by Karen Clarke
My head jerked. ‘Visitor?’ Mum rarely had visitors, and normally told me when she did. ‘Who was it?’
Kath shook her head, her beehive wobbling. ‘Didn’t recognise the car, but the only vehicle I’ve ever seen parked outside your mum’s is her boss from the health food store. What’s his name? Gavin. Comes to discuss the accounts every month.’
I remembered now, Mum saying that Gavin was ‘quite dishy’. He’d been there once when I’d called in, supposedly going through some paperwork, but drinking coffee and eating a batch of my shortbread biscuits, his jacket flung on the sofa. I’d briefly wondered whether there was more to it, because Mum’s skirt had ridden up over her knees and her cheeks were a rosy red, but she’d not said anything since and neither had I.
‘Maybe he’s got a new car,’ Kath said, ‘and him and your mum are doing the biz.’ She laughed with her whole body. ‘I keep telling her, get yourself a man, Rose, or you’re going to rust over downstairs.’ Her eyes bobbed downwards, and I mentally recoiled from the image, though I’d occasionally thought it a bit unhealthy that Mum had only ever slept with my father.
‘I’m sure she’d have said if she was seeing Gavin like that.’ Wouldn’t she? Maybe she was keeping it quiet, in case things didn’t work out, but Mum was an open book where emotions were concerned, and we saw each other so often it was impossible to imagine her hiding a whole relationship. ‘You’d surely have seen a car out there more often.’
‘True.’ Kath hoisted the empty laundry basket onto her hip. ‘Any news about the bakery, love? I thought you were great on the telly, by the way, nothing to be embarrassed about.’
‘Did you know Freya’s husband’s going to buy it for her?’
‘WHAT?’ The word shot out so loudly, a magpie flew out of the hedge with a startled squawk and I ducked as it flew over my head. One for sorrow. Another sign? ‘But she’s got a new baby to look after.’ Kath’s face was screwed up with shock. ‘What the hell’s she doing buying a bakery?’
‘Apparently, she wants it to be an ice-cream parlour.’
‘Ice-cream parlour?’ Kath’s face straightened out. ‘I don’t know where I went wrong with that girl, I really don’t. Marrying a man old enough to be her father, even though he’s lovely, and her constantly wanting this and that.’ She gave me a sad little smile. ‘Shame she didn’t turn out like you, Meg. You didn’t even have a dad, but you’re a credit to your mum.’
‘Oh, Kath, don’t say that.’ Now I felt even worse. ‘I’m really sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything.’
‘If only she’d met someone a bit younger, who would stand up to her a bit more,’ Kath said on a sigh. ‘Don gives in to her far too much.’
Guilt twisted my insides. ‘He does seem to really love her.’
Kath’s mouth turned down. ‘He’s far too soft, giving her whatever she asks for. It’s not healthy. She’s never going to grow up at this rate. She’s tried to replace her dad, and that’s not healthy either.’
As I tried to think of something consoling, I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye and looked up. Had the curtain just twitched? Mum’s bedroom was at the front, so we couldn’t be disturbing her – unless she’d moved into the back bedroom where it was usually quieter.
‘I’d better go,’ I said to Kath, remembering my cakes were in the car, probably overheating. ‘I’ll call Mum later. And please, don’t feel bad about Freya, she actually offered me a job, and I might end up taking it.’
‘Oh, Meg, I’m sorry.’ Kath’s face hardened. ‘I’ll be having a word with the little madam.’
Back in my car, driving to Seashell Cove, I thought again about working for Freya. As much as I detested the idea, Don had promised a good salary, and he seemed like a man of his word. If I could keep a few shifts at the café, who knew? Maybe one day, when Freya was desperate to move on, I’d have enough money to buy the place myself.
Buoyed up by the thought, I pulled the car over at the top of the narrow road that led to Maitland’s Café, and sat for a moment, looking over the cove where the sun-silvered sea was gently lapping the sand. The beach was strewn with bodies, sunbathing on towels, or paddling at the water’s edge, without a worry in the world to a casual observer.
Sighing again – I’d never sighed so much in my life as I had in the past week – I took out my phone to call Nathan, and almost dropped it when it rang and his number came up.
