Finding Love at Mermaid Terrace

by Kate Forster

  ‘Your photos are great,’ he said to her. ‘You could do this full-time, like for the bigger papers.’

  ‘Thanks, but I like painting. That’s what makes me happiest. This job just supports that. I mean I like it but it’s not my true love.’

  He went through the schedule with Tressa and looked at the upcoming events that he was supposed to cover.

  ‘We have the fishing boat naming ceremony next week. It will be something generic but they buy advertising from us in the summer for fresh crabs, so we need to cover it.’

  ‘Oooh,’ said Dan. ‘That will be fun now I know everything there is to know about the naming of sea vessels.’

  Tressa rolled her eyes at him but he ignored her. He liked learning new things and this was what he was here for, to learn – and also to sit back and find some peace in his head and heart.

  Dan jotted notes in the notebook Tressa handed him when he sat at George’s desk, with its old computer and keyboard with what looked like biscuit crumbs in the keys.

  The desk was messy but he had seen worse, including his own desk back at the paper in Dublin.

  Tressa worked fast, which he admired. She took him through the paper set-up. He would have to do his own copy-editing and subediting, which was perfect for him. He hated the stupid headlines his subs gave him in Ireland, always so sensationalistic and veering towards clickbait.

  Tressa paused when they were going through the schedule.

  ‘If you have any ideas, please feel free to bring them to the table. I mean I am sure you think this is a bit half-arsed but the paper matters to the people here,’ she said, almost defensively.

  Dan looked up in surprise. He would have expected her to be proprietary but she was anything but. She said she wanted his knowledge and experience and if he saw something he thought would be a good topic then he should write about it.

  Everything about Tressa was surprising, from her easy-going nature, to her commitment to Port Lowdy. Also, she’d included Richie in the lunch order and for that he was grateful. Richie was his only family and it mattered to him that people recognised that.

  ‘I’ll have a think,’ he said, watching the light on her curls. Some of them were a dark auburn and some black, all springing out of their own accord.

  She was prettier and younger than he’d expected but she wore no makeup except for red lipstick. She had a chic quality that only came from not dressing for anyone else but yourself. Dan had spent years dating women who were fixated on their looks and their style, but he doubted Tressa cared in that way. In her striped top and her jeans, she was casually elegant.

  ‘Are they your natural curls?’ he asked and realised he had said it aloud.

  She touched her hair. ‘Yes, all mine.’

  ‘Sorry, that was weird.’ He knew he had turned red.

  ‘At least you didn’t touch it. So many people come and just touch my hair like I’m a chia pet. That’s weird.’

  Dan laughed. ‘I promise not to touch.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  They went through the rest of the paper. Dan had pages of notes in his book and he felt excited to start.

  Maybe Tressa was right, maybe this would be the break he needed.

  ‘Can I see your art?’ he asked suddenly.

  Christ, what was wrong with him? It was like he had turned into a child, blurting out whatever came to mind.

  But Tressa didn’t look fazed.

  ‘Sure, but not today. Come for dinner with Richie. Tomorrow night?’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, meaning it. He was lonely, even more now he didn’t have his normal job to lose himself in.

  When they finished work, Tressa walked him back to the post office. The sun was getting lower and the sky was turning a lovely shade of pink.

  ‘I can see why you love it here,’ he said as they walked. ‘It’s like a made-up place. You said your cat was named after a Beatrix Potter animal, well, this village feels like a Beatrix Potter sort of a place.’

  Tressa looked around with him. ‘It still has pain and loss and tragedy; you just can’t see it when the sun is shining so brightly and the sea is sparkling.’

  Tressa’s bicycle was exactly where she had left it and she pulled it away from the wall and jumped on easily.

  ‘Goodbye to you, Dan Byrne, the angriest man in Ireland. I hope you will be the happiest man in Port Lowdy while you’re here.’

