The Summer Without You

by Karen Swan

  So much for just hooking a right and keeping going till she drove into the Atlantic. It had looked so easy on the map – Long Island a long, skinny arm that shot out of America’s mainland and straight into the Atlantic Ocean, Montauk sitting at the fingertips, East Hampton – where she was headed – more in the wrist.

  But then, all of this had seemed easy before she had actually had to go and do it. It had been one thing sharing her news when she’d flown home in early April, revelling in the shocked expressions and envious eyes as she’d casually dropped the bombshell that she – she, who needed moral support getting in a round at the Pig & Whistle – was moving to America for the summer. She hadn’t been left behind after all, see? Brenda, her cleaner, had agreed to ‘adopt’ Shady in her absence – it had been depressing to realize that the humble goldfish was pretty much her only responsibility tying her there – so that she could have her own adventure too. She’d delighted in recounting how she’d ‘won’ a coveted bedroom in Hump’s house from the bathroom, boasting about Bobbi’s sharp ambition and slim ankles, showing off the photos of the white-sand beaches and the sunny forecasts that she brought up on the internet. It had been so good being the one with the surprise for once, when she’d spent years listening to everyone else’s of secret weekends away, long-awaited pregnancy joys, big promotions, intricate marriage proposals . . . And it had restored a little of her pride. She’d seen the way everyone had looked pityingly at her as news got out about Matt’s tour of Asia – alone – for six months. They hadn’t heard her when she’d reassured them that they weren’t actually breaking up; they were simply pausing, taking a breather. They’d just nodded politely when she’d said Matt had told her he was going to spend the entire trip dreaming up an original and romantic marriage proposal for his return. They hadn’t known that she had repeated his words with a beatific calm she didn’t feel: ‘It’s not the end. He just wants us to have a new beginning.’

  So yes, she had enjoyed talking about this ‘adventure’. It had given her a glamour and an edge that had caught her friends unawares. But now, wedged between two monster trucks on an expressway in rush hour and unable to remember the laws about overtaking, she wasn’t feeling so confident. The New York suburbs had given way to dense woodland that bracketed the highway, occasional dead raccoons in the road reminding her that it wasn’t just the cars and accents that were different over here. Even the roadkill had an American flavour.

  After a while, a sign for ‘27E Montauk’ directed her to take the right-hand slip road and she relaxed her grip on the wheel, grateful for this karmic mercy. She knew the 27 Highway ran like a bone down the length of Long Island’s skinny arm, and that she only had to drive in a straight line now, right into East Hampton’s high street – or rather, Main Street.

  Still, Hump had promised to keep his phone near him, in case she got lost. He was already at the house. It was the end of May; the summer season officially started this weekend and Greg – a lawyer friend of Hump’s brother who was in the fourth bedroom – and Bobbi would be over tomorrow. Ro was looking forward to seeing her again: as the only other person she vaguely knew in the whole of America, Ro felt an artificial closeness to the architect – like a gosling imprinting on a panther – that paid no heed to the bolts of terror that flashed through her every time she read Bobbi’s tweets: ‘Five a.m. kettlebells. #hellyeah’; ‘To M.I.T. 4 talk on Spatial Strategies of Resistance #bringit’.

  Ro was looking forward to seeing Hump again too. They had communicated with increasing frequency via Facebook for the past six weeks, their messages becoming more relaxed by the day as their updates and photo posts educated them remotely about each other’s lives. For instance, Ro already knew Hump could surf (a little bit – the photos mainly showed him wiping out), that he changed girls like he changed underpants (every three days), and he considered the lime that came with his vodka to be one of his five a day. He knew that she, on the other hand, was partial to ‘box-set weekends’, drank only wine in pubs and bought fish food in bulk (Brenda wasn’t going to have to spend a penny on Shady, even if she didn’t come back for a year). Greg was technically their Facebook friend too, but his page didn’t even have a photo of him, and he hadn’t posted anything at all in the six weeks since they’d paid their deposits.

