Annie's Lovely Choir By The Sea

by Liz Eeles

  ‘As well as the most annoying,’ he murmurs.

  Chuffing hell, I think he might be about to kiss me again, so I let his last remark slide.

  ‘Are you finished with these?’ A gigantic man in a neon-yellow T-shirt barges between us and grabs hold of our empty glasses with hands like two slabs of meat. ‘Happy Hour finishes in five minutes so get your refills now,’ he intones lifelessly, a vision of boredom. The glasses clank together when he lumbers off, trailing a scent of fried food, and Josh pulls back from the table. The spell is broken, and I’m not sure now that Josh was going to kiss me anyway.

  ‘Woah, did that bloke take away my G&T?’ demands Kayla, who’s just appeared wiping her wet hands on her trousers. ‘There was a bit left in the bottom and I need all the alcohol I can get if I’m spending the evening supervising teenagers. Talking of which, have you seen the time, Josh?’ She pulls back her sleeve and shoves her watch into his face. ‘The curtain goes up in forty-five minutes. We’re taking the kids to see Wicked,’ she explains, slinging her bag over her shoulder. ‘I’ve learned all the songs so I can sing along. It’ll be good practice for the choir. Is everything all right with you two?’

  ‘Fine.’ Josh gets to his feet and zips up his leather jacket while I scramble up from the table. There’s something I must say to him before they leave.

  ‘Please tell Cyril and the rest of the choir I’m sorry for leaving so abruptly, and thank you for keeping the choir going. I really appreciate it and I’m sure your dad would be proud of you.’

  Josh stares over my shoulder at the cars and taxis gridlocked outside. ‘Will you come back for the concert?’

  I’m tempted, I really am, but Josh hit the nail on the head in Alice’s garden – what’s the point when my life is here in London? What’s the point of getting involved, and hurt?

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Josh nods as though that was the answer he expected. ‘Come on then, Kayla, or we’ll be late for the show. Goodbye Annie; look after yourself.’

  Kayla flings herself into my arms and hugs me tight. ‘Ooh, I wish we had longer. Please come back and see us in Salt Bay before too long. The place isn’t the same without you and half the locals are mad as a meat-axe.’

  After checking that Josh is heading for the door, she whispers in my ear, ‘How did things go with Mr Hotness?’ and hugs me tighter when I shake my head.

  ‘I can speak to him about it if you like.’ But she looks relieved when I tell her that she’s never to mention anything about it to anyone. On pain of death.

  Tearing herself away, she gives me a smacking kiss on the cheek and races after Josh, who’s waiting on the pavement.

  ‘Enjoy the show and don’t sing along too loudly!’ I shout. At least I think that’s what I say. My head is spinning with all that has happened in the last half hour or so and I can’t think clearly. All I want to do is chase after Josh, fling my arms round his neck and see if he still smells of cedar wood. Which in one tiny way would be lovely, but in every other gigantic way would be a Very Bad Idea. He’s tied to his family in Cornwall three hundred miles away – and I can’t be tied to mine.

  So I wave at Kayla through the window and grin like a loon while Josh crosses the road without a backward glance and is swallowed up in a crush of people rushing past.

  Chapter 28

  There’s a box waiting for me when I get home from work a few days after meeting up with Kayla and Josh. The battered shoebox has been placed in the middle of the coffee table and I recognise it immediately. It belonged to Mum. Sighing, I make myself a cup of coffee, sit on the lumpy sofa and rub my head which has been aching for hours.

  I was rubbish at work today because I kept thinking about Salt Bay; or, to be more accurate, about Josh in the bar. Was he about to kiss me again? I’m not sure, but I really wanted him to. Partly – I can’t help it – because I fancy the pants off him, but mostly because of that flash of hurt vulnerability I’ve noticed in him before. It strips away his moody layers and gets to the sensitive man underneath. A man who’s given up everything to support his family – whereas I’ve done a runner from mine.

