Page 9

NINE

Ash takes her morning toast into the living room and sits with crossed legs on the oversized sofa in the picture window that overlooks the sea.

Sometimes you can see France from here, sometimes you can even make out the shapes of individual houses.

But today there’s a pall hanging over the channel and no sign of anything on the horizon.

There’s a chill in the air and she covers her bare legs with the fluffy blanket that sits on the back of the sofa, then picks up her phone and begins to scroll.

She stops scrolling at the sound of breathing in her periphery, the whine of a floorboard underfoot, and turns to see Nick walking toward her.

He’s in boxers and a T-shirt. The sight is quite alarming.

Boxers are basically underwear. They’re pale blue with a cream windowpane check.

His legs are slim and hard, deep dips carved into the point where his quads meet the flesh on the back of his thighs.

His reading glasses are on his head, nestled into his thick white hair.

“Good morning, Ash,” he says. “How are you?”

“Oh,” she replies. “Good. You?”

“Yes,” he says, rubbing at the back of his neck with his fingertips. “A little rough around the edges but otherwise OK. I was trying and failing to work your coffee machine.”

Dad’s coffee machine, she wants to say but doesn’t.

“Oh,” she says, peeling the fluffy blanket off her lap. “Sure. Let me…”

“No,” he says. “Please. Don’t. You look so cozy there. Just give me a quick pointer and I can work out the rest.”

She explains the vagaries of the machine to him and when he goes, she toys with the idea of tiptoeing out of the other door and escaping to her bedroom. But she’s twenty-six. She’s not a moody teen. She straightens herself and waits.

When he returns a moment later, he’s holding one of Dad’s coffee cups.

He sits himself down next to her and she clears her throat, holding back the stupid fury and the stupid rage.

“This view,” he says dreamily. “I mean, I have never seen anything like it. It’s almost as if you’re in the South of France. Hard to believe it’s Kent.”

“It’s the cedar tree,” she says, pointing into the middle distance. “That’s what gives it that Mediterranean feel.”

“Ah, yes,” he says, nodding. “I can see that. It’s beautiful. And you’ve lived here all your life?”

“Yes. Since I was a few weeks old. Apart from the bit when I was at uni in Bristol.”

“Well, lucky you. What an incredible place to grow up.”

She shrugs. “I guess.”

It has been a wonderful place to grow up.

Close enough to London to feel connected to a metropolis, but still with the old-fashioned charms of a Victorian seaside resort, the higgledy streets, the independent coffee shops and pizzerias, the pebble beach with sweeping views across the channel and around the coast toward the sinister, lumpen outline of Dungeness.

It is wonderful. But she should not be here still, and her childhood idyll has lost its luster.

“Your parents,” Nick continues, “very astute. Buying here before it was fashionable. I mean—this house.” He gestures around himself at the high ceilings, the large, airy room, the rolling grounds. “What a place!”

She shrugs again. “I know,” she says. “It’s beautiful.” She pauses, looks at him briefly. “What about you? Where do you live?”

“Oh, I’m in a temporary situation at the moment, renting a flat in Tooting.”

“Tooting?” She is surprised, had imagined owning a wine bar in Mayfair equated with owning property somewhere in a smart Zone 1 postcode.

“Yes.” He smiles at her playfully. “Something wrong with Tooting?”

“No. I just thought…”

He continues to smile at her. “Just thought what?”

“Nothing,” she says, hearing the sound of her mother’s steps down the staircase.

She turns fully so that she can see her walk in and when she does, she feels a sense of relief.

Her mother has her hair tied up in a bun and is wearing a gray oversized cardigan over her pajamas, thick socks on her feet, her big square reading glasses on top of her head.

Nina yawns and smiles and says, “Morning, angel,” to Ash, then leans down and kisses the top of her head. Ash grabs her mother’s hands and holds them for just a moment, long enough to anchor her, to center her, in the eye of this weirdness.

She hates how right her mum and Nick look together.

It had long been a running joke with her dad’s friends that Paddy was punching when it came to Nina. But Nick isn’t punching. She and Nick make a perfect match.

“Right,” says Ash, pulling back her blanket, getting to her feet, picking up the empty plate she’d eaten her toast from, “I’m going to get ready.”

Her mother strokes her hair again and then slides onto the sofa next to Nick, her legs pressed up against his, the fingers that had just been in Ash’s hair now brushing gently against the hairs on his arms.

Ash turns and leaves the room.