The Beach House (6 page)

“What?” Sarah’s mouth drops open in shock. “Which house?
This
house?”

“There
are
no other houses anymore.” Nan gives a rueful smile.

“But, Nan! That’s terrible!” Sarah sinks down onto a chair opposite Nan at the kitchen table.

“Oh sweetie. Nothing is terrible.”

“But what do you mean, the money thing is a disaster?” Once upon a time, when Sarah first started here as a weekly cleaner, she would never have dared ask this of Nan. Nan seemed so grand, so imperious, Sarah would scuttle around with her bucket of cleaning equipment, trying to keep out of her way.

That was almost fifteen years ago. Sarah was seventeen, trying to fund her studies, cleaning houses on the island for families she had known since she was a baby, families her own mother had worked for, her grandmother.

Now Sarah is part of the family. She still cleans for Nan, and cooks, and runs errands, but she is, effectively, Nan’s daughter, the only difference being that her recompense is more clearly defined.

Sarah has always thought of Windermere as her second home—it is, after all, the place where she considers herself to have grown up, her twenties being a difficult, unstable time, the only stability seeming to come from Nan.

And now Nan is talking about selling the house? Sarah couldn’t live without this house, without Nan, and the two are intermingled in her mind—there could not be one without the other— and the prospect of losing them is terrifying.

Sarah may now have a husband and a home of her own, but Windermere is the place where she came to understand what “home” meant: that anyone can live in a house, but homes are created with patience, time and love. And Windermere has always felt more of a home to her than anywhere else. More, even, than the home she is now starting to build with her husband.

“You know me and money.” Nan smiles. “Andrew started talking about hedge funds and high risk and large returns, and it seems the hedge fund had put all their money with something they shouldn’t have, and the market dropped hundreds of points the other day, whatever that means, and it seems we’ve all lost everything.”

“But, Nan!” Sarah is shocked. “What are you going to do?”

“When you get to my age, you tend not to worry about these things happening. It’s only money, after all.”

“So you have more?”

“Well . . . not really. But I imagine it’s highly unlikely I’ll sell the house. We’ll all have to put our thinking caps on and come up with something.”

“Have you told Michael?”

“Not yet. I’ll call him later.” She stubs the cigarette out roughly in the crystal ashtray that is now yellow and cloudy with age, and she looks Sarah firmly in the eye.

“I’m not going to sell this house, though,” she says. “Hell will freeze over before I sell this house.” And Sarah leans back in her chair with a sigh of relief.

“Do you really think it’s that simple? We go away for a weekend and it makes everything okay?” Daniel looks doubtfully at Dr. Posner, who raises his eyebrows.

“No,” Dr. Posner says. “I don’t think anything is that simple, but I certainly don’t think it can do harm. I think it may be a good opportunity for you and Bee to reconnect, to remember what you both saw in one another before you got caught up in being parents, in the frantic pace of life with children.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell him,” Bee says. “And it was a wonderful opportunity. Hardly anyone else was bidding on the weekend in Nantucket, it includes flights, and it’s only for a couple of days. It cost almost nothing,” she concludes defiantly.

“I think you did a good thing,” Dr. Posner says, validating Bee. “I think you should both go and enjoy it.”

The weekend away was one of the silent-auction prizes at the breast cancer charity gala they had been to a few weeks before. It was one of the galas that all their friends went to, all of them working themselves up into a tizzy of excitement at the items on offer in the auction, the biggest prize being a week at Atlantis in the Bahamas, leaving the field free for Bee to swoop in and claim Nantucket.

She hadn’t even particularly wanted to go, even though she had a vague recollection of her dad talking about Nantucket, saying what a magical place it was, but she wanted to bid on
something,
and there were only two other names and it had been so cheap. Perhaps a weekend away was what they needed, although of late it had seemed they would need nothing short of a miracle to bring them back together again.

