The Hourglass

by Tracy Rees

Genres: Family Life; Holiday books; Romance; Clean & Wholesome Romance; Contemporary Romance; 20th Century Romance; Time Travel Romance

Synopsis

2014: Troubled by anxiety and nightmares, Nora finds herself drawn to the sweeping beaches of Tenby, a place she's only been once before. Together with a local girl, she rents a beautiful townhouse and slowly begins to settle in to her new life. 1950: Teenager Chloe visits Tenby every summer. Every year is the same, until she meets a glamorous older boy. But on the night of their first date, Chloe comes to a realisation, the aftermath of which could haunt her forever.

Release date: May 4, 2017

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 544

Sample

Prologue

Sometimes, you have to ask for what you want.

The old woman rose from her bed in the deepest watches of the night. She’d always liked that phrase – the watches of the night – suggestive as it was of vigil. It made her feel as though someone, somewhere, was witnessing the passing hours and minutes of her life, and cared. She struggled into her robe. It was yellow and fluffy, making her feel like a newly hatched chick, when actually she was at quite the opposite end of life’s arc. Never mind slippers. She couldn’t sleep and the time had come.

She flipped her hair out from her collar and pulled it over her left shoulder, a gesture that had been with her many years. She drew a deep breath, pressing her hands to her cheeks. They were soft as tissues, their plump resilience long gone. All the more reason, then, to make her demand. She didn’t like the idea of demanding, but then a request was too soft, and this was important. Utterly unaccustomed to asking for anything for herself, she wasn’t sure how it would feel, how it would be received. But she had decided. She’d lain awake too many nights now. Well then.

She moved through indigo shadows to the window and drew back the curtains on a glittering sky. Despite her trepidation, she smiled. The stars were scattered across the blackness like breadcrumbs; it filled her soul to see them. Fields stretched in every direction, dark and empty. At least, they looked empty but she knew that out there foxes moved, owls hunted, mice crept.

She knelt down – that hurt – and rested her forearms on the windowsill, hands clasped together. The silence was indigo too.

‘Dear God,’ she began, but her voice was soft, tentative, her usual voice.

‘Dear God,’ she said again in the voice she saved only for very rare occasions. She had used it long ago when the teacher wrongly accused one of the children of mischief. She had used it when the boys reached their troublesome teens and needed to be told ‘no’, in no uncertain terms. She used it for speaking to the doctor.

‘I thank you as always for all my blessings, Lord. You have granted me a long life filled with many good things and I have been grateful, you know that. But Lord, I cannot bear this situation now and I want an end to it.’

Her eyes filled with tears as she looked into the fathomless night, her own reflection a faint imprint upon the window, a familiar-strange overlaying of elderly woman and young girl.

‘It hurts too much, Lord, that’s the thing. I’ve never asked you for anything for myself, only for the family. But there’s a first time for everything, they say, and this prayer is for me. I’m not pretending otherwise. All for me.

‘I’ll be honest, I can’t see why you wouldn’t grant it. We both know I’m not going to be here much longer. But I think you should and I trust you will and I’ll . . . I’ll accept nothing less, God. Enough, now. In your infinite mercy and might, you can make this happen. Somehow.’

She hesitated. But sometimes, you have to ask for what you want.

‘So please, Lord, before I go, bring my girls home to me. That’s all I want now. Bring my girls home. Amen.’

The tears trickled free. Her words drifted into the dark corners to settle like dust, and shivered through the glass to float over the inky plains of the night sky. There was no sound or movement. If God had heard, He sent her no sign.

Still, as she leaned heavily on the windowsill to struggle to her feet, she felt she had made her point. She felt she had been very clear.

Nora

December 2014

After Nora had been in therapy for a while, things did start to change. It’s just that they didn’t change in any of the ways she’d expected. Before her first session, on a dusty evening back in June, she had made a list of all the ways she hoped her life would improve. Never having had counselling before, she didn’t want to be underprepared.

For a while life had continued as usual, except for these once-weekly trips to Belsize Park to see Jennifer. Then, after about three months, the nightmares became more persistent, her anxiety intensified and her relationship with her mother got much worse. She also split up with her partner, Simon, just months before her fortieth birthday. None of these things had been on her list.

