Summer at Shell Cottage (24 page)

He missed her.
He missed her.
Maybe being away wasn’t so bad after all.
Didn’t they always say absence made the heart grow fonder?
She liked thinking of
him pining away for her, unable to concentrate, counting the days till she was home and back in his arms .
.
.

Yeah, yeah, steady on.

As Dexter had said, they were all going down to the beach and Mum had this whole speech planned about how Molly had been indoors the entire morning and it was a beautiful day and she needed to
get fresh air and Vitamin D, and .
.
.
Oh, whatever, Mum – Molly had switched off by that point.
She was in such a good mood about the ‘miss you’ text that she couldn’t be
bothered to argue.
‘All right, all right,’ she said, pulling a face.
‘Don’t give yourself laryngitis, Mum.’
Even fresh air was better than listening to her mother when
she went into one.

Down at the bay, Molly spread out their large turquoise beach towel and frowned through her sunglasses at her phone.
Surprise, surprise: barely any signal.
(Poor Devon teenagers.
How could they
stand it, living here with such crap phone coverage?) She thought longingly of London and Wi-Fi and of messages from Ben piling up in some celestial traffic jam, unable to drop into her phone, and
felt like thumping the sand.
She didn’t but she must have made some noise of exasperation because Mum pushed up her sunglasses to peer sideways at her.
‘Everything all right?’

‘Yes, of course, everything’s completely amazing and spectacular, why wouldn’t it be?’
she replied witheringly, tucking her hair up into a bun before it got loads of sand
in it.
Then she pulled off her T-shirt and shorts to reveal her new white bikini, and flumped onto her front before anyone could see her stomach.
If she had to be down here, she might as well top
up her tan, she supposed.

‘Marvellous,’ Mum said sarcastically.
‘Well, just as long as you’re happy.’
Then she spread out a towel alongside Molly and put her nose in a magazine.

It was only the two of them on the sand right now – the others were already by the water’s edge, pumping up the lilo and a dinghy that Robert had found at the back of the garden
shed.
Molly squinted crossly at her phone and turned the Wi-Fi on then off again in the hope it might encourage her phone to try a bit harder to find some kind of signal.
Yes – two bars!
Thank you, patron saint of heartsick teenagers.
She twisted her head and shoulders sideways, and tilted the phone to shield the screen from prying eyes.
I miss u 2
, she typed, then
added a sadface emoticon.

Her phone buzzed a second later.
Bn thinking about u.

He was thinking about her!
Get in.
She felt her insides turn to liquid, imagining a picture of her face in a thought bubble floating above his head.

What r u thinking??
she typed, feeling giddily, ridiculously happy.

Bzzzz.
About kissing u.
About doing it again.

Her heart pounded.
Her body felt swimmy, as if her blood was rushing through her veins too quickly.
Her fingers flew over the screen.
Mmm.
Sounds good.

What r u wearing?
came his swift reply.

Bikini .
.
.
she typed back recklessly, adding a winking face.
Her mouth quirked in a smile, anticipating his expression as he read it.

‘What are you up to, over there?’
Harriet asked, and Molly jumped.

Shit.
The Motherlord’s bad-daughter radar was obviously working well today.
‘Just chatting with Chlo,’ she said from behind her hair.

Bzzzz.
Send me a photo
, his reply instructed, and Molly felt her body flush with heat.
A photo?
How was she going to get away with that, when she had the Parent Police
less than a metre away?
Unless she rolled onto her side, maybe, but even then – she was lying down, and everyone knew that was, like, the least flattering angle ever for a photo.

A worrying thought struck her.
He did mean a photo of her
face
, didn’t he?
Or was he after some pervy cleavage shot?

‘What’s she up to?’
asked Harriet.

A new text buzzed in.
I’m waiting .
.
.

‘Hmm?’
Molly asked, distracted.

‘Chloe.
What’s she up to, over the summer?
Is she going away, or .
.
.
?’

Molly couldn’t concentrate on the conversation.
‘Um .
.
.
dunno.’
She did know, of course.
She could practically recite Chloe’s diary for the next month ahead, they knew
each other so well.
But all she could think of was Ben’s text.

I’m on the beach!
she typed apologetically in the end.
Surely he’d get the message that she couldn’t just start snapping pictures of –

Bzzzz.
Oh my God.
Her eyes nearly popped out at the photo that had just appeared.
Seriously?
That surely wasn’t what she thought it was.

