Bones Under The Beach Hut

Chapter Seven

It was the kind of blazing June that got the residents of Fethering talking darkly of global warming. Mind you, every kind of climatic change got the residents of Fethering talking darkly about global warming. A thunderstorm, a heavy fall of snow, a sudden frost, even an unusually high wind, could start a lot of heads shaking in the Crown and Anchor or the local supermarket Allinstore. Like most of the English, the residents of Fethering had always used the weather as a conversational staple. But whereas the fisherman who once peopled the village would look gloomily up at the sky when they discussed it, the current inhabitants, who had just parked their 4x4s, would take on the same gloomy expressions and mention global warming. Not all of them actually believed in it, but they knew that in Fethering mentioning global warming was de rigueur.

The Thursday dawned even brighter than the previous days and Carole decided that she ought to go and investigate her new beach hut. The one to which Kelvin Southwest had given her the key had the name Fowey spelled out in whorls of rope on a board above its doorway. It was in every structural particular identical to Quiet Harbour, but Carole still felt she should check the place out. Her main aim was that, when she introduced Gaby and Lily to the delights of Smalting Beach, she should appear completely relaxed, au fait with the beach hut and its location. Almost an authentic hutter. She had already marked down The Copper Kettle as a good place to fill Lily up with ice creams and fizzy drinks. (She'd never allowed Stephen to have fizzy drinks when he was growing up, but her attitude to her granddaughter was more relaxed. After all, one of the essential clauses in the grandparents' charter was the right to spoil.)

There was also something new she wanted to introduce to Fowey. In common with Quiet Harbour, the hut only contained two chairs, also director's chairs, suggesting that perhaps they were equipment supplied by Fether District Council for the original renters. And it had so happened that, driving her Renault past a garden centre the previous day, Carole had seen on display a tiny child-size director's chair. Its wooden structure was painted pink and the seat and back were made of pink canvas.

The normal reaction of Carole Seddon to such an object would have been to snort while the phrase 'overpriced rubbish' formed in her mind, but the existence of Lily was having strange effects on her normal reactions. In the control of an irresistible power, she found herself parking her Renault outside the garden centre, going straight in and buying one of the small pink director's chairs. It was indeed overpriced, but Carole didn't let that worry her. She just knew that her granddaughter would love her own personal seat.

On a heady roll, she also found herself going to the Fethering Allinstore and buying a Big Beach Bucket Bag. Inside the red net sack was a big red bucket, which contained a smaller red bucket with crenellated indentations, a blue plastic spade and a selection of brightly coloured sand moulds in the shapes of a fish, a crab, a boat and a star.

Carole didn't want to risk the danger of Lily seeing these new purchases before they got to Smalting Beach, deciding that their maximum effect would be produced if her granddaughter found them when she entered the beach hut. So they needed to be planted there. Which was another reason for her to pay a visit to Fowey that Thursday morning. Also Gulliver could do with a change from Fethering Beach for his walk.

Just as Carole was about to leave, Jude appeared at the front door of High Tor. In deference to the weather, she only wore one chiffon scarf over her yellow T-shirt and denim skirt. Perched on her blond topknot was a battered straw hat.

'Hi, Carole,' she said. 'It's so hot I'm about to go down to the beach. I've knocked together a bit of a picnic. Do you and Gulliver fancy coming?'

'We were just about to go to the beach ourselves. But not Fethering Beach.'

'Oh?'

'Smalting. To check out my substitute beach hut.'

'And follow up on your investigation?' asked Jude teasingly.

'Who knows? Anyway, why don't you come with us?'

Fowey was not in the same row of beach huts as Quiet Harbour. It was in fact as far away as it could be. The three slightly curved rows of twelve units each were set in a bigger curve, forming a crescent shape, so that from their director's chairs outside Fowey Carole and Jude had a perfect view of the damaged hut.

It was, of course, locked shut, as were about half of the others. In front of the remainder, families spread themselves while small children made endless journeys up and down to the water. Like the nearby Fethering Beach, the one at Smalting sloped very gradually, so that at low tide a couple of hundred yards of sand were exposed. When the tide was high, it came up to the bank of shingle that protected the beach huts and the promenade.

Carole and Jude found themselves looking at a perfect English seaside scene, as featured on vintage railway posters; one that hadn't changed much for the previous fifty or sixty years, except for the ubiquitous mobiles and the white earphone leads of iPods. Another difference from the normal reality of English seaside scenes was that it wasn't raining.

Thinking back to her own childhood, Carole was also struck by the brightness of the swimwear on display. Her recollection was of a navy woollen bathing costume that clung embarrassingly to her developing figure, that tickled and felt clammy when it got wet. Watching the pubescent girls in tape-thin bikinis cavorting on Smalting Beach made her feel very old.

