Second Chance Summer, page 7
‘Nothing much – only I’m wondering if this is really Lily Harper talking? The uber-confident entrepreneur who made a man cry on TV?’
‘That was a slip of the tongue! I let my mouth engage before my brain and the producers edited the clip to make me sound even worse,’ she said, instantly on the defensive. ‘I never called Tyrone “talentless”. I actually gave him some positive feedback, despite my misgivings. It was what I said when I thought I was off air that caused all the trouble.’
Even telling Sam what had happened brought the tell-tale knot back to her stomach.
‘If you’ve seen it, you’ll know how it came out.’
‘I don’t watch much TV but after you booked, I’ll admit I did watch the clip,’ he said, rather sheepishly.
‘Morven sent you the link, did she?’
Sam gave a wry smile. ‘She suggested I watch it, yes, but I’m interested in your side of the story.’
Lily inhaled in surprise. ‘Thank you, because no one usually cares. What actually happened,’ she said, shuddering at the memory, ‘was that I was talking to one of the other judges – who also hadn’t been impressed by Tyrone – and made a comment: “Tyrone just keeps ripping off another artist’s work. His talent doesn’t match the other contestants’ here. How did he get through the selection process?”’
Even repeating the words made her grow cold, but she wanted to be completely honest with Sam. ‘I didn’t know my mic was still on. I apologised to Tyrone at once. He was upset but he calmed down when I tried to explain he needed to have confidence in his own original creations – and I thought he’d accepted my apology and my feedback.’ She let out a breath. ‘I was wrong.’
Sam winced. ‘Ouch.’
‘I felt awful for treading on his dreams.’
‘It was a competitive show, though,’ Sam said. ‘I can’t imagine ever taking part in anything like that, but he must have known what he was letting himself in for?’
‘Possibly, but I shouldn’t have been so naive. Things were far worse when the show was aired. The editors cut all my positive feedback and only showed my off-mic – but on-mic – remark. There was also a scene where Tyrone ran off the set in tears. That definitely didn’t happen!’
‘Jeez. Are you saying they staged it?’
Lily gave a bitter laugh. ‘Yes, but how could I accuse him and the show’s producer of lying?’ Tyrone had also made the most of the incident since, repeating the misquote and putting other words into her mouth, Lily might have added, but didn’t.
‘Can producers even do that?’ Sam said, incredulous.
She groaned. ‘Apparently, they can do anything. I was stupid not to realise what could happen and be more guarded. Nothing I say or do can change it. No one really cares what I actually said. I’m just the Wicked Witch of the Craft Show.’
Sam turned his blue gaze on her, and Lily felt a shiver – a pleasant shiver – run up her spine. ‘If it’s any consolation, you don’t seem like the kind of person who would be deliberately cruel to anyone,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’ She was amazed at the warmth in his voice and more touched than she dared admit. ‘Unfortunately, my reputation always precedes me now.’
He screwed up his face in embarrassment. ‘I shouldn’t have Googled you. And I apologise for Morven, too. She almost never lets her brain engage before her mouth.’
Lily laughed. ‘It’s OK. I’ve heard far worse said about me than “horrible”. You have no idea …’ She shuddered, recalling the vile online abuse and newspaper comments that had followed her ill-judged remark on the craft programme.
‘You know the comments that hurt the most?’ she said. ‘The ones that said because I was successful, I should be championing people who were struggling to make it in the crafting world – not bringing them down. I set up Lily Loves to do just that: help makers gain a higher profile and proper reward for their work. I’ve always wanted to support my friends and fellow makers, right from the start. It’s why I agreed to be a judge on the show. Now I wish I could turn back the clock.’ She stopped, realising she was talking about work again, yet also that she’d never told anyone how deeply the trolling had hurt her.
‘You don’t have to worry about any of that today. I know you found the lack of connectivity here frustrating to begin with, but I hope it means that you can forget about the trolls – while you’re on Stark at least – and just be present,’ he said gently. ‘I’m sorry for bringing it up.’
