The Hidden Beach

by Karen Swan

  Getting to the city’s beating heart took only four minutes by scooter but as she wove along the widening streets, it was like a chameleon changing colour – the same, but different. High street stores and commercial offices lining the avenues, museums and libraries replacing townhouses, playgrounds swapped for imperial bronze statues, gardens for parks; and around every corner, the sea, a glistening sliver of ice blue, like the ribbon round a wedding cake.

  The Nybroviken port was a horseshoe-shaped basin, flanked on all sides by the city’s grandest luxury hotels. Seagulls wheeled overhead, cawing loudly, some roosting contentedly, others waddling heavily along the promenade like grey-suited businessmen with big bellies and their hands behind their backs. Fleets of white ferries nodded and bumped against the harbour walls, their gangplanks laid down like medieval drawbridges as passengers stepped aboard with bags, or sometimes just a newspaper. The earliest birds were already sitting on the open decks out back, sunning themselves and waiting patiently to be whisked to the archipelago.

  Not the Mogerts, though. They had beaten her down, but Bell cracked a wry smile at the sight of her adopted family, the chaos amidst the calm: Max illegally parked, hazard lights flashing as he frantically disgorged almost the entire contents of their home onto a small flatbed trailer one of the crew had brought over to them. Hanna was talking to the captain, who was nodding at something she was saying and looking over her shoulder at Max’s efforts. Linus was leaning against the lamp post, still absorbed in the game on the iPad, the girls having seemingly made up and Tilde examining something on Elise’s palm.

  Bell rode up to Max, who had by now worked up a sweat. She left the scooter beside a bench for the next punter and helped him place the last of their luggage onto the trailer: a fishing net and a guitar.

  ‘You play?’ she asked in surprise, as together they followed the crewman across the cobbles. She’d never heard anyone in the house playing an instrument before; they were a creative family, but not particularly a musical one.

  He rolled his eyes. ‘Not me, no.’

  ‘Oh good, you made it,’ Hanna said, turning to them both, and Bell wasn’t sure to which of them her comment was directed.

  ‘Yes,’ Max sighed, removing his glasses and rubbing the sweat off his face. He was dressed in shorts and a linen shirt, driving shoes with no socks; he looked ready for a morning on a boat, rather than sitting alone in a large, empty house, working at the kitchen table. Not for the first time lately, Bell felt sorry for him.

  She saw how his gaze snagged and caught on Hanna, as though to look at her was somehow illicit.

  ‘Come on, kids, say bye to Daddy,’ Bell said quickly, deciding they needed privacy and hustling the children towards him for alternately bashful (Linus) and exuberant (the twins) hugs.

  ‘See you in a few days, Max,’ she said with a brisk nod as the kids crossed the gangplank ahead of her. She would be getting on the same ferry he’d be disembarking from on Friday afternoon. She hurried the children into the boat, sighing as they automatically ran up to the food counter and pleaded for muffins. Getting them apples instead, she also ordered coffees for herself and Hanna, glancing back as she reached into her pocket for change. Hanna and Max were standing on the gangplank, his hands on her waist, eyes locked. Even from a distance, it was evident the world had fallen away for them. Lovers in love.

  ‘Can we go on the top deck?’ Tilde asked her excitedly, pulling her back. ‘I want to make my face hot.’

  Bell groaned. Such was the substance of her days. ‘Well, not too hot, I hope,’ she said, allowing herself to be led towards the stairs. ‘We wouldn’t want it melting off now, would we?’

  The ferry pulled away with a peremptory dismissal of the maritime city, leaving it behind in its island chunks, the bright copper roofs and colourful, canopied windows of Gamla Stan quickly giving way to contemporary-looking tower blocks and duplexes, and then to ever larger and grander suburban houses. Bell felt the equation shift quickly, the solid mass of urban sprawl diminishing against the mercurial body of the vast sea, land breaking down into crumbs until it was water, water as far as the eye could see. It was an idyllic, sparkling blue under these clear skies today, but she had seen the archipelago turn on numerous occasions – brown and churning – and she knew this was a fragile peace.

