Summer at 23 the Strand Read online

‘Okay. It’s not cold. The boys can go barefoot on the sand. They’ll probably go in the sea and get wet anyway.’

  ‘No. On my own, I mean.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Don’t sound like that about it,’ Cally said. She fingered the amethyst she’d worn around her neck since the minute she’d found it there waiting for her. Her gift. It made her feel calm touching the cold stone, as though it held some sort of healing quality.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Defensive.’

  ‘Well, how am I supposed to sound? I’m getting the brush-off at every turn…’

  ‘You’re not! I’ve told you, I’m just very tired, and I’ve been stressed at work. I couldn’t work if my mum didn’t have the boys, but I have to drive them there and fetch them afterwards and… and we’re in danger of arguing and you know the boys don’t like it when we do.’

  ‘Which isn’t often, is it?’

  ‘No. It isn’t,’ Cally had to agree. ‘But I really must get out. Clear my head a bit. Get a bit of exercise.’

  ‘Okay,’ Jack said, sounding resigned. ‘Seems we’re not wanted on this voyage, boys.’ He ruffled the boys’ small curly heads with his large, tanned hands.

  How safe they look in his hands. They’ll be fine. Still a family. If…

  ‘It’s not that, and you know it, Jack,’ Cally said with a bit of a wobble. ‘I’ll just go and find something to wear.’

  Cally didn’t have wellies so trainers would have to do. And a cagoule that was probably more sieve than waterproof. As she hurried along the promenade in front of the chalets, the rain began to ease off. The relentless hammering on the roofs of the chalets and into the puddles forming on the promenade had changed to what her Aunt Frances would have called a ‘mizzle’. A sort of misty drizzle that soaked you just as much as heavy rain did but at least it didn’t beat against your skin.

  How often she was thinking of her Aunt Frances here. More so than at home, that was for sure. She knew, had her aunt still been alive, that she would have shared her fears over the lump with her, before telling her own mother. She still dreaded telling her mother, which she knew she would have to soon, because the lump wasn’t going away. It wasn’t getting any bigger either but Cally had read enough on the internet to know there was no significance in that. Her mother, she knew, would smother her with love and want to take over everything – looking after the boys, the housework, the cooking; she’d probably turn up every day with a cottage pie or some macaroni cheese – ‘To save you having to do it, darling. While, you know, you fight this thing.’ But she didn’t need smothering with love, did she? She needed a good talking-to so she’d stop being so reluctant to tell Jack, who had a right to know – Cally knew that now.

  Cally had no idea where she was going as she strode out towards the pier. A sign screwed to the low beach wall indicated there was a two-mile walk from where she was standing to a point the other side of the harbour and back.

  ‘That should do it,’ Cally said out loud. Although what the ‘it’ was she wasn’t certain. Certainly it wouldn’t make the lump go. But it might help her focus on what her next step was. To get through this fortnight, see a doctor and then a specialist on her own, or tell Jack first? To tell him here or when they got home? She felt sick with the possibilities.

  Cally found a handful of coins in the pocket of the cagoule. Enough to buy a coffee somewhere if she wanted to. She hurried on.

  Jack and the boys didn’t deserve to have their holiday blighted by her low – no, not low, worried – mood, did they? She wondered what Jack might be doing with the boys. Perhaps he’d found another TV channel to watch with them – cartoons maybe – and was sitting with them both cuddled up on his lap, his arms around them, holding them safe. Or he could be reading to them. Jack loved to read to the boys and it was always he who did the bedtime story every night. And Cally loved to watch him, peering through a crack in the bedroom door, listening to the lower timbre of his voice, watching until the boys drifted off to sleep, and sometimes Jack with them.

  ‘And you, Cally Jones, have got yourself too wrapped up in your boys and not enough in your husband, who is second to none,’ she said, wagging a finger at a bemused gull standing on the sea wall. ‘He won’t take much more of my self-absorption will he, Mr Seagull?’

  The gull flew off. And that’s why men have affairs, Cally told herself – because their wives forget they married a man, making them semi-redundant once they’d fathered the children they wanted. Sometimes, Cally knew, she put Jack below her boys, her parents and her job.

  ‘Guilty as charged,’ she called after the gull, who was now landing at the water’s edge.

