Summer at Shell Cottage (18 page)

The next morning, Freya woke to find herself still half-dressed under the covers, with the unpleasantly gritty feeling of sand in her hair.
Her head pounded as if someone had
been at it with a mallet and the skin on her face was tight and dry.
Then a series of unwanted memories from the night before dropped into her mind, like struck matches illuminating dark corners of
a room.

Oh God, yes.
Mum’s face at dinner.
The quaver in her voice as she broke the news.
Dad’s affair with Katie, his secret second family tucked away in Silver Sands village, right under
their noses for all these years.

She clutched at the pillow, feeling as if the underpinnings of her world had just collapsed again.
Last night, she’d been in freefall, plunging helplessly from drink to drink, plummeting
towards oblivion with no safety net left beneath her.
And .
.
.
something else.
Something else had happened.

The door burst open and she heard Libby’s voice.
‘Mum!
Look what I made!
It’s a reverse twist pattern – Molly showed me how to do it.’
Her daughter’s wrist
was shoved under her nose, the fair freckled skin adorned by a lurid bracelet made from coloured rubber loops.
Loom bands, she thought they were called.
The big craze at school for the last
term.

‘Lovely,’ she croaked, but almost immediately Libby was recoiling, her freckled face twisting as she stared.

‘What’s that in your hair, Mum?
That green thing?’

Freya had no idea what her daughter meant.
‘I .
.
.’
she began uncertainly.

‘Is it
seaweed
?
Oh my God.
It IS.
Mum, you’ve got seaweed in your hair.
That is so weird.’
She took a step back, then bolted for the door.
‘Dex, come and look,
Mum’s just woken up and she’s got
seaweed
in her hair.
Seriously!’

Oh help.
World, please swallow me up now.
Thunderbolt, strike the house and blast me away.
Cringing, Freya tentatively put a hand up to her hair, with no idea or memory of what her
daughter could be talking about.
Her hair felt matted and sticky, then her fingers landed on something slimy and she gingerly picked it off and brought it down for a closer inspection.
Yes.
Libby
was right.
A dark green thread of seaweed had been nestled against her scalp all night.
Shit.
How had it even got there?

She shut her eyes, letting the dizzying blackness swing mercifully into her head.
Go away, world.
If only she could somehow stop time for a while and stay here in this cool dim room,
unmoving in the rumpled sheets, until she felt able to face the day.

But the door opened again just then and in came Victor in his dressing gown, bearing two cups of coffee.

Her head thumped.
Victor.
She vaguely remembered running away from him towards the beach the night before but everything else was fuzzy.
Blurred.
Christ, she must have been wasted.
Trashed, even
by her already diabolical standards.

‘Morning,’ said Vic, leaving a mug on her bedside table.
He, unlike her, smelled fresh and clean.
He had already showered; tiny water droplets still clung to the dark mat of hairs on
his legs.
She, in contrast, had never felt more unclean.
Never so ashamed.

‘I .
.
.
I’m sorry about .
.
.
what happened,’ she said, her voice sounding small and broken.
She still wasn’t quite sure what
had
happened, but that was
probably enough of a reason to apologize, she figured.

Vic sat down on the bed beside her and said nothing for a moment.
‘I know you had a shock last night, Frey, but .
.
.’

He left the sentence hanging in mid-air and Freya winced, wondering how on earth it might end.
A fragment of memory bloomed in her mind like a photograph developing: her, lying weeping on the
beach, the cold, granular sand against her face.

‘But what?’
she said miserably.

‘But you were completely out of control.
I mean,
completely
.
I’ve never seen you like that.’

She swallowed, unable to look at him, scared of the disapproval she would no doubt see there.
She wanted to touch him, for him to put his arms around her and tell her it was okay, but he was
sitting so stiffly, so rigid, she knew that was not going to happen.
‘What .
.
.
what did I do?’
she asked hesitantly, almost immediately wanting to cover her ears.
Did she really want
to hear the answer?

‘You can’t remember?
Seriously?’

She shook her head.
She was a dreadful human being.
The worst.

‘Well, you ran all the way down to the beach.
You were upset about your dad.’
He sipped his coffee, eyes hooded.
‘Then you decided to go swimming.
Fully dressed and totally
pissed.
It was freezing cold and almost pitch-black.
If I hadn’t been there, Frey .
.
.’

Oh God.
A shiver went through her.
She dimly remembered the shock of the icy water now, tussling with Victor as he tried to haul her out.
Seaweed in her hair.
Sand on her skin.
Shame swept
through her.
Dark, damning shame.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, but her teeth had begun chattering and it was hard to get the words out.
‘I’m really sorry.’

He sipped his coffee, still not looking at her.
‘You could have died, Freya,’ he said.
‘You could have drowned.
If I hadn’t been there .
.
.’

She shut her eyes wretchedly.
Hadn’t she wanted to be rescued by him?
Hadn’t she wanted someone to notice she was unhappy?
Not like that, though.
Not in a way that meant her husband
could barely look her in the eye afterwards.
‘I’m sorry,’ she blurted out.
‘I realize that.
It was a one-off, it won’t happen again, I’ve just been under a lot
of stress.’
She thought she might actually vomit with mortification.

