The Holiday Home

by Fern Britton

  ‘Oh, all right, we’ll split it.’

  The party was on the beach. A hot August night. A huge moon hung fully in the heavens surrounded by a carpet of bright stars.

  As soon as Pru got to the beach road, her three passengers leapt out and disappeared while she was left to park.

  When she got down on to the sand, there was no sign of her sister or her mates. She collected a tin of cider from a trestle table and mooched around the outer circle of the party. Pru knew a few people, who nodded to her, but no one came forward to chat. She found a cool piece of clean sand and lay down to watch the stars. Back then she used to love searching for satellites as they tracked their way across the heavens.

  A soft Cornish voice broke into her solitude.

  ‘Can I join you?’

  She turned her head, feeling the sand shift beneath her. He was wearing sawn-off jeans and a Debbie Harry T-shirt. His face was in shadow, but she could see the outline of curly hair.

  She sat up. ‘Be my guest.’

  ‘I’ve been watching you.’

  She felt a little scared and turned towards the party to see if she could glimpse Connie.

  ‘It’s all right. I’m not a nutter. Mind you, if I was that’s exactly what I’d say, isn’t it?’

  Pru laughed nervously.

  ‘I thought you looked like someone I’d enjoy talking to, that’s all.’ He smiled and in the moonlight she made out kind sea-green eyes, nice lips and slightly wonky but very white teeth.

  ‘Oh.’

  He sat down next to her and rolled a cigarette. ‘Want one?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Good girl.’

  There was silence for a while as he sat gazing at the moonlit waves gently breaking on the sand. Pru thought she had never seen anyone so gorgeous.

  After blowing a series of smoke rings, he turned to her, holding out his hand: ‘Merlin Pengelly.’

  She held it. Rough and coarse but clean and strong. ‘Prudence Carew. How do you do.’

  He laughed. ‘Oh, a posh girl! I’ve never met a Prudence before.’

  ‘Well, my family and friends call me Pru.’

  He looked at her steadily and took another draw of his cigarette. ‘Got a boyfriend, Pru?’

  She wasn’t sure how to answer this. The true answer was no, but under the circumstances she didn’t want to look an idiot. ‘Oh, you know.’ She shrugged. He shrugged too.

  ‘And what do you do, Pru Carew?’ He smiled.

  ‘I’m at university.’

  ‘Posh and clever.’

  ‘Don’t make fun of me.’

  ‘I’d never make fun of a girl like you,’ he said softly. He stood up and held a hand out to her. ‘Want to go for a walk?’

  She smiled up at him. ‘OK.’

  They moved away from the main party and walked and chatted and laughed together until the first streaks of dawn were visible on the horizon. He told her he was a lifeguard for the summer and in the winter he’d do some labouring. He was Cornish born and bred. In return she told him about the courses she was taking for her business degree, the family firm and Atlantic House. Hoping that he might come and find her. ‘I’m here all hols,’ she said.

  She didn’t know what it was that made her feel so comfortable with him, but when she finally got home to Atlantic House and her bed, it was his sea-green eyes fringed with sunkissed blond lashes that burned in her memory. His freckled nose bending towards her, slowly blurring as he gently kissed her goodbye. The feel of his warm hand holding hers as she left to go and find Connie, Tracey and Marion. He had stood and watched from the sea wall as she drove away. She prayed he would come and find her.

  *

  More than two decades on, an older, wiser Pru smiled ruefully at the memories. Merlin had taught her a lot about life. But that was a lifetime ago. She had moved on – there was no changing the past.

  When she reached the top of the cliff above Figgoty’s, the beach below was deserted. Pru scrambled down the steep and awkward path. Some of the rocks were slippery, but she remembered the hidden footholds and managed to jump the final six feet on to the smooth sand below. Only the locals knew about Figgoty’s; no visiting families encumbered with pushchairs and windbreaks would dare make the tricky descent. The beach was sheltered by the huge natural curve of the cliffs. The sea here had a deep swell and the undercurrents could catch out the most seasoned of swimmers. It was here that she and Merlin used to escape on his days off. They would take their clothes off and lie naked on the sand before racing each other into the water and enjoying the pleasure of the cool waves running off their warm skin. She hugged herself.

