The Beach Hut (6 page)

She set the last page back down. She felt ready. It would be wrong to deprive the world of this work any longer. Fifty years was enough. She’d had her revenge. Now Graham was dead, she was ready to move onto the next phase of her life. The last phase. She wanted peace. After all, she was old. Her body no longer raged in its quest to relive those feelings she’d once had. However long she had left, she wanted it to be calm, gracious and dignified. While she still had the manuscript, the silent feud would rage on.

 

It was surprisingly easy to contact him. A website, a publicist, an email, a phone call from his people to arrange lunch. At a private members’ club in Soho - a dark blue door down a little alleyway. She rang the buzzer and gave her name over the intercom, then announced herself again when she reached the reception desk. A girl with shining long hair and a tartan dress made her sign the register, then led her through a maze of corridors to a small room. It was painted in the same dark blue as the door, lined with books, and had an assortment of small sofas and chairs arranged around coffee tables.

He was sitting in a corner. She was astonished at how small he was. Where once he had towered over nearly everyone, now he was tiny, a shrunken little being.

His eyes were the same. Hooded, burnt into his face. Only now the shadows underneath were a sickly yellow.

She ordered a drink from the girl and sat down in the chair opposite him.

‘Jane.’

For years she had imagined this moment. Him speaking her name.

It left her cold.

She put the manuscript down on the table between them.

He stared at it for a full minute before he spoke. He reached out and touched it, flicked through the pages. He didn’t need to count them to know they were all there. He raised his eyes up to hers, the eyes she had once drowned in. The ones she had dreamt of so many times during her life.

And he laughed.

She gazed at him coldly. He wasn’t going to diminish her gesture.

‘You have no idea what you did to me, have you?’ she demanded. ‘I was so completely in love with you. I never loved anyone again. And I don’t suppose you ever gave me another thought.’

‘Of course I did,’ he said, and his vehemence surprised her. ‘You have no idea how I felt, do you?’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘How could I? You never told me.’

He reached out a clawed hand and pulled his glass towards him, staring down into it ruminatively.

‘You had a lucky escape, you know.’ He swirled the liquid round, and Jane heard the ice clink. ‘I never made anyone happy. I’ve never been able to. Not least myself. ’ He drank deep. ‘I’m a silly, weak, foolish, selfish old man. What the youth of today would call a waste of space.’

‘Yes,’ said Jane. ‘I know.’

And suddenly, she did know. He was right. He would never have made her happy. Not in a million years. She would just have been a stepping stone to his next liaison, the next woman who fed his rotten, narcissistic ego.

‘It’s your best book,’ she told him. ‘I’ve read them all.’

‘You’re right,’ he admitted. ‘I didn’t want to write again, after losing that. I did, of course. Only way I knew to earn a crust.’

Crust? He was a multi-millionaire, she knew that. The nation had an appetite for the rather trite action thrillers he had taken to. The sort of books she had thought he would write in the first place. They were superficial. Dishonest. They sold by the shed-load, piled up in supermarkets and airport bookstores, candy that rotted your brain.

‘Were you . . . happy?’ he asked her.

‘No.’ Her answer was direct. He took a breath in, and then began to cough. The fit was interminable. It racked his body, pain flitting across his face with each spasm, as if he was being knifed. By the end he slumped back in his chair, exhausted.

‘Can I get you something?’ Jane asked gently, but he shook his head.

He was incredibly still. For a moment she wondered if he was dead. But she could see the rise and fall of his chest, and he seemed to be sleeping
sweetly
. She didn’t want to disturb him. Besides, she had nothing left to say. It had all been said.

She found the girl behind the reception desk and tried to pay for her half of the bill, but the girl was firm. Mr Shaw wouldn’t hear of it, she was sure. Jane wasn’t going to spend any time arguing. She wasn’t going to feel guilty about him buying her a gin and tonic. He owed her a great deal more than that. He owed her her whole life.