  She put her helmet on and then with a wave, she rode off towards the beach. He watched her until she disappeared into the distance, wishing she had stayed a little longer. She had a certain energy that made him feel calm, hopeful. It was a new feeling and possibly addictive. Don’t make a play for the only co-worker at the paper, he reminded himself. Workplace romances were rarely a good idea.

  Dan rang the bell for the post office and soon Penny had him upstairs, Richie was fed and Dan had a bowl of vegetable soup in front of him, which was perfect after such a heavy lunch.

  The heater was on and BBC news was playing.

  ‘This is lovely, Penny, really,’ he said – and it was.

  There were only a few times he had felt nurtured in his life. Once when he had a nice foster mother for a while who gave him tomato soup with toast soldiers and put a hot water bottle in his bed. And another time when he was in hospital when he was twelve and was having his appendix out. The nurse gave him extra ice cream and an extra blanket and she tucked him in the way he imagined a mother might.

  Penny chatted about her day, which seemed extraordinarily boring, but she was enthralled with everything that had happened.

  He remembered something one of his senior editors had said when he was working as a junior: ‘Everyone has a story.’ Dan listened to Penny and then he thought about the photo of her downstairs.

  ‘Penny,’ he asked, ‘would you let me interview you?’

  ‘About what? There has been a price rise on stamps but I don’t know I have much else to say about the state of the British mail service.’

  ‘No, about you, your life. I think it would be nice to do some stories on important people in Port Lowdy, and since you were once Miss Crab… I mean that’s important.’

  Penny took his empty bowl away. ‘Nobody cares about that now,’ she said.

  ‘I think you would be surprised. People love reading about other people. Especially people they know.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know…’ Her voice trailed away.

  But Dan was hearing interest in her tone. Gut instinct told him there was a story in the Miss Crab contest.

  ‘You just answer some questions and if there is a story, I will tell you, and if there isn’t then we can forget it. At the very least, I can get to know you.’

  Penny frowned at him. ‘I’m quite boring, you know.’

  ‘I doubt that. Everyone is interesting, they just don’t know it, and that’s what makes them unique.’

  Penny made them both tea and Dan fetched his notebook from his bedroom.

  They sat in front of the heater in the armchairs and Dan started with one question. ‘Tell me about being the one and only Miss Crab of Port Lowdy.’

  *

  It was the most thrilling moment of Penny’s life. When they put the crown of claws on her head in front of everyone from Port Lowdy and the local area, she could feel the pride of her family.

  All those girls who had said she wouldn’t win and all those boys who’d called her names at school were now clapping as she paraded in her bathing suit. She had the best legs in Port Lowdy; in fact, the photographer from London told her that she could be a model. That she looked like an American actress called Sissy Spacek, but more beautiful.

  After the ceremony, there was a celebration at the Black Swan and Penny drank far too many gin fizzes and danced with the photographer all night.

  She spent three days with him. Even though her strict father had told her she wasn’t allowed, she went anyway. Penny had never disobeyed her father before. But something in her made her lose all judgement o
r care. His name was Paul Murphy and he had come from Australia to London to be a fashion photographer. He was working for the local papers but soon he would be working for the fashion magazines like 19 and Teen. They had already asked to see his portfolio, he told her.

  He promised to return after a photoshoot in Manchester but he never came back and Penny was left with a growing pregnancy and a bad reputation. People laughed at her in the street, and the council decided that Port Lowdy’s Miss Crab competition would be no more because Penny had brought shame on the village, and on the Royal Mail service – or so her father told her. He didn’t let her out of the post office for seven months and when she went to St Ives to have the baby, her father told her the paperwork was ready for a couple who couldn’t have one of their own.

  But Penny fought them tooth and nail in the hospital and told the doctors she would go to every paper in the country and tell them they forced her to give the child up. She screamed when her parents came into the room with the social worker until they finally left her with the baby.

  When they returned home in silence, Penny’s mother whispered to her that she was glad she kept her but she couldn’t disagree with her husband; it wasn’t right.

