Chapter Eighteen
The next day we finally leave the house for a walk on the beach. It’s Theo’s idea, but I am quick to agree. It’s a beautiful, sunny day and we emerge blinking into the light. I hiss like a cat and Theo chuckles.
‘Come on, Drusilla.’ He shakes my elbow. ‘A bit of vitamin D will do you good.’
‘Ugh, you sound like Serena.’
We head through the rickety gate at the bottom of the back garden and down the steep path. Winding through the dunes of fine golden sand punctuated with clumps of feathery green grasses, I am hit by that familiar blast of clean salt air. It feels so good, it must surely be medicinal.
‘So you and your sisters used to come here for the summer?’ Theo asks.
‘Yep,’ I nod. ‘It belonged to Granny Mac, Lil’s great-grandma. I mean, she was related to Lil by blood but she always saw Serena and me as family, too.’
‘What was she like?’
‘She’d have made mincemeat of you,’ I laugh. ‘She came from Peebles, and when she and her husband moved here, her family called her a soft southerner, even though it’s only about thirty miles south of there. And she agreed with them! She lived here for most of her life and you’d think she’d retired to the south of France the way she talked about Northumberland.’
We’ve reached the beach now and the sand stretches out, the tide is low.
‘Lil’s grandparents didn’t want much to do with Petty when she got pregnant, but Granny Mac did. Her husband died before we were born so she lived here alone. If Petty hadn’t moved in with Mum, she and Lil would have come up here. We visited for every summer holiday for as long as I can remember.’ I think about the woman who was a grandmother to us all.
‘She hated my dad, hated him, but she loved us.’ I smirk. ‘I remember the only time she met Ripp she called him an over-sexed idiot and told him it was a relief to us all that his genes were so pathetic because luckily there wasn’t a bit of him in her girls. Then she said she thought his music was pure shite, too. Ripp looked like he was going to wet his pants.’
Theo’s laugh bursts out of him and I grin back. ‘Yeah, it was great.’ I think about it a bit more, about how best to describe Granny Mac. ‘She was kind,’ I say, swallowing hard. ‘Gruff and bad-tempered and a bit intimidating I suppose, but under it she was so kind. She never made me and Serena feel like there was any difference between how she felt about us and Lil.’
‘She sounds great.’ Theo’s hands are dug in the pockets of his jeans as we amble towards the sea. The tide is right out and the water is a perfect, clear blue.
I nod. ‘I miss her a lot. I haven’t been back here since she died.’
Theo stops in surprise, turns to me. ‘You haven’t?’
‘No, not since I came back for her funeral when I had just turned eighteen.’
He blows out a long breath. ‘I had no idea. How is it? Being back I mean.’
I twist my foot in the sand. ‘It’s strange. A bit sad. It helps that the house looks so different inside, I guess, but being down here,’ I gesture around us at the beach. ‘This is where the three of us lived. Granny Mac used to open all the doors and let us loose for the summer. The first thing we’d do is run down and write our names in the sand, claiming it for our own. We were wild for six weeks, just lost all sense of civility. Tangled hair, bare feet, sunburn, sand everywhere, never showered. We swam and played and climbed over all the rocks. It was wonderful.’ I look around at the site of so many of our adventures and feel that particular, sweet mix of nostalgia and sadness that comes with memories of Granny Mac and those magic, uncomplicated summers.
Theo’s white teeth flash. ‘A sort of feral Famous Five?’
‘That’s right.’ I smile back at him. ‘I don’t think Serena could ever pull off anything as wholesome as Enid Blyton. None of us could. One of our favourite games was seeing which one of us the others could pin down and force to eat the most sand.’
Theo hums with amusement.
‘At least until we hit puberty and then it was sunbathing, Jilly Cooper novels and sneaking up the coast to watch the surfers in their wetsuits. And better personal hygiene, thankfully.’ I gesture to the rocks that hem in this private cove. ‘Do you want to keep going? We have to climb over the rocks but then we join a long stretch that’s good for walking.’
‘Yeah,’ Theo agrees easily. ‘This is nice.’
We scramble over the rocks past the ‘private property’ sign. Well, I scramble; Theo lopes gracefully over them on his long legs like they’re nothing at all. Once we reach the other side I’m reminded that it’s early summer and that it’s not just the two of us out here at the end of the world. The long sweep of the public beach is dotted with people – families playing in the water, couples stretched out sunning themselves, excited dogs tearing about through the sand.
I glance over at Theo, but he doesn’t seem worried. He’s wearing his sunglasses and a baseball cap and his scruff has grown in so much it almost constitutes a beard. I guess it’s unlikely anyone will recognize him. We walk for a bit, and he bends down, picks up a pretty, pale pink seashell. He turns it over in his hands then hooks his finger in the pocket of my shorts, tugging me closer as he drops the shell inside.
‘So, why haven’t you been back here since you were eighteen?’ Theo asks.