  ‘It would never work,’ I say out loud to myself. ‘How could I possibly live in Salt Bay and give up everything I have here?’ I glance round the muddled, empty flat and the ready meal for one peeping out of my carrier bag. Even if I could, one thing I can never give up is being a Trebarwith and that would always come between us. ‘Don’t worry, Germaine, I’m not about to change my whole life for a man,’ I murmur, picking up the note on top of the shoebox that Gracie’s scrawled on a used envelope. It reads: Found this under your bed during my clear-out. Do you still want it?

  The note raises a couple of worrying questions.

  When is Gracie going to move out? No time soon, judging by the way she’s ferreting under my bed as if she owns the place. She keeps promising she’s looking for somewhere else to live but there’s no evidence of flat-hunting. No newspaper adverts or Internet searching or viewing appointments. At least she’s now sleeping on the sofa and I’ve got my bed back, but I need to be more firm about a moving out deadline.

  What exactly is she clearing out? If it’s her stuff, that’s fine; the bedroom is still jam-packed with her possessions with mine shoved into a corner. But it’s not so good if she’s ousting my stuff in a stealthy takeover bid.

  When Amber and Gracie get home, I’ll have a word and hope Gracie doesn’t get hysterical. She threw a wobbly when asked to clean fake-tan stains off the bath, so bringing up her moving-out date will probably herald an evening of door slamming. Oh, the joys of living with hormonal teenagers.

  I turn my attention back to the box, which is crammed to the brim with bits of paper, old bills and receipts. Mum kept strange things. She’d throw out important information like school reports and NHS numbers, but hang on to bills from way back. The first piece of paper I pull out proves my point. It’s an electricity bill for our tiny Crouch End flat, from June 1998. I haven’t thought about that flat for ages. It was one of the few we lived in that had outside space for me to play, and I was so sad when we moved out after a few months. We had to move because Mum was convinced the neighbours were spying on us.

  I’ve not looked at the box since Mum died and I cleared out her things. At the time I was too cut up to deal with her paperwork so I shoved the box out of sight and forgot all about it.

  Perhaps now is the right time to go through it and get rid of stuff. Maybe a clear-out will help me to get back on track and back to how I used to be – before Alice and Salt Bay, before Josh.

  Yep, I’m going in. Taking a deep breath, I start flicking through the curling bills and scraps of paper. Jeez, Mum kept a load of crap. There are receipts for who-knows-what stretching back over twenty years, several ancient red bills and a bailiff’s letter I never knew about.

  Buried among the dross, I’m touched to find a drawing in thick crayon with ‘Sept 1993’ pencilled in the corner. Both stick-people in the picture have green hair but the one with bright blue splodges for eyes must be me. I run my finger across the chunky writing underneath – ’Mummy and me’ – and try to remember how it felt to be young and unaware of life’s challenges. The ‘throw away’ pile on the coffee table is getting higher but I put my drawing into a new ‘keep’ pile.

  Towards the bottom of the box there’s a ripped-open envelope with a letter inside on thick Basildon Bond paper. The writing is large and looping like mine.

  Dearest Joanna. I’m not sure where you are so I’ve asked people who know you to forward this letter on. I hope and pray that it will eventually reach you. I want to ask you to please come home. The house is so quiet and empty without you. Your father is a proud man, but he regrets what was said and I’m sure he will come round if you come home with your baby.

  It’s signed ‘Your loving mother.’

  I’m not sure how long I sit staring at the letter. Mum was lying when she said her family had cut her off completely. This letter i
s proof of that, and everything I thought was true has shifted.

  Carefully placing the letter on the ‘keep’ pile, I delve further into the box and pull out a tattered newspaper cutting that was hidden underneath the envelope. It’s yellowing and faded with age but the headline jumps out in thick, black letters: Seven drown in Cornish fishing tragedy. The story is only a few paragraphs long and gives only brief details about the storm that hit Salt Bay, but Samuel is named among the dead.

  Mum knew! She knew that Sheila wanted her to come home; she knew that her dad had drowned and her mum was all alone. Yet she still didn’t tell me. Or go home. Alice was right all along.

  Now the initial shock is wearing off, I feel a rush of hot anger. I’ve never been properly angry with Mum before, not even when she showed me up at the school gates with her strange behaviour. Instinctively, I knew she was fragile and couldn’t help it. But now there’s so much I want to ask Mum but I can’t because I found out too late.