  ‘It’s all going to be great. Just great,’ Ro whispered to herself as she drove through Southampton and then Bridgehampton, where preppy-looking men and nautical-chic women were clustered round cafe tables, sipping soy lattes and reading the local papers as the Manhattan commuters looked on enviously in their scramble to join them.

  The road had become narrower now, having segued from a dual carriageway to a single-lane road a while back, and was flanked on either side with standalone units housing antiques and contemporary furniture shops; long, low, painted wooden deli huts with the shutters pushed up and fresh fruits and vegetables arranged on trays; enormous, grand redbrick schools with pretty white windows, flags in flagpoles and yellow buses parked out the front. The houses she could glimpse through the trees were set back from the road, clapboarded and rustic, with no fences or walls to delineate their garden boundaries, and she didn’t see any cats, but plenty of deer.

  The road came to a T-junction and Ro followed the traffic round to the left. She knew she was close now. She had just passed the sign for East Hampton Tennis Club and there was a marked shift in tone as she rounded the corner – everything tightened suddenly, raised its game.

  A sweeping, daffodil-fringed green (only the leaves left now) with a pond and a windmill on it sat to her right, a ribbon of bucolic, wainscoted and cedar-shingled houses streaming down a straight and widened road that was shaded by giant horse chestnut trees. Ro put her foot on the brake, gliding more slowly down the street with an almost reverential wonder. Everything was so neat and pretty – the colour palette like a watercolour painting, all misty greys and heathery greens, gardens bracketed with the famous white picket fences as stationary swing seats hung on covered porches and carved shutters were pressed flush to the walls.

  Her eyes grew even wider as the homes gave way to shops and she counted Tiffany & Co., Ralph Lauren (not one store but three!), Juicy Couture, Tory Burch . . . Her eyes wandered to the people milling around – most of them looking like they were heading to a yoga class or a tennis match – and all shrunken to 30 per cent thinner than the average population.

  She stopped at another set of lights and hurriedly reread the directions. Hump had said to take the next right turn after the cinema, which she could see out of her passenger side window. Then it was next right onto Egypt Lane and his house was a quarter of a mile on the left, just by the green.

  The trees grew in girth and height as she moved a block away from the town centre, their canopies interlacing like fingers above her, tunnelling the road, and she could tell from the dazzling glare at the end that the ocean lay directly ahead of her. Ro pushed her sunglasses onto the top of her head, her chin almost resting on the wheel as the car idled slowly past houses that were rapidly swelling in size and stature.

  She’d never seen anything like it – set back from the wide streets, with no pavement but a wide cycle lane, every single house sat amid a large, manicured plot. Some had barn-style hipped roofs, others multiple pretty dormers; some had covered verandas that ran round the perimeter of the house, others stepped porches, loggias and balconies. They all had pools. They all had Mexican gardeners riding on sit-on mowers or adjusting sprinkler systems. And every, but every estate was pristine and immaculate. There were no wild brambles winding round the picket fences, no flaking paint at the windows or missing shingle tiles, no cars that hadn’t been hand-polished – heck, no cars, it seemed, that were more than two years old. How was it possible for an entire community to share the same sense of aesthetic perfection? Did they have neighbourhood meetings where they chose their house colours from a coordinating palette so that none clashed? Maybe it was somebody’s job to make sure that newcomers to the area ke
pt to the scheme. This wasn’t a simple case of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. Out here, even the Joneses were keeping up – with the Spielbergs and Martins and Parkers, if Hump was to be believed.

  She saw the triangular green Hump had told her to watch out for, passed it and indicated left as she spotted the red water hydrant. Ten metres on, she pulled into the drive signposted, ‘Sea Spray,’ and switched off the ignition with a muffled shriek. She had done it! She was alive!