Now, on a frosty evening in December, she stood at the window of Jennifer’s cream waiting room, staring into the clear darkness of a quiet North London street. One or two faded leaves ghosted past on a winter wind, drifting through a beam of lamplight. Nora didn’t mind the wait. She was too busy wondering how to explain to Jennifer what she’d done now.

‘I resigned today!’ she blurted out, forty minutes later. Jennifer had commented that she often did that – bit her tongue over something really important until late in the session so there was no time to discuss it properly. Usually Nora didn’t recognise how significant these omissions were until Jennifer seized on them like an archaeologist examining an apparently ordinary bit of stone and pronouncing it an arrowhead. But even Nora knew this was important.

She would have loved to put off the revelation for another week but if she couldn’t say it to Jennifer, who was trained to bear witness to the vagaries of human motivation, how would she tell her staff at the office? How would she tell Simon (who still kept in touch even though she had broken up with him)? And – oh God – how would she tell her mother?

‘I see. Would you like to say a bit more about that?’ asked Jennifer, betraying none of the alarm Nora was certain she must feel. Jennifer had a shock of auburn hair and lovely creamy skin. She was probably only ten years older than Nora at the most, but she seemed somehow aeons ahead. Wise? Motherly?

‘Um, well, I did it after lunch,’ said Nora, then grimaced. That was not what Jennifer meant, clearly. ‘Olivia was really surprised but quite nice about it. I don’t know why I did it. Um . . . I saw a beach.’

‘A beach?’

Nora sighed. There was no way to explain this without sounding barking mad. She probably was. People didn’t just quit their jobs because they wanted to go to the beach!

‘Yes. In my mind’s eye. I know it sounds crazy. I . . . I don’t know why I did it,’ she repeated.

How could she ever explain? Surely it had been nothing more than an idle daydream . . . but she wanted to call it a vision. It had felt almost breathtakingly significant. Sudden, diamond-bright and impossible to resist, it made her feel something unfamiliar and buoyant. Hope, perhaps. But now, on top of everything else, she would soon be unemployed. Jennifer had said that when a person started therapy things often got worse before they got better. She wasn’t kidding!

‘We’ve only got a few minutes left, Nora . . .’ Jennifer began. A therapy hour, for some reason, was fifty minutes long. She hadn’t glanced at her watch and the only clock in the room was above her head, but Jennifer seemed to have time running through her veins. ‘However, I’m happy for you to stay an extra few minutes if you’d like to explore it a little further.’

‘Really?’ Jennifer never ran over. Perhaps she was more shocked than she appeared. ‘Thank you.’

‘Then why don’t you tell me exactly what happened today, as if it’s unfolding now?’

Nora nodded. She closed her eyes as Jennifer had taught her and took herself back to a memory of earlier that day. Just like that she was back at work: lunchtime. The rest of the department had gone out but, as usual, she was eating at her desk. She could see the filing cabinet’s grey metallic gleam out of the corner of her eye, the white glow of her computer monitor and the black stapler ranged neatly behind the keyboard.

‘It’s lunchtime,’ she began. ‘I’m in the office. I’m telling myself I’m lucky because my office has two windows. Except, when I look out of one of them, I see the corridor. And the other one looks over the indoor courtyard. What’s the point of an indoor courtyard? But at least there’s greenery – some ferns growing over some rocks . . . Remember you said last week that—’

‘Concentrate, Nora,’ Jennifer’s voice murmured. ‘You’re in the office . . .’

‘Oh, yes. So I decide to go down to the courtyard to stretch my legs. I go over to the ferns and I touch them and . . . they’re plastic.

‘I feel completely betrayed. So I get a Kit-Kat from the vending machine and go back to my office. I think, no wonder I never look up from my desk – I’ll just get on with my work. But when I sit down again all I can see is this beach . . .’

And she could still see it. It hadn’t really left her the rest of the day. A cool, clear sweep of beach, golden sand turning oyster coloured in the pale, clear light, miles of walking, under a silver sky.

‘I mean, I can see it – as clearly as if it’s the actual view from my window! And it’s beautiful . . . It’s winter, but the sky is bright and the wind is blowing . . . and I’m filled with this yearning . . . It’s not just that it’s beautiful, it’s the feeling it gives me. It’s a feeling of freedom and of something . . . real . . . I want so badly to be there. And it’s not just that I want to be somewhere beautiful, though I do. It feels . . .’ Nora sighed again and shook her head. ‘It feels as if I’m meant to be there, like it’s calling me. Commanding me, actually. As if it holds the key to a great secret – though I didn’t even know there was a secret!

