The Beach House - Jane Green
Chapter One
The bike crunches along the gravel path, weaving around the potholes that could present danger to someone who didn’t know the road like the back of their hand.
The woman on the bike raises her head and looks at the sky, sniffs, smiles to herself. A foggy day in Nantucket, but she has lived here long enough to know this is merely a morning fog, and the bright early-June sunshine will burn it off by midday, leaving a beautiful afternoon.
Good. She is planning lunch on the deck today, is on her way into town via her neighbor’s house, where she has spent the last hour or so cutting the large blue mophead hydrangeas and stuffing them into the basket on the front of the bike. She doesn’t really know these neighbors—so strange to live in the same house you have lived in for forty-five years, a house in a town where once you knew everyone, until one day you wake up and realize you don’t know people anymore—but she has guessed from the drawn blinds and absence of cars they are not yet here, and they will not miss a couple of dozen hydrangea heads.
The gate to their rear garden was open, and she had heard around town they had brought in some super-swanky garden designer. She had to look. And the pool had been open, the water was so blue, so inviting, it was practically begging her to strip off and jump in, which of course she did, her body still slim and strong, her legs tan and muscled from the daily hours on the bike.
She dried off naturally, walking naked around the garden, popping strawberries and peas into her mouth in the kitchen garden, admiring the roses that were just starting, and climbing back into her clothes with a contented sigh when she was quite dry.
These are the reasons Nan has come to have a reputation for being slightly eccentric. A reputation she is well aware of, and a reputation she welcomes, for it affords her freedom, allows her to do the things she really wants to do, the things other people don’t dare, and because she is thought of as eccentric, exceptions are always made.
It is, she thinks wryly, one of the beautiful things about growing old, so necessary when there is so much else that is painful. At sixty-five she still feels thirty, and on occasion, twenty, but she has long ago left behind the insecurities she had at twenty and thirty, those niggling fears: that her beauty wasn’t enough, not enough for the Powell family; that she had somehow managed to trick Everett Powell into marrying her; that once her looks started to fade, they would all realize she wasn’t anyone, wasn’t anything, and would then treat her as she had always expected when she first married into this illustrious family . . . as nothing.
Her looks had served her well. Continue to serve her well. She is tall, skinny and strong, her white hair is glossy and sleek, pulled back in a chignon, her cheekbones still high, her green eyes still twinkling with amusement under perfectly arched brows.
Nan’s is a beauty that is rarely seen these days, a natural elegance and style that prevailed throughout the fifties, but has mostly disappeared today, although Nan doesn’t see it, not anymore.
Now when she looks in the mirror she sees the lines, her cheeks concave under her cheekbones, the skin so thin it sometimes seems that she can see her bones. She covers as many of the imperfections as she can with makeup, still feels that she cannot leave her house without full makeup, her trademark scarlet lipstick the first thing she puts on every morning, before her underwear even, before her bath.
But these days her makeup is sometimes patchy, her lipstick smudging over the lines in her lips, lines that they warned her about in the eighties, when her son tried to get her to stop smoking, holding up photographs in magazines of women with dead, leathery skin.
“I can’t give up smoking,” she would say, frowning. “I enjoy it too much, but I promise you, as soon as I stop enjoying it, I’ll give it up.”
The day is yet to come.
Thirty years younger and she would never have dared trespass, swim naked in an empty swimming pool without permission. Thirty years younger and she would have cared too much what people thought, wouldn’t have cut flowers or carefully dug up a few strawberry plants that would certainly not be missed, to replant them in her own garden.
But thirty years younger and perhaps, if she had dared and had been caught, she would have got away with it. She would have apologized, would have invited the couple back for a drink, and the husband would have flirted with her, would have taken the pitcher of rum punch out of her hand and insisted on pouring it for her as she bent her head down to light her cigarette, looking up at him through those astonishing green eyes, flicking her blond hair ever so slightly and making him feel like the most important man in the room, hell, the only man in the room, the wife be damned.
Thirty years younger and the women might have ignored her, but not, as they do now, because they think she’s the crazy woman in the big old house on the bluff, but because they were threatened, because they were terrified that she might actually have the power to take their men, ruin their lives. And they were right.
Not that she ever did.
Not back then.