‘It’s OK,’ she said airily. ‘And I’m not so confident when I’m not “on show”, of course I’m not. Who is? I also like to be honest. While I did do A-level Art and Textile Design at school, I’ve never really been good enough at one thing to make a living solely from that.’
‘I thought you started off selling your own work on a market stall?’
‘I did, and it took off in a way I’d never dreamed, but the real breakthrough came when I sold other people’s creations as well as my own. I have an eye for the beautiful and unique, you see …’
Lily wished Sam hadn’t been giving her his full attention at that precise moment. The light caught his profile, illuminating eyes the exact colour of deep ocean in the distance. His thick hair, almost black, stirred in the soft breeze. He lifted tanned, strong arms to push it off his face.
‘Go on,’ he encouraged her.
Lily forced her attention back to what she’d been saying.
‘My work sold well, but other artists’ sold even better, so I sought out more and more of it.’ She gave a rueful sigh. ‘I wouldn’t have any old thing on the stall, only the pieces I loved and that complemented my vision. My artist friends didn’t want to have the hassle of sales and admin. I did – I was naturally pretty good at it and taught myself to be even better.’
Still embarrassed about her reaction to him and having opened up a little too much, she pointed to the hill. ‘Shall we get to the top or do you think I won’t make it?’
He grinned. ‘Let’s see, shall we?’
He didn’t try to lead the way, or follow, but walked beside her. Lily found herself caring what he thought, drawn by his interest in her background and what made her tick. He seemed to be genuinely interested in how the trolling had affected her, and it was cathartic to talk to a virtual stranger about how hurtful it had been.
She hoped he’d appreciate her honesty – she wanted him to like her, which surprised and disturbed her because it made her feel vulnerable.
She’d long ago got over the embarrassment of being proud of her achievements and frank about her strengths, while privately recognising her limitations and finding staff who could make up for them. It was essential in business and too many people – sadly too many women, even of her generation – still found it almost impossible to laud or even acknowledge their own achievements.
She’d lost count of the men who were not only unafraid to big themselves up, but also unaware of how very average they were.
Sam wasn’t one of them. He could be a very good retreat proprietor if he played to his strengths but his discomfort front of house was all too obvious. Could he find and afford a manager who would be good at that role? He’d made it quite clear the previous evening that he thought she should take a complete break from all things business so she wouldn’t offer her opinion again.
‘Here we are.’
‘Wow,’ said Lily, forgetting her vow. ‘Just amazing.’
‘Not too shabby.’ Sam stood, hands on hips. The three-sixty panorama enabled them to see all the other islands in the archipelago: St Mary’s, Tresco, Bryher, St Agnes … ‘And beyond St Martin’s, that hazy cliff-shaped shadow is Land’s End.’
‘The metropolis,’ Lily murmured.
‘Feels like it after here. It’s low tide so if you look over there, where the pest house is, you can just see some old wall systems running across the sand flats.’
Pest house. Lily didn’t like the sound of that, but couldn’t deny the history of the island intrigued her.
She looked hard and then saw the dark lines in the bay. ‘I see them. They almost reach Bryher. Who would build walls in the sea?’
‘They weren’t always under the sea. There was a low plain between Tresco, Bryher and Samson that was used by medieval farmers. Then sea levels rose and drowned the fields and separated the islands.’
Imagining the farmers’ land and homes being flooded, year by year, Lily shivered. ‘That is pretty eerie.’
‘Some say that Scilly is the land of Lyonesse featured in the King Arthur myths,’ Sam went on. ‘And that once you could walk from Land’s End to here.’
‘Of course you believe that,’ Lily said wickedly, secretly entranced by the idea of a mythical landscape.
Sam frowned. ‘Of course. Doesn’t everyone?’
She laughed.
‘Let’s head down the hill towards the pest house,’ he said.
As they walked, Lily’s curiosity was well and truly piqued. ‘Have you lived on Bryher your entire life?’ she asked.
