‘No . . . I mean, yes. Thanks. I’m just, erm, regrouping.’ He forced a smile.
There was a yelp from behind. They both turned to see a black and white mongrel sniffing Harrie’s Peppa Pig lunch box, the only pink thing Nicci allowed houseroom, except pink wine.
‘Stop it, Norman,’ the woman yelled, tugging at the dog’s collar. ‘I’m sorry,’ she added. ‘He’s such a piglet. He thinks there might be second lunch in there.’
David’s smile was weak. ‘Afraid he’s out of luck. Nothing in there but dolls, clothes and KitKat wrappers.’
‘You’re David, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘I thought I recognised you. Your girls have got so big.’
He racked his brains. The woman was vaguely familiar, but only in the way people you see in the street or on television are.
‘Jilly,’ she said. ‘Three huts down from yours. Usually see more of you guys in the winter. How’s Nicci? Seems like an age since you were here. Must have been what, September?’
‘August Bank Holiday,’ David said.
It was only seven months ago, but his mood could scarcely have been more different.
Back then, they’d known Nicci was ill. The cancer had been given a name and a stage. There was still hope. Not a lot, but it was there. The date for Nicci’s operation was just days away. So this was their last family weekend away before the unavoidable weeks of treatment and, they hoped, recovery. This time, next August, they’d be back, they told themselves, drinking ice-cold rosé, David barbecuing Cumberland sausages, Nicci unpacking tubs of salad and olives, tearing crusty French bread into a basket. Far too much food for the four of them.
The girls had been crouching on the sand, wearing pants and Hello Kitty T-shirts, their shorts and crocs long discarded, faces comical masks of concentration as they built sandcastles for their Baby Alives, which Nicci had let David’s mother buy them. She’d stalled at the accoutrements. Fortunately, Jo and Lizzie hadn’t. The sky had been a perfect August blue, broken by a smattering of cartoon clouds the twins could have drawn.
Despite the Choos, and the Chanel, and the designer jeans that replaced her vintage frocks and Doc Martens, Nicci was the same girl he’d fallen in love with the moment he saw her. The knackered denim cut-offs with a hole in the bum where, if he looked hard enough, he could see a flash of black lace knickers, were gone. And so was the faded Stone Roses T-shirt – the one he’d bought her the first birthday after they’d got together. Although, knowing Nicci, it was folded in a box or bin bag somewhere. She’d worn it to grey and with sleeves rolled up to reveal slim tanned upper arms. The peroxide had been replaced by a pricey, professional dye-job, and the skinny tanned legs ended in orange toenails and clashing pink Havaianas, not the battered Docs she’d lived in when they first met. But she was still his Nicci.
He could see now that her face that day had been brave. With hindsight, her exhaustion and fear were obvious, but at the time it had been easier not to see. Kinder too. To both of them.
Too often he’d complained that they didn’t spend any time alone. Never did anything together, just the four of them, as a family.
‘The house is always full of your friends!’ he’d snapped, more than once, when the twins had gone to bed, and Sunday was about to slip into Monday, when they’d both be back at work without a private word spoken. ‘Why can’t we be just us? If I’d known I was walking up the aisle with all four of you—’
She’d put her hand in front of his mouth and he’d let her shush him.
‘They’re not just my friends. They’re my family,’ she said, as she always did. ‘You know that.’
And she replaced her hand with her mouth.
He missed her face and her smile. Her scent, the texture of her hair, the taste of her skin. She’d been what let him be him: David, the thoughtful one. He missed her body, and he missed feeling her naked skin as he fell asleep, and their hands clutching as they sometimes did when they both awoke.
The woman was staring at him, looking anxious. The rain was heavier now, slicking dark curls to her forehead.
He remembered her now. Well, he didn’t. But Nicci was always striking up conversations. Standing up to the rims of her Hunters in the freezing surf, chatting with strangers, as if it was July. You never knew who you might meet, she said. Better to waste ten minutes talking to a dull person than miss a chance of meeting an interesting one. To her, three huts down was almost family.
Always open, always looking. His exact opposite.
Nicci collected: people, things, clothes . . .
‘Oh!’ The woman’s face was ashen. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve said the wrong thing, haven’t I? You two haven’t . . . you haven’t split?’ Mortification crossed her face. ‘I can’t believe it. You always seemed so, happy . . .’ Her voice trailed away.
David shook his head, finally glad of the rain blurring his vision and trickling down his face. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We haven’t split.’
Oblivious to the rain, the girls sat at his feet petting the dog, content for the first time that day. ‘I’m sorry,’ David said. ‘I told everyone I could think of. Everyone in Nicci’s address book . . . I don’t know how to say this . . . She had cancer. It . . . the end . . . was quick.’
Quick, but not painless.
The expression that crossed the woman’s face was agonisingly familiar. He’d seen it before, many times, over the last two months. In the months before too, when the end became inevitable. But that didn’t make it any easier, for either of them. As the woman hastily made her excuses and strode off down the beach, dog in tow, head down, into the rain, David decided he could hardly blame her.
Nicci’s Dead. It was a hell of a conversation stopper.
They packed up soon after. There was no point staying. He’d come here looking for Nicci, but he hadn’t found her.
She wasn’t here to be found.
Chapter Eleven
The only good thing about Croydon is leaving it, Lizzie thought, as she pulled her second-hand Renault out of The Cedars’ car park.
It wasn’t Croydon’s fault. She didn’t have anything against the place. In fact, it wasn’t Croydon she hated at all. It was Sanderstead, and The Cedars in particular.
The Cedars had been Lizzie’s mother’s home for two years now and Lizzie’s elder sister, Karen, had only managed to visit once. OK, so Lizzie lived an hour’s drive away, and Karen’s journey involved an eight-hour transatlantic flight, but even so, Lizzie thought, stomping her foot on the brake as a bus pulled out, would it kill her to visit her mother a couple of times a year?
‘I only get two weeks’ holiday,’ Karen reminded her when Lizzie called from the car park to give her an update. ‘And anyway, what would be the point of begging unpaid time off work? She wouldn’t recognise me anyway.’
Lizzie’d had to resist the urge to hurl her mobile onto the gravel. She couldn’t afford to replace it. ‘You think she recognises me?’ she said instead.
Before the home there had been the memory loss. The missing door keys, the lost handbags, the returning from school to twenty-five voicemail messages from her mother, all checking she hadn’t been killed in a car crash reported on the local news thirty miles away.
Doctors’ appointments, specialists’ appointments, MRI scans and CAT scans, had swiftly followed those calls. Lizzie handled it largely on her own. Gerry was in meetings. Entertaining important clients. Away on business/at a training course/being fast-tracked. Gerry was off being Gerry.
And