Of course there have been a few affairs, but Nan was never out to steal a man from someone else, she just wanted some fun, and after Everett died, after years of being on her own, she came to realize that sometimes sex was, after all, just sex, and sometimes you just had to take it where you could find it.
The village of Siasconset, known to all simply as Sconset, is burning with a bright morning light by the time Nan arrives on her bike. She cycles past the Sconset café, around the corner past the Book Store that isn’t a book store but sells liquor instead, and hops off at the general store to get some delicious sweetmeats, designer candles.
All the way at the back there is still a refrigerator stuffed full of yogurt, milk, eggs—the bare essentials of life—but the rest of the store is taken up with gourmet foods, sesame crackers, delicious sweetmeats, and with designer candles and the necessary wall of T-shirts, baseball caps and tote bags advertising that the tourists had been to Sconset for a vacation, were wealthy enough to afford to come to a place where billionaires play.
As always, she heads to the back, nodding at the tourists, waving hello to the woman behind the cash register.
She is a familiar sight in Sconset, her long linen skirts floating behind her as she cycles along on a rusty old Schwinn. It is not a bike you often see these days, with its huge oversized basket on the front, but it is the one that she and Everett bought when they spent their first summer here, back in 1962, when she was twenty, and he’d brought her home to Windermere to meet his parents.
Nan cycles slowly, one hand lightly balanced on the handlebar, the other wielding a cigarette. She waves at everyone she passes, greets them with a smile, stopping to chat if the whim takes her, or if she sees a neighbor busy in the garden.
Most wave back, but more and more often she is noticing the change in the people around here, the people who don’t wave back, who pretend they don’t see the crazy blond lady on the old bicycle, the people who are so bright and shiny, so clean and perfect as they walk down Main Street tapping on their iPhones, it almost hurts to look at them.
This wouldn’t have happened had she been thirty years younger, she thinks from time to time, when yet another young, glamorous New York couple hesitate as she approaches them, weaving wildly on her bike as she attempts to light her cigarette without stopping. Thirty years ago he would have pulled a lighter out of his pocket and lit it for her, instead of turning when his wife prods him, sneering with distaste, as Nan’s cigarette lights and the smoke wafts, as if planned, right under the woman’s nose. She coughs dramatically, and Nan happily gives her the finger as she cycles off, while the woman gasps in horror and attempts to shield the eyes of the toddler who is with them.
What has happened to people, Nan thinks as she traverses the cobblestones. When did we become so precious? A family of six passes her, father, mother, then four little ones, like four little ducklings with sparkly aerodynamic helmets on. When did our children have to wear helmets, she thinks, turning her head to watch them wobble into the distance. When did we all become so scared?
She thinks of Michael, at seven, falling off the monkey bars and splitting his head open on the concrete ground. She didn’t panic, it was just one of the things that happened to everyone. She bundled him in the front of the car and drove him to Dr. Grover’s house where he was stitched up in the Grovers’ kitchen as Mrs. Grover served them lemonade and ginger snaps.
She never knew where Michael was when he was growing up. Someone had a boat on the marshes, and Michael and his friends once got stranded for the day. Nan only knew when they ran in the kitchen door, shrieking with excitement at what swiftly became their near-death adventure. Whatever adults were around smiled affectionately, one ear on the conversation, the other somewhere else, because life, in those days, revolved around the adults. Not around the children.
The first time Everett brought her to their summer house, Nan had no idea what she was letting herself in for. She had barely heard of Nantucket. Had vacationed only on the Jersey Shore, knowing little of what she later came to think of as “old America”—the true Yankee families, the old-money families, whose ancestors had sailed over on the Mayflower, and who could trace their families back hundreds of years.
Her own parents had been English, had sailed to New York hoping for a better life than the one they left behind in Birming-ham, and had moved to Ossining because of a distant cousin who lived there.
She had been this naive little girl, still known to all as Suzanne, who hadn’t known what to expect when Everett brought her home. There was no Googling to find out about the Powells, no one who could have told her the family was famous in Massachusetts for funding the majority of the renovation that has made Cape Cod what it is today, no one who could have explained the money she was marrying into, the privilege and history that came with the Powells.
