Page 39 of High Season

TWENTY-NINE

They always eat as a family here.

It isn’t something that Hannah is used to.

When she was a child, she would rarely sit down for dinner with both her mum and dad.

There was always something that needed doing at the shop, some excursion that one of her parents would be running, some equipment that needed setting up for the next day.

It wasn’t unusual for meals to be eaten standing up in the kitchen, or behind the shop counter.

Makeshift picnics carried down to the beach.

It was a habit that Hannah had continued into early adulthood.

She and Eric hadn’t been able to afford a dining table in their first tiny flat, and by the time they could, sitting down for a family meal fell so far down Hannah’s list of priorities that it scarcely warranted a look-in.

After school and nursery pickups, she’d wrestle trays of chicken nuggets into the oven, throw on a load of laundry while frozen peas boiled on the stovetop, help Mason with his homework while she did the dishes.

Eric would be home for bedtime, and by the time both kids were settled, the two of them rarely had the energy to sit up straight at the table.

They’d order takeout, or microwave a frozen meal, slump in front of a box set to eat, always talk about how one day, when the kids were old enough, they’d do things properly.

Hannah would cook something from scratch.

Eric would get out of work early enough to help.

They’d all sit at the dining table together, some happy, wholesome version of parenthood that always seemed to be just around the corner, but that they never quite caught up with.

Hannah had only once thought they were about to make the change from hassled, time-poor parents to the kind of people she saw on Instagram.

The kind of mums who wore floaty linen dresses without unidentifiable orange stains, who baked their own cake pops for party bags, and read the back of washing powder packets to make sure that their kids weren’t somehow absorbing lethal chemicals through their fabric softener.

Noah had been due to move up to juniors, and Mason was nine, starting to be independent, wanting to hang out with his friends instead of his mum and dad.

Hannah was beginning to feel like she’d almost got the hang of parenting.

She’d joined an online group for local parents and had made a few mum friends.

She’d set up a sleepover a few weeks before, and she and Eric had actually had a date night for the first time in their entire marriage.

She’d started to research the local adult education college, wondering if she could finally finish the accountancy qualifications she’d dropped out of all those years ago.

The pregnancy was a complete accident, even more unlucky than the first. While that had been the result of a casual approach to using condoms, she’d been religious about taking the pill since Noah was born.

But then they’d had a dodgy curry one night and Hannah had spent the entire weekend throwing up.

She thought it was just a myth that you could get pregnant if you missed a few pills, but then there was the inarguable blue line telling her otherwise.

“We said we were stopping at two,” she said, tearful, when she had told Eric. When she hoped that he would tell her that it was early, and maybe they should think about getting rid of it, that nobody would need know, because then she wouldn’t have to be the one to say it.

“We were,” said Eric. “But I guess now we’re stopping at three.”

Eric would never have thought to suggest an abortion.

He wasn’t the one giving up the hope for a career, the possibility of a separate identity other than mum and wife.

He still had a job, and mates that he went to the pub with on a Thursday night, and people who spoke to him like an actual human being every single day.

But Hannah knew he’d never make her go through with a pregnancy for a child she didn’t want.

“You never know,” Eric continued. “We always used to say that we wanted a boy and a girl, ideally. Maybe we’ll get two boys and a girl.”

Hannah had thrown away the leaflets about returning to education as a mother the next day.

Now, as her mother sets the table, Isla solemnly following her holding a stack of woven place mats as if the success of the entire meal depends on it, Hannah can hardly believe that she’d considered getting rid of the cluster of cells that would eventually become her daughter.

She still feels a stab of guilt when she thinks about the abortion that never was, knows that she’ll never tell anyone, not even Eric, that she ever considered it.

She also knows that in some parallel universe she made a different choice.

She’s still a mother of two. She has a job, and friends, and hobbies, and interesting things to say at dinner parties.

Maybe she learned another language, like she’s always threatening to do when she’s had a couple of glasses of wine and feels a bit useless.