  I want to know why she kept all this a secret from me and why she never went home, and another question is niggling at the edges of my mind. Why did she deprive me of belonging to a proper family and sentence me to a life of flat-hopping around the seedier parts of London?

  Sentence is too strong a word. I shake my head to dislodge the mutinous thought but it won’t budge, even though I wouldn’t have changed growing up in this city. The flats might have been rubbish but Mum and I had some good times together, dodging the Saturday crowds on Oxford Street, paddling in the Serpentine, riding to the end of Underground lines and exploring where we found ourselves. Thinking about our happy times together always makes me smile.

  But there could have been lazy holidays by the sea as well, and ice creams on Salt Bay’s magical beach. And grandparents, Alice, a family. They were things I never wanted because I thought they didn’t want me, but I was wrong.

  Picking up my grandmother’s letter, I smooth out the creases in the blue paper and feel unutterably sad. The fallout from my mother’s decisions have reverberated down the decades, leaving a lonely widow waiting in vain for a daughter who never came home. And me, twenty-nine years old and completely alone, living in a cramped flat with people who don’t want me here. I’m not a free spirit. I’m unloved and lonely.

  Why does it feel as if an elephant has parked its wrinkly backside on my chest? This must be what a panic attack feels like. It’s getting harder and harder to breathe and a strange whooshing sound in my head is blocking out shouts from the street below. I read somewhere that a panic attack won’t kill you but, knowing my luck, I’ll be the one person who drops dead. I’ll end up a footnote in a text book for medical students: Annabella Sunshine Trebarwith, the woman who panicked herself to death.

  Reaching shakily for my cup of coffee, I take a huge gulp but it’s stone cold and that’s the final straw.

  Hurling the cup at the wall, I start to cry. Not in a genteel way, that’s not my style. My crying consists of snotty, gulping, ugly sobs that fill the flat while muddy-brown liquid runs down the wall and pools on the carpet.

  The last time I cried like this was after Mum’s funeral, while her hippy friends put down their spliffs, patted me awkwardly on the shoulder and burbled on about nirvana. The neighbours will think I’m being murdered but I don’t care.

  After snotting and gulping my way through half a box of tissues, I feel spent and strangely calm. Coffee has soaked into the grey carpet, but I don’t care if the landlord makes me pay for it to be cleaned. Nothing really matters. I fetch a wet cloth and I’m half-heartedly attempting to clean it up when Amber and Gracie bowl in through the front door, arm in arm and laughing.

  They stop dead at the sight of me, hair all over the place, with red, swollen eyes and on my knees, scrubbing coffee from the wall.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ squeaks Amber, giving Gracie a ‘she’s gone mental’ glance. ‘Did you spill your drink? Don’t worry about it.’ She scurries across the room and starts placing broken china onto the coffee table. ‘There’s no need to get upset. I’m sure it can be cleaned up and we can buy another cup just the same, can’t we Gracie?’

  Gracie nods, her eyes huge.

  ‘We’ll help you clear it up, won’t we?’

  Another mute nod from Gracie.

  ‘And then I’ll make you another coffee and everything will seem better.’

  Amber is sweet and helps me to clear up the mess and we move a chair on top of the stained carpet. Out of sight, out of mind and all that. A new cup of steaming coffee is presented to me by Gracie, who backs away quickly while I take it out onto the balcony and look across the lights of Stratford.

  I take a sip and wince as the thick treacly liquid hits the back of my throat. Gracie must have stirred in half a dozen teaspoons of sugar but at least she cared enough to make me a drink. I give her a small wave through the open balcony door and she smiles back. Maybe I’ll give her a bit more leeway about moving out.

  Cars are streaming out of the Westfield centre and people are walking home from work. Things around me are normal but I feel weird after my huge crying jag. Everything seems to have slowed down, including my thinking, which is crystal clear now the panic attack has faded.

