Summer at Shell Cottage Read online

  She was in a rented villa with six female friends and, as sheer bountiful luck would have it, the neighbouring villa was stuffed full of six English blokes. ‘Happy holidays all round,’ her friend Becky whistled, the afternoon they arrived, leaning out of the window to gawp into the grounds next door. ‘Take your pick, ladies.’

  Freya fancied dark, Latin-blooded Vic from the off, spying from the balcony as he dived into the next-door pool. He was the best diver by far, with his broad back and athletic body, and watching him plunge into the water left her deliciously shivery. She and her friends took it upon themselves to go next door with a neighbourly bottle of tequila that evening, and all twelve of them chatted and laughed together long into the night. The next day they teamed up again to hire motorbikes and explore the local area and by dint of good fortune (and admittedly some jostling with her friend Cathy, who also fancied him), Freya wangled a ride with Victor. Sitting behind him, knees gripping his body, feeling the engine throbbing beneath her as they wheeled around dusty coastal roads, the scent of rosemary, lavender and hot tarmac in her nose … it was one of the most exhilarating and downright erotic experiences of her life.

  The first time he kissed her was a few evenings later when all twelve of them traipsed down en masse to the small town nearby, for pizza and cheap carafes of red wine. Afterwards the others left to investigate a local band the waiter had tipped them off about, but Freya and Victor exchanged a secret glance and said they’d stay for one last drink before catching up. The sky was violet-blue, darkness gradually filling in the edges, and Freya felt heady with lust and sunshine and too much red wine. They were laughing about something – she had no idea what, now, maybe Vic’s terrible French accent which he kept putting on to crack her up – and then the atmosphere shifted, and the evening felt suspended, suddenly, as if everything else around them had melted away.

  ‘Freya,’ he said softly, and her name sounded like a poem on his lips. Then they were leaning towards each other, and his lips grazed hers – softer than she’d expected – and it was as if she’d fallen head first into him, into his kiss, his arms, his very being, as their bodies pressed together. Electricity seemed to tingle all around her; her blood thrummed, her nerve endings quivered in ecstasy. She felt like Sleeping Beauty, awoken with a single kiss, after all those wasted years of cocky med school boyfriends.

  Afterwards, as they drew apart, the world seemed to have changed up a gear: the colours were more vivid and dazzling, the very air around them was charged with passion, and her heart was thumping with joy and excitement.

  ‘Do that again,’ she had demanded, half laughing, but giddy too, with the shock that one man could have such a physical effect on her entire body – on the entire world around her! She was a scientist, a doctor – she thought she knew the human form and all its vagaries. But she had never felt like that before.

  She thought about all of this as she drove to the childminder’s after work, both because she was desperate to see her husband again after his fortnight away, and also because she was horribly aware of how much the two of them had changed since that first summer. Three children and house moves and work stress later, the holiday in France seemed like a mirage these days, a dream; something that had happened to a more carefree person who was game for anything. Look at her now – in trouble at work, a bad-tempered mother, too exhausted for sex, several stone heavier … When was the last time they had kissed like that, with such rampant desire? Did Vic ever look back and wonder what it would have been like if he’d chosen Cathy instead, or another woman altogether?

  Parking outside the childminder’s, she gave herself a talking-to before getting out of the car. Come on, Freya. Pull yourself together. Victor the conquering hero was on his way home to them, right now. She had to make sure he was glad to be back.

  ‘Sir Dextrous! Lady Libby-Loo! And the Tedster! Come here. I’ve missed you guys!’

  The minute Victor walked through the front door, the children leapt on him like wild animals and he hauled them all up off their feet in a huge bearlike embrace, even though Dex was well over five foot these days. ‘Cor, look at you lovely lot. Everyone all right?’

  ‘Did you bring any presents?’ asked Libby without answering the question. ‘Oh, Dad, I’ve got a really cool joke for you. Knock, knock. Dad – knock, knock!’

  ‘Did you get to wear riot gear?’ Dexter wanted to know.

  ‘Did you fight any more stabbers?’ Teddy asked ghoulishly, bouncing up and down.

  ‘Dad, knock, knock!’

  ‘Who’s there?’ Vic replied. ‘Ted, gently, mate.’

