The Beach Hut Next Door

by Veronica Henry

  Even his presence. She heard his footsteps behind her. She wasn’t going to turn. She bit her lip with the anticipation, smiling to herself. He stood right behind her. She felt his hand on her waist. She breathed in, revelling in his touch, a touch that told her everything she needed to know, then leaned back until she was nestled into him.

  ‘Shall we go for a walk?’ he asked, his voice low.

  ‘Yes.’

  She put her glass down on the balustrade. Then she slipped her hand into his. Together they walked down the stone steps and across the lawn. She knew the grown-ups in the drawing room would have a perfect view of them if they chose to look out, but she didn’t care. Everyone, after all, had to start somewhere. And her mother, for one, would be cheering her on.

  Without a word, they made their way down the cliff path, swishing through the marram grass, the sand beneath them giving way so their steps got faster and faster until they fell in a laughing tangle onto the beach.

  It had a special magic at night. A softness, like a cashmere blanket; the sound of the waves as soothing as a lullaby; the darkness leaving all other senses heightened. They left their shoes at the bottom of the cliff path, their feet sinking into the cool damp.

  ‘I’ve never felt like this before,’ whispered Jolyon, and part of Elodie wanted to press him further, ask him what he had felt with other girls; find out why she was different, what it was he was feeling. Common sense told her, however, that this would be wrong, and so instead she stopped in her tracks, turned to him, went up onto her tiptoes and slid her arms around his neck.

  ‘Neither have I,’ she breathed. ‘Neither have I.’

  And the next thing she knew, she understood why it was that people bothered kissing.

  The rest of the summer was perfection. It was as if God had snapped the final piece of the jigsaw he was doing into place. Jukes’s Groceries became Lewis and Jukes. Desmond drew up a masterplan for the stores, and he and Jeanie and Jolyon spent the weeks implementing his vision, travelling to each of the stores in turn. No one was quite sure of Roger’s role in all of this, but he seemed to have his own affairs to attend to.

  They all reconvened at The Grey House at the weekends. Elodie found the days of the week without Jolyon endless, and lived in a fever of excitement until she heard his bike roar through the drive on a Friday lunchtime. Eventually Roger would reappear, then Jeanie and Desmond, and forty-eight hours of heavenly hedonistic eating, drinking, card-playing, tennis, bathing, fishing and cricket would begin, mingled in with Lillie’s summer guest rota.

  For Elodie, her relationship with Jolyon was breathtakingly simple and uncomplicated. He was just so right for her. They made each other laugh. He didn’t dismiss her thoughts or opinions, but had spoken to her father about Elodie helping with the advertising side of things for the shops, and they’d had a meeting in the dining room and Elodie felt she had really contributed. There had been talk of giving her a place on the board, and although she wasn’t sure entirely what this meant, she felt sure it was important.

  Only Lillie seemed slightly adrift, languid in the heat, but she came back to life at the weekends, when her rightful role as hostess was restored and she set the pace, the brightest star around whom the constellations moved.

  And one night, towards the end of the summer, when dusk was starting to close in earlier and earlier, the moment Elodie had been both longing for and dreading arrived. She and Jolyon had spent the afternoon in the beach hut, and as dusk fell they were drowsy with heat. They’d trailed to the water countless times to take a dip to cool themselves down, and the salt had dried on their skin. They were tangled in each other’s arms, but this time, as they began to kiss, there was something more urgent between them, a sense that there was no going back. Something unspoken but agreed.

  Elodie wondered how many hours she had spent in this hut over the years. Curled up with a book on a pile of cushions, sheltering from the afternoon rain as it rattled on the roof, eating toffees. Drying herself after an early morning or late afternoon swim. Sheltering from the fierce midday sun, drinking squash and chewing on egg sandwiches. Several times she had slept here, when the house had overflowed, lugging down cushions from the sofa in the living room to construct a makeshift bed. Playing draughts or Ludo with her cousins.

