Just for the Summer

by Fay Keenan

  Just for the Summer

  Fay Keenan

  This one’s for my sister, Helen, and my brother, Luke, who tolerate my big-sisterness, and who I’d be more than happy to live next to. Thanks.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  More from Fay Keenan

  About the Author

  About Boldwood Books

  1

  SOLD. The sight of the yellow and blue rectangular sign atop the post in the front garden of Kate Harris’s home gave her a jolt. Though the sale had been confirmed some weeks ago, the estate agent had obviously amended the sign while she’d been dropping her three sons off at school. A neat but spacious detached property in the heart of one of Cambridgeshire’s most attractive villages, it had been snapped up quickly a few weeks back by a young family desirous of more space.

  Kate had been preparing herself, mentally and in more practical terms, for the ordeal of uprooting her sons and herself since the start of the year. It was only logical, now that the divorce had gone through and her ex-husband, Phil, had set up home with his new partner, that the house would have to be sold to release the equity and allow them both to start afresh. When the house had finally gone on the market in February, it had only been for sale for six weeks before an offer had been made and accepted. So now, in late March, knowing all of this, why did Kate’s stomach turn at the sight of the sign? Why did her hand clench convulsively around her car keys as she pressed the key fob to lock it where it stood on the driveway? Why did her face feel hot, and her mind start to race?

  Before she could take more than a deep breath, the phone in her other hand pinged. It was a WhatsApp from her friend and next-door neighbour, Lorna.

  Saw the guy come to change the sign. Any news about when you have to get out?

  Kate grinned. Trust Lorna to take the direct approach. She wasn’t exactly renowned for her subtlety. That was probably why they got on so well, though. Kate, with three sons in the house, had discovered that subtle got her absolutely nowhere, especially when it came to getting them to complete their household chores. She valued directness in her friends, too. Turning sideways, she was unsurprised to see Lorna putting her recycling bins out, and obviously waiting to catch her for a chat, and check in.

  ‘Fancy a coffee?’ Kate called as Lorna set down the last of her green bins. ‘I can fill you in on all of the gory specifics if you like.’

  ‘Thought you’d never ask!’ Lorna replied, hurrying over to the low fence that separated the front gardens and hopping over it. ‘It’s been a while since we had a proper catch-up.’

  As Kate made two cups of coffee from the machine that would, most likely, end up in storage in the next few weeks, Lorna filled her in on the latest gossip from the Year 6 parents’ WhatsApp group, to which Kate had resolutely refused to belong after she’d been passive aggressively reprimanded for dropping ‘the f-bomb’ on the forum, as one member had primly named it, with the caveat that, ‘I’m sure I’m not the only one who checks her phone in sight of small eyes.’ Kate, who had boys of thirteen and sixteen as well as her eleven-year-old, had merely rolled her eyes and refrained from pointing out that she was sure most modern parents had said a lot worse in front of their kids, and if they hadn’t, then their siblings certainly had. She encouraged her sons not to swear in the house, but she was pretty sure that once the front door closed on them, all bets were off. Fortunately, Lorna, who had a higher tolerance for the playground pecking order, kept her up to date with anything of significance.

  ‘I cannot wait to delete that bloody group from my phone, the second the gates close on the kids in the summer,’ Lorna said. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, most of them are great but it’s starting to feel more and more like some high school movie as the kids hit puberty. And it’s only going to get worse.’

  ‘You’re a braver woman than I am for staying on there.’ Kate laughed. ‘And I’m grateful, so you can give me a heads-up on anything I’m likely to have forgotten for school.’

  ‘Happy to take one for the team for a mate.’ Lorna grinned. ‘Inside, I’m counting the days, too. But enough of that crap. How’s the packing coming?’

  Kate sighed. ‘Slowly. Much as I hate to admit it, Phil was right when he said that most of the stuff in this house is mine. He wasn’t just being noble. I mean, apart from a hideous sideboard that I insisted he took with him when he buggered off, a wardrobe full of clothes and then the usual splitting of the CD and DVD collections and the pots and pans, the rest of it really does belong to me and the boys.’ She shook her head. ‘I never realised I was such a hoarder!’

  ‘Well, you were married for sixteen years, and three kids will fill your house faster than teenage girls to the O2 Arena to watch Harry Styles, so it’s hardly surprising.’ Lorna took a sip of her coffee. ‘So, when’s the completion date?’

  ‘The first Monday of May half term,’ Kate replied.

  ‘Jesus! That’s about ten weeks away. You’d better get your act together, then.’