  Why not? she thought. No one can see from the cliff. She pulled her sensible Marks and Spencer hoodie over her head and stepped out of her Rohan shorts. After another quick look to make sure there was no one watching, she slipped off her bra. Placing everything neatly on a dry rock, she ran across the sand and into the icy sea. What would Francis say if he saw her now? Maybe she’d bring him down here when he felt better.

  Pru didn’t stop running until she was up to her shoulders, then she took a deep breath and ducked under a breaking wave. When she surfaced, she floated on her back and looked up at the periwinkle sky. It felt so good to be this liberated and unencumbered, she couldn’t help laughing out loud. Turning back on her tummy, she swam through the breakers and out to where the sea was smooth. Again she lay on her back and felt the sun warming her front. Presently she heard another kind of splash over the sounds of the sea. An oar. She flipped over and saw a man in a sea canoe coming ever closer to her. He hadn’t seen her … yet. What should she do? She bobbed quietly, her nose just above the water. He was less than six feet away now and when he saw her he almost dropped his oar.

  It was Merlin.

  11

  Connie wondered if she could find the entrance to the cave in the wooded valley after all these years. She’d asked Greg to join her on her walk, but he was busy with emails. Though she made a show of disappointment, secretly she’d been relieved to take the walk on her own. She desperately needed to get out of the house and think about her unsettling row with Pru the other night. The appearance of Merlin had had a very strange effect on them both. She was shaken by how much emotion the memories of that summer had stirred up.

  Her sandals allowed the long grasses to tickle her instep as she pushed her way along the overgrown path. She saw the remembered stile ahead of her and, after climbing it, turned right to follow the rushing stream leading through the valley and on to the sea. The first time she’d come here was with Merlin and Pru. The three of them had played Pooh sticks and Merlin had given them their first experience of smoking a joint. It had been a warm afternoon with the drone of flies in the air.

  ‘Either of you girls know what a fuggee hole is?’ asked Merlin, his blissed-out eyes turning Connie to jelly.

  Pru giggled, ‘I wouldn’t like to say.’

  Merlin grinned his suntanned grin and clamped the joint between his crooked teeth. ‘Shame on you, Pru Carew. Dirty mind!’

  He took her hand and pulled her up the sloping side of the valley.

  Connie watched the giggling couple for a moment then hurried to catch them up, not wanting to be left behind. The climb got steeper until they reached a small plateau. Merlin was now leading the way and the girls were scrambling after him. Giggling and stoned.

  After about fifty metres, Merlin stopped and bent down on his haunches, pulling aside some tall ferns.

  ‘’Ere it is.’

  The girls crouched next to him and saw an opening in the side of the valley. Carved out of the rock, it was just big enough to take a barrel of brandy or a small crouched person.

  Merlin flicked his lighter and, using it as a torch, disappeared into the hillside.

  The girls looked at each other nervously.

  ‘Come on, girls. The lights are on,’ he called.

  Pru went first, letting out a gasp as she entered the carved cavern, lit now
by six flickering church candles.

  ‘Oh my God!’ she called to her sister. ‘Connie, you must see this.’

  ‘What is this place?’ breathed Connie in wonder as she stood in the tall space.

  Merlin shrugged. ‘No one knows for sure, but there are several of them in these parts. Prehistoric, I think. The smugglers used them to hide their stash.’

  At the back of the dry cave there lay a pile of blankets and an old-fashioned feather quilt. Merlin shook them out and spread them on the floor.

  ‘Come and lie down next to me,’ he told them. As they did so, he began to sing the Beatles’ ‘Come Together’. His voice ricocheted richly from the walls.

  Connie put her arm across his muscly chest and met Pru’s doing the same thing from the other side. Merlin finished the song and put each of his arms under their heads.

  ‘Oh, my lovely girls. Summer doesn’t get much better than this!’