  They found a table at the very back of the top deck, just out of reach of the protective covered area, leaving them to the mercy of the elements, the wind wildly whipping everyone’s hair. It was a beautiful day, so they weren’t cold, but Bell knew that by the time they disembarked in two hours they would look like crows had nested on them – and that they’d be burned. She dug out the suncream and began slathering it onto Elise’s face.

  Hanna was sitting inside, downstairs, doing some work on her laptop, and Bell had to keep the girls from running down to her every ten minutes. They passed much of the journey playing I Spy and Would You Rather, Elise setting everyone into deep contemplation with her conundrum of ‘would you rather eat a whole raw onion or drink mustard’?

  Bell’s gaze kept returning to the archipelago; it was impossible not to. There were so many tiny, almost fragment-like, islets and islands and skerries – Kris had once mentioned a figure of 30,000 – that on a map, they looked like smashed glass on a stone floor. Some were nothing but smooth rock plateaus, breaching the glassy surface like beluga whales; others were fully forested and bushy, like distant, dark clumps of moss floating upon the water.

  This would be her third summer on the archipelago; it was where she had truly fallen in love with the country, why she’d decided to stay. Stockholm was great – smaller than London, friendlier than Paris, calmer than Rome, even cooler than Berlin – but experiencing the Swedes’ summer lifestyles at their island cabins and houses had been a game-changer for Bell. Her own childhood had been spent summering on the North Norfolk coast, sailing and crabbing and playing tennis, but the version here was even more stripped back, raw. Pure. Some of the islets were so incredibly tiny that there was barely enough room for a single-room cabin to perch on the rocks; clearly, electricity and heating and running water weren’t options. There was really nothing for the occupants to do but sit on the shore and read, fish, swim and watch the boats go by.

  And there were a lot of boats to watch. Saturday mornings in particular looked like regattas, with low-lying yawls and ketches and sloops in full sail, small speedboats zipping over the water’s surface, some towing inflatables or water-skiers, jet-bikers carving into tight turns and trying to catch air over the ferries’ wakes.

  Bell always loved the two months she spent with the Mogerts here. Their island – known in the family as Summer Isle – was still small compared to some; it took just fifteen minutes to walk around, whereas the larger ones would take perhaps an hour and the very smallest, just a couple of minutes. But they had a few neighbours, including Gustav Persson, an elderly man who spent ten months of the year in an almost defiantly rudimentary cabin on the northern tip; it got the worst of the weather and had been patched numerous times with squares of corrugated tin, so that the effect on approach was of a patchwork house. There was another house, too, further up from the main jetty on the eastern side, owned by a middle-aged couple, the Janssons, from Halmstad. It was painted in the traditional brownish-red, with white square windows and a Swedish flag flapping from a pole out front. None of the gardens had delineated boundaries, and it had taken Bell a while to adapt to the idea that the island was theirs collectively; people were largely sensible about respecting each other’s privacy without the need for fences, walls or gates.

  Her own accommodation was a tiny cabin set twenty metres or so back from the family’s main house. They were both painted black, as though to demonstrate the connection to passers-by or trespassers. But where the main house sat dead centre, back from a curved private beach, her tiny cabin was tucked into a thicket of trees at the far end, with a path leading through the moss to a narrow inlet in the rocks. From there, she could
step straight down into the water, and it had become something of a private ritual for her to skinny-dip under the midnight sun before bed each night.

  The space was almost unimaginably small when she was away from it – just big enough for a bed, table and chair, and tiny kitchenette hidden in a cupboard. The toilet was housed in an add-on room around the back, old-school style, and the shower was outdoors, clad with rickety timber panels and prone to spitting water. It wasn’t the easiest way to live, but the vast majority of her time was spent in comfort at the family house anyway, and she was grateful for the brief respite of peace and solitude at the beginning and end of each day.

