Chapter 24

24

‘But the chippy’s an hour’s round trip,’ Pearl protested.

‘ Over an hour,’ Shelley corrected her.

‘And it’s been snowing.’

‘Only a tiny bit. And it’s stopped now.’ She insisted that they would drive to Land’s End in a blizzard if it meant fetching dinner for everyone tonight. So with some trepidation Pearl agreed to drive, and she and Shelley set off, leaving Lena at the cottage to look after the guests.

In the village chip shop now, a cheerful woman with pink streaked hair lifts golden battered haddock from the fryer. ‘Bit peckish, ladies?’ she jokes.

‘Just a bit.’ Shelley grins.

‘So, you’ve got seven fish suppers…’ She turns to the till.

‘That’s fish and chips, right?’ Shelley clarifies, and the woman chuckles.

‘That’s right. It’s a supper up here. A fish supper or a pie supper or whatever kind of supper you fancy.’ She looks up at them. ‘Salt and vinegar on everything?’

‘Yes please.’ Pearl turns to Shelley. ‘We should get some veggie options too, shouldn’t we? Just in case?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Shelley looks down at the selection of pies in the warming cabinet. ‘What are they?’

‘Macaroni pies.’ The woman says this as if no one has ever had to ask before.

‘Macaroni? In a pie?’ Shelley exclaims, warming to the concept immediately. In all her years of family meal production, her palate has settled at the heavily carb-laden meals to satisfy a ravenous husband and kids.

‘That’s exactly it.’ The woman closes the cartons of their fish suppers and bags up the required pies. ‘Nothing better than a macaroni pie if you want comfort food…’ Her gaze veers towards the window. ‘Look, the snow’s come on really fast. Hope you don’t have far to go?’

‘It’s quite a way actually.’ Pearl glances out at the rapidly falling flakes, illuminated by the street lamp. ‘We’re staying at a B little corners off the beaten track. He’ll post his picture of a woman with numerous pugs on leads, or of noodles with a comically rude brand name in a grocers. Sometimes Lena rolls her eyes at his boyish humour, but she loves it really. He is uncomplicated, which she finds refreshing. What you see with Tommy Huntley is what you get.

Of course, he was seeing Daisy today, she remembers now. It’ll have been good for them to have a dad-and-daughter day, all to themselves. For Tommy to have some company too. He’s not the kind of man to do loads of stuff with his mates, or have a raft of activities that don’t involve her. From the night they met, he’s pretty much wanted to do everything with Lena.

However, it’s not one of Tommy’s photos that she’s looking at now. It’s one of Daisy’s. An Instagram Story that she must have posted earlier today.

Lena would never think of herself as Daisy’s stepmother. She hasn’t been around for long enough to earn the title. And Daisy, although pleasant enough, hasn’t really let her into her life. Lena has tried her best, asking her all kinds of questions and then holding back in case she was quizzing her too much. She has bought books for her, carefully chosen to hopefully chime with a teen mindset. Although Daisy has always thanked her, Lena suspected that they were slung somewhere, never to be read.

Lena has tried to be Daisy’s friend, and if it’s felt a little hopeless, then that’s fine, she’s reassured herself. Catherine is Daisy’s mother and she would never try to get in the way of Tommy’s family. But now, as she stands stock still in the moonlight, and stares at the picture of Tommy and Catherine together, she feels as if she has been punched in the gut.

Tommy is smiling a little awkwardly, but then his smile is always off-centre like that. And Catherine is beaming and their faces are actually pressed together, cheek to cheek. They are two extremely good-looking middle-aged people with excellent bone structure and great teeth and, Christ, how had Lena never realised how right they must have looked together? How right they look , she corrects herself. Present tense. Tommy and Catherine Huntley still look like a happily married couple. Since Lena has known him, the three of them have never gone to lunch together. At least not to her knowledge. It’s shocking to Lena, that she’s so rattled by a silly photo that Daisy probably put up without even thinking. And they were only having pizza, she tells herself, irritated by this unexpected surge of jealousy.

It was just lunch. It’s fine. It doesn’t mean a thing. That was what Max, Lena’s ex-husband, said when she spotted a restaurant receipt tossed casually on the kitchen worktop one evening.

Just lunch with a friend. It was nothing.

She hated herself then for checking his emails and phone, and for rifling through his pockets and desk drawers at home. Everything was remarkably accessible to her: the texts, the little secret codes in his diary, the photos on his phone. Naked pictures of the woman; nudes as they’re called now. Max had been so careless about passwords that Lena could only conclude that he didn’t care whether or not she found out.

All those years, through the trying for a baby and her pleading with him to try at least one round of IVF, there’d been an affair. And then there was a baby with this beautiful and – Lena had to hand it to her – extremely flexible woman (did she do yoga or Pilates, Lena wondered? Or was there some other way of being able to position your legs like that?). Lena couldn’t have a child, but that didn’t matter to Max, because he’d made one with someone else.

Tommy isn’t like that, Lena tells herself as tears flood her eyes. She looks up at the star-speckled sky and breathes in great lungfuls of crisp Highland air, as if that will chase this terrible feeling away.

‘It was only lunch,’ she mutters out loud. But still, she can’t unsee the image of Tommy and Catherine jammed tightly together with Christmas decorations all around them, as she steps back into the house.