Page 14 of The Love Game

Some people might have chosen to dress conservatively, to present as plain and respectable a presence as possible in the circumstances.

Violet, however, wasn’t some people. Her clothes were her armour, and she chose to go into battle wearing a scarlet dungaree mini dress over a long-sleeved T-shirt and stripy tights. None of it matched with her hair.

‘You look fabulous!’ Keris said, already in the lower lobby when Violet made her way downstairs.

Barty threw a jaunty wave over his shoulder at her as he locked his door.

He was dressed as he’d been on the morning Violet first met him, long coat and fedora.

His granddaughter shared his tall frame, and had an infectious energy about her that Violet found herself drawn to and encouraged by.

‘Cal’s running late.’ Keris glanced at her phone. ‘He texted just now to say he’ll meet us there.’

Vi nodded. She’d tapped on his door a couple of minutes ago and found him out, and although he hadn’t expressly agreed to come to the meeting with them, she’d felt her heart sink because she wanted him there on her side.

She paused also to momentarily wonder at the relationship between Keris and Cal again; they seemed pretty close.

Looking from Barty to Keris, she put her chin in the air. ‘Come on then. Let’s do this.’

Violet offered to drive, but Barty said he’d rather stretch his legs and it was only ten minutes along the seafront, so why bother?

Besides, he said, he wanted to walk in there with the two best girls in Swallow Beach on his arms, so Violet had slipped the car keys into her bag and hooked her arm through the one he offered.

It turned out that it wasn’t far, and by the time they arrived he’d had them both laughing with a story about a new woman who’d moved into the local residential home and tried to feel his bum at the tea dance that afternoon. Maureen, by all accounts, was a frisky one for a woman in her nineties.

‘Best feet forward, girls,’ Barty said, removing his fedora as he held the door open for them to go in ahead of him. Violet followed Keris into the wooden-clad hall built on the side of the church.

‘Keep your coat on, the heating never works in here,’ Keris said, leading them through a set of double doors into the main room, which looked like pretty much every other local church hall up and down the land.

Scuffed wooden floor, magnolia walls, plastic chairs piled around the edges.

Except some of those chairs had been hastily dragged down and arranged in lines, and a gathering of perhaps twenty or so people were assembled there.

Vi scanned the faces for Cal, but he wasn’t there.

She wasn’t surprised, but she really hoped he’d try to make it, even if he was late; she needed as many people on her side as possible.

‘Usual suspects,’ Keris whispered, saying a few hellos as she led them to an empty row of chairs in the safety of the middle of the gathering.

Curious eyes turned to look at Violet as she settled into her seat next to Keris. She tried her best to meet their eyes and smile; Della had taught her the value of first impressions and she badly wanted these people to warm to her.

‘Showtime,’ Barty said, sliding into the row on Keris’s other side, nodding towards a side door at the front of the hall.

Following his nod, Violet found herself looking at the floral blouse of Swallow Beach’s Mayoress, her official mayoral chains rattling around her neck as she placed her huge briefcase on a side table and made a show of unsnapping the catches.

Shuffling her folders, she took her place at the lectern.

Given that most people were looking at her there really wasn’t any need to bang the gavel, but she gave it several good thumps just for effect anyway.

‘Order in the room please,’ she said. ‘Order in the room.’

The general hubbub hushed, and Mayoress No-name laid the gavel down slowly and looked around from face to face until she found Violet and narrowed her eyes.

‘Psyching you out,’ Keris muttered. ‘Don’t look away first.’

Violet wasn’t about to.

‘Thank you all for coming at short notice tonight, it’s good to see so many concerned faces here.’

Vi’s eyes moved around the room, trying to work out the mood. Thankfully they didn’t seem like a lynch mob; she and Keris were the youngest there by a long chalk.

‘As everyone who has been here for any length of time knows …’ she paused here to look down her nose at Violet, ‘our beloved pier has played an integral part in our community for almost two hundred years.’

She nodded, falling silent to let that grand fact sink in.

‘And again, as those of us who’ve been residents for more than five minutes know , its continued closure has affected our town tremendously.’

‘Ouch,’ Keris whispered, leaning in. ‘I can feel Glad’s barbs and I’m only sitting next to you!’

Vi swallowed hard. ‘Glad?’

‘Short for Gladys. Everyone calls her Glad though. God knows why, because I don’t think anyone’s ever glad to see that woman, she can be a right pain in the arse.’

A woman sitting in the row in front turned round and lifted her eyebrows, but the look on her face suggested that she didn’t wholeheartedly disagree.

