The Beach House Read online

  The phone is ringing when she walks in. She dumps the hydrangeas in the sink, and grabs the phone, running the water as she picks up.

  ‘Hi, Mom.’ It’s Michael, ringing, as he so often does, on his way to work.

  ‘Hi, my love. How are you?’

  ‘Tired. It’s hot and muggy and revolting in the city. I’m deeply jealous of you on the island – is it beautiful?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Nan smiles. ‘But it will be. Why don’t you come out? I miss you. It’s too quiet here with just me rattling around.’

  ‘What about Sarah? Do you still have Sarah?’

  ‘She still comes once or twice a week to help me out,’ Nan says, ‘and I love having her around, but I miss my family, miss this house ringing with the sounds of people having fun. Remember when you used to come up here with all your friends for the summer? Remember how much fun it was? Why don’t you come up with some people? Wouldn’t they all kill for a vacation on Nantucket?’

  Michael laughs. His mother never changes. ‘They would undoubtedly kill for a vacation on Nantucket, if only they could take the time off work. And most of them are married now, with kids. It’s different. They can’t just sweep their families up and bring them out.’

  ‘But why ever not?’ Nan is genuinely perplexed. ‘I adore children, this is the perfect place for children.’

  ‘I know that, but it’s just… hard. People are busy, everyone’s running all the time. But I would love to come. I’d love to see you. I can’t make it up at the moment, the bosses are away for another week or so and I need to be here, but maybe I can come at the end of the summer.’

  Nan turns off the tap and reaches for a cigarette.

  ‘Oh Mom. You’re not still smoking.’

  Nan ignores him. ‘How are things going with the girl… what’s her name? Aisling?’

  Michael smiles. ‘Interesting. I like her. Still very early days but so far so good. She’s fiery. Independent. You’d like her.’

  ‘I’d love to meet her.’ Nan is careful not to ask too much. ‘Bring her.’

  ‘Maybe I will. What are you up to today?’

  ‘Making lunch. Andrew Moseley is coming.’

  ‘Your financial advisor?’

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘Is everything okay?’

  Why wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘It seems unusual for him to travel up to see you.’

  Nan shrugs. ‘I think, after four years, it’s probably just due. Anyway, lovely to have some company. I’m making delicious salads straight from the garden, and Sarah has promised to drop off a lobster salad she made yesterday.’

  ‘Sounds yummy.’ Michael instantly pictures the table set on the deck, his mother’s ballet slippers kicked off as she curls her legs under her after lunch, cradling a large tumbler of white wine in one hand, a ubiquitous cigarette in the other. ‘Don’t drink too much.’

  Michael says goodbye with a sad smile, clicking his phone shut as he reaches his bike, which is chained to a lamp post outside his apartment on 94th and Columbus. As he does so he is unaware of the admiring glance he’s given from a tall blonde walking her dog.

  Michael has always been unaware of his appeal, taken for granted his large green eyes, inherited from his mother, his easy smile, his all-American clean-cut looks.

  At forty-two he looks much like the college football player he used to be, tanned and rangy, and utterly comfortable in his skin.

  He undoes the lock and secures his helmet, slipping the phone into his backpack and weaving off down Columbus, making a mental note to phone Sarah, just to make sure that Mom is okay, to make sure that someone is looking out for her, that she isn’t quite as alone as she sounds.

  Chapter Two

  ‘Tell me about how you met.’ Dr Posner leans back in his chair and looks over at them, sitting at opposite ends of the sofa, the elegant brunette tucked awkwardly into the corner, twisting a strand of her shoulder-length bob nervously as she darts glances towards her husband, who sits still, staring at the floor.

  The husband is slim, dark-haired, with coal-black eyes that occasionally rise to meet Dr Posner’s, eyes filled with sadness and pain.

  They are a handsome couple. She early to mid-thirties, he early forties, Dr Posner guesses. She wears printed capris, ballet slippers, a crocodile purse at her feet and a cashmere wrap bundled on her lap in case the air conditioning gets too strong. The husband is in jeans and a polo shirt; he is clean-cut, darkly good-looking with a light spring tan and a body that shows he goes to the gym at least four times a week.

