The Hidden Beach

by Karen Swan

  He looked quickly away, finding Linus already watching him. He smiled reassuringly. ‘It’s okay, Linus, we’re perfectly safe here.’

  ‘But what if it doesn’t go?’

  ‘It will. We just need to be patient. My father used to say to me birds fly not into our mouths ready roasted.’ They sat in silence on the still water, all waiting. Waiting. The sense of expectation – of something having to happen – settled heavily upon him. This had been his idea after all. It was his fault. Fifteen minutes passed. Twenty . . . His eyes fell on something beyond his son’s shoulder.

  Linus turned and saw a dot of blue begin to grow, the mist beginning to thin and peel back. Emil saw his son’s body soften with relief, a small laugh escaping him now that the worst of the danger was seemingly past. ‘That was so cool!’

  Bell laughed too as the landscape became less hostile and more friendly by the moment, the reasserted sunlight highlighting now caramel-coloured rocks covered with yellow sedum and violet beach pea, wild bilberry and lingonberry bushes, fir and alder trees – and a sheer ten-metre escarpment that had Linus almost leaping from the boat in excitement and Bell grabbing him by the arm.

  Within minutes the sea mist had gone without trace, as insubstantial as candyfloss, and both Linus and Bell were stripping off their clothes and leaping in without hesitation, both of them joyous. So ready to be happy. He looked away as she leapt, refusing to look again at the last body he had touched, the only woman he had known in eight years. He refused to remember the yielding feel of her in his hands . . . They surfaced laughing, enjoying the cool as they trod water and looked around them again, before doing some playful duck dives and backward rolls.

  Emil looked on, feeling a stab of envy at their closeness. He could see how Linus’s gaze always tracked back to Bell like a safety buoy, and he felt his position as the third wheel keenly again, his confidence having disappeared like that mist . . .

  ‘Aren’t you coming in?’ Bell asked, as though it was that easy. As though happiness could be grabbed with a single leap.

  ‘I thought I’d film Linus doing some jumps first.’

  ‘Oh. Okay.’ She gave an easy shrug.

  ‘Cool!’ Linus exclaimed, looking more lively than Emil had ever seen him. It was clear neither one of them was bothered whether he joined them or not.

  ‘So is there a path up there?’ she asked, straining to see.

  ‘Yes. Climb out below the bushes and you’ll see it runs behind. It’s narrow, though, in places, so –’

  ‘Okay, I’ll go first and he can follow me,’ she said, hardly able to wait. ‘Come on, Liney.’

  He watched them swim off, their wet, darkened heads like seals’ as they moved further away. Their voices carried as they got to the rocks and he watched their limbs scramble and climb as they hauled themselves from the water. Within minutes they were standing on the shallow ledge that had always been his jumping-off point as a boy. This was his place; he had brought them here; and yet he felt shut out from it. An observer of a private moment.

  He held up his phone and watched them through the zoom lens. They were holding hands, peering over the edge – checking for rocks, no doubt – and chatting away. She was wearing a black bikini, her wet dark hair slicked back. Her body looked soft, relaxed, in the sunshine but he still remembered the way she had tensed like a stray cat as she talked about her dead fiancé . . . It was a strange thing to know something so intimate about a near-stranger, to see a beautiful woman in a bikini, a child by her side, and to understand that despite this distant image of seemingly perfect happiness, she was hollow inside too. Like him.

  He watched them jump together, heels kicking back, arms outstretched, hair flying upwards, their shrieks carrying over to him. They were everything he wanted to be, everything he wanted . . .

  But no. That evening with her had been but a glancing flash of light in both their lives. Though it had held a quiet importance for him – reminding him he was alive, that he was a flesh-and-blood man, still – she could never know it. They must remain, fundamentally, strangers who had once shared a night under the midnight sun. Nothing more. She could never be more than that. Now, she was just the nanny.

  ‘Did you get it?’ Linus yelled, triumph in his still-high voice.

  Emil caught his breath, realizing he had forgotten to click.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘So what shall we do today?’ Emil asked as they finished breakfast. It had mostly been taken in silence, the overnight sleep somehow setting them all back a step from yesterday’s adventures, formality restored again.