Her face flamed as she tilted her phone away from her mum’s prying eyes and out of the glare of the sun.
Whoa.
Yes.
It
was
what she’d thought: his pink, swollen .
.
.
Molly’s mouth went dry.
His willy.
His tackle.
His tent pole.
Oh God, she didn’t even know what she should call it.
Penis sounded like you were in a biology lesson.
Willy was a word
that five-year-olds used.
Knob?
Cock?
She and Chloe had once giggled over a film where the female characters had referred to one male character’s .
.
.
equipment .
.
.
as his schlong.
It had
been a running joke between them for a while; they’d both used it as their new favourite insult.
‘What a total schlong,’ Chloe would mutter about Mr Dobson, the deputy head,
whenever he bollocked them about their skirts being too short.
‘He is such a schlong-head,’ Molly might moan about Jackson West, an annoying boy in the year above, who was always
squeezing girls’ bums when they went by in the corridor.

She imagined herself typing
Nice schlong
back to Ben and a hysterical giggle rose in her throat.
No way.
She couldn’t.
But what should she do?

‘Molls, have you got any suncream on?’
her mum asked just then, and the phone slipped out of her sweaty fingers, landing on the towel.

No.
Don’t look, Mum.
Help.
Quick.
She snatched it up and closed the image, her breath hard and fast in her lungs.
Bloody hell.
Lying on a beach could be surprisingly
stressful.

‘Mollypops?
Speak to me.
Shall I put some cream on your back for you?’

She didn’t care about suncream.
She didn’t care if the sun fried her skin to the colour and texture of crispy bacon.
She quickly typed
gtg
– got to go –
and turned off her phone before things got any more complicated.
‘Yes please, Mum,’ she said.

Harriet came over and knelt beside her, rubbing lukewarm coconut-scented cream into her back and shoulders.
All Molly could think about was the photo, though.
That pale, thick penis rising from
the forest of dark hair.
It was freaking her out.
It actually made her feel a bit scared.
She had been innocently thinking about holding Ben’s hand and kissing, gazing into one
another’s eyes.
Schlong photos were another thing altogether.

‘It’s a lot easier to do this now you’re grown-up,’ Harriet said, rubbing circles into Molly’s shoulders before smearing the last of the cream down the tops of her
arms.
‘There.
All done.’
She laughed.
‘Dear God, the palaver of getting suncream on you when you were little.
I had to chase you round the flat before you’d let me put any
on.
Do you remember?’

Molly smiled faintly but for some mad reason her mum’s words made her want to cry all of a sudden.
They made her want to be a little girl again, squirming out of her mother’s reach,
shrieking that the cream was too cold, too ticklish.
Back then, that was all she had to worry about.
‘Yeah,’ she said, an unexpected lump in her throat.
‘I remember.’

And now Ben probably thought she was a little girl too, abruptly ending the conversation as soon as he pinged his naked penis into her inbox – so to speak.
How uncool she was.
How prim and
proper.
He probably thought she was frigid, and being a fridge came a close second to being a Klingon in terms of undesirability everyone knew that.

Molly didn’t mean to give such a heavy sigh as her mum moved back to her own towel, but she must have done because then Mum was pushing up her sunglasses again and staring at her.
‘Are you sure everything’s all right, love?’

And oh, how she wanted to tell her.
Oh, how she wanted to ask so many things.
(Did they all look like that?
Was sex really painful?
How should you reply when someone sent you a schlong photo?)
But in the next moment Libby ran up, screaming and dripping water everywhere – ‘Hide me!
Hide me!’
– because Dex was charging up the beach after her, his arms laden with
wet, slimy seaweed, and the moment vanished.

Up jumped Mum, dropping her magazine onto the sand – ‘Don’t you dare!
Libby, get behind me!’
– and then she and Libby and Dexter were all laughing and running
around on the sand together.
Part of Molly wanted to join in too but then she thought of Ben, and what he might say if he saw her racing around squealing with the others.
He really would think she
was a baby, then.
Maybe she should seize the opportunity to take a quick cleavage photo to send back to him instead?

She hesitated, not really wanting to.
No boy had ever seen her bare breasts before; she didn’t want the first time Ben saw them to be on the screen of his phone.
It wasn’t very
romantic, was it?
And what if he thought they were a bit .
.
.
weird, or something?
Too small.
Too girlish.
It might put him off her.
He might laugh about the picture.
He might even show his mates
and snigger.
But if she didn’t text him a photo, then he might think she wasn’t interested.
Maybe she should just bite the bullet, get it over with .
.
.

Splat!
All of a sudden, something wet and slimy landed on her back.
Shrieking in shock and horror, she leapt up to see Robert – bloody Robert!
– pelting away from her with a big,
dumb grin on his face.
Ben forgotten, she abandoned her phone and set off in pursuit.
She’d worry about what to do later on.

