Summer at Shell Cottage (9 page)

Of course – wouldn’t you just know it – Dexter had spent his whole childhood as if he had some kind of death wish.
He was the boy at nursery who managed to scramble out of the
window, landing in a shrub outside with a soft, surprised thump.
He was the boy who would race nimbly to the top of the highest climbing frame in any playground, shout, ‘Hey, Mum, catch
me!’
and throw himself off, with Freya almost having a coronary each time she had to hurtle to catch him.
He was the boy who’d always answer a dare, who’d jump off the shed roof
because he was bored, who’d skateboard on the ramps with all the teenagers.
By dint of sheer good luck, he’d somehow made it through twelve years of robust good health and become a
clever, sporty boy, albeit one with a new proclivity for hurling his dinner around, it appeared.

She’d lived through all that fear and dread, though, she remembered now, kneeling down on the kitchen floor to pick up the spilled food.
The scars of the special baby unit would be there
on her heart for ever after.
So when, she wondered, had she become so hardened to another new mother in a panic, another woman experiencing the same sort of anxiety?
She’d fobbed off Melanie
with casual reassurances last week because she couldn’t wait to get rid of her, so desperate was she to go home and drown her own sorrows.
And now poor, tiny Ava Taylor was struggling to
breathe on a ventilation unit at the children’s ward, her chest concave with effort, her lips turning blue.
(Freya
had
listened to baby Ava’s chest, though, that day.
She had!
And yes, she’d been distracted, but she would have noticed a wheeze or shortness of breath, wouldn’t she?
Wouldn’t she?)

If only Vic was home right now to talk to.
It wasn’t the sort of thing you could bring up on the phone, not when his new course-mates were calling things to him in the background and she
had the nagging feeling he wasn’t listening properly.
Without him around, she was left to sink into paranoia, with fears of official warnings, talk of negligence, her spotless record being
tarnished, all battering her confidence.

Is everything all right, Freya?
came the voice of Elizabeth, her boss, in her head.
I know you’ve recently lost your father, but .
.
.

Oh, go away, Elizabeth.
I’m fine, all right?
I am absolutely bloody fine!

She began wiping the dark smeary sauce from the lino, still on her knees.
It seemed that it wasn’t only her career she was failing at these days, it was motherhood too.
The meal just now
had been a prime example.
Maybe it was end-of-term fatigue, but the children had all been pushing the boundaries lately, defiant in the face of her half-arsed mothering.
Four more days and
they’d be off to Shell Cottage, she reminded herself, getting to her feet and trying not to look at the bottle of Rioja lolling so temptingly in the metal wine rack.
The holiday could not
come soon enough.

Later that evening, when the house was eventually quiet, the sky dark outside and children everywhere were fast asleep and dreaming, she crept upstairs and looked in on each of
her three.

The first bedroom smelled of socks and sweaty armpits.
(She really had to set Dexter straight on personal hygiene; there were only so many times you could hint gently that a person needed a
shower before you had to just come out and say, ‘Mate, you stink, all right?’) There lay her eldest son, the bruiser, so determined to lock horns and push against her these days, now in
serene repose, his dark eyelashes smudgy against his pale cheek, his body relaxed for once.
The sooner she got him to Shell Cottage the better, she thought to herself.
He always regressed when he
was there, rediscovering the childish pleasures of sandcastle-building and playing with his siblings.
She hoped he could remember how to be a boy again for one more summer at least.

The room next door was Libby’s, its walls a patchwork of animal posters, dance certificates and felt-tipped drawings.
Libby, as usual, had flung the quilt off most of her body and Freya
bent to straighten it, and tuck it around her, smelling her daughter’s sour-sweet night breath.
Darling Libby and her fondness for clashing colours and Knock Knock jokes; she was quirky and
unconventional and daydreamy, a million miles from the serious little girl Freya had been.
The other day Freya had overheard her singing to herself, and it was only when she listened harder that
she realized the song was actually ‘Sex Bomb’ by Tom Jones, except her daughter was singing it as ‘Sex Bum’, which sounded even worse.
Don’t go and grow up too
fast on me, lovely Libby,
she thought with a pang.

