What Can Be Saved

Chapter One: The Write-Off

The kitchen had been under eleven inches of water for two days, and the woman who owned it kept apologising for the smell.

"It's not you," Eleanor Howell said. "It's the drains. It's always the drains."

She crouched by the sink unit and pressed her thumb into the chipboard at the base of the cupboard. It gave like wet bread. Behind her, Mrs Sandra— no, Mrs Beeching, second name on the schedule that morning — hovered in the doorway of her own house in a pair of borrowed wellingtons, holding a photograph album she had been carrying around for forty-eight hours because she could not think where to put it down.

"Can it be dried out?" Mrs Beeching asked. "My husband says it can be dried out."

Eleanor stood up. This was the part of the job she was known for, the part her regional director called, admiringly, her bedside manner. She had learned it the way other people learn a language, by living inside it until it came without thinking.

"The floor can be dried out," she said. "The units can't. Chipboard wicks. It will look fine in October and it will smell like a canal in July, and by next spring the doors will drop. If I tell you to dry it out I'll be back here in eighteen months and you'll have paid twice." She wrote three lines on her tablet, then looked up. "I'm going to write off the kitchen. That's not me being kind. That's me being right."

Mrs Beeching's face did something complicated. Relief and grief at the same time, which was the standard expression of Eleanor's working life.

"It was a good kitchen," she said.

"It was." Eleanor unhooked her lanyard and held it out with the photo turned up, an old habit; people trusted a face on a card. "Everything in that album is fine, by the way. You can put it down."

The woman laughed, and then cried a bit, and Eleanor stood in a wrecked kitchen in Bristol and let her, because that was also the job.

By half past two she was back on the ninth floor of Latham Verrell, in the open-plan office with the view of three cranes and a slice of the Avon Gorge, writing the word *uneconomic* eleven times in a document that ran to sixteen pages. She was thirty-seven years old. She was, by every measure her industry recognised, extremely good at this. Her settlement figures held up under scrutiny. Her claimants sent her Christmas cards, which nobody else in the department could say. Roger Batley had told her twice this year that she was the safest pair of hands in the south-west, in the tone of a man complimenting a well-maintained van.

The flat she went home to at night had been half emptied in March. Eleven years with Paul, and the end of it had not been a slammed door but a series of small, reasonable conversations, the last of which had been about whether to put an offer in on a two-bedroom in Redland with a south-facing balcony. She had said, *is that it, though? Is that the next thing?* And he had said, honestly baffled, *what else would the next thing be?*

She had not been able to answer him. That was the part that stung. Not the leaving. The not being able to say what she wanted instead.

Her phone rang at ten past four. Her mother's name on the screen, which meant either a hospital or a birthday.

"Eleanor," said Glenda Howell, and Eleanor was already standing up, walking towards the stairwell, because her mother's voice had gone thin and careful, the voice she used for weather warnings and funerals. "It's Beryl. She died this morning. In her chair, in the flat. Hetty Dunphy found her at half seven when she came up for the key."

Eleanor stopped on the landing between the ninth floor and the eighth. Somebody had left a bicycle wheel chained to the handrail.

"How old was she?" she said. Which was a stupid first question, and she knew the answer.

"Eighty-nine. Eighty-nine and four months." Her mother took a breath. "She'd had her swim on Sunday. Eighty-nine and she'd had her swim on Sunday. In she went off the steps and out she came and told Hetty the water was warmer than last year, and then she sat down in that chair on Tuesday and that was that."

"That's — " Eleanor pressed the heel of her hand against her eyebrow. "That's how she'd have written it herself."

"It is. It absolutely is." A wet laugh. "Funeral's Friday. Eleven o'clock, St Cynin's, and then the wake at the pool because where else. Will you come?"

And there it was, that whole flat calm before the question, and the question underneath the question, which was: *will you come home?*

"Of course I'll come," Eleanor said.

"Only I know you're busy."

"Mam." She had not used the word in months, and it arrived in her mouth like a coin found in a coat pocket. "I'll come Thursday night. I'll stay at the Ship. I'll be there for eleven."

"You could stay here."

"I'll stay at the Ship."

A pause, in which her mother declined, gracefully, to fight. "She left things," Glenda said. "There's a solicitor wants us all in a room. Alun Skerrett. You won't remember him, he did your father's — anyway. Monday. He said the word *beneficiaries* and I said well, there's a word."

"Monday's difficult."

"Everything's difficult, love. I'll tell him you'll be there."

Eleanor stood in the stairwell for a while after the call ended, listening to the building hum.

Beryl Howell had been her father's aunt, which made her Eleanor's great-aunt, which made her, in the strange arithmetic of Trellan, more or less a public utility. She had run the Blue Bowl for forty years. She had lived in the flat above the pavilion with a two-bar heater and a radio permanently tuned to the shipping forecast, and she had taught two generations of children to swim by the simple method of walking into the water beside them and refusing to look worried.

She had also, in the eighteen years since Eleanor's father's funeral, sent a card every single Christmas. Never a letter. Never a reproach. Just a card, always the same kind, a robin or a lighthouse, and inside, in handwriting like barbed wire: *The water was 6 degrees on Boxing Day. Beryl.*

Eleanor had kept every one. She had not once written back.

She went upstairs, sat at her desk, and finished the report on the kitchen. Then she opened her leave calendar, looked at it for a long moment, and booked Friday off.

---

She drove down on the Thursday afternoon in a hired estate car, because her own was in for a clutch, and she left the radio off from Newport onwards.

The motorway peeled away into A-roads and the A-roads narrowed into lanes with grass in the middle, and the light changed the way it always changed on that coast, going wide and silver and slightly cold even in May. She passed the caravan site at Pwll Du with its new plastic gates. She passed the garage where a boy called Trystan Pugh had once put air in her bicycle tyres for nothing and then blushed to the roots of his hair.

She had told herself she was not thinking about that.

At the top of the hill above the town she pulled into the layby, because everybody pulls into the layby, and she got out and stood with her hand on the warm bonnet.

Trellan lay below in its bowl of land: grey roofs, the harbour arm, the church tower, the long white front of the Ship Aground with its hanging baskets. Beyond the last houses the ground rose into the headland at Pen y Bwl, and cut into the rock at the foot of it, where the sea broke and re-broke in slow white ropes, was the lido.

From up here it should have been a perfect blue rectangle. A hundred feet by forty, sunk into the shelf, filled at high tide through a culvert cut by hand in 1925, with a diving stage at the deep end and a curve of pavilion behind it like a shell held to the town's ear.

It was not blue. It was the colour of milky tea. A section of the far wall was wrapped in scaffolding and shrink-wrap. The diving board had been boarded over with plywood and someone had spray-painted DANGER on it in orange.

Eleanor Howell, who had spent fifteen years learning to look at damage without flinching, stood in a layby above her own town and felt something in her chest go quietly and comprehensively out.

"Oh," she said, out loud, to nobody. "Oh, Beryl."