‘Then Nick comes back from lunch. He’s my assistant,’ Nora added, opening one eye, in case Jennifer had forgotten. But she hadn’t, of course; she just motioned for Nora to continue.

‘He bursts through the door – the office doors are hideous by the way, this really horrible shade of green. I mean, who saw that colour paint and thought, Yes, let’s go for this one? Anyway, so Nick bursts in and I look at him – I mean, really look at him. His hair’s untidy, so I realise it’s windy out, but I wouldn’t have known otherwise because I’m in this hermetically sealed building. I’m never outside. I’m either at the office, or the gym, or on the Tube, or in the flat . . . He’s holding his battered old satchel. It’s always crammed with those black Moleskine notebooks because he’s attempting to write the great British novel. And I realise that my bag contains absolutely nothing I’m passionate about. Only my purse and phone and make-up – essential stuff. Then Nick gets back to work and I can still see the beach. It’s clamouring at me. So I walk down the corridor and knock on Olivia’s vile green door, and tell her I’m leaving. Oh, I gave a month’s notice, of course, I wouldn’t leave them in the lurch. But after that . . .’

Nora opened her eyes. Jennifer was nodding slowly. ‘Your wish for a life of your own making is calling loudly now,’ she said at last. ‘It doesn’t seem as though you can run from it any more.’

‘Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide,’ Nora laughed nervously. ‘I’ve left Simon and I’ve left my job and I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ And God only knew what her mother would say – for so many reasons. Yet Nora couldn’t help but feel that somehow Jasmine was at the heart of all this, an impression that made no sense at all. This was the last course of action that her mother would ever have advised and that beach would be the last place she’d ever want to go, yet the feeling persisted, irrational and worrying.

Jennifer was still looking thoughtful. ‘And how have you been feeling since you resigned?’

They exchanged a wry smile. They had shared a little joke, that first day in June, about the cliché of counsellors asking ‘And how does that make you feel?’ Jennifer agreed it was a dreadful question – yet sometimes unavoidably useful.

‘Disbelieving! I mean, me without my job . . . what is that? And also, I feel like a little kid playing truant. I’m scared someone will find out and shout at me.’

‘Someone?’

‘Someone in authority. A teacher or something.’

‘But there are no teachers, Nora. You’re not a child and your decisions are your own. The only person you’re accountable to in this situation is your boss, Olivia, and you’ve already told her.’

‘All right then, my mother.’

‘And what do you imagine she’ll say?’

And just like that, Nora found herself tongue-tied. Predicting anything about her mother had become impossible lately. A distance had somehow grown up between them over the last twelve months. Nora would never have imagined that could happen, close as they’d always been, but she could remember noticing it vividly last Christmas. She’d asked Jasmine repeatedly what was wrong but Jasmine had told her she was just being oversensitive. And Nora’s own troubles had started around the same time.

Then Jennifer did look at her watch. ‘We need to stop now, Nora, so perhaps that’s something you can think about for next time. Meanwhile, just a quick question. Did you recognise the beach? Is it imaginary, or somewhere you know?’

Nora gave a bleak laugh. ‘Oh, I know it. Thank you, Jennifer.’

She gathered her things and headed out, back to the dark street that led, as all streets must, to Starbucks. She really needed a latte. Oh yes, she knew where that beach was. And she’d be more reluctant to tell her mother that than anything.

Chloe

July 1953

‘Joy has a colour! And it’s bright blue, like this summer sky!’ cried Chloe, spinning around, her face tilted up to the sun, her palms outstretched.

Her new pleated skirt – mint-green and grey check – lifted about her legs and spun with her. It wasn’t new really, she’d inherited it from Margaret Matthews (who was seventeen now, and gone away to Swansea) but it was new to her and quite the most grown-up piece of clothing she possessed. Her mother said maybe she should save it for best, but Chloe could think of no ‘best’ that could better this, the start of her annual summer holiday to Tenby.

Tenby! The very name filled her with elation. It smacked of adventure, of endless sunny days on the beaches, of romance and hidden treasure . . . She would see her glamorous Aunt Susan and her Uncle Harry – as they were calling him now. She would see her cousins, Megan and Richard, who were sixteen and eighteen. Their ages alone conferred upon Chloe a vicarious glamour that she wore like new gloves when she went home. She would see Mr Walters in the ice cream shop and Mrs Isaacs in the paper shop. She would go to the Fountains Café and the picture house and the caves and the bandstand. And above all, oh! Above all, she would see Llew.

