A Summer Scandal: The perfect summer read by the author of One Day in December

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 this pier,’ she said. ‘Is it open to the public?’

Della laughed softly. ‘It used to be.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t even know if it’s still standing, Violet. I haven’t been back there in almost forty years. It’s probably crumbled into the sea by now.’

Even though Violet had only known of the pier at Swallow Beach for a few hours, the idea of it no longer being there filled her with dismay. She wanted to see it, to walk beneath it and find those rock pools, to hopefully walk the length of it and try to connect with the woman who’d fallen in love with it all those years ago.

‘That apartment.’ Della shook her head, talking softly to herself more than Violet. ‘I can’t believe he never sold it.’

‘He didn’t need the money to come home?’

Della shook her head. ‘Dad’s business paid well back then. Besides, the house next door belonged to his mum, my gran. We moved in with her when we came back after …’ She paused, struggling to say it out loud even after so many years. ‘And then we stayed here after we lost my gran a few years later.’

There wasn’t a picture of the Swallow Beach seafront mansion block in the album, but from the way her mum described it Violet was desperate to go and lay eyes on it for herself. Three storeys, graceful picture bay windows, sweeping staircases. It was an impossibly romantic story, and it sliced straight through Violet’s soft heart and ignited her thirst for adventure. Perhaps that was a gift from her grandmother too; adventure certainly wasn’t a trait displayed by either of her parents. Her mum didn’t go anywhere without making at least three lists first, and her father had a special book in his study drawer for plans. Not to mention the fact that they’d shared the surname Spencer even before they married; it was a standing joke that her mum had chosen her dad mostly because she wouldn’t need to change her maiden name on her passport.

Violet pulled the jumble of keys slowly towards her. ‘Why have I never heard about any of this before, Mum?’

‘Your grandpa didn’t like to talk about it,’ Della said. The stiff set of her jaw suggested that Henry wasn’t the only one who preferred to leave Monica’s memory in the past.

‘But why?’ Violet knew she was pushing too hard, but it just didn’t make any sense. Her grandparents had clearly been very in love, and obviously Monica’s death must have profoundly affected both Henry and his young daughter, but it was as if they’d tried to wipe her from their memories rather than celebrate her existence.

Della sighed. ‘I was eight years old, Vi. My mum left the apartment after dinner and never came home.’ A tear ran down her cheek. ‘It was a huge scandal at the time, things like that don’t happen in Swallow Beach.’

Violet stared at her mum. ‘What happened to her?’

Della raised her eyes to the kitchen ceiling, concentrating on the light as if she needed something to fixate on.

‘She was found on the beach by an early morning walker, someone out looking for treasure washed up on the dawn tide.’ Her face was drawn, remembering. ‘They didn’t expect to find a body washed up amongst the shells and loose change.’

Violet drew in a sharp breath. ‘Do you think she …?’

It was a few seconds before Della met her daughter’s anxious gaze. ‘I don’t know, love. All I know is that we left Swallow Beach within days and Dad never spoke her name again.’

Reaching across the table, Violet squeezed her mum’s hand. She’d never seen her look so troubled; the morning’s revelations had taken a heavy toll. Gathering the letters and keys together, she tucked them back inside the envelope and closed the album.

‘Let’s not think about it any more right now,’ she said, setting them aside. They were all so desperately sad about Henry’s death; this extra layer of murk and mystery suddenly felt like too much to handle right at that moment. ‘It’s waited all of these years. A few more days won’t hurt.’

But even as Violet said it, her fingers lingered on the worn leather edge of the photograph album, desperate to know more about Monica Spencer, the grandmother she was the living image of.

CHAPTER TWO (#u57291a77-a29f-55e7-afa5-22124fdd8f8c)

‘Will you marry me?’

Violet stared at Simon, on his knees in the local Indian restaurant that evening. To say his proposal had come as a surprise was an understatement; she couldn’t have imagined that anything could top the shock of that morning’s revelations. She hadn’t even had time to fill Simon in on all of that yet; her letter from her grandpa lay in her handbag at her feet. She’d planned to show him over dinner, but she’d barely had time to order a glass of wine in the Taj Star before Simon pulled a diamond solitaire from his jacket pocket and dropped down on bended knee.

It came as something of a shock; they’d been together for over a year now but marriage was something they’d never even spoken about, and in truth not something that she’d contemplated. She’d just turned twenty-five; too young in her own head for a ring on her finger or a new surname to wrap her head around or a husband to sleep with each night.

It wasn’t that Simon wasn’t husband material; he was perfectly nice and ticked most, if not all, of the boyfriend boxes. Dependable? Tick. Kind? Tick. Humorous? Almost a tick; it wasn’t that Simon didn’t have sense of humour, it was more that he was so logical that irreverent humour either went over his head or left him cold. He’d opt for Panorama over The Inbetweeners, a fact that fun-loving Violet had found out early on; subsequently she’d chosen not to spend many cosy nights in front of the box with him. If they went to the movies it was either his choice or hers; the only movie they’d ever been equally enthusiastic about seeing was 300, albeit for wildly different reasons. Simon was a history buff, and Vi had a thing for Gerard Butler. They had other things in common, of course, and her parents loved what Simon represented in Vi’s life: a safe pair of hands. He was an all-round decent man, unlikely to bring heartache to Vi’s door, not the type to eye up the girls at work or run up secret bills playing late-night poker. Violet sometimes thought he was more like her parents than she was.