She walked back out into the streets of Soho. The light was strangely bright after the tenebrous atmosphere in the club. It was inappropriate. It didn’t suit her sombre mood at all. She hailed a cab and jumped inside, grateful to be shielded from the sunlight. She was glad when she finally reached Paddington, the familiar hubbub of the station where you could be somebody and yet nobody, just another person on their way to somewhere else.

She sat down in the train carriage and shut her eyes while the rest of the passengers came on board and jostled for seats, shoving their packages and laptop bags onto the insufficient luggage racks. Around her she could hear people calling home, reporting back as to when their train would get in, what time they would be home for dinner. There was no one for her to call. There’d be no one waiting for her at the station, no one to lean over and give her a kiss while she told them what she had been up to. No one who’d been out to buy ingredients for supper. She’d be going back to a taxi and an empty fridge. She should have bought something from M&S at the station. A little bubble of resentment rose up inside her, and she pushed it away.

She wasn’t going to think about it. She wasn’t going to wonder what life she might have had if she had never met him. The happiness she might have been allowed to feel. She was going to pick up the pieces of what was left of her life, and make the most of it. Between Terence and Graham, they had managed to destroy her. But she had her children and her grandchildren, and they hadn’t managed to destroy her love for them. This was going to be her summer.

Eventually she reached the station and found a taxi, which put her down at the top of Everdene beach. She climbed out, weary from her journey but as ever exhilarated by the view and the sea air. She filled her lungs and stepped out across the sands until she reached the hut.

Inside it was reassuringly familiar. It had hardly changed since the day her father had bought it. There were new curtains at the window - nautical blue and white - and a new cooker and fridge. It smelt the same, slightly damp, slightly tangy. There were the same board games and paperbacks, the same chipped mugs and plates.

The fridge door was shut and she went to open it, worried that mould would have built up inside. She was surprised to find it was on, and inside she found milk, cheese, eggs and bacon. Further investigation revealed a loaf of bread, a box of tea and a packet of chocolate digestives in the cupboard.

It could only have been Roy. He was the only one with a key.

She felt a flicker of warmth leap up inside her, just as if she had held a match to the pilot light on the little cooker. How wonderful to be thought of.

As she unpacked her things, she looked forward to the weeks ahead. The little hut would be cramped, filled with a succession of her offspring and their offspring, a complicated timetable of comings and goings that depended on work, school, university, exam results, holidays abroad, social engagements. She wouldn’t bother trying to keep up, she never did. She took each day as it came. Catered for whoever was there. Fitted in round their madcap plans.

They would all be there for this weekend, for the opening. And she’d have to tell them. It would break her heart, if she let it. There was nothing she could do. She couldn’t afford to keep it going. And she knew none of them would be able to buy it from her - they had too many financial commitments between them already. Anyway, it was probably best to make a clean break. She would give each of them a little money from the sale, to put towards a holiday. Small consolation, but it was the best she could do, given the circumstances.

She sat down later that evening to draft an advert. She’d get her grandson Harry to do it on his laptop and get it printed out in the town nearby. She wouldn’t need to market it hard-a copy through each of the other beach-hut doors, a few pinned up in the village. Word would get round, offers would come in.

By the end of the summer, the deal would be done . . .

I
t was astonishing how easy it was to lie.

Only, strictly speaking, she wasn’t lying. She really was going down to Everdene to kit out the beach hut for the summer. She really was going to stop at IKEA in Bristol and stock up on melamine mugs with spots on, and new rugs, and a coffee table and a big bag of tea lights and some lanterns and a couple of bean-bag chairs. And then scrub out the hut until it gleamed, rearrange the furniture, put up some new pictures, make up the bunks with fresh linen - all for the first set of holiday-makers who were due to arrive the week after. It was two days’ work at least.

So she wasn’t actually lying. Only by omission. Although every time she thought about it she went hot under the arms and panicked. Her hand hovered over her mobile incessantly. She could cancel any time, she knew that. It was up to her. She was in control of the situation.

The problem was she wasn’t in control of herself.

