'Yes, please . . . Kel.'
As she rose, he guided her out of The Copper Kettle, again with a proprietary hand on her lower back. He grinned saucily at the waitresses as they left.
'Oh, what about the bill?' asked Carole when they reached the door. 'For the tea and coffee.'
Winking at her and then at the waitress who'd served them, Kelvin Southwest said, 'Oh, I have an arrangement here. I have an arrangement in a number of places in the area, actually. I do favours for a lot of people and they're happy to do favours for me . . . if you know what I mean. As I said, you scratch my back ..." Rather than finishing the phrase, he let out a fruity chuckle.
Carole recoiled inwardly. She hated to think what kind of favour Kelvin Southwest might think was his due in exchange for the favour he was doing her.
Chapter Seven
It was the kind of blazing June that got the residents of Fethering talking darkly of global warming. Mind you, every kind of climatic change got the residents of Fethering talking darkly about global warming. A thunderstorm, a heavy fall of snow, a sudden frost, even an unusually high wind, could start a lot of heads shaking in the Crown and Anchor or the local supermarket Allinstore. Like most of the English, the residents of Fethering had always used the weather as a conversational staple. But whereas the fisherman who once peopled the village would look gloomily up at the sky when they discussed it, the current inhabitants, who had just parked their 4x4s, would take on the same gloomy expressions and mention global warming. Not all of them actually believed in it, but they knew that in Fethering mentioning global warming was de rigueur.
The Thursday dawned even brighter than the previous days and Carole decided that she ought to go and investigate her new beach hut. The one to which Kelvin Southwest had given her the key had the name Fowey spelled out in whorls of rope on a board above its doorway. It was in every structural particular identical to Quiet Harbour, but Carole still felt she should check the place out. Her main aim was that, when she introduced Gaby and Lily to the delights of Smalting Beach, she should appear completely relaxed, au fait with the beach hut and its location. Almost an authentic hutter. She had already marked down The Copper Kettle as a good place to fill Lily up with ice creams and fizzy drinks. (She'd never allowed Stephen to have fizzy drinks when he was growing up, but her attitude to her granddaughter was more relaxed. After all, one of the essential clauses in the grandparents' charter was the right to spoil.)
There was also something new she wanted to introduce to Fowey. In common with Quiet Harbour, the hut only contained two chairs, also director's chairs, suggesting that perhaps they were equipment supplied by Fether District Council for the original renters. And it had so happened that, driving her Renault past a garden centre the previous day, Carole had seen on display a tiny child-size director's chair. Its wooden structure was painted pink and the seat and back were made of pink canvas.
The normal reaction of Carole Seddon to such an object would have been to snort while the phrase 'overpriced rubbish' formed in her mind, but the existence of Lily was having strange effects on her normal reactions. In the control of an irresistible power, she found herself parking her Renault outside the garden centre, going straight in and buying one of the small pink director's chairs. It was indeed overpriced, but Carole didn't let that worry her. She just knew that her granddaughter would love her own personal seat.
On a heady roll, she also found herself going to the Fethering Allinstore and buying a Big Beach Bucket Bag. Inside the red net sack was a big red bucket, which contained a smaller red bucket with crenellated indentations, a blue plastic spade and a selection of brightly coloured sand moulds in the shapes of a fish, a crab, a boat and a star.
Carole didn't want to risk the danger of Lily seeing these new purchases before they got to Smalting Beach, deciding that their maximum effect would be produced if her granddaughter found them when she entered the beach hut. So they needed to be planted there. Which was another reason for her to pay a visit to Fowey that Thursday morning. Also Gulliver could do with a change from Fethering Beach for his walk.
Just as Carole was about to leave, Jude appeared at the front door of High Tor. In deference to the weather, she only wore one chiffon scarf over her yellow T-shirt and denim skirt. Perched on her blond topknot was a battered straw hat.
'Hi, Carole,' she said. 'It's so hot I'm about to go down to the beach. I've knocked together a bit of a picnic. Do you and Gulliver fancy coming?'
'We were just about to go to the beach ourselves. But not Fethering Beach.'
'Oh?'
'Smalting. To check out my substitute beach hut.'
'And follow up on your investigation?' asked Jude teasingly.
'Who knows? Anyway, why don't you come with us?'
Fowey was not in the same row of beach huts as Quiet Harbour. It was in fact as far away as it could be. The three slightly curved rows of twelve units each were set in a bigger curve, forming a crescent shape, so that from their director's chairs outside Fowey Carole and Jude had a perfect view of the damaged hut.
It was, of course, locked shut, as were about half of the others. In front of the remainder, families spread themselves while small children made endless journeys up and down to the water. Like the nearby Fethering Beach, the one at Smalting sloped very gradually, so that at low tide a couple of hundred yards of sand were exposed. When the tide was high, it came up to the bank of shingle that protected the beach huts and the promenade.
Carole and Jude found themselves looking at a perfect English seaside scene, as featured on vintage railway posters; one that hadn't changed much for the previous fifty or sixty years, except for the ubiquitous mobiles and the white earphone leads of iPods. Another difference from the normal reality of English seaside scenes was that it wasn't raining.
Thinking back to her own childhood, Carole was also struck by the brightness of the swimwear on display. Her recollection was of a navy woollen bathing costume that clung embarrassingly to her developing figure, that tickled and felt clammy when it got wet. Watching the pubescent girls in tape-thin bikinis cavorting on Smalting Beach made her feel very old.
She wasn't made to feel younger by the behaviour of her neighbour. As soon as they'd got the director's chairs out and Carole had settled down to her crossword, Jude proceeded to remove her T-shirt and skirt. What was revealed was a turquoise two-piece costume, which did little to disguise its owner's generous proportions. Carole, who didn't carry a spare ounce of weight, still worried about her wobbly bits, but clearly Jude had no such inhibitions. And as ever, in spite of the volumes of flesh exposed, she managed to look good. A couple of passing boys in microscopic Speedos viewed her with considerable interest.
Jude caught Carole's eye and, as she so often could, seemed to intuit her friend's thoughts. 'If you've got it, flaunt it,' she shrugged. 'Haven't you brought a bathing costume with you?'
'No,' replied Carole in a manner that suggested she had been asked something much more offensive. That teenage awkwardness about her body had never quite left her, and now as a post-menopausal woman she felt far too old to start showing it off. She didn't even really like showing her legs without tights and her chosen beachwear for the day was a pair of grey slacks, a sleeveless white shirt, white socks and blue canvas shoes.
'You'll have to get hold of one before next week,' said Jude.
'What do you mean?'
'Lily's going to want her Granny to go into the sea with her, isn't she?'