  Mum was eccentric, a one-off and – I admit properly to myself for the first time – often very unwell. She made some strange decisions and kept the truth from me but it wasn’t all her fault. Hopping about from flat to flat meant she never saw the same GP twice and didn’t get the help she needed. She rarely went to the doctors anyway because she didn’t trust them. That’s why she ignored the lump in her breast for so long.

  But now Mum’s gone and I know the truth. Where does that leave me?

  Chapter 29

  By the next morning, I’ve decided the best thing to do is talk things over with Toby. All I’ve had from Kayla recently is a text with a smiley face, saying she got back to Cornwall safely. And Maura is out of action, dealing with what she delicately referred to as Harry’s ‘runny tummy’, before launching into a detailed description of his nappy contents. Let’s just say that I won’t be eating curry for some time.

  Toby is a strange choice of confidante but he’s family, he knows the people involved and maybe he knows more about what happened thirty years ago than he’s letting on. I don’t need to tell him about Mum’s more bizarre behaviour.

  His office is empty when I poke my head round the door first thing. I haven’t been in here before and it’s pretty impressive; not overly large but light with a huge sash window and sunbeams flooding in across his sparkling, glass-topped desk.

  My desk is piled high with papers, pens and tissues. Toby’s desk is the least cluttered I’ve ever seen and a thing of beauty. All that’s on it is a chunky gold pen, a wireless mouse and a ginormous silver-backed computer screen. Above me, a gold ceiling fan is turning noiselessly, wafting the leaves of a glossy plant in a corner of the room. Everything is calm and peaceful.

  I want Toby’s feng-shui office. I want it with all my heart. If I was working in here I’d be more organised, more disciplined, more driven. Hell, I could rule the world from this gorgeous place. Checking no one is around, I sink into Toby’s high-backed leather chair and twirl round. Glass shelves behind me are packed with hardback books about fine art and there’s a small gilt plaque on one shelf with Toby Trebarwith picked out in black, like a proper VIP.

  Outside the window, everything looks cold and grubby and grey. But inside it’s an oasis of squeaky-clean calm.

  Swinging back round, I notice that Toby’s computer screen is switched on and there’s a beautiful picture on screen; a painting of a woman and her child standing in the wind with a steel-grey sea behind them. The woman has her hair up and is wearing a long dress, and the baby – I can’t tell if it’s a boy or girl – is in a flowing old-fashioned christening robe. In the left-hand corner, almost out of the painting, is an ancient church tower built of grey stone.

  The painting is so detailed it could almost be a photograph and it
seems familiar. The wild background, the rich colours, the luminosity of the woman’s face; they remind me of the painting in Alice’s sitting room, of the woman who looks like me with her oval face and high cheekbones.

  There’s a line of text underneath the painting: ’Cornish Christening. Painted by Ludo Van Teel in 1863. Sold at auction in Geneva, January 2016, for £75,000.’ Hang on a minute, I read that wrong. It was sold for £755,000. Over three-quarters of a million pounds. What the…?

  ‘What are you doing in here, young lady?’ Malcolm sweeps into the office carrying a pile of folders.

  ‘I’m waiting to speak to Toby,’ I stutter, trying not to sound guilty which is a sure-fire way of sounding like you’ve just murdered someone.

  ‘Are you now?’ Malcolm brushes past me to check what I’m looking at on the computer screen and I take a sniff. Nope, he doesn’t smell of eggy sandwiches. Malcolm doesn’t really smell of anything. Just clean.

  ‘I see you’re admiring Ludo Van Teel, a much overlooked artist who’s recently been discovered by collectors.’

  ‘I love this picture. Where was it painted?’

  ‘We don’t know for sure; somewhere in Cornwall.’ Malcolm puts his folders onto the desk, fastens a button on his straining pink shirt and moves too close to me. His face looks pinched and I’m sure he’s trying to hold his stomach in. ‘The artist is Dutch but spent two years in Cornwall in the mid 1800s, I believe. He loved the rugged coastline and mainly painted landscapes but he made money doing commissions for people, usually portraits. It’s a travesty his genius was never recognised during his lifetime.’

  He caresses the painting with his middle finger, leaving a greasy streak across the screen.

  ‘Are there lots of undiscovered paintings by him?’ I ask, an idea half-forming in my mind.