Summer at Shell Cottage

by Lucy Diamond

  ‘Let me guess,’ Harriet said as her daughter hung up. ‘Chloe’s got these well nice new shoes and she had to describe them to you, stitch by stitch, because they’re, like, so totally amazing and awesome.’

  Molly beamed. ‘Something like that,’ she said, but Freya was not wholly convinced. She would have put money on that phone conversation being with a boy. Maybe that was how teenagers spoke to each other these days, though.

  As they walked to the car, Harriet and Molly fell into stride ahead of Freya and Teddy. Molly really was gorgeous, Freya thought with a sigh for her own lost youth. Her skin was flawless – translucent and radiant; she had high cheekbones, a luscious wide mouth and that great sweep of long caramel-coloured hair. How did Harriet dare let her walk around London unchaperoned, when she was so ripe and beautiful? Even in Ivybridge, you could feel the stares from teenage boys and men alike, heads turning, tongues practically hanging out in the Co-op car park. Freya would want a full burqa and bodyguard for Libby if she blossomed into such a peach, along with a sign around her neck reading Hands Off. Out of Your League. Her Father is Six Foot Two and a Policeman, I’ll Have You Know.

  To Freya’s surprise, the hallway at Shell Cottage was absolutely sparkling when they arrived back half an hour later. She stood there for a moment, barely noticing the plastic handles of the shopping bags cutting into her fingers, as she gazed around at the transformation. The black-and-white-tiled floor, which, only a few hours ago, had been coated in a fine powdering of sand, strands of dried grass and general sticky grime, positively gleamed. The mirror – previously smeared with fingerprints and thick with dust – shone with the light from the open front door, reflecting Freya’s own surprised face back at her.

  Further into the house, the kitchen now resembled something from a Flash advert. The worktops had been cleared and all the toast crumbs wiped away, the pile of washing-up had vanished, and a load of laundry tumbled obediently around the washing machine. The floor shone, the hob was newly spatter and grease free, and a damp cloth hung tidily over the shining mixer tap, as if taking a rest from all its hard labour.

  It was only the scent of bleach and cigarette smoke hanging in the air that convinced her she was not in some kind of dream world or hallucination. Whoa, as her kids would say. Mum had certainly been busy while they were out.

  ‘Wow!’ Harriet said, almost cannoning into her as she came in. ‘Has Katie come over, do you think?’

  Freya set the shopping bags on the floor, still marvelling. ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, just as Olivia appeared and jumped to see her daughter standing there.

  ‘Oh! You’re back. I didn’t hear the car.’

  ‘We’ve only been here ten seconds. We were just saying how lovely it looks in here. Has Katie been round, or did you get stuck in yourself?’

  ‘Neither. This is all down to Gloria. Our new cleaner.’ Olivia’s lips twitched suddenly. ‘Our nude-modelling, former pet-shop-owning, widowed cleaner. Who’s done rather a good job so far, I have to say.’

  Freya was trying to compute all of those adjectives at once but it was no use: her mind was blown. ‘The nude-modelling … ?’

  ‘Of course, she only had time to do in here and the hall today. Something about going to see a man about a dog. Whether it was pet shop related or coincidental, your guess is as good as mine, but there you have it. She’ll be back tomorrow to do the living room and bedrooms.’ Olivia gestured to the laundry. ‘And I put this lot on,’ she added, looking uncharacteristically proud of herself.

  ‘Right.’ Freya rubbed her forehead, still not feeling quite up to speed on the strange turn of events. I go out to the shops, I leave you for a few hours and this is what happens? ‘Well … great,’ she added eventually. As long as the house was cleaned by somebody, it made no odds to her who that person might be. And there was still time to patch things up with Katie and bring her back into the fold, after all. Yes. She’d check out this strange-sounding Gloria, and if there was any kind of dodginess afoot then Freya would dispatch her and phone Katie, begging if she had to.

  She went out to get the rest of the shopping, still puzzling it all over. She hoped Mum was okay. The whole thing sounded very odd indeed.

  Chapter Twenty

  Dinner that evening was a huge plateful of Aberdeen Angus steak burgers, slightly blackened and all the better for it, in Harriet’s opinion. She had cooked an entire bag of Jersey Royal potatoes, adding lashings of creamy Devon butter and sprinkling them with mint snipped from the garden, while Freya had assembled a salad.

