Pip could read her mother’s code as clearly as if it were written in the Queen’s English. Too posh for Jez. But not as posh as me, Pip wanted to say. Not as posh as Rose Appleby, at least. Her mother wouldn’t understand, though, and anyway, what was the point? What did it matter how you behaved or spoke or dressed? There were so many more important things to life, not least being alive.
‘I gather she’s got a good job,’ Pip continued.
‘Yes. She’s the manager of that big hotel on the front. I forget the name.’
She hadn’t forgotten the name, Pip thought. Her mother really didn’t like Jez’s fiancée.
There was a pause in which Pip knew her mother was girding her loins to ask a difficult question. She braced herself.
‘And did you manage to talk to Jez?’
She pressed the word ‘talk’ so that her meaning would be crystal clear without her having to spell it out. She had Pip’s best interests at heart and just wanted her to recover, Pip knew, so she curbed her irritation.
‘A bit,’ she replied, and could almost feel her mother’s relief pass between them like a current.
‘That’s good,’ said her mother, and Pip was relieved that she seemed content to leave it at that.
After dinner, Pip excused herself as usual and retreated to her room and the diary for her nightly foray into Evelyn’s life. She settled herself on her bed and opened up where she had left off the night before.
Tuesday 16th August
Such a perfect day today. I took Scarlet crabbing off the end of the pier. We dug Peter’s old line out of the garage and I stole a couple of rashers of bacon from the fridge as bait. High tide was madly early – no problem for us, of course – so it wasn’t too busy, and we got a great spot. S wasn’t very patient about the waiting part, and I kept telling her it might take a while, but then, lo and behold, we struck gold within ten minutes! He was a whopper, too, and we managed to get him all the way up and into our bucket without dropping him. Scarlet was so excited （and a little bit scared）， but I showed her how to hold him so he didn’t pinch her, and she gave him a bit of a stroke on his shell. Then we put him back and went to get hot chocolate and a bun in the café. S didn’t finish hers – I think she might be coming down with something – but I polished it off for her. Then we built her favourite sandcastle – the one with a moat and bridge – and wandered back home for her nap just as the beach was filling up. It was perfect.
Pip had only vague memories of going crabbing herself. Her parents had always been too busy to take time away from the farm for activities like that, and by the time she was old enough to go alone she was too caught up with her studies to be interested. It did sound like the perfect day for Evelyn and Scarlet, though. She could picture them, Evelyn dressed like someone from Dexys Midnight Runners, her hair held out of her eyes with a polka-dot scarf and Scarlet in a little sundress, walking hand in hand along the beach with their bucket and line. It was such a happy, carefree image that it made Pip smile.
She flicked over the page, eager for the next day’s entry, but it was blank. That was unusual. Some days Evelyn didn’t manage to fill the entire space, but she always wrote something. Pip turned the pages over, and over again. Nothing. There was no entry for ten days. Perhaps they had gone on holiday, but surely Evelyn would have taken the diary with her, and there had been no build-up to a holiday in the diary entries.
Finally, on Tuesday 30th August the entries started up again, although the words seemed to have been formed with no care, as if Evelyn had been writing with the wrong hand or been half asleep when she wrote them.
We buried her today. Ted came. I couldn’t have got through the day without him. Peter was there, too, with his wife. Joan was not. She said she had a cold, but I know it was just an excuse. I was glad she didn’t go. I’m too angry with her just now. I wouldn’t have been able to hold it in.
I don’t know what to do without her. I don’t know how I’ll live without her. My life is over. I have nothing left.
Pip reread the words and then reread them again and again. What was it that Evelyn was saying? Was there another way of interpreting her entry other than the most obvious? But really, Pip knew.
Scarlet. Lovely little Scarlet, not yet at school. Scarlet, the light in Evelyn’s life, the centre of her universe. Scarlet was gone.
Tears pricked at Pip’s eyes and then, before she could control them, came streaming down her face. Poor Evelyn. Pip knew that to lose a child was the worst that could ever happen to a parent, causing the most unbearable, unhealable pain. She knew because she had been haunted night and day by how much it must hurt.