the sea wall and ate every other meal al fresco. As the sun set and the temperature dipped, the children were tucked into miniature beds, exhausted by their seaside adventures.
By day, they made the beach their playground, lying on the sand, digging a hole, and making repeated trips to the shoreline to retrieve unwieldy buckets of freezing sea water that would be soaked up as soon as they were tipped in. Despite the futility, trying to fill their hole with water kept the kids occupied for hours. Their tiny feet pounded the mud-like sand back and forth, leaving smudged footprints that would be sucked back into the beach, disappearing in minutes.
It was only anyone close enough to hear who would have caught the unpalatable topic of conversation. As the family sat on the tartan blanket and shared sandwiches, Mark decided to open a debate with his baby children.
‘So, Dominic, who do you love the most, Mummy or Daddy?’
The three others had looked on as his little face had crumpled in contemplation.
‘Both the same!’ the little boy declared as Lydia clapped her hands at this happy resolution.
If only it had ended there. Mark, however, was far from satisfied.
‘No, Dominic.’ His voice was firmer this time. ‘You can’t say both the same; you have to love one of us more than the other, you have to love one of us the best. Is it Daddy? Do you love Daddy the best?’
Dominic had wrinkled his nose and looked from his mum to his dad and back again. His mummy was looking down at the ground and didn’t seem to be joining in. This made his decision easier; he could give the answer that he knew his dad wanted to hear.
‘You, Daddy. I love you the best.’
Mark was elated, jubilant; Dominic’s reward was a tight hug in his daddy’s arms.
‘That’s right, my clever boy! You love your daddy the best because your daddy loves you the best!’
This alerted Lydia, who even at a young age did not miss a nuance.
‘Who loves Lydia the best?’ she enquired.
Mark gathered her to him and kissed her face. ‘I do, Lyds. Your daddy, I love you the best!’
‘And who loves Mummy the best?’ Lydia was not finished trying to analyse and understand the situation in which she found herself.
Mark looked her directly in the eyes. ‘No one can love Mummy the best, Lydia, because she is a miserable, skinny cow. She wants to spoil all of our fun and make us all feel miserable with her miserable face and her miserable voice and we don’t want that, do we, Lyds? We want to have fun! Do we want to be miserable?’
‘No!’ Of that and nothing else Lydia was sure; we didn’t want that at all.
Kathryn had cried as she propped her head on her raised knees, keeping her face forward and looking out to sea so as not to alarm her children.
That night as the children slept soundly in their nautical-themed nursery, with anchors painted on the floor and billowing sails on the walls, Kathryn prepared to climb the stairs and meet her fate. She hesitated before drawing together all her courage. Reaching out, she touched her husband’s arm.
‘Mark?’
‘Yes, Kathryn?’
‘I want to ask you something.’
‘Ask away!’
He said this with such joviality that for a second she wondered if she had imagined the whole horrid exchange. Such was his ebullience that if anyone overheard, it would be her that sounded unreasonable, with her formal tone and nervous, hesitant air. A miserable cow.
‘I would like to ask you, Mark…’
‘Yes?’ He gave a slight nod, encouraging her to speak out.
‘I… I would like to ask you not to turn the children against me.’
He didn’t respond and it was this silence that she mistook for acquiescence. It gave her a small jolt of courage, enough to continue.
‘I put up with a lot, Mark, and I don’t care what you do to me, but I beg you, please, please do not be mean to me in front of the children because they are everything to me and it’s not fair on them or me. They are all that I have and it’s the one thing I can’t cope with, I really can’t.’
He moved quickly and without warning, striking her hard across the mouth with the back of his hand. It was the first time that he had properly struck her. Her mouth filled with the iron-tasting liquid that she recognised as her own blood and her lip felt enormous against her teeth as