‘You a’right?’ he mouthed over the heads of the crafters.
Kitty caught the exchange too, before also looking at Beatrice inquisitively.
‘I’m fine,’ Beatrice mouthed back before giving Kitty a cautionary glance, warning her not to do or say anything.
Beatrice wanted to be the matchmaker around the village, but Kitty Wake had been known to interfere when she thought Beatrice and Atholl needed a shove in the right direction, which, in the early days back in August, they definitely had.
The pair’s scrutiny was too much for her and Beatrice hurried round the desk, saying to the weavers, ‘Right, let me help you with your cases, Ms…um?’ She was sure they’d said their names as they approached the desk, but had forgotten already.
As the women reintroduced themselves, Beatrice rolled away two of their cases to the foot of the stairs. Kitty stopped her with a hand on her arm.
‘You can’t be carrying those up the stairs,’ she whispered, horrified.
The colleagues froze, staring at one another. Beatrice hurriedly checked Atholl had left, which he had, thank goodness.
‘I’ll be fine, and not a word to Atholl, OK?’ she hissed and bumped the cases up the steps, calling the women after her, only too glad to get away from Kitty’s fussing.
As soon as the crafty mums and daughters were at the door of room four, the only family four bed in the place, she retreated to her little sun room, using the back stairs to avoid the inn’s residents. Only Echo, Atholl’s wandering dog, followed her from his favourite napping spot on the back landing.
‘Come on, little guy. Let’s light a fire and take a nap,’ she told the obedient collie, making her way inside the room, being sure to turn the key and sighing with relief that she was alone at last.
Yet Beatrice didn’t sleep. She’d given up after fifteen minutes of fretting and turning under the tartan blanket on the sun room sofa. The window faced south and the inn’s back gardens, where, in the summertime, crocosmia bobbed their heads and blackbirds made their nests in amongst the bramble briars and teasel stems, but everything now looked tangled, damp and black and topped with snow.
Echo lifted his head lazily from his spot on the hearth rug as Beatrice got up and drew the curtains before coming to a stop in the middle of the room, fixing her eyes on the cardboard box that had for weeks now been shoved into a corner. After a moment’s hesitation, she dragged it into the middle of the room.
The tape was still intact over its seals. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to open it when it arrived; when she’d been too happy, too busy, too swept up in her exciting new life at the inn to want to face its contents.
The box was addressed to her in familiar handwriting. She ran her hand over the ink.
Sender: Richard Halliday, Apartment 21A, Castle View Wind, Warwick
Reading the words stilled the voices in her head that had been chiming like alarm bells since Kitty had coaxed her into realising she might indeed be pregnant; voices that had been asking how she could have been so unobservant, so out of touch with herself not to figure it out. These were mixed in with other, less-persuasive, voices saying she couldn’t be sure she really was pregnant until she took a test, and, anyway, hadn’t she had a few, admittedly unusually light, periods in the last few months, so how could she somehow be carrying a baby?
Beatrice was very aware of her breathing as she tore the tape from the box, simultaneously wincing at the thought of what she’d find inside but also wanting to be occupied with anything that would take her mind off the clamorous baby thoughts.
Rich’s new address on the box was the same one that had been on the lawyer’s letter and the divorce papers.
Since the separation had been, in the end, amicable in its own way, she hadn’t suffered too much when signing the documents and returning them. She’d done all her suffering and crying when he walked out, back in the spring.
The money from the sale of their Warwick two-bed had been split equally between them and Rich had packaged up her few belongings and sent them on to her at Port Willow. She’d opened the case of clothes when they arrived, but this box she couldn’t bear to open at the time.
Taking a deep breath she plunged her hands through the scrunched newspaper, immediately finding a framed photo of her mum, her sister Angela and herself on the ramparts of Warwick castle on a bright spring day long ago. Angela was still only a teenager then.
Beatrice smiled. That was the summer they both got undercuts and Beatrice had instantly regretted hers while Angela looked and felt gorgeous. At that point the three women still lived together and the cancer diagnosis that would steal their lovely mum’s retirement and the chance to meet her grandbaby, Clara, lurked seven thousand days away in their futures, just waiting to scupper all their plans.
Her mum was pictured carrying the picnic bag and with her coat over her arm. She looked quiet and content, the way she always had then – the midnight dash to the women’s refuge, with Angela still a baby in her arms, escaping the girls’ volatile, controlling father and the many months of rebuilding their lives that had followed was by then a series of distant unhappy memories for her. Beatrice could barely recall her father, and Angela had no memories of him at all.
Her mum had never remarried, even though Beatrice had dreamed of having a lovely step-dad like she’d seen in her favourite teen movies and for a long while in year eleven she’d conjured up an entire secret romance scenario between her kindly art teacher, Mr Greig, and her mum, after she’d seen him make her mum laugh at a parents’ open day. Her mum had laughed again when Beatrice eventually confessed this to her and she’d told her she didn’t want or need a man, not when she had everything she needed right there in her girls.
Beatrice couldn’t help sighing, running her thumbs over the happy faces in the picture before laying it down gently by her side. Echo watched on, blinking by the fire, half asleep but keeping an eye on his boss.
Beatrice’s old diaries came next, a few books, her watch, and various bits of jewellery, some precious (her mother’s locket with the word ‘mum’ on the front), the rest mostly high street stuff and nothing special. Out next came her wedding band and engagement ring together in a little box she didn’t open, putting them down in the growing pile by her side. An almost-empty bottle of perfume came next and the stale, sickly smell of her old life made her aware again of the queasiness in her stomach.
She wrapped the bottle in some of the scrunched newspaper. She’d bin it later. The scent had taken her straight back to the bedroom she’d shared with Rich, with his ties draped over the wardrobe door, and all his early starts for the station on dark winter mornings, and her own commute to her beloved Arts Hub, and all their late homecomings with M&S carrier bags and something easy to heat up for dinner; all the daily, dry rhythms of her old life.
Beatrice had the urge to get up and throw open the sun-room window for some sea air but remembered it was snowing outside, so she shook away the thoughts, making Echo side-eye her with concern before flopping his sleepy head back down onto his paws.
Reaching into the bottom of the box, her fingertips touched the bundle. This was it. The part she’d been dreading had arrived. She tentatively held up the tissue paper package she’d wrapped so carefully back in the summer, only days before she’d drunk all the white wine in her empty house and boozily booked a lone holiday to Port Willow. It seemed so long ago now, but the package reminded her that it wasn’t even half a year ago. She slowly ripped the Sellotape free, letting the parcel spread open across her lap.