  Penny said nothing to her mother but resolved to never be controlled by a man or give in to the opinions of others.

  Eventually she earned her father’s respect by raising little Tegan, as she called her. Tegan was a sunny child who turned Penny’s father into a doting grandfather until his sudden death from a heart attack when Tegan was twelve. Penny’s mother went not long after, a stroke – and then it was Penny running the post office and raising a teenager. She had no regrets. Port Lowdy had been good to her and Tegan was a single mother now to her own little girl, Primrose, or Primmy as they all called her, who loved Penny more than Penny loved herself. She was grateful for the two of them.

  But there were nights when she was so alone, she wondered if there was more to life than Port Lowdy. She felt like the oldest fifty-five-year-old in Cornwall. She was sure people thought she was over sixty, even closer to sixty-five, not that anyone really looked at her. She was just Penny Stanhope from the post office. Penny Stamp, the children used to call her at school. Lick a penny stamp, they used to say, and she would laugh along but she wanted to be more than the postmaster’s daughter. Instead she became postmistress, with a child and no husband.

  Sometimes she looked for Tegan’s father on the internet but there were so many Paul Murphys she didn’t know where to start, and besides, she didn’t know anything else about him. They hadn’t talked of themselves, only of their feelings, their hopes, and that he would be back. She had believed him. Tegan never asked much about him, assuming he was just another man taking advantage of a young girl.

  Stupid woman, Penny told herself more often than she should.

  Port Lowdy had been good to her, but it was easy to lose herself in the village and routine. There was a sense of complacency that was encouraged, living here, she tried to explain to Dan.

  People didn’t like change and perhaps that was okay to a point but Penny worried about the village. She worried about people who had stayed in their heads too long, like Tressa Buckland.

  But she worried about everyone, she told Dan. The people in the village who didn’t get mail, who were expecting it, who left feeling abandoned and lonely.

  The loneliness was exhausting for her some days. It ate away at you until you thought you had nothing of any value to give to anyone.

  And when she finished talking, it was after midnight. This was the latest she had stayed up since Tegan had been sick as a child.

  ‘I’m sorry, I talked too much,’ she said to Dan, stepping over Richie to turn off the heater.

  ‘You are an incredibly interesting and insightful person,’ said Dan, closing his notebook.

  ‘You just asked good questions,’ she said, and she handed Dan a key. ‘This is your house key. You can use the back stairs to let Richie in and out – and yourself, of course.’

  Dan took the key.

  ‘Thank you, Penny, for the room, the soup, the conversation, for your friendship.’

  Penny laughed and shook her head at him. ‘Oh, you are a charming Irishman, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, I mean it!’

  ‘I know you do – that’s what makes it so dangerous.’ And she laughed to herself all the way to bed.

  9

  The Black Swan kitchen was busy when Remi joined for his first shift.

  There was him, Marcel, and a dishwasher who Marcel called Melon, which Remi couldn’t understand because he didn’t look at all like a Melon.

  Melon didn’t seem to mind; he just stuck his headphones in his ears and washed the dishes in a rhythmic fashion along to the music. It was relaxing just watching him and the smells in the kitchen were soothing, without all that yelling from the prison dining hall or the guards screaming at him for a minor infraction.

  ‘You can start with the salads and then you can move on to thickening the sauce for the shanks,’ Marcel instructed. His tone was friendly, and Remi felt his body finally relax enough to ask a question.

  ‘A shank?’

  He wasn’t sure what this was. His English hadn’t really improved in prison. He had started to take courses but then the prison cut costs and the lessons stopped. He had talked to an American for a while who was in for a drugs charge, but he was soon sent back to America and Remi’s English was forgotten.

  ‘Souris d’agneau,’ said Marcel in French.

  ‘You’re from Provence?’ asked Remi, reverting to French without really noticing. The souris d’agneau was a classic French dish from Provence, where the sheep roamed the fields in the early spring and late autumn. In the summer months the lamb herds were transported to higher, cooler ground for grazing and the tender meat they yielded was exceptional.