  Harriet had enjoyed spending some time with Freya and Teddy that day. She had always found Freya rather distant in the past. Perfectly nice, don’t get her wrong, but just the tiniest bit cool and offhand, not what you’d call super-friendly. Perhaps Harriet was being paranoid but she had wondered a few times previously if Freya looked down on her, secretly thinking she and Molly weren’t good enough for the likes of Robert. Mind you, Harriet had always felt kind of shambolic and inferior to the Tarrants full stop, because they were so clever and well-off, basically, and because so many people judged single mothers and often not in a good way. It was difficult not to be ultra-defensive about these things.

  Anyway, it had been rather an eye-opener, their shopping trip, because for the first time ever, Freya had seemed kind of vulnerable. Fragile. She definitely wasn’t her usual composed self, that was for sure. Harriet had tried asking if she was okay but Freya’s face had closed up like a clam. I’m fine, she’d said at once, but it was not a convincing response, especially as she turned bright red and practically burst into tears ten seconds later when Teddy went and dropped that gin bottle. Harriet would keep a weather eye on her for the time being, she decided.

  Over dinner, the surfers were in high spirits with tales of dramatic megawaves and theatrical tumbles, as well as moments of triumph for them all. Robert, who always became pathetically competitive whenever Victor was around (much to Harriet’s dismay), boasted of riding an eight-footer, although nobody else seemed to have witnessed this.

  In contrast, Olivia still seemed out of sorts, barely joining in with the conversation, which ranged from a discussion about who was going to win the family swingball championship this summer (Teddy was most vociferous in anticipating personal glory, although Harriet caught the distinctly unsporting glint in her husband’s eye which said, Over my dead body) through to a period of whinging about why the children had to eat lettuce when it was like leaves and it wasn’t like they were giraffes or anything, and then finally (and thankfully, if the tired snap in Freya’s voice was anything to go by) onto what everyone wanted to do the next day.

  A hike was mooted – by Robert, of course, who had to go and suggest a really hard walk on Dartmoor, the sort attempted by professional mountaineers for charity slogathons, just to prove how he fit he was. Much to Harriet’s secret relief, this was shot down first by Dexter, who declared scathingly that walks were boring, and then by Molly, who said, with withering sarcasm, ‘Er, hello? We can walk in London. And there’ll be no signal at all on Dartmoor!’

  Harriet gave her a look. ‘We are not here solely for the phone signal,’ she said primly, hoping that nobody thought her daughter too bad-mannered. And then, ignoring the muttered ‘You’re telling me’ that came from her beloved, added quickly, ‘We could go kayaking.’ They’d all enjoyed this the summer before. It had been like Swallows and Amazons, setting off down the river in convoy, Alec with a pirate hat on his head, shouting ‘Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum!’

  ‘Yeah, kayaking!’ Libby said, her face lighting up. ‘Granny you could come too. Remember how last time we—’

  But Olivia didn’t look as if kayaking was uppermost in her mind, as she suddenly pushed her plate away, knocking over the salt pot. ‘I can’t do this any more. I just can’t. I have to tell you,’ she said, her mouth buckling as if she were in pain. Everyone turned towards her except Teddy, who was enjoying the fart noises he was making with the ketchup bottle way t
oo much, and Molly who was surreptitiously typing a text on her phone under the table.

  ‘Stop that, Ted,’ Freya hissed. ‘Mum, what’s wrong?’

  ‘Tell us what?’ Robert asked. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Do you want to hear one of my jokes, Granny?’ Libby asked kindly. ‘Knock, knock.’

  ‘Not now, darling,’ Freya said urgently. ‘Mum? What is it? Are you unwell?’

  Olivia took a deep breath, one pale hand clutching her throat, then looked from her daughter to her son and shook her head. ‘We need to talk,’ she said. ‘It’s … It’s something bad. I thought I could keep it from you, but I just can’t pretend any longer.’ She got to her feet rather unsteadily, abandoning the rest of her dinner. ‘I’ll be in the snug,’ she said, and left the room.