  ‘You’re not kidding.’ Kate sat back on the padded bar seat that had been ‘hers’ for the duration of her marriage. Phil had been a creature of habit, and would never dream of sitting in it, far preferring the other side of the table. That rigid sense of routine was what had made his sudden declaration, just over two years ago, that he’d fallen in love with a fellow architect at his firm, all the more shocking. Within two weeks of telling her, he’d moved out of the family home and into his new love nest one village over, and set up home with alarming speed. While she couldn’t complain about his financial support of her and the boys over the past two years, and he’d been more than helpful in terms of his access to the boys at weekends and in the school holidays, now that the time had come to actually move out of the family home, Kate’s sadness and grief was creeping back up on her.

  ‘It’s all right to feel miserable, you know,’ Lorna said, obviously sensing that behind the jokes about WhatsApp, Kate was struggling. ‘You’ve been through so much over the past couple of years. And I know you don’t like it when I call Phil “that
shit of an ex-husband”, but you didn’t deserve any of it.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Kate swallowed a mouthful of still scalding coffee to try to get rid of the lump in her throat. ‘It’s not like I didn’t know this was coming.’

  ‘Still doesn’t make it any easier,’ Lorna said stoutly. ‘I know when Dan finally moved out, I kept finding his stuff for months afterwards. I couldn’t look at the hook on the back of the bathroom door without imagining his dressing gown on it. It takes time.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got a couple of months to pack everything up,’ Kate said, ‘and Mum’s offered me the annexe at the bottom of her garden for the time being – although God knows how all four of us are going to fit in there – it’s only got two bedrooms and a sofa bed in the lounge. Guess where I’ll be sleeping!’

  ‘Sounds like it’ll be, er, cosy,’ Lorna said. ‘I’d offer you my spare rooms, but something tells me the last thing you’ll need is to witness the new people setting up home in your old house.’ She looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Although, now you come to mention it…’

  ‘What?’ Kate looked at her friend, who smiled enigmatically.

  ‘Is the annexe your absolute last resort?’ Lorna said. ‘As in, if something better, but with a teeny, tiny string attached came along, you’d snap it up?’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose,’ Kate said. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘Leave it with me,’ Lorna said, finishing up her coffee. ‘It might not be what you want, but I’m pretty sure I can find you something better than the bottom of your mum’s garden, for a few months at least.’ She stood up. ‘I’ll text you later. Don’t say yes to your mum just yet.’

  ‘Okay,’ Kate said dubiously. ‘But you do know that I’ve got three sons, right? And they’re often not the most careful of people. If what you’ve got in mind involves anywhere expensive, with breakables, it’s a non-starter.’

  ‘Oh, your lot aren’t that bad,’ Lorna said. ‘I’ll be in touch. Now get on with that packing. Or at least thinking about what to put in boxes first!’

  Wondering, as she often had over the years that she’d known Lorna, whether her proposed ‘solution’ would actually lead to more complications, Kate still couldn’t help feeling intrigued. Anything that meant she didn’t have to squish into the annexe with her mum’s beady, disappointed eye on her from the other end of the garden had, surely, to be a good thing. Didn’t it?

  2

  Four weeks on, and Kate felt as though she was going to go bald, she’d torn so much of her hair out trying to get her sons to pack their stuff up ready for the move. Surely it wasn’t essential to take every PlayStation game with them into their temporary accommodation? As it had turned out, Lorna’s idea for a place to stay had materialised. She’d sorted out a charming cottage in a nearby village (thankfully not the same one where Phil and his new partner, Jennifer, were living), which belonged to a friend of hers. A holiday let, the ‘teeny, weeny string’ that came attached to the place was that the owner wanted it freshening up before offering it as an Airbnb for the summer season. Strapped for cash already, so needing the job done on the cheap, he’d offered it to Kate rent-free if she spent the next few weeks giving it a lick of paint. Because it was a holiday home, the redecoration needed to be neutral, and hard-wearing. Kate, who’d spoken to Lorna some time ago about possibly starting her own business as a painter and decorator, was initially thrown into a tailspin, until Lorna had reassured her that the owner ‘couldn’t care less what you do with the place, so long as it looks good in the photos’.

  Kate had agreed to let the cottage become her first blank canvas, and was already excited to pick out some colours from the Farrow and Ball and Craig and Rose colour charts. With the boys at school all day, she hoped she could tackle the living areas and the three small bedrooms with minimal disruption to them. And with, in theory at least, as few possessions as possible, this shouldn’t involve too much packing and repacking. As it was, the boys had moved most of their stuff that they wanted immediate access to Phil’s house so that they could at least have it at weekends.