‘Nathan, hi, I was about to call.’ I had to say it quickly before I changed my mind. ‘I’ve been having a think about staying on at the bakery when it’s an… ice-cream parlour.’ It was so hard to say those two words. ‘I wondered whether you could pass on a message to the Williams’s to say I’d like to accept.’
There was a momentary pause, as if Nathan needed a moment to absorb this information, and I pictured his face in detail, as if he was sitting beside me. ‘Actually, I was calling to say they’ve just this minute pulled out.’
‘What?’ I slumped back in my seat. That was that then. Back to square one. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or cry. ‘I can’t believe it,’ I said, pushing my hair off my cheek. ‘I didn’t even want to work for Freya, but I’d just got my head around it.’
‘Are you working at the moment?’
Barely able to summon the energy, I said, ‘Not until two o’clock. I was just heading to the beach at Seashell Cove for an hour. Why?’
‘Would you mind if I joined you?’
Chapter Twelve
‘Charlie didn’t fancy the zoo today, then?’
Nathan shook his head. ‘He got it into his head this morning that he wanted to build the biggest sandcastle in the world. I thought the beach here might be less busy than the one near us.’
I slid him a look, sensing he was making excuses, secretly pleased that he might have wanted a reason to see me. After fleeing the bakery yesterday, and the way I’d reacted to his phone call, he was probably concerned about my state of mind, and it was nice that he cared enough to check up on me.
I hadn’t expected him to arrive with his nephew, but the sight of them in the car park behind the café had boosted my mood. Charlie was a sturdy little boy, with dark eyes and brown curls peeking through his back-to-front baseball hat. He’d gurgled with laughter as he rode down to the beach on Nathan’s shoulders, and said shyly, ‘Hello, Meg,’ when Nathan introduced us.
‘Did Don say why they’d changed their minds?’ I said, as Charlie got busy with his bucket and spade and Nathan pulled a blue beach towel from his rucksack. He flapped it onto the sand in the shade of the grassy headland beneath the café, and indicated for me to sit down.
‘Just that they’d had a chat and decided it wasn’t the right time with a baby to take care of.’ He dropped beside me and leaned back on his elbows, his legs stretched out in front of him. In navy swim shorts and a plain white short-sleeved shirt, he looked like he’d stepped off a yacht – all tanned skin and wild hair – and a couple of passing females in bright bikinis looked at him and nudged each other before running into the sea.
‘I was under the impression that Freya was looking for a nanny.’ I smoothed my daisy-patterned skirt over my knees, conscious of my vampire-pale skin compared to Nathan’s.
‘She was obviously put out that you didn’t jump at her offer,’ he said, through a yawn. ‘She went all sulky after you’d gone, and flounced off.’
‘So now she’s changed her mind and it’s all my fault.’ I wriggled my back against a rock and primly crossed my ankles, wishing I’d thought to touch up the varnish on my toenails. ‘Lester won’t be happy, and the agency won’t get any commission.’
‘Lester doesn’t know,’ said Nathan, batting away a persistent wasp. ‘I was waiting until they’d made a firm offer before I called him.’
Charlie, squatting beside a heap of sand, looked over. ‘Is Uncle Nafan gone to sleep?’
‘I don’t think so.’ I smiled. ‘He’s just resting his eyes.’
‘I can still see
you.’ Nathan peered at his nephew through half-open lids. ‘Do you want some help with your sandcastle?’
‘No fanks, you won’t be very good like me, ’cos you’re not as strong for digging, see?’ Charlie demonstrated by jabbing his orange spade in the sand and waggling it about.
‘I see what you mean.’ Nathan sat up and hooked his elbows over his knees. There was a pair of sunglasses nestling in his hair that he seemed to have forgotten about. ‘But where’s this sandcastle you were telling me about?’
‘I’ve not started yet, silly.’ Charlie pushed his baseball hat off and scratched his forehead. ‘I’ve got to fill up my bucket to the top.’
‘Of course you have.’ Nathan petted Charlie’s curls as though cossetting a poodle, before squashing his hat back on. His affection for his nephew was clear, and obviously returned in full. ‘We might need to get some water though to make it stick together.’