And finally, there was Teddy, their funny little surprise baby, who had been jokingly referred to as ‘The Accident’ for the first seven months of the pregnancy – right until
they heard Dexter conspiratorially saying, ‘The baby in Mummy’s tummy was an accident, you know,’ to his Year 1 teacher, the unsmiling Mrs Lamb.
Thank goodness for accidents,
though!
She couldn’t imagine the family without golden-haired, laughing Teddy with his love of numbers and dinosaurs, and his wonky little glasses permanently balanced at an angle on his snub
nose.

Gently, very gently, Freya lowered herself onto the end of Teddy’s bed and rested a hand on his warm slumbering form.
She thought of Ava across town in hospital, the rhythmic suck and
sssh
of the ventilator, the stifling, too-warm temperature of the ward, and the other grey-faced parents you passed in the corridor, all bearing enormous burdens of stress.
It was like
remembering a bad dream she’d once had, and her hand tightened inadvertently on her son’s body.
If I thought for a single minute that anyone had misdiagnosed something crucial with
one of my children,
she found herself thinking,
then I’d want to kill them too.
I’d be shrieking down the phone, demanding someone’s head on a plate.

A shudder went through her.
It didn’t feel good to have turned into the sort of woman that mothers like her despised.
It didn’t feel good at all.

In hindsight, Harriet should have spotted the philandering and dalliances of Evil Simon, her first husband, a mile off.
The top notes of unfamiliar perfume in the car.
The
ringing phone that went mysteriously dead whenever she answered it.
The times he was away on shoots and the filming schedule overran yet again.
(Simon was a TV producer, specializing in natural
history documentaries.
Unfortunately, Harriet discovered far too late that his particular speciality seemed to be human mating habits and all their variations.)

Harriet had been blind to such malarkey, though, for two reasons.
Firstly, because she was obviously the most gullible, trusting numpty ever to walk the earth.
And secondly, because at the time
she had been increasingly obsessed with trying to get pregnant again, after three agonizing miscarriages, and she could barely think about anything other than ovulation testing kits and whether or
not they should just sod it and go for IVF.

It all fell into place with shocking vividness, though, the day she was coming back from the hospital following – of all things – yet another miserable D&C experience.
She
hadn’t even bothered to tell him she was pregnant that time because he was away on location and also she thought that maybe, just maybe, if she hugged the secret to herself, it wouldn’t
feel so bad if things went wrong again.
(A misguided assumption as it turned out.
If anything, a lonely secret miscarriage was a million times worse.)

It was a Tuesday lunchtime.
Molly was safely at school, Simon was filming in Iceland, and there was Harriet, on the bus back to their flat, numb with sorrow, one hand across her (now vacated)
belly.
When the bus queued at the traffic lights and she glimpsed Simon on the opposite side of the road, she thought at first it must be a hallucination, brought on by the mega-strength
painkillers the hospital had given her.
That couldn’t be right.
He was supposed to be in Iceland, filming Atlantic puffins, not loitering on a street corner, talking to some random woman.

Her eyes narrowed.
A
pregnant
woman, she noticed.
Some friend of his he hadn’t told her about?
He must have come home early from filming to surprise Harriet – lovely!
He had
been on his way to the flat, but had bumped into this pregnant woman he’d met ages ago and .
.
.

Oh my God.
Wait, though.
Harriet froze, mouth dry, as she saw Simon lift his hand to the woman’s face and cup it tenderly before leaning in to kiss her for several long seconds.
Not a random pregnant woman, after all, she realized, but some bit on the side; a fertile, fecund mistress.
He couldn’t have hurt her more if he’d slapped her about the head with an
actual Atlantic puffin.

