Page 32 of High Season

TWENTY-TWO

The car’s air conditioning starts to give up somewhere close to Avignon, the vents beginning to splutter in and out, blasting them all with intermittent puffs of cool air.

By the time they see signs for Marseille, it has given out entirely, and they sit, marinated in their own sweat, the windows fully rolled down.

“This is the last time we’re doing the tunnel over,” says Hannah’s husband, Eric, hitting his hand against the air vent for the eleventh time. “Next time, we’ll fly.”

Hannah doesn’t answer, because it would be the fiftieth time they’ve had this debate since becoming parents, Eric lamenting the horror of the eighteen-hour trip, Hannah pointing out the impossibility of wrestling all three children and the countless clothes and toys and pushchairs that they need for four weeks in France onto a flight.

“My dad will take a look at it when we arrive,” she says. “I’m sure it’s something he’ll be able to sort.”

Her words are supposed to be soothing, but Eric sighs and taps against the vent slightly more aggressively.

“That’s the other thing,” he says. “Your dad already thinks I’m such a shirt. He’ll love the fact I know nothing about cars. I won’t hear the end of it.”

“Oh, stop it,” says Hannah. “My dad loves you. You know he does.”

“ Mum .”

A small foot digs into the back of Hannah’s seat.

“Tell Mason it’s my turn with the iPad.”

“It’s not your turn with the iPad. You had it for ages.”

“ You’ve had it for ages. You’re not even using it.”

“You only use it to play stupid baby games.”

“You’re the stupid baby.”

“You’re a stupid shithead.”

“ Mason. ” Hannah’s voice makes everyone jump. “Apologize to your brother right now.”

Just then Isla, strapped into her booster seat, decides it’s the perfect time to start wailing.

“Apologize for what?”

“For calling your brother a shithead.”

“Mum!”

“Mum, you just said shithead.”

“No, I didn’t.” Hannah is twisting round to ply Isla with yet another strawberry lollipop. The sugar high is going to be unbearable to deal with, but she can’t stand the screaming. Not now, not at these temperatures. “I said an s-head. I didn’t actually say the word—”

“Look, boys, I can see the sea!” Eric roars, cutting Hannah off before she can finish.

Hannah turns back, grateful as Noah starts to chatter about how Uncle Nic is going to teach him how to dive and Isla slobbers happily over her lollipop. They’re a good team, she and Eric, even in thirty-degree heat. Even after spending seventeen hours in a small metal box together.

She’s glad that he’s here, glad that she has him to come back with.

Without him, she would never have come back at all.

For years after she left this place, Hannah did not return.

She couldn’t stand it. Her home had been so marred by tragedy, so overshadowed by the arrest of her best friend.

She had moved to England. Thrown herself into her studies, living in an unfamiliar city—not Oxford, in the end, but Manchester—drinking cheap pints in student bars and staying in the library until late at night.

She got a waitressing job in an upmarket pizzeria, and the Christmas shifts gave her a good enough excuse to avoid going home at the end of autumn term.

She met Eric at a silent disco at the student union midway through her first year and slept with him the same night, with an impulsiveness and clarity that took her by surprise.

They were an item right away, finding each other on nights out to go home together, and meeting each other’s flatmates, and missing seminars to sleep in late, and going on dates to chain restaurants that did midweek deals.

It was so unlike her relationship with Blake that sometimes she couldn’t quite believe it.

She would sometimes lie awake listening to Eric breathing, unable to believe how easy it had been.

She let herself, for the first time in over a year, feel happy.

Hopeful. But when Eric would ask when he’d meet her parents, Hannah always had an excuse.

It wasn’t until Mark and Marie decided to retire that Hannah could stand to come back.

Against all odds and everyone’s expectations, the dive shop had begun to flourish after Tamara Drayton’s death.

The media storm had brought attention to their strip of sea: a developer bought land just down the coast and built a mega-hotel; locals who owned smaller, cheaper houses on the other side of the hill seized the opportunity to rent out holiday lets to people who had seen the impossible blue of the sea on news reports.

