CHAPTER 3

Unauthorised Coasters

 

Cass woke to the smell of croissants and the unfamiliar rumble of somebody else’s central heating. Graham and June’s, she thought as she pulled her thoughts together. It was Wednesday, no, Thursday morning, she was in Graham and June’s spare room and today she had to begin to sort out the chaos that yesterday’s cliff fall had caused. She would have to ring the bishop, for a start. But first, before she could ring the bishop, she had to work out where her underwear was.

June was very kind and had carefully put all the clothes that had been rescued into the drawers and cupboards of her spare room. “Of course, Vicar, you can stay as long as you need to!” she had said last night, and organised everything as if Cass was going to be there for weeks or even months. Her clothes were folded neatly in a white laminate chest-of-drawers, her ornaments ordered in nice rows along the lacy mat on top of the dressing table, books methodically stacked under the pink-frilled single bed. Clean, tidy, organised – stifling. Cass was not a naturally neat person herself and it felt alien seeing all her things so regimented – as if they were no longer her own and she was forbidden to touch anything.

Cass opened June’s pink curtains and peered out between them at the dull morning outside. The storms of yesterday had died away and it felt like autumn had taken its last gasp before giving way to winter; the winds had stripped the last of the leaves from the few trees on the clifftop, bent over with the force of the prevailing wind. Graham and June’s house was a neat villa in New Rawscar, the Victorian settlement at the top of the hill, and from there Cass could look down the steep bank to Old Rawscar and the bay beyond. From up here the red-tiled roofs of the old village looked like some strange, crazy patchwork, one roof overlapping the next. The paths that weaved between the cottages were so narrow it was impossible to see them from this distance, only Quay Street running parallel to the beck could be seen, like a grey ribbon winding its way amidst the roofs that tumbled down the hill to the harbour. She sighed. Time to get on with the day and the bishop.

Just then a figure climbing the hill caught her attention; a slight, slender woman in mourning-black velvet with flowing red hair who could almost have stepped out of another century, toiling her way up the hill towards the village car park.  It was the young woman from Widow’s Row, the one who had saved Twiggy with Hal yesterday. What was she called again? For a vicar, Cass really did have an appalling memory for names. It was an old-fashioned name … Eliza? Agnes? Anne? – No, not Anne, Annie, that was it! She should thank her for her help yesterday.

She tried to open the window to call out to her but June had firmly locked out the sea air and the handle wouldn’t budge.  Snatching up a blanket to wrap round herself, Cass ran down the stairs and flung open the front door. Barefoot, she took a couple of steps down the path towards the main road where she could see Annie walking past the end of the little side street where June and Graham lived. The ground was bitingly cold, she couldn’t get any further without shoes or slippers, her feet already ached with the frost.

‘Annie! Annie!’ she called out to the young woman, who walked on, seemingly oblivious to her surroundings, not really looking at the road ahead – or at the vicar shouting out to her from the side-street. ‘Please stop, I just want to talk to you!’

The slight, black-clad woman turned her head towards Cass briefly, then turned away again as if she hadn’t seen her, or as if she was looking right through her; as if she was nothing, nobody; invisible. Cass shivered, and not just with the frosty morning; there was something off-putting in the blank way the young woman had looked at her.  Then she was gone out of sight, into the entrance of the car park, and Cass was left standing on June and Graham’s garden path in her pink spotty pyjamas feeling foolish and frozen.

‘Morning, Vicar …’ said Graham’s voice behind her. ‘Can I get you a cup of coffee and a croissant? June’s gone out to work already, but I said I’d stop in until you were up. Lots of repairs to be done today; the storm yesterday damaged more than one of the cottages.’ He almost sounded gleeful; Graham was a man who liked to keep busy.

‘Oh, Graham, good morning!’ Cass didn’t know quite which note to strike. The vicar-church warden relationship wasn’t quite the same when your church warden caught you in bare feet and spotty pyjamas on his garden path. ‘Yes, coffee would be lovely, thank you.’

She hobbled back into the house, feet numb with the cold, mentally adding “slippers” to the ever-increasing list of things that had been lost to the sea.

‘I was trying to catch Annie, she walked past the end of the road,’ Cass explained as she followed Graham in the living room, wrapping her blanket more tightly round her.

‘Annie?’

‘You know, the Goth from Widow’s Row? The one who helped save Twiggy. I wanted to say thank you.’

‘That’s Anna. She’s a bit of a strange one, mind you.’

‘Anna. Of course. Well, that explains the odd look she gave me just then, she probably didn’t like me getting her name wrong.’

‘Well, she has problems of her own …’ Graham began, but he cut himself short. ‘No, no! You mustn’t put your coffee down there!’

There was a sudden urgency to his voice and Cass snatched her mug of coffee back up. She had put it down on a white china coaster with pink roses on it.  ‘June won’t like it; it’s the wrong coaster, that one. White coasters are for best – just use these brown ones for every day. June’s a bit particular, mind.’

