Sara MacDonald - In a Kingdom by the Sea

I think of Mike heading off to the lights and smells of an unknown city, the heat fading from the pavements, the smell of enticing food wafting on the night air with all the excitement of exploring somewhere new.

A breeze moves the leaves of the small red acer on the lawn. They are reflected in the windows of the house, like delicate hands waving. Loneliness swoops like a sudden murmuration of starlings filling the sky.

Behind me, my house lies empty. How do I cope with just being me all over again when I longed for an us ? I had the illusion that this summer would mark a change, that Mike would finally be around, that the four of us would take a holiday together and then Mike and I would move on to a new phase in our lives.

I shiver in the night air as I face the truth. I am still here in the same place I have always been. Mike has moved on to the next phase of his life. Will and Matteo have their own lives. I am no longer central to their world nor will I ever be again. Mike, after a lifetime of working abroad, still chooses to live and work away from home and away from me.

In the house the phone rings. It is Kate.

‘Hugh says he will take us out to supper if you’re free. We’re both suffering from summer in the city blues. We never see the girls, they are off doing exciting things in the country with friends who have horses and jolly parents who are obviously much more fun than us. We’ve just cracked open a bottle of wine while we contemplate the meaning of life …’

I laugh. ‘I’m ordering a taxi now.’

I am glad when September comes and everyone is back from their holidays and the office gets back to normal. Will and Matt head back to Scotland, fit and brown. They have so much luggage I drive them to the station.

‘Thanks for the lift, Mum. Don’t be lonely. Not long until Christmas and then you’ll see Dad.’

‘You can practise light packing for Oman, Maman. By the time we get home you will have perfected the art …’ Matteo says, patronizingly.

I raise my eyebrow at his carpet of luggage. ‘I don’t think it’s me who needs to perfect the art of travelling light, Matteo …’

They hug me and are gone in a blur of rucksacks and loudspeakers, disappearing into the busy crowds, moving swiftly back into their own worlds.

I head for the office through the choked traffic. It is Emily’s birthday and we are all taking her out for lunch. As I pass the park I see the leaves on the sycamores are beginning to turn. The air is cooler, the shops are filling up with autumn clothes and the sun now sets beyond the garden. Summer is nearly over.

Cornwall, 1966

From the moment we moved into Loveday’s house Dominique and I forgot Redruth. We slipped off our lives there as easily as discarding a coat we had outgrown. We moved in time for the summer holidays and my parents were so busy working on our new home that we were allowed to run wild.

Papa brought us small knapsacks. Maman made sandwiches and a drink and off we set each day, mini explorers with a new world to discover.

Dominique was only ten that first summer but she had inbuilt common sense. She was fiercely protective of me and my parents trusted her. In a few years beauty and hormones would turn her into a bit of a wild child but I remember our first years there as near to idyllic.

There were strict rules. We had to know the tide times each day. We were never to go into the sea without an adult and there were unnegotiable boundaries beyond which we must not roam.

The village was full of summer people down in the holiday cottages by the harbour. Within weeks of moving in we were suddenly part of a little gang. There was a doctor’s family with identical twin boys, Benjamin and Tristan. They were Dominique’s age but wild and undisciplined. Their parents seemed to have given up trying to control them, but Dominique, somehow, managed to harness their energy and imagination. If they broke gang rules they were out.

The twins were in awe of Dominique and the three of them instigated most of our adventures. They made maps of our kingdom from Nearly Cave to Poo Tunnel. From Forbidden Beach out to the rugged cliffs and down to Priest’s Cove where the Pirate Boats came in with plunder.

After a while Maman and Papa let us roam a little further, as long as Dominique and the older children were with us. Papa would drop us off in his truck at Priest’s Cove to play soldiers and pirates on Smuggler’s Bridge. Later, Maman would walk along the coastal path to meet us with Mr Rowe’s old collie, Mabel.

None of us ever fell off the edge of a cliff or drowned. Nothing dire happened apart from us occasionally getting tired and quarrelsome. I was the youngest and wilted first at the miles the older children covered. Often Maman made me go home with her and I was secretly grateful. I am sure keeping up helped with my running when I was older. I learned stamina. I learned that if you whined or dragged your feet you got left behind.

Of course, it wasn’t a Mary Poppins life. Papa liked the pub a bit too much. Maman was possessive and jealous of other women. They had spectacular rows. Sometimes, Dominique and I would cover our ears and run out into the wild garden.

I would get upset but Dominique just laughed and shrugged.

‘Pff! It’s only Papa flirting or Maman thinking he is. They will make up.’ And they always did. We would return home to find Maman flushed and happy in a mysteriously embarrassing way. Papa would wink at us as he self-consciously helped Maman prepare our tea.

‘Guilty!’ Dominique would whisper.

‘Of what?’ I would whisper back.

Dominique would lean behind her hand. ‘Flirting with Miss Hicks. He’s mending her roof. Maman accused him of fancying her.’

‘Is fancying the same as flirting?’

Dominique considered. ‘I think it is one step worse. It’s okay though, it’s what grown-ups do. They get married, then they like other people and have rows.’

‘But … Papa still loves Maman?’

‘Of course he does, Rabbit. Look at them, all lovey-dovey …’

Dominique would roll her eyes and put a finger down her throat and pretend to be sick.

My sister was the font of all knowledge and my lodestar. When she went to secondary school I would wait for her at the bus stop every afternoon.

One day, she did not get off the school bus as usual. A girl in Dominique’s class told me that my sister had got off a stop early so she could walk home with her friends.

I was stricken by the sudden realization that Dominique was too kind to tell me that she wanted to spend more time with her friends, less with me.

I took off for the beach, mortified, and sat for the rest of the afternoon finding flat pebbles to skim, determined not to cry. Papa spotted me driving home in his truck. He came and sat beside me as I skimmed the stones into the waves. I did not say anything but somehow Papa knew.

‘Dominique needs a bit of space sometimes, sweetheart …’

From then on Papa tried to come home early on the days Maman was giving French lessons or privately tutoring. He took me body-boarding. He bought a double canoe and we towed it off to the estuary. I would do my homework or read a book while he fished.

Dominique had discovered the Jubilee Pool in Penzance. Everyone went there in the summer. Papa would drop me off after school to join her and her friends. That was where I met Morwenna, my first best friend.

She lived in a cottage the other side of the point by the harbour. Her father was a fisherman and her house always smelt of fish. Like Maman, her mother was always working too. In the Co-op, in the chippie and she cleaned holiday cottages.

Morwenna also had an elder sister, called Ada. Ada was not kind or pretty like Dominique. She had the disturbing, hard little face of an adult. A girl who grimly believed she had been cheated of something everyone else had. She had cause, I think, because her tired mother expected a lot of her.