Summer at 23 the Strand. Linda Mitchelmore
have wellies so trainers would have to do. And a cagoule that was probably more sieve than waterproof. As she hurried along the promenade in front of the chalets, the rain began to ease off. The relentless hammering on the roofs of the chalets and into the puddles forming on the promenade had changed to what her Aunt Frances would have called a ‘mizzle’. A sort of misty drizzle that soaked you just as much as heavy rain did but at least it didn’t beat against your skin.
How often she was thinking of her Aunt Frances here. More so than at home, that was for sure. She knew, had her aunt still been alive, that she would have shared her fears over the lump with her, before telling her own mother. She still dreaded telling her mother, which she knew she would have to soon, because the lump wasn’t going away. It wasn’t getting any bigger either but Cally had read enough on the internet to know there was no significance in that. Her mother, she knew, would smother her with love and want to take over everything – looking after the boys, the housework, the cooking; she’d probably turn up every day with a cottage pie or some macaroni cheese – ‘To save you having to do it, darling. While, you know, you fight this thing.’ But she didn’t need smothering with love, did she? She needed a good talking-to so she’d stop being so reluctant to tell Jack, who had a right to know – Cally knew that now.
Cally had no idea where she was going as she strode out towards the pier. A sign screwed to the low beach wall indicated there was a two-mile walk from where she was standing to a point the other side of the harbour and back.
‘That should do it,’ Cally said out loud. Although what the ‘it’ was she wasn’t certain. Certainly it wouldn’t make the lump go. But it might help her focus on what her next step was. To get through this fortnight, see a doctor and then a specialist on her own, or tell Jack first? To tell him here or when they got home? She felt sick with the possibilities.
Cally found a handful of coins in the pocket of the cagoule. Enough to buy a coffee somewhere if she wanted to. She hurried on.
Jack and the boys didn’t deserve to have their holiday blighted by her low – no, not low, worried – mood, did they? She wondered what Jack might be doing with the boys. Perhaps he’d found another TV channel to watch with them – cartoons maybe – and was sitting with them both cuddled up on his lap, his arms around them, holding them safe. Or he could be reading to them. Jack loved to read to the boys and it was always he who did the bedtime story every night. And Cally loved to watch him, peering through a crack in the bedroom door, listening to the lower timbre of his voice, watching until the boys drifted off to sleep, and sometimes Jack with them.
‘And you, Cally Jones, have got yourself too wrapped up in your boys and not enough in your husband, who is second to none,’ she said, wagging a finger at a bemused gull standing on the sea wall. ‘He won’t take much more of my self-absorption will he, Mr Seagull?’
The gull flew off. And that’s why men have affairs, Cally told herself – because their wives forget they married a man, making them semi-redundant once they’d fathered the children they wanted. Sometimes, Cally knew, she put Jack below her boys, her parents and her job.
‘Guilty as charged,’ she called after the gull, who was now landing at the water’s edge.
She walked on, picking up pace until she was almost running. She had to jump over a large puddle that had formed in a crack in the pavement, and just for the moment she jumped over it, and looked down, it became a mirror and Cally saw that she was smiling. She’d read somewhere that the human mind doesn’t know the difference between a real smile and a false one, and if you just keep smiling your mood will lift, and you’ll become happier. She’d just have to keep smiling then, wouldn’t she? And keep walking.
Cally went past the marker for the two-mile walk and under a small arch that led to the harbour.
Trips around the bay it said on a blackboard propped up against a kiosk that had seen better days, with peeling paint and a plank broken at the bottom of the door. On another it offered ferry rides, Every hour on the half-hour. Both kiosks were closed. Cally and Jack had never taken the boys on a boat – they’d like that, or Cally hoped they would. She’d suggest to Jack they book tickets for another day – one when the sun was guaranteed to shine.
But first, coffee. Cally drew out a handful of coins from the pocket of her cagoule. They were rather wet, as she was. But no matter, she had enough to buy a cappuccino – how comforting one of those was when you needed it. And besides, while she drank it, it would give Jack more time with his boys. Cally’s smile widened, just thinking about that.
Jack stood in the open doorway waiting for her. The rain had stopped completely and there was a hazy sun trying to break through. It was warmer too.
‘Phew! You’re back,’ Jack said as Cally walked up the steps to 23 The Strand in her now-sodden trainers because she’d walked back along the beach, walking through the bits covered with a thin film of water where the tide had gone out.
‘Have I been long?’ she asked. In truth, she had no idea how long she’d been out but could see now that the sun – hazy as it was – was almost overhead. Nearly lunchtime.
‘Two hours, thirty-three minutes, and about fifteen seconds,’ Jack said.
‘Are you sure about that?’ Cally said. She couldn’t help smiling. Jack had been worried about her. He’d missed her. He loved her and she’d hazard a guess he didn’t want to be without her. It was a good feeling and yet a terrible one because what if he ended up missing her, like, for ever…
‘Give or take a second,’ Jack quipped. ‘The kettle’s on. Or shall we celebrate your return with a pre-lunch glass of wine? Seeing as we’re on holiday?’
‘Wine. Please,’ Cally said. On impulse she kissed Jack on the lips, just a swift kiss, the way she kissed the boys, but it conveyed how much she loved him, or she hoped it did. ‘I’ll just get out of these sodden things.’
The shower was warm rather than hot, and hardly a power shower, but it helped revive Cally. She roughly rinsed her hair too. Towelled herself dry as best she could in the cramped space.
‘Jack! Could you pass me my dressing gown?’ she yelled, opening the door of the bathroom a tad. ‘I’ll dress in our bedroom.’
Jack was back in seconds, just as the towel Cally had wrapped around her still slightly damp body slid to the floor.
‘Pity the boys are here,’ Jack said. ‘I could ravage you.’
He reached out a hand and the ends of his fingers caught Cally’s left breast. She flinched. Wrapped both arms around herself protectively.
‘Cally?’ Jack said, fear in his eyes. ‘What’s wrong? Is there someone else?’
‘Of course not.’
‘I’m not sure I believe that.’
‘You must.’
‘Must I? You’ve never recoiled from me before…’
‘I know. I’m sorry. It’s me. I’ve got something I need to tell you and I don’t know how to do it. Or when. But right now I’m freezing.’ She held out her hands for the fleecy dressing gown with roses on it that she’d got in a charity shop – it was rather less than fashionable but it was warm and strangely comforting. And she needed comforting now. ‘And I will tell you but I don’t want it to be in front of the boys. Soon, I’ll tell you soon. Jack, I love you. Perhaps more now than when I married you. There is no other man for me and there never will be. Can you hang on to that?’
‘Strange compliment,’ Jack said, but he gave Cally the lopsided grin she so loved, the one that gave her butterflies in her tummy – the one that told her Jack loved her just as much as she did him. ‘But I’ll take it.’
Cally and Jack took the boys on a boat trip that afternoon.
‘I can hardly believe it’s the same month, never mind the same day,’ Cally said. ‘It’s so warm now compared to this morning.’ Just