Summer at Shell Cottage

by Lucy Diamond

  Victor had made light of the situation on the phone, of course – ‘just some nutter with a knife,’ he’d said. But he was tough, Vic, a real man’s man. He was one of those blokes who’d say, ‘I’m fine! Barely a scratch,’ if he’d fallen headfirst down a mineshaft. Until she saw the damage for herself, she was officially in panic mode, fearing the worst.

  Thank goodness, then, that it wasn’t until she had seen him and knew he was going to be okay that she discovered it hadn’t been ‘some nutter with a knife’ at all; it had been a psychopath wielding a samurai sword – a samurai sword! – and that all kinds of horrible damage might have been done.

  The story was quite something. Vic and his colleague Tony had been called out to a disturbance in the Barclays bank in town, and arrived to find a crazed-looking man brandishing a seventy-centimetre gleaming sword and threatening the terrified staff. Lee Carlson, they now knew he was called: thirty-seven, local, no previous convictions. (‘A bit of a loner’, according to his neighbours and former colleagues. Defaulting on his mortgage payments, according to his bank. ‘Just so fucking angry with banks and shit’, according to the man himself, once he’d been locked in a cell and had given a statement. Like that made it all right.)

  Victor and Tony had tried to calm Carlson down but he’d been wild with rage, out of control and swinging the sword above his head. He took offence to Tony calling him ‘mate’ and went berserk, launching himself at the terrified young bobby without warning. Victor responded instinctively, grabbing a rack of insurance and pension leaflets and throwing it at Carlson, before wrestling him to the ground. Unfortunately, though, while the two men grappled, Carlson managed to swing the sword around, catching the back of Vic’s shoulder. The stab vest had saved him from too much damage, thank goodness, but the blade had sliced the top of his arm, creating a shallow wound that required stitching. ‘I’ve had worse nicks shaving,’ Vic had said (showing off because his colleagues were present, Freya thought) but there was some bruising and tenderness as well, and he’d walloped his head pretty hard when he and Carlson went down.

  Back-up had arrived moments later, the weapon was confiscated, Carlson was hauled off to the nick, and an ambulance was called for Vic. Tony, who’d escaped unscathed, was wide-eyed with shock. ‘You saved my life,’ he kept saying dazedly, as if he couldn’t quite believe it himself. ‘You saved my life, mate. The man’s a bloody hero, I’m telling you.’

  Since then, the ‘bloody hero’ had had his photo taken for the local press, and been interviewed on local radio, much to his amusement (‘Just doing my job. Any officer would have done the same’). He’d also had a pat on the back from the detective superintendent and been bumped up the queue to go off to this public order training course in Gravesend, which he was absolutely thrilled about.

  Freya, meanwhile, felt as if she was still reverberating from the shock. They all were. She had played down the whole thing as best she could at home, but on the day of the incident, Dexter had said over dinner, ashen-faced, ‘You can die from being stabbed, can’t you, if the knife goes through one of your major arteries? I saw it on 24 Hours in A&E, Mum. He could have died, Mum! Shit!’

  ‘The stabbing man is in prison now, isn’t he?’ Libby had asked on numerous occasions, and particularly at bedtime, however much Freya had tried to reassure her. ‘He’s not going to come out and get Dad, or anything, is he?’

  As for Teddy, Freya had received a phone call from his teacher at school to inform her that Teddy had started a gruesome playground game called ‘Stabbers’, and please could Freya have a word with him about it?

  Yes, Freya had had plenty of words with her gory son about it since then. She’d sat up for several nights with Libby too, soothing her after bad dreams. And she’d seen Dexter break his own non-hugging rules and lean against Victor on the sofa a few times once he was home from the hospital, as if seeking the physical reassurance of his dad’s living, breathing presence. They had all been left reeling by the reminder, yet again, of life’s fragility.

  Freya, for her part, hadn’t wanted Vic to go on this two-week course so far from home. Tormented by all the terrible parallel outcomes that left her widowed weeks after losing her father, she had wanted him right there in Oakthorne where she could keep an eye on him, where she could curl up beside him at night, safe in the knowledge that the family were all together under the same roof.