  And now, the most important thing to have happened to her so far in her life was about to happen. She could feel it between them. There wasn’t a cell in her body that wasn’t affected. Every nerve ending, every square inch of skin, was crackling. Her blood was like mercury, balls of it running haywire through her veins.

  He put up his hand and ran it through her hair, and she shivered with pleasure. His hand rested on her neck, stroking it gently, and she tipped her head back. She felt his lips on her throat, warm and gentle.

  This is it, she thought. She was melting; giddy and helpless. When he brushed his hands over her breasts, running his thumbs over the thin cotton of her dress, she pushed herself towards him, longing for more.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he whispered, as his hand reached down to her thigh and pushed the hem of her dress upwards. ‘I want you to be sure.’

  Nothing in the world would stop her now. Nothing. ‘I’m sure,’ she breathed. ‘I am absolutely sure.’

  Outside, she could see the stars spinning round in the sky.

  The cushions with the anchors on, which had been in the hut for as long as she could remember, on which she’d lain so many times, were the perfect resting place. She pulled him down onto them. Underneath, she felt grains of sand. There were always grains of sand in the hut, no matter how many times you swept it. Each one dug into her skin, but she didn’t feel them. All she could feel was him.

  ‘Tell me if it hurts,’ he told her, but it didn’t. Not one bit.

  That New Year’s Eve, Lillie threw a glittering party at The Grey House. She didn’t like to leave the house empty over the winter, and this was the ideal opportunity to open it up and breathe life into it.

  At midnight, Elodie and Jolyon slipped away from the revelry and down to the beach hut. They’d offered to camp in there as the house was full to the brim with guests. They went down armed with blankets and hot water bottles and Thermos flasks full of hot, sweet coffee laced with brandy.

  And when the hands of her Timex watch reached midnight, and she asked Jolyon if he had any resolutions, he said, in a gloomy voice, ‘Give up going to bed with single women, I suppose,’ and she looked at him, frowning, puzzled, and then he laughed, and she punched his arm and then he turned to her and said, rather fiercely, ‘Don’t you get it?’

  And she stood very still while she thought about what he might mean, but she didn’t want to voice her theory in case she’d got the wrong end of the stick and she didn’t want to start the New Year looking like an idiot, so she said, in rather a small voice, ‘No. I don’t.’

  And Jolyon sighed and said ‘El. Darling El. You absolute nit. I’m asking you to marry me.’

  TIM AND RACHEL

  The beach hut was the only thing they couldn’t agree on in the settlement. Rachel had the cat. Tim had the power tools. Everything else, including money – even though there wasn’t much left, even after they sold the house, which was hardly surprising – was split straight down the middle.

  But when it came down to it, neither of them could bear to part with the hut. The thought of selling it was anathema, even though it would fetch a good price. They agreed they were grown-ups, and that as the divorce was as amicable as a divorce could ever be, there was a logical solution.

  So against both of their solicitors’ advice, they decided they would share it, post divorce. Six months each seemed tidiest, rather than every other weekend, so they didn’t keep having to clear up for the other person. Anyway, Rachel preferred the spring, with its promise of new beginnings, while Tim liked the autumn water after it had been warmed by the summer sun.

&nbs
p; So Rachel had it from January to the end of June, and Tim from July to December, and they pinpointed a weekend in the middle when they handed over and together made a list of running repairs and anything that needed to be replaced and divvied up the responsibility accordingly.

  It was important to each of them to keep this ritual. Neither of them could ever quite come to terms with letting someone they had once loved out of their life, and there was something comforting about touching base every year. They both still cared deeply for each other. It wasn’t lack of love that had driven them apart.

  As soon as he saw Rachel, this year, Tim knew. She had a glow, of course, but she always did after spending time at the beach hut, so that was nothing new, her skin burnished to an even light caramel that contrasted with her white-blonde hair. But there was something else this time. An aura. A certain serenity.

