Lulu walked back to her car and started to bring in the remains of the packed boot and back seat. A couple of suitcases with clothes and toiletries, her many boxes and bags of shoes, a box with a kettle, teapot, and bits and bobs for the kitchen, an air bed and linen, and Mabel’s bed and paraphernalia. Once it was all in it looked tiny and quite pathetic in the huge hallway. All she had to show for the best years of her life.
As she opened the door to the study and what would be her new bedroom for at least a little while, everything, at least, looked brighter. She stood back as far as she could so that she could evaluate the whole room. The yellowed paint on the bookshelves was still not pleasant but it was now, at least, clean. The extra-wide timber floorboards were far from shiny, but they were dust-free and good enough. What was most impressive was the window. Who would have ever thought that she would be vacuuming a window? But the gathering of spider’s webs, dead flies, thick piles of dust on the panes, and grime in the architrave had needed more than a quick wipe. But the work had been worth it. Light now flooded through the window, surprisingly, the grapefruit spray cleaner had not done a bad job, and fresh sea air worked to banish the stale depressed murkiness in the room.
‘Right, Mabel. Let’s make our way to the garage and see what Aunty Wills has done in there,’ Lulu said as she put the air bed down and placed a little white lamp onto one of the shelves.
Brushing off her clothes, Lulu walked out the front door, down the path, checked that her car was locked, and looked at the double garage on the left of the property. Huge old timber doors with a narrow strip of windows at the top and an old-fashioned lock opened onto what once was a driveway. As she walked along the pavement, she could see an indentation in the weeds where a van must have reversed onto the drive.
Picking her way through the weeds, Lulu pulled the keys out of her pocket, guessed the one for the garage door, put it in, and turned the lock. It clicked and she heaved the door back and looked in.
In contrast to the rest of the house, the garage was clean and organised. Willow had not only had a lot of bits delivered, she'd obviously had the whole place blasted too.
Lulu smiled and shook her head. Neatly piled up against the walls were boxes of things Lulu hadn’t even thought about. A jet washer with all the extra attachments, a steam mop, and a window vacuum. A coffee machine, multi-cooker and microwave and, tucked in the corner humming away to itself, a plugged in and working brand new side-by-side fridge.
Lulu took a deep breath in and closed her eyes. Suddenly everything felt too much. All of it came crashing down by her ears. Willow’s kindness and thoughtfulness had floored her and she felt hot tears prick the very back of her eyes.
Tucked on top of a tub full of cleaning materials that looked a whole lot more suited to the job than the fancy sprays Lulu had bought was a huge pair of pink elbow-length rubber gloves with leopard print fur attached to the elbows. Lulu laughed at the gloves. Such a Willow joke.
Lulu shook her head and realised how much she loved Willow. Willow would have seen these and thought it was hilarious that Lulu who coordinated every accessory she ever possibly could, would be taking on the renovation and cleaning of the huge house on her own without the right accessories.
I will not cry. I will not cry. I can do this.
As Lulu opened her eyes, they fell onto the other side of the garage, a lawnmower, strimmer, and leaf blower both set up and ready to use and right over on the right, a bike. A beautiful electric cruiser bike with a basket on the front and a little envelope taped to the side.
Lulu walked over to the bike, pulled the envelope from the bike frame, slumped down on a cardboard box, and read the card inside.
Welcome back to Pretty Beach. I’m so sorry I’m not there for it!
I know you said you don’t want any help with anything. Really! As if I was ever going to do that.
You were always going to need a bike in Pretty Beach if you really want to be a local again - just like when we were little. This one has a little help. When I’m back we’re going to ride around Pretty Beach with the wind in our hair. Mum will be looking down on us and smiling.
Love you lots.
Wills x
Lulu smiled at the note and wiped a tear from her eye. Thank goodness she had Willow in her corner.
As she moved the gorgeous bike away from the wall and tried it out for size, Lulu blinked and nodded and felt ever-so-slightly calmer than she had since she had pulled up at Seafolly House all those hours ago.