  ‘Needap,’ said Libby. ‘Dad! Are you listening? Needap!’

  Freya, who had just slid the joint of beef out of the oven to rest – she had done a full roast, Victor’s favourite – felt her spirits lift at the excited clamour of voices. Thank goodness he was home! She had missed him so much. Everything seemed to have gone wrong without him there, propping her up. ‘Hi, love,’ she said, shucking off the oven gloves and hurrying over to join the group hug. ‘Welcome back.’

  ‘Hey! Great to see you,’ he said, leaning in to kiss her, the children still swinging from him. ‘Something smells good. I’m starving.’

  ‘You smell good,’ she replied, pressing against him. ‘I’m so glad you’re home. We’ve missed you, haven’t we, kids?’

  ‘Dad, Needap!’ Libby said again insistently.

  ‘Needap who?’ Victor replied and all the children fell about laughing.

  ‘Go to the toilet then!’ Libby told him in delight. ‘Go to the toilet, Dad, if you need a poo!’

  He laughed too, feigning outrage. ‘You naughty little madam. I’m shocked, Libby Castledine. Shocked!’

  ‘So are there any presents?’ asked Teddy, who could be relied upon to repeat questions as doggedly as the Gestapo, especially if presents or sweets were involved. The boy was a shoo-in for a doorstepping journalist one day, make no doubt about it. ‘Presents, Dad!’

  ‘Let him take his shoes off, kids,’ Freya scolded, although she wasn’t really cross. She smiled at Victor, so handsome and real and there in the hall once more, albeit currently under siege from their offspring. It was probably easier facing down a full-scale riot. ‘So you enjoyed it, then – the course?’ she asked. ‘It was worth doing?’

  ‘It was brilliant. We had such a laugh. Some of the lads there …’ He grinned and then promptly stopped talking as if the rest of the sentence was not suitable for the ears of children. ‘But we learned loads too. And yes, Dex, we did have to wear riot gear, and long shields, and practise rescuing people from dangerous situations …’

  ‘Cool!’

  ‘What about the—’

  ‘Yes, Ted, I did have time to pick up a few little somethings. Now, where are they?’

  ‘Can I have a big something?’ Teddy asked, still capering about with demented zeal. ‘Can I have the biggest?’

  Freya went back in the kitchen to check on the Yorkshire puddings and make gravy. ‘I thought we could make a proper evening of it,’ she said as Victor came in, passing him a just-opened beer. ‘I’ve done a roast and all the trimmings, there’s an apple crumble for afters, the fridge is full of booze and there are four episodes of The Walking Dead saved up for us to watch. I didn’t sneak so much as a minute of it without you,’ she added proudly. In short, she had lined up the perfect night for them both. Melanie who? Elizabeth who? She would not even think about them.

  But to her dismay, Vic was shuffling his feet and not looking her in the eye. ‘Oh, mate – I thought I told you?’ he said.

  Mate? Since when had he started calling her ‘mate’? She had a bad feeling all of a sudden. ‘Told me what?’

  ‘I said I’d go out with the boys tonight. It’s Tony’s birthday and he …’ Victor looked bashful. ‘Well, he kind of wants me there as his guest of honour, he said.’ An uneasy few seconds passed. ‘I thought you knew.’

  Freya shook her head. ‘No.’ She might have been distracte
d recently, but she was pretty sure she’d have remembered her husband telling her he was going straight out the very same night he came home after two weeks away.

  ‘Shit. Sorry. But … well, we’re going on holiday tomorrow, aren’t we? And we’re going to spend the whole fortnight together. Yeah?’

  The gravy was blurring before her eyes and she blinked, desperately trying not to cry in front of him. She needn’t have worried. He had turned his attention to his phone, laughing at some text or other that had just come in. ‘You nutter,’ he said affectionately, typing a reply. ‘This bloke on the course, Dave, funniest geezer I’ve ever met.’

  Freya opened her mouth to respond but found she didn’t actually feel like asking about Dave the geezer or hearing any hilarious stories. She stirred the gravy grimly, trying to convince herself it didn’t matter, and that he was right, it was only one more night. No worries, mate. Whatever.