That was one word for it, Cass thought, but said nothing. She was beginning to understand why Graham spent so much time “fixing things” at the two churches – the shabby work clothes in which Cass usually saw him were kept firmly in the utility room with his tools, and the “indoor Graham” before her now wore tweedy slippers and a “nice cardigan” which June had knitted for him. June was aggressively small and neat, and so was her house.

‘I don’t know Anna very well,’ said Cass as she took a sip of coffee. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in church.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t,’ Graham said. ‘Never was much of a one for church, even when she was a little girl.’

‘Oh, so she’s a local? I always thought she was an incomer like me.’

‘She likes to keep herself to herself does Anna. Cut herself off from her family; there’s only that brother over in Canada who still talks to her – and he’s never here. He was back for the funeral, maybe you met him then, but that’s the only time I’ve seen him since he emigrated five year ago.’

Graham was talking as if he expected Cass to know who he was referring to.

‘Whose funeral?’

‘Their mam’s of course – Rosamund Dawnay.’

‘Rosamund Dawnay was Anna’s mum?’

Rosamund Dawnay, pillar of village life, upright, grey and disapproving in her wheelchair had died not long after Cass arrived in Rawscar in April and if Rosamund Dawnay had been Anna’s mother, that meant -

‘So, Anna is Charles Dawnay’s daughter?’ Cass said, putting her mug down very carefully on the correct brown coaster. Charles Dawnay was the second of her church wardens and he had never, in all the time she had been there, mentioned a daughter to her once. Cass knew all about his son Gregor, a Chartered Accountant who had emigrated to Canada, but he had told her nothing about the daughter who lived down the road.

‘That’s right. Didn’t you know?’

Cass shook her head as she drank some more coffee. There was so much about this close, closed little village that she didn’t know; that nobody ever told her.

‘I only wanted to thank her, but she just looked right past me as if I wasn’t there.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t take it personally. Like I say, she’s a bit odd – born into trouble, her mam always used to say.’

Cass noticed with amusement how Graham, usually deft and clever with his hands when he was working, suddenly in his own home looked clumsy as he placed his drink down on the coffee-table next to him with exaggerated care.

‘I ought to go and thank her, take her some flowers or something. Do you know where she’s staying? Is she at the Old Vicarage with Charles?’

Graham looked at her strangely.

‘Not likely. She’s at Maidensbower Cottage, down in Old Rawscar, Hal Thorburn told me. She’ll be at work now, though, you might want to wait until she gets in tonight.’

‘Yes, you’re right. I’ll go and see her tonight.’

 

On the way to the parish office Cass went to the little village shop in New Rawscar, where June worked, to get a bunch of flowers to take for Anna. There were just three sad bunches in a cracked brown plastic bucket outside the door of the shop; roses that were past their best, dyed carnations and boring white chrysanthemums. It would have to be the chrysanthemums, she supposed, staring at them in the hope that they would magically turn into something more inspiring.

‘Is everything all right, Vicar?’ June asked, sticking her head out of the shop door, her grey bobbed hair immaculate as ever and with full make up on.

‘I was looking for flowers for Anna. Are these the only ones you have?’

June came out and stood beside her; the shop wasn’t busy at this time of day.

‘They are I’m afraid. But look, I’ll let you have these white roses for a pound; they’re well past their best. Then if you take out the dying ones, you’ve got three good ones, look …’ she worked as she spoke, deconstructing the faded rose bouquet. ‘… then you take the greenery and that sprig of gypsophila from the carnations, here, like this …’ she unwrapped the plastic and took out the foliage that Cass hadn’t even noticed in the unnatural bunch of screaming pink carnations, ‘… then add in some of the chrysanthemums, and here, some ivy …’

June bustled off to get a pair of scissors from behind the till and started cutting sprigs of ivy from the old wall beside the shop, which she proceeded to add in to her improvised bouquet.

‘Then I can tie it up with the ribbon from the carnations, and there you are! Bob’s your uncle!’ She held it out to Cass who took it carefully from her.

It looked stunning.

‘June that’s amazing! Thank you!’

‘I used to work in a florist’s when we lived in Saddleton. Still miss it sometimes,’ June said as she rang the bunches of flowers through the till.

‘Oh, I assumed you’d always lived here!’

‘No, I’m from Saddleton. Graham and I used to live there when we were first married, near my Mum. Sometimes I think it would be nice to go back to Saddleton, get a nice little bungalow maybe, but I know I’d never get Graham to leave the village now.’

Cass could imagine June in a neat little suburban bungalow with manicured lawns and flower beds into which no weed would dare to stray, but she couldn’t imagine Graham there. She picked up the flowers, thanked June and steeled herself. There was nothing else for it, it was time to go to her office and phone the bishop.