Jane Linfoot - A Cornish Cottage by the Sea

I feel my nose wrinkle. ‘I guess someone with a home made it.’ I have no ideas where that bollocks came from, but I have to come clean. ‘It wasn’t me.’

He looks half amused. ‘In that case I won’t say great cooking. Or make any mention of baking and entering.’

I’m groaning inwardly at that, but I don’t flinch. ‘And I won’t say thanks a lot for the compliments, although I might risk an “enjoy”.’ But that’s only for Cam’s sake, obviously. Okay, someone please tell my mouth it’s time to stop. ‘And in case you’re thinking of sending the special constables round to interrogate us, it isn’t stolen – the person who brings that white stuff in bottles brought it.’

His nostrils flare slightly. ‘Any cake is good cake as far as we’re concerned. Not that we’re desperate or anything.’

‘I’ll take your word on that.’ I swear that’s my last word too.

‘Ready, Cam?’ He cocks his head at the boy, then turns to Aunty Jo. ‘I hope it’s okay he gate-crashed your afternoon tea?’ He’s raising an eyebrow at Cam. ‘C’mon then, big man, fast as you can, we’re already late. What do you say?’

‘Thanks.’ Cam’s clutching his stack of cake parcels, dropping crumbs as he hurries out onto the stone-flagged path.

‘You will come again?’ There’s no time for Aunty Jo to say more because they’ve almost reached the lane.

So there’s ‘in a hurry’. And there’s ‘bad mannered’. And I know where my money is.

As she pulls the door closed behind them her voice has lightened. ‘He was nice.’

‘He was, I don’t see many kids that age.’

Her eyes narrow. ‘Not the child, I was talking about Barney.’

It takes me a while to pick myself up off the floor. ‘Nice, in what way?’ All that stubble and on-trend scuffed Timberlands still don’t make up for rushing off. Or accusing me of robbery. Even worse, now he’s gone my heart is pounding and my pulse is racing. I blame my faulty adrenalin circuits. The slightest excuse, they flood my body so I’m ready to run away. Which is great for survival and outsmarting the Neighbourhood Watch brigade, but leaves me feeling way more jumpy than I’d like.

‘Put it this way, if he’d asked me to dance thirty years ago I wouldn’t have said no.’ Her wicker chair creaks as she settles back into it.

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. ‘But you’re grieving.’ And she’s also my aunt who’s into ballet and wheat grass juice and rubs on Estée Lauder Youth Dew body lotion morning, noon and many times later on. Every day. How can a guy whose idea of a meet-the-client outfit is a ripped T-shirt and is hunky enough to have jumped off the pages of GQ magazine even register on her radar? He’s totally nothing like, you know … the one who looks like he wants to snog Margot’s face off every time he snatches her out of the air. Or smooth old Uncle Harry, come to that.

‘Don’t be so frumpy, Edie, I’ve lost my husband, not my eyes.’ It’s another one of those times when her snap is so sharp, arguing is pointless.

I fix my gaze on the ferns in the room beyond the door. ‘We really need to do something about this wallpaper.’ This is me, and I’m taking back control. A few minutes’ break from the riot of black and purple has been bliss. At home Dad repainted my bedroom and the pale grey walls and soft light filtering through the muslin nets worked wonders for clearing my head. We’ve got to make a start somewhere and Edie Browne, site manager, knows the cottage is the place.

‘You could be right. If we’re having regular visitors we don’t want to come across all dark and gloomy, do we?’

If Mr Awful-Neighbour got an upgrade to visitor status, even if it’s only in her head, we need to get this quest up and running. The sooner we do, the sooner I’ll be back to civilisation. And normality. And after today I could really do with some of that.

Day 139: Tuesday, 20 thMarch

Calligraphy at The Deck Gallery

Epic Achievement: Remembering that word I keep forgetting. But mostly getting Aunty Jo down the hill.

‘Don’t worry, Aunty Jo, it’s only a bit of lettering – what can possibly go wrong?’

I’m power walking a reluctant Aunty Jo down the narrow winding streets of St Aidan, hoping I’m not about to answer my own rhetorical question. For starters, I can’t remember the name of the cottage let alone the postcode. Worse still, it’s going to be like the stroke department revisited, and everyone will be ancient.

It’s funny how my life has flipped; when I remember that most days I’d be toughing it out with contractors at site meetings it’s hard to align that person with the one who’s about to sit at a table with a load of dreary people doing loopy writing. Truly, if someone had told me I’d be going to an after-lunch Care in the Community class I wouldn’t have believed them either. But this is for Aunty Jo not me, so I’m happy to do it.

We’ve eaten a compromise lunch of pasta tubes made from split peas, which was way worse than it sounds, with lettuce leaves, followed by prunes. We stopped at the cash machine outside the Spar shop on the way down, where Aunty Jo barked prompts over my shoulder and I punched in my 1111 pin all by myself. I’ve now got a bundle of notes, so from here on I can pay with cash. As we push our way into the gallery there’s a wall of huge paintings of the sea that feel so real I can almost hear the crash of the waves on the canvas. Further down the space there’s a group of women around a large table, their laughter bouncing off the high white ceiling.

As their heads all turn I feel Aunty Jo go rigid. She’s growling through her teeth at me, ‘If we leave now, they might not notice?’

‘Hang on.’ She’s not getting out of it that easily.

The tug I give her is so hard that we speed down the gallery. Then, just before we reach the group, she locks her knees but I keep on going. My body’s miles ahead and my legs are running to catch up. As I make a grab for the table edge my thighs crash into it too and set the ink bottles rattling and send a pen rolling off onto the floor. I ignore the gasps around the table and pull out my best sparkly smile. ‘We’re here for the class?’

Whatever I was expecting, it wasn’t someone my age in a daisy print jumpsuit bounding towards me around the table in duck-egg blue Converse.

‘Josie and Edie? And I’m Beth – we were hoping you’d come.’ Her bleached pixie haircut shows off the cute dents in her cheeks when she smiles. Better still, she’s almost as breathless as me. ‘It’s more of an informal workshop actually, we all work on different projects but we help each other along.’

I make a grab for my sunnies, then push them back up on my head again as I realise there’s nothing flashy or jarring about the light. It’s seeping in through a series of frosted slit windows and, instead of dazzling me, it’s washing the room with softness. It’s as if a lot of the places I’ve walked through in my mind the last few months have come to life again here. As the people sit back in what look like fabulously funky chairs for a backwater and let go of the pens and ink pots they’ve grabbed hold of, even if I can’t read what it says, I have to admit there’s some pretty cool work going on.

As Beth’s words sink in I whoosh around to Aunty Jo. ‘Projects! That’s what I was trying to think of – the one I can never get.’ It’s days ago now, but I can’t let it pass. Projects Manager. For the South-West. That’s my job at Zinc Inc.

Aunty Jo’s eyes are open very wide. ‘I see why you said getting out would be good, Edie.’

Beth pulls some spare chairs in our direction. ‘It’s not all hard work – we do a lot of chatting too. Drinks and snacks are on the side, come and help yourselves. Then settle in, and I’ll get you some practice sheets.’