At last, Harriet thought, as she traipsed up the sandy steps back to the house later on, a rolled windbreak under one arm and a canvas bag full of sandy towels in the other.
A
lovely afternoon on the beach where everyone seemed happy.
Robert was laughing again.
Freya had thrown herself into a game of beach cricket for the first time all holiday, and miraculously Molly
had actually put down her phone for five minutes and joined in too.
Nicest of all was when Olivia appeared on the sand with a box of ice lollies for them, to be enthusiastically mobbed by the whole
family.
Harriet had almost forgotten what her mother-in-law looked like with a smile on her face.
A tremulous smile admittedly, and a wan face, but still.
This was progress.

The bombshell about Alec had been so devastating that Harriet could foresee the reverberations continuing for weeks to come but after several subdued days when Robert, Freya and Olivia all had
faces as grey as the overcast sky, she felt as if they were now picking themselves up again, and peering around the scorched ground to see what was left of their lives.
Besides, there was something
about being back on a beach with kids that made everyone remember how to have fun.
However deflated you might be feeling, by the time you’d had a seaweed fight, lilo races, beach cricket and
helped with the construction of a huge sand fortress complete with an intricate set of moats, it was almost impossible not to feel the blackness lifting away like gulls on the breeze.

Later on, she and Robert had swum out to the point together and floated on their backs, saying nothing for a while.
The sea was cool and deep but the sun warmed their faces, casting broken
streaks of light across the water as they lay there companionably.
‘It’s going to be all right, you know,’ Harriet ventured after a few minutes had gone by, and he reached out
through the water and took her hand, squeezing her fingers in gratitude.

It
would
be all right.
Of course it would.
Harriet hadn’t survived years of single motherhood by being a pessimist.
It’ll Be All Right
would be carved on her
gravestone, she had said the words to herself and her loved ones so often.
We’ve got each other.
We’ll get by.
If you kept on telling yourself, you did actually start believing
it in the end, even though you might be down on your luck with mice scratching beneath the floorboards and mould sprouting on the wall.
Even when – in Robert’s case – your father
turned out to be a bit of a shit, and not Captain Awesome after all.
If years of social work had taught Harriet anything, it was that human beings were often way more resilient than they thought.
People could get through extraordinary times of stress with the support of loved ones.

The worst was over, Harriet thought, as she pushed open the gate that led into the garden.
The truth about Alec was out and even though it would take them all time to get over the shock, to
recalibrate the family lines in a different shape, at least they were here together for another week, and could lean against each other for that time.
With a bit of luck, there would be no further
dramas, and everyone could take a breath and regroup.
And at least they were in the most blissful surroundings for some rest and recuperation.
Silver linings .
.
.

Back in the house, everyone scattered.
Olivia announced that she was going to cook dinner that evening, having bought some fresh fish and salad earlier.
She was even going to dig up some new
potatoes from the garden, having abandoned her vegetable patch for the entire holiday so far.
(More progress.
Good for you, Olivia
, Harriet thought, seeing her heading off purposefully
with the garden fork.) Victor took charge of carting all the beach equipment over to the shed, Molly vanished off upstairs, glued to her phone again and Robert bagsied the first shower.
Meanwhile
the younger children played on the lawn together, Libby arranging the shells she’d collected in size and colour order, while Dexter and Ted gently tipped up the bucket they’d brought
from the rock pools, releasing a couple of crabs to begin a sideways scuttling race.
‘Make sure they go back to the beach later on,’ Freya called, seeing them.
‘Or they might end
up in Granny’s cooking pot.’

Harriet and Freya busied themselves shaking the worst of the sand off the towels and hanging up wet swimming costumes to dry.
The sun was still warm in the garden, even though it was almost five
o’clock, and Harriet loved the sensation of it on her bare arms.
She breathed in the scent of suncream and seawater, mingled with the fragrance of Olivia’s yellow velvety roses and the
white trumpet-shaped nicotiana flowers which gave out such a glorious evening perfume.
The smell of summer, she thought cheerfully.
If only it could be bottled, she would wear it year-round.

Fair-skinned Freya had a newly sun-pinked nose, Harriet noticed, and a mass of freckles on her face and shoulders.
Her hair was frizzy from the sea, and fell around her face like a blonde
candyfloss cloud.
They hadn’t had the opportunity to chat much recently but she had noticed Freya had kept to her word about being on the wagon.
She looked less haggard for it too.

‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ said Harriet, when the last pegs were snapped into place.
‘Fancy a brew?’

‘Definitely,’ said Freya.
‘That would be great.’

No sooner had they stepped inside, though, than Robert’s phone began ringing from where he had left it on the worktop on his way up to the shower.

‘I’d better get that,’ Harriet said, ‘just in case it’s something important.
Probably Hollywood calling about film rights or something.
I’ll see if I can
wangle us two parts as extras, Freya.
Be right back.’
She pressed the answer button and walked quickly out of the room, into the dingy cool of the snug.
‘Hello, Robert’s
phone?’

