her mum’s funeral, people had marvelled at the job Caitlin had done organising everything and consoling their dad; she’d heard them remarking how well Caitlin would take care of him.
You’ve always been spoiled.
Caitlin’s words that afternoon had replayed in Eden’s head almost every day since.
Never accepted a minute of responsibility in your life. Always had everyone dancing to your tune, always wanting more and more, no matter how much you’ve got.
And so on. Eden had heard it all before, of course. She’d often found it funny, funnier the angrier Caitlin got, which enraged her sister even more. When Eden was little, Caitlin had indulged her too, just as their parents had, and perhaps that was partly why Caitlin couldn’t stand it now, conscious on some level of her part in the ruining of her little sister.
Not that Eden thought for a minute what she herself had become was anyone’s fault but her own. Her family may have reinforced her sense of entitlement, but in the end, she had to accept responsibility for it. It had taken twenty-seven years,but finally, she had. Too late for her mum, too late to rebuild their destroyed family, so what was she meant to do with this revelation now?
She spent an hour on the beach, as soothing today as it had been the day before. There was no sign of Livia, Nancy and Levi, and Eden was oddly disappointed by that. What she did enjoy was the notion that there was no pressure to spend all her time here thinking that she had to squeeze every drop out of it because she’d be going home in a few days. This – for all intents and purposes – was home, for the next six months, and so she had all the time in the world to sit in this spot and no desperate rush to cram those moments in.
Then she got up and brushed herself down, and by the time she’d walked to the town with its cluster of shops and houses crowding the curve of the bay, she was hungry and thirsty.
The chip shop was more or less as she remembered it, but she hadn’t for a minute expected the chips to be as good as she’d recalled. They were, however, and as she ate them, she was tempted to phone her dad, just to tell him so. Perhaps she would, she promised herself, instantly realising that she’d have to drum up the courage first and doubting she’d be able to. She wanted to. Perhaps that was a good enough start.
After her chips, she had just enough room for ice cream. She was hopeful as she made her way over to the window that this wouldn’t have changed either. Sure enough, it looked exactly the same: the ramshackle collection of tables and chairs out on the pavement, the silver freezers lined up, the pink and blue stripes of the sign over the hatch. The sight encouraged her to hope that the ice cream might be the same too. There was a queue – which was also encouraging because that invariably meant people knew it would be worth queuing for. When it came to herturn, she looked up from counting the coins in her purse and stared straight into the face of the woman she’d met on the beach the day before.