Charlie looked at the sea. ‘It’s very full today.’
Nathan and I exchanged smiles. ‘That’s because the tide’s in,’ he said.
‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s when the water comes right up the beach because of the moon, then later it goes out again.’
Charlie tipped his head and looked at the sky. ‘But it’s not night, Uncle Nafan.’
I gave Nathan a look that said get out of that.
He grinned. ‘No, but the moon’s still there. You just can’t see it during the day.’
‘Nicely done,’ I murmured.
Seeming satisfied with Nathan’s explanation, Charlie hunkered down and returned to shovelling sand into his bucket.
‘You’ll make a good dad one day,’ I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t. ‘Sorry, I hate it when people say that sort of thing to me. You never know what someone’s circumstances are. I mean, you might not want children of your own, or even be able to have them, so I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry.’
‘Hey, it’s OK, I don’t mind.’ He looked at me with a mixture of puzzlement and amusement on his face. ‘I didn’t used to think I wanted kids, too much responsibility et cetera. But I must admit, being around Charlie has changed my mind.’ He hesitated. ‘Is the topic a sore point with you?’
My face felt on fire. ‘No, not really, it’s just… I always thought I wanted a big family, being an only child, and planned to have my first child by the time I was thirty. I wanted to be a young mum, like mine was, but now…’ I hesitated, a knot of discomfort tightening my insides. ‘Now, I’m not sure.’
‘You’re only, what?’ Nathan turned and scrutinised my face, which felt as if it was glowing like a beacon. ‘Late twenties?’
‘I turned thirty in March.’ I pushed my fingers into the sand. ‘Did you know that the optimum age for fertility is eighteen? Technically, my eggs are already past it.’ I couldn’t believe I’d just said that.
‘That doesn’t mean they’re no good.’ Nathan knelt forward to help Charlie lift the bucket off his mound of sand. ‘If you’re not ready for a family yet, you’re not ready.’
‘Try telling that to my mum.’
‘Have you tried?’
‘Well… no.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s hard, because she desperately wants to be a grandmother and she’s still trying to persuade me that having children’s the most important thing I’ll ever do.’
‘But, it’s your life too.’
‘I know, but it makes her happy to think about it.’
‘And if you decide you don’t want children?’
‘I’m sure I do, I mean, I just don’t…’ want them with Sam? A chill swept over me, as if the sun had gone in. ‘I just don’t want them yet,’ I finished, quickly.
‘How did you and Sam get together, if you don’t mind me asking?’ Nathan was helping Charlie put sand back in his bucket, compacting it down with his fist.
‘Oh, it’s quite a boring story, really.’ I watched a woman holding a child by the hand as she jumped through the waves, laughing and squealing. ‘We were high school sweethearts,’ I said, preparing to tell the tale that Beverley had wanted us to incorporate into our wedding invitations, and which most people already knew. ‘He smiled at me in the corridor one day, even though I had a really bad cold and my nose was bright red, and I just fell for him.’ I didn’t say that most boys hadn’t been interested in me, because I was shy and overweight, and that no one had ever smiled at me like Sam had. ‘One day, he asked me to go fishing with him, and I think it was a test because most of the girls weren’t into fishing. In fact, my friend Tilly thought he was totally lame, but I said yes, and actually quite enjoyed it. I even caught a tiddler.’ I clasped my hands, and made a face meant to convey teenage joy. ‘Our fate was sealed. I was welcomed into his family, we snogged in his dad’s shed, I made him a cake for his sixteenth birthday and the rest, as they say, is history.’
‘Wow.’ Nathan sat back, and looked at me with renewed interest. ‘So, you’ve been together, what, nearly fifteen years? That’s longer than a lot of marriages last, and you’re not even married, yet.’
I felt myself blush even harder under his scrutiny. ‘Actually, we broke up for a couple of years. Sam went to university in Edinburgh and met someone else while he was there.’
As if sensing something in my voice, Nathan turned to me and narrowed his gaze. ‘That must have hurt.’
‘You could say that.’ I curled my legs beneath me and picked at the pile on the towel with my fingernails. ‘I always hoped we’d end up back together, though.’