Suddenly, after years of struggle, the dive shop was busy—just as Mark and Marie were ready to wind down.

Eventually, they had decided to pass the family business on to Nic.

A trusted friend would manage the day-to-day running until Nic was ready to take over, and Mark and Marie would receive a split of the future profits.

It would be enough for them to retire and live more comfortably than they had for years.

Hannah was twenty-three then, and had just found out she was pregnant. It was an accident; she was only partway through her accountancy exams, and she and Eric were living in a small flat up three flights of stairs, completely unsuitable for a baby.

Still, there had been no question that they’d keep it.

They had gone to France that summer for the first time, and Hannah’s mother had been delighted, pressing her hand against Hannah’s rounded stomach as her dad made jokes that weren’t really jokes about how he’d have liked to have met his daughter’s boyfriend at least once before he knocked her up.

Since then, they’d returned almost every year.

Each time, the memory of that terrible summer had faded just a little bit.

Motherhood was so consuming, so exhausting, and with Eric working long hours as a teacher at an inner-city comprehensive, holidays in the C?te d’Azur became something that they looked forward to.

Time as a family. Time to forget the stresses of home—the fact that they never quite seemed to have enough money, or that Hannah had lost touch with all her university friends when she’d been changing nappies and they had still been out partying, or the nagging sense that she should really go back and finish her accountancy qualifications, or at least get another job, but then childcare was so expensive, and could they really afford it, and what was the point of spending all day in an office away from her kids if they would only just about break even?

But when they arrived at the sea, all that faded away. This tiny town, which had always felt so claustrophobic, so stifling when Hannah was a child, started to feel like an escape. She began to feel the muscles in her shoulders release every time she drew within sight of the famously blue sea.

Her mother is waiting outside the house when they pull in.

“You made it!” she says as they clamber, sticky and sweat-soaked, out of the car.

She reaches out her arms for Noah, still young enough not to be embarrassed by open displays of affection.

Mason hangs back, shy all of a sudden, sullen, and Hannah feels a brief twinge of sadness at how quickly it all passes, that lack of self-consciousness and easy affection of childhood.

In just a few years, Noah will be a teenager, too, and Hannah will no longer be able to reach either of her sons in the way that she used to.

“Where’s my little girl?” says her mother. “Oh. There she is. Come to Grand-mère .”

She scoops Isla out of the car seat, showering her with kisses.

“Look at you. You all look exhausted. Come inside, quickly. Granddad’s in the house.”

They let Noah fly past them, Mason trailing behind. Eric gives his mother-in-law a brief squeeze before hauling two suitcases out of the boot and following his sons.

The second they’re alone, Marie kisses her daughter on both cheeks.

“You look tired,” she says.

“You would, too, after that car journey.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” says Marie, but she doesn’t elaborate any more.

“Let me just get some of the cases out,” Hannah says. “I’ll be in in a sec.”

Her mother doesn’t move.

“I wanted to tell you,” she begins, “before anyone else does.”

She sways Isla back and forth on her hip, a movement that seems instinctive. She would have rocked Hannah like that once, unthinkingly, as if she could soothe anything away.

“Josie Jackson is back,” she says. “Your father saw her yesterday, down near the beach.”

Hannah bends over a wheelie case, pretends to be struggling to release the handle. It gives her a second, just long enough, for the bolt of unease to pass.

“I know,” she says. “Nic texted me.”

“Word gets round fast here,” Marie says. “People won’t be happy. When they realize she’s back.”

Hannah straightens.

“It’s her decision,” she says. “If she wants to make a rod for her own back, so be it.”

“Do you think you’ll go and see her?” Marie asks. “Do you think that you might want to… I don’t know. Talk to her? You girls used to be such good friends.”

Hannah swings a backpack onto her shoulder and turns to look her mother straight in the eye.

“Why would I do that?” she says. “Being friends with Josie Jackson almost ruined my life.”