For while they lived as husband and wife, they were feeling, increasingly to Bee, like roommates, and roommates who were drifting further and further apart. Daniel was still perfectly nice, pleasant, but it was as if someone had reached in and switched off the light. Any warmth, any intimacy that they had once had had disappeared, leaving Bee with the peculiar feeling that it had all been an illusion.

Jordana dusts a fine coat of translucent powder across her nose and tucks her hair back into her chignon before slipping into the workroom.

“I’m just checking to see how that necklace is coming along for Mrs. Branfield,” she says, as Michael looks up from his workbench and smiles at her.

“I finished it yesterday,” he says. “Hang on.” And he walks over to the safe, quickly turns the combination and pulls out a velvet box.

“Oh Michael!” Jordana gasps as she looks at the diamond flower, the pear-shaped diamonds, at the petals, set prettily around an emerald, with delicate marquis-cut emeralds as the leaves. “She’ll love it.”

“I hope so,” Michael says. “It may make coming to terms with the divorce a bit easier.”

Lesley Branfield was the former wife of the very successful owner of a large makeup company. She had never managed to have children during their seven-year marriage (her first, his fourth), and had consequently considered herself somewhat screwed during their divorce (wives one, two and three had ended up with smallish alimony but huge child support).

She had, however, been left with their Upper East Side apartment, a cottage on Shelter Island, and all the furnishings, clothes and jewelry, which is where Michael came in.

Her husband, while wealthy, was too cheap to pay retail. If Lesley Branfield fell in love with a ring, or a pair of earrings, or a beautiful necklace at Cartier or Tiffany, they would borrow it (you’d be surprised at what the jewelry stores do for their wealthiest, well-known customers), photograph it, and take the photo into the back room at Jordana & Jackson, where Michael could create an exact replica for a fraction of the price.

The rich may like the best of the best, but they still love a bargain.

And since the divorce Lesley Branfield had decided that rather than do an Ellen Barkin and sell everything, she would simply remodel, thereby eradicating any painful memories that may have come with the original jewelry.

“I’ll phone her and tell her it’s ready,” Jordana says. “She’ll be so happy. Oh Michael, you’ve done a really beautiful job. Thank you.”

“It’s a pleasure.” Michael smiles, turning to get back to work.

“So how’s everything going with your new girlfriend?”

He shrugs. “It’s okay.”

“Just okay?” Jordana laughs. “That doesn’t sound so good. What’s going on?”

In different circumstances it might perhaps be odd for the boss to be talking to her employee about his love life, but since they opened the second store in Manhasset Jackson has been spending more and more time there, and Jordana has found herself turning more and more to Michael for help with the store.

Of course there are others—the two sales assistants who work in the store—but she would never really talk to them, would never ask their advice; and there is something calming about Michael, something that makes her want to open up and confide in him, and she has found herself forming an unlikely friendship with him. For the first time in years she has found herself looking forward to getting in to work.

Not that she doesn’t like her job—she and Jackson decided, even before they got married, that they would create a line of high-end, affordable jewelry stores, which is exactly what they are beginning to do—but the Manhasset store had been Jackson’s baby from the outset, and she had felt, left on her own in the Madison Avenue store, that life had become a bit dull.

Which is why she is so enjoying this friendship with Michael. Sometimes they have lunch together, a sandwich in the staff room usually, occasionally walking over to the park if the weather is nice enough. It is just lovely to have someone to talk to again. To have a friend at work.

“No, better than okay,” Michael says. “I really like her, it’s just . . .”

“Not the one?” Jordana smiles.

“Oh God,” he groans. “I feel like every time I meet girls who are really great it’s just a matter of time before I start to find problems with them, and then after a while I start to think that maybe it’s not them, maybe the problem is with me, and that I’m the one who needs to work through it, and so I stay in these relationships but I can’t commit and then they start accusing me of being a commitaphobe and all I want to do is run as far away from them as possible.”

Jordana starts to laugh. “Do you think perhaps that’s a sign that you are a commitaphobe?”

“Which bit?” Michael grins. “The running away from them as far as possible bit?”

