Linda Mitchelmore - The Little B & B at Cove End

‘You couldn’t?’ the WPC said.

‘No. Perhaps he thought he was doing it for the times he did win and he bought a new car, or changed the TV for one with a bigger screen or something, bought our daughter a whole load of new clothes – things to give us a better life.’

‘You are in no way to blame,’ she’d told Cara gently.

But Cara did blame herself because a bank manager’s salary should have been more than enough to send Mae on school trips and she, Cara, ought to have challenged him about his gambling long before she had.

‘These trips aren’t supervised enough,’ Mark had said once when Rosie had offered to pay for Mae to go on a trip to Amsterdam. ‘I’m not allowing my daughter to roam about some foreign city at night, un-chaperoned, while their teachers are in a bar somewhere drinking their heads off, whoever might be paying for it.’

And Cara had given in. But what do you do when you love someone as much as Cara had loved Mark? He’d been a good husband in other ways – a fantastic lover for a start. And on Cara’s birthday there had always been another painting, or some other present that Mark knew Cara would love.

Now Cara knew different. Mark preferred to risk money that should have been spent on Mae in the hope of making more. And with that knowledge, her love for him had dimmed. And the original paintings had only been an investment, hadn’t they? Mark had said as much, wanting her to sell a painting he’d bought for one of her birthdays once he realised the artist was on the up and her painting was making four times the amount he’d paid for it.

It was the car full of paintings, now smashed, and burned, beyond saving, in the back-seat area that had alerted the police to the fact that this was not just another sad, speed-induced accident. Mae had been at school and Cara, unable to bear seeing Mark leave, had walked down the hill to the harbour as he loaded his car with his clothes, his favourite CDs and his computer. She hadn’t known he would be taking the paintings.

When she’d got back, she’d almost stopped breathing when she saw all the darker patches on the walls where her beloved paintings had been.

A knock at the front door jolted Cara back to the present, and glad in a way that it had. She raced down the hall, making a mental note to get the polisher out and give the parquet a thorough going over very soon. She could see the silhouettes of two people – a man and a woman at a guess – through the stained glass.

‘Have you got a double room?’ the woman asked the second Cara opened the door. ‘Two nights?’

‘Oh,’ Cara said. She hadn’t been expecting guests so soon. ‘Well …’

She had two nights with no bookings before the people she’d just spoken to arrived. A whole host of butterflies was doing a dance in her stomach – this was all happening so fast. What had been just the germ of an idea was being made a reality.

‘Have you?’ the man said. ‘It does say B&B on your sign. And vacancies.’

‘Yes, I know it does,’ Cara said. ‘But it was a try-out with the sign, and really I’m not quite ready for guests. I was just about to put the polisher over the parquet.’ She opened the door wider so that the middle-aged couple could see the tatty state of the hall floor and her still-denuded walls. ‘I’m in the middle of redecorating,’ she lied.

‘Well, it looks clean enough to me,’ the woman said, ‘so can we come in? We’ve tried the pub but they don’t do rooms, and that place called…what was it, the Lookout?… is fully booked, and the Information Office is closed. I know I sound desperate and really we would be so …’

Cara took a deep breath. She hadn’t really prepared herself for how it might feel to have strangers in her home. But she had to start her fledgling business some time. She hoped Mae wouldn’t be too shocked – or cross – to find strangers in the house already when she got back from her date with Josh.

‘A double,’ the man said, as though to remind Cara of what she’d been asked.

‘Yes, I’ve got a double room,’ she said. ‘Do come in, if you don’t mind the fact the walls are less than perfect. My paintings are in storage while I redecorate …’

‘A bit of faded wall won’t bother us, will it, Eddie?’ the woman said.

Cara did a mental inventory of the linen cupboard. The best was an Egyptian cotton duvet cover and matching sheets and pillowcases, which was on her own bed – a luxurious treat to herself, a bit of spoiling now that Mark was gone. But the lilac floral was clean and aired and would have to do. No matching towels, but she couldn’t worry about that now.

‘I’ll get a room ready for you as quick as I can.’ She opened the door wider and ushered them in. ‘I’m Cara, by the way.’

She proffered her hand first to the woman, and then the man.

‘Pam and Eddie Hine,’ the woman said. ‘Pleased to meet you, and I mean really pleased. We thought we were going to have to sleep in the car, didn’t we, Ed?’

‘Yes, love,’ Eddie said, looking fondly at Pam as a flush reddened the side of his neck.

Well, well, well , Cara thought. I’ll bet my last £223.26 that these two aren’t married, despite making a good display of being newlyweds. She glanced at Pam’s wedding finger where a wide gold band shone brightly in the lights from the hall. And that look, and that flush of Eddie’s, brought a lump to Cara’s throat that was threatening to choke her. She saw herself trapped, in limbo, between fifteen-year-old Mae’s calf-love for Josh, and Eddie and Pam at the other end of the spectrum.

And her own love for Mark stripped bare, sucked from her by his gambling.

‘Will you want the full English breakfast?’ Cara croaked.

‘Lovely,’ Pam said. ‘We don’t usually have a fried breakfast when we’re at home, do we, Ed?’

‘No, love,’ Eddie said. ‘But we’re not at home now, are we?’

‘No, we’re not,’ Pam giggled, which made Cara’s oneness more painful, and she felt herself invisible, a not-really-wanted witness to their coupledom.

‘Right,’ Cara said, battling to look like a real B&B hostess, ‘I’ll show you where the sitting room is and then I’ll make you a cup of tea while I get your room ready. The downstairs cloakroom is over there,’ she went on, pointing, and metaphorically crossing her fingers it was as squeaky clean as it usually was. ‘After that, I’ll need to pop to the shop to get the wherewithal for a cooked breakfast because, as I said, I wasn’t expecting guests so soon.’

At least the sitting room was nicely appointed. Mark hadn’t had room to take the flat screen TV or what was left of the silver that had been Cara’s grandmother’s, although Mark had already squirreled a fair bit of that out of the house and sold it, much to Cara’s annoyance at the time.

‘You do that, Cara,’ Pam said as Cara ushered them into the sitting room and urged them to make themselves comfortable. ‘We’ll be as happy in pigs in muck here while we wait.’

‘I’ll make you a cup of tea. Then ten minutes to sort your room, another fifteen or so while I pop to the shops and…’

‘Don’t panic, Cara,’ Pam interrupted, laying a gentle hand on Cara’s arm. ‘We’ll be just fine while you pop out or our names aren’t Pam and Eddie Hine.’

‘Lovely in here it is, Ed,’ Cara heard Pam say as she walked towards the door that led into the hall. ‘Quality. Lovely curtains and everything. Comfy cushions. Very high end, designer.’

A warm glow spread across Cara’s shoulders. She’d made those curtains. And the cushion covers. Rosie was always telling her she should take up sewing and make a business of it … well, maybe if the B&B business didn’t take off, she would. She left Pam and Eddie Hine cooing over her lovely sitting room and went to make the tea.