Page 31 of Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon

CHAPTER THIRTY

Trudy doesn’t often leave the salon for lunch.

It’s her morning, noon and sometimes her night, that place, because that’s what happens when you run a small business – so why would she leave the premises to go …

where? To the hamburger place on the corner?

The ice-cream shop in the other direction?

The sandwich shop near the beach? She brings her lunch from home and that means the back room at the salon is usually just fine.

Today, however, she feels the need for the sun on her face. It’s winter sun, so it’s not going to hit her like a blast furnace, and she’ll be able to sit by the water while she eats her curried egg sandwich and tries not to think.

It occurred to her recently that thinking a lot is a problem.

If she starts thinking, her thoughts are bound to turn to Laurie, then she’s off down not so much memory lane as maudlin motorway, remembering all the reasons why she misses him so much.

And that motorway can be about ten lanes wide and seem to lead inexorably to a destination she can’t name and suspects she doesn’t want to reach, because every time she’s on it she experiences dread.

It’s the dread she wants to avoid, because she’s feeling it settle in her bones, in her blood, in her tissues.

Whether it’s the dread of being without Laurie forever or of someday forgetting what it was like to be married to him, she doesn’t know. But regardless, she doesn’t like it.

Sunshine is life’s great disinfectant, as her mother used to say, so it seems like her solution today. Along with sea air. Who doesn’t like a good sniff of the salt?

So, sandwich in handbag, she sets off from the salon toward the beach, although she doesn’t get far before she is stopped in her tracks by the sight of Sol heading in her direction, slowly; he’s told her he has a bad hip, ‘although I can’t remember which one’, which she didn’t find as funny as he no doubt intended it to be.

‘Trudy!’ he says, his face alight.

‘Oh, hello, Sol,’ she says in that tone she gets – in fact, most women she knows get – when they can’t avoid a social entanglement yet don’t want to open any kind of door for further interaction.

It’s something learnt at mothers’ knees and has probably been going on for millennia, which is why it’s so instinctual.

Or it is for her. And she doesn’t want to stop and chat – she wants sun, sea air and sandwich.

‘How are you?’ he says eagerly, as if she’s going to have a fascinating answer for him.

‘I’m heading out for lunch.’

‘Oh?’

She holds up her handbag. ‘A sandwich by the seaside.’

He nods. ‘What a good idea.’

Then he looks at her. Really looks at her, in a way that makes her feel exposed. As if he sees her grief, her loneliness, her sleepless nights, her occasional sense of hopelessness, her dismay that her son hardly contacts her …

She feels empty so much of the time, and that’s what she thinks Sol is seeing now.

It’s unsettling, because she was so sure she’d done a great job of hiding that emptiness from everyone.

Even as she has wished someone would notice it.

However, here he is, possibly noticing it, and she is afraid it means she hasn’t been so good at hiding it, really, which makes her wonder if she’s been wandering around with some kind of hole in her heart that everyone can see.

The sort of hole that can’t be filled, that might make her feel ashamed that she isn’t stronger, more capable, more resilient.

All the things an adult is meant to be. All the things she has not felt, not one day, since Laurie died.

He was those things for her, and she didn’t really want to have to be them for herself.

There’s only so much a woman can handle in her life, and when she has to do it all it wears her out.

She is wearing out. Worn out, even. It’s not what she wants, although she doesn’t know how to end it without it being the end.

And she’s not ready for that. For all the grief she feels, for how hard the past two years have been, she still wants to be here, on this planet, trying to find a way forward. That’s something.

‘I don’t mean this to sound untoward,’ Sol says.

Trudy thinks that she hasn’t heard untoward for quite a while.

‘I would very much like to take you out for lunch,’ he continues. ‘Or dinner, perhaps. Yes, dinner might be preferable, since you have your business.’

He keeps looking at her. Looking -looking, and she feels she can’t glance away or it would be rude somehow. Yet she has to ask him something, because she needs to know.

‘Why?’ she says.

He looks amused. ‘Why?’

‘Mm.’

‘I suppose I could be flippant and reply, “Why not?”’ His eyes are twinkling and she likes the way they do that. It makes him seem lively.

‘You could,’ she says, and something lets go in her. She’s having an adult conversation – a proper exchange between two people who know they’re at the same stage of life and don’t have time to waste – for the first time since … well, since Laurie died.

‘But the truth is, Trudy … I presume you want the truth?’

What a question. A big, all-encompassing question. Or not. There are little truths and big truths. A little truth is giving direct information in response to a question. A big truth is saying ‘I love you’ – except that’s also a little truth, because it should be a daily affirmation.

So maybe they’re all big truths. Maybe every time we’re honest with ourselves and others it goes to the bigger whole of how to be in this world, how to make life meaningful, how to roll out the carpet for the rest of our lives. Or for that day alone.

Yes, she’s been doing too much thinking since Laurie died but it can sometimes lead her to good places, and one of those places is the recognition that truth is good. So that’s what she’ll ask for.

‘I do,’ she says.

‘I was a little jealous of Laurie,’ he says, and his eyes look even more alight. ‘You’re an impressive woman.’

She’s taken aback by that. Her, a little hairdresser from Terrigal, impressive?

That’s a word she’d reserve for prime ministers and monarchs.

Maybe Maggie Tabberer. Not herself. Impressive people are people who have achieved great things.

Her life has been small – by choice and circumstance – and she has never minded it, and she certainly wouldn’t make a claim to being impressive.

So she doesn’t know what to say back to him except, ‘Oh?’

‘Indeed. He was a lucky man, I always thought. And, of course, I would never have said anything, but …’

He looks at her again, in that same piercing way, and she understands: he’s waited for two years to approach her. That’s respectful and she likes it, even if she’s not sure whether or not to accept his invitation.

It’s merely an invitation, though, and she shouldn’t overthink it.

Definitely shouldn’t do that. Dinner does not oblige her to anything other than a conversation, and it will also be a change, and she knows she needs to make some sorts of changes.

Who knows? Maybe her life will be less small as a result.

After Laurie died one of her clients brought her a book called You Can Heal Your Life by a woman called Louise L Hay.

Trudy thought it was a tad presumptuous of the client – what did the woman think she should heal, exactly?

– but it turned out to be a comfort at times.

Trudy has struggled to completely understand how her thoughts affect her physical wellbeing, the way Louise says they do, except she can see the evidence of it in her life: she thinks herself into holes, and over the past few months she has noticed that she feels heavy and sluggish, which she has put down to being older, except it coincided with the wake of Laurie’s death.

So she’s prepared to concede that there’s something in it and that it would be good to change things.

Change will only come, though, if she commits to it and the discomfort that can come with it.

Like having dinner with a man who isn’t her husband.

‘That’s kind of you,’ she says to Sol. ‘And I would like to accept your invitation.’

‘Wonderful!’ he says. ‘May I call you at the salon to arrange a day and time?’

How polite he is, she thinks. And how nice it is.

‘I’ll give you my home number,’ she says, and is unsurprised when he whips out a notebook and pencil from his back pants pocket.

After he’s written it down he puts the items back in his pocket and nods again. ‘I shall call you this evening,’ he says. ‘And now I’ll let you go on your way.’

‘Thank you.’ She smiles, and it feels as if it’s the first time she has today.

‘You’re welcome.’ Then he makes a gesture as if he’s doffing an invisible cap, and she finds it charming.

As Sol stands back to let her continue walking down the path, she keeps smiling, and as she crosses the street to head for the beach she feels lighter than she has for a long time.

So perhaps that Louise Hay is onto something about thoughts and wellbeing.

That’s what Trudy will contemplate as she eats her curried eggs.