  She walked on, picking up pace until she was almost running. She had to jump over a large puddle that had formed in a crack in the pavement, and just for the moment she jumped over it, and looked down, it became a mirror and Cally saw that she was smiling. She’d read somewhere that the human mind doesn’t know the difference between a real smile and a false one, and if you just keep smiling your mood will lift, and you’ll become happier. She’d just have to keep smiling then, wouldn’t she? And keep walking.

  Cally went past the marker for the two-mile walk and under a small arch that led to the harbour.

  Trips around the bay it said on a blackboard propped up against a kiosk that had seen better days, with peeling paint and a plank broken at the bottom of the door. On another it offered ferry rides, Every hour on the half-hour. Both kiosks were closed. Cally and Jack had never taken the boys on a boat – they’d like that, or Cally hoped they would. She’d suggest to Jack they book tickets for another day – one when the sun was guaranteed to shine.

  But first, coffee. Cally drew out a handful of coins from the pocket of her cagoule. They were rather wet, as she was. But no matter, she had enough to buy a cappuccino – how comforting one of those was when you needed it. And besides, while she drank it, it would give Jack more time with his boys. Cally’s smile widened, just thinking about that.

  Jack stood in the open doorway waiting for her. The rain had stopped completely and there was a hazy sun trying to break through. It was warmer too.

  ‘Phew! You’re back,’ Jack said as Cally walked up the steps to 23 The Strand in her now-sodden trainers because she’d walked back along the beach, walking through the bits covered with a thin film of water where the tide had gone out.

  ‘Have I been long?’ she asked. In truth, she had no idea how long she’d been out but could see now that the sun – hazy as it was – was almost overhead. Nearly lunchtime.

  ‘Two hours, thirty-three minutes, and about fifteen seconds,’ Jack said.

  ‘Are you sure about that?’ Cally said. She couldn’t help smiling. Jack had been worried about her. He’d missed her. He loved her and she’d hazard a guess he didn’t want to be without her. It was a good feeling and yet a terrible one because what if he ended up missing her, like, for ever…

  ‘Give or take a second,’ Jack quipped. ‘The kettle’s on. Or shall we celebrate your return with a pre-lunch glass of wine? Seeing as we’re on holiday?’

  ‘Wine. Please,’ Cally said. On impulse she kissed Jack on the lips, just a swift kiss, the way she kissed the boys, but it conveyed how much she loved him, or she hoped it did. ‘I’ll just get out of these sodden things.’

  The shower was warm rather than hot, and hardly a power shower, but it helped revive Cally. She roughly rinsed her hair too. Towelled herself dry as best she could in the cramped space.

  ‘Jack! Could you pass me my dressing gown?’ she yelled, opening the door of the bathroom a tad. ‘I’ll dress in our bedroom.’

  Jack was back in seconds, just as the towel Cally had wrapped around her still slightly damp body slid to the floor.

  ‘Pity the boys are here,’ Jack said. ‘I could ravage you.’

  He reached out a hand and the ends of his fingers caught Cally’s left breast. She flinched. Wrapped both arms around herself protectively.

  ‘C
ally?’ Jack said, fear in his eyes. ‘What’s wrong? Is there someone else?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I’m not sure I believe that.’

  ‘You must.’

  ‘Must I? You’ve never recoiled from me before…’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. It’s me. I’ve got something I need to tell you and I don’t know how to do it. Or when. But right now I’m freezing.’ She held out her hands for the fleecy dressing gown with roses on it that she’d got in a charity shop – it was rather less than fashionable but it was warm and strangely comforting. And she needed comforting now. ‘And I will tell you but I don’t want it to be in front of the boys. Soon, I’ll tell you soon. Jack, I love you. Perhaps more now than when I married you. There is no other man for me and there never will be. Can you hang on to that?’

  ‘Strange compliment,’ Jack said, but he gave Cally the lopsided grin she so loved, the one that gave her butterflies in her tummy – the one that told her Jack loved her just as much as she did him. ‘But I’ll take it.’

  Cally and Jack took the boys on a boat trip that afternoon.