  Not that she’d said as much out loud, of course. Freya was a coper. She didn’t go in for weakness or vulnerability, priding herself that her upper lip was so stiff it might as well be reinforced concrete. But God, it was hard work trying to manage everything on your own while your heroic husband was away, learning how to be even more heroic – especially when she could have done with being rescued just a little bit herself at the moment. Here she was, eating dinner with the children on automatic pilot, for instance, and all she could think about was whether it would be setting too appalling an example if she mixed herself a vodka tonic right now, just to take the edge off things. Probably.

  ‘Mum! Are you listening? I said, Libby dropped her fish on purpose. Look!’

  Freya blinked and tried to re-engage with the real world instead of her drinks cabinet. ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘You said if she did that again, she’d have to go to bed early. Mum – look! It’s there on the floor! Are you going to tell her off, or what?’

  Twelve-year-old Dexter could be very severe when it came to busting his younger sister for her various teatime-related crimes. Unlike Freya, who would never refuse a plate of food unless unconscious or on her deathbed, Libby ate like a sparrow – pecking up a few meagre crumbs then claiming to be full. There was nothing wrong with a delicate appetite, obviously – what Freya wouldn’t give for one herself – but it was the endless list of excuses she had to contend with that wore down her sanity. Last week tears had trembled in Libby’s round blue eyes when Freya had cooked roast lamb (‘I don’t want to eat a lamb! They’re really cute!’). At the weekend, there had been the cup of milk ‘accidentally’ knocked into her plate of sausage and mash (‘I didn’t do it on purpose!’) and the handful of garden peas that Freya later found in her daughter’s trouser pocket (‘I didn’t put them there!’). Today it seemed that the salmon fillet had made a balletic leap of its own accord from Libby’s plate onto the vinyl flooring, re-enacting a feat of athleticism it might once have made upstream in happier times.

  Victor was able to display impressively abundant patience when it came to his daughter’s culinary whims but Freya, always the one to cook, felt she was being driven slowly round the bend by one excuse after another.

  ‘MUM! You need to tell Libby off. Tell her!’

  ‘Yeah,’ Teddy chipped in, always happy to see a sibling in trouble. ‘Tell her, Mum.’

  Dexter was turning red in the face; he was up from his chair and pointing, enraged both by the slack parenting on display and the fact that his sister might actually get away with her transgression. A seam of self-righteousness ran through her son; his catchphrase as a four-year-old had been ‘That’s not FAIR!’ in such thunderous tones, it was enough to make even the most hardened criminal mastermind break into a sweat of self-reproach.

  Freya did not have the energy to conduct a judicial review into crimes against salmon right now, though. ‘Never mind,’ she said wearily to Dexter. ‘Let’s just finish our tea, all right? I’ll clear it up later.’

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Libby stick her tongue out at her telltale brother and smirk with triumph.

  Dexter’s eyes shone with outrage. ‘Right,’ he said, and you could almost hear the cogs whirring furiously in his brain. ‘So you don’t care about fish on the floor, then? Fine!’ And with that, he picked up his plate and tipped it sideways, so that everything on it – salmon, noodles, carefully chopped spring onions and baby corn, sticky sweet hoisin sauce, the lot – slithered off, landing with a series of splatters. There was a percussion of falling cutlery, the fork skidding straight und
er the fridge. ‘Talamanca,’ Teddy breathed in shocked delight and promptly hurled a mushroom overarm across the table, not wanting to miss out on any badness.

  ‘That’s enough!’ shrieked Freya, her temper reaching breaking point. The hoisin sauce and olive oil were congealing stickily; the treacly mixture already gumming up the grooves of the expensive textured vinyl flooring laid a mere three months ago. It was going to be a bugger to clean up.

  ‘Dexter Castledine, that is not acceptable,’ she yelled, voice shaking. ‘Go upstairs to your room and think about your behaviour. All of you, in fact. Just get out of my sight.’ Her voice rose to a hysterical shriek. ‘Go!’

  ‘What about pudding?’ Teddy asked, looking mutinous. He had a sweet tooth like her – he was anybody’s for a tube of Smarties.

