Four months before Catherine
Lulworth Cove, a day of endings and beginnings, though I don’t know that yet as we arrive at the famous shell-shaped beach, with its clear, brochure-blue water arcing into shore.
Sam strides ahead, picking his way over buckets and pale English limbs, loaded up with backpack, hamper, rug and towels.
We trail behind him, Joe with his earbuds in, not yet thirteen but already in every way a teenager; Daisy carrying books and buckets and the grubby, bobbly Eeyore that at nine she is really too old for.
The minute we’re settled on a rug, on the furthest, loneliest corner of the beach, the kids race at full pelt into the water, diving beneath its surface and sending white jets of spray up into the air.
‘Go on,’ I say to Sam, who is sitting anxiously beside me, watching me rub suncream into my face, ‘go and swim.’
He hates sunbathing, sitting still a slow torture to him.
What he likes is to swim out as far as he can, pushing himself harder and harder with his laboured crawl until he feels the blood pumping in his lungs.
He likes to swim to the diving platform with Joe and dive over and over again into the cold, murky depths of the Channel.
Or climb over the rocks until he finds the perfect rock pool with Daisy, where they will lie on their stomachs waiting for crabs.
My eyes are shut, and I am drifting in and out of memories, good ones, perfect ones, when an ice-cold hand lands without warning on my stomach.
I let out a tortured, horror-movie scream.
It’s Sam, laughing as he squats down next to me and shakes drops of seawater from his thick black hair.
Sometimes I think we’re more like siblings than anything else, just an older extension of Joe and Daisy.
We are and we aren’t, I decide, as Sam slides briefly on top of me, trapping me beneath his cold, hard body, slipping one hand dangerously between my thighs.
‘Family beach,’ I say, pushing him off.
‘Daisy heading our way.’
We lunch in the sun on cheese rolls and crisps and little bottles of Orangina, and afterwards Sam forces us on a walk, right to the top of the cliff, where we’ll have a perfect view of Durdle Door.
It’s an easy climb, ledges worn into a staircase over the years, and at the top a covering of grass that has been scorched of its greenness by our long summer of sun.
We sit by a cluster of stones looking out at the sea and Sam takes two beer bottles from his pockets, a surprise, chipping off their tops cowboy-style against the rocks.
The beer is cold and I’m about to take a sip when he says, ‘Wait. A toast first. To your mum.’ He raises his bottle skywards, waiting for me to do the same.
‘To Mum,’ I say, checking myself for the ache that is always there.
It is fourteen years since she died, or fourteen years since she lived, whichever way you look at it a great big gap of missing and mourning, an absence, a silence that is louder in my head than anything else.
I worry that my children are growing up without knowing anything about the grandmother they never met.
They do not know, because I cannot bring myself to tell them, that her favourite flowers were peonies and when they were in season she gifted them to herself every week.
Peonies and Rodin and Eau de Rochas perfume.
Mozart and spaghetti vongole and tailored white shirts from Paul Smith (we found fourteen almost identical ones in her wardrobe after she died).
Easy to list her loves, impossible to recount the loss, the moments I had with her, thousands and thousands of them stacked up and compressed into a flat little pillow of sadness.
My children, used to this sort of thing, to their father’s impromptu parental toasts, say nothing; they just stare out at the whirls of bright foam breaking at the shoreline.
Afterwards we go to look at the boat, an old-fashioned beauty painted white on the outside and sky blue within.
She’s called Pandora , which wins Daisy’s heart immediately.
‘Best thing is to find a mooring at a lake near you,’ says the old boy who is selling her.
‘That way you’ll use her all the time.
’
Pandora is more than we can afford, but Sam barters good-naturedly and the old man knocks off fifty pounds, and on the journey home, just over an hour in summer-holiday traffic, we talk of nothing else.
Eventually Daisy falls asleep and Joe sticks his headphones on and Sam flicks through the radio channels, stopping when he finds a programme about beekeeping.
He cocks his head to one side, the way he does when he’s concentrating, and when I start to speak, he shushes me.
‘My God, you’re actually enjoying this, aren’t you?
’ I say, and he laughs and grabs my hand and doesn’t let go for the rest of the journey; even when he changes gear he takes me with him, up, across and down.
So I stare out of the window at the colours and curves of the Dorset landscape, still new enough to hold my interest, shrugging myself into our regular country life, and I think that it’s really not so bad after all.
By the time we get home it’s almost seven and the kids are tired and cross when I make them go upstairs to shower before supper.
‘I’ll put some pasta on,’ Sam says, disappearing into the kitchen, and when the doorbell rings I go to answer it with no thought or preconception in my head at all.
I find Julia Wright, a teacher friend of Sam’s, in the porch of our funny tumbledown cottage, and for a moment I’m so surprised that I don’t think to ask her in.
She came to our house in London once; she brought Smarties for the kids.
‘Smarties,’ Joe said in disgust at the time, ‘like we’re babies.
’
‘Julia,’ I say, ‘what a nice surprise,’ though my heart sinks as she follows me through the hallway, walls lined with our smug happy-days gallery of family photographs: Sam, tall and heart-stoppingly young in a morning suit, laughing down at his bride; Joe and Daisy in their matching car seats, marooned in the middle of a festival; then at school in cobalt-blue sweatshirts, Joe with a forced, serial-killer grin, Daisy with her hair scraped tight into unfamiliar bunches.
How depressing, our mellow Wednesday evening will be ruined by interaction with a stranger.
I picture the bottles of wine we’ll have to drink, the adult supper we’ll have to cook, the absence of television and papers and an early night.
‘We were just cooking pasta for the kids,’ I say, leading her into the bright white kitchen, and then I see Sam’s face as he turns around from the hob and catches sight of Julia, and my heart catapults and crash-lands on the floor.
What can I tell you about those first scorching moments while he semaphores his shame, while our world begins its slow and agonising landslide?
‘Sam?’ I say, uncertain for a second or two, but that is all.
I can read the horror in the blackness of his eyes and the miserable slope of his mouth.
No words are needed; his guilt is rushing from every pore.
In a heartbeat I’ve understood it all.
Julia says, ‘Hi, Sam,’ but neither of us reacts.
Sam is staring at me with his dark eyes, the children’s eyes, and he looks so, so sad and I find that I am shaking uncontrollably.
This is it, the end or the beginning, I’m not sure which, but I’d do anything to turn back the clock and freeze it on five minutes ago.
I whisper, ‘How could you?’ and Sam sort of howls, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ and Julia, who by now is beginning to understand the dark exchange of information that has taken place between husband and wife takes a step closer to Sam and, in a tone of familiarity that makes me want to roar like a caged wild animal, says, ‘I’ve tried calling you so many times but you never call back.
How could you treat me like that?
’
‘What do you want?’ I scream it, oblivious to the children upstairs, who can probably hear me through the thin cottage floorboards.
I am the wild animal now.
But Julia ignores me and speaks to Sam instead.
‘Can’t you understand why I’m here, Sam?
’ Her voice is unbearable, soft, knowing.
‘Can’t you understand why I couldn’t leave it, why I couldn’t stand it to be over?
’
But Sam is still watching me, a look of utmost sadness printed on his face, printed on my soul, the final moments of our before as the dial flips to after.