The Hidden Beach

by Karen Swan

  ‘What?’ she asked, bewildered.

  ‘Mats is racing in the America’s Cup. He’s going to go over there soon. You’re not leaving too, are you?’

  She stared at him, a little boy with two fathers and a mother who couldn’t choose. ‘Oh Liney –’ She went to put a hand to his cheek, as she so often did, but before she could make contact, Hanna pulled him back.

  ‘Now, Linus, we’ve discussed this. Bell has her own life too. We can’t keep expecting her to give up everything just for us.’ Hanna looked back at Bell and Mats with a smile. ‘Apologies. We should let you lovebirds get back to the party.’

  ‘Okay, sure,’ Mats said, clearly relieved. ‘Well, good seeing you all. Sleep tight, champ.’ He gave Linus a high five. ‘Nice to meet you at long last, Hanna. Emil, stay strong, man.’ Mats held out his hand, but there was a noticeable hesitation before his boss took it.

  ‘See you Monday, Bell,’ Linus said reluctantly, as he was led off by his mother.

  ‘Yes, Monday, dude,’ Bell said quietly, feeling Emil’s stare lift off her finally. Her gaze lingered on the trio as they walked down the gangplanks to the berth where the paint-flaked, underpowered boat was moored. To the unwitting, they looked just like a regular, highly photogenic, small family. There was nothing to indicate they were anything but.

  ‘Shit,’ Mats hissed under his breath, raking his hands through his hair as soon as they were out of earshot.

  ‘What?’ she asked, watching them become silhouetted in the harbour lights, Emil jumping into the boat first and holding out a hand for Hanna. She looked more beautiful than ever in a red silk dress. It was a dress that said she would be sleeping in his bed again tonight.

  ‘Did you see Emil’s face? He looked like he was ready to explode.’

  ‘Did he?’ she asked, swaying slightly and feeling an unexpected surge of triumph.

  ‘You didn’t notice?’

  ‘I wasn’t looking.’

  ‘You don’t think he had a problem with . . . us, do you?’

  She shrugged angrily. ‘Why should he? You’re his boat’s skipper and I’m his kid’s nanny. What does he care if he we hook up? It’s none of his business what we do in our own time. We’re employed by him. Not owned by him.’

  A surprised chuckle escaped him. ‘Feisty, aren’t you?’

  She shrugged again, feeling the adrenaline pump through her now that the crisis was over. So what if he’d seen her here with Mats? She owed him nothing – he’d made that perfectly clear. He’d won Hanna back and got exactly what he wanted.

  Mats pulled her closer to him again, seeing the dark gleam in her eyes. ‘So, we’re hooking up, are we?’

  She looked up at him and smiled. ‘We are now.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The darkness claimed him and his body jolted into sleep like he’d been pushed from a cliff. There was never complete refuge to be found for him here; a part of his brain – perhaps the only part that had remained alert enough to classify him as alive for all those years – always refused to surrender, a lone night-light burning in an empty house.

  But the tension in his body softened, his fisted hands curling open like autumn leaves, the headaches that strapped around his brain unbuckling for the night. It would not be for long, this fitful oblivion – the irony of emerging from a coma an insomniac never failed to amuse him – but it would be enough to quieten the hounds that snapped at his heels, their relentless shadows crossing over him like blades in the sunlight. The accident might have passed, the trauma healed, but danger persisted, he knew. For a man who could neither taste nor smell well, he had an acute sense that it was still here, close at hand.

  He moved through the blackness, wading through its different textures and shades, always searching for the speck of light that would grow if he turned towards it. And she would be there, as she always was, held within the brightness, her pale hair and lambent skin like beacons showing him the way. She had saved him, brought him back to life . . .

  And now she was here. Far away, pressed against his body, he felt the silken slip of her against his flesh, the tickle of her breath, the warmth of her limbs tangled with his, and he fell deeper into the velvet where nothing existed. No light, no taste, no touch, no smell. Just a sound.

  A . . .

  Bell.

  ‘Knock, knock.’

  She peered through the open door as Max looked up. He was sitting at the table, a coffee mug still steaming in front of him, reading yesterday’s paper. ‘Hey, Bell!’

