Christmas by the Lighthouse Read online

  Summer sighed, but then cheered up again as she fiddled around with the iPad and dialled Levi’s number. The FaceTiming was a weekly arrangement and was far too early as far as the boys were concerned, so she barely got anything out of them. But it was easier than trying to catch them in the evening – their social life was rampant. Her twins were twenty and in their second year at the same university where they studied the same course and lived in the same house, even though, like Summer and Seth, they were very different characters – Luke a happy-go-lucky sort for whom the phrase ‘winging it’ might have been invented, and Levi a planner who left nothing to chance. But they were the best of friends, which, whenever Summer thought about it, gave her a warm glow. If she’d done nothing else right in her life, she felt she’d at least brought up two very lovely boys.

  ‘Morning, whippersnappers,’ she said as she peered at the screen. Luke and Levi sat side by side, yawning, mugs of coffee in their hands. Identical to look at, they were also pretty much replicas of their mother, with unruly dark hair, piercing blue eyes and – except at this time of the morning – beaming smiles. Their features weren’t as delicate as Summer’s, though, who had what she’d been told was a ‘pixie’ (or sometimes plain old ‘naughty’) face thanks to her tiny nose and dimpled chin and cheeks.

  Seth had been dark like her and the boys, though his hair was quickly becoming ‘salt-and-pepper’ as he approached forty, and his eyes were much more serious. He probably had the most engaging smile of all of them but he was less forthcoming with his. In some ways, it made the smile all the more enchanting when it finally arrived, like being paid a compliment by someone who has impossibly high standards.

  Having dragged some news out of the twins, Summer switched off FaceTime and turned to the BBC website, searching for a recipe for Eton Mess. Before starting to gather ingredients, she read it through twice – a discipline she’d come to realise was essential to implement, for she suffered from what she called ‘recipe dyslexia’, always missing some crucial component or instruction, which had led to some fairly unappetising meals over the years. Despite that, she never ran out of optimism when it came to cooking; always convinced that – somewhere inside her – a fantastic chef was lurking and, if she just kept on trying, it would eventually emerge.

  The Mess finally concocted, she slotted it into the fridge and found her fluorescent sticky notes. She scribbled on two of them Remember pudding! and placed one on the fridge and the other on the front door, a nifty trick she’d learnt to help with her uncooperative memory. She checked her watch. Her deadline was one o’clock and the article she was due to file needed an awful lot of polishing. She abandoned the muddle in the kitchen and hurried through to the study, where she found her laptop and went to open the article.

  ‘Where is it?’ she asked herself. She searched. A sinking sensation was swiftly followed by a slightly sick feeling. After a panicky five minutes, it was clear the document was gone. She hadn’t saved it. A computer whizz-kid might well have been able to retrieve it from some cloud or other but sadly she was no expert and she hadn’t the time to locate one. Seth was even worse than her at computers. There was no other option – she’d have to rewrite it. She racked her brain, trying to remember what she’d written on the subject of ‘Sexual Positions in your Thirties’, as the article was called. Ironic, really, considering she and Seth hadn’t had sex for nearly a year.

  She was, to the horror of several of the school parents, a journalist for the ‘women’s health’ section of a well-known magazine. When she’d taken the job, she’d expected to be researching articles on fad diets and revolutionary vitamins, but by and large the editor, Guy Simmons (a man Summer had decided was a complete pervert), wanted Summer to write about sex. By twelve forty-five she’d emailed her hastily invented article to Guy, fingers and toes crossed it wouldn’t bring about a most unpleasant rage (he was fiery as well as perverted), then dashed back to the kitchen.

  She started gathering her jacket, handbag and keys, all the while muttering Eton Mess, Eton Mess, Eton Mess to herself. She got a little flustered when she couldn’t find her ballet pumps but, eventually ready, she raced out of the door and drove as fast as she could within the village speed limits to Barbara Robinson’s house, where today’s Tuesday Group – a gathering of middle-aged women with connections to the school – was to take place. She slammed the car door, made her way up Barbara’s front path and rang the bell.

