The Beach Hut Next Door

by Veronica Henry

  The difference between the money Elodie spent and the money her mother had been used to spending was that Elodie worked on the basis that you had to speculate to accumulate. Anything she spent was an investment, or an enhancement to her investment. And it was her own money that she was spending. Her mother, as far as she knew, hadn’t done a day’s work in her life. Her mother had been a professional wife. A role for which, Elodie realized now, she herself had been groomed. An over-priced girls’ boarding school that taught you how to make rum babas but sapped you of any ambition; a job with daddy; no mention of anything intellectually strenuous …

  In some ways, thank goodness things had turned out how they did, or she would just be a carbon copy of her mother.

  The front door hadn’t altered. Oak, with large metal studs, a latch with a twisted ring for a handle, and a mortice lock that opened surprisingly easily. As she stepped inside, the ghosts all came fluttering forwards to meet her. She knew perfectly well they were only in her mind, but they were just as real. And the smell. How was it that the particular smell of a house never changed? The Grey House scent was a familiar mixture of seaside dampness and wood and something else that unlocked the flicker of a memory but wouldn’t be pinned down. The trace of someone’s perfume, perhaps?

  She stepped into the hall. The staircase rose to her right, curving upwards, its bannister as inviting as it ever had been. How many times had she slid down it as a child? How many times had she walked down the stairs from her bedroom, carrying a book or her bathing things or an empty glass or cup? And what of the last time she had walked down those stairs, her head held high and her heart thumping at the thought of what was to come, her father’s hand in hers? The final descent. Even now, the emotion made her chest feel tight.

  She walked through the hall, through a shard of dust motes spinning in the midday sun, ignoring the doors to the dining room and the morning room and the corridor that led down to the kitchen and scullery and heading straight for the drawing room. As soon as she opened the door, the light from the French windows blinded her, the light that bounced off the infinite sea; the sea that was the reason for the house being built. And she could hear it, too, the roar that never ceased, for the waves here never abated; the comforting susurrus that used to reassure her whenever she woke in the night, lulling her back to sleep with its gentle rhythm.

  The room had barely changed. Its shelves were empty of the books and ornaments she had grown up with; the wooden floor was scarred where the furniture had stood. The yellow curtains were still there, faded and thick with dust. They hung limp and tattered, as if too tired to carry on their job. The chandelier, too, was crusted in grime. But it was still a room to take the breath away, with its perfect proportions, the full-width French windows leading out onto the garden, and the staggering view beyond.

  Elodie stood in the doorway. She felt an incredible calm settle upon her. She had done the right thing, she felt sure. There was no other place on earth to make her feel like this. She walked across the floorboards, her footsteps echoing in the emptiness. She twisted the metal knob that undid the lock of the French windows. Even now she could remember the extra push you needed to unlatch it. As she stepped outside, the wind ruffled her hair, playfully rearranging her Sassoon-style bob, as if to say this is no place for your city chic, madam.

  She had so many plans. Landscapers, builders, decorators: she had them all lined up. There was a strict schedule to adhere to if she was going to meet her deadline. The beauty of it was that it was all here. She didn’t want to change a thing. All she wanted was for it to be restored to its former glory. Except for the hideous garage, there was to be no smashing down of walls, no restructuring, no ripping out of the kind that was so fashionable in magazines and on television. After all, you couldn’t improve on perfection. She wanted the house to be just as it had been, the last time she was happy. So that she could be happy again. It was just within her reach. She could feel it.

  But first, there was something she had to do. Someone she had to see. How easy it would be not to. How easy it would be to forge ahead with her plans regardless, and leave that particular door closed for ever, never knowing what lay behind it. Forgiveness, Elodie knew, was the way to make her soul, and therefore her happiness, complete. Because without forgiveness, she couldn’t forget, and unless she could forget …

  She pulled the card out of her handbag. It had taken a bit of dissembling to get it. The address for all the conveyancing had been care of the solicitor, so that had given her no clue. But if there was one thing Elodie had inherited from her distaff side, it was the ability to give off the air of being someone. And when Elodie chose to pretend to be someone, she was hard to resist, especially if you were a gullible and rather bored estate agent in a small seaside town. He’d been easily foxed by airy hints of a bunch of thank-you flowers for the vendor.