‘Chloe Samuels! You stop that twirling now!’ the repressive voice of Auntie Bran cut across her spirals. ‘Enough to make the cat dizzy you are! Come and sit down nice, now. What would your mam say?’

Chloe did not retort that there was no cat, since they were waiting at the bus stop in Carmarthen. The very mention of her mother was enough to turn her happiness to homesickness. Before she had even left the county! Her parents had put her on the bus in Nant-Aur and, fifteen miles later in Carmarthen, here was Auntie Branwen to meet her off it and make sure she caught the Tenby bus. Oh Mam, Dad, she thought, how can I leave you for three whole weeks?

Chloe and Auntie Bran subsided into side-by-side silence. Auntie Bran was satisfied that, by invoking Chloe’s mother, she had effectively quashed her thirteen-year-old niece. But the truth was that Gwennan was as excited as anyone about Chloe’s holiday. If she had been here, she would have been twirling too. She had packed her daughter’s suitcase, layering tissue paper between the worn jumpers, skirts and blouses as carefully as if they were the finest Parisian silks. There was nothing Gwennan would not do for the happiness of her first-born child and only daughter, but she and her husband, Daf, had little to give. So they made do with this: parting with Chloe for three weeks every summer so she could have the time of her life in Tenby.

The red Tenby bus arrived in a puff of dust and a crunch of wheels. Chloe’s aunt swung the battered brown case (another Margaret Matthews cast-off) up the steps and gave Chloe a quick, sharp kiss on the cheek. She stepped back as the bus ground into motion again and then, without a wave or further glance, she trudged away.

The three sisters were completely different, thought Chloe, watching her aunt stump off down the road. Branwen, the eldest, had never married and lived alone in her little cottage in Blue Street. This situation might have lent itself to all kinds of fun and adventures, had not Auntie Bran been the kind of person who chased away fun and adventure with a stiff broom. Pale and unbeautiful, with eyebrows that sprouted where eyebrows really had no business to go, Auntie Bran, it was safe to say, was Chloe’s least favourite.

Then there was Susan, the ‘middle child’, a designation that seemed to imply all sorts when Chloe heard it muttered among the neighbours. She was tall, rather glamorous and had almost gone to university! In fact, Chloe had not known she even had an Auntie Susan until four years ago – there had been some sort of family feud during the war, when Chloe was a little one. But in 1950 Auntie Susan had ‘mended fences’. She wrote to Gwennan, the softer-hearted of her sisters, saying it was a new decade; they should put the past behind them. She wrote that she was settled in Tenby now, and that if Gwennan was happy for Chloe to visit, they would look after her very well.

Gwennan, the youngest of the sisters, was Chloe’s mother . . . but no. Chloe loved her mother so much, and it was too soon in her holiday to be able to think of her without crying. It would be worst tonight, she knew, when she spent her first night in the camp bed at the foot of Cousin Megan’s bed. Then she would remember her mother’s worried expression as she checked and checked that Chloe had everything she needed. Such love . . . A parting, even for just a holiday, made such love a double-edged sword.

But tomorrow she would wake to the screaming of gulls and the promise of long, sunlit days of liberty. The days would pass and Chloe would be happy, writing home in instalments, posting the letters once a week; the hiraeth would ease. She knew well the pattern of the days now, for this was to be her fourth summer holiday with the other branch of the family, the ‘posh’ branch.

And this would be the best holiday yet because she was thirteen! And that meant – her stomach turned over just thinking about it – that this year, for the very first time, she, Chloe Samuels, could attend the Tenby Teens summer dance! How could a person stand this much excitement and live?

Forcing herself to sit still, she dug in her coat pocket for a gob-stopper.

Enjoy, now, cariad! Enjoy every minute! The memory of Gwennan’s kind, lovely voice made Chloe miss her mother all the more, so she thought about Llew instead.

Chloe had met Llew that first summer in Tenby, three long years ago now, and he was her best friend in all the world. Of course, she didn’t say that to Bethan Hill, who was her best friend in Nant-Aur. She didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. BUT.