  ‘No pudding,’ Freya said in a strangled voice. ‘Just go.’

  They went, and she poured herself that vodka tonic and knocked it back in a single gulp.

  You’d never know to look at him now but Dexter’s very existence had wavered perilously for the first few weeks of his life. Born prematurely, he and Freya had spent an agonizingly stressful twenty-four days in the NICU at the local hospital after his unexpectedly early arrival. Twenty-four gruelling days during which every emotion it was possible for a human being to experience seemed to have been ripped from within her and hung out on public display. She felt turned inside out with worry, vulnerable and frightened. So this is what parenthood means, she thought, frazzled on caffeine and hormones and lack of sleep. This is how it feels to love a person so desperately that you’d literally breathe for them if you could.

  Poor Dex, so small and shrunken in his perspex bed, a tube up his nose, a woollen cap on his bald head, the soft new Babygros heartbreakingly too long on his stick-thin legs. It was the first time in Freya’s life that something had gone this wrong, spinning out of her control like a car on a wet road. The experience had shocked her so fundamentally that for years afterwards she would find herself holding her son close, listening to the steady thump of his heart to reassure herself that he was healthy and strong.

  Of course – wouldn’t you just know it – Dexter had spent his whole childhood as if he had some kind of death wish. He was the boy at nursery who managed to scramble out of the window, landing in a shrub outside with a soft, surprised thump. He was the boy who would race nimbly to the top of the highest climbing frame in any playground, shout, ‘Hey, Mum, catch me!’ and throw himself off, with Freya almost having a coronary each time she had to hurtle to catch him. He was the boy who’d always answer a dare, who’d jump off the shed roof because he was bored, who’d skateboard on the ramps with all the teenagers. By dint of sheer good luck, he’d somehow made it through twelve years of robust good health and become a clever, sporty boy, albeit one with a new proclivity for hurling his dinner around, it appeared.

  She’d lived through all that fear and dread, though, she remembered now, kneeling down on the kitchen floor to pick up the spilled food. The scars of the special baby unit would be there on her heart for ever after. So when, she wondered, had she become so hardened to another new mother in a panic, another woman experiencing the same sort of anxiety? She’d fobbed off Melanie with casual reassurances last week because she couldn’t wait to get rid of her, so desperate was she to go home and drown her own sorrows. And now poor, tiny Ava Taylor was struggling to breathe on a ventilation unit at the children’s ward, her chest concave with effort, her lips turning blue. (Freya had listened to baby Ava’s chest, though, that day. She had! And yes, she’d been distracted, but she would have noticed a wheeze or shortness of breath, wouldn’t she? Wouldn’t she?)

  If only Vic was home right now to talk to. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could bring up on the phone, not when his new course-mates were calling things to him in the background and she had the nagging feeling he wasn’t listening properly. Without him around, she was left to sink into paranoia, with fears of official warnings, talk of negligence, her spotless record being tarnished, all battering her confidence.

  Is everything all right, Freya? came the voice of Elizabeth, her boss, in her head. I know you’ve recently lost your father, but …

  Oh, go away, Elizabeth. I’m fine, all right? I am absolutely bloody fine!

  She began wiping the dark smeary sauce from the lino, still on her knees. It seemed that it wasn’t only her career she was failing at these days, it was motherhood too. The meal just now had been a prime example. Maybe it was end-of-term fatigue, but the children had all been pushing the boundaries lately, defiant in the face of her half-arsed mothering. Four more days and they’d be off to Shell Cottage, she reminded herself, getting to her feet and trying not to look at the bottle of Rioja lolling so temptingly in the metal wine rack. The holiday could not come soon enough.

  Later that evening, when the house was eventually quiet, the sky dark outside and children everywhere were fast asleep and dreaming, she crept upstairs and looked in on each of her three.

  The first bedroom smelled of socks and sweaty armpits. (She really had to set Dexter straight on personal hygiene; there were only so many times you could hint gently that a person needed a shower before you had to just come out and say, ‘Mate, you stink, all right?’) There lay her eldest son, the bruiser, so determined to lock horns and push against her these days, now in serene repose, his dark eyelashes smudgy against his pale cheek, his body relaxed for once. The sooner she got him to Shell Cottage the better, she thought to herself. He always regressed when he was there, rediscovering the childish pleasures of sandcastle-building and playing with his siblings. She hoped he could remember how to be a boy again for one more summer at least.