  ‘Hello!’ welcomed Barbara, who leant forward, reeking of Chanel No. 5, all set for some air kissing. But Summer stood stock still as, for the second time that day, her stomach lurched.

  She’d forgotten the bloody Eton Mess.

  Chapter Three

  JERSEY, THURSDAY

  JUDE

  Thursday morning and he tramped through the side door of the bank and deliberated over whether to take the lift or the stairs. Taking the lift was like a game of Russian roulette – half the time it gave out on the way up to the third floor – but Jude wasn’t sure he could face three flights of stairs at this time in the morning. He felt headachy and fatigued. Then again, it would be good exercise, would set him up nicely for the day. In fact, he could eat the pastry he’d just bought without feeling guilty. Jude wavered.

  He took the lift.

  It was his lucky day. Amazingly, he made it all the way up without incident. Today he’d decided to bring coffee in with him. He didn’t want a repeat of Tuesday’s performance when Helena had thwarted his coffee-making attempts. He checked his watch. Four minutes until the first call. He scrolled down his emails, deleting several trivial-looking items without reading them (Has anyone seen my mug? and Important training session), then let out a tut of frustration. There was one from his mum. He must have told her a million times not to email him at work but to his personal address instead, explaining about the bank’s resident IT geek who made no secret of the fact that he got all his kicks from reading employees’ personal correspondence. But Beryl was not very tech-savvy and clearly hadn’t worked out how to remove Jude’s work email address from her list of default contacts. Jude opened it.

  G’day from Australia, it began, as her emails always did. How are you? Hope work isn’t too stressful. Is that boss of yours being a cow? And do you think she’s still having it off with that chap from IT?

  Jude groaned.

  Everything’s fine here in Perth. It’s autumn now so the days aren’t so hot – a relief for us Brits. Still mid-twenties and sunny most days. I’ve joined a new bridge club – a good bunch of people although the woman who hosts it can be a bit snotty. I always thought you wouldn’t get snobs in Australia but I guess they get everywhere. Dad is doing okay after his hip op – walking around now and in a lot less pain. Have you heard from Daisy? She seems to have gone ‘off grid’.

  Jude snorted at his mum’s use of the expression. She sounded like an undercover agent. Too many Aussie cop shows.

  Love to you, as always. Come and stay soon. Love Mum x

  Nowadays, thinking about his mum caused Jude very normal conflicting feelings of affection and irritation. For the first couple of months after his parents had emigrated, if he’d thought about his mother at all he’d wanted to howl like a two-year-old. He’d been eighteen.

  Jude had been mollycoddled as a baby and all through his childhood. He was a shy child, gawky and four-eyed, his only saving grace a natural ability at games that – by and large – prevented him from suffering a school lifetime of bullying at the boys-only secondary he attended in Jersey. As it was, he was neither popular nor (save for one small period in his life) one of the poor dweebs who regularly suffered the merciless ridiculing of the cool boys. He seemed generally to blend pretty much into the background, a position he was more than happy to live with. And home life, by contrast, was blissful. A cosy mother – blonde, nurturing and happily domesticated – and a steady, breadwinning father who stood dutifully at the sidelines and cheered when Jude managed to get into the Under Fifteens rugby team.
Daisy, his bossy older sister, was a little on the jealous side, having decided that Jude was her parents’ favourite, but she was still grudgingly loving and caring – particularly about Jude’s rugby injuries. She loved a bit of blood and gore.

  Jude imagined his life would continue like this, a life where, whatever the outside world threw at him, home – the home he’d lived in his entire life in the seaside parish of St Brelade – would always be there, reassuringly dated in its decor but smelling perpetually of Mum’s dinners and freshly ironed laundry. A place where his mother would be ready at the door to welcome him with her sweetly perfumed kisses and his father would pat him on the back and be ready with a listening ear.

