Summer at 23 the Strand: A gorgeously feel-good holiday read!

‘Do I? I…’

‘There you go,’ Jack said. ‘You’re doing it again.’

‘Just tired,’ Cally said. ‘It’s been manic at the salon. So many went sick with that norovirus. We were lucky to miss it. I did double shifts, remember?’

Cally loved her work as a hairdresser. She loved cutting best of all. ‘Anyone can gild a lily,’ was what Hannah, her tutor, had told her, ‘but a lily is beautiful without the gilding. You have to have a solid foundation to work on and a good cut is paramount.’ So many clients asked for her now that she rarely did colours or perms these days.

‘Hmm,’ Jack said, as though he didn’t quite believe it was just tiredness and overwork. ‘You would tell me if…?’ It was Jack’s turn for his voice to trail away, as though he couldn’t remember what it was he was going to say, or didn’t want to say what should be coming next. ‘If anything was wrong? Whatever sort of wrong it might be?’

Cally pressed her lips together and nodded. She couldn’t tell Jack what was bothering her, not yet. Not on the first day. They had to have some good and happy days first. She had to make memories on this holiday for Jack as well as the boys. And she and Jack needed to get back to their close and loving relationship, and it was her fault cracks had begun to appear – not because she’d found the lump but the way she was dealing with it. She’d lost count of the times Jack had come up behind her when she’d been online searching for information, and she’d closed down the site with a stab of the exit icon.

‘Cally?’ Jack had said the first time he’d walked into the spare bedroom they’d set up as an office and eventual homework space for the boys. ‘What’s that you don’t want me to see, eh? Shopping channel? Hmm?’

And Cally had lied and said, ‘Something like that,’ because wasn’t she shopping around for information?

But Jack was less jokey about it after the fourth time – the time she’d had an email from someone she’d contacted on a cancer support chat site; someone who was in the same position she was right now. A man. Tony. Up until then it hadn’t really crossed Cally’s mind that men could get breast cancer too. Cally and Tony had exchanged a few emails and she’d been reading the latest from him where he’d said he wished he hadn’t told as many people his fears in the beginning because they’d immediately begun to treat him as though he were made of eggshells and would shatter at any moment. He’d urged Cally to think about when, and who, she told.

‘You’re getting a lot of emails these days,’ Jack had said, coming up behind her. He sounded more concerned than accusatory – as though he suspected something was up but didn’t know what.

But Cally had been more alert by then. She’d heard him coming and exited Tony’s email, and it was one from an old school friend, Ruthie, that filled the screen as he came to stand behind her, placing his hands on her shoulders.

‘Won’t be a moment. Ruthie’s having another crisis. Someone called Mark wants to take her to meet his mother. Well, you know Ruthie, she’s never going to commit!’

‘Spare me!’ Jack had laughed. ‘I’ll put the kettle on, shall I? Tea or coffee?’

‘Hot chocolate,’ Cally said. She needed the comfort of that at the moment. She’d reply to Ruthie’s email tomorrow. And Tony’s. And then, maybe, she’d share her fears with Jack. Maybe.

‘Come on, boys,’ Cally said, struggling to make her voice sound bright and enthusiastic. She’d missed an opportunity to tell Jack before coming away and now she was beginning to regret that. She could have been starting treatment, if treatment was what was needed, couldn’t she? But Jack had sprung the surprise of the holiday and it would have been like throwing his kind gesture back in his face to have told him then. He needed a holiday as much as she did. ‘Last one on the beach gets chucked in the water!’

Cally found she couldn’t tell Jack about the lump on the second or third day either. Every morning when she showered, Cally felt tentatively for the lump, praying it had gone or at the very least reduced in size. It hadn’t. The first few days after she’d discovered it, she’d felt it at least twenty times a day – every time she went to the loo so she’d know, with the door locked, she couldn’t be interrupted, and each night in bed when she was sure Jack had fallen asleep beside her. But now, on holiday, she only felt for it once a day. It was reducing the horror a little not to be constantly touching it.

Each day Cally and her family spent most of their time on the beach, coming back up to the chalet to eat their lunch and tea, squashed together on the tiny deck if it was warm enough, or inside when it wasn’t. Noah and Riley loved being barefoot, sand between their toes, in their hair – loved the freedom of being able to run on the sand without their parents urging them to be careful of the kerb, or other hazards, as they did in everyday life.

‘I want to swim!’ Noah announced on the fourth day.