  Bell inwardly groaned, feeling like she was trapped in a groundhog day. Was it going to be like this every day for the rest of the summer? Did she have to plan every step of Emil getting to know his son? She had expected he would take the lead yesterday but he had seemed reluctant to get into the water, in spite of the fact it had been his idea. He had seemed almost shy. He had eventually done a few jumps with Linus (although they hadn’t held hands on the rocks. Perhaps he thought it wasn’t acceptable for a ten-year-old boy to hold hands with his father?), but she must have scrambled up and jumped off that rock with Linus thirty times. Each time she had felt a spike of fear at the drop below her feet; she had never been good with heights, and it had taken all her courage to make herself do it, for Linus’s sake. Her body was complaining today, though. She was stiff, and had a few scrapes and bruises from where she’d knocked herself on the rocks.

  She looked at Linus, trying to gauge his mood. He had bags under his eyes, and she could tell from his sullen silence that he hadn’t slept well, that he didn’t want to be here. Was this going to be groundhog day for him too? Would Linus reset every morning to his default resentment at being made to be here, no matter how fun or exciting the day before?

  She felt exhausted, caught between them both. ‘Fancy a kayak?’ she asked as brightly as she could manage.

  ‘No,’ Linus muttered.

  ‘We could go fishing?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Cycling? We could go to Sandhamn and you could take your board instead if you like?’

  ‘No!’

  She was shocked by the suddenness of his snap. ‘But Linus, you love—’

  ‘I don’t want to!’ he cried. ‘I’m tired, why can’t you just let me be?’ She knew it wasn’t the activities he was resisting, but the person he had to do them with. His plea to her to be left alone was, in fact, a plea to Emil. She glanced over at him to see whether he understood that, but on the contrary, he seemed almost pleased by Linus’s bad mood, because it was ostensibly being directed towards her.

  ‘Well, we could just chill out and watch a film,’ Emil suggested, playing the good cop to her bad.

  Bell arched an eyebrow. She had seen his DVD collection, and The Flight of the Condor and Dambusters weren’t going to cut it. Linus had never even seen an actual DVD before, much less those films.

  ‘We can go over to Sandhamn,’ he shrugged, seeming to get her point.

  ‘There isn’t a cinema there, is there?’ she puzzled.

  ‘No. But there’s a screen at the hotel, in the conference room. I can get them to set it up for us.’

  ‘Just the three of us?’ she queried.

  ‘Well, is there anyone else you’d like to bring?’

  She and Linus swapped hopeful glances. It was obvious, surely? But one look at Emil’s face . . . There was a long silence, and Bell’s heart ached as his mother’s and sisters’ names didn’t fill it. Linus swallowed. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Okay. And what film shall we watch? Anything you want.’

  ‘Anything?’ Linus queried.

  ‘Anything at all. New. Old.’

  Linus looked overwhelmed by the seemingly unlimited scope of choice. ‘Umm . . .’

  ‘Hey, has the new Avengers one come out yet?’ she asked him.

  ‘No. September twelfth,’ he said with certainty. He took his superheroes very seriously.

  ‘Oh.�
�

  ‘Okay, you want to see that one?’ Emil asked.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Linus said hesitantly.

  ‘Okay then. Avengers it is.’

  ‘You don’t understand. It’s not out y—’ she faltered.

  He stopped her with a look. ‘It is for him.’ He looked back at Linus and gave him a wink. ‘Shall we say be ready in an hour?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Linus said uncertainly, a faint excitement blooming in the words and in his eyes. Emil smiled, somehow growing, becoming bigger before them.

  ‘Good. Then I’ll see you down at the dock.’

  Linus bolted from the table excitedly to brush his teeth and find his shoes as Emil half glanced over his shoulder. ‘Måns?’

  ‘Absolutely, sir.’ And the valet slipped from the room to make the necessary arrangements.

  Bell watched on. Surely he couldn’t just . . . rig up a private cinema for an unreleased film, within the hour?

  Emil got up at the table, stopping just by her. ‘I assume you’ll be coming with us. Where he goes, you go, wasn’t that it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He nodded, the resentment in his green eyes like a cold wind upon her. She was still unforgiven for yesterday’s showdown. Unwelcome. ‘Yes. Of course.’