‘Apart from when I went to uni and a year of travelling around after.’
She noticed he didn’t say ‘we’ again so if he’d had a companion on his gap year, that person had now been erased from the narrative.
‘You said Elspeth has never left at all?’
‘Only for holidays and not too many of those. Travel to and from here is expensive. Young people tend to go away and either don’t come back or try to return a decade later, but making a living and finding a home in any rural spot is hard.’
‘Did you ever think of making the cottages into homes for the islanders?’
‘I did but there are only six ruins left and I wouldn’t want to build on the natural landscape. By developing the retreat, I can provide jobs and I’ve created two studio flats above the hub for my live-in staff. Who I will be recruiting very soon,’ he added pointedly.
‘I’m glad to hear it, otherwise you’d end up needing a retreat yourself. Now, can you show me this “pest house”? It sounds horrifying and fascinating at the same time.’
‘It’s both of those things. Come on, we need to go down and up again.’
Annoyingly, Lily was puffing a little by the time they’d trekked down one hill and up another. Sam stopped again so she could look down on the western end of the island where the pest house was situated well away from the cottages of the Island Retreat. There were also a couple of ruined buildings behind a beach on the northern coast.
‘The retreat was one of two settlements with a handful of dwellings,’ he explained. ‘Each of its cottages originally housed a different family, though most of the inhabitants were related in some way. That was another reason for life on Stark being unsustainable. People tended to stay in one place their whole lives and it’s obviously not great for people’s health when generations keep on marrying their cousins.’
‘Oh, dear,’ she said, realising the implications.
‘However, the main reason they eventually had to leave was that the well dried up. My first job here was to find a new water supply. Without that, there would be no retreat.’
‘You said the well was the main reason people left?’
‘There were others. Generally, the place was too tiny and too isolated to be viable. Stark is wild, windswept and not terribly fertile. For a few decades, the inhabitants made a living harvesting seaweed for fertiliser, and they had a rowing gig that was used to pilot visiting ships safely to the other islands. They lived on potatoes and limpets and kept a few sheep, cattle and goats.’
‘It sounds a very hard life.’
‘It was bad enough in summer but in the winter they could be cut off for weeks. The community only had one rowing gig between it and that was wrecked one winter. No one could afford to buy another. Food was in short supply, the well was running dry and the young people all left. Eventually in eighteen fifty-five, there were only two families clinging on and it was decided by the Cornish authorities that they should be evacuated to Bryher.’
‘Surely that was better for them?’ Lily said, finding it hard to imagine how any sane person would want to live in such harsh conditions, always on the brink of starvation.
‘In one way it was, because life on Stark had become unbearable. However, one of the families still didn’t want to leave, even though they were practically starving. There are documents about the mother, Mabel, having to be led away forcibly from her cottage, cursing the men sent to evict her. While being dragged from her home, she cursed anyone who ever set foot on Stark again.’ He smiled. ‘I didn’t tell you that before.’
‘Thanks!’ Lily said, forming a picture of Mabel, screaming as she was carried away from her home in a tiny boat, with her few possessions, never to return. ‘The poor woman. It must have been traumatic.’
‘Apparently so. My aunt found an old newspaper cutting in the Scilly Library describing the scene. She was Elspeth’s great-great-great-grandmother.’
Lily gave an audible gasp. ‘Oh, my God. No wonder your aunt has such a strong connection to the place.’
‘Yes, Stark – its inhabitants – are literally in her blood. Talking of which, shall we visit the pest house?’
They walked on, to a lower, flatter area of scrubland facing the Atlantic coast. The roofless stone building was situated at the edge of the island, well away from the cottages, and surrounded by gorse bushes and wildflowers. As they approached, Sam told her about its history.
‘It was built in the mid-seventeenth century as an isolation hospital for sailors with the plague. They were dropped off here by ships sailing for Scilly.’
