The Beach Hut Next Door (7 page)

As the rest of the guests arrived – the Kavanaghs, and two other sets of friends Lillie had made at the tennis club – Elodie and Jolyon gravitated onto the lawn.

‘So – you work for your father?’

Elodie made a face. ‘Yes. Very unimaginative. But it seemed like the logical thing to do.’

He gave a sympathetic smile. ‘Same here. Well, I work for my mother. What do you do? Secretary, I suppose?’

She shot him a fierce glance. She didn’t like being pigeon-holed.

‘No, actually.’

He widened his eyes at her and drew back. ‘Sorry.’

‘I’m in charge of marketing. And advertising.’

‘Impressive.’

She relented with a grin. It wouldn’t do to be on her high horse. ‘Well, not really. Basically it means making up slogans. And drawing pretty pictures to put on labels.’ She swirled her champagne in its glass. ‘At the moment, I’m working on Sally and Sammy Strawberry. To try and get children to eat as much jam as possible. Each jar has a Sally or a Sammy sticker behind the label. If you collect ten you can send off for an enamel badge.’

‘Very clever.’

‘Actually, it is,’ she told him. ‘Sales have soared.’ She leaned in to him. She felt very daring. ‘If you’re very good,’ she said, ‘I’ll get you a badge of your own.’

He put his head to one side as he considered this, and she was amazed how his eyes laughed even though his face was perfectly straight.

‘I wouldn’t want you abusing your power.’

Elodie felt something rise up inside her; a joyful bubble that was like the beginning of a laugh, but had a keener edge, something syrupy and sharp. From the terrace, she saw her mother watching the two of them, an expression of approval on her face. Lillie gave her a nod. Of encouragement, she thought.

Then she realized Jolyon was watching them watch each other.

‘You’re not much like your mother,’ he said.

‘It has been said.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘I haven’t inherited much from her at all. It’s a wretched curse, having a beautiful mother. People can’t help but compare.’

His eyes didn’t leave her face. She found it disconcerting. ‘What?’ she said.

‘But you’re beautiful,’ he said. ‘Much more beautiful, to my mind.’

Elodie just laughed. Jolyon looked perturbed, as if he wanted to press the point further, but Lillie was waving at them to come in. It was time for dinner.

Lillie had done the placement with care, Elodie noticed. You could always tell her motives by where she chose to seat people. Lillie was next to Roger Jukes. Jeanie was in placement Siberia, at the bottom end of the table, in between the two tennis club husbands. Elodie could tell she knew that she’d been outcast by the way she didn’t flicker as she took her seat.

She wondered who was better at the game, Jeanie or her mother. She saw her father frown as he took in the table arrangements. He was next to Mrs Kavanagh; another tennis club wife on the other side. If he thought he should be next to Jeanie, it was too late for him to say, or for the placement to change.

Jolyon was on Elodie’s left. She was pleased, but she thought she probably couldn’t face food. There was too much excitement in her stomach for so much as a morsel. But she could copy her mother. Not help herself to anything. Push her food around her plate. Talk so much that no one noticed she wasn’t actually eating. So many of her mother’s tricks, hitherto ignored, were coming into play today. She could already imagine Lillie’s triumph.

‘So you spend all the summer here?’

Elodie nodded. ‘Always. We shut up our Worcestershire house. Well, my father rattles around in it during the week, but basically we all move down here for July and August.’

‘It’s wonderful.’

‘It’s heaven. I love it.’

Jolyon looked gloomy. ‘It’s the nearest we’re going to get to a holiday. We used to go to Capri. But we’re a bit strapped.’

Elodie let him fill up her glass with wine. ‘Well, that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’ Jolyon shrugged. ‘I’ve stopped listening.’

He looked weary.

‘I think the idea is we join forces,’ said Elodie. ‘I think my father’s going to invest. Or something. But I probably shouldn’t say too much.’

‘Well, there’s clearly more money in jam than shops.’ Jolyon looked impressed as several platters of oysters resting on ice were set on the table.

