Maybe Jude knew more, but client confidentiality or perhaps a wish to protect the woman’s privacy had stopped her from revealing anything else. What Carole did gather, though, was that her boyfriend’s departure had not only shattered Philly emotionally, but also left her in dire financial straits. There hadn’t turned out to be much freelance work for a graphic designer in West Sussex and, having lost Mark’s substantial contribution to their mortgage payments, Philly felt the threat of repossession looming.
As a result, she was trying to realize the value of any assets she could. The Range Rover was sold and replaced with an eight-year-old Nissan. The sailing dinghy was advertised for sale, but had yet to find a buyer. And Philly had confided to Jude that if she could recoup any of the annual rental they’d paid for the beach hut – some six hundred and fifty pounds – that too would be welcome.
Needless to say, it was Jude who’d suggested the idea to her neighbour. Up until that point Carole would have reckoned she had no need for a beach hut. She could never see herself as a ‘hutter’ (as the users were inevitably called). Beach huts were for visitors, families from London perhaps, who needed somewhere to store all their impedimenta for days at the seaside. For someone like her, living only a few hundred yards from the sea at High Tor in Fethering High Street, renting a beach hut would be a pointless indulgence.
But that was before Carole knew that her granddaughter Lily was coming to stay in Fethering for a week that summer. Lily was the new element in Carole’s life, whose existence had gone some way to thawing the permafrost of her grandmother’s emotions. Not blessed with natural maternal instincts, Carole reckoned she had failed in the upbringing of her only child Stephen. He had reacted to her emotional distance – and perhaps to his parents’ divorce – by building up a carapace of his own. Burying himself in his work (which involved money and computers in a relationship his mother could never quite understand), he too had minimized engagement with his fellow human beings. But marriage to the vivacious Gaby had changed all that, and the arrival of Lily had also contributed to the humanization of Stephen Seddon. He was never going to be the relaxed life and soul of any party, but family life had saved him from the route of total desiccation on which he seemed to have been set.
And though Carole was very cautious in assessing her emotional reactions to everything, what she felt for Lily did seem wonderfully spontaneous. Somehow, without the worries about her competence as a parent, which had dogged her during Stephen’s childhood, Carole did have the feeling of starting something new, the possibility that her instinctive attraction to her granddaughter represented something that she had never experienced before – uncomplicated love.
A visit from Stephen and family to High Tor on Christmas Day had been successfully achieved, and now a pattern had emerged of their meeting up every six weeks or so, either in Fethering or at Stephen and Gaby’s house in Fulham. At times Carole still couldn’t believe how well she got on with her daughter-in-law, but Gaby had a generous and inclusive personality.
While recognizing that Carole was not necessarily easy, she managed to achieve a relaxed relationship with her mother-in-law, whose basis was their mutual adoration of Lily.
Happy with the way things were going, Carole was still amazed when Gaby proposed that she and Lily should come and stay in Fethering for a whole week. At the end of June Stephen had a work commitment that was going to take him to New York, and his wife reckoned Lily was just at the age to appreciate a seaside holiday. The little girl was starting to toddle and although the flat, slow gradient of Fethering Beach didn’t offer any rock pools, it still offered sufficient riches of wavelets and worm casts and seaweed to fascinate a two year old.
Carole made no prevarication when the suggestion was made. She told Gaby it was a great idea, but once everything had been agreed she went through much anxiety about the forthcoming visit. Carole Seddon was one of those people whose forays into society had to be shored up with periods sequestered in High Tor with only Gulliver for company. The thought of someone – even someone as easy as Gaby – sharing her home for a week was a troubling one. Would the two of them still get on after such sustained exposure to each other? And would there be enough going on in Fethering to satisfy the demands of a toddling two year old?
It was just after she had begun to ask herself these questions that Jude suggested her taking over Philly Rose’s beach hut. The timing was perfect. Philly had proposed her paying for just a month to see how the arrangement worked out, but Carole, in an atypical moment of extravagance, had said no, she’d pay for the whole year. Given her financial situation, it was no surprise that Philly didn’t argue.
These negotiations had been conducted through Jude. Carole had yet to meet Philly Rose, and she was happy about that. She suffered from that very English unwillingness to conduct financial dealings face to face, which is of course why estate agents in England do so well.
But, with the agreement made and her cheque safely in Philly Rose’s bank account, Carole felt she could treat
And now, rather to her amazement, Carole Seddon was about to become a hutter.
? Bones Under The Beach Hut ?
Two
The deal with Philly Rose was concluded at the beginning of June, but it took a couple of weeks before Carole plucked up the courage to visit her acquisition. A new owner of a beach hut in Smalting must of necessity be an object of curiosity for the more established users. Everyone would be bound to look at her.
But eventually Carole had to overcome her misgivings and bite the bullet. It was a Tuesday in mid-June. Gaby and Lily would be arriving for the start of their seaside holiday on the following Sunday week. If Carole was going to look vaguely competent as the denizen of a beach hut (would she ever get to the point of thinking of herself as a hutter?), she needed to have a few dry runs. And she had nearly a fortnight to make it look as though beach-hut life was second nature to her.
Because of her disquiet about potential illegality, Carole had spent much time consulting the website of Fether District Council to check local by-laws. (Having for a long time resisted the lure of computers, she had finally succumbed, and with the zeal of a convert was now in a relationship with her laptop which made many happy marriages look inadequate.) She was relieved not to find on the website any ruling that specifically prohibited subletting of beach huts, and her researches also brought her another bonus piece of information. Dogs were allowed on Smalting Beach.
She was quite surprised by this. Carole knew there were beaches in Bognor, Felpham and Littlehampton where no dogs were allowed during the summer. And she would have expected a place as refined as Smalting to be very strict in such matters. The idea of dogs fouling their precious sand must have been anathema to the gentry of the village. But according to the website there were no restrictions, even in the summer months when the beach would be crowded with visiting families. Carole eventually decided the reason for this anomaly. Most of the inhabitants of Smalting probably were dog owners themselves and so would lobby against anything that might curb their own pets’ movements.
Anyway, she was cheered by the thought that she could have the support of Gulliver during her first experimental day at the beach hut.
¦
Carole had once again fallen into the error so common among shy people – the idea that everyone is watching their every movement. But when she pitched up at Smalting Beach with her tote bag and Labrador, nobody took a blind bit of notice. Though the beach was quite full, mostly families with very small children taking advantage of the relative calm before the schools broke up, they were all too preoccupied with their splashings and sandcastles to register the newcomer undoing the padlocks of
The blue double doors at the front went virtually the entire width of the hut. Across them a stainless- steel bar was fitted into slots and padlocked at either end. There was also a padlock on the staple and hasp where the two doors met, so there were three keys on the yellow plastic-tagged ring that Jude had got from Philly Rose. In spite of the protective rubber covers that fitted over the slots, the salt air had got in and the keys were hard to turn. When she had finally – and with difficulty – opened the doors, she fixed the hooks that hung from them into the rings at the sides of the hut.
Carole dared to let Gulliver off the lead while she examined her property. Though he was unfamiliar with
