Finding Love at Mermaid Terrace Read online

  Also by Kate Forster

  Starting Over at Acorn Cottage

  The Sisters

  FINDING LOVE AT MERMAID TERRACE

  Kate Forster

  AN IMPRINT OF HEAD OF ZEUS

  www.ariafiction.com

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Aria, an imprint of Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Kate Forster, 2021

  The moral right of Kate Forster to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (E): 9781788544375

  ISBN (PB): 9781800246027

  Cover design © Cherie Chapman

  Aria

  c/o Head of Zeus

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  www.ariafiction.com

  To all the doctors and nurses who helped so many through COVID-19.

  Thank you.

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Part Two

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  About the Author

  Become an Aria Addict

  Part One

  1

  Port Lowdy had ideas above its station. The sign at the top of St Martin’s Road read Welcome to the Coastal Town of Port Lowdy. At best it was a large seaside village. Once famous for brown crabs and being the location of a film starring Dame Judi Dench, it was now so sleepy even the crabs took afternoon naps, no longer concerned with nets hauling them from their ocean floor slumber. Tourists came, not too many. There were enough visitors to help the village be lively in the summer and to make the residents feel smug in their decision to make Port Lowdy their forever home.

  Tressa Buckland was one of the smug ones. She had been a holidaymaker with her family since she was born. Now she was a full-time Port Lowdian of two years and she loved everything about living there. The way it looked, with its messy, coloured houses along the shore and the cobbled streets amongst the village. There was a sense of routine in a village as old as this, a certain waythings had always been done and though people came and went every summer, the routine stayed the same.

  Tressa wasn’t one to argue about changing the routine. The familiarity of the village was what made her want to be one of the smug ones who complained about the tourists but who knew the village relied on them to survive.

  On a warmer than usual February morning, Tressa swung her backpack onto her shoulders, adjusted her helmet on top of her messy black curls that refused to be tamed, and hopped onto her pink bicycle.

  At twenty-six, she was one of the few single people in the village under the age of sixty. Not that Tressa minded. She wasn’t looking for a relationship; her art was her true love and that was enough for her.

  Tressa never tired of her daily ride from her house – Mermaid Terrace, her pale turquoise cottage that sat on the edge of the esplanade overlooking the beach. It was one of four houses all painted different colours, and all with different names.

  Tressa pedalled her bike along the esplanade, warming up quickly with the sun shining while a light breeze touched her face.

  She had dreamed of living in Port Lowdy since she could remember, and she had always looked at the coloured terrace houses and imagined her life inside one of them. She longed to have it filled with things her mother did not approve of – like a cat, and plates that didn’t match, and jam jars filled with flowers and paintbrushes soaking in water.

  At the front of the terrace houses were a garden and a sea wall that overlooked a small patch of sand. If you walked across the sand bar at low tide, you could reach the rock pools where Tressa spent most of her time during the holidays as a child.

  Her parents lived in St Ives, as did her older brother and his wife, who had young twins, but Tressa had moved to Port Lowdy to escape them.

  Mermaid Terrace was her heaven, a stone house with a bay window that looked out over the few fishing boats left over from a previous era. She had bought it with money her grandmother left her. She often wondered if her grandmother had understood how difficult it was to grow up under the mothering of Wendy Buckland. Her parents’ house was so grand and so perfect that people stopped to take photos of it. Inside, it was impossible to put down a glass or a mug without a coaster appearing from somewhere. Tressa used to wonder if her mother had a holster of them ready to fling at anyone from ten yards like a cowboy, protecting the heavy furniture from unsightly water rings.

  As she rode through the village, the freshly laundered tablecloths from the Black Swan pub snapped in the wind, bickering with each other. She waved at Marcel, the owner, who was sitting outside the pub drinking a coffee and reading the paper. Marcel made a lovely crab bisque with croutons, which was old-fashioned, but Port Lowdy was that sort of place. This suited Tressa. She painted old-fashioned pictures that weren’t popular with the art market but they made her happy.

  Penny Stanhope, the postmistress, waved as she turned over the Closed sign on the door. The post office also served as the bank, the local passport office, and the insurance office. Penny sold chutneys and jams made by some of the local women and questionable shell craft with googly eyes and the occasional diamante for pizazz. Port Lowdy didn’t really do pizazz so the shell craft didn’t sell but the jams were popular.

  The bakery with its striped red awning was already open, the Cornish pasties just out of the oven and the scones rising for morning tea. There was a small garden with a white picket fence out the side of the bakery, where tourists could eat their Cornish cream tea under the apple trees and watch the passing foot traffic.