  They look as though neither of them has ever had a problem in their lives. Young, fit, beautiful, what could possibly be wrong? Although, of course, Dr Posner knows better.

  Why else would they be here?

  ‘Tell me why you fell in love,’ Dr Posner says, watching how the man shifts nervously. ‘Tell me what brought you together.’

  Bee looks over at Daniel, and as he meets her eye they both smile slightly, and Bee begins to talk.

  ‘I was doing a house share in the Hamptons,’ Bee says, her eyes misting a little at the memory. ‘It was this house that had looked wonderful in the pictures, but once we got there it had basically been trashed by the people before us –’

  ‘It was a wonderful pool, though,’ Daniel interjects, and Bee nods with a smile.

  ‘It was.’

  ‘So, you were both in the house together?’ Dr Posner asks.

  ‘No.’ Bee shakes her head. ‘Daniel was staying a couple of houses away, but it wasn’t a house share, he was with family friends.’

  ‘I was horrified at the house shares.’ Daniel grins properly, for the first time since walking in. ‘All these people drinking and partying, everyone single, all looking around frantically to see if someone better had just walked through the door.’

  ‘And you weren’t?’ Dr Posner looks at Daniel.

  ‘No. That scene has never been my thing. My parents had these friends who had a house in Amagansett and they were away for the summer and said we could use it.’

  ‘They knew they could trust Daniel.’ Bee laughs. ‘Anyone else would have trashed it in a day, but Daniel spent all day walking around with a vacuum in one hand and a broom in the other, scouring the floors for stray grains of sand.’

  Daniel shrugs as he laughs, as if to say, she knows me so well.

  ‘You’re fastidious?’ Dr Posner asks.

  ‘He’s a clean freak,’ Bee says. ‘He’s the only man I know who makes the bed every morning and does all the laundry.’

  Dr Posner smiles. ‘He sounds like the kind of man most women dream about.’

  Neither of them says anything, and there is a pause.

  ‘Do you mind him being a clean freak?’ Dr Posner asks eventually.

  Bee laughs, but it’s forced. ‘Are you kidding? As you said, he’s amazing. All my friends are jealous because he does all the washing-up, everything.’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ Daniel shrugs. ‘I get anxious if I’m surrounded by mess or dirt.’

  ‘Let’s go back to the beach house,’ Dr Posner guides them. ‘Tell me how the two of you actually met.’

  ‘He was playing volleyball on the beach with some of the guys from the house. They were all pretty awful. You would think that out of ten guys in a house share at least one of them would have been nice, but even the ones who looked cute were just assholes. My friend Deborah and I decided to have a glass of wine at the beach, and then we noticed Daniel and his friend because, obviously, they were strangers, but also they were cute.’

  As she continues talking, both of them begin to relax, their bodies sinking into the sofa, their voices growing more animated as they smile, interrupt one another, remember what life was like when it was simple, when there was nothing to worry about. When they weren’t sitting at opposite ends of a leather sofa in a psychiatrist’s office because neither of them is sure their marriage is going to make it.

  ‘Daniel, did you notice Bee?’

/>   ‘It was difficult not to.’ Daniel grins. ‘She was wearing a hot-pink bikini, and she kept smiling at me every time I looked at her.’

  ‘So you were attracted to her?’

  ‘I… yes. She was gorgeous. Of course.’

  Had Daniel been attracted to Bee? Even now he doesn’t know the answer to this. She was gorgeous, it was true. He remembers all the other men trying desperately to get Bee to notice them, but Bee didn’t seem to have eyes for anyone other than Daniel.

  He hadn’t understood it. He wasn’t looking for romance, had recently ended a four-year relationship with Nadine, whom he had loved, had been perfectly happy with, but she was the same age as him, thirty, and was desperate to marry him – or, at least, desperate to marry someone.