  She was wearing her hair up, and a faded green dress that Tim remembered her buying: its familiarity made his throat ache. She was packing away the last-minute bits of detritus to take with her: her favourite down pillow and her swimming things, piling them up into a cardboard box ready to take to her car.

  The crockery and glasses in the kitchen area were the same ones they’d got when they first bought the hut – chunky blue-and-white striped plates they’d got in Ikea, with matching bowls and mugs that had come in a big white box, obviously marketed to students. Rachel had liked them because they were nautical; Tim had liked them because they were cheap. Surprisingly, none of them had got broken. There were still eight of each.

  Their crockery had survived, but their marriage hadn’t.

  Looking now at the plates, with their blue lines, Tim imagined another blue line, and the joy he knew Rachel would have felt on seeing it. He couldn’t identify the feeling this gave him, because it was a cocktail of emotions, some razor sharp, some duller. Shock, despair, sorrow – but also happiness on her behalf, because Tim wasn’t an unkind person; far from it.

  They’d never seen their own blue line. Time and again he could remember waiting, those few minutes interminable while she lurked in the bathroom then came out, face bleak. He realized now he’d never really hoped to see one; that he’d always known deep down, with some sort of sixth sense, that it wasn’t to be.

  As he stood there now, the hut suddenly felt very small. She couldn’t quite meet his eye. She was babbling on about all sorts of inconsequential nonsense. She wasn’t going to tell him, he realized. Although she would have to at some point. After all, next year it would be blindingly obvious. There would be another little being in the world. She couldn’t keep that a secret. He would arrive here, and there would be tiny clothes, and baby sunscreen, and a bucket and spade … He couldn’t expect her to expunge the presence before his arrival. No matter how hard she tried to hide it, there would be evidence. A sock under a chair; a sippy cup in the sink; a pack of baby wipes …

  She was smiling at him, uncertain. Her awkwardness was tangible. There wasn’t an elephant in the room, he thought. There was an embryo. But it was the size of an elephant. Its impact was just as big.

  ‘Let me carry that stuff to the car for you.’ He reached out his arms, anxious that she shouldn’t overdo it. She hesitated, then smiled at him, grateful. He’d always been a gentleman. An opener of doors and a puller out of chairs. It was one of the things Rachel so missed about him. So few men were instinctively kind.

  ‘I’ll make us a sandwich.’ She put a hand up, ruffling her hair, pulling it out of its ponytail so it fell to her shoulders, before scooping it up again and re-tying the band. It was the gesture she always made when nervous. He knew her better than he had ever known anyone, even now.

  He nodded, satisfied with the deal. He trudged up the beach with the box in his arms, her car keys in his pocket, not knowing how to prioritize his emotions, even though she hadn’t officially told him yet.

  The sun seared down on him. It was the sort of heat that might drive you to kill, like Camus’s Outsider. As he walked along the front of the beach huts with his cargo, he felt as if he were in a film, a close-up in a fashionably long tracking shot that followed him past endless pageants of happy family life. Fathers patting sandcastles into perfection; mothers doling out beakers of squash and peeling the wrappers off ice-creams; haphazard games of rounders fuelled by squealing and cheating; babies dozing off in buggies under the shade of a huge parasol, slick with factor 50. All of them saying to him: ‘this is what it’s all about’.

  He had thought he would get over it. But, of course, he couldn’t. What did everything count for, if you had no one to look up to you, no one that mattered? No one to inherit the good bits of you and carry them on into the next generation? And the bad bits too, he supposed. Without children, life was just one long round of self-gratification, without someone to nurture, to teach, to spoil, to share with the person you loved.

  By the time he reached the car park, his mouth was dry with despair. He bought a Coke from the kiosk by the car park, gulped it down, letting the sweet coolness soothe his parched throat. Respite from his physical discomfort, perhaps, but not the raw anguish he felt further down, in his gut. A pain that dug and twisted and nipped, like a cornered rat.

  He was tempted not to go back; to dump her stuff then go to his car and drive away until she had gone. He didn’t want to see her. He didn’t want to breathe in the essence of new life that she breathed out. They could leave the things that needed to be organized for another day. Or he could work it out for himself. None of it was complicated.