  Tressa pedalled up the small hill and came to the front of the little office that was both the headquarters of The Port Lowdy Occurrence and the local car rental in the summer. S
he pushed open the door, trying to balance the bike and the heavy wood door. She took off her bicycle helmet and felt her curls spring outwards in protest after the short ride.

  Tressa’s black curls had a life of their own. Her brother didn’t get them, in fact, no one knew where the curly hair gene had come from in the Buckland family. Everyone else was blonde and brown-eyed but Tressa had dark hair and blue eyes. As a child, she used to pore over the family tree in the old family Bible on the bookshelf. Her curls were from ancestors unknown, and it always gave Tressa a thrill to think of the relative who bequeathed the hair to her, generations later, like a charm. Her skill for drawing was also an unclaimed talent: no one could see where it came from in the family tree. Tressa cherished these differences because they made her special – and God knows it was hard to be special in her family.

  Anything for a peaceful life, her boss George Fox said, and she agreed. George was the owner and editor of The Port Lowdy Occurrence. It was just the two of them working at the Occurrence, but the paper made enough to pay her wage and keep George in whisky, and it funded his passion for antiques. They were busy enough through advertising from the fishing and holiday community and George had business all over Cornwall, with the car rental in the summer and numerous other fingers in other Cornish pasties.

  Tressa was grateful for her job because it allowed her to paint. She was an artist – a properly trained one at that, her mother would tell you if you asked, having gone to art school in Plymouth. Tressa sold her paintings and prints of the Cornish sea from a website under the pseudonym The Cornish Mermaid; the sales topped up her income to pay for living expenses and canvas and everything else was cream.

  Her mother Wendy said that Tressa was the oldest twenty-six-year-old in the UK. She spent her money on not much else besides her art. All her friends were still drinking and dancing all night but Tressa was a loner, not so much by choice as by circumstance. She was shy and she had struggled to stay in contact with friends from school or university, all of whom seemed to be getting engaged or married now. A few of them even had babies. She sent little paintings off to her friends, celebrating their news, and drew cards for the babies and posted them to faraway places but no one wanted to come to Port Lowdy and stay at Mermaid Terrace. If Tressa ever pulled an all-nighter it was in front of her easel waiting for the moon to slide behind the clouds when it was the sun’s turn to take over.

  ‘How will you ever meet someone?’ her mother asked. ‘You’ll never find anyone there. Come on home and find love. We will buy you a place, and you can rent out your house there and come back to it later on.’ Wendy kept trying to coax her daughter to return to St Ives but Tressa didn’t believe in finding love. Love wasn’t lost, so why should she go looking for it? It would come if it was ready and if love never found her, she had her cat and her art and that was enough, she told herself. There was no one in Port Lowdy worth swinging hands with. She knew nearly everyone in the village and there were no eligible men under the age of sixty. Older men had never been her thing.

  There was another artist she’d had a thing with for a while, who she used to see in St Ives, but it wasn’t serious and they both knew it. She didn’t want to live there and he didn’t want to come to Port Lowdy. It was unspoken that their connection was merely physical and a mutual appreciation of art and nothing more. He was nice enough but not enough to want more from him.

  The sound of her boss, George, talking on the phone welcomed Tressa to another day at work, as she put her bike into the storage room and then went into the kitchen to make them both a cup of tea. Her job at The Port Lowdy Occurrence had been a happy accident after his wife Caro left work to be more involved in with their grandchildren. It wasn’t full-time but it gave her enough time to paint and stare out the attic window from her terrace house at the ever-changing colour of the sea.

  ‘Can I see you, Tressie?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Tressa. ‘Want your tea?’

  ‘Yes and bring the digestive biscuits,’ George said sombrely.

  A morning digestive meant George was trying to solve a serious problem.

  Tressa took the mugs to his desk and sat down facing him, the biscuits tucked under her arm, and she placed the morning tea between them.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked. ‘Am I being fired?’ She was always waiting for the axe to drop on her life. She couldn’t help it – that was the anxiety she lived with. Mostly, she kept it under control – but today, George looked worried and tired. She herself was usually the problem in most situations, her mother had once told her.

  George blew on his tea. ‘No, love, I have a business decision I need to chat to you about.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Tressa carefully.

  ‘Caro’s sick,’ he said.

  ‘Oh no! What’s wrong?’

  Tressa felt such dread at anything happening to George and Caro. They were her dear friends and meant so much to Port Lowdy. George and Caro Fox were the parents she wished she had. They were encouraging, peaceful, and the only ones who’d seen how hard it was for Tressa growing up with Wendy and David Buckland as her parents. Where her parents pushed her, George and Caro nurtured her. Starting as their local delivery girl over summer at thirteen, to now the advertising manager and photographer, Tressa had found her place in the Foxes’ paper and family. Their children Anna and Blake were her friends over summer, and taught her to sail and snorkel and build fires on the beach. They were the siblings she was close to, not Jago, her older brother with whom she had nothing in common.