She married Everett because she loved him, and as a wedding present his parents bought them an apartment in New York City. Nothing fancy, she would say years later, but it was utterly fancy, and for the first two years of their marriage Nan would wake every morning and think she had died and woken up in a Grace Kelly movie.
Nowhere did she feel this more than at Windermere. Built in the 1920s, just off Baxter Road in the village of Sconset, it stood high on a bluff, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, its shingles gray and weary from being buffeted by the wind, but its lines graceful and elegant, the porches, in the old days, always abuzz with people.
Not a huge house, Windermere now sat on nine perfect acres. Originally a modest saltbox, over the years various careful additions had turned it into a stylish estate. The developers had started to circle, like vultures looking for their kill. The house would be torn down, Nan knew, if she ever let them get their hands on it, and it was a place that held too many important memories for her to let it go that easily.
It was the Powells’ summer house—their idyllic retreat from Memorial Day to Labor Day each year—a home filled with naked children, clambakes on the beach, and so much joy.
It was one of those naked children who caused her name change, that very first trip. “It’s Suzanne,” Everett kept saying to the little three-year-old—someone’s daughter, or cousin, or something—who kept trying to drag her off to build another sandcastle. “I want Nan to come,” the little girl kept saying, and Everett had laughed, so handsome then, his blue eyes crinkling in his tanned face. “Nan,” he said, turning to Suzanne. “Nan in Nantucket. I like it.” And since that time she had only ever been called Nan, had mostly forgotten her given name; she often found herself crossing out Nan when filling in forms that requested her full name, only realizing at the end that she hadn’t written Suzanne.
When Nan thinks back to those early days at Windermere, she can almost hear the tinkling of drinks being poured and the musicians playing, she can almost see the fairy lights strung up around the house, the lanterns hanging from the trees, people laughing and drinking and dancing.
There were dinner parties that went on all night, Everett’s parents—Lydia and Lionel—the first to lead their guests through the dunes for their notorious midnight swims, the shrieks from the guests as they hit the cold water audible almost in the center of town.
Friends were always coming to stay, often not leaving for entire summers at a time, but Windermere was big enough, and the overspill could always stay in one of the four cottages on the far edges of the compound.
Two of the cottages were sold off after Lionel died and Lydia developed Alzheimer’s. Lydia eventually went into a nursing home in Boston and Nan tried to visit her there as often as she could, sometimes bringing her son, until it became too painful, toward the end, when Lydia wasn’t even a shadow of her former self but a tiny, shrunken, white-haired old lady, whom Nan once walked straight past when she went to visit.
Everett had died by that time, or, as Nan put it for so many years, had gone. She had woken up one morning and the bed had been empty, which was not particularly unusual—he would often wake up and go for an early morning swim—but it wasn’t until he failed to return that her heart quickened with a trace of anxiety.
She went down to the beach, and still she remembers that she knew, knew from the moment she turned over and saw his side of the bed empty, that there was something not quite right.
His T-shirt was roughly folded, weighted down by his father’s watch. No note. Nothing. And the sea was particularly rough that day. Nan had stood and looked out over the waves, listening to the ocean crash around her as a tear rolled down her cheek. She wasn’t looking for him, she knew he had gone.
She just didn’t know why.
It turned out to be no coincidence that Everett’s grandfather had won Windermere in a poker match. Gambling, it transpired, skipped a generation and landed quite solidly on the shoulders of Everett.
Nan knew he loved his poker games, but had no idea they were anything other than fun, anything other than a reason to spend a night out with the boys, drink a few single malts and smoke a few cigars, or whatever it was they did.
But after he died, all those years ago, she received phone calls from the banks, then from various people to whom he clearly owed money, and, finally, from his accountant.
“It does not look good,” he had said.
Luckily, there were assets. The two remaining cottages on the edges of Windermere were sold, and then, a few years later, the New York City apartment. A big decision, but she had always loved Windermere, had loved the thought of making it a permanent home, and Michael was young enough that she thought he would benefit from a quieter life, a life that was simple, in a place they had always adored. It was in the late seventies, and she got so much money for the apartment she thought she would be fine forever.
“I leave it in your hands,” she had said to her stockbroker with a laugh, knowing that a pot that sizable would be fine.
