The Beach Cabin

by Fern Britton

  The children both shrugged. ‘OK,’ they said in unison.

  ‘It’s a bloody long drive, too, so we’ll have to be up and ready to go by six a.m. And I’m not doing all the packing by myself – you’ll both have to help.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And we have to make it a proper break, be a family, do things together.’

  ‘OK!’

  ‘Even if it means not being glued to your iPad for the next three days?’

  ‘OK! OK!’

  As Charlotte scraped the untouched prawn surprise into Molly’s bowl she wondered at the ease with which the children had agreed to come. Maybe this trip was something that needed to happen. If nothing else, it would give her and Ed a chance to have a proper talk, clear the air. They’d been dancing around each other for too long.

  As Molly sniffed noncommittally at her bowl, Charlotte picked up her phone. She’d text Ed later. First she needed to call Henry…

  2

  It was gone 9.30 a.m. and Charlotte was only now switching on the satnav.

  ‘Mum!’ whined Sam from the back seat. ‘Why does it have to be me in the back with Molly?’

  ‘I’ve told you, Sam, you can swap seats with Alex halfway through. Now let me concentrate on putting this postcode in the satnav so we can get going. I was hoping to miss the worst of the traffic, but we’re so late—’

  ‘It was you who overslept, Mum,’ Alex pointed out smugly.

  Charlotte cast an irritated glance at her daughter, sitting in the passenger seat fiddling with her headphones.

  ‘That’s because I was up past midnight, packing.’

  ‘You love your bed too much, Mum.’

  ‘It is the holidays.’ Charlotte wasn’t sure why she needed to justify herself. She and the children were all good sleepers. It was Ed who tossed and turned, often padding downstairs in the middle of the night, dogged with insomnia brought on by worries about work.

  ‘Mum!’ Sam nudged the back of her seat with his knee. ‘Why do I have to get stuck with Molly?’

  Charlotte turned to look at Molly. The expression ‘hangdog’ could have been coined especially for her. Molly’s head was hung low and her soulful eyes gazed out mournfully from under her shaggy hair.

  ‘Poor old Mol,’ Charlotte cooed sympathetically. ‘You totally hate car travel, don’t you, girl?’ And she reached out to stroke her. Molly responded by giving her hand a sorrowful lick, then put her head down on her paws with a sigh.

  ‘Nobody gave her any food, did they?’ Charlotte asked suspiciously.

  ‘No,’ they both answered, but Charlotte thought that Sam looked shifty.

  ‘Sam?’

  ‘Nothing, I promise!’ he protested.

  ‘Well, if Molly gets sick,’ she warned, ‘I’ll have a pretty good idea why. Now, let’s get this show on the road.’

  ‘Hang on, Mum,’ Alex said suddenly, rummaging in her bag. ‘I’ve forgotten my charger.’

  ‘Alex!’

  ‘What! You were rushing me!’

  ‘Oh, just hurry up, will you.’ She thrust the door key at Alex, who leapt from the car and ran towards the house. Shaking her head, Charlotte returned her gaze to the satnav, which had just finished calibrating. The estimated journey time popped up on screen: five hours and seven minutes. Great, thought Charlotte, this is going to be so much fun.

  Adjusting the rear-view mirror, Charlotte caught sight of herself and pushed her long fringe behind her ear. Her short, layered hairstyle hadn’t changed much over the years, though the spicy copper colour was a thing of the past. Charlotte’s naturally light-blonde hair was now flecked with grey, which she disguised with highlights. The smattering of freckles over her nose and cheeks gave her a girlish appearance, but there was no ignoring the crow’s feet and laughter lines that were becoming more prominent with every passing year. It didn’t bother her unduly: getting older was better than the alternative, she always thought.

  Alex dashed back to the car and thrust the door keys at her mother. ‘Did you lock up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Double-locked it?’

  ‘Yes, Mum. Let’s go!’

  ‘Right, A303, here we come. Oh, by the way, we’re going to make a little stop en route…’

  ‘Where are we going, Mum?’

  Two hours in and Alex had finally taken off her headphones. Sam was dozing on the back seat.