Everything in Pretty Beach was going to be better, more relaxed, different. She was going to be different.
The new Lulu was going to embrace the Pretty Beach lifestyle with gusto. All she had to do was get rid of a large amount of dust and mould.
4
Lulu pulled her laptop out of her bag and balanced it on top of the air bed. She pressed the tab for her website Lovely Little Things, checked that the ‘away’ notification was still intact at the top, and worked her way through the pages and stock levels. Everything was exactly as she’d left it, except for one message from a regular customer who was desperate for another one of her rose quartz candles, and a note from a woman in Notting Hill who wanted to know if she could have some monogrammed leather planners for a fiftieth birthday dinner as gifts for the table.
Lulu replied to both the comments, sat back with her back against the wall, and stared out of the window. Time to get back to the real world. Time to get Lovely Little Things back online. The whole thing had been on hold since she’d packed everything up from the little storage unit she used and had everything transported to the house in Pretty Beach. Now it was time to open it back up, sort it out, and start making an income again.
Leaning forward to grab her coffee from the side, Mabel jumped up on the bed and snuggled up beside her, and Lulu found herself clicking on the Facebook tab and scrolling to her ex-husband’s profile.
Suddenly she was right back there in Fenton’s world. Fenton sitting in the sunshine in designer glasses looking at the camera with a huge smile. Fenton tagged in a post from his new partner with ‘look at my lovely man.’ Fenton in a five-star hotel toasting with a flute of champagne. The very same five-star hotel he’d taken her to for their wedding anniversary.
She didn’t know whether to laugh at his brazenness or cry. Curl herself up in a tight ball and cry for England, or any other country for that matter. She knew she should have stopped herself from Facebook stalking but she couldn’t help herself. As she continued scrolling through, looking at Fenton and his new partner’s seemingly fabulous shiny life, she almost wanted to gag. Was that a little bit of sick coming up at the back of her throat?
How could she have been so wrong about someone? And for so long! He didn’t even have the decency to keep off social media. Not rub it in her face that he was happily shacked up with a new woman and living the life without a care in the world. Not a care that he’d left her with nothing.
It was like he had taken the lid off a catering pack of table salt, stood above her grinning maniacally, and poured it liberally all over her very raw wounds.
Rather than cutting her losses and closing the tab, she started looking through the comments and gaped at some of who she thought were her friends congratulating him on this, that, and the other. None of them knew what had really happened. No one had the slightest idea about the debts, the deceit. The intricately laid out web of lies he’d suffocated her in.
Taking another sip of her coffee, Lulu smiled as Mabel took in a deep breath and let out a sigh as if reading Lulu’s thoughts.
‘You nailed it, Mabel. What an absolute idiot I am. I was. And what am I even thinking of looking through his social media posts? Trying to make myself feel even worse? Because that’s exactly what is happening! This has made me feel like a screwed up old dishcloth left to get old and mouldy on its own.’
Mabel let out a tiny little bark and put her head back down as if resigned to the fact that Lulu had done a stupid thing.
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Lulu shook her head and slowly closed the laptop, wriggled off the airbed and put the laptop on top of her suitcase. Trying to put Fenton (whose real name was actually Darren, not a lot of people knew that either) out of her mind, she clasped her hands in front of her and tried to think positive thoughts, trying to be grateful.
‘Yes, Mabel. I need to get myself together, get the Lovely Little Things website back up and running, get this house sorted, and think about number one.’
Who are we? We are confident, capable, independent women who can do it on our own.
After a long walk by the sea that had done nothing in the slightest to improve her mood, and dropping Mabel back off at Seafolly House, Lulu closed the door behind her, put her basket over her shoulder, and made her way through the streets to the laneway. There was one thing that would help a melancholy divorcee who had just gone down a rabbit hole of ex-husband stalking; Pretty Beach cinnamon buns and coffee.
As she strolled along Seafolly Passage, Lulu almost felt worse. The houses were so beautifully kept with their fancy cars and gleaming windows. And then there was her house down the end. Like the blot on the landscape.