  But he was wrong. Unbeknown to him, his parents had always planned to move to Australia, where his mother’s sister – Auntie Irene – had lived since marrying an Aussie at the age of twenty-one. And, loving though she was, Beryl believed that a child miraculously turned into an adult the minute their eighteenth birthday arrived. So when that time came, while her affection towards Jude had not diminished exactly, it had altered sufficiently to enable her to make the decision. She and Jude’s father put the family home on the market. They were going to Australia. The news came a fortnight after Jude found out he’d got into Exeter University to train as a teacher. Having imagined he would return at the end of every term to the cosy bosom of his family, he was devastated.

  Of course, his parents offered for both Jude and Daisy to emigrate with them. For Daisy, it was clear-cut. She was two years into training as a doctor at King’s in London and was not quite so tied to Beryl’s apron strings as Jude. She would visit, she promised them, but she wouldn’t move. Jude, on the other hand, didn’t know what to do. It was a big enough change for him to be moving to England after eighteen years solid on the tiny island of Jersey, but Australia? In all honesty, he didn’t fancy it. He dithered for weeks, unable to decide, until in the end his father told him what he thought Jude should do.

  ‘Get your studies done in the UK,’ said his dad. ‘Then, when those years are done, come to Australia and be with us then. I’m sure you’ll be able to convert your qualification easily enough so you can teach in Perth. And we’ll be there, welcoming you with open arms, a few years down the line.’

  Jude had taken his father’s advice, but he’d been a mess – unable to enjoy his first term at university, feeling embarrassingly sorry for himself about it all, with his misery heightened by all the frolics going on around him as the freshers became legless and played practical jokes on each other.

  Ultimately, however, he’d got over it and had joined in the partying and the studying. And he’d somehow never gone to join his parents in the end, though he’d holidayed with them over several Christmases – the happy cliché of a barbie on the beach. Instead, he’d returned to Jersey, rented himself a flat and taken up his first teaching job, a career he’d achieved a huge amount of satisfaction from until that fateful day.

  It had been Jude’s thirty-second birthday and he’d spent it dealing mainly, as usual, with his delinquent student – a sixteen-year-old called Melvin with a number of issues. School had finished for the day and Jude had decided to get his marking done there, rather than in the comfort of his own home – a decision he would come to regret. He’d turned the classroom lights off and headed down the corridor, out the front doors and along the pathway that led to the car park. He’d seen a boy in a hoody, just along the path from him, spraying graffiti on the wall.

  ‘Hey! Stop that! Hey, you!’ he’d bellowed at the figure. The boy had turned and run and, with some kind of misguided heroic instinct, Jude had run after him. He would never have caught up with him, but the boy had tripped and fallen, quickly getting to his feet just as Jude reached him.

  ‘Melvin!’ he’d shouted, realising now who the culprit was. ‘You’re going to be in big trouble for this. Just you wait until . . .’ The remaining words had been taken from him as a sharp pain overwhelmed him. He’d reached for his stomach and felt the blood oozing from it. He’d been stabbed – the knife narrowly missing a major artery.

  Jude had survived. But something had happened to him that evening. He felt utterly pathetic about it, but the whole experience had robbed him of his already shaky self-confidence. He’d carried on teaching for a short while, once he’d physically recovered, but he’d lost his enthusiasm for it, and after a couple of months he’d handed in his notice and found himself his safe yet soul-destroying job at Hedgeleys.

  But Jude realised when enough was enough. One way or another, he had to at least try to grapple his way out of this beige existence that had, somewhere along the lines, become his own.

  Chapter Four

  ENGLAND, THURSDAY

  SUMMER

  The bungalow was, on the face of it, both neat and homely. Summer always just hoped fervently no visitor would think to open any cupboards, where her true slovenly nature won out – to the despair of Seth, who often grumbled about being the victim of Summer’s cruel practical jokes when he opened a cupboard door only to have the entire contents fall on top of him, usually prompting him to mutter something about how it never rains but it pours if he was in a bad mood or there being no point in crying over spilt milk if he was in a more forgiving one. Summer sometimes thought he was just a walking cliché.