‘I can’t remember the pier ever being open, Glad,’ someone down the front piped up. A low murmur of consent bubbled around the room, and the Mayoress raised and lowered her hands like an orchestra conductor appealing for quiet.

‘Well I can,’ she shot back. ‘As can anyone else over the age of fifty.’ She squinted towards them. ‘Barty?’

Keris and Violet turned to look at him, as did most of the heads in the room. Barty lifted his shoulders, for all the world like a schoolboy who didn’t want to tell the truth and land his mates in hot water.

‘I’m not a day over forty-five, as you well know, Lady Mayoress,’ he said, going for humour to diffuse the spotlight, effectively so given the laugh that rippled around the room.

Gladys didn’t see the funny side of it, huffing and making a point of opening her file and peering at it over her glasses.

‘Swallow Beach Pier has stood proudly on our shore since 1879,’ she said, clearly gearing up to read an impassioned speech.

After a second Keris raised her hand, interrupting the Mayoress in full flight. ‘That’s a hundred and thirty-nine years, Glad.’

Gladys narrowed her eyes. ‘And?’

‘You said nearly two hundred years, but it’s not. It’s one hundred and thirty-nine so actually it’s closer to one hundred.’

‘I’d thank you not to question my mathematics, Keris Harwood,’ Gladys said, haughty, and Violet looked down at her boots to hide her smile. Glad cleared her throat, banged the gavel once for gravitas, and then started again.

‘Swallow Beach Pier has stood proudly on our shores since 1879, and back in its heyday it was a major tourist attraction, rivalling Brighton.’

‘Steady on, Glad,’ a man across the aisle said. ‘Brighton’s bloody massive.’

‘Melvin Williams, I’ll have you know that our pier once housed a national exhibition of paintings by …’ Gladys paused and consulted her notes, ‘Arthur Bowmore.’

A woman at the back of the room stood up. ‘He was my grandfather!’

‘There you go then,’ Gladys spread her hands. ‘Sue Simpson’s grandfather, a prolific local artist, held a grand exhibition there in the twenties.’ Sensing an ally, Gladys homed in deeper. ‘Have you any idea of the breadth of his work, Sue?’

Sue frowned and held her hands out in front of her as if holding a dinner plate. ‘About like that?’

Gladys stalled, and then rallied. ‘No, no. The number of paintings dear, not the size. Size is irrelevant.’ She let out a small peal of laughter.

A woman with a bubble perm sitting beside Melvin Williams raised her hand. ‘I have to come in there, it’s my area of expertise.’

Keris started laughing under her breath. ‘You’ll love Linda and Melvin. Sex therapists. Make the Fockers look tame.’

‘Linda Williams, this is neither the time nor the place to lower the tone,’ Gladys said, exasperated. ‘If I could just get on.’

Linda shrugged as if to say it was Gladys’s loss.

‘Three,’ Sue Simpson said, still standing up at the back. ‘He painted three in total, all of his dog, Mindy.’

‘Sit down, Susan Simpson,’ Gladys growled, her mayoral chains shuddering on her heaving chest. She looked down at her speech again, and then seemed to think better of it, closing her file.

‘My point, ladies and gentlemen of Swallow Beach, is that our pier has long lived in the heart of our townsfolk and it should be officially given back to us. We could reinvigorate our town’s fortune, rather than line the greedy pockets of a private investor.’

Violet couldn’t help herself, she shot to her feet. ‘Those would be my pockets that you’re talking about, Lady Mayoress, and I’ll have you know that they’re neither greedy nor private.’

A hush fell over the room, and every eye in the place rested on Violet.

‘This isn’t how I wanted to introduce myself to everyone, but I’m Violet Spencer, and I very recently inherited the Swallow Beach Pier from my grandmother, Monica Spencer, who lived here in the bay back in the seventies.’

A low whisper rattled around the room.

‘I didn’t even know the pier existed until a few weeks ago when my grandfather died and willed it to me.

He bought the pier, legitimately , when it was put up for sale in 1965.

He and my grandmother came here on honeymoon and she fell in love with the place; as far as I know they came for a holiday and stayed here for the rest of her life.

I know for a fact that she loved this town, and even though he wasn’t living here my grandpa has always ensured that the pier has been properly maintained, so I hoped that I’d come here and find a friendly welcome, at least.’

Some people nodded, hesitant to be unnecessarily rude to the blue-haired girl in their midst. Gladys didn’t flinch, just stared at Violet, her thin lips puckered cat’s-bum-tight.