  Docking at Sandhamn again after a couple of days on 007 was like touching down in LAX after a year in Alaska, or emerging into the Mardi Gras after a long sleep: the noises, the colours, the aromas of barbecues on the beaches . . . Everything felt dialled up to the max after the gentle, sleepy tranquillity of private island life. Midsommar was over, but the holiday fever continued – every berth in the marina was still rammed with yachts, and all the guest moorings were taken in the sound too, sails wound tightly around masts, rigging clinking in the breeze. Boats were coming and going like trains in a station, people calling across decks to one another. Holidaymakers were sashaying slowly in bikinis and flip-flops from boats to beaches and bars, joggers running in just shorts with towels tucked into their waistbands, kids choosing ice creams, locals walking their dogs or pushing wheelbarrows loaded up with pot plants, towels and the other tokens of city life that had come in with the ferries.

  Emil jumped off first, reaching down for Linus and helping pull him up onto the jetty. He held a hand out for Bell too, and she managed not to react as his hand closed around her wrist.

  They walked along the rattling gangplanks, long since bleached grey by the lashing winters and beating summers on the Baltic’s edge. No one had to be anywhere in a hurry, it seemed. A quartet of girls on bikes dawdled past, ringing their bells lazily, tennis racquets slung across their backs, brown legs levering up and down in micro-skirts, ponytails swinging.

  Linus had brought his skateboard with him – excited by the prospect of dirt roads and makeshift pavements again – and began weaving expertly through the crowds. She saw Emil’s mouth open as he sped past and instinctively his arm went out – but too late; his son was already out of reach. Emil glanced back at her, as though for help, but when he saw her looking back at him, snapped around again, chin down.

  She stared at the back of his head; he was pointedly walking two strides ahead of her, his baseball cap back on so that his face was obscured from casual, enquiring glances; nonetheless, she noticed he still somehow drew the eye, women looking over with latent interest, oblivious to the complicated history of the man. Too late, she remembered she hadn’t yet managed to get Linus to send his mother an email. After yesterday morning’s breakfast ruckus and Nina’s unannounced arrival . . . She picked up her phone and took some shots of Linus skateboarding ahead of them.

  ‘Bell!’

  The shout made her jump and she wheeled round to find someone running towards her, jumping over a couple of kayaks that had been laid out on the ground.

  ‘Kris!’ She threw her arms up in delight as he picked her up and swung her around. ‘What are you doing here mid-week?’

  ‘I got a last-minute gig catering for a dinner on one of the bigger boats tonight,’ he said proudly, jerking his chin towards the sound.

  ‘No way!’ she gasped.

  ‘I’m just on my way to get the fish. Wanna hang for ten minutes? I could murder a beer.’

  ‘Oh.’ Her smile faded. ‘I can’t. I’m working.’ She looked over to where Emil and Linus had stopped, further ahead, looking back and watching them with curious stares.

  ‘Oh. I didn’t realize you were all together.’

  ‘No, well, I think that was the intention,’ she said under her breath.

  ‘Right.’ He frowned. ‘You okay, Hell? You look a little . . . wonky.’

  ‘Wonky?’

  ‘Out of sorts. Not quite right.’

  She shook her head. ‘All good. Just working hard, around the bloody clock.’ She couldn’t help but groan.

  ‘You don’t mean that, I hope.’ He gave her a quizzical smile.

  She twitched her nose. ‘Things have changed quite dramatically in the last few days,’ she sighed. ‘But it’s a long story. I’ll have to tell you properly when there’s time.’

  ‘At the weekend, then? Marc and Tove are coming back tomorrow night.’

  ‘No, I’ll be working this weekend, sadly. And the one after that. And the one after that.’

  ‘Hell, Bell, that’s crazy,’ Kris said sternly. ‘And it’s certainly not legal.’

  ‘It’s a very complicated situa—’

  ‘Hi.’

  She jumped as Emil came back and stood beside them both.

  Kris stared back at him, not looking his friendliest, although even unfriendly, he was still traffic-stoppingly handsome. From Emil’s assertive, questioning body language, an introduction appeared to be required. ‘Hi?’