I scrunch up my nose. ‘I didn’t leave the place on the best of terms. I came here after a breakup, a bad one, and then it was only a few weeks after I went home that Granny Mac passed away. She had a heart attack and no one found her until it was too late.’ I feel my eyes sting, blink rapidly.
It was just another thing that made me furious with Sam… and with myself. I’d been too busy thinking about my own drama to spend time with her. Heart-broken Clemmie was even less fun to be around than sick Clemmie, and I hated the thought that those last, precious memories were mired in a cloud of misery and me being the very worst version of myself.
Most important of all was the guilt that I might have missed some clue about her health, something that could have changed the outcome. I don’t say any of that, but for a second I want to. I want to spill my guts to Theo, and I don’t know when and how he started slipping past my defences.
‘The last time I came up was for her funeral,’ I say instead. ‘She left the house to Petty in her will, but none of us could face being up here without her, so Petty lets the place out as a holiday home.’
‘That’s rough,’ Theo says quietly. ‘When my gran passed away no one told me until after the funeral. I was on tour in the States and they didn’t want to bother me.’ There’s a bitterness in his words that I haven’t heard from him before.
I suck in a breath. ‘Ouch, that’s awful.’
‘Yeah,’ he agrees, ‘I was pretty angry about it. I would have wanted to be there. I loved her.’ We come to a stop at the edge of the water and he turns his face, looking out to the horizon. ‘Also, I guess I felt like, what does it say about me that my family did that? That they thought I’d treat her death as… an inconvenience? I don’t know what I did to make them feel that way, but I must have been pretty shitty.’
‘I’m sure they were only trying to protect you. I know from Serena’s job what the big record labels can be like; they were probably thinking you wouldn’t be able to come and then you’d feel awful.’
‘I would have made it work,’ he says, his voice low. ‘I’d have been there to say goodbye. I’d do anything for my family.’
‘I’m sure they know that,’ I say, matching his tone.
‘Excuse me,’ a nervous voice says from behind us. Theo and I both turn and there’s a woman standing there. She’s in her twenties and she looks as if she’s about to pass out, pale and shaking.
‘Are you,’ she starts, barely above a whisper. She closes her mouth, then opens it. Tries again. ‘Sorry, but are you Theo Eliott?’
I freeze. It’s not like we aren’t allowed to leave the house or anything, but the plan is very much to keep Theo’s exposure to people as low as possible. Serena had a long talk with me about security risks if the paparazzi and his fans found out where he was staying. It’s not like Granny Mac’s house is exactly Fort Knox.
But Theo is relaxed, smiling. ‘No, sorry,’ he says, slipping effortlessly into a Californian drawl that I don’t recognize. ‘I get that all the time, and my wife thinks it’s hilarious.’
Here he picks up my hand and gives it a little squeeze.
My mouth opens and it takes a second for any words to come out, for me to realize he’s using me as normal-person camouflage. I think it’s because the word wife has short-circuited my brain. ‘Yeah, he wishes,’ I manage to croak in the end.
Behind his glasses I know exactly how Theo’s eyes are sparkling. ‘Don’t I just? That Theo Eliott is one good-looking guy.’
The woman slumps in disappointment. ‘Yeah, I thought it couldn’t be him. I mean, what would he be doing here, right?’
‘He’s probably off doing goat yoga and drinking kombucha somewhere,’ I agree.
The woman laughs. ‘Yeah. Well, sorry to bother you,’ she says with a shy smile, her eyes sliding back to Theo for another look before turning and running back to her friends who are watching us with interest.
We keep our backs to them, walking away.
‘I feel bad,’ I say. ‘She was so excited.’
‘Yeah, me too,’ Theo agrees. ‘I don’t want to disappoint people, but sometimes it’s more important to protect my little corner of normality, and the other people who are there with me. It took me a long time to get my head around that, that I wasn’t obliged to give every piece of myself away. Boundaries and everything.’
Something warms in my chest. It’s the sort of thing I have never, ever heard Ripp Harris say. I can’t even imagine him thinking it, worrying about boundaries or wanting to protect me, and I’m his actual daughter.
In fact, I don’t need to imagine it, do I? I’ve been there with Ripp, begging him to save me from the storm around him, and he didn’t do a thing. Didn’t even understand there was a problem. My stomach clenches at the memory.
‘I’ve never done goat yoga by the way,’ Theo says.
I roll my eyes. ‘Tell it to the bottles of organic kombucha fermenting in our kitchen cupboard.’
‘I’m not saying I’m against the idea,’ he muses. ‘Those baby goats are pretty cute.’
I laugh, a big, sunshiny laugh, and we carry on walking. I think about the seashell in my pocket and how I’ll put it on my bedside table when we get home. And as my hand stays wrapped in Theo’s all the way up the beach, I tell myself it’s just part of the charade. It doesn’t mean anything. Nothing at all.