‘Who cares about money?’ asked Elodie. ‘No, please, you help yourself first. I’m not an oyster person.’

‘It’s easy to say
who cares about money
when you’ve got it,’ Jolyon told her. ‘We nearly couldn’t afford the petrol to get down here.’

Elodie looked at him. ‘Well, you should all have come in one car then,’ she said. ‘And a more sensible one at that.’

Jolyon was speechless for a moment, then laughed. ‘You speak your mind, don’t you?’

‘Whose mind am I supposed to speak?’ Elodie retorted, but she was laughing too.

At the other end of the table she could see Lillie effervescing, as only Lillie could when she had someone who interested her in her sights. Jolyon’s father was leaning back in his chair, bemused, his eyes glittering, a glass of wine in his hand. It was clear Lillie was nothing he couldn’t handle. He was the kind of man who attracted female attention and thrived on it. It was all in an evening’s work to him.

At the other end of the table, Jeanie was composed, as cool as the ice the oysters were resting on, as charming to the man to the right as to the left of her. It was still early on in the evening. The chatter was animated but controlled; the champagne had relaxed everyone but it was not yet time for fierce debate or ribaldry. There were several courses to get through yet.

At the head of the table sat Desmond. There was something kingly in his presence tonight, thought Elodie. She felt he was surveying his courtiers, as if each one had a role. What was hers, she wondered? She put down her glass. She’d had more to drink than usual. Reality was slipping away from her. For a moment, she felt unsettled. For the first time, she felt like a grown-up at her parents’ table, rather than a child.

‘Are you all right?’

She turned to find Jolyon staring at her, concerned.

‘Fine. Sorry. It’s just a bit hot in here, that’s all.’

Elodie picked up her water glass and drank.

When dinner ended, everyone left the table together. Lillie had never subscribed to the tradition of the ladies withdrawing next door while the men were left to smoke cigars and drink port. She was nothing without the company of men, and she presumed all women were the same, so she served coffee and digestifs for everyone in the drawing room. Lit by lamps, with the doors open out onto the sea, the atmosphere was languid and relaxed. Everyone, it seemed, was comfortable in each other’s company. Any fears of a pecking order, the tyranny that rules so many dinner parties, had been rubbed out by the excellent food and wine, and they all slumped into the comfort of the sofas and armchairs while Oscar Petersen played in the background. The stresses of the working week receded into the background, and the pleasures of the weekend ahead stretched out in front of them.

Only Elodie felt restless, but she hadn’t drunk as much as the rest. She had spent the whole of dinner enraptured by Jolyon, although she had remembered not to forget her good manners, and had spoken to everyone else at the table. Now she couldn’t remember a word anyone else had said, only what he had. She prowled the room, turning over the record when it came to an end, refilling the silver cigarette box, not sure where to put herself.

Where she wanted to put herself was next to Jolyon, but he was engrossed in conversation with her father. Every now and then he would look over at her, and twice he held her gaze and smiled. She had no way of telling if he felt the same way she did. Had he just been polite throughout dinner? He too had perfect manners, after all, and would have been trained in feigning undivided interest. Yet the way they had laughed at the same things, and the way he was happy to contradict and argue with her – in a teasing way, not a high-handed way – implied to her there was a mutual attraction. But Elodie was an ingénue. She really had no knowledge of the games men and women played between them.

Her mother, of course, would be able to guide her. Her mother would know the signs. But Lillie was perched on the edge of a golden velvet armchair, describing something to Roger, her hands drawing pictures in the air, her hair slipping from its chignon, her eyes alive. She was oblivious to her daughter’s need for advice.

‘Be bold,’ Elodie told herself. ‘You have to make it happen.’

Where she had got this courage from, she had no idea, but she had a staunch heart, and she still wasn’t afraid. What was the point in running away from the momentous? Surely you had to do everything in your power to draw it to you?