Incipient infidelity was a curious thing. It made her feel as if she was walking on air one minute, then as if she had the weight of the world on her shoulders the next. She would be skipping around the aisles in Sainsbury’s with a silly grin on her face,
singing
to herself, for heaven’s sake, only to go home and bury her head in her arms for half an hour, completely paralysed, unable to speak, think, operate on any level. Oh, the agony and the ecstasy. Pandora’s box wasn’t quite open yet, but she definitely had her fingers on the lid, ready to prise it off.

How had this happened to her? Sarah wasn’t the sort of person to be unfaithful, although she suspected no one was until they found themselves on the brink of it. No one went into marriage thinking, ‘It’s OK, I can sleep with whoever I like when I get bored. No biggie.’ It just happened.

The obvious answer was that it was a mid-life crisis. She was, after all, thirty-six. Technically mid-life, if you still went by three score years and ten. Her children were eight and six, which meant life was far, far easier than it had been - they were at school, they didn’t need so much mollycoddling, they could get themselves ready for bed, do their own teeth, wipe their own bottoms. So she had more time on her hands - she was no longer in that fug of lack of sleep, car seats and push-chairs and potties, everything slightly crusted in dried food, biscuit crumbs everywhere. Life had a routine, a pleasant, manageable routine, and she was organised enough to keep on top of most things - she wasn’t an anal control freak, but neither was there full-scale panic on a regular basis. She remembered spellings and swimming kit and home-made cookies for the school coffee morning most of the time, and didn’t go into meltdown if something was forgotten.

So yes, maybe she did have too much time on her hands.

As for her and Ian, if challenged, she would have said they were still
basically
quite happy. She remembered when they had first got together, the tiny little house they had bought in Harbourne, a fashionable area of Birmingham with a warren of streets full of aspirational couples just like them. They had done it up themselves, spending the weekends sanding floorboards and stripping skirting boards, revealing all the original features but giving it a modern twist with Sarah’s paint effects, so that when they eventually came to sell it, when the two girls came along and they finally couldn’t squeeze another thing inside its four walls, they got what seemed a ridiculously high price for a two-bedroomed terrace.

It had been Ian who had insisted they move to Hagley, a ‘village’ on the outskirts of the city, insisting that the schools were better, that the girls needed fresh air and access to the countryside. The move coincided with him joining a big corporate firm in Birmingham, a totally different kettle of fish from the family-run outfit he had been working for. Sarah wasn’t sure if it was the change of house or the change of job that had altered him, but after the move Ian seemed to have a different set of values.

He seemed very preoccupied by things that didn’t matter a jot to Sarah - what cars they were driving, where they went on holiday, what they wore, where they ate out, who they socialised with. When she confronted him about it, he asked what was wrong with him wanting the best for them? And she supposed there was nothing wrong, as such, but he didn’t need to be so
obsessed
. She’d been quite happy with her old Micra, but he had insisted on chopping it in for a shiny new Golf, even though it meant taking out a loan. And he’d bought her a private number plate for her birthday, which was absolutely the last thing on earth she had wanted. She wanted to be anonymous when she was out driving. She didn’t want people to watch her while she hashed up parallel parking on the high street. He had watched in satisfied smug pleasure as she had opened it, and she had to feign gratitude, even though she would have far preferred . . . well, anything, quite frankly.

And Ian always had a plan these days, a scheme, a scam, usually something that had been planted in his head by one of the partners at work. Sarah had questioned these plans at first, but always glazed over when he got the figures out. The first had been to purchase a flat in the rather ugly new block that had been built at the end of their road, to let out.

‘The figures add up,’ he told her. ‘If we buy it on an interest-only basis, the rent we get will cover the repayments. It’ll wash its face, easy.’

Wash its face? Where did he get these expressions? Sarah couldn’t argue with him - she didn’t have a clue about interest rates or APRs - and so suddenly they were the owners of a four-bedroomed house and a flat. Then another one, which he had been tipped off was going cheap. Then another.