‘Yeah,’ said Ivy, fiddling miserably with her boot lace.
‘Well, why don’t you bite the bullet and say sorry? Tell Trip how you feel, take a chance for once and put yourself out there? And then you can make up before the show. Which, by the way, I am going to try to make. Cleo has her ballet recital in London tomorrow, but we’re hoping to leave straight after.’
‘Really?’ said Ivy hopefully. Suddenly she wanted to see Raye – who seemed to have transformed from manic pixie dream girl to wise woman of the world in the space of a few months – more than anything.
‘I wanted to see the show anyway – you know, I have never missed a single one, not since Mr H got the drama bug in Year Two. But now I have an added incentive. I need to see how thisromance plays out.’
Ivy pressed the phone tighter to her ear, the lump in her throat surprising her. ‘I want to tell Trip I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘And I want to show him how I feel. But … I’m scared.’
There was quiet on the other end of the line for a moment. Then Raye added, more softly now, ‘Oh, Ivy. You can let people in, you know? Let some cracks in the façade show. You might find that people will surprise you. They’re notguaranteedto let you down.’ She laughed. ‘Or so I’m discovering, anyway.’
Ivy closed her eyes. ‘Okay.’
‘Okay,’ Raye echoed. ‘Now I’ve got to go and finish packing. But try and be brave. You’ve got it in you, Ivy Pearson, I know you do.’
The atmosphere in the hall when Ivy arrived for the prep session that afternoon could best be described as the sort of controlled chaos Jackson Pollock might have been aiming for. There was order in there somewhere, Ivy thought, she just wasn’t sure where.
Josie had shut the shop early so they could both help. Children tore up and down the corridor outside the main hall, trailing ribbon and shrieking. The pixies had lost their tights. Sweyn Forkbeard had lost his helmet. One of Ivy’s carefully constructed barrels of whisky for theJamaica Innscene had been crushed after a Year 5 boy insisted he could barrel dance on it. King Doniert’s Stone, which Ivy had spent weeks stippling so it mimicked actual rock, had somehow gone missing and was eventually found in the toilet. The photo montage of the St Ives artists’ movement had permanently snagged on a slide of Barbara Hepworth.
There was, however, something warm and thrilling about the chaos. Ivy couldn’t resist taking a late-afternoon break, perched on a stepladder with her sketchbook, capturing vignettes until her tea went cold: Josie pinning costumes, Mr Hargreaves sitting on the stage breathing into a paper bag, Callum humming the notes for his self-penned ballad,The Mermaid of Lamorna, the children doggedly performing their lines, The Mariner’s Arms’ dog breaking in and savaging a cushion, sending feathers flying.
Ivy was in the middle of drawing Merlin’s concentrated little face as he mouthed his lines when she realised that someone had paused just behind her. She glanced up, her hand flying out instinctively to cover the page.
‘Sorry,’ Trip said, ‘I couldn’t help noticing. They’re really good.’
‘They’re just scrappy little sketches,’ Ivy said, flushing.
‘Well, I like them,’ he said. There was a pause.Be brave, Ivy, she thought. This was the perfect moment to apologise and tell him how she really felt. Even if it was glossy Madison he liked, she could at least be honest with him.
‘Trip,’ Ivy said, trying to keep her voice from shaking. ‘Can I—’
Just then Mei ran over. ‘Trip, can you look at the sound cues for the Jamaica Inn sequence?’ she said. ‘I think Cal’s been a bit ambitious on the storm front. He wants thunder, lightning wavesandgunshots – no one will be able to hear the kids.’
‘Sure,’ said Trip, allowing himself to be tugged away with an apologetic smile. ‘Speak later, Ivy.’
Ivy sighed and watched him go. It had been a mistake to try and talk to him before the show. Trip was, of course, the one holding all the chaos together. Calling out suggestions, ushering children off and on the stage, taking the dog back to the pub, encouraging the performers, reminding them of their cues. Calling Fin to repair a leaky pipe, Ted to move chairs, Lou to set out trays of glasses for the interval and collecting the programmes Kate had printed for them at the surf shop. His good humour never faltered, even when Mr Trenwith announced dramatically that one of the twins had gone AWOL.
By the time early evening hit, they had managed one full dress rehearsal, complete with thunder and lightning and the fog machine on full blast. There were hiccups – Sweyn walkedoff the stage the wrong way, smack into one of the lobsters – but, all in all, it was a success. The rogue twin even returned with a bag of Haribo in time to finish his epilogue.
Then, when darkness had fallen and the children had been collected by their parents, chattering off into the evening, when the chairs were set in neat rows and the props carefully labelled and collated backstage, when Ivy had glued and patched everything together and begun to hope that they would, in fact, open tomorrow … disaster struck.
‘Um,’ said Fin, appearing in the doorway of the hall, a worried look on his face. ‘Ivy, I was just fixing the pipe in that back room and … was this important?’
With a sinking heart, Ivy followed him into the back room and groaned. One of the key set pieces of the Historical Cornwall section involved the Legend of Tom Bawcock and his loyal cat, Mouser; the tale of a man who had braved a terrifying storm to bring back fish and feed his starving townsfolk. The reveal would be a huge net of origami fish, which were to be released on to her recreation of the famous harbour to – Ivy had hoped – great applause. Ivy had spent hours painstakingly folding the paper fish, in silver, gold, pink, grey and brown, along with most of Year 4. She had stored them carefully under the backroom table – right under the vigorously leaking pipe, it turned out. They were now, Ivy realised, a soggy, waterlogged mess.
‘Oh no,’ whispered Ivy, pulling out a handful of wet paper and squelching it in her fist.
Fin grimaced. ‘Unsalvageable, I take it?’
‘Unless the starving townsfolk of Mousehole are going to feast on a pile of mush, I’m going to need to do this again,’ Ivy said.
‘Ivy, we’ll all help,’ said Josie, squeezing into the room behind Fin. ‘I can round up Simi and the others and we can have a marathon folding session together—’
‘It’s okay,’ Ivy said. Yet another thing she’d managed to mess up – she couldn’t even look after a stupid box of paper fish. ‘I’ll sort it. Liv and Bethie will be bouncing around at home having a pre-show sleepover. I could use some peace and quiet. I’ll do it back at the shop, if that’s okay, Josie?’
‘Just call if you need reinforcements,’ Josie told her. Fin squeezed her arm, handed her a box of biscuits, and made her promise not to work too late.
Ivy went first to the art room at the school, where she packed up fresh paper, folding instructions and a Thermos of tea and then escaped, laden with her supplies, to the closed bookshop. She couldn’t help breathing a sigh of relief when she went inside – after the chaos of today, the place was still and, as always, faintly cinnamon-scented.