“Well, yes.”

“Hmm. You think?”

“What do you think?”

“Me? I think I’d love nothing more than to find a wonderful woman, a true partner in every sense of the word, who I could spend the rest of my life with. I just don’t think I’ve found her yet.”

“And this . . . Aisling?”

Michael nods.

“Aisling couldn’t be the one?”

Michael sighs. “She’s doing that changing thing.”

“What changing thing?”

“You know. That thing where on the first few dates they act as if everything you do is wonderful. They adore the fact that you ride a bicycle because it’s so ecologically sound, and they love that you’re a jeweler because it means you’re creative and soulful, and they think it’s wonderful that you have a rent-controlled prewar on the Upper West Side because they say they’ve always dreamed of a rent-controlled prewar on the Upper West Side.”

“So far so good.” Jordana shrugs.

“And then dating becomes more serious, and then they ask very casually whether you’ve ever considered a Vespa, and it would really make a huge amount of sense because not only is it cool but then the two of us could travel together. And then they start wandering around your apartment looking meaningfully at the walls and floor, and they tell you that the apartment would be really amazing if the floors were sanded and stained, and it costs almost nothing, apparently, to have your bathroom re-tiled and your bathtub re-enamelled, and Smith & Noble do great custom blinds that are really not that expensive . . .”

Jordana starts to laugh again.

“And then one night when you’ve had a really great dinner and you’re starting to think that perhaps you can overlook the warning signs—even though the warning signs always lead to the same place and frankly your instincts about the warning signs are never wrong—they look you in the eye and ask if you’d ever want your own jewelry store. Or they’ll ask you where you see yourself in five years’ time and you see nothing but disappointment in their eyes when you tell them that ideally you’d love to be settled down with the right woman, living in the same apartment, working for the same company.”

Jordana puts a hand over her heart and breathes an exaggerated sigh of relief. “Phew. You’re not leaving us any time soon?”

“Not planning on it. And that’s the problem. They can’t believe, can’t accept, that I’m happy with my life exactly as it is. All these girls want to help me discover my inner mogul, convinced that somewhere I have this hidden, untapped, fathomless well of ambition that only they can help me access, and none of them want to accept me as I am.”

“So has that happened with Aisling?”

“Yes. Things were going great, and then she asked the five-year question, and said she couldn’t understand how I could not ask for a partnership in this business, or want to set up on my own. ‘You could make so much more money,’ she kept saying, and I kept trying to explain that I wasn’t motivated by money. And then, inevitably, she asked how I could support a family and I explained that I didn’t have a family to support—and of course she wants a family, so suddenly I seem like horrible husband material. ” Michael sighs, shaking his head.

“That’s tough,” Jordana says. “She sounds like she probably isn’t the one for you. I do think that your goals have to be the same or, at least, have to be in tune with one another for it to work, and if she’s motivated by money, or at least by a husband with money, then that’s not right for you. Thankfully,” she says and laughs, “Jackson and I were both equally motivated by money.”

Michael laughs too. “That’s what I like about you,” he says. “You don’t mind admitting it.”

“Listen, as I always say, I came from nothing and I grew up wanting everything, and knowing that I would find a way to get it. I loved sparkly things as a little girl, and worked damned hard at that gemology course before I went to work for a jeweler. I just don’t understand these girls who expect their husband to provide everything for them.”

“Me neither,” Michael says. “Why is it those are the ones I keep finding?”

“You must be looking in the wrong places.” Jordana smiles. “Right. I’m back up to the floor. I’ll phone Lesley Branfield and let her know. I’m sure she’ll want to thank you herself. Are you around the rest of the day?”

“I’m going nowhere,” Michael says. “At least, according to Aisling.” And they both laugh as Jordana closes the door of the workshop behind her.

"Isn’t this nice?” Bee reaches over at La Guardia and strokes Daniel’s arm, and he smiles at her, wondering if perhaps his sense of being lost is an overreaction, for he does love Bee, does love so many aspects of his life.