  It was only much later on, when he’d vanished out again in his favourite shirt and clean jeans, and the children were upstairs in bed, that she put her head in her hands and allowed herself to cry softly in the silence of the empty kitchen.

  Then she opened the celebratory champagne she’d bought specially, and drank the whole bottle herself.

  The next morning brought with it a particularly vile hangover – a decidedly crap way in which to pack for one’s holiday. Freya could vaguely remember a time when she had planned holiday packing far in advance, with much consideration and attention to detail – laying outfits on the bed in order to put together a ‘capsule wardrobe’, as the magazine articles advised, picking out jewellery, make-up, shoes for all occasions, several bikinis, toiletries in special fun-sized bottles …

  That was back then, though, when she had time and head space to think about herself, and herself alone. So far, this year’s abysmal packing list read as follows:

  Clothes

  Beach stuff

  Swimming costumes

  Paracetamol

  Which was a sorry state of affairs in anyone’s book.

  Victor – rather annoyingly – had leapt out of bed at eight that morning, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, despite not crashing in until the early hours. Superman that he was, he had gone out for bacon and eggs, then proceeded to cook an enormous fried breakfast for the whole family. Now he and Dexter had headed off to fill the car with petrol and check the tyres at the garage while Freya set to work bundling the children’s clothes into suitcases, cajoling Libby into packing the books and toys she might want to take and trying not to combust with exasperation when she saw that Teddy had turned his bedroom upside down looking for some long-lost dinosaur figures.

  Deep breaths. Relax. Only calm, serene thoughts permitted from here on in, she told herself. On holiday the sun would shine and turn her pale skin from milk-white to double cream – the soft gold of muscovado sugar if she was really lucky. The fresh air would help her sleep deeply for once and she might finally shed those eye bags while she was at it. She would swim in the sea every day until her muscles ached. And you never knew, she and Vic might actually manage a proper conversation too for a change.

  Libby burst into the room just then, wearing a red polka-dot swimming costume, a Hello Kitty woolly hat, rollerskates and some enormous purple sunglasses, and whirled around in a wobbly circle. ‘READY!’ she cheered. ‘Ready for the holiday, Mum!’

  Despite her previous despondency, Freya burst out laughing. She caught hold of her daughter’s middle and rolled her closer in for a cuddle. Never mind her troubles. They would shortly be heading off to wonderful Shell Cottage and getting away from it all. She couldn’t wait to see Mum and spend some relaxing time together. (Mum must be really relaxed, seeing as she hadn’t responded to any of Freya’s calls or texts the previous week.) Deep breaths, calm thoughts, she reminded herself. As soon as she reached Silver Sands, she’d switch her phone off too – and her worries, while she was at it.

  It was all going to be absolutely fine. It was.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Olivia didn’t know it was possible to experience such desolation. Since the bombshell of her husband’s betrayal had detonated so devastatingly, she had felt hollowed out, numb with agony, and more alone than ever before.

  Another woman. Another child! Another whole secret life behind her back, sneaking down to Devon on pretence of writing weekends. His charade of needing to be alone every summer so as to read through and work on his new novel in peace and quiet! Had he even been on all those foreign book tours he’d claimed, or was he here the whole time, sleeping with this other woman, raising this other son, in her beloved house?

  She could hardly function with shock. It was as if he had punched a hole right through her heart. As a husband, Alec had been the most loving of men. As a father, he’d been tender and doting. One of her favourite ever photos showed him gazing down at newly born Freya, nestled in his arms, with a look of complete wonder and adoration. She couldn’t bear the thought of him feeling like that about somebody else’s child. That boy. In some ways it was even worse than him sleeping with another woman. Weren’t Freya and Robert enough for him? Hadn’t she been enough as his wife?

  As for Katie, doe-eyed, thirty-something Katie, ‘their angel’ as Olivia had always laughingly called her – the devil, more like – she could go to hell, along with that son of hers. The son of hers, Leo, who was the mystery beneficiary in Alec’s will, of course. And there she’d been, innocently assuming it was a great friend of her husband’s, some beloved colleague in the publishing world. Oh, Olivia! Silly Olivia. What will we do with you?

