Page 17 of The Key to the Last House Before the Sea

NESSA

Nessa walked along the lane, cut across the field and started climbing back up over the clifftop towards Driftwood House, which was a smudge in the distance.

She’d folded the battered leather box into the crook of her arm and it pressed against her side as she moved. The weight of it felt like her grandmother’s hand on her waist. If only it was. If only her gran was here to give advice on how to do the best for Lily when Nessa’s life was such a muddle.

But Nessa had learned long ago that if onlys were pointless. If only her mum hadn’t died so young, if only she hadn’t been too busy as a carer to pass her exams at school, if only Jake hadn’t turned out to be such a mistake.

Nessa shook her head as she marched on up the steep slope. No. Jake would never be a mistake because, without him, she’d never have had Lily. And however hard life got, her daughter was nothing but a blessing.

She stopped when she got to the top of the cliff, hands on her hips and puffing. She’d missed lunch and her stomach was grumbling. She’d make herself a sandwich at Driftwood House, as long as Gabriel wasn’t about. But first she had to find out what was in her grandmother’s mysterious box.

Nessa walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down. It was a dizzying drop. Hundreds of feet below, the sea was pounding into rock and, a little farther along the coast, there was Heaven’s Cove. Tourists were thronging the narrow lanes, and flags were flying from the ancient church that stood at its centre. The faint toot of car horns was caught on the breeze. The village was gridlocked as people, taking advantage of the heatwave, flooded into the area.

It would have been a good day for Shelley’s to sell the inflatable toys, windbreaks, buckets and spades that tourists lapped up at this time of year.

But Shelley’s would likely be turned into flats that locals couldn’t afford to buy, and Mr Scaglin was now miles away, living near his daughter. Nessa would take Lily to visit him, when she got a new job and could spare money for the bus fare.

She sat down on the tinder-dry grass and pulled her knees up to her chin. The box was beside her and she eyed it nervously. What was inside?

There was only one way to find out. Nessa pushed her gold bangle up her arm and unbuckled the straps around the box. Then she opened it slowly, as seagulls wheeled and screeched overhead and sunshine warmed her skin.

Inside lay a pile of black and white photos and yellowing papers. Nessa pulled out the top piece of paper, which was a local newspaper cutting announcing the engagement of Nessa’s mum and dad.

The printed announcement seemed quaint – from a time before social media allowed everyone to trumpet their news, good and bad, at the touch of a button.

She ran her fingers across the fading newsprint, feeling almost unbearably sad. There were her mother’s and father’s names. They must have been so excited and blissfully unaware of the heartache to come.

First, Mark, her father, had died of an undiagnosed heart condition when Nessa was four years old. And then her lovely mum, who’d already suffered so much, developed a degenerative nerve disease eight years later.

People said lightning never struck twice, but it had in her family, leaving her orphaned at the age of seventeen.

Perhaps that was why she’d fallen for Jake’s charms so easily and had wanted to have a child of her own – to make her own family whom she could love and protect.

Nessa shivered as she thought of Lily squeezed into Rosie’s box room, with no home to call her own. Loving her daughter was easy, but protecting her? That was proving harder.

Nessa pushed her hand further into the box of treasures from her gran. There were black and white photos of her gran and gramp as a young couple, photos of Nessa as a child and more recent photos of Lily.

Nessa was touched to find some of her old school reports, pictures she’d drawn twenty years ago, and a copy of her antenatal scan when pregnant with Lily.

Nessa ran her fingers across the shadowy image of her daughter before she was born. She’d known from Jake’s reaction to the image that he wasn’t going to find fatherhood easy. He’d been keen to try for a child but, when faced with evidence that a baby was on the way, he’d become irritable and withdrawn, his insistence that he was a ‘free spirit’ not sitting well with the ties and responsibilities of parenthood.

And then, when Lily was only a baby, he’d had a one-night stand with Gemma, a tourist he met in the pub. He’d told Nessa all about it on the day he’d walked out for good.

Nessa pushed that memory from her mind and pulled a black and white photo from the box. It was of three men, sitting side by side, wearing tin hats. One looked familiar and, when she turned the picture over, she saw written on the back: Seth, G. Rider and ?, France 1918.

Seth, her great-great grandfather. She recognised his face from the photo of him and his wife that her gran had kept propped up on her bedside table. Her gran had been so proud of him for being a wartime hero.

‘He saved the life of his captain, George Rider, during a great battle in France,’ she’d tell open-mouthed Nessa, who lapped up stories of his courage. ‘His army unit was awarded the Croix de Guerre for its bravery and your great-great-gramp was the bravest of the brave.’

Nessa doubted Seth Paulson had ever insisted he was a ‘free spirit’ unable to cope with responsibility. He’d have been too busy fighting for his life.

She took another look at the photo, noticing the army uniform, the exhaustion etched across the men’s faces, and the wall of mud behind them. They were in a trench. And the man sitting next to Seth, G. Rider, must presumably be the comrade he’d saved. The man whose family had once lived in this area too, before they’d upped sticks in the 1920s and moved to Cheshire. ‘The posh part,’ her gran had once told her. ‘They were loaded.’

Nessa put the precious photo back into the box for safe-keeping and pulled out another drawing. This one, unlike her childish sketches, had obviously been done by an adult. An intricate pattern had been drawn in pencil, its irregular shapes shaded in with jewel colours – ruby red, emerald green, sapphire blue. It was beautiful, like a mosaic.

Nessa squinted at the faded words written beneath the picture. It was her grandmother’s writing.

We left it behind, Mama’s art,

---