  ‘Oui,’ answered Marcel. ‘Now – here is the cold room, where you can gather the ingredients for the salad.’

  Then he pointed to the board above the work bench and said in English, ‘Monkfish and mussel curry, with jasmine rice. Slow-roasted shanks and garlic mash. Spinach and feta pie with Greek salad. They’re the specials,’ said Marcel proudly.

  Remi nodded. His mind was trying to catch up.

  ‘You start with the salads. Greek and garden,’ said Marcel and Remi pushed open the cold room door and took out the ingredients for the salad.

  Chopping tomatoes and cucumber, he marvelled at the sharpness of the knife. The knives in prison were as dull as some of the inmates and guards. It took so much longer to slice anything. But he had watched videos in the training courses the prison service offered, and learned how to use a knife properly. He had tried his technique while in the prison kitchen but now finally he felt the knife do what it was supposed to do.

  He was able to sweep through the chopping easily and with flair. After tearing apart the lettuce for the garden salad, he moved on to making large bottles of dressing for the garden salad.

  Then he turned to Marcel. ‘I am done.’

  Marcel looked up from the stove and glanced at Remi’s work.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Come thicken the sauce for the shanks.’

  Marcel showed him what he needed and Remi worked quickly, having been accustomed to the pace of the prison kitchen where hundreds of men needed to be fed.

  He met every task with a positive attitude and did his best, which was what he was taught growing up in his grandmother’s kitchen in Seine-Saint-Denis.

  Marcel was a reasonable boss; he laughed too hard at his own jokes but he was generous with the serves to the tables and went to meet the guests throughout the meal.

  He was exactly as Remi was told he would be when he left prison. The man from the charity had said, ‘There is a chef named Marcel Foulard, who wants to help someone like you. He will train you, and he will help you with a new job after you have finished with him.’

  Remi hadn’t asked why Marcel wanted to help him. But th
e five-dotted tattoo, like that of the number five on a dice, placed between his index finger and thumb, told its own story.

  Some prisoners had it. The meaning was un homme entre quatre murs. A man between four walls of the prison cell. Marcel was thirty years older than Remi, and only the older prisoners seemed to have them nowadays – but Remi knew it was usually reserved for those who had done long sentences.

  But thanks to the unwritten rule, he wouldn’t ask about Marcel’s time in prison and Marcel wouldn’t ask about his. Though come to think of it, he very likely already knew all the details, from the charity that had set up the placement.

  After the dinner service was finished, Pamela came and divided up the tips and split them between Melon, Remi, and the three wait staff.

  ‘Well earned,’ she said loudly, ‘nothing but compliments all round tonight.’ Then she leaned in to Remi and whispered in his ear. ‘The sauce for the souris d’agneau was highly commended but don’t tell Marcel. He’ll be jealous.’

  Remi smiled at Pamela who gave him a wink. Her false eyelashes tinged in glitter sparkled in the light.

  He stood holding the money in his hand, wondering where he should hide it in his room.

  One by one the wait staff left, and then Melon; now it was just Remi and Marcel and Pamela.

  ‘Cognac?’ Marcel asked, and Remi nodded.

  How long since he had had a cognac? Probably seven years, eight months, and two weeks… give or take a day.

  He didn’t like to think about that last night at the bar when the life he had known had suddenly ended. As the thought of it approached he pushed that night from his head and followed Marcel into the restaurant. They sat at one of the big square tables, and Pamela brought them two glasses and a bottle of brandy.

  ‘You did okay,’ said Marcel, pouring the liquid generously into the glasses and then lifted his to Remi.

  ‘Santé.’

  ‘Santé,’ replied Remi and he took a small sip.

  The flavours filled his nose and mouth: vanilla, cherry, coffee, almond, rose, fig, orange zest. He closed his eyes for a moment and savoured the liquid in his mouth.