  *

  Connie was starting to sweat a bit as she climbed the steep slope and found the plateau. Her heart beat with a sense of stepping back in time. It didn’t take her long to find the entrance, hidden now by a thicket of ferns and gorse. The plants scraped her legs and stung her feet, but she kept going until the small hole was revealed.

  As she ducked her head inside, Connie cursed herself for not bringing a torch. Then she remembered that the three of them had scratched their initials just inside the entrance. She closed her eyes tightly and counted to sixty, hoping that this would trick her eyes into seeing in the dark better. When she opened them, her sight slowly adjusted. Turning her head to the right she saw the letters CC, PC and MP.

  12

  As soon as he saw Pru in the water, Merlin stopped paddling and put his head to one side, staring at her from under his still-golden eyelashes. He dropped his gaze to her bare shoulders and then down to the water, where he could clearly see she wasn’t wearing any clothes. He lifted the boat’s paddle out of the water and balanced it across the front of the canoe.

  ‘So. My little Pru has returned.’

  ‘I think it’s you who have returned.’

  He laughed. ‘True, that. I haven’t been to Figgoty’s since you left me.’

  Pru snorted in derision. ‘Stop sounding like a schoolboy and leave me alone. I need to get out and get dressed.’

  ‘Nothing I haven’t seen before, eh, Pru?’

  She was shivering in the water now. ‘Bugger off, Merlin.’ She started to swim back to the beach.

  He leaned on the paddle and looked thoughtfully up at the sky.

  ‘You’re not holding a grudge are you, Pru?’

  Angrily she stopped swimming and turned to him. ‘Hold a grudge? Whatever for? You are a footnote to my youth, someone Connie and I laugh about.’

  He smiled, showing his attractively wonky teeth. ‘If I thought that was true, you’d be breaking my heart.’ He picked up his paddle and put it in the water. ‘You and I are unfinished business. Catch you later.’

  She watched as he disappeared around the next headland and then she swam back to shore and into her warm, dry clothes.

  The climb from the beach and up the cliffs was hard. Her legs were shaky and her fingers felt weak as she fumbled for handholds in the slate. Seeing Merlin had upset some delicate balance within her. She grasped a good wedge of rock, but as she hauled her weight on to it, it came away in her hand and she slid a little, grazing her shins. Her breath was uneven and painful in her throat. She felt something rising within her – something buried but not dead.

  ‘Come on, Prudence. It was all a long time ago. Don’t let that idiot under your skin.’

  After a while she scrambled from her hands and knees to a bent walk and then, finally, she was standing upright on the grass-tufted path of the clifftop. Pru rubbed her eyes with her T-shirt and looked down to the beach. She saw her own footprints in the bare sand, but of Merlin there was no sight.

  There was a weather-beaten bench ahead of her, facing the ocean, and she gratefully walked towards it and sat. She put the palms of her hands over her blue eyes and instantly saw an image of Merlin making love to her for the first time in the little cave up in the valley. The fuggee hole. She remembered the excitement of having given Connie the slip. She remembered how he’d held her hand and guided her through the gap in the earth bank and into the warm pitch-blackness. She could hear the rasp of his lighter and see the candle stubs sitting in solid pools of wax on the floor. She’d watched as he bent and lit their wicks. Now, she could see the tall graceful arch of the rock; white and smooth. It wasn’t dank and slimy like the cave under Atlantic House. Merlin had moved to the back of the cave and collected the bundle of blankets and the faded paisley eiderdown quilt. He’d laid them on the floor, the same as he had that day when Connie had been with them.

  ‘Do you want to lie down?’

  She kicked off her plimsolls and sat on the makeshift bed.

  ‘I’ve never seen a girl like you before.’ He was kneeling in front of her. Slowly he slid his arms round her waist, all the while gently kissing her neck and shoulders.

  ‘Is that nice?’ he breathed.

  ‘Mm,’ she said, her eyes wide open.

  She had been kissed by boys before, but had never understood what all the fuss was about. Now, with the warmth of his arms around her and his soft lips on her face, she felt different.

  He sat back a moment to look at her. Satisfied that she appeared not to mind, he moved in to kiss her mouth. Unsure how to respond, Pru had parted her lips a little and allowed his tongue inside her mouth. She didn’t know what to do with her hands, so she let them hang loosely by her side. He pulled away and looked at her.