Time, Lulu, and you certainly have a whole lot of that ahead of you. A whole life of being alone in a huge dusty old partially-falling-down house.
Turning the corner into the laneway, Lulu couldn’t help but smile and her mood lifted up the tiniest of notches. The bunting flapped in the breeze coming up from the sea, a bus driver was standing with a lunchbox under her arm talking to a pretty heavily pregnant woman, and a man beside her who appeared, by the looks of his uniform, to be a pilot. And as if he hadn't changed at all from the last time she’d seen him, Suntanned Pete strolled towards the bakery in wraparound sunglasses and shorts. Some things in Pretty Beach stayed the same. Pete’s tan was one of them.
Lulu patted her hair and adjusted the silk scarf at her neck and pushed open the door to Holly’s bakery and there it was. That old familiar smell. Freshly baked bread, coffee, cakes, and cinnamon buns. It hit her squarely between the eyes and she almost had to grab onto the drinks fridge to steady herself. All sorts of memories came flooding back. Running into Holly’s after school with Willow, stocking up on sliced loaves for her mum to put in the freezer, getting her mum a Locals Only vanilla bun when they’d found out that their dad had decided to live with someone a few years older than his daughters in Pettacombe Bay. It was all right there in front of her as she was enveloped in the scent that could only be Pretty Beach Bakery.
Lulu took off her huge sunglasses, tucked them in the top of her silk t-shirt and observed the comings and goings of the shop. The familiarity soothed her jagged nerves; the sight of Pete’s long deeply tanned legs in flip flops, his banter with Holly, and the passing over of a white paper bag with no comment.
As she got to the counter, Holly the bakery owner looked up and squealed. ‘Ooh! Look who’s here! Lulu Drinkwater is back. Hooray! Oh, we’ve been so excited,’ Holly yelled and called over her shoulder in Vietnamese. Holly’s mum Xian shuffled out from the back of the bakery and beamed.
‘Lulu! Willow said you were coming back. Welcome home. Thank goodness you’re here! We all need that eyesore of a house sorted out. It’s bringing the area down,’ Xian stated.
‘Mum!’ Holly admonished. ‘How are you getting on, Lulu?’ Holly asked.
‘Good as I can be. It’s not been a fun ride this year,’ Lulu said with her eyebrows raised.
‘Yes. I’ve heard what you’ve been through. What a devil. Never mind. You’re well rid of that toad. You’re back here with us now. Everything will be okay,’ Holly replied sincerely.
Lulu smiled. ‘Thanks, Holly. You’re too kind.’
‘Coffee?’ Holly asked.
‘Yes, please, and you know…’
Holly nodded, Xian went out to the back, and as Holly made Lulu’s coffee Xian passed a white paper bag over the counter.
Just as Lulu picked up the bag of buns, as she leant forward her sunglasses fell off from her t-shirt, slid across the bakery floor, and ended up back near the front door at the fridge. Lulu turned around, looked down the queue of people, and spied the sunglasses wedged under the fridge.
‘Excuse me! Sorry,’ Lulu said as she passed the line of customers and walked towards the front of the shop. As she got near to her sunglasses, a man was just taking a can of drink out of the fridge and closing the door behind him. He saw the sunglasses on the floor, bent down, and picked them up. As he turned around, Lulu held out her hand.
‘Sorry, they just fell off as I was getting my buns.’ Lulu smiled.
‘Not a problem,’ the man replied as Lulu looked up and she didn’t know if she was imagining it or not but he’d almost seemed to do a double-take.
As she gazed at the man, her heart felt as if it had stopped. The world had stopped. Everything stopped as the man with the most gorgeous honey-coloured tanned skin and green eyes smiled, handed her the sunglasses, and stepped forward back to his place in the queue.
As he stood there with a twinkle in his eye he continued, ‘You need to be careful who you go around throwing your sunglasses at in this little town.’