Memories of that painful day seared through Harriet’s head as she stood outside the very much closed Marylebone Tavern for a full two minutes, paralysed with shock.
So her second husband
had clearly lied about his whereabouts, just like her first had before him.

Oh no,
she thought, her stomach lurching.
Not you as well, Robert.
Not you!

She tortured herself imagining him cosied up to some thin, beautiful mistress in a strange bedroom that very moment, while she stood there, pit-pony legs and all, the sting of betrayal like
mocking laughter in her ears.
Then she pictured Robert checking his phone when she texted earlier –
Shit, it’s the wife.
Give me a moment and I’ll just fob her off .
.
.

The thought was unbearable.
Life-shattering.
And yet in hindsight he
had
been kind of secretive recently.
Jumpy, you could say.
He’d spin round whenever she came into the room,
and often close down the browser of his laptop before she could see what he was up to.
But surely he wouldn’t go behind her back like that with another woman?
After all the shit she’d
gone through with Evil Simon, too.
Robert was different.
Wasn’t he?

He couldn’t have lied, she decided in the next minute.
No way.
Robert just wasn’t like that.
He brought her a cup of tea most mornings!
He emptied the dishwasher and hung out the
laundry!
He noticed when she was grumpy and tired, and gave her a back rub!
Surely men with such an unusual and winning combination of talents couldn’t then turn out to be snakes in the
grass, could they?
Was that even
allowed
?

They did say that fame and glory went to a person’s head, though, she remembered glumly.
Alongside all the dazzling pre-publication success he’d enjoyed, who knew what temptations
had been wafting themselves under his nose lately?

With Simon, Harriet had buried her head in the sand for weeks after she knew the truth, kidding herself with a foolish, naive optimism that she could win him back, that it
didn’t matter.
There would be no such cowardice with Robert, though, she vowed.
The brave and battle-scarred version of Harriet would confront him the first chance she got.

As it turned out, that evening was the Year 10 end-of-term disco, to which Molly departed in a miasma of hairspray and cheap perfume, and Harriet and Robert were left sitting outside on their
small patio which passed as a garden in this part of Finchley.
The night-scented stocks were just starting to release their sweet perfume, Robert was in his running gear, waiting for his dinner to
go down before he took off for a brisk five-miler around the streets, whereas she had a hot date lined up with the secret carton of Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough ice cream hidden under the
bag of peas in the freezer: the reward she had promised herself for being brave.

She cleared her throat.
‘I need to ask you something.’
The words sounded dramatic, as if she was a character in a soap opera.
‘Were you with another woman today?
A
lover?’

His face elongated in a gape.
‘What?
Where’s this come from?’

‘Tell me, Robert.
Just tell me.
Is that where you went at lunchtime, to meet a woman?’
Christ, she was gripping the edge of the wrought-iron table so tightly, it was a wonder it
didn’t buckle and bend with the pressure.

‘No!
Of course not!’
His eyes pleaded shock and innocence, but Simon’s had too.
Stay strong, Harriet.
Do not be fooled by the eyes.
‘I told you,’ he went
on, but there was a definite shake to his voice now.
‘I went to meet my American editor.
Who is in his fifties, decidedly male, with a comb-over.
What is this?’

She played her trump card.
‘Well, that’s strange.’
The tension in her jaw was making her teeth ache.
‘Because the Marylebone Tavern was shut when I walked by.’
She
noted the flicker of panic that crossed his face, before adding, ‘Closed for building work, apparently for two weeks.’

A single beat of time elapsed, then he recovered himself with impressive composure.
‘Wait – did I say the Marylebone Tavern?’

‘Yes, Robert.
You did say the Marylebone Tavern.’
She leaned back against the uncomfortable metal patio chair, barely noticing how cold and unforgiving it was against her shoulder
blades.
So.
What did he have to say for himself now?

He put a hand to his forehead.
‘I’ve got a mental block about that place,’ he said after a moment.
‘It was the
Marlborough
Tavern.
You know, in Covent
Garden?’

She pursed her lips.
‘Right.’