  Talk about going out on a cliffhanger. Freya and Robert looked at one another and rose from the table wordlessly, food abandoned, as they hurried to follow her. Harriet gazed at Victor, who shrugged blankly. ‘Eat up, everyone,’ Harriet said in the deafening silence that remained.

  ‘So are we going kayaking, or not?’ Teddy wanted to know, unmoved by all the drama. A huge splurge of ketchup burst out of the bottle and drowned what was left of his salad. ‘Whoops,’ he said innocently.

  ‘Can I leave the rest of my tea?’ Libby added in the next breath. ‘Can we get down from the table?’

  Victor was gazing back at the door through which the Tarrants had all departed. ‘Er … yeah. Sure,’ he said distractedly, which both children claimed as their answer, Teddy giving a fist-pump and Libby sliding down from her chair before he could change his mind. Her siblings quickly followed.

  Molly looked up from her phone and did a double take. ‘Where did everyone go? What’s going on?’

  Harriet spread her hands wide. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is the question.’

  Whatever the announcement was, it was taking a while, Harriet thought as she finished the washing-up and then poured herself a glass of Pinot Grigio. Seeing Victor out in the garden with the children, Teddy hoisted up on his shoulders and all of them laughing as they attempted a game of badminton doubles over the washing line, she poured him one too. ‘Sustenance right here when you need it, Vic,’ she called, taking both glasses up to the patio table on the terrace.

  He was nice, Victor, she thought, watching the scene as she sipped her wine. Tall and broad, with cropped dark hair and lovely olive skin (she was sure he’d already tanned a shade darker from being on the beach today), he had a directness about him that she found pleasing, a way of looking at you when you spoke as if he were really listening to your every word, mentally noting down each detail in his little policeman’s book. You could tell he was good at his job too – he was always fair to the children, never losing his cool with them, even during Olympic-standard bouts of bickering and She-started-it-No-he-started-it fisticuffs.

  Seeing him with his brood like that gave her a pang for all the babies she’d never quite had, the big family she’d always wanted. Some things just weren’t meant to be, though. She’d accepted that long ago and was grateful for Molly and Robert at least. They were enough for any woman.

  A few minutes later, Victor lowered Teddy to the ground, pleading exhaustion, and came up to the terrace, grinning. ‘Good one, thanks,’ he said, taking up the glass of wine. ‘That’s exactly what I need right now.’

  ‘I wonder what’s going on inside,’ Harriet said as he sank into the chair beside her. ‘Olivia and the others, I mean. Have you got any clue what all of this is about?’

  ‘Not the foggiest. Olivia seemed pretty on edge, though. She has done since we got here. Definitely not her usual self.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Harriet hesitated. ‘Actually, I was wondering … is Freya all right at the moment? She doesn’t quite seem herself either.’

  Victor looked surprised at the question. ‘Freya? Sure, why?’

  ‘Oh.’ Back-pedal, back-pedal. ‘It’s just … Nothing, really. Must be the social worker in me, worrying about everyone, that’s all.’

  Victor shrugged. ‘No need to worry. You know Freya – the ultimate coping machine. She’s always on good form.’

  Harriet didn’t quite know what to say. Was he for real? He was married to Freya and yet couldn’t see what Harriet had noticed – that she was really fragile and stressed out. She was packing away the booze, too. Last night, she’d drunk so much, Harriet was amazed she could get upstairs to bed in one piece.

  Before she could reply, though, the back door of the house banged and then Freya and Robert came marching up the path towards them, tears rolling down Freya’s face. ‘Well, she doesn’t seem all that happy now,’ Harriet murmured, before jumping to her feet. ‘What’s happened? What’s wrong?’ she cried.

  Freya reached the terraced area and flung herself into one of the chairs, her back deliberately turned to the children. ‘Oh my God, Vic,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.’

  ‘What? Is your mum okay?’ he asked, reaching out for her. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘It’s Dad,’ said Robert, catching up, white-faced. ‘He had an affair.’

  Harriet’s jaw dropped open. Had an affair? No way. Not Alec. He was devoted to Olivia. His face had softened with love every time he so much as glanced her way! ‘No,’ she breathed. ‘Shit. No wonder your mum’s been looking so upset.’ She clapped a hand to her mouth, feeling almost as sad as if it had been her own parents. ‘Oh my God. I’m so sorry. I always thought they were, like, the happiest couple in the world.’ Robert sat down next to her and she wrapped her arms around him. ‘What a terrible shock.’