  The truth was, she could hardly wait to get back there and she felt a small thrill as she began to recognize elements of the nautical landscape. Last year, she had spent a lot of time with Linus particularly, pootling around the neighbouring islands while the girls – only two years old at the time – played on the beach and napped with their parents. She and Linus had kayaked together along the coves almost every day, looking out for orcas and herons and choosing which houses or boats they liked best, so the landmarks from those adventures stood out to her now: the bright-yellow lichen-covered rock at the tip of the island with the freshwater pool in the middle; the ragged flag by the tumbledown, storm-ruined jetty on the island three away from them; the deep cove where they’d found a dead gull in the water. And then, up ahead, the tip of the steepled Sandhamn tower peeking through the trees and announcing itself to passing sailors and travellers. It was set on a tall scaffold, rather like a gigantic dovecote. Max had told her last year that it had originally served as the piloting bridge, or lookout, back when piloting – navigating ships through the straits to Stockholm as commercial trading developed – had been the islanders’ primary income.

  The land bellied out and swooped back in again in dynamic curves, the cabins beginning to cluster close together on the rocks like barnacles, and she saw the ferry channel up ahead narrow into a wincingly tight strait as Sandhamn’s shores all but kissed those of its neighbour Lökholmen. Inching through, they rounded a headland and suddenly a small harbour opened out and stretched away from them; fronting the town, it was a mini metropolis in the Baltic vastness.

  They had arrived.

  ‘Okay, everyone, have you all got your things?’ Bell asked, checking that backpacks were zipped shut and nothing had been left on their seats. ‘Let’s join Mamma downstairs. Now remember, you’re all going to need to be patient while we get the stuff off the boat. Linus, you’re in charge of looking after your sisters, okay?’

  He nodded nonchalantly.

  ‘I don’t need him to look after me,’ Elise protested. ‘I’m big enough to look after myself.’

  Linus and Bell made eye contact, but said nothing. She gave him a wink instead.

  They all walked carefully down the stairs and back into the cabin, where Hanna was sitting with her laptop shut, her hands resting one upon the other as she stared out of the window. Who could blame her? Even from inside, it was a magnificent sight. The approach past the neighbouring islands, Telegrafholmen, Lökholmen and Krokso, was so tight, it was a constant marvel to Bell that the big boats could get through it. She could easily throw a stone from one isle to the next, and even just coming in on the little putt-putt for morning bread and papers, it felt confined, like a canal.

  The rocks on either side of the strait swelled like mini mounts, twenty, thirty feet high, their lower edges draped with seaweed, a tide line marking the stone. The tiny port fanned out gently to the sides; everything seemed gentle here – weather-worn, accepting, welcoming. To the right was the police and fire station, an orange helicopter sitting idle as a couple of uniformed officers talked about something that probably wasn’t crime-related. The island had a grand total of ninety full-time residents, and although that number swelled to 3,000 in the summer months – with a further 100,000 visitors and day-trippers annually – the worst thing that usually happened on the island was someone illegally mooring on a berth, or dropping litter.

  There was a pub, the well-stocked grocery store Westerbergs, a bakery, gift shop, art gallery, clothing boutique – and, to the left of the harbour, the grand Yacht Hotel, which had once been the headquarters of the Royal Swedish Yacht Club. It was by far the swankiest place on the island, with a smart restaurant for dinner dates and a beach club vibe at its outdoor pool and grill. Bell knew it well, for all the big summer festivals and parties usually ended up being celebrated there.

  She looked over now as they disembarked, hearing the distant shouts and splashes coming from the pool just out of sight. She wished she could take the kids over there for an ice cream, just to get her eye in on the scene again; but Hanna was already talking intently to a man she had known for years, Jakob Cedergren, the harbourmaster. A bearded man with a pronounced limp and ready smile, he was one of The Ninety, and he clearly loved his job, his family and his life. As far as he was concerned, his world might not be big but it was pretty close to perfect. Bell had left last summer on cheery ‘hai hai’ terms with him, but would he remember her now? She would never be on the inside track like Hanna and Max, who had been coming here all their adult lives.

  ‘Linus, if you stand with the girls there,’ she said, taking them to the nearby hut where fizzy drinks, ice creams and newspapers were for sale, ‘I’m going to start unloading our stuff.’