I sensed Nathan trying to read my face and kept it averted. Charlie was oblivious, quietly chanting ‘Bam, bam,’ as he rhythmically slapped the sand in the bucket with his spade.
‘And you did,’ said Nathan. ‘End up back together, I mean.’
I nodded, and pushed a lock of hair behind my ear. ‘His dad fell out of a tree and nearly died, and Sam came home for good. His dad’s accident had made him realise what was important, and he still cared about me.’ That’s what he’d said, now I thought about it properly. Not, loved. Cared about.
‘What about her?’
It was as if my thoughts were flashing in a bubble above my head. I puffed out a long breath of air before I spoke. ‘They’d broken up by then.’ I was still plucking at the towel. My engagement ring had swivelled round, so it looked like any old ring. We hadn’t picked our wedding bands yet. Sam’s mum had suggested a matching pair in rose-gold with our initials engraved inside, but at over six hundred pounds each, we hadn’t yet made up our minds. ‘He doesn’t like to talk about it.’
I’d tried just once, asking lightly to disguise my thudding heart, ‘What was she like? She wanted to be a model, didn’t she?’ I’d overheard Beverley and Maura talking about her. ‘She must have been pretty.’
He’d paused in the act of pulling his T-shirt over his head. We’d been getting ready for bed, after an evening out with Chris and his then girlfriend. ‘It’s over, Meg,’ he’d said, folding his T-shirt with his back to me, his muscles tensed. ‘It doesn’t really matter what she was like.’
The tinkle of Giovanni’s ice-cream van trickled into the pause as Nathan surveyed my face. ‘Do you think he would have stayed in Edinburgh, if they hadn’t broken up? Or if his dad hadn’t fallen out of a tree, which, by the way, has got me curious.’
‘He was a tree surgeon,’ I said, ignoring the first bit. ‘His rope snapped, and he fell a long way. The doctors thought he’d never walk again.’ I kept my face impassive, reliving Sam’s ghostly pallor when I’d met him that night at the hospital, where I’d been attempting to console eleven-year-old Sadie who’d made herself sick from crying and had called me. ‘I guess I’ll never really know whether he’d have come back, or whether he would have stayed.’
‘You might have moved on and met someone else if he hadn’t.’
We looked at each other for a long, slow motion second. ‘But he did and I didn’t.’ My heart was pummelling my ribcage as Nat
han gave a slow nod.
‘I hope he knows how lucky he is.’
The chill I’d felt was replaced by a hot wave of panic. The way he said it sounded so… accepting. Yet, why wouldn’t it? I’d made such a big show of telling him I was getting married – I’d even told Alice that Sam was cuter than Nathan – and could hardly turn round now and say I was having second thoughts – not before I’d spoken to Sam.
Second thoughts. Oh god, it was really happening. I was having second thoughts about marrying Sam. And it wasn’t just because I’d met Nathan, and imagined us passionately kissing. After seeing that photo of Sam with George, and the way he’d been looking at her with such warmth in his gaze (when had he last looked at me like that?) I’d been thinking about him searching online for Andrea after we’d got back together – how many other times had he looked for her? – and I knew that I didn’t trust him properly; that I didn’t feel the love for him I once had.
‘Meg?’ Nathan was looking at me strangely. ‘Are you OK?’
Breathe deeply, I told myself. Don’t say anything rash.
‘I’m fine.’ My voice had shot up the scale with dismay. ‘I just… I’m fine.’
In a fit of agitation, I kicked my legs out in front of me, and accidentally crumbled the turret Charlie had just built.
‘Oh, you’ve killed it, Meg.’ He dropped to his knees and poked at it with his finger.
Tears threatened. ‘I’m sorry, Charlie.’
Nathan began scooping the sand back into the bucket with his hands. ‘Meg didn’t mean to knock it over.’
Charlie tilted his head. ‘It’s OK,’ he said kindly. ‘There’s lots more, but I fink I’d like to have a paddle now, and get some water from the sea.’
‘That sounds like a very good idea.’ Nathan pushed himself to his feet and dusted his hands on his shorts. ‘Fancy coming with us?’ The sun’s brightness caught his smile and turned his eyes sea-green, and I wanted to say yes, almost as much as I wanted to run away and be alone with my thoughts.