In that parallel universe, she would be completely certain she’d made the right decision. But just now, with her own mother thanking Isla profusely in French each time she offers up a place mat, the thought is too terrible to bear.

With her parents’ retirement, dinners have taken on a different tone.

The house that they rent out of town is more spacious than the two-bedroom flat Hannah grew up in, big enough to fit a dining table that Mark made out of sanded-down driftwood, with patio doors that open out onto a garden where Hannah’s mother grows her own herbs.

They’re happier now, more relaxed than they used to be.

Sometimes, Hannah wonders if they regret all the time they spent trying desperately to make the dive shop work.

All the years of stress, of scrimping to get by.

If they could have found other jobs, if they could have been living like this all along, would they have done so?

There are so many pathways in life, so many unknown versions of ourselves that we might be, that she wonders how we don’t all go insane with the possibilities. How can anyone know if they’ve made the right choices? If another, better life isn’t only one or two undone mistakes away?

“There’s a bottle of Piquepoul open in the kitchen,” Marie says, spotting Hannah hovering. “Go and get a glass, if you want one.”

“I’m good, thanks,” Hannah says.

She’s never been a big drinker. A few wild nights when she was a teenager.

Student socials at university. But then, she was pregnant with Mason so young that she missed out on actually learning to like wine in her twenties.

She has the odd glass every now and again, but it doesn’t take much to make her tipsy.

She doesn’t like the feeling it gives her, the lack of control.

“Nic’s coming by for dinner tonight, by the way,” Marie says, frowning at a smudge on a bright blue tumbler. “He should be here soon.”

She lifts her head and spots Hannah’s face.

“What?” she says. “You love Nic.”

“He’s been seeing Josie Jackson,” Hannah says. “Did you hear?”

Marie sets the wineglass down.

“Well,” she says. “I’m sure he’s not planning on bringing her, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“’Nother one, Mémé?” pipes up Isla.

“Don’t you think it seems weird?” Hannah says, as her mother accepts the place mat offering.

“I trust Nic’s judgment,” Marie says, as if that ends the matter.

“You’ve changed your tune.”

“He’s my only nephew, Hannah. I’m not going to stop inviting him over because of some fling. Besides, you know what Nic’s like. He’ll be on to the next one before you know it.”

“’Nother one?”

“Maybe I will have that glass of wine.”

“Top mine up while you’re in there, would you?”

It is one of those perfect summer evenings. Warm. A slight breeze. Everyone together. The kind of night that always makes Hannah wonder aloud to Eric if they should consider moving out here, an idea that melts away as soon as the wine buzz wears off.

But tonight, with the news of Josie Jackson being back, the heat and the alcohol only remind Hannah of that summer. Blake. Tamara, a blaze of fury and bad ideas, tearing through what none of them knew would be the last few weeks of her life.

And Josie. Always Josie, always intertwined with Hannah’s memories.

It seemed, sometimes, like their teenage years merged together in places, until Hannah couldn’t make out which memories were hers and which were Josie’s.

Who got a detention for running a black-market bubblegum-selling operation on the playground, who had their first kiss at a year-eight disco with a boy with cystic acne, who won the year-seven sports day, and who cracked their head open falling over in the egg and spoon race.

It was always Josie and Hannah, bearing witness to each other’s lives, telling each other’s stories until they tangled into one.

That is, until Evelyn Drayton’s birthday party. The day that their paths were spliced into two, sent spiraling into wildly different directions.

Hannah goes outside, to the small patch of garden that Mark and Marie dreamed of their entire working lives.

There are borders crammed with tomato plants, pots of basil, an explosion of strawberries.

A wind chime Marie made at a ceramics class that she’s taken up on a Tuesday afternoon.

A stone wall that Noah kicks a football up against over and over again.

Mosquito candles, the smell of citronella almost overpowering the garden’s natural herbal scent, because Marie has become obsessed with the possibility of her grandchildren getting bitten, even though Hannah spent most of her childhood wandering about with tender scarlet swellings patterning her arms and legs.