  ‘I know how hard it must have been for her to give up the house. And I want to reassure her it’s in good hands,’ Elodie had gushed, wide-eyed with sincerity. Moments later, she’d had the address of the nursing home in her hand.

  And it wasn’t a lie. Not really.

  July 1962

  Lillie Lewis was the mistress of ceremonies at The Grey House. Of that there was no question. It was her playground and her guests were her playthings. More than one person had compared her to Marie Antoinette, and not just because she was French.

  Every year she decamped to Everdene for the summer, and had free rein and a limitless budget to entertain whomsoever she liked. Her husband Desmond came down at the weekends, for the factory he owned, which churned out jam and money in equal measure, couldn’t stop just because the sun was out. On the contrary, this was its busiest time, when strawberries and raspberries and apricots burst their skins and begged to be transformed into sweet, sticky preserves. The air around the factory smelt intoxicating in summer – to anyone who didn’t actually live near it, that is. After a while, you longed to go to sleep without the scent of hot sugared fruit invading your sleep. It got into your nostrils, your hair, your dreams.

  There was money in jam. Oh yes. More than even Lillie Lewis, not known for her pecuniary restraint, could burn through (although she could drive a hard bargain, as those who dealt with her knew). And there were some – many, in fact – who observed afterwards that money is no substitute for attention.

  Lillie far preferred summer at The Grey House to the rest of the year in the Lewis’s ugly, sprawling Gothic monstrosity in Worcestershire; a former lunatic asylum which Desmond felt had the stature and grandeur he needed to prove his social standing. For, like many people who made a lot of money very quickly, he felt the need to prove his wealth over and over again, as if it might disappear if he didn’t ram it down people’s throats. It had been a pleasant surprise to him, his ability to turn a profit, but it became something of an addiction – an obsession, almost.

  The Grey House had been Lillie’s choice; an impulse purchase she had seen in Country Life. It hadn’t taken her two minutes to persuade her husband that a summer home was the ultimate proof of your success. She relished her guests’ delight in the setting, overlooking Everdene Sands, the most glorious bay on the north Devon coast. The house slept twelve comfortably, but as many as you liked if you weren’t worried about bunking up, which children, especially, weren’t. Tents, bunks and hammocks abounded, all in the spirit of summer fun. Four or five families would descend at a time, some related to the Lewis’s, some not. Some whom Lillie barely knew, but had taken a fancy to at a point-to-point or a dance. She collected people. And then she entertained them. As a hostess, she was unbeatable. No need was left untended; she asked nothing of her guests but for them to do just as they pleased.

  She would appear at midday, in a pink silk peignoir, all décolletage and déshabillé, then smoke her way through three cups of very strong coffee, opening her post, only paying any real attention to missives from fashion houses announcing
their new collections, which she would annotate with a fountain pen, putting exclamation marks next to anything she really liked so her dressmaker could copy them. She rarely ate: the occasional piece of ham or triangle of bread, but her disinterest in food was evident.

  At midday, she poured her first glass of champagne, a glass that stayed topped up to three quarters full for the rest of the day and from which she took tiny, delicate sips, as if it were the bubbles in the champagne keeping her oxygenated. She drank about a glass an hour, so was never drunk.

  She bathed at one, was dressed and coiffed by two, then wrote letters until three. By then she deemed herself awake enough to start communicating with the rest of the world, and the whirlwind of organization for the evening’s social events would begin. Meanwhile, her guests would have made the most of the facilities at The Grey House – the huge drawing room overlooking the garden in which were laid out the day’s papers and the latest magazines, the tennis court, the terrace for sunbathing, the beach hut and, of course, the wide blue ocean beyond. Grown-ups relaxed in the knowledge that the children roamed in packs and looked after each other, all under the vaguely watchful eye of the Lewis’s good-natured and obliging only daughter, Elodie.