  He seemed pleased – and surprised – to see her, standing up as she came in and giving her a kiss on each cheek. ‘Long time no see.’

  ‘I know! Wow, you’ve really been looking after the place,’ she marvelled, looking around the spotless cabin like she’d been gone for ten years rather than two weeks.

  He gave her a bemused look and she remembered what Hanna had said about her mother coming out this weekend. ‘All by my own hand, naturally. Coffee?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t worry, I’ll get it,’ she said, walking over to the espresso machine.

  ‘Have you lost weight?’ he asked her, sitting back down again.

  ‘Funny, I was going to ask you the same,’ she smiled, glancing over her shoulder.

  ‘Maybe.’ He gave a hapless shrug. ‘Probably.’

  ‘You look tired. Did you meet that client deadline?’ she asked, popping in a capsule and speaking over the gurgling machine.

  ‘Only at the expense of my sanity and two members of staff,’ he sighed, sitting back in the chair, looking exhausted. His skin was sallow beneath the tan, and he hadn’t shaved in days. Bell thought his dark hair looked noticeably more salted, too. ‘They kept making changes after everything was signed off.’

  ‘Well, it must be great to have it done, at least.’

  ‘Honestly, it’s been so much hassle, I’m not even sure we want the client now.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ She brought her coffee back to the table and sat opposite him, interlacing her fingers around the hot mug and letting the steam rise in her face for a moment. Anything to purify . . . It had taken a full day in bed – her own bed – to recover yesterday. ‘And the girls? Where are they? I’ve missed them.’

  ‘Still sleeping.’

  Her eyebrows shot up. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, Ebba thinks they’re having a growth spurt.’

  ‘Is she still here?’ She hoped not. Hanna’s mother was an exacting woman to be around. Nothing was ever quite right.

  ‘No, she went back last night. Bridge tournament this week.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Thank God,’ he mouthed, lest she should in fact be hiding behind the sofa, listening.

  She grinned into the mug, feeling something unspoken creep into the room and sit down beside them. A baby elephant.

  ‘So . . .’ Max tapped his fingers lightly on the table. ‘How are things over at Ingarso?’

  ‘Where?’ Her brow puckered quizzically.

  ‘Also known as 007.’ His tone aimed for levity, but his eyes could play no such game.

  ‘Ah, of course.’ Bell smiled vaguely at the family’s dramatic nickname for the island. She wondered if he knew the ‘villain’s lair’ was in fact a tired but genteel bright-orange manor house. ‘They are . . .’ she paused, wondering what on earth she could say. ‘They are okay.’

  ‘Okay?’ He looked underwhelmed.

  ‘Yeah. It was a pretty sketchy start. Linus was very quiet and reserved to begin with. Understandably.’

  Max nodded, looking pained. It couldn’t be easy for him to hear about the boy he had raised and loved as his own son bonding with his biological father.

  ‘I think he was so wary, after the hospital visit.’

  Max winced. ‘I told her it was a mistake. She never should have taken him.’

  ‘No, I agree,’ Bell murmured. ‘But I guess it’s just so hard to know what the right thing is in a situation like this. There’s not exactly a handbook, is there?’

  ‘Christ
, if only.’ He dropped his head into one hand and raked it through his hair. ‘And now? Is he calling him Pappa?’

  ‘No, that’s you and it always will be, Max.’ She took a breath. ‘But he is beginning to call him Dad.’

  ‘In the English?’

  ‘Yeah. I guess it feels . . . a step removed? It’s warmer than Father, but not you.’

  His face flinched, and she reached out and touched his hand lightly. ‘He loves you, Max – you’ll always be his pappa. This is not about replacing you.’

  ‘Isn’t it? I replaced Emil.’ There was a brutality to his words; they almost had a self-flagellating quality to them.

  She watched him. ‘How are you bearing up?’ She sensed that out of all of them caught up in this web – him, Emil, Linus, Hanna – he was the one most overlooked. He didn’t have a blood link here, nor even a legal or religious one. Emil was Hanna’s legal husband and Linus’s legal father. He had all the rights, all the sympathy, all the money, all the power . . .

  ‘Me? Oh, I’m just . . . waking up every morning wondering if this will be the day Hanna finally leaves me.’

