don’t understand, Mum,’ Violet said. ‘What’s this all about?’
Della tapped her fingers slowly on the cover of the photograph album. ‘This. I thought it was all long gone, but it seems I was wrong.’
Violet slid onto her bum beside her mother and crossed her legs like a child sitting on the carpet for a story at the end of the school day. ‘Shall I look?’
Her mum shook her head. ‘Not yet.’ She didn’t look at Violet. ‘He shouldn’t have let things go on like this. If he’d told me, I could have sorted it out, but now he’s gone and saddled you with it.’
From what Violet could see, the album hadn’t seen the light of day in many, many years. It had been put to the very bottom of the box; some might say it had been hidden away.
‘She was a free spirit. That’s what everyone always used to say about my mother.’
Violet sat quietly, waiting for Della to go on.
‘An artist. A performer. A dancer.’
This was all news to Violet. Monica Spencer was an enigma; never spoken of fondly, no photographs on the hallway wall amongst the various family shots. So many questions filled her head … A dancer? A performer? An artist? Violet herself was an artist, of sorts. Was that where her artistic bent came from? It certainly wasn’t from her pragmatic mother or her accountant dad. Even her lovely grandpa had never revealed much about his long-deceased wife; it was as if everyone felt it best to pretend Monica Spencer had never existed at all. Until now.
Violet tried to piece together the scant pieces of the puzzle she had, to at least make up the edges, to form a frame to build the picture from. She knew that her grandfather Henry had never remarried, and her mother Delilah, Della for short, was his only child. Monica, his wife, had died when Della was just a child, and afterwards he’d moved them both here to Shrewsbury to start again somewhere new. Or nearly new; Henry and Monica had grown up and met here, and moved to Swallow Beach just after they’d married. And that was it. All she knew.
‘Mum, can I see?’
Violet reached out and touched the album, and Della swallowed hard. ‘I haven’t opened this in over ten years.’
‘Are you sure you want to now?’
‘No,’ Della said. ‘But I don’t think I’ve got any choice. Come on, let’s go downstairs. We’re both going to need a brandy to get through this.’
‘It’s not even lunchtime.’
‘Trust me. You won’t care what time it is.’
As Della got to her feet, a photograph slid from the album to the floor. Violet bent to retrieve it, and then stood bone still, staring at it.
‘Oh my God.’ She lifted her eyes to meet her mother’s troubled gaze. ‘Why did no one tell me?’
Della’s ash-blonde bob was shot through with silver, catching the light as she tucked it behind her ears, a resigned look on her pale face. The woman staring up at them had wild black curls and laughing grey eyes. She was crabbing in a rock pool, a slight, blonde child wrapped around her leg.
‘It was taken at Swallow Beach,’ Della said, gazing at it. ‘I was about four, five at most. It’s underneath the pier, you can just about make out the ironwork there in the background.’
Violet scoured the image, hungry for more. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from her grandmother.
‘She’s …’ She shook her head, rocked. ‘She’s the image of me, Mum.’
It was almost an understatement. Monica Spencer was probably the closest thing to a doppelganger Violet was ever going to get.
Della looked from the picture to her daughter, and then silently took the image and slid it back between the leaves of the album.
‘I told you we were going to need a drink.’
Violet frowned as she followed her usually unflappable mum down through the house. Grandpa Henry had mentioned his reluctance to open Pandora’s box, but she had a creeping feeling that that was exactly what they were about to do.
Two hours and two large brandies later, Violet had several more pieces of the puzzle to arrange. Poring over the album at the kitchen table with her mum, she’d learned more about her own heritage that afternoon than in the twenty-five years leading up to it. She’d seen all that the album had to offer: her grandparents’ black and white wedding picture, them cradling their newborn baby girl, again with their shiny new car in the late sixties. Life events recorded and annotated with dates and names, but the images that touched Violet the most were the unposed ones, the natural, captured snapshots of Monica laughing up into the lens, or ballerina-like balancing along the beach wall, or with her hair tied back by a scarlet chiffon scarf as she painted at an easel.
From the pictures and her mother’s memories, Violet learned that her grandparents had honeymooned in Swallow Beach, drawn down south by the bright lights of Brighton and the pretty coastline to explore. Grandpa Henry had been a well-to-do businessman back in his younger days, and he’d been powerless to resist his beautiful, wilful new wife when she’d fallen in love with both the town and its struggling little Victorian pier. Even as they’d watched the For Sale sign being hung onto the closed ornate metal gates, he’d known he was going to buy it for her, that their future as husband and wife lay in Swallow Beach.
It was an idea filled with hope and a plan filled with optimism, and for a while it seemed that they’d been as happy as clams in their beautiful new seafront apartment. Making a success of the pier had become Monica’s obsession, and then tragically, when Della was just eight years old, the story twisted when the pier became the scene of Monica’s untimely death. The newspaper cutting reported that she’d fallen from the pier at midnight on her fortieth birthday, her body washed up on the dawn tide. Della had needed to leave the kitchen by the back door for a breath of air at that point of recounting the story, flapping her hand at Violet to stay where she was.
Alone in the kitchen, Violet held the picture of her grandmother in her hands and stared into her oh-so-familiar eyes, trying to see more than was there, to understand this woman with who she shared so much. And not just physically. Violet might not paint particularly well, but all of the things she’d ever truly excelled at had been art of some form. She’d dabbled with various mediums over the years, but she always ended up back at her sewing machine under one guise or another. Piecing together intricate quilts, making up clothes from vintage dress patterns – and for the last couple of years she’d been working to build up her own business from the converted old brick-built stable at the end of her parents’ long garden.
She laid the photograph down as her mum came back in, sniffing, a balled-up tissue in her hand.
‘Sorry, love. Got me there. Unexpected.’
Sitting back at the table, Della placed an envelope down. Violet recognised it as the same pale blue stationery as her own letter from Grandpa Henry. Della shook it until a set of keys fell out onto the waxed pine table.
‘These were in my envelope to pass onto you.’
Violet made no move to pick them up, just looked at them, and as she studied them she could almost feel fate trying to give her hand a subtle shove towards them.
‘So
