The Beach Hut Next Door (8 page)

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.

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 was 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.

Once he’d dropped off Rachel’s stuff, he started to head back to the hut. He remembered their excitement the day they’d decided to buy it. They’d spent a lazy bank holiday on the beach, picnicking and sunbathing and swimming, and on the way back to the car they’d seen the For Sale sign in the window. Rachel had sighed, ‘If only.’ By the time they got to the car, Tim had done the maths. ‘Why not?’

They’d never actually vocalized it, but of course the purchase had been a long-term one, and each of them had envisaged family holidays there in the future. Now, for Tim at least, that vision was crushed.

He trudged back along the crescent of sand. The tide was right in, and the crowds had moved accordingly, shifting their picnic blankets and UV tents as far in as they could go. Although the sun was high in the sky, Tim felt a grey bleakness close in on him. Most people would give their right arm to have the summer ahead of them to enjoy Everdene, but it filled Tim with a sense of dread. Maybe he would just sub-let it; it would be easy enough. And better than being reminded of his broken dream every weekend …

He tried to snap himself out of his
doleur
by drinking in the sparkling sea, thinking about the early morning surfing he could do; the mates he could ask down over the next few weeks. He stood outside the door for a moment: it was propped open to let in what little breeze there was. The huts always baked in the afternoon sun, and he could smell the heat of the bare wood.

Rachel had made a pile of sandwiches, pulled open a bag of Kettle chips and flipped him open a beer. They sat next to each other on the steps, as they had so many times over the years, and ate in silence, each pretending that it was simply too hot to talk.

Afterwards, they sat on the sagging corduroy sofa – the one the turquoise velvet bargain had replaced – with their feet on the coffee table Tim had made out of old wine-boxes, and went through the to-do list. The felt on the roof needed replacing. Tim got out his iPad to check out workmen who might be able to do it. As he searched, he realized that Rachel had fallen asleep.

He barely dared breathe as he didn’t want to wake her. As she fell deeper into slumber, she sank into him until her head was on his chest. It was an unbearably familiar pose, the one they’d always ended up in on a Friday night in front of the television, after a hard week’s work and a bottle of wine. Rachel would pass out after the first half hour of whatever movie they had decided to watch, and Tim would curl himself round her, protectively, watching it until the bitter end. And would then have to tell her what had happened, when she woke up in indignation as the credits rolled.

He wanted to put a hand on her stomach. He wanted to see if he could feel the baby. He knew it wouldn’t be big enough yet, but he felt sure he would be able to detect some sort of energy pulsing inside her. But he fought the urge, even though he knew she would be so deeply asleep she wouldn’t notice. It was too invasive. Creepy. And Tim didn’t want to be a creep. Or jealous. Or over-interested. He wanted to run away from the whole situation. He had no idea how to deal with it. Not least because he didn’t really know very much about the guy Rachel was seeing, who was presumably the father. They didn’t touch upon their personal lives when they met. Well, they didn’t touch on hers. Tim didn’t have one. Or at least he felt as if he didn’t. There was nothing personal about his existence.