  ‘Well…’ Charlotte said enthusiastically, ‘I thought we’d stop at Stonehenge.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s sort of on the way, and you and Sam have never seen it, and I haven’t been there for years. And…why not? We’re on holiday, aren’t we? We said we’d do things as a family – and you promised there’d be no grumbling.’

  ‘Don’t remember promising that,’ Sam mumbled under his breath from the back.

  ‘It’s a bit random, Mum.’ Alex raised her eyes heavenward.

  ‘No, it isn’t.’ Charlotte was conscious of the defensive tone in her voice. She was wondering now what had possessed her. As much for her own benefit as the children’s, she tried to explain why she felt the need to make this detour: ‘Stonehenge is an amazing place. I came here when I was a kid, but couldn’t remember anything about it, so I asked your dad to bring me here once when it was the summer solstice. I was pregnant with you at the time.’

  ‘Really?’ Alex sounded genuinely interested for once.

  ‘Yep. So, technically, you’ve been here too.’

  ‘Cool.’

  Charlotte stole a glance at her daughter. Alex had Ed’s nose and his eyes and his brown wavy hair. Sam took after her with his fair hair and skin.

  ‘What were you listening to? On your phone?’

  Alex shrugged. ‘One of my Spotify playlists.’

  ‘Oh, like those ones that you and Poppy used to spend hours putting together in the kitchen?’

  ‘It’s not one of those,’ Alex said tetchily.

  ‘Oh.’ It suddenly struck Charlotte that she couldn’t remember the last time Poppy had been round to the house. The two girls had been best friends ever since primary school and had made the leap to senior school together. For years they’d been inseparable, wearing the same clothes, liking the same films and music and TV shows, and even sounding alike. But, apart from Alex telling Charlotte that she’d been with Poppy when she hadn’t, there’d been no mention of her for ages. Charlotte could have kicked herself for not realising that Poppy hadn’t been on the scene for a while. Perhaps she’d give Carol, Poppy’s mum, a call and ask her about it, though Alex would go nuts if she found out she was snooping.

  ‘Stick it on the Bluetooth and let’s have a listen? I could do with waking up. So could Rip Van Winkle back there.’ Charlotte nodded towards Sam in the back seat. ‘We’ll be at Stonehenge soon.’

  Alex paused as if weighing her options, then gave another shrug and connected her phone to the Bluetooth. A moment later a playlist popped up on the screen of the car’s media player: ‘Lily’s Love List’. The first track came through the speakers, it was ‘Stay with Me’ by Sam Smith.

  ‘Who’s Lily?’ Charlotte asked.

  Alex stiffened. ‘No one.’

  ‘No one called Lily?’

  ‘She’s just one of the girls at school,’ Alex said through gritted teeth.

  Clearly, the question had hit a raw nerve, but Charlotte had no idea why. Who was this girl? And, if the two of them were friendly enough to be sharing playlists, why hadn’t Alex brought her home?

  Charlotte put the questions to one side for a moment as she sang along with Sam’s lonesome sentiments, but, the moment she did, Alex clicked on her phone and stopped the track.

  ‘Why did you turn it off? I was enjoying that.’

  ‘You were ruining it! Can’t you put your Happy Mondays CD on like you normally do.’

  All right all right, thought Charlotte, don’t get your knickers in a twist. She popped the CD in. The last thing she wanted was to infuriate her touchy daughter even furthe
r.

  The car pulled up on the roadside and the three of them looked at the 4,500-year-old monument. A light rain was falling and the ancient site sat behind a wire fence, cloaked in drizzle. Charlotte couldn’t help thinking that they weren’t seeing the place at its best.

  ‘What do you think? Hordes of slaves dragged those stones across the country to get them here, you know.’

  There was a moment’s silence before Alex said, ‘It’s smaller than I thought it would be.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s puny,’ Sam agreed.

  ‘It’s quite big, actually. It’s just that people have these preconceptions…’

  ‘Yes,’ Sam said flatly. ‘Preconceptions that it’s bigger and better than it actually is.’