  She peered through the windscreen at Sea Spray Cottage – her home for the summer. The house was far smaller than those she’d passed further up the street – it was indeed only a cottage with three dormers upstairs, a small porch with steps – and there was almost no garden at the front, just a short patch of lawn behind a low, undulating hedge. Why had there been such a clamour for a room in this house? There had been at least a hundred people at the party that night, but this cottage was nothing compared to its neighbours (even though she personally preferred old-world charm to grandeur). Clad in cedar shingle that had weathered to a dove grey, plain shutters flanked the downstairs windows, and it had a wisteria growing along the porch roof that was in full flower.

  Ro stepped out of the hire car and leaned against the door. She could hear the sound of the Atlantic pounding the beach in the distance.

  ‘Hey! I didn’t expect you so soon,’ Hump said, coming round the porch. He was wearing board shorts and carrying a box in his arms. He dropped it on the Adirondack chair beside him and vaulted over the wooden railings, landing lightly in front of her, his arms out wide.

  Ro wasn’t sure whether to hug him or shake his hand. She knew him better online than in the flesh, and right now, shirtless, there was a lot of flesh to deal with. She decided to err on the side of caution, opting for the handshake – only she caught her own foot as she stepped towards him, and ended up in the next instant with her cheek pressed flat against his warm (seemingly waxed) chest.

  Hump grinned as she jumped back in horror and tried to restore composure by thrusting out her hand like a toy soldier.

  ‘You Brits, so formal.’ He laughed, folding her back into a bear hug.

  ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled against his chest.

  ‘And apologetic.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  He laughed again, thinking she was joking. ‘Are your bags in the trunk?’

  ‘Mmm-hmm,’ she nodded, as he opened the boot and pulled out her giant, battered canvas holdall. He peered back round the car at her. ‘That’s it?’

  ‘I travel light.’

  ‘Yeah, but . . . you’re gonna be living here for four months. There’s hobos with more on their backs than this.’

  Ro smiled. ‘Did my stuff arrive?’ She had sent her photographic and computer equipment ahead by air freight several weeks earlier.

  ‘It’s all in the studio, ready for you to unpack.’

  ‘Oh God, I’m so excited – I can’t wait to see it,’ Ro said, biting her fingers.

  ‘Well, you don’t have to. I was just going to stop by the unit before you got here. I’ve got to drop off the ads.’ He pulled a poster from the box on the chair and unrolled it. Hayley, the maid of honour, pouted back at her, looking sexy and vibrant and enticing in her glamorously dishevelled get-up with the provocative sign ‘Get Humped this summer’ round her neck. ‘Remember her?’

  Ro laughed in astonishment, a hand clapped over her mouth as she took in, at the bottom, what appeared to be a timetable of shuttle runs from Main Street to the beaches. He’d been doing ads for his business?

  ‘We could do the tour when we get back.’

  ‘Totally . . . You did get her permission, right?’

  ‘Yeah. And her number,’ he winked. A phone inside the house rang. ‘Listen, I gotta take that call – I’ve been waiting the past half-hour for it. Why don’t you check out the beach and I’ll come pick you up in ten minutes?’

  Ro looked down the street towards the band of bright sky. ‘That way?’

  Hump was already barging through the door, racing for the phone. ‘That’s it. Left fork, first right onto Old Beach Lane,’ he called. ‘Three-minute walk.’

  Ro started walking, waking her body up again. It felt good to stretch after so many hours sitting cramped on the plane and then hunched, rictus-like with tension, as she negotiated the traffic. A couple of girls cycled past her in the opposite direction, wearing swirled, brightly coloured minidresses and chatting away in high-pitched voices, cars driving past at a leisurely pace, everyone relaxed from a day at the beach.

  To her right was a panoramic golfing green, and at its fringe, a sprawling building that Ro could tell was grand from the roof alone. As she passed the car park, she clocked a line-up of top-of-the-range Range Rovers, Mercedes SLs, Jaguars and Aston Martins.