She wasn't made to feel younger by the behaviour of her neighbour. As soon as they'd got the director's chairs out and Carole had settled down to her crossword, Jude proceeded to remove her T-shirt and skirt. What was revealed was a turquoise two-piece costume, which did little to disguise its owner's generous proportions. Carole, who didn't carry a spare ounce of weight, still worried about her wobbly bits, but clearly Jude had no such inhibitions. And as ever, in spite of the volumes of flesh exposed, she managed to look good. A couple of passing boys in microscopic Speedos viewed her with considerable interest.

Jude caught Carole's eye and, as she so often could, seemed to intuit her friend's thoughts. 'If you've got it, flaunt it,' she shrugged. 'Haven't you brought a bathing costume with you?'

'No,' replied Carole in a manner that suggested she had been asked something much more offensive. That teenage awkwardness about her body had never quite left her, and now as a post-menopausal woman she felt far too old to start showing it off. She didn't even really like showing her legs without tights and her chosen beachwear for the day was a pair of grey slacks, a sleeveless white shirt, white socks and blue canvas shoes.

'You'll have to get hold of one before next week,' said Jude.

'What do you mean?'

'Lily's going to want her Granny to go into the sea with her, isn't she?'

'Oh. I hadn't thought of that.'

'I'm going down for a paddle,' Jude announced impetuously. And she ran over the flat sand towards the sea, setting everything jiggling, but again attracting some admiring male glances.

Carole tried to focus her mind on The Times crossword, but without success. She was continually distracted by the sounds and sights of the beach. And her eyes kept wandering across to the locked frontage of Quiet Harbour, prompting further speculations about what she had seen inside the hut.

To distract herself, she went into Fowey and took the small pink director's chair out of its plastic wrapping. She set it on the sand between its two grown-up counterparts and indulged in a moment of soppiness. She couldn't wait to see Lily sitting in it. She somehow just knew her granddaughter would love the thing. Then, not wishing Jude to witness her sentimentality, she folded the little chair and put it back inside.

Still restless, she gave in to the reproachful look from Gulliver, who took a pretty dim view of being tied up by his lead to a hook on the outside of the beach hut. So Carole took him for a little stroll along the curved rows of beach huts, observing as much as she could without being seen to be snooping. The one right next door to Fowey was called Shrimphaven. The doors were open, but the hut looked to be empty. As a result Carole peered in more obviously than she might have done, and was embarrassed to meet the bespectacled gaze of a young woman sitting in the shadows over an open laptop. Making an awkward cough of apology, Carole scuttled off along the line of huts.

Some of the owners she recognized from her previous visit. Outside a hut called Mistral an elderly couple sat on candy-striped loungers. The woman, plump, white-haired, with powdered skin like pink meringue, was contentedly working her way through a book of word searches. She looked up as Carole passed.

'Morning,' the old woman said in a comfortable, homely voice. 'I gather you've got problems with Quiet Harbour.'

'A bit of fire damage. Not too serious. Vandals, I suppose.'

The woman shook her head gloomily. 'Too much of that going on these days. By the way, my name's Joyce Oliver.'

'Carole Seddon.'

'And that's Lionel.' The husband she gestured to looked unsuitably dressed for the beach. Though he was in shirt sleeves, the shirt was a formal white one, and his charcoal trousers with neat creases looked as though they were the bottom half of a suit. Over the back of his lounger hung a matching jacket. His shoes, black lace-ups with toecaps, were highly polished. Beside him on the sand was a copy of the Daily Mail, but he wasn't reading it. He was just looking out to sea with an expression of infinite bleakness.

'In a world of his own, as ever,' said Joyce Oliver with a little chuckle, as Gulliver tugged on his lead to get moving. 'Well, I'm sure we'll see you again, Carole.

We're here most days in the summer, and particularly at the moment because we're in the process of moving house. Place where we brought up the kids is far too big for us now. It's a wrench leaving the house, but has to be done. Lionel can't manage the garden any more. It's his pride and joy — the work he's put into the landscaping and the water features you wouldn't believe. But it's too much for him now and he hates the idea of having someone else doing it for him, so the move does make good sense.

'Anyway, we're not quite out of the old house, and there's lots of work needs doing on the new one — well, you can't really call it a house, it's only a flat — so coming down here to the hut is quite a relief, let me tell you.'

'Yes, it's a lovely spot,' said Carole, providing a predictable comment on Smalting Beach. Then with a nod to Joyce Oliver, she continued along the line of beach huts.