  Charlotte tutted at his lack of appreciation. ‘Well, the last time I came—’

  ‘We came,’ corrected Alex.

  ‘The last time we came it was amazing,’ she persevered.

  Charlotte could remember the day so vividly. She’d been eaten up with anxiety. Her pregnancy had been going well, she was fit and healthy and her midwife was pleased with how things were progressing, yet she couldn’t help feeling overwhelmed at what was to come. She decided that what she needed was something to ground her, something to remind her that childbirth was part of the endless cycle of life and not merely something to scare the shit out of you. She’d always liked to dabble in alternative stuff. Ed used to tease her about it, saying she was a bit ‘woo-woo’, but she didn’t care. A lot of it was mumbo-jumbo, but you couldn’t argue with the magical antiquity of a place like Stonehenge.

  The summer solstice was approaching and she’d told Ed that she wanted to see the sun rise at Stonehenge, never expecting that he would embrace the idea. But he surprised her by offering to drive them there, and he’d even booked them into a B&B somewhere close the night before so she wouldn’t be too tired to appreciate it. As they ate a pub meal on the eve of the longest day of the year, Charlotte could hear the locals discussing the approaching event.

  ‘Only them druids is all that’s allowed on the site now,’ said an ancient barfly as he supped his pint.

  Curious, as they got up to leave Charlotte asked him whether they would be allowed to join the ceremony.

  ‘No, my love, they don’t let anyone ’cept druids come to the stones these days. Too many New Age travellers and the like spoiling the site, they reckon.’

  Charlotte was bitterly disappointed that she wouldn’t be able to get close enough to touch the stones and feel the connection between herself and the baby growing inside her with something timeless, enduring and powerful.

  But, at 4 a.m., Ed had woken her gently and told her to wrap up in warm clothes. She didn’t know how he’d found out about it, but he drove them a little way from the site and they walked through something called Stonehenge Avenue. He told her that this was the ceremonial route to the ancient site and that they were walking in the footsteps of their Neolithic ancestors. He spread his waterproof coat out for them to sit beneath a row of beech trees. And, as the sun rose over Salisbury Plain, Charlotte was left speechless by the breathtaking spectacle of the summer solstice taking place below them. It was beyond words.

  As she peered through the drizzle now, Charlotte couldn’t help but reflect the difference in her feelings then and now. She couldn’t imagine Ed doing anything that spontaneous these days. Everything he did was planned and plotted down to the minutest detail. She sighed. What on earth had happened to them?

  Her thoughts were interrupted by Sam’s groan from the back seat. ‘Mum, this is so boring! Who cares about a load of old ruins? It’s raining and it’s my turn to sit in the front!’

  ‘You’re right,’ she said, peering out gloomily through the windscreen at the procession of tourists trudging around the fence. Resignedly, she waited for the children to swap seats. ‘Pass me a sandwich from that M&S bag.’ She took a bite, started the car and pointed it towards Cornwall.

  They arrived in Pendruggan three hours later. Apart from a false alarm when Alex had shouted that Molly was hanging her head in that funny way she did before she got carsick and they had to make an emergency stop, the journey was uneventful. Alex was in a world of her own, plugged into her headphones, while Sam kept up a constant prattle on the subject of Spike Turner and Casper flips and pop shove-its and nosegrinds. Charlotte was pretty good at tuning him out when she needed to, though she couldn’t help feeling that Sam deserved a more receptive audience – and, if his father could only be bothered to be a more available dad, he’d have one.

  They all cheered when the sea finally came into view. By this time the weather had brightened considerably and Charlotte was heartened by the sight of the sparkling blue expanse. She loved the sea, and it always had the power to make her feel good. Everything was better by the sea, wasn’t it?

  As they entered Pendruggan, she was thrilled to see that it was a typical Cornish village with rows of robust cottages rendered in local stone, their doors painted in bright seaside colours. Some of them had lifebuoys and upturned lobster pots and nets lying in their front gardens. Charlotte wound down the window so they could hear the loud cries of the gulls that circled above.

  In the centre of the village was a green, and around it she could see that all the needs of the villagers could be met: there was a shop, a church with what looked like a beautiful vicarage close by; there was even a red telephone box that actually seemed to have a working phone inside it.