  ‘I can hardly believe it’s the same month, never mind the same day,’ Cally said. ‘It’s so warm now compared to this morning.’ Just a few short hours ago she’d been trying to settle her demons, getting herself soaking wet in the progress, and now here they were, almost back to how they’d been – her and Jack – before she’d found the lump.

  ‘We’re opportunists, that’s what we are,’ Jack said. He leaned towards Cally and kissed her cheek. ‘Got the boat almost to ourselves as well.’

  ‘Well, it is early in the season. Still May. There’ll be more people around next month, I expect.’

  ‘Are there whales?’ Noah asked. ‘The man said.’

  ‘He did, didn’t he?’ Cally said.

  The man who’d sold them the tickets at the kiosk had said they were a bit late coming out to see the dolphins because they liked to feed in the mornings off Berry Head. Then he’d said a whale had been spotted in the bay the previous summer. A few lucky holidaymakers had seen it from his very own boat and had photos to prove it. Gosh, how exciting that would be, to see a whale. They’d come back.

  Gosh, the first positive thought about the future since I’ve been here.

  ‘Can I see? Can I have a whale for a pet? I’ll help look after it. It could live in the bath.’ Noah was pink-cheeked with excitement at the thought.

  ‘I want to see a whale,’ Riley said. He slid from the seat and was at the rail in a nanosecond before Jack reacted and leapt up to grab him. ‘A big whale.’

  ‘Maybe a goldfish,’ Jack said, scooping his youngest son into his arms and carrying him back to the wooden bench where Cally and Noah sat.

  ‘Two goldfish,’ Noah said. ‘One for Riley and one for me.’

  ‘Two it is then,’ Jack said.

  And there it was – Jack’s first sign of acceptance that, perhaps, his boys needed pets in their lives.

  ‘We’ll go to the pet shop as soon as we get home and buy a big tank and some weed for them to hide in,’ Cally said.

  Goodness, the second positive thought in such a short space of time.

  ‘We’re going to look for whales!’ Noah announced. ‘Come on, Riley!’

  He grabbed his little brother’s hand and they went over to scramble up onto a large, varnished, wooden box in the middle of the boat. They were safe there, sitting with their legs dangling, feet from the deck, but clinging on to one another.

  ‘Do you miss the computer?’ Jack asked suddenly.

  ‘Why?’ Cally asked, sharply, her little bubble of happiness deflating a little. How quickly moods, and thoughts, could change.

  ‘Well, you’re on it a lot at home and you haven’t got access here.’

  ‘I’m not on it a lot,’ Cally said, knowing just how defensive she was sounding. ‘Just half an hour or so while you read to the boys and settle them for the night. Facebook mostly, seeing what old school friends are up to.’

  ‘Not everyone is as they seem on chat sites or Facebook,’ Jack said, immediately planting a seed of doubt in Cally’s mind that maybe Tony, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, might fit into that category, although Cally was fairly certain he didn’t. ‘And any information you might Google is only as accurate as however knowledgeable the person who put it there is.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Cally said.

  ‘Well, you do now. I’ve looked up things about engineering when I’ve been at work and on more than a few occasions the info has been utter tosh.’

  ‘Oh,’ Cally said. How naïve of her to have accepted everything she might have looked at as being one hundred per cent the truth – if what Jack was saying was true.

  ‘And emails,’ Jack carried on. ‘I’ve noticed you get more of those than you used to.’

  Cally and Jack used the same computer at home but it was a golden rule that neither tried to access the other’s emails. Cally knew Jack’s password in case there was ever an emergency and she needed to be able to contact his bosses, and he knew hers, but that’s all it was, a safety net. Wasn’t it?

  ‘Have you been spying on me?’ Part of her hoped he had and that he had seen her browsing history and would ask why she was looking at cancer sites, and then it would open the conversation she knew they must have.

  ‘I’ve not used your password to look, no. I’d never stoop that low. I like to think we’ve got a better, more trusting, relationship than that.’

  ‘And we have,’ Cally said. There’d never been a second in all the time she’d known Jack, and been married to him, when she’d questioned the truth – or not – of what he’d told her. But all the same, she couldn’t just blurt out here what was troubling her. She knew she’d probably burst into tears and there were other passengers, and the crew, to think about. They wouldn’t want her raw emotions spread in front of them. And Jack would be torn between comforting her and checking the boys were okay. ‘So, can we just get on and enjoy the trip?’