Nan doesn’t have a stockbroker anymore. Stockbrokers used to be revered, but she doesn’t know anyone who calls themselves a stockbroker these days. These days she hears the summer people use phrases like M & A, bond derivatives and, perhaps more than anything, hedge funds. She still doesn’t understand what a hedge fund is, knows only that the people who are building the biggest houses on the island, the husbands who fly in for the weekend in private jets and helicopters, joining wives, nannies and house-keepers, all seem to work in hedge funds.
She has her money in a hedge fund herself. Every month she receives a statement, but mostly she forgets to open it. Her mail has a tendency to pile up on a kitchen counter before being swept away into a cupboard somewhere, for Nan has no patience for the prosaic—bills bore her, and the only envelopes that are opened and responded to immediately are handwritten, and personal.
Today her financial adviser is coming for lunch, although Nan thinks of him less as a financial adviser and more as a friend. Not that he is much of either—she has not seen him in person for four years, and he doesn’t advise her particularly, other than to have told her, all those years ago, that the hedge fund she subsequently invested in was a good one, started by one of the brightest traders at Goldman Sachs, and would be a wonderful place for her to put some money.
The phone is ringing when she walks in. She dumps the hydrangeas in the sink, and grabs the phone, running the water as she picks up.
“Hi, Mom.” It’s Michael, ringing, as he so often does, on his way to work.
“Hi, my love. How are you?”
“Tired. It’s hot and muggy and revolting in the city. I’m deeply jealous of you on the island—is it beautiful?”
“Not yet.” Nan smiles. “But it will be. Why don’t you come out? I miss you. It’s too quiet here with just me rattling around.”
“What about Sarah? Do you still have Sarah?”
“She still comes once or twice a week to help me out,” Nan says, “and I love having her around, but I miss my family, miss this house ringing with the sounds of people having fun. Remember when you used to come up here with all your friends for the summer? Remember how much fun it was? Why don’t you come up with some people? Wouldn’t they all kill for a vacation on Nantucket?”
Michael laughs. His mother never changes. “They would undoubtedly kill for a vacation on Nantucket, if only they could take the time off work. And most of them are married now, with kids. It’s different. They can’t just sweep their families up and bring them out.”
“But why ever not?” Nan is genuinely perplexed. “I adore children, this is the perfect place for children.”
“I know that, but it’s just . . . hard. People are busy, everyone’s running all the time. But I would love to come. I’d love to see you. I can’t make it up at the moment, the bosses are away for another week or so and I need to be here, but maybe I can come at the end of the summer.”
Nan turns off the tap and reaches for a cigarette.
“Oh Mom. You’re not still smoking.”
Nan ignores him. “How are things going with the girl . . . what’s her name? Aisling?”
Michael smiles. “Interesting. I like her. Still very early days but so far so good. She’s fiery. Independent. You’d like her.”
“I’d love to meet her.” Nan is careful not to ask too much. “Bring her.”
“Maybe I will. What are you up to today?”
“Making lunch. Andrew Moseley is coming.”
“Your financial adviser?”
“Exactly!”
“Is everything okay?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“It seems unusual for him to travel up to see you.”
Nan shrugs. “I think, after four years, it’s probably just due. Anyway, lovely to have some company. I’m making delicious salads straight from the garden, and Sarah has promised to drop off a lobster salad she made yesterday.”
“Sounds yummy.” Michael instantly pictures the table set on the deck, his mother’s ballet slippers kicked off as she curls her legs under her after lunch, cradling a large tumbler of white wine in one hand, a ubiquitous cigarette in the other. “Don’t drink too much.”
Michael says good-bye with a sad smile, clicking his phone shut as he reaches his bike which is chained to a lamp post outside his apartment on 94th and Columbus. As he does so he is unaware of the admiring glance he’s given from a tall blond walking her dog.
Michael has always been unaware of his appeal, taken for granted his large green eyes, inherited from his mother, his easy smile, his all-American clean-cut looks.
At forty-two he looks much like the college football player he used to be, tanned and rangy, and utterly comfortable in his skin.
He undoes the lock and secures his helmet, slipping the phone into his backpack and weaving off down Columbus, making a mental note to phone Sarah, just to make sure that Mom is okay, to make sure that someone is looking out for her, that she isn’t quite as alone as she sounds.