  ‘Caro has to go to Plymouth for an operation. We’ll have to stay there for a while,’ he said slowly, as though he was still processing the news himself.

  ‘What sort of operation?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s cancer,’ George said but he was white as he spoke, avoiding her eyes.

  ‘Oh, George, shit sticks.’ She felt tears welling. She stifled them by pushing her thumbnail into the palm of her hand. George needed her help, not her grief.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said.

  ‘Is she okay? I mean, she’s not okay but how is she feeling?’ Tressa felt ill-equipped to ask the right questions. What she really wanted to know was if Caro was going to be okay. ‘Did they say… how bad it is?’ Somehow it seemed indelicate to ask what stage it was.

  But George saved her the effort. ‘Stage-three bowel cancer,’ he said. His voice was lifeless as he spoke.

  ‘Triple shit sticks,’ she said and George gave a small snort of laughter.

  ‘You sound like Caro. That was exactly her response.’

  ‘Okay, what can I do to help?’ she asked. ‘What do you need at the house, at work? Do you need me to make food or something?’

  She needed a task so she didn’t feel so completely useless at such terrible news.

  George was staring ahead of him, over Tressa’s head, looking at the large whiteboard with its schedule of stories that they had planned to cover.

  ‘You’ll have to run the Occurrence,’ he said. ‘But hire someone to help you. It’s too much for one person with summer coming up. The advertisers will need to be chased and the photos from the real estate companies compiled. And there are articles to be written about the new ferry and the art show at the school.’ He paused. ‘I was looking forward to those.’

  Tressa put her hand on his across the desk. ‘George, I’ll take care of it all, I promise.’ She felt about twelve years old as she spoke.

  George was thinking aloud. ‘You’ll need a journalist, maybe someone who is retired. You won’t get anyone from around here. You’ll have to advertise, and I’ll pay for a room for them to stay here.’

  Trying not to crumble at the fear in his voice, Tressa nodded.

  ‘I can ask around for us but I have to get her to Plymouth tomorrow. The doctor called last night. I need to take her in right away.’

  He looked ashen and Tressa worried he might be next for a health issue.

  ‘I can handle this. I’ll manage it all,
I promise,’ she said, trying to sound soothing while her stomach was twisting in knots.

  ‘The Port Lowdy Occurrence hasn’t missed an issue since 1781,’ George said blankly.

  ‘And it won’t miss one under my guidance,’ Tressa stated. ‘You focus on Caro and I’ll focus on the paper. Now head home and let me get on with it.’

  He took a biscuit at last and dipped it in his tea.

  ‘Can I finish my tea first, boss?’ he said with a faint smile.

  Tressa blinked away tears. ‘Take as long as you need, George; I’m just going to just sit here and be with you if that’s okay?’

  ‘I couldn’t think of anyone I would rather sit with at this moment,’ he said and they finished their tea and the biscuits in silence.

  2

  Penny Stanhope adjusted the jam jars on the table by the door of the post office. These were a fresh batch from Rosemary March, who had been dabbling with new recipes after a trip to France. There was an orange marmalade with whisky and a plum and rum jam, both of which sounded delicious – but Penny knew she would have to hide them when Old Walter came in to post his weekly letter to the editor of The Cornish Times. The inhabitants of Port Lowdy were Old Walter’s sober companions and everyone took the role very seriously. Walter was banned from the Black Swan and from the off-licence, and everyone in town knew to not let Walter buy the liquor-filled chocolates at the shops.

  He used to get the bus to Truro and drink. Then Penny spoke to the bus driver, a man whose wife sold a tangy tomato chutney during the summer at the post office. She and the driver were old mates. So now Old Walter could no longer head over to Truro where all too often he ended up in a police cell sleeping it off.

  ‘Morning, Penny,’ she heard and looked up to see Tressa Buckland walking into the store.

  ‘Hello to you, Tressa – lovely day for a bike ride.’

  She liked Tressa. In fact, everyone liked Tressa. Tressa was kind. She had given Penny a stack of old canvases for her little granddaughter who came to stay over the summer holidays, and then spent Saturday mornings with her teaching her how to paint kittens. Really, the paintings were just a mess of mad brushstrokes, but Tressa had claimed genius in the work, and Penny loved her for having been so enthusiastic. Her own father had done a fine job on her, his only child. So Penny knew what it was like to have someone tell you as a child that you weren’t good enough.