  Bell looked back at him in astonishment. Did he know? How could he possibly? Had he seen them out on Saturday night, or heard about it? They’d hardly been discreet.

  ‘What?’ he asked, reading her face. ‘You can’t be surprised, surely?’

  ‘M-Max, Hanna loves you,’ she said, stumbling over the words.

  ‘Yes. But more than him? Ever since that bastard phone call that he’d woken up, she’s been . . . different. Distant.’

  ‘She’s in an impossible situation.’

  ‘We all are, Bell. Believe me, I’ve got sympathy for the poor guy. What he’s been through . . . No one should have to endure that . . . He was my friend too. Christ, he was my friend first.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah. Before he met Hanna, before I did, we were childhood friends. Out here.’ He shrugged, motioning to the cabin, the island.

  ‘No one’s ever mentioned that before.’

  He shrugged. ‘I guess it’s not important. But it’s also pretty obvious, isn’t it? His place is across the pond. His family built on that island five generations ago, and my grandparents bought this plot. We’ve both been coming to the lagoon our entire lives. I’ve never really not known him . . . Well, until recently.’

  ‘Were you close?’ She shifted position, hardly able to believe she hadn’t heard about this before now. Hanna hadn’t said anything, nor Emil . . .

  He gave a reflective smile. ‘When we were about eight or nine, he and I used to row our boats to the middle of the lagoon and tie them together at the oar hooks and sit fishing all day.’

  ‘That’s so sweet.’

  ‘I’m not sure you’d have thought it was sweet if you saw the contraband we smuggled out.’ He chuckled. ‘Chocolates and sweets when we were younger, but then as we got older – Penthouse magazine, cigarettes, weed, booze. We would smuggle out bottles of schnapps and drink ourselves stupid. It was perfect. No one ever came out to bother us; the only rule was, we had to return home when either of our families waved a white flag.’

  The white flag . . . She remembered the ones both Linus and Hanna had waved at each other in the night.

  ‘It sounds idyllic,’ Bell murmured, watching the memories flit across his face like sunbeams. ‘It sounds like you were best friends.’

  ‘Oh, in the summer we were,’ he said, glancing at her and away again. ‘Everyone is equal out here on these little islands and skerries.’ He chewed on his lip. ‘But it’s a different matter back in the city, of course. His family owned – still own, in fact – the Grand Hotel; they had an apartment that covered the entire top two floors. Whereas we lived in a cramped duplex in Tensta.’

  ‘Tensta? I don’t know it.’

  He gave a wry smile. ‘No, it’s a suburb in the north-west of the city.’

  ‘And you didn’t see each other then?’

  ‘He was at a boarding school in Switzerland, and his family travelled a lot. He was only really around in the summers. I used to feel like I spent all year waiting to see him.’ He gave an embarrassed smile and looked away.

  ‘Max, if you were such good friends, why haven’t you gone to see him?’

  ‘Because . . . how can I, Bell? I’m the bastard sleeping with his wife!’

  And now he’s the bastard sleeping with yours, she thought, watching as he dragged a hand through his hair again. She hated that she was stuck in the middle of this and being forced to lie, but this wasn’t her secret to tell. ‘So, if you were his friend, then you were Hanna’s too, I assume?’

  ‘Of course. I went to their wedding.’

  Bell nodded. She could see how it had played out – Hanna in a tailspin after the doctors’ prognosis; old friends consoling each other, comfort turning into refuge, into something more . . . But was it guilt, or rekindled love, that had sent her spinning back into her husband’s arms again?

  ‘So then Emil must understand how it would have happened between you and her, even if he doesn’t want to admit it to himself.’

  He was silent for a moment, watching her. ‘. . . You’d tell me if you knew anything, wouldn’t you, Bell?’

  ‘Max –’

  ‘Please don’t tell me I’m being paranoid. I’m not a fool. When Hanna heard about the accident, she rushed out in the middle of a storm to be with him. And now she’s been there all weekend, just her and Emil and Linus, playing happy families. You got given the weekend off –’

  She swallowed, wishing she had never set foot in that room that night and seen what she’d seen. Ignorance would have been bliss. ‘For the record, I asked for that time off. But they’re not alone, if that’s what you’re thinking. Måns is there too.’