  Her satnav directed her to a turning that led to a row of cottages. She drove carefully up the gravel track.

  ‘Look at that cute one, Mum.’ Alex pointed at an extremely pretty cottage called Gull’s Cry. They drove to the end and Charlotte felt her heart lurch when she saw Ed standing outside what must be their holiday let. It had been over four weeks since they had last set eyes on each other – the longest they’d ever been apart. Even when he’d been filming abroad, they’d always managed to slot some family time into the schedule, with Ed flying home or the rest of them flying out to visit him on location.

  She pulled up in front of the cottage; there was no driveway, just a small front garden filled to bursting with lavender, rosemary, hebe and other scented shrubs. Alex was the first out of the car and she threw herself at her father, who hugged her back tightly.

  Sam was close behind, chattering excitedly as his father rubbed his hair and slung an arm around his shoulders. Determined not to be left out, Molly bounced around Ed’s legs, yapping excitedly.

  Ed waved to Charlotte, waiting for her to join them before ushering the children inside. She was aware that she was taking an age to park the car. Her insides tightened again and she took a deep breath to steady herself, knowing that this flutter of nerves was a precursor to the conversation that she and her husband needed to have.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Ed, eager for her approval. It seemed to him that the cottage was every bit as perfect as Penny had said it would be. The front door opened straight into a small but perfectly formed living room with a wood burner in the fireplace. It was snug and cosy, with comfy sofas and cushions strewn around, though it had probably taken a lot of hard work on the part of the owners to make it look so casually thrown together. Through the back was a kitchen that had everything a family on holiday could need, and dotted around everywhere were pictures of boats and the sea.

  ‘It’s amazing, Ed,’ Charlotte agreed, and Ed felt himself breathe a sigh of relief. He’d been on tenterhooks for hours, wondering what she’d make of it.

  They trailed after the children as they raced up the stairs to check out the bedrooms, with Molly bringing up the rear. There was a double with an en-suite and two single bedrooms, plus a bathroom.

  ‘This one’s mine!’ joked Sam about the master bedroom.

  ‘You’ll be lucky.’ Ed ruffled his son’s hair.

  The children bickered good-naturedly over their rooms as Charlotte checked out the en-suite bathroom.

  She ran her finger along the side
of the antique Victorian bath. ‘They’ve thought of everything, haven’t they?’ she said, clearly impressed.

  ‘The owners have only recently put it on the rental market and it’s getting towards the end of the season, otherwise we wouldn’t have got a look-in.’ Ed sat down on the edge of the bath and pulled his wife towards him. ‘I think this is big enough for two, don’t you?’

  Charlotte gave a little shake of her head, but held his gaze. ‘Looks small to me.’ Then she deftly slipped away from his embrace and headed back out to the hallway, entreating the children not to let Molly jump on the bed.

  Ed’s heart sank. The look in his wife’s eyes was guarded, distant, but he cautioned himself not to rush things. It was always like this after a big job away; they needed to find their way to each other again; get the first row out of the way and the first night in bed together – whichever came first, hopefully the latter – then get back to normal. Be patient…Give her some space, said the voice in his head.

  Putting on a bright smile, he went to join the others, who were now admiring the view from Sam’s designated bedroom.

  ‘What do you think that is?’ Sam was pointing to a shedlike structure in a large garden beyond.

  ‘Penny said it belonged to someone called Tony. Apparently it’s a shepherd’s hut.’

  ‘Is he a shepherd, then? I can’t see any sheep.’

  Ed tried to recall what Penny had told him about the man who lived there, but it eluded him for the moment. ‘I’m sure they must be around somewhere,’ he said vaguely. ‘Anyway, the tour’s not over yet – and the best is yet to come!’ He couldn’t keep the bubble of excitement out of his voice; this was the part he had been looking forward to most.

  Charlotte eyed him curiously. ‘Oh?’

  ‘Come on.’ He slipped his arm around Charlotte’s waist and ushered her to the stairs. ‘We’re going for a little walk and you are going to love what we find at the end of it…’