  ‘You’re not in charge of me,’ she heard Elise say bossily to Linus as she hurried back up the gangplank. She found one of the crew standing in front of their not so much luggage as home, scratching his head in bafflement. Everything had been stacked into a precarious tower beside a door that led down to the bilge pumps.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s ours. I’m here,’ Bell called, jogging up behind him and reaching down for the first load. ‘I’ll get it cleared out.’

  ‘How are you going to manage all that?’ he asked, frowning at the sight of her and all the luggage. At five feet four inches, she wasn’t small, but neither was she a seven-foot power-lifter. ‘You know we leave again in an hour?’

  ‘Not a problem. Our boat’s just . . . there,’ she huffed, hoisting a bulging soft leather holdall under each arm, along with three tennis racquets, the dolls’ house and the guitar. She jerked her chin towards the nearest porthole and beyond it, the Mogerts’ humble boat, Nymphea. In spite of the name, she was no beauty: she had a tired white hull, a dated red-painted water- and bowline, with a semi-enclosed cabin and just enough room for sitting out in front, more on the bench seats at the back. Max’s father had bought her when he was a teenager, Max ‘inheriting’ her when the twins were born (and, as Max muttered, the maintenance bills became unsustainable). Max called her a plodder: she was unimaginative but dependable for ferrying the family and small groups from their island to others in the vicinity and, of course, back to here. Sandhamn was their portal back to the real world again, where they came for bread, papers, human contact and medical help.

  The crewman gave her a sceptical look. ‘Let me help.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ she asked, smiling gratefully.

  He shrugged. ‘I can hardly leave you to do it alone. There must be slavery laws against that sort of thing.’

  She grinned. He was young, good-looking . . . Hanna was still engrossed in conversation; it apparently hadn’t crossed her mind to help Bell unload their belongings. ‘Well, thanks,’ she said, giving a wriggle and small jump to hoist the bags higher under her arms again. ‘I’m Bell, by the way.’

  ‘Per.’

  Together they carried the first of the piles to the boat, Bell glancing over every few strides to check on the children; they were sitting slumped on a low wall, looking very bored.

  Nymphea was thankfully moored close by, in her usual berth at the near end of the jetty. The chandlery yard had serviced her and put her back in the water in time for the summer. Bell dropped her pile carefully on the ground, but Per was a few steps ahead of her and had hopped onto the deck before she could even pu
ll in the bowline. He held out his hands for the first consignment.

  ‘Anywhere’s fine,’ she said as he looked around the modest deck for a place to put their stuff. Hanna had the key, so the cabin was still locked. Bell tried not to think about having to unload it all at the other end as well.

  It was another two runs before they had everything transferred.

  ‘Finally! Lugging all that across really would have killed me if I’d had to do it on my own,’ she said with a roll of her eyes. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No problem.’ He smiled.

  She felt his interest creep towards her like a tide coming in, and she knew what he was going to ask as they began walking back towards the hard standing again; but she was distracted, her gaze constantly strobing for the kids. It always worried her, the girls being so near to the water, even though Linus and Hanna were close by. They weren’t yet strong swimmers, and there’d been a fright when Elise had fallen in the pool at a friend’s house the year before and Max had had to jump in to save her, fully clothed.

  Per turned to her as they approached. ‘. . . So listen, are you hungry? We could get some lunch if you’ve got time?’

  ‘Oh sorry, I’m working.’ She jerked her head towards the children; at least they were sitting in the shade. ‘I’m on duty.’ She gave an apologetic grimace.

  ‘Oh.’ He looked disappointed. It was like she’d kicked a puppy.

  ‘But another time, perhaps?’ She liked his manners and he was roughly her age – okay, maybe a bit younger, but why not?

  ‘You’ll be here long?’

  ‘All summer,’ she shrugged. ‘My employers have a place on the lagoon past Krokso.’

  ‘Okay, so then I’m bound to see you around. We come over every day,’ he said excitedly.

  ‘Yeah,’ she shrugged, not minding either way. ‘And I’m back in the city at weekends, so . . . y’know. Whatever.’ She got her phone out and gave him her Snapchat details.