  ‘The old guy’s still going?’

  ‘He’s still going – slowly, but going.’ She smiled. ‘Plus, there’s cooks, gardeners, a physio . . . . Look, she’s only there because Emil was concussed, and I think she was terrified he was going to slip back into a coma again.’

  He shot her a sceptical look. ‘Statistically, that wasn’t likely to happen.’

  ‘Statistically, Emil was never supposed to wake up.’

  ‘Touché.’ With a mirthless smile he sat back in the chair again, staring into space. They sat in easy silence, Bell drinking her coffee as his fingers tapped absently on the crossword.

  He glanced over at her again. ‘So back to you – why have you lost weight? You didn’t answer before.’

  ‘Oh.’ She gave a groan, trying to make light of it, find a reason. ‘You know – boy trouble. The usual.’

  ‘Ah.’ Sympathetic nod. ‘Anyone I know?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. He’s . . . uh, a sailor, skippers a megaboat. Leaving for New Zealand soon, just my luck.’

  ‘New Zealand?’ he grimaced. ‘That really is unfortunate.’

  ‘Yeah. He couldn’t get further away.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that – but don’t cry too many tears over him. In my experience, The One appears whether you’re looking for them or not.’ He shot her a wry look. ‘Clearly, I was not.’

  She gave a sympathetic smile.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘Enough of our respective heartbreaks. What’s the plan for today? When are you going back? I’ve packed a bag for Linus, just some little things he forgot –’

  ‘Back?’ She got up, taking their empty cups over to the sink.

  ‘To 007.’

  ‘Oh. I’m not,’ she said over her shoulder, rinsing them.

  ‘You’re not going back?’ he echoed, as though he hadn’t heard correctly.

  ‘No.’

  He came over and joined her by the sink. ‘But Hanna hasn’t mentioned you not staying there.’

  ‘Well, I was only needed to help Linus settle in and get to know his father. Emil I mean,’ she corrected, flashing an apologetic smile. ‘Which he’s now done.’

  ‘But it’s only b
een two weeks.’

  ‘I know, but it’s going well. They’re certainly relaxed together. You know, Emil’s like the cool uncle.’ She shot another apologetic smile. ‘Not that you’re not cool.’

  ‘But doesn’t Linus need you still?’

  ‘No. He’s having fun now and I was getting in the way of that, somewhat.’

  Max stared at her. ‘Were you? Or was that just Emil trying to make you feel that way?’

  She shot him a blank smile. ‘Well, either way, I’m not going back.’

  ‘Bell, I’m sorry to have to say this, but I don’t think you’ve got any choice in the matter. As far as I’m aware, Hanna wants you over there with Linus.’

  She turned the cups upside down on the draining board and reached for a tea towel, drying her hands. ‘Max, I love Linus, you know I do. And I wouldn’t leave him there with his father if I didn’t genuinely believe he will be absolutely fine. But I’ve made my decision. I can continue working for you here, with the girls.’

  ‘Or?’ He stared at her, incredulous.

  ‘Or I can quit.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ‘That’s it. Now keep your chins down,’ she said as Tilde and Elise kicked frantically, their tiny bare bottoms peeking up through the water like little islands. Their breathing sounded Darth Vader-esque through the snorkels as they excitedly scanned the bottom of the sandy shallows, most likely seeing nothing more exciting than her fluorescent-orange-painted toenails. ‘Can you see the fishes?’

  The twins nodded their heads underwater, in unison, as she walked them slowly along the edge of the curved beach, holding a hand in each of hers, the water clear and cool. She stretched her neck as she walked, feeling the sun beat on her shoulders, and knew she ought to reapply some sunscreen. The weather had settled again after the storm at the end of last week, clear skies stretching tightly overhead. She checked her skin for signs of burning. Her tan was growing deep, and caramel highlights streaked the wispy front sections of her hair so that her eyes looked especially fiery and bright in the mirror.

  The sound of a boat made her glance up and she saw Max coming round the headland with Hanna beside him, in the twin stroke; she had been stranded at Emil’s when Bell had left in Nymphea and not returned.