  And although she had no interest in food herself, Lillie understood the importance of a good table for guests. So she sat with a towering pile of cookery books, making lists of recipes for the kitchen staff. Mousses and fricassees and terrines and jellies and blancmanges: anything with visual impact that took hours to prepare. Her favourite was a show-stopping fish mousse in the shape of a salmon, decorated with piped mayonnaise and wafer-thin slices of cucumber, wedges of lemon, curls of parsley and served with melba toast.

  Lillie would smile at her guests’ gasps of admiration, as if she had applied all the cucumber herself, and would chain-smoke at the end of the table while she watched them devour it. After dinner there would be dancing in the drawing room with the latest records sent down from a shop in Carnaby Street, or moonlit croquet, or charades.

  Lillie’s guest list was drawn up with military precision at the end of June and followed up with handwritten letters of invitation on lilac notepaper. Occasionally, just occasionally, Desmond asked her to invite a business associate or customer and his (invariably his) family. Lillie could hardly refuse, because no doubt the associate or customer had in some way contributed to the Lewis wealth, but it annoyed her because it upset the equilibrium.

  This had been exactly the case with the Jukes. Desmond had asked her, at very short notice, to include them in the upcoming weekend, and Lillie was irked, because that particular Saturday’s dinner was centred around the Kavanaghs, who had bought the manor house in the next village, and Lillie wanted all her attention to go on making them feel special. As local royalty she didn’t want them to be overshadowed, but Desmond pulled rank, which he rarely did, because the Jukes were instrumental in his plan for world domination.

  The Jukes owned a chain of upmarket grocery stores in strategic locations that Desmond had his eye on as a possible acquisition. It didn’t do to have all your eggs in one basket, or indeed all your jam in one jar, and he was eager to diversify. The Jukes had fallen on hard times since the founder had passed away six years ago. It was evident to anyone with half an eye for business that they now didn’t have a clue about running the shops. Desmond was keen to swoop in and take over – a substantial investment and his entrepreneurial eye would mean a soar in profits, he felt sure. But the Jukes needed convincing this was the way forward first.

  ‘They can’t read a spreadsheet between them,’ Desmond told Lillie, ‘so they don’t know they are in trouble. I need to charm them; show them the way forward – and make sure they don’t go to anyone else for investment.’

  He’d been to each of the shops and assessed their profitability. Ill-stocked shelves, dilatory staff, minimal advertising, dreary window displays – the shops were sliding backwards into the post-war austerity everyone else was charging away from. And Desmond knew retail. After all, his wares were readily available all over the country. There was barely a home that didn’t have a pot, or even two or three, of Lewis jam on its shelves. From castle to council house, it was classless; universally popular.

  But as Desmond had pointed out, where do you go after jam? He was tired of experimenting with flavours – and anyway the money was in the popular; for him there was little point in experimenting with peculiar fruit varieties in an attempt to brainwash the nation. No, his ambitions lay elsewhere.

  So the plan was to lure the Jukes down for the weekend so Desmond could butter them up and steer them into a deal of some sort. And although she was disgruntled that her carefully balanced guest list had been tampered with, Lillie loved nothing better than a challenge and the chance to charm. One of her favourite things was to watch people melt under her ministrations. As narcissists go, she was a beguiling one who managed to make people think it was all about them, not her.

  ‘I hope they’re not dull,’ she warned Desmond. ‘Dull would just be dreadful.’

  But, being a man, he couldn’t give her a great description. The Jukes, according to Desmond, were aristocratic but impecunious – and likely to be even more so unless they took advantage of his timely intervention. ‘They’re about our age, with a son about Elodie’s age – and he’s the one due to inherit, so we need to butter him up too.’

  Lillie rolled her eyes. ‘Well, there’s no point in asking Elodie’s assistance.’ Elodie didn’t have a scrap of guile. ‘In fact, it’s probably better not to tell her anything.’