  But he had to give back her car keys. Anyway, not going back would be ungracious and mean-spirited. It would make Rachel feel even more guilty than she obviously already did, and he didn’t want that. He didn’t want her to feel anything that might adversely affect the precious cargo she was carrying.

  How bloody selfless of him, he thought, miserably.

  He could still remember the day they’d been told about his useless, apathetic sperm. As humiliation went, you couldn’t top it, even though Tim was repeatedly reassured it wasn’t his fault; it was nothing he had done. Nor was there anything he could do about it. For nearly two years the diagnosis lay there between them. He felt useless and ashamed. He couldn’t give his beloved wife the one thing she wanted. The thing she deserved.

  He couldn’t get her to accept that she needed to go and find someone else.

  ‘I love you. A baby doesn’t matter. It’s us that matters,’ she repeated, time and again, when he railed, drunker than he should be on a Friday night after a takeaway curry.

  In the end, he made himself so dislikeable that she’d had no choice but to leave him. Short of having an affair, which he couldn’t bring himself to do, it was the only way he could think of to give her another chance. He drank, he brooded, he made himself and her life unbearable. He was never quite sure if she suspected his tactic, because she stood him for a lot longer than he would have stood himself. Once or twice, she tried to get them to go to counselling.

  ‘We don’t have to deal with this on our own,’ she pleaded. ‘We aren’t the only ones. Plenty of people go through this and go on to have a happy and fulfilling life.’

  ‘Fuck you and your bloody leaflets,’ he’d snarled, and the memory of it seeped acid into his stomach. He had never wanted to hurt her. He wanted to give her the world, but he couldn’t. And the pain of that ground him into a bitterness that made him impossible to live with. She wept uncontrollably as she packed up and left, and he sat on the turquoise velvet sofa they had impulse-purchased one New Year’s Day sale, six years ago, and said nothing. Nothing to stop her; nothing to explain how he felt.

  They sent each other tentative polite emails about the divorce. They met in fashionable coffee shops with bare brick walls and industrial lighting to finalize the details. And then, suddenly, ‘they’ were no more. No longer responsible for each other.

  Tim could never let go of the guilt. He w
as still riddled with an anxiety that drained him, a fear that he’d ruined Rachel’s life; that he had taken away her raison d’etre. Even when he slept, the ache of it ran underneath his dreams, persistent and debilitating. It was like a curse, and he raged against it. It wasn’t that he felt he deserved to be ecstatically happy; just at peace would have been enough. But the torment wore him down.

  As for having another relationship, there was no hope of that, at least not a proper one. He could never do what he’d done to Rachel to another woman. Of course, the next time he could be totally up front about it; they wouldn’t need to go on that agonizing, humiliating voyage of discovery to uncover his infertility But at what point did he announce it? Should he wear a badge? Divulge it on the first date? Or even before? ‘By the way, before we go any further, I’ve got duff sperm.’ Clever use of the word ‘duff’. But then, Tim was a copywriter; a player with words.

  He certainly wasn’t short of offers. On paper and in the flesh, he was a great proposition. More than solvent, easy on the eye, creative without being flaky, a connoisseur of coffee and wine and French cheese without being a bore about it, fit, fashionable without being a victim … He skirted around women, longing for intimacy but fearing the inevitable conclusion that if it was going to go anywhere they would one day have to have the baby talk.

  He knew, if he was his own friend, he would tell himself off for deeply unattractive self-pity and martyrdom; that there were plenty of women out there who didn’t want a baby, or who couldn’t have one themselves so his infertility wouldn’t matter. Or what about women who had already had the children they wanted? But Tim didn’t want to choose his love because she fitted in with his physical shortcomings. So he would rather go without. He had become adept at meaningless two or three night stands, after which he would let the women down gently. He usually told them he wasn’t over his ex. No girl wants to play second fiddle to the ghost of an ex-wife.