  ‘Not shy, are you?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  He’d taken her hands and placed them on the belt of his jeans. ‘Undo me,’ he whispered.

  She squeezed the palms of her hands tighter over her eyes, remembering the way he’d made love to her and how she had felt. Special. Adult. Wanted. Until …

  ‘Merlin!’ the sound of that name broke through her reverie. Rubbing her eyes roughly, she uncovered them and sat blinking in the daylight.

  A little round dog followed by a little round man barrelled towards her.

  ‘Here, Merlin!’ the man called in a Midlands accent. ‘Quiet, you’ve disturbed this lady. Mind if I share the seat with you?’ He sat down before she could answer. ‘Beautiful up here, isn’t it? I’m going to be scattered up here when I die.’

  Without saying a word, Pru stood up and walked away as fast as she could. Behind her, she heard the man say, ‘Well. Some people, eh, Merlin?’ Her walk turned into a trot which turned into a run. She had to get back to the real world. To Francis and security.

  *

  ‘Mum … Muuuuum?’ Abigail was shouting from upstairs.

  Connie, who had only just sat down after clearing up the supper things, was in the drawing room with Greg. Her mind had drifted back to the initials carved in the rock wall. She took a deep breath and blew it loudly through her lips. ‘What?’ she yelled.

  ‘There’s no hot water. And I’ve got shampoo in my hair.’

  ‘Well, use the cold tap.’

  ‘It’s cold.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  A short silence ensued. Connie picked up her glass of wine and waited.

  ‘Daaaad?’

  Connie looked over at Greg, who was trying to watch the news.

  ‘Whaat?’ he bellowed.

  ‘There’s no hot water and …’

  ‘… You’ve got shampoo in your hair?’ he chorused with her.

  ‘Yes. Help.’

  He flicked the TV off and stood up, quietly swearing.

  Connie heard him go upstairs, followed by Abi’s protestations that he couldn’t come in the bathroom because ‘I haven’t any clothes on.’

  ‘I’ve seen you without clothes on since you were born. Now open this door.’

  After another five minutes or so Greg came downstairs and into the d
rawing room.

  ‘There’s no hot water,’ he announced.

  Pru and Francis stuck their heads round the door. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any hot water, Connie.’

  Connie looked at them as if they were all mad. ‘Really? You don’t say? What do you expect me to do about it?’

  ‘Oh, don’t get all huffy. We’re only saying,’ said Pru.

  ‘And I’m only saying why are you all asking me? I don’t know what to do.’

  The four of them stood, pathetically, trying to come up with a solution.

  ‘We’ll have to talk to Dad in the morning. He’ll know a plumber. In fact, Mum and Dad need to do a bit of maintenance on the old place.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Pru looked at Francis. ‘The tap in our en-suite basin is still dripping.’

  The following morning, a delegation of Connie and Pru knocked on the door of The Bungalow.

  Dorothy opened it in her dressing gown.

  ‘It’s terribly early. What do you want?’

  Connie poked Pru in the back, which Pru took as a signal, correctly, for her to open the conversation.

  ‘It’s almost ten. Can we come in?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Dorothy opened the door wider. ‘I hope you don’t want breakfast.’

  ‘We’ve had breakfast. We just want to have a chat with you and Daddy.’

  ‘Oh God. Sounds ominous. Henry!’ she called. ‘The children want to speak to you.’

  A muffled, ‘One moment,’ came from his bedroom. They heard movement, then he opened his door and walked out to greet them, tying the belt of his silk dressing gown.

  ‘Good morning, all. To what do we owe this pleasure? Come into the lounge and sit down. Dorothy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Put some coffee on, would you?’

  Dorothy went to the kitchen, grumbling.

  Henry sat in his armchair and smoothed his hair with his hands.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  Connie turned to Pru, who started: ‘Daddy, when did you last have the boiler checked? It’s broken down and there are several taps dripping.’

  ‘Only to be expected in an old house,’ he replied, smiling.