  ‘I’m Emil. Bell’s boss.’

  Bell inwardly flinched. Last weekend he’d been the best sex she’d ever had; her mystery lover. Now he was her boss.

  ‘Hi. Kris,’ he replied, deliberately not supplying any further information, like who he might be to her.

  Both men shook hands, but there was a passive-aggressiveness to it, as though they had decided they didn’t like each other.

  A brief pause followed, with Emil looking as though he was waiting for something further – for her to stop talking to Kris, perhaps? Then he said, ‘Linus and I will go ahead. We’ll see you in there.’

  Had he really come over just to say that? ‘Okay. I’ll be right there.’

  Kris watched him go, his eyes narrowing. ‘He seems easy-going,’ he muttered under his breath.

  ‘Yeah,’ she sighed.

  ‘Emil . . . Emil . . . He looks familiar . . .’ Kris murmured as they watched him catch up with Linus and go to pat a hand on his shoulder; but the boy ducked and pushed away on his board, out of reach again. ‘That’s not . . . oh, holy shit, that’s not Emil Von Greyers, is it?’

  She blinked her reply.

  His eyes widened. ‘You know who he is, right?’

  ‘Yes. My boss.’

  ‘And scion of one of the biggest industrialist families in the country.’

  ‘Bully for him,’ she muttered. ‘Trust me, you’d never know it from the state of his boat. Or shoes,’ she added, watching him go.

  ‘How come you’re working for him?’ But the answer came even as he asked the question. ‘He’s coma guy? Hanna’s ex?’

  ‘Technically not ex, they’re still married. But yeah – and he’s now my new boss for the rest of the summer. Long story short – he wants to bond with Linus. I’m the chaperone.’

  ‘I can’t believe you never said!’

  ‘I didn’t know myself until a few days ago. But look, it’s probably best if you don’t say anything to anyone. They’re very private.’

  ‘Not that private. Everyone on the island saw the helicopter arriving yesterday.’

  ‘Oh.’ She could already imagine what Emil’s reaction would be to that.

  ‘You weren’t on it, were you?’

  ‘God, no.’

  ‘Shame.�
� His eyes twinkled with mischief. Kris had a taste for the finer things in life.

  ‘Look, I’d better go,’ she said, standing on tiptoe and kissing his cheek. ‘We’re watching the new Avengers movie.’

  ‘I didn’t think that was out yet?’

  ‘It isn’t, apparently,’ she shrugged, beginning to walk away backwards. ‘Give my love to the others. I’ll let you know when I can get away. I’d better dash.’

  She hurried along the boardwalk, hopping out of the way of a cyclist and running up the steps into the dark-timbered cool of the hotel lobby. She stood at the door for a moment, trying to get her bearings. Emil had said ‘conference room’, hadn’t he?

  There was a man with an extravagant blonde moustache working at the reception desk and she walked over, composing herself with a deep breath. ‘Hello. I’m with Mr Von Greyers and his son. Could you tell me where they are, please?’

  The man’s eyes narrowed at the sight of her – was there a dress code here? Was her dress too short? Her hair too scruffy? – and he stopped typing. ‘May I see some ID confirming that?’

  Her smile faded. ‘What?’

  ‘ID, miss.’

  ‘I don’t have any ID. What would I need that for?’

  He looked away and around the room, as though checking he wasn’t going to offend any neighbours with his words. ‘Well, I’m afraid you wouldn’t be the first young lady to purport to be one of Mr Von Greyers’ employees.’

  She stared at him, incredulous. ‘I’m his son’s nanny.’

  ‘Yes, madam. That’s what they tend to say.’

  She gave a short bark of laughter that would have made Nina proud. ‘Oh my God! Are you seriously—’

  ‘It’s okay, Lennart, she’s with me.’

  She turned to find Emil walking towards her. He must have been sitting in one of the chairs by the window. Had he been waiting for her? Watching her with Kris?

  Why?

  ‘Where’s Linus?’ she asked, hot-cheeked that he must have overheard this pompous man’s ridiculous intimations that she was some sort of . . . groupie.

  He regarded her coolly, his cap still on. ‘Already in the cinema. I thought I’d wait for you. The room can be hard to find if you don’t know where to look.’