Jenny Oliver - The Summerhouse by the Sea - The best selling perfect feel-good summer beach read!

Next to the wardrobe there was a door to a room in the eaves that she presumed housed things like the Hoover and ironing board. Walking over the tread-worn Indian rug, the sounds outside of beach playing and bells ringing, she went to turn the handle but the door didn’t open. The paint had almost melted it shut. She tugged a couple of times, about to give up, when it pulled free to the sound of splitting paint.

It wasn’t a room for the Hoover. It was a dressing room. Ava narrowed her eyes but just saw outlines in the darkness. She searched the wall for the light and when she finally found it, a tatty bit of too-short string, she clicked and a million sequins shone as the little ante-room lit up.

‘Bloo-dy hell.’ She put her hand up to her mouth.

A rail, filled with furs and rhinestone jackets, afghan coats and sequinned ballgowns, bowed under the weight. Pairs of shoes – patent, velvet, some with diamanté buckles – were crammed into every nook and cranny. Black-and-white-striped hat boxes were pushed on to too-small shelves next to baskets of silk scarves and belts curled like sleeping snakes. On a peg hung a fox fur, still with its little face and tiny claws, and next to him an open jewellery box filled with sunglasses. Everywhere she looked there was something: a lipstick that had rolled from its basket, a homeless brooch on a ledge, a bulging make-up bag with a zip that wouldn’t close, a teetering stack of glossy programmes.

Ava stared with her hands on both sides of her face. These weren’t her grandmother’s things but her mother’s. Things she had thought lost, gone, given away forever.

The smell in here was different. No more cologne but sweet, dark perfume. Guerlain’s Shalimar. The grooved glass bottle with its golden seal such a familiar sight in her youth. And lipstick, chalky and red. And the remnants of decadence: money and fur, couture still in dry cleaning plastic, expensive shoes once so carefully protected in soft white bags.

Ava could barely breathe.

It all suddenly felt completely different. No longer just the bittersweet task of packing away her grandmother’s long, beautifully lived life, but of being handed back her mother. As though she was standing there in the poky little room with her, hat shading one eye, lips slicked red, selfish, unreachable, magnetic, magnificent.

Ava backed out of the room, her hand gently closing the paint-cracked door. She walked fast, almost a trot, towards the staircase, the hallway and the front door, and seconds later was outside. Out into the bright heat of the sun, out into the noise of the beach and the shimmer of the wide blue sea, out where time kept moving and she could breathe like a normal person again.

CHAPTER 8

Rory was heartbroken.

It had taken less than an hour for the tweet and linking article to go viral.

Executive producer, Bruce Haslen, had arrived in his Range Rover, where they sat, rain hammering the windscreen.

‘I know you didn’t mean it, mate. But it wasn’t one of your brightest ideas.’ Bruce tapped the cream leather steering wheel.

Rory felt utterly sick. His whole career was being shredded before his eyes. People were questioning all his past work, sending him #VileRory hate messages, mocking up pictures of his face on a Christmas dinner goose. People were tweeting and retweeting faster than he could refresh Bruce’s iPad. All this was happening and he didn’t even have his own smartphone.

‘Can’t I just send out some kind of apology? Draft something with PR?’ Rory said, and even to his ears it sounded lame.

Bruce sat back and exhaled, staring up to where the rain battered the sunroof, then turned to look Rory’s way. ‘Too late for that, I’m afraid. They’re already placarding. One lot have made a human wall of protection around the nest.’

Rory put his head back against the plush leather and shut his eyes. ‘Well at least something’s happening, I suppose.’

Bruce gave a half-hearted attempt at a laugh. The rain thrashed around them in the darkness.

‘I’m sorry, mate,’ said Bruce.

‘Not your fault,’ Rory said. ‘Bloody Petra though – who tells their Daily Mail boyfriend about something like this? Why didn’t I know she was shacked up with a journo?’

‘New romance, evidently.’ Bruce shrugged.

Claire ran out of the house with a brolly and tapped on the window. ‘Are you all OK?’ she asked. ‘Anyone want a cup of tea? Glass of wine?’

Rory shook his head. ‘No, I’m just coming back in.’ He barely looked at Claire as he opened the door, part of him still annoyed with her for throwing his phone down the toilet, which, given the escalation of events, he knew wasn’t healthy or fair but he couldn’t help it.

Bruce started the engine. ‘We’ll reconvene in a week and see where we’re at. I think you’re off the swans for good, but I’m sure you’ll be fine for the jellyfish.’

Rory couldn’t see how he’d be fine for the upcoming Jellyfish Apocalypse documentary. People remembered. They’d say that he’d somehow warmed up the ocean and bred them himself to create the epidemic.

Once inside he disappeared to the bedroom and sat refreshing his Twitter feed on his laptop. The Eskimo-snow documentary-maker had refrained from commenting on Rory directly, but when tweeting about his exciting new project – which it transpired was a voyage across the Pacific Ocean in search of Plastic Island – he added the hashtag #honestwork, which made Rory cover his face with his hands and shout with frustration.

‘You should go to sleep,’ he heard Claire say as she came into the bedroom.

He ignored her. Refreshed the app again. His Twitter feed couldn’t even register the number of retweets and comments about him there were so many. He also had Ava’s Instagram feed open in another window and he stared at a picture of their grandmother’s house. ‘I can’t believe she went anyway, even though we agreed she wouldn’t. How could she?’

‘You need to turn it off, Rory, it’s driving you mad.’ Claire got into bed and turned her sidelight off, casting the room into gloomy darkness. Rory’s face was lit only by the blue glow of the laptop.

‘I won’t be able to sleep.’

‘You haven’t tried.’

‘I know I won’t be able to.’

Claire shuffled up the bed a bit. ‘They say that blue glow stops the melatonin that helps you sleep.’

Rory gave her a look.

Claire breathed in through her nose and out again. ‘It’ll be OK, Rory. I mean, maybe it’s not a bad thing? Maybe it’s a chance to do something new?’

Rory felt his jaw clench. ‘I don’t want to do something new. This was my dream. I was living my dream and I just wanted to keep on living it. Forever. And ever. Till I died or got so old that I couldn’t physically manage to do it, but even then would know that I could do it if some new technology was created to keep me alive. Jesus.’ He bunched his hands into fists. ‘I don’t want it taken away from me.’

Claire was looking up at him from her half-sitting position. ‘We’ve got to find a bright side to this.’

He stared at the pattern on the curtain, just visible in the black. ‘There is no sodding bright side. My life is basically ruined.’

‘Well why did you plan to kidnap the bloody goose?’ Claire bashed the duvet with her hand then immediately sighed, as if she hadn’t meant to say what she’d said. Like she’d been holding it in. After a pause she said, ‘The way you talk about it, it’s like you have no acknowledgement of the fact you still have us, you still have your home. This is one part of your life, Rory, and we’ll fix it.’

They both stared straight ahead at the curtains, the only noise the sound of rain tapping on the window.