‘That’s awful,’ Lily said, beginning to think that Stark had a very sad history, despite its idyllic location. ‘I’m surprised you wanted to rebuild anything on here.’
‘I had no choice,’ he said, then quickly corrected himself. ‘I mean, I needed to build the retreat, for all kinds of reasons,’ he muttered. ‘Let’s go inside.’
Intrigued by his comment, Lily walked inside, staring up at the clear blue skies surrounded by granite walls. She imagined people – sick and perhaps dying – looking through the windows, wondering when – or if – they might ever escape these four walls. She shuddered and hugged herself.
‘Those poor sailors. Imagine being abandoned here.’
‘Yes, and some people want me to leave it as a memorial to them.’
‘Will you?’
‘I’d prefer to breathe new life into it, give it a purpose that benefits the living and future generations. If all goes well, this place would be further staff accommodation.’
‘Won’t the staff think it’s creepy?’
‘I’m hoping they’ll be more relieved they have a decent place to live. I was planning to create four bedsits in it with a communal area. With the other studio above reception, that’ll provide accommodation for me and five more people during the season.’
‘You certainly have ambition,’ Lily said, admiring his pragmatism.
‘I’ve never thought I was ambitious. It’s more of a passion – a compulsion. I’ve always wanted to resurrect the island but never dared to.’
‘Until now. What made you decide to go for it?’
‘I don’t know …’ He stopped. ‘Let’s just say that my life took an unexpected turn.’
‘A good one?’ Lily murmured.
‘Not really. I didn’t think so at the time.’
‘And now?’
He kicked at a pebble. ‘It was what it was. I simply came to accept I couldn’t change what had happened. The old path was barred forever, and I had no choice but to walk down a new one – or stagnate. I decided that wasn’t for me. It never has been.’
They both fell into silence. The lonely walls, the isolated yet beautiful spot … the contrast of a dark past with the bright promise of a summer’s day … all of it threatened to overwhelm Lily. Sam seemed to be affected too, standing by the wall, gazing out at the vastness of the sea before snapping out of his trance-like state.
‘Come on, I think we’ve had enough doom and gloom. The pest house can wait for now, let me show you something special.’ He smiled. ‘I think it will be exactly what you need.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sam’s ‘something special’ was, indeed, exactly what she needed.
For an hour or so, Lily had been completely entranced by the sight of seals basking on the rocks and cute puffins flying in and out of their burrows in the cliffs with their beaks full of sand eels to feed their pufflings. The idea of new life being born around this rugged coast gave her a warm glow. She could see how the natural beauty of Stark would cast a healing spell on anyone.
Even its owner had smiled more in the past hour than he had in the rest of the time since she’d arrived on the island. By the time she’d returned to the retreat hub, she was feeling energised and buzzing with creative inspiration.
While Sam went to work on a nearby cottage, Lily collected her sketch pad and a sandwich and set off to explore on her own. Avoiding the pest house, she returned instead to the cliffs where they’d seen the puffins. The breeze had freshened but the sun was still dazzlingly bright.
She found a sheltered spot on a low grassy bluff out of the wind, kicked off her trainers and sat in the shelter of a large boulder. The granite warmed her back and the sun brought a pleasant glow to her bare legs. Waves rolled into the cove a few feet below, with soothing regularity. Who in the world had a whole island all to themself? Or almost totally to themself.
She started to sketch, absorbed in capturing the scene, yet after only a few minutes, she was muttering in frustration that she couldn’t do it justice.
She tried again on a fresh sheet of paper … and again … until she was on her sixth attempt.
Flinging down the sketch pad, she let out a cry of frustration. ‘Arghhhhh!’
No one could hear her. It had felt cathartic, so she shouted again. ‘Arghhhh!’
Maybe she needed fresh inspiration. Ahead of her, she found it. Along the beach, beyond a headland, she came across a tiny cove with turquoise water glittering in a pool. The rocks surrounding it shimmered with bright green weed and cormorants perched offshore, drying their batlike wings in the sun.