‘Me too,’ Cally said, ‘but it’s too cold. Even to paddle. Your feet will go blue if you paddle.’

‘Blue feet are silly,’ Noah said.

‘They are,’ Cally agreed.

‘I swim!’ Riley yelled, racing away from them. Jack leapt up and went after him, tucking the small boy under his arm, legs and arms flying like windmill sails in the storybook Cally often read to the boys at bedtime.

‘Is it really too cold?’ Jack said, sotto voce, when he came back with Noah.

‘It’s May, Jack,’ Cally said.

‘I know. But the tide’s coming in over sand that’s had the sun on it for a while. I used to go in the sea with the Cubs when I was six or seven.’

‘Riley’s only three. I don’t want him to get a chill.’

‘No, but they’ve got to learn to take risks. Live a little dangerously now and then. It’s not as though I’m going to stand here and watch him drown, now is it?’

Cally didn’t answer that because, really, it needed no answer. Jack was as committed to their boys as she was. And so they left it at that – the issue unresolved, but only showing up their differences; Jack prepared to have a go and sort out any problems as they arose, and Cally seeing dangers and problems everywhere. She shivered then, despite the sun’s still being warm on her cardiganed-shoulders, to think that, should she have to face the worst-case scenario of all and no longer be around, Jack would more than likely let the boys paddle in May.

‘Time to get back?’ Jack asked. ‘You shivered then.’

‘Did I?’ Cally said, touched he’d noticed and yet alarmed too, as though he were constantly monitoring her mood. ‘I was thinking of something.’

‘Well, I hope it involves what we might eat later. All this fresh air is making me ravenous.’

And I seem to have lost my appetite.

‘It does. Pancetta, olive and tomato pasta,’ she said. A little white lie because she hadn’t been thinking about supper at all, and at home Jack often cooked, starting to prepare meals from whatever he found in the fridge and cupboards while she was fetching the boys from their grandparents’ house.

At least he’ll be able to feed them.

‘Sounds good to me. You go on. I’ll pack up and bring the boys back with me via the supermarket. I’ll get something for us for later.’

‘I’m getting quite used to this little kitchen,’ Cally said as she put away the crockery and red-handled cutlery Jack had washed and dried. ‘Galley kitchen, I suppose. But everything we need is here and within an arm’s length.’

‘Bijou it said in the brochure,’ Jack said. ‘I didn’t have a clue what that meant, apart from it being the name of the jeweller where I bought our wedding rings, so I thought maybe it meant jewel or something.’

‘It was Bijoux, with an “x”, where you bought our rings,’ Cally said. ‘It does mean jewels, translated from the French, but it also means small and compact, I suppose.’

‘Like you,’ Jack said.

‘Oh, Jack, you say the nicest things. I’m taking it as a compliment anyway.’

‘As it was meant. Now come and sit down. Wine time now the boys are asleep, although we won’t be able to get up to any noisy athletics or we’ll wake them!’ Jack, seated in the small leather bucket chair, a throw draped over one arm of it, patted the other one, inviting Cally to come and sit beside him.

She went. She sat. It would have been churlish not to. Jack had nipped up to the small supermarket in the middle of town to fetch wine while she’d been cooking the pasta sauce. She didn’t know how she was going to turn down his offer of ‘noisy athletics’, as he put it, should their kisses and cuddles move from the sitting room to the bedroom and on to other things, as they usually did at home.

‘It’s quite lovely in here with the lamps on low,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘Do you think sometimes, Jack, that we’ve got too much stuff? Our first flat was small and we filled that up, and now we have a much bigger home, we’ve filled that up too.’

‘Everybody does,’ Jack laughed. ‘I daresay even the Queen looks around her sometimes and wonders if she’s got too much stuff in her palaces.’

‘Yeah,’ Cally laughed. ‘But I like the pared-back look of this place. I mean, we only need a knife, fork and spoon each for everyday use, and a plate and mug each, and yet when I open drawers and cupboards at home they’re stuffed with the things.’

‘Eh?’ Jack said. ‘You’re coming over all deep here! Time to relax a bit. Jack filled a glass to the brim with chilled Sancerre and handed it to her.

‘It gives me space to think,’ Cally said, accepting the glass and taking a large gulp of it, ‘with less stuff about, I suppose.’

She yawned. Jack gave her rather a sharp look.

‘Sorry. You’re not boring me. Honest,’ she laughed. ‘It must be all the sea air.’

‘Phew! I thought it might have been something I said.’