  The day the Jukes were due to arrive Lillie put the finishing touches to the menu plan – oysters (being French, she was convinced that there was no social occasion that couldn’t be ameliorated by a platter of oysters), beef wellington and an elaborate cherry-filled gateau smothered in swirls of cream. She sent the menu down to Mrs Marsh, the housekeeper, then she put her mind to what to wear. As she flipped through her rail of dresses, Lillie imagined a stuffy couple rigid with tweed and florid of face, like most people who lived in the English countryside seemed to be. It wouldn’t be hard to dazzle them, she thought, but nevertheless she put her mind to it. She wondered where Elodie was, and thought about giving her sartorial guidance but, actually, it was too hot to have that battle. And Elodie wasn’t really part of the battle plan. She would fit in wherever. She always did.

  Elodie was, at that moment, charging up the cliff path, running through her wardrobe in her mind, trying to remember which of her decent clothes she’d brought down from Worcestershire and wondering how long it would take the new arrival to follow her directions back to the house on his motorbike: he would never be able to get to the house by way of the beach, so she’d given him detailed instructions which took him the long way round, via the village church. She just hoped it was long enough to get changed into something respectable and do her hair.

  Her mother was always on at her to pay more attention to how she presented herself. Elodie didn’t give a stuff what she had on most of the time, as long as she was comfortable, spending most of the summer in shorts and her old school aertex and a pair of battered plimsolls. She knew this was a source of frustration to Lillie, who was rigid about being properly dressed for every occasion, but you could take the woman out of Paris, thought Elodie, but you couldn’t take Paris out of the woman.

  Having a beautiful mother when you yourself weren’t could have been a heavy cross to bear, but Elodie had spirit and a spark about her that was ultimately more pleasing to the casual observer than her mother’s Gallic perfection. She’d never been intimidated by her mother’s looks, and didn’t care that people probably compared them unfavourably. Her mind wasn’t exactly on higher things, but Elodie was cheerful and optimistic and interested – interested in everything and everyone – which gave her a more grounded view to life. Lillie, by comparison, was fragile and an air of simmering neurosis clung to her as surely as her scent.

/>   There was nothing fragile about Elodie. She was solid. Besides, although she wasn’t delicate and ravishing like Lillie, her rather hooded sludge-grey eyes smiled, as did her full mouth which delivered wit and encouragement and things that people wanted to hear, because more than anything Elodie was nice.

  Suddenly, however, she saw herself through the eyes of Jolyon Jukes and imagined him being slightly less than impressed by what he had seen: a gangly nineteen year old, unkempt and unsophisticated. And something primal in her told her it was very important that his second impression should be a better one. By the time he got to The Grey House, she determined to be gliding down the staircase, soigné and serene, in time to lead him through to the drawing room and offer him a cocktail.

  Thereby playing the role her mother had been grooming her for since the dawn of time. Lillie had known, of course she had known, that this moment would come. Elodie, in her headstrong way, had resisted. Not that there was any animosity between them. Elodie wasn’t the type to invite animosity: Lillie was only ever exasperated with her daughter, and possibly slightly mystified by her lack of vanity. She never gave up presenting her with the very latest in skin creams and cosmetics. She brought her with her to the hairdresser and made him work his magic on Elodie’s thick, dark curls. She had dresses and coats made up for her and shoes delivered, but they rarely saw the light of day. Desmond just laughed, and told his wife she was wasting her time and his money. Lillie pouted and stamped her foot with the frustration of it all. ‘One day she will understand,’ she declared.

  And, suddenly, Elodie did. It was sudden and startling and urgent, the feeling. No one had ever made her feel that way before.

  She’d always been perfectly comfortable in the company of men. She held her own at the dinner table with her parents’ friends. She had male friends of her own with whom she played tennis and went to dances. She’d had several fumbling skirmishes after too much fruit punch, which she’d found more amusing than enjoyable, and certainly not upsetting – she wasn’t squeamish – but she couldn’t say she was longing for the next encounter; to embroil herself in the next kiss. They were all much of a muchness to her, men, and certainly not a source of fascination.