  He loved her, but he hadn’t wanted to marry her, hadn’t wanted to make that sort of commitment, and eventually, after months of arguing, Nadine had issued the ultimatum that he had expected all along, and they had split up.

  He knew Nadine hated him for it. She never believed he wouldn’t come back. She thought that he would realize what he had only when it was gone, and would come crawling back on his knees, diamond ring in hand. But he hadn’t. He couldn’t. He felt safe in a relationship, but marriage was terrifying to him. He couldn’t do it.

  ‘It’s because she’s the wrong one,’ his friends would say. When it’s right, it’s right.’ But he had a nagging suspicion that, for him, that wasn’t the case. That Nadine was possibly as right as it got, but that there was something wrong with him.

  The holiday in Amagansett was supposed to have been a welcome break. He and Steve went there with cases of books, a leather-bound backgammon set and plans to play tennis every day.

  He wasn’t thinking about Nadine, or about anyone else. He was hoping to immerse himself in relaxation, and stay as far away from the burgeoning Hampton scene as he could.

  But Bee had drawn him out, or perhaps she had drawn him in. Women like Bee didn’t look at men like Daniel. Not that Daniel was unattractive, but he was… understated. He was sensitive, quiet. He liked parties that were small and intimate, where you could connect with people, hear one another’s thoughts, not parties with roaring music, meat markets where you couldn’t hear one another think.

  He and Bee should have been chalk and cheese, Bee loving loud parties, loud music, surrounding herself with friends; but she also loved conversation, was thoughtful and curious, with an energy and vivacity that he had never encountered, that made him feel, for perhaps the first time, truly alive.

  Bee made everything fun. She was extrovert, glamorous, always laughing. Daniel suddenly understood how opposites could attract, and if someone like Bee could want someone like him, how could he refuse? What must it say about him that someone as great as Bee, someone that every man wanted, only wanted him? He must be better than he thought. And it was true: when he was with Bee, he felt like a king.

  So Daniel was seduced into a relationship, and once he was there it felt safe – safer, certainly, than being single. Another four years went by during which time they fell into a predictable routine, living together at Bee’s Upper East Side apartment, meeting friends for brunches and lunches and dinners, spending weekends in Central Park, or back in the Hamptons, until one night when Bee had been bitchy all evening.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked. ‘Is your period coming?’

  ‘God, that’s what it is!’ she said, jumping off the bed and going out into the hallway then into the tiny bathroom. ‘I knew I’d been feeling off.’

  But her period hadn’t come, and when she checked her diary it seemed she had made a mistake with the timing. Either that, or her period was two weeks late. A couple of months previously she had had a pregnancy scare, and she had bought a double pack of First Response. There was one left. Bee reached to the back of the medicine cabinet and pulled it out, calmly and quietly, knowing instantly, before the deep-pink line appeared, that she was pregnant.

  She looked at herself in the mirror and a smile spread across her face. Bee hadn’t even known she had wanted a baby just yet, and certainly hadn’t consciously premeditated this as a means to trap Daniel. She had heard many times about the ultimatum Nadine had issued and wasn’t about to make the same mistake. But although only in her mid-twenties, all around her Bee’s friends were starting to have babies, her social life had become babyville, and she’d known that eventually she would want what her friends had – a big wedding and a honeymoon in the Bahamas, a baby and a house in Connecticut.

  But at that moment Bee realized that she wanted the rest of her life now, and if it didn’t happen in the order in which she had always dreamed, well so be it.

  She came out of the bathroom clutching the stick behind her back, a secret smile on her face. ‘What’s the matter?’ Daniel said, but he already knew, the fear was already in his eyes, disconcerting Bee only a little as she held the stick up for him to see.

  Daniel started hyperventilating.

  ‘It will be fine,’ Bee said later, nestling in the crook of his arm in bed and ignoring his earlier reaction. Of course he was bound to react badly, she thought. They’d never discussed children before, or certainly not in anything other than the abstract, and it was bound to take a little time to get used to.

