say. “I might not be the best conversationalist … but I’m not a bad listener.”
Nettie looks at me, and for a long moment, I think she might cry. Nettie is not a crier, she hasn’t been since she was a very little girl. But a few seconds pass and Nettie regains her composure, sits straight. “Thanks, Mum,” she says. “But everything is fine.”
16
Lucy
The past …
“Are you feeling okay?” Ollie asks.
I nod gloomily.
“Not carsick?”
“No.”
I do get carsick, but that’s not what’s bothering me. We’re in the car, on our way to the Goodwins’ beach house. I understand, of course, that it is a privilege to be miserable about this. There are people with worse problems. Certainly, Ollie isn’t unhappy about it. He loves Sorrento. All year he romanticizes it, waxing lyrical about how nice it is to have the whole family together under the same roof for a week. He is utterly oblivious to any undercurrents of tension. If I mention anything to him, he always looks baffled. (“Mum, stressed? No. That’s just how she is! She enjoys the stress.”)
Perhaps it’s just Ollie who enjoys the stress. He’s been whistling all morning, and his entire body is growing more spongy and relaxed as we inch along the foreshore in bumper-to-bumper traffic, catching the odd glimpse of sapphire blue through the beach scrub.
Whenever I tell anyone my in-laws have a beach house in Sorrento, they make appreciative noises. Sorrento, ooh la la. I understand why. Tom and Diana’s clifftop beach house is arguably one of the most spectacular houses on the Mornington peninsula, a 1900s sandstone braced into the cliff with manicured gardens and a whitewashed timber path built down to the beach. There is a pool, a tennis court and a three-tiered limestone patio with uninterrupted sea views.
I hate it.
“How on earth can you hate that?” Claire demanded recently. “I would kill to have a beach house that I could visit whenever I liked. I mean, I’d literally kill for it.”
I would kill not to have such a place. For one thing, the Goodwins’ place is entirely un–child friendly. Artwork, pottery and sculptures adorn every wall and surface. I can barely set Archie on the floor without Diana gasping. It’s so foreign to me. My own mother couldn’t have cared less about artwork or sculptures. If she’d had the chance to be a grandmother, all the artwork on her walls would have been painted by her grandchildren, and she only would have gasped when I told the kids it was bedtime. (“Don’t be ridiculous kids! You’re staying up late with Nana tonight.”)
Growing up, we’d spent our summers in Portarlington, a quaint beach town on the less glamourous side of the bay. On the main street opposite the beach was a fish and chips shop, a pub, and a shop that sold beach chairs and tents. For the entire month of January, old bald men sat in deck chairs along the sand, exposing their enormous bellies, and middle-aged women in sun hats stood in the shallows in frilly turquoise one-piece swimsuits, offering children watermelon from Tupperware containers. Prior to visiting Tom and Diana’s place, I’d always thought of a beach house as a place that had sand on the floor, beach towels on the rail of the deck and a jumble of little plastic shoes inside the front door. But Sorrento is something else entirely.
“The Greenans are coming for dinner tonight,” Diana had said on the phone to Ollie this morning. “You remember Amelia and Jeffrey, don’t you?”
I remember Amelia and Jeffrey. Amelia was nice enough, but Jeffrey, a colleague of Tom’s, was awful. All of the ists: sexist, racist, classist. The first time we’d met (within minutes of meeting) he’d asked me what school I went to, and when I’d said Bayside High School, he’d scrutinized me a moment and then said with a little awe, “Wow. You’d never know.”
When we arrive, Nettie and Patrick are still unloading their bags from the car. Patrick resembles a packhorse, lumbering under a dozen smallish bags while Nettie only carries her purse. Nettie looks a little green.
“Welcome!” Tom says, standing in the grand front doorway, his arms outstretched. “Diana, they’re all here!” He beams at us. Having all the family down at the beach house—this is his happy place. “Where’s my grandson?” he says to me. I put Archie down and he toddles over to Tom. “Well, hello there, my boy. Haven’t you grown?”
I kiss Tom and then walk past him into the house.