Llew was special. He was two years younger than Chloe, the same age as her brother Clark. If he had been anyone else, Chloe would have considered him a child. But he had an ‘old soul’, Auntie Susan said, not necessarily meaning it as a compliment. Chloe agreed, though; she could see it in his greeny-browny-yellowy eyes, and when he talked she felt as if she were with someone older, not younger. He was as tall as she was, too, and everyone knew boys grew slower than girls. Then again, Chloe had never been tall – she followed her mother like that. She worried she would end up stout like her too. No sign of that yet, though. Chloe was as slender as a daisy stem.

Llew thought a lot, and read poetry. Chloe teased him for this but secretly she was impressed. He was going to be a famous photographer when he grew up and take pictures of all the famous people of the day – the actors and actresses, the writers and dancers and inventors. He was never seen without his Box Brownie slung around his skinny neck. He was completely unafraid to accost fishermen, holidaymakers, lifeboat men, usherettes at the picture house . . . and ask them to do this, that or the other that he thought would make an interesting photograph. Even when Red Sam the lobsterman roared at him and chased him off, Llew was undaunted. Red Sam scared Chloe with his hands and feet like anvils, the drinker’s complexion that gave him his name and his beard thick as a blackberry bush, but Llew danced away over the rocks and laughed at him.

Red Sam was a dramatic exception, though. More often than not people seemed flattered, or at least amused, and Llew got his picture. Occasionally they swore at him and told him he would be a waster when he grew up, like his old man. Chloe couldn’t have borne being rejected like that but Llew only shrugged.

‘They’ll be sorry one day,’ he always said. ‘They’ll be begging me to take their picture, but they won’t be able to afford me.’

Llew would take Chloe’s picture in the future, he said, because she was going to be beautiful. He said it quite matter-of-factly, the way you might say that a ladybird has spots or a butterfly has wings, but Chloe was thrilled. He was the first person besides her mother ever to say so, and she badly wanted to be beautiful because then, when she grew up, men would fall in love with her and she would have a magical life . . . Chloe was determined to have a magical life.

It was hard, in Nant-Aur, to imagine how that could ever happen. Not that Chloe didn’t love her home; she did. She adored her parents, tolerated her brothers better than she let on (she would never, ever admit that she loved them) and she couldn’t imagine surviving for any length of time without waking up to the sight of the mists wreathing the bryn.

But Nant-Aur was a village. She knew everyone in it and, if there was greatness in her, no one there was going to see it, apart from maybe her mam. To everyone else she was just ‘the Samuels girl’, too flighty by half, but a pretty enough little thing, if only she filled out a bit.

As for men . . . besides her brothers the village boasted only twelve boys close to her in age. Even allowing for great improvements in their looks and manners when they grew, Chloe couldn’t see herself falling in love with a single one of them. They were unimaginative souls, dense as lumps of coal. Whereas Chloe wanted . . . well, in truth, she didn’t know what she wanted, and that was part of the problem with Nant-Aur. Apart from the piano teacher and the church caretaker, both of whom were spinsters (a word that caused Chloe to shiver), all the women were mothers, wives. They kept house, they did laundry. They didn’t present a wide range of options for Chloe to choose from.

An excited chant rose from the children on the bus, rousing her from her reflections.

‘Oneby, Twoby, Threeby, Fourby, Fiveby, Sixby, Sevenby, Eightby, Nineby, TENBY!’ they hollered, voices rising with every count, before collapsing in gales of giddy laughter.

Some of the old people tutted, others smiled indulgently. Chloe raised her eyebrows as Megan might have done. In previous years she had joined in, but she was a Tenby Teen now! No need to be childish like the little ones.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to get married and have children; it was just that she didn’t want to do it Nant-Aur style. She didn’t want to wrap herself up in an old pinny six days a week and wear a patched dress to church on Sundays, then hurry home to cook a massive roast with all the trimmings while her family snored by the fire. She wanted . . . something else, as well.

It was only in Tenby that she glimpsed alternative ways of arranging things. Aunt Susan, for example, had a husband and children, but she wore beautiful clothes from her London days. She frequently lunched with female friends and spent a great deal of time gazing at the sea, tapping her cigarette holder against her teeth and painting her nails a gorgeous holly-berry red. Chloe felt that if she had nail polish and pretty things to wear and time to giggle with friends, she could be happy. Her own mother had none of these things yet Gwennan was always happy, and Chloe couldn’t think why. The only person she could talk to about such things was Llew, and he said that there were as many different ways to be happy as there were people in the world or pebbles on the beach.