He looked at her at last, looked at her as if he didn’t even know her.
‘Freya .
.
.
I think you are drinking too much.’

‘Yes.’
Her voice was barely more than a whisper.

‘I’m sorry, I know it’s a horrible thing to say, but that’s the truth.
Even the kids were saying as much last night.’

A hot tear rolled down her face and her throat was so tight and clenched she couldn’t speak.

‘And in the sea .
.
.’
He shook his head.
‘It all could have gone so badly wrong.
Irreparably wrong.
You know how strong the current gets, you know how cold the temperature
drops.’

‘Yes,’ she mumbled.
And she
did
know, of course she knew about hypothermia, and survival rates, and just how brutal the current could be.
Her parents had drummed it into her
from an early age, incessantly, repeatedly, just like she and Vic had told the children: you can’t take a chance with the sea.
It’s bigger than you, it’s stronger than you.
Rule
number one: respect its power and know when to stay out of the water.
‘Vic, I’m sorry,’ she tried saying again, but he was already speaking, not seeming to hear her.

‘I don’t know what to say, Freya,’ he said unhappily and his gaze slid away.
‘I just don’t know any more.’

Freya had never experienced quite such depths of self-loathing as she stood in the shower ten minutes later, washing the seawater from her hair and skin, watching another
strand of seaweed twist around the plughole with the foaming shampoo suds.

You could have died, Freya
, she heard Victor say accusingly as she towelled her hair dry afterwards.
Her head ached with the roughness of the action and she could hardly catch her own
eye in the mirror for the wave of hot shame that cascaded over her once again.
Just imagine.
The children would have woken up to discover their mother was dead, seaweed-hair and all.
The thought of
their shocked, tearful faces was like a punch in the stomach.
How could she have been so stupid?
How could she have let herself get into such a state?

When she finally slunk through to breakfast, she felt as if everyone must be staring at her, but Libby was busily making another bracelet under the tutelage of Molly, Dexter was glued to his
iPod, Teddy was lying on his front arranging a series of pebbles into a line, and none of them gave her a second glance.
Over at the worktop, Harriet looked as if she’d just got up too; still
in pyjamas, her hair dishevelled.
She popped a couple of Nurofen from a packet and tossed them down her throat with a shudder.
Seeing Freya, she slid the blister pack along to her.
‘Morning,’ she mumbled huskily.
‘Bloody Nora.
My head.’

‘Thanks,’ said Freya, accepting the packet.
She felt embarrassed for having blurted out all her problems to Harriet the evening before too.
What must her sister-in-law think of her?
‘Listen, I’m sorry about .
.
.
last night,’ she said in a low voice, tucking a wet curl of hair behind her ear.
‘Me blathering on for hours like that.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ Harriet said.
‘There’s no need to apologize for anything.’

Freya threw two Nurofen down her throat and washed them down with the last dregs of her coffee.
‘Thanks,’ she mumbled.

‘How much did you guys have to
drink
last night anyway?
Jesus!
What was all
that
about?’
Molly asked, looking up disapprovingly.

‘Fifty, I bet,’ Ted replied gleefully.
‘
Fifty
drinks.
Jesus!’

Freya felt herself turn scarlet but Harriet merely rolled her eyes.
‘Don’t pay any attention to Goody Two Shoes over there,’ she said.
‘We are on holiday, thank you very
much,’ she added, addressing her daughter.
‘Adults are allowed a few drinks on holiday.
And God knows we need it, after days on end spent with our loved ones.
That’s you lot, by
the way.’

‘Charming,’ Molly replied, tossing her hair.
‘Well, as long as you keep setting me a good example, then .
.
.
Oh, wait.
You don’t.
Role model failure.’

Harriet groaned.
‘I can’t cope with crushing teenage wit and acerbity today,’ she said, rubbing her eyes.
‘I am weak and vulnerable.’

‘Ha.
Well, if this is your mid-life crisis, then you’ve only your bad-ass self to blame,’ Molly said heartlessly, passing the bracelet back to Libby.
‘There,’ she
said in a friendlier voice as she ran a finger along the colourful pattern.
‘See?’

You could see genuine awe shining in Libby’s eyes as she gazed up at her cool older cousin.
‘Thanks,’ she said, slipping it onto her wrist and turning it this way and that.
‘It’s bad-ass,’ she added daringly.

When was the last time Libby had looked at her so admiringly?
Freya thought with a pang, remembering how her daughter had recoiled from her in bed, freaked out by the seaweed.
Colour burned in
her cheeks at the thought.
Even the kids had noticed her drinking, according to Victor, and that felt like the worst kind of judgement of all.

How had it all gone so wrong?
She had tried so hard to be the perfect wife and mother, juggling her schedule and begging favours from colleagues so that she could go to school assemblies and PTA
meetings.
She had tried too hard, if anything, desperately overcompensating by spending hours creating Gruffalo and dinosaur costumes for fancy dress parties in the vain hope that her children
would love her for it and other parents would notice and approve.
The last thing she wanted was for anyone to accuse her of being a part-time mum just because she had a demanding full-time job.
And
she had worked damned hard to protect that image this far, to keep all those different plates spinning merrily.