‘Is that Robert Tarrant?’

‘Er .
.
.
no.’
Harriet pulled an are-you-serious?
face into the mirror above the mantelpiece.
Did she sound like a man?
‘It’s his wife.
Can I take a message for
him?’

‘Sure.
It’s Nick from YourBook International.
He left a message, wanting a quote for self-publishing his novel?
If you could just tell him – have you got a pen there?
–
that we would charge the following fees.
For the complete package – editorial work, cover design, formatting – our prices start at .
.
.’

Harriet, hunting around for a pen, stopped short, suddenly confused by what this man was on about.
Charges?
Prices?
He must have got it wrong.
‘Wait.
Hang on.
Someone else is publishing
it,’ she explained.
‘And
they’re
paying
him.
He’s already sold it around the world!’

There was a pause and the man gave a little embarrassed-sounding cough.
Yeah, and you should be embarrassed, pal
, Harriet thought, shaking her head.
It had to be some kind of scam, and
she’d just caught the guy out.
Fees indeed.
Wait till she told Robert!

‘Sorry, maybe I’ve made a mistake,’ the man said in the next moment.
Harriet could hear him clicking something.
‘Robert Tarrant?
Seymour Street in London N2?
Yeah.
He
contacted me a few days ago and we chatted through some options.
I’m going to put all of this in an email if that’s easier, only I thought, having spoken in person yesterday,
I—’

Harriet frowned.
This was too weird.
Robert had phoned the guy?
She must have missed something crucial here.
‘Oh, sorry.
So .
.
.
you’re from the publishers, then?’
she
guessed.
‘Or the literary agency?’

Another pause.
‘We’re a reputable self-publishing firm,’ he said, as if speaking to a particularly stupid child.
‘We’ve been established for three years, and have
lots of very satisfied customers.’

Customers.
Now they were back to fees and charges again.
So how did that work?
Surely the author wasn’t a
customer
?
Robert was being paid shedloads of money, he had told her,
promising holidays to America and a new car, just as soon as the first portion walloped into the bank account.
So why was this man talking about prices and packages and customers?
‘I think
I’d better get him to ring you back,’ she said in the end, defeated.
She finished the call and sank into the nearest armchair, the dusty velvet tickling the backs of her bare legs.
Something wasn’t right here.
She felt as discombobulated as she had standing outside the closed-up Marylebone Tavern the other week.
The story didn’t quite stack up.

Her gaze fell to Robert’s phone, still warm in her hand, and her skin prickled with the sense that something fishy was going on.
Harriet did not like being made to feel a fool.

The phone buzzed just then, making her jump, and she glanced down to see that a new email had arrived.
Nick from YourBook International
, she read – the man
she’d just spoken to, from the self-publishing firm.
She clicked on it before she could stop herself.
One can of worms, open for business.

Dear Mr Tarrant, Thank you for your email
, blah blah.
She skimmed through it, wincing at the prices he was quoting, until she reached Robert’s original email
below.
As she saw his email address followed by the subject line
Self-publishing query
, her hands began to shake.

She shouldn’t be reading his private emails.
This was not her business.
She should stop right there, take her beak out, switch the phone off.

Yeah, but actually
, a voice inside her head pointed out,
it is your business if there’s something dodgy going on.
It’s absolutely your business if he’s stringing
you along.
Wouldn’t you say?

She looked away, not wanting to believe he had been keeping secrets from her.
He wasn’t that type.
Was he?

She cocked an ear as she heard the boiler rumble off, and guessed he must have just stepped out of the shower.
He’d be towelling himself dry now and throwing on some clean clothes.
Give it
a minute and he’d be running downstairs to see what everyone else was up to.
If she was going to read his email, she’d have to hurry up about it.

It was now or never.
Now?
Never?

Sod it, she decided impulsively.
She was going to look.
Look and be damned.
She scrolled down, her eyes skimming through the words, fast and guilty.

‘There you are!
I was wondering where you’d got to.
Here, this is from Freya.’

Harriet jumped as Robert walked into the room, bearing two steaming mugs of tea.
He was wearing shorts and a clean white T-shirt, and his hair was damp around his face.
With the guilt of being
caught spying on him, her hands gave an inadvertent jerk and the phone slipped out of her fingers and into the velvety depths of the armchair.

‘Is everything all right?’
Robert asked, setting down the mugs and perching on the edge of her chair.
His solid, muscular thigh pressed against her arm and she flinched away.
Do
not touch me.

‘You had a phone call,’ she said, her tongue feeling thick in her mouth.
Here goes nothing
, she thought, her fingers clenching in her lap.
Here goes marriage number
two.
‘A man from a self-publishing company.
He wanted to give you some quotes, how much it will cost to have them produce your book.’