Lulu gazed back at him, for a second unable to speak and then shaking her head she continued in the same jovial tone, ‘Yes, I do. You never know what damage a pair of sunglasses can do.’
‘Nope,’ he replied and as Lulu walked past, smiled and made to leave, she widened her eyes.
I wouldn't mind doing some damage with you Mr Honey Skin.
5
The next day, Lulu woke up on the air bed next to Mabel snoring softly in her little bed on the floor. Apart from the sound of Mabel, it was ridiculously quiet. Even though she’d lived in a nice leafy suburb of London, it was nothing like waking up to the faint sound of the ocean in the distance. It was a welcome sound of nothing that washed over her and made her feel, oddly, as if she had come home.
As Lulu turned over and pulled the quilt over her shoulder, the Lovely Little Things throw she’d tacked up at the window moved softly in the breeze. Resting her head on her arm and looking around the room, she went through her plan of attack for the day. The first thing would be to plan a few meals and go shopping to fill the fridge, ascertain what and how she was going to start work in the house, and finally, if she had time, she would go out on the new bike Willow had left in the garage. A bike ride solved all sorts of life’s conundrums.
The night before, she’d again walked around the house slowly taking it all in, wondering where to start first and how long it would all take before it would look, feel, and be anything like a home. After adding task after task to a note on her phone, she’d gone through the side door to the garage from the inner back hall, found a box of wine glasses from Willow, opened the fridge, said a silent thank you to her sister, and had taken a bottle of cold white wine into the kitchen.
With Mabel trotting happily along beside her, she’d taken the wine down to the end of the garden and found an antique sun lounger with a broken leg under a tree. She’d dragged the sun lounger down as near to the beach as she could, put her one and only pillow on the back, covered herself in a throw, poured wine to the very top of the glass, and gazed out at the sea as the sun went down.
With Mabel cuddled up beside her they’d sat there for ages, thinking about the last few months, wondering how it was going to go with Seafolly House, and feeling nervous about her new job at the hotel in the Old Town.
Now, as she lay on the air bed the next morning thinking about venturing into the kitchen and putting on the kettle to make a cup of tea, everything seemed a little bit brighter. Lulu leaned down and smiled at Mabel, swung her legs over the side of the bed, put her feet into her soft white slippers, and opened the study door.
Walking across the wide hallway in her pyjamas, the house didn’t seem to smell quite as bad as it had the day before. Nor did it look as bad. Or was she imagining it? Had she already become used to living in a nearly derelict house? She laughed to
herself and shook her head as she walked down the inner hallway, past the tiny second set of stairs, and into the kitchen. Well, one thing was for sure, the kitchen didn’t look better on a new day. The kitchen most definitely looked worse. It looked and smelled hideous.
Goodness. How am I ever going to live in this place? Lulu thought as she flicked the switch on the smart kettle she’d removed from the box and rinsed out the night before.
‘A cup of tea will make everything better,’ she said, trying to convince herself that it was true.
Ten minutes later, she was standing on the back terrace with a cup of tea and a warmed croissant - another of Willow’s well thought out welcome gifts.
Lulu’s eyes wandered around the garden. She could see the remnants of what looked like a herb garden way down on the right, an old storage shed alongside it, an outside shower protruded from the brick wall on the left, and down at the end the boathouse looked as if it was dangerous to enter.
Brambles and reeds swayed in the wind as she sipped on her tea, and she nodded and thought to herself that it could have been worse. She’d inherited a huge house right on the coast, in the part of the world she’d grown up in. Yes, it might not be quite habitable to your average Joe, but she’d get there and it was brimming with potential.
Mabel barked as a bird flew down from a cherry tree and Lulu tried to remind herself that there were a lot of people who had just walked away from ten years of marriage and a nasty divorce who would give their right arm to be anywhere near the position she had found herself in. Spider webs, years of neglect, wasps’ nests, weeds or not.
Lovely Little Things in Pretty Beach : A magical feel-good romance book to escape with in summer 2021. Page 3