  Alec, Katie and Leo. Their own little family a secret side-shoot branching off the main stem. Katie, who was two years younger than their own daughter. Katie, the housekeeper, who’d gone above and beyond her job description when it came to extra-marital duties performed for the master of the house. Katie, who had stood there in the kitchen – Olivia’s kitchen, thank you very much! – weeping inconsolably, sobbing that she never got to say goodbye, that Leo had been left without a father, that she’d loved him so much. Olivia had felt precisely nothing at the sight of such unchecked emotion. If anything, her heart had frozen over, glistening with ice crystals.

  ‘I thought he’d gone quiet on me because of the new book,’ Katie snivelled. ‘I had no idea that … that he was dead!’

  Olivia had heard enough. She could not stand there a second longer and listen to this woman speak about her husband as if she had any kind of claim on him. As if she had any right to grieve! ‘Get out,’ she roared. ‘Get out of my house. I never want to see either of you again. Have I made myself clear?’

  They went, both crying, the door banging shut behind them, and Olivia sank into the kitchen chair, put her head in her hands and burst into hot, gulping tears of her own. No. Not Alec. How could he? How could he?

  Three days later, and the scene had barely changed. Her emotions may have fluctuated between shock, rage, heartbreak and despair, but the tears seemed to have flowed almost ceaselessly. Now and then she would drag herself from the chair in order to eat or sleep or make another pot of tea, but it would only take a glance at something beloved and familiar – the red knitted jumble-sale tea cosy that Alec had worn on his head during a silly dressing-up evening; the watercolour of Bantham beach he’d given her ten years ago as an anniversary present; the apple tree in the garden they’d planted as a sapling, which bore basketfuls of fruit every September – and the pain would come tearing back.

  Olivia had never believed in any kind of afterlife yet found herself doing things that would deliberately annoy her dead husband were he to see her now. She drank red wine straight from the bottle and made a point of not wiping up the drops that spilled on the pine table. She took his favourite green coffee mug and hurled it out of the back door so that it smashed into a satisfying number of shards on the patio. She took a saw to the apple tree, her fingers blistering as she hacked it down and then burned it, leaving only a broken stump. And she threw his batte
red old panama hat far out to sea – even if she did then have a stab of conscience about ocean pollution afterwards and ended up wading in to retrieve it. She contented herself by trampling the crown of the hat into submission, the straw splintering beneath her feet, then shoving it down into the fetid depths of the dustbin. So there, Alec. That’s what I think of you and your stupid hat. And good riddance to you both!

  By the end of the week, she had reached the point of numbness. She was all out of emotional energy and could no longer feel a thing. A letter appeared through the door one morning addressed to her in Katie’s handwriting but she deliberately didn’t open it, not wishing to reignite all those exhausting emotions. Instead, she walked for miles along the coastal path, barely noticing the scenery, just needing to get out, away from the house and everything that reminded her of Alec. She ignored the elegant skirts and summer blouses in her wardrobe and took to roaming the cliffs in a pair of ancient cut-off jeans, and an old surfing T-shirt of Robert’s she’d found in his bedroom. She stopped brushing her hair and twisted the long silvery strands up into a messy chignon, fastened in place with one of Libby’s butterfly clips, left behind at Easter. Who cared what she looked like any more? She didn’t. She didn’t care about anything.

  It came as a shock to return from a long hike one day to see a dark green Peugeot parked outside Shell Cottage and to hear children’s high-pitched voices in the garden. It took her a moment to realize that the car belonged to Freya, and the children were actually Dexter, Libby and Teddy. Goodness – was it really the weekend already? She had lost track of time, forgetting that the rest of her family were due to descend for their summer break.

  Her mind raced, picturing the house room by room, and how it must have appeared to Freya and Victor as they arrived. She had left the dirty crockery to pile up abandoned in the sink for days now. There were a lot of empty wine bottles too. The broken mug was still there in pieces on the patio, making her snarl with triumph every time she saw it, but now she imagined her precious grandchildren cutting their small pink feet on the smashed shards and felt terrible. Had she even opened the living room curtains that morning? The house probably stank too. Yesterday she had treated herself to a packet of cigarettes for the first time in years and had smoked almost all of them, enjoying the sensation of blowing plumes of curling smoke into the darkening sky. She could just imagine little Libby’s jaw dropping and the scandalized ‘Granny!’ when she saw all the discarded butts.