  The room next door was Libby’s, its walls a patchwork of animal posters, dance certificates and felt-tipped drawings. Libby, as usual, had flung the quilt off most of her body and Freya bent to straighten it, and tuck it around her, smelling her daughter’s sour-sweet night breath. Darling Libby and her fondness for clashing colours and Knock Knock jokes; she was quirky and unconventional and daydreamy, a million miles from the serious little girl Freya had been. The other day Freya had overheard her singing to herself, and it was only when she listened harder that she realized the song was actually ‘Sex Bomb’ by Tom Jones, except her daughter was singing it as ‘Sex Bum’, which sounded even worse. Don’t go and grow up too fast on me, lovely Libby, she thought with a pang.

  And finally, there was Teddy, their funny little surprise baby, who had been jokingly referred to as ‘The Accident’ for the first seven months of the pregnancy – right until they heard Dexter conspiratorially saying, ‘The baby in Mummy’s tummy was an accident, you know,’ to his Year 1 teacher, the unsmiling Mrs Lamb. Thank goodness for accidents, though! She couldn’t imagine the family without golden-haired, laughing Teddy with his love of numbers and dinosaurs, and his wonky little glasses permanently balanced at an angle on his snub nose.

  Gently, very gently, Freya lowered herself onto the end of Teddy’s bed and rested a hand on his warm slumbering form. She thought of Ava across town in hospital, the rhythmic suck and sssh of the ventilator, the stifling, too-warm temperature of the ward, and the other grey-faced parents you passed in the corridor, all bearing enormous burdens of stress. It was like remembering a bad dream she’d once had, and her hand tightened inadvertently on her son’s body. If I thought for a single minute that anyone had misdiagnosed something crucial with one of my children, she found herself thinking, then I’d want to kill them too. I’d be shrieking down the phone, demanding someone’s head on a plate.

  A shudder went through her. It didn’t feel good to have turned into the sort of woman that mothers like her despised. It didn’t feel good at all.

  Chapter Eleven

  In hindsight, Harriet should have spotted the philandering and dalliances of Evil Simon, her first husband, a mile off. The top notes of unfamiliar perfume in the car. The ringing phone that went mysteriously dead whenever she answered it. The times he w
as away on shoots and the filming schedule overran yet again. (Simon was a TV producer, specializing in natural history documentaries. Unfortunately, Harriet discovered far too late that his particular speciality seemed to be human mating habits and all their variations.)

  Harriet had been blind to such malarkey, though, for two reasons. Firstly, because she was obviously the most gullible, trusting numpty ever to walk the earth. And secondly, because at the time she had been increasingly obsessed with trying to get pregnant again, after three agonizing miscarriages, and she could barely think about anything other than ovulation testing kits and whether or not they should just sod it and go for IVF.

  It all fell into place with shocking vividness, though, the day she was coming back from the hospital following – of all things – yet another miserable D&C experience. She hadn’t even bothered to tell him she was pregnant that time because he was away on location and also she thought that maybe, just maybe, if she hugged the secret to herself, it wouldn’t feel so bad if things went wrong again. (A misguided assumption as it turned out. If anything, a lonely secret miscarriage was a million times worse.)

  It was a Tuesday lunchtime. Molly was safely at school, Simon was filming in Iceland, and there was Harriet, on the bus back to their flat, numb with sorrow, one hand across her (now vacated) belly. When the bus queued at the traffic lights and she glimpsed Simon on the opposite side of the road, she thought at first it must be a hallucination, brought on by the mega-strength painkillers the hospital had given her. That couldn’t be right. He was supposed to be in Iceland, filming Atlantic puffins, not loitering on a street corner, talking to some random woman.

  Her eyes narrowed. A pregnant woman, she noticed. Some friend of his he hadn’t told her about? He must have come home early from filming to surprise Harriet – lovely! He had been on his way to the flat, but had bumped into this pregnant woman he’d met ages ago and …