  But there was still the mountain of other random stuff to sort out. She stared around the living room in exasperation. Initially, she’d been really good at packing things in boxes, marking them carefully with contents and rooms they should go in, and stacking the boxes in the conservatory. But as time went on and her frustration rose, she found herself grabbing the Sharpie and writing ‘Random Crap – Living Room’ and ‘Rubbish Old Toys – Tom’s Room’ in rising exasperation.

  And that was before she’d even tackled the loft. Logically, she knew she should have started there first, but she hated climbing about in the draughty, dark space at the best of times, and now without Phil there to hold the ladder, she was even more nervous about it. But, since the boys were all at school, and she’d hit a bit of dead end in terms of packing stuff the family still needed until they finally moved out, she supposed the time had come.

  Struggling up the old aluminium retractable ladder a few minutes later, Kate looked around in rising despair. She’d never expected to move from this house, at least until all three of her sons were grown up and she and Phil no longer needed the space. After the initial shock of Phil’s betrayal, she’d gone into a kind of long-term crisis mode; shutting out her own grief and anger in an attempt to keep her sons on an even keel, and only breaking down in private, in the middle of the night when they were sound asleep, or, in the early days, when she’d done the school runs and was safely behind the locked front door again. She’d got through it with the help of the friends who’d stuck by her, Lorna especially. Those who felt too awkward about taking sides, the ‘couple’ friends who couldn’t quite come to terms with the new status quo, had drifted away, but the hardcore of mates she called her own had helped her through it. Nights spent drinking wine on the sofa, and putting the world to rights, and later, when she’d been up to it, nights out doing the same thing, had helped immensely. But the hard reality now was that she had to tackle this mountain of stuff in the attic, the stuff that had been put up here and out of mind, that neither of them really knew what to do with.

  Bracing herself, she climbed the ladder, rung by careful rung, and then reached for the pull cord for the naked bulb hanging from the apex. Stepping up into the boarded space, she headed for the first in a series of plastic lidded boxes that were stashed in the eaves. The cool, spring breeze coiled around her like a waking serpent, and she shrugged deeper into her thick grey cardigan. She didn’t want to spend too long up here.

  Opening the first of the many boxes, she sighed in new exasperation. She remembered, now, why they’d been put up here. When her father had died, her mother, Selina, had downsized from the spacious family home to a smaller bungalow on the outskirts of the village, about a mile from Kate’s current house. Even though her new property had an annexe, that same annexe that was waiting stoically for Kate and her sons, should she need it in later months, Selina had refused to store the seemingly endless stream of toys, games and books from both Kate’s and her brothers, Aidan and Sam’s, childhood in the annexe, as at the time it had a serious damp problem. Kate also knew that her mother had recently become a disciple of the Marie Kondo method, and so had been adamant that the old clutter just had to go. As a result, Kate had agreed to stash these in her attic, and even though her brothers, who both lived in Somerset, had come to visit since their mother’s move to a smaller place, every time they’d left again Kate had slapped her forehead and remembered she’d forgotten to give them their share of the stuff.

  Well, she thought as she surveyed the boxes, there’s no way all this is going into storage at my expense! There were about ten plastic stackable boxes that contained toys, board games, old schoolwork, ancient audio cassettes, and each was packed to the brim. She wondered if Sam and Aidan would be able to pop across at some point before her house move and collect them, but then she had a better idea. The Easter holidays were coming up in a week’s time, and she’d been i
tching to take the boys away for a change of scenery, just for a few days. She couldn’t justify a full-on foreign holiday at this time of year, with the move coming up so soon, and her eldest son, Corey, about to take his GCSE exams, but perhaps a few days in Somerset might be a good halfway house? She could take her brothers’ share of the stuff down with her, get a bit of fresh country air and unwind for a bit. If one of her brothers couldn’t put her and the boys up, then she could book something last minute on the internet, she was sure.

  They’d all spent a raucous family Christmas together, their mother included, last year, when Kate and her boys had squished themselves into Aidan’s two spare rooms, and Selina had stayed with Sam and his wife, Florence. Family harmony had been helped by the fact that Sam and Aidan lived in two of the three terraced houses on Bay Tree Terrace in Willowbury, which meant that they could all hang out together over the festive period without worrying about how they were going to get home again, and their mother could head off to bed when she’d had enough. That Christmas had been, despite the cramped bedrooms, one of the best she’d had in ages, and the perfect tonic to a stressful period of her life. Even Selina had defrosted a little once she’d had a few glasses of Somerset’s finest mulled cider, and it had been a much better Christmas than the previous year when, still reeling from the separation, she’d spent Christmas Day alone as the boys had gone to stay with Phil.