  ‘That’s not all.’ Robert looked at Freya, who was still pale and weeping. ‘There’s a child,’ he said heavily. ‘Our half-brother.’

  ‘And I’ve met him,’ Freya spluttered. ‘The kid with the flapjacks; Katie’s son. I even thought he looked familiar!’ She scrubbed at her eyes furiously then turned to Victor with real pain in her face. ‘And all this time we had no idea. No clue whatsoever that there was a cuckoo in the nest. An extra kid brother!’

  It wasn’t long before their mother’s distress filtered down to the bat-like ears of the Castledine children, and their badminton game was abandoned, racquets dropped to the lawn. ‘Why is Mum crying?’ asked Teddy uncertainly, hanging back and staring.

  ‘Mum!’ cried Libby, loping across the grass. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Freya pushed her tears away and smiled a wet and very artificial smile. ‘Nothing, darling, I’m fine. It’s just … hay fever.’

  ‘But – ’ Libby didn’t look convinced but Victor rose to his feet and headed her off before she could say another word.

  ‘Mum’s fine,’ he said, ‘but you grubby lot all need a bath or shower. Teddy! You’re up first, mate. Come on.’ He glanced back at Freya. ‘I’ll get this lot washed and ready for bed.’

  ‘Ready for bed?’ Dexter said indignantly. ‘It’s not even seven o’clock!’

  ‘Well, clean at the very least,’ Victor said, herding the three of them towards the house with impressive aplomb. ‘Chop chop. Quick march. You can have some pudding once you’re in your pyjamas, if there’s no mucking around.’

  Once they’d gone, Harriet looked from Robert to Freya, both of whom seemed to have lost the power of speech. ‘I am so sorry,’ she said. ‘What a shock. And your poor mum too.’

  Freya nodded miserably, draining Victor’s glass of Pinot in a single mouthful, and Harriet seized an opportunity to offer some practical help. ‘I’ll get more wine,’ she said, dashing inside.

  By the time she had located the bottle and extra glasses, Robert was loitering at the back door. ‘I need to go for a walk,’ he said, raking a hand through his hair. ‘Clear my head. This is completely nuts.’

  Of course. This was Robert’s answer to everything: to move, whether it be walking or running or cycling, just working his body, hard and fast, to try and relieve the build-up of stress. ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ she asked,
remembering Freya weeping up on the terrace and now presumably alone. ‘Because …’

  He shook his head. ‘I’d rather be on my own,’ he said. ‘Whereas Freya …’

  ‘Yeah.’ Whereas Freya should definitely not be on her own in this state. Got it. Harriet gave him a hug. ‘Okay, well, take care, all right? Don’t go too far. Make sure you come back again.’

  His lips smiled briefly but his eyes were sad, so sad. ‘I’ll be back,’ he said. He must have been really sad because he didn’t even do an Arnold Schwarzenegger impression as he said the words.

  Meanwhile, Freya was pink-eyed, her face swollen and puffy from tears, so Harriet hurried back up to her and poured her a gigantic glass of wine. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Get that down you. What a shitty bit of news to hear.’

  Freya gulped. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yet another shitty piece of shitness in Freya Castledine’s shit-tastic shitsville life.’ And with that, she drained the glass in two swallows and filled it up again.

  Whoa. Okay, then. So Harriet had been right. Something was troubling her sister-in-law, just as she’d suspected.

  ‘Do you know what?’ Freya said before she could respond to this declaration. ‘You’re the first person in this whole family who has actually asked me, am I all right. Yeah. You! The only one. Mum hasn’t noticed. My own husband hasn’t noticed. Too busy rescuing everyone else to remember I’m even here. But who’s left to rescue me? Nobody, that’s who.’ Her mouth trembled and she twisted her fingers in her lap. ‘And then today, in Ivybridge Co-op, you asked me, was everything all right. The only one to ask. And I said …’ She began to cry again. ‘And I said yes, everything was fine. But it isn’t. It isn’t fine at all.’

  Harriet reached out and put a hand on Freya’s. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked softly. ‘Tell me.’