‘You do know, it’s down that side street, not far from the Royal Opera House .
.
.’

No.
She didn’t know.
She tended to have weekday lunches in the school canteen or staff room, not fancy places in the West End.
But he proceeded to bang on convincingly about what
he’d eaten, and the interior decor, and the meeting itself, until she put her hands up to stop him.

‘Harriet,’ he said earnestly.
‘Look at me.
I adore you.
There is no other woman.
I’m not Simon, okay?’

His voice rang with sincerity and she believed him.
Just about.
‘Okay.
Good,’ she said.

All the same, as soon as he set off on his run, she went straight online to see if what he’d told her checked out.
Once bitten, twice shy and all that.

Right – here it was, the Marlborough Tavern, just as he’d described, with the
steak au poivre
he claimed to have eaten on the online menu, along with the crab starter.
Despite her doubts, it did all stack up.
It must have been a genuine misunderstanding all along, then.
Oh thank goodness.
Thank goodness!

She dug into the ice cream with vigour moments later, relief making her ravenous.
And there she had been, tarring Robert with the same cheating brush as her ex, she thought guiltily.
Next time
she’d know better.
Because Robert
was
better, simple as that.

Two days later, this fact was proved conclusively true yet again when Simon achieved a new low in the Worst Ever Father and All-Round Human Being stakes.
Contact with her
ex-husband had been sporadic, verging on non-existent, for the last ten months, mainly consisting of the occasional apologetic text when he was bailing out of picking up Molly or, worse, forgot to
meet her.
He had missed her school parents’ evenings for three years on the trot, too busy dallying with Maya and Mia and Michelle, Sophie and Suze, Vicky and Nicki .
.
.
Harriet had given up
trying to keep track.
As far as she knew, he had lost contact with Jasmine – the pregnant woman glimpsed from the bus window – as well as his now eight-year-old son, Gabriel.
Molly had
never even met her half-brother.

These days there was Anne-Marie: young, beautiful and – yes – pregnant.
(Ironically Simon was nothing if not fertile.
He was a veritable baby machine.) And, according to the latest
text, they were soon to be on the move.
Just like that.

Hi all, apols for group text.
Just to say, new address is below.
Moving on Monday!
Check Facebook page for leaving bash!
Si x

There followed an address which ended, shockingly, with the word ‘France’ and Harriet almost dropped the phone on seeing it.
France?
FRANCE?!
The wave of fury and hurt prompted by
this new rustic address, coming straight out of the blue, left her reeling.
‘What the hell?’
she cried, reading the message all over again to check she hadn’t just gone mad.
The
absolute tosser.
How could he?

‘What’s up?’
Molly asked from the end of the sofa, without taking her eyes off her laptop.

‘Everything all right?’
Robert asked breathlessly.
He was midway through a set of sit-ups on the living room floor but paused mid-crunch to glance over.

Harriet was just about to launch into a furious rant about how absolutely awful Simon was, and why was he going off to bloody
France
when he was already so damn slapdash with his
existing children, and she supposed this meant even less time spent with Molly and even fewer child maintenance payments to her .
.
.
but she checked herself just in time.
She couldn’t break
the news to Molly that her father was leaving the country in a shrill-voiced tirade of fury.
This was a task to be tackled sensitively, sitting on the end of Molly’s bed, ready to throw her
arms around her in comfort.
Bloody Simon.
Bloody Simon!

‘Harriet?’
Robert prompted when she didn’t immediately reply.

‘Nothing,’ she muttered through gritted teeth.
‘It’s fine.’

Lying in bed that night, she was still very far away from feeling that Simon springing this news on her in such a casual, cavalier way could remotely be considered ‘fine’.
It was not
fine at all.
It was unforgivable.
Not for her sake, of course – she couldn’t have cared less if she never saw his smirking face again.
But Molly would be heartbroken, however hard she
tried to pretend it was cool, however much she shrugged and said, ‘Whatever’.