‘How do you know?’ she had demanded, looking at him askance. ‘You’re ten!’

But whether he was right or wrong, Chloe liked the thought of finding her own way to be happy. She didn’t want to be like her mother, nor quite like Auntie Susan, and she certainly didn’t want to be like Auntie Bran! So she would just have to blaze a new trail. One thing she knew for sure: if there was magic to be found anywhere in the small, ordinary life of Chloe Samuels, Tenby was where she would find it.

Nora

The anxiety was as bad as ever. At least it was Saturday, so she didn’t have to go to work. So far, the big achievement of Nora’s day had been getting out of bed, making a mug of tea and transferring herself to the armchair by her bedroom window. She hadn’t managed to dress yet but thanks to the hot radiator, a fleecy blanket and a pair of purple bedsocks, she was warm. Even so, she couldn’t stop shivering. Jennifer said when this happened to ‘sit with it’ and ‘breathe through it’ and to ‘watch it with curiosity and compassion’. Mindfulness. Nora was trying. Not so much because she had faith in it as because this felt so bad – so bad – that she would entertain any technique, any perspective, that might one day make this cold grey paralysis go away. If the people in work could see her now, they wouldn’t believe it.

Nora was – for another four weeks anyway – the office manager for the Faculty of History in the School of Humanities at the University of Greater London. She oversaw a team of nine administrators (a little faculty joke: why employ one person to do a job when three can do it half as well?) and supported eight academics, making sure their working lives ran like clockwork. She used to think of the morass of university procedures, paperwork and protocol as a dense jungle and herself as a mighty explorer slashing a way through with a machete. Because of the unflinching way she rampaged through a to-do list that would make lesser mortals quail, Simon used to call her the Achiev-o-meter. It wasn’t exactly the sexiest thing a man had ever called her.

But it was true that Nora was a consummate professional. She was never seen with a hair out of place. She had never known what it was to cower under a blanket. But about a year ago, vague, unspecified fears had started to plague her. She’d begun to wake up crying from nightmares she couldn’t remember and, sometimes, from erotic dreams so sharp and insistent, so at odds with her waking life, that she found those the most unsettling of all.

The view from the back of her one-bed flat in Kingston was a jumble of roofs and corners of buildings, a couple of drainpipes and a cracked gutter with lavish weeds springing forth like some kind of deconstructionist hanging basket. Nora sat and stared, the mug cooling between her hands.

What was she going to tell everyone at work on Monday? She had been there nine years; she was ‘part of the furniture’, as Dr Menna Brantham (Gender and Narrative 1765–1857) often said. (She meant it as a compliment.) She wasn’t remotely ready to answer the questions that were sure to follow. Like, Why?

Maybe Simon was right. Maybe she was losing the plot. It was a moment of pure impulse, brought about by the contrast of the image of the beach with those green-painted doors and that damn plastic fern. A sudden vehement rejection of everything they symbolised about her life. But she couldn’t say that to her colleagues.

Her brain kept telling her that she had just made a catastrophic mistake; her job really could be worse. But, some rebellious, unacknowledged part of Nora whispered, it could be a lot better, too.

What would she do when she finished? Spend every day like today, playing dead to an invisible predator, shrinking from life? Would she go really properly crazy? The possibility had never been anywhere on Nora’s radar before. She was clever. Practical. Dedicated. ‘A very together young woman,’ Dr Wendham Windsor (Twentieth-Century Politics and Sociology) had commended her, once.

Her mug was now stone cold. Nora set it down on the windowsill and the roofscape before her eyes reconfigured itself into the beach. Long and clean, sparkling like champagne, it was edged by froth and floodlit by a winter sun. Nora groaned. Did she now have to add hallucinations to her list of difficulties? It was just a place in Wales that she’d visited once as a child.

Nora and Jasmine had been staying with Gran, who suggested a day out in Tenby. Jasmine wouldn’t go, of course, so Gran took Nora. Nora probably hadn’t thought about that day in twenty years – until the beach, improbably, flashed into her mind in the office yesterday.

And why that beach specifically? Tenby had two or three lovely beaches if Nora remembered correctly. It was only briefly, at the end of the day, that they’d gone to see the South Beach. When