  But get used to it he would. Bee was, is, a woman accustomed to getting what she wants. Daniel has always said she is strong enough for both of them, and it is true. When Bee sets her sights on something it is rare for her not to get it, and she had set her sights on Daniel from the very first moment she laid eyes on him.

  Stella was the flower girl at their wedding. At eighteen months old, she clutched at her mother’s Vera Wang skirts and her father looked down adoringly as the minister pronounced them man and wife, acknowledging, with humour and a pointed look at Bee’s pregnant stomach, that perhaps they had misunderstood the natural order of things.

  Daniel hadn’t expected to fall in love the way he had the moment Stella was placed in his arms in the delivery room. He looked down at her red, scrunched-up face, and he felt his heart almost literally explode.

  And then along came Lizzie, and despite his fears that he could never love another child as much as he loved Stella, his heart expanded to fit them both.

  Daniel still wakes up every morning excited about seeing his girls. He has been known to wake them up early, leaving Bee fast asleep, just so he can have some alone time with them before he goes to work, sitting at the kitchen table as they eat their cereal and asking them very seriously about their thoughts on school, friends, life.

  It is his love for the girls that keeps him going, for together they are the light of his life, and if that life doesn’t feel quite right, if he doesn’t feel the way he thinks he ought to feel for Bee, it is comfortable, and easy, and what, after all, is the alternative?

  When Lizzie was one, and Stella three, they moved out of the city into a pretty 1940s cottage in Weston, Connecticut. For a while Daniel commuted into the city, but his work was going well and after a year or so he started developing property in Norwalk, and soon they were able to move into a big new house they built themselves in Westport. They should have been happy. Bee certainly seemed to be happy; she had thrown herself into the children’s school, the PTA and various organizations, and forever seemed to be seeing this one for lunch and that one for a meeting, arranging play dates and dinners, and organizing trunk shows in the spectacular great room in their new house.

  While Bee was keeping busy, Daniel found that he couldn’t stop running, and for a long time he thought that no one was noticing, thought that no one realized he wasn’t happy.

  Daniel honestly thought that if he filled up his life with distractions, he wouldn’t have to face the truth. And the truth was that he adored his girls more than anything in the world, and he loved Bee.

  But this marriage wasn’t right.

  Bee had been his best friend, but there was little left. He felt, more often than not, that they were t
wo ships passing in the night, occasionally making contact, not because of passion but because of duty, because he didn’t know how to say no, because there were only so many nights you could come home late and walk up the stairs with a heavy heart, praying she would be asleep.

  He hadn’t wanted to get married, but he had been persuaded to, and he had hoped that even though it wasn’t what he wanted, perhaps if he ran fast enough, long enough, he would find that he had reached the end of the road and it had all turned out okay.

  Couples’ counselling. It was Bee’s idea, and not the first time. They have, twice before, gone into therapy, both individually and jointly, and although Daniel has never been able to fully open up, and even though both times were short-lived, somehow they managed to recover something of their equilibrium and carry on with their marriage as if they were happy.

  Bee started seeing a therapist soon after they met. She had baggage, she said, and it was so liberating, so useful to be able to have an hour to herself every week, to talk about anything she wanted, to be able to think clearly, speak clearly, process her thoughts and figure out the answers.

  He was never sure what the questions were, but Bee seemed happier, and although Daniel had always thought therapy was for the seriously self-indulgent, he indulged her.

  At first, Bee had merely talked about how wonderful she found it, but soon she started gently suggesting that perhaps Daniel should go and see someone, that even though he claimed not to believe in it, therapy would help him open up, help him realize his full potential.

  ‘I don’t want to realize my full potential,’ Daniel had groaned, all those years ago. ‘I’m perfectly happy as I am.’

  Bee thought this wasn’t possible. He was, she would say when they were arguing, the most closed person she had ever met. He never connected emotionally, she would say, it was like talking to someone through a steel wall. ‘I can help you,’ she insisted, and then she began to plead with Daniel to let her help him. And after a while he grew tired of saying no, so he agreed to see someone.