She picked up the glass of wine she hadn’t finished from dinner. She looked across to Jolyon and caught his eye. Then she turned and walked out of the French doors and onto the terrace. The night was still and warm and smelt brackish: the tide was out and the trace of drying seaweed tinged the air. The moon hung in the sky, as pale and lustrous as the largest pearl on the necklace her mother had lent her. She could feel it on her skin. She could feel everything on her skin.

Even his presence. She heard his footsteps behind her. She wasn’t going to turn. She bit her lip with the anticipation, smiling to herself. He stood right behind her. She felt his hand on her waist. She breathed in, revelling in his touch, a touch that told her everything she needed to know, then leaned back until she was nestled into him.

‘Shall we go for a walk?’ he asked, his voice low.

‘Yes.’

She put her glass down on the balustrade. Then she slipped her hand into his. Together they walked down the stone steps and across the lawn. She knew the grown-ups in the drawing room would have a perfect view of them if they chose to look out, but she didn’t care. Everyone, after all, had to start somewhere. And her mother, for one, would be cheering her on.

Without a word, they made their way down the cliff path, swishing through the marram grass, the sand beneath them giving way so their steps got faster and faster until they fell in a laughing tangle onto the beach.

It had a special magic at night. A softness, like a cashmere blanket; the sound of the waves as soothing as a lullaby; the darkness leaving all other senses heightened. They left their shoes at the bottom of the cliff path, their feet sinking into the cool damp.

‘I’ve never felt like this before,’ whispered Jolyon, and part of Elodie wanted to press him further, ask him what he had felt with other girls; find out why she was different, what it was he was feeling. Common sense told her, however, that this would be wrong, and so instead she stopped in her tracks, turned to him, went up onto her tiptoes and slid her arms around his neck.

‘Neither have I,’ she breathed. ‘Neither have I.’

And the next thing she knew, she understood why it was that people bothered kissing.

The rest of the summer was perfection. It was as if God had snapped the final piece of the jigsaw he was doing into place. Jukes’s Groceries became Lewis and Jukes. Desmond drew up a masterplan for the stores, and he and Jeanie and Jolyon spent the weeks implementing his vision, travelling to each of the stores in turn. No one was quite sure of Roger’s role in all of this, but he seemed to have his own affairs to attend to.

They all reconvened at The Grey House at the weekends. Elodie found the days of the week without Jolyon endless, and lived in a fever of excitement until she heard his bike roar through the drive on a Friday lunchtime. Eventually Roger would reappear, then Jeanie and Desmond, and forty-eight hours of heavenly hedonistic eating, drinking, card-playing, tennis, bathing, fishing and cricket would begin, mingled in with Lillie’s summer guest rota.

For Elodie, her relationship with Jolyon was breathtakingly simple and uncomplicated. He was just so right for her. They made each other laugh. He didn’t dismiss her thoughts or opinions, but had spoken to her father about Elodie helping with the advertising side of things for the shops, and they’d had a meeting in the dining room and Elodie felt she had really contributed. There had been talk of giving her a place on the board, and although she wasn’t sure entirely what this meant, she felt sure it was important.

Only Lillie seemed slightly adrift, languid in the heat, but she came back to life at the weekends, when her rightful role as hostess was restored and she set the pace, the brightest star around whom the constellations moved.

And one night, towards the end of the summer, when dusk was starting to close in earlier and earlier, the moment Elodie had been both longing for and dreading arrived. She and Jolyon had spent the afternoon in the beach hut, and as dusk fell they were drowsy with heat. They’d trailed to the water countless times to take a dip to cool themselves down, and the salt had dried on their skin. They were tangled in each other’s arms, but this time, as they began to kiss, there was something more urgent between them, a sense that there was no going back. Something unspoken but agreed.

Elodie wondered how many hours she had spent in this hut over the years. Curled up with a book on a pile of cushions, sheltering from the afternoon rain as it rattled on the roof, eating toffees. Drying herself after an early morning or late afternoon swim. Sheltering from the fierce midday sun, drinking squash and chewing on egg sandwiches. Several times she had slept here, when the house had overflowed, lugging down cushions from the sofa in the living room to construct a makeshift bed. Playing draughts or Ludo with her cousins.