  Just as she tried to conform with her own outward appearance, so Summer did her best to keep ‘Headmaster’s House’, as it was known, clean and tidy. The place was not owned by them but was theirs for the taking all the while Seth was headmaster of Camford Preparatory School (so far, ten years) on the outskirts of the village of Camford, near Peterborough. The school was an imposing Victorian building with several classroom Portakabins and the head’s modern bungalow hidden discreetly behind it.

  Summer had her methods to help her in this quest for tidiness. Music mainly. Radio 2 was her favourite, especially Chris Evans’s breakfast show, and she found that if she danced her way around the house the chores weren’t quite as boring. It was the futility of it all that annoyed her. What was the point of cleaning and tidying when it didn’t last longer than a day? But then perhaps that could be said of lots of things. She just wished she were more of a natural at it. Her friend Tilly was exceptionally neat and Summer observed her when she was round having coffee, making a mental note of the way she went about things. Summer and Tilly had been friends for ten years – ever since Seth had become headmaster at Camford. She’d been the first person to drop round, a dish of lasagne in her hands. Summer was a pescatarian, but she’d been hugely appreciative of the gesture, and she’d known that Seth, an enthusiastic meat-eater, would be thrilled.

  ‘Welcome to the village!’ Tilly had beamed. Summer had invited her into the bungalow and Tilly had placed the carefully cling-filmed dish down on the kitchen top and turned to embrace Summer in a hug, as if she were simply a friend she hadn’t seen in years rather than someone she’d never met before.

  Tilly was a warm person, always full of compliments, but there was just one part of her character that over the years Summer had learnt to be cautious about. Tilly was a tiny bit controlling. She had exceptionally high expectations and at times Summer felt her failure to match up to them frustrated her friend. Still, being a control freak had its advantages – Tilly’s enormous house at the centre of the village was always pristine, and Summer had realised that it wasn’t even that much of an effort for Tilly to keep it that way. It was completely natural for her to take a pan out of a cupboard, use it, wash it up and pop it straight back, when Summer would have just left the pan to soak in the sink.

  Summer’s other weak point was organisation. Oh, how she tried! She wasn’t one of those people who laughed indulgently at their own chaos while clearly considering themselves charmingly unconventional. She really, really wanted to be organised. She’d tried everything over the years to remember birthdays, school events when the boys were little, obligations associated with her own and Seth’s jobs and social functions. But th
e bottom line was that she was hopeless, and no whiteboard or cleverly reminding mobile phone could entirely transform her. Seth put it down to her upbringing, which had been severely lacking in structure and discipline, even if it had been rather lovely.

  Summer’s latest organisational test was Seth’s fortieth. Encouraged by Tilly, she’d arranged a surprise party.

  ‘Seth’s not even much of a party person!’ Summer had argued with her friend.

  ‘But you’ve got to do something!’ Tilly had said as she towel-dried her hair. They’d just been for a swim at their local gym.

  ‘But couldn’t I just do a family meal or something?’

  ‘Come on, Summer. That’s a cop-out. It’s his fortieth. He’ll be expecting something.’

  ‘Yes, of course he will. And quite rightly, too . . . A surprise party, you think?’

  ‘Perfect. I’ll help. Come to mine for coffee now and we’ll get everything organised. I’m happy to make the cake.’

  ‘Oh, would you?’ Summer had asked gratefully. She hated baking.

  And so she’d sent out invitations to all their friends and had ordered a job lot of tacky fortieth decorations from the ‘Part-eee Shop’. Seth was very particular about alcohol so she’d contacted the twins for advice – a barrel of real ale, Nyetimber sparkling wine and a robust red like a Shiraz, apparently. The boys promised to be there for the do, though the rest of their Easter holidays would be spent inter-railing through Europe. Food-wise, Summer couldn’t quite afford caterers but she and Tilly had decided to make a vast array of salads, quiches and sandwiches and she planned to buy a selection of canapés and crudités from M&S.

  She’d wondered about holding the party in the back garden but April was a funny time of year so she’d plumped for the school dining room in the end. At least it was available, being the Easter holidays, and all the tables, chairs, glasses and crockery they could need would be to hand.