  The beach car park just beyond it had cars with a lower spec – SUVs, a couple of saloons and vans. A group of bare-chested teenage boys in baggies were laughing with some girls in cut-off jeans and bikini tops sitting on the tailgate of a Chevy, low music pulsing from the dash. Ro walked past them towards the wooden railings that delineated the beach, pulling off her Converses without bothering to undo the laces, her eyes fixed on the huge heave of the ocean, which broke and smashed upon the shore, the wind picking sand off the set-back dunes and combing it up into the sky, while bending the bleached grasses almost flat to the ground. Either side, left and right, stretched miles of unending blond beach chopped up with footprints, distant dog-walkers and joggers silhouetted by the low sun that cast angled rays across the water, making it gleam like cut glass.

  The light was incredible, strong and blinding, and her hand instinctively reached for the camera hanging round her neck. It was always there, like a favourite necklace, ready to point and click – not just to capture the moment but make it real. For Ro, ever since her parents had given her a camera for her eleventh birthday – the last one before they died – life was only real through the lens: she only felt a moment in the fraction after the ‘click’; she only remembered it when she saw it on film – even her last image of Matt before he’d disappeared through airport security had to be confirmed on the display screen before she could actually believe and process that he’d gone.

  She walked down to the shore, camera poised at her eye as she framed the landscape, making sense of it in neat circles, adjusting the focus by single degrees as it pinned on the plovers that wheeled in the sky, the dot-dot-dash of the wind over the water. The zoom lens found a dog chasing a frisbee into the surf, and as she tracked its leap through the air, droplets from its coat shining like crystal in the blue sky, she picked up on something else beyond: two young children standing by the shore, throwing something into the water.

  They looked like ebony cameos from her vantage point, but Ro could see one was a girl from her dress billowing behind her in the wind. Their chins were tucked down, their hair lifted off the backs of their necks as they watched something floating in the water in front of them.

  Ro started clicking automatically, loving the way their silhouettes were picked out in such high definition against the sparkling water behind, tiny ambassadors of childhood with their duck curls and plump limbs. The shutter came down repeatedly like a fluttering eyelid – black, image, black, image – the children oblivious to her presence or the way the camera tracked their movements.

  But Ro was as lost as they were; she didn’t see the man racing towards her, his fists clenched, the sand kicked up in plumes behind him, and when, in the next moment, everything went black, Ro jumped back in alarm.

  The man had clamped his hand across the camera lens and was staring at her with a trembling, pinched fury.

  ‘Who the hell,’ he said quietly and ominously slowly, ‘do you think you are?’

  Ro stared back at him, open-mouthed and too shocked to reply. Who was he? Where had he come from?

  ‘Why are you photographing my children?’

  She blinked at him.

  ‘You think it’s OK to intrude with
your goddam camera? A pretty scene, is it?’

  Ro literally couldn’t find her voice. The anger in his eyes was terrifying. He looked wild and barely restrained, his dark brown hair blown forward like a nimbus around his face, which was angular and planed, his blue-shock eyes red-rimmed and unblinking.

  ‘Give me the camera.’ His hand was still on the lens and his grip tightened round it, no longer merely obscuring the view but trying to pull the camera away from her.

  That was enough to bring back her voice. ‘What? No!’

  ‘You are not keeping those images. Give me the camera.’

  ‘I bloody well won’t!’ Ro cried, trying to step back, but with the strap still round her neck and a full-grown man attached to the camera lens, she was stuck. Her neck bent forward from the jolt and she winced. The man released the camera at once and she stepped back, out of reach immediately, rubbing her neck with her free hand to make a point.

  ‘This is a £3,000 piece of equipment. Over my dead body am I handing it over to some bully boy like you,’ she said fiercely, adrenalin beginning to surge through her now.

  ‘Bu-bully boy?’ the man demanded incredulously. ‘You take photographs of my kids without consent and I’m the bully boy?’

  ‘I couldn’t see your damned kids. They were just silhouetted. They could have been cardboard cut-outs for all I could see. And what’s so bloody special about your kids, anyway, that people need to sign some kind of consent form to photograph them on a public beach?’