  The boat’s engine slowed then. One of the passengers was pointing to some rocks near a cove that were exposed now the tide had gone out.

  ‘Oh, it’s a seal!’ Cally said.

  She leapt up and went to the boys, lifting them down to take them to the side of the boat where they’d see the seal.

  The captain came over the tannoy to tell them that this seal loved to swim up to boats and catch any fish thrown to it.

  ‘And I just happen to have some mackerel here!’ he laughed. ‘And I can see two little boys who would be very good at feeding seals, I should think.’

  ‘Me! Me!’ Noah and Riley yelled in unison.

  Jack came up behind Cally and put his arms around all of them, and her awkward moment had passed.

  Another memory was being made for her boys and she must relish the moment.

  ‘And to answer your question,’ Cally said, leaning in to him. ‘I’m not missing the internet. Not one bit.’ And she wasn’t, because she knew now that it had only been fuelling her fears – a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, as the old adage had it. She wriggled in closer to Jack, the slight frostiness that had been between them melting a little.

  ‘Good,’ Jack whispered in her ear. ‘That’s music to my ears.’

  But still Cally couldn’t find it in her to tell Jack what was worrying her. She found that the best way not to have to tell him was to have the boys around all the time. When Noah wanted to paddle but Riley didn’t, Cally went with him. Even though she could have reached out and grabbed him from where she’d been sitting had he fallen.

  ‘The sea is sucking my feet,’ Noah giggled. ‘Look, they’re disappearing!’

  Cally looked. As the tide pulled back out again, leaving the sand full of water, Noah’s small and perfect feet sank down, the tops covered with a sheen of water.

  ‘Do you like it?’ Cally asked.

  ‘I love it, Mummy,’ Noah said. ‘It tickles. I like tickles.’

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nbsp; ‘In that case…’

  Cally bent down and tickled Noah, making him squirm, making him laugh. And she found she was laughing too. A genuine laugh. Making memories for Noah.

  ‘Can we live here?’ Noah asked. ‘I like it here.’

  ‘We can come back,’ Cally said. ‘Maybe,’ she whispered under her breath. Then in a louder voice she said, ‘Yes. Yes, we will.’

  ‘The zoo today, boys,’ Jack said, lifting Riley onto his shoulders ready to board the bus. An open-top bus ran a round robin service. Cally and her family scrambled up to the top deck and sat in the two front seats – Cally with Noah, Jack with Riley.

  ‘Grandstand view,’ Jack said as the bus made its way past the pier.

  ‘Will there be whales?’ Noah asked.

  ‘Where?’ Jack said.

  ‘At the zoo.’

  ‘No, I shouldn’t think so. Although the man who took us out on the boat the other day when we saw the seal said they do get a whale come into the bay sometimes.’

  ‘See whales now!’ Riley shouted, and Cally and Jack shushed him in unison.

  ‘But there will be crocodiles,’ Cally said. ‘At the zoo.’

  ‘Crocodiles!’ Noah shouted, looking terrified and yet thrilled beyond belief in equal measure.

  ‘Crocodiles!’ Riley emulated his big brother.

  ‘Definitely,’ Cally said.

  ‘Sing the song!’ Riley yelled. ‘Sing the song!’

  One of the songs Riley loved from the playgroup he went to two mornings a week was about a crocodile.

  ‘You must never smile at a crocodile, ’cos a crocodile has got an evil smile,’ Cally began to sing softly, almost a whisper.

  But the boys had other ideas and began to sing the song, with wild facial gestures and much snapping of arms to indicate a crocodile’s jaws, very loudly.

  Jack looked slightly embarrassed at the noise his sons were making.

  ‘Sorry,’ Cally mouthed at him.

  ‘Nah,’ Jack said. ‘It’s all right. We’ll let this one go. I expect there’ve been worse things on the top deck of a bus!’

  And so the boys made more than a few repetitions of the crocodile song, and when they got to the zoo, Jack bought bags of special food for them to feed the animals and birds. Cally burst out laughing when Noah showed more interest in the locks and bolts on the gates of the pens than he did in the animals inside them.