The House We Called Home: The magical, laugh out loud summer holiday read from the bestselling Jenny Oliver

Sonny turned round though and made a sniggering face at Gus. And Rosie was walking backwards now, eyes narrowed as if she’d been certain she had cracked a particularly difficult code that no one else had yet deciphered.

Gus raised a brow, smug to have outwitted her.

Amy marched on ahead, not speaking, putting herself as far ahead of the group as she could.

Gus thought about the phone call he’d had with his mother last night when he’d been out walking the dog. Needing to talk to someone but unsure who. As soon as she’d answered the phone he knew she’d been the wrong person to call.

‘She says she’s going to keep it.’

‘Oh, Gus, love, that’s wonderful.’

‘It’s not wonderful.’

‘Where are you? It’s very loud.’

‘Cornwall. It’s the sea.’

‘You could do with a bit of fresh air.’

He imagined her bustling round the kitchen, desperate to envelope him in a big, busty hug. She’d be clutching the cat, probably, to make up for his absence. He’d sighed, regretting the panic that had made him ring in the first place. ‘If she has it, I suppose it’ll only be every other weekend though, won’t it?’ he said, almost to himself. ‘Isn’t that what people do?’ He could hear his sister, Claudia, in the background as his mother relayed the whole chat to her, say, ‘Overnight usually in the week as well, Gussy!’

‘Stop it, the pair of you,’ his mother said. ‘You don’t just have a baby at the weekend, Gus. It’s forever. It’s in your life, that’s it.’

Gus had made a hasty excuse to hang up then walked glassy-eyed after the dog, the word ‘forever’ looping in his head like the monotonous drone of the waves.

Now the air was getting warmer as they walked. Out the other side of the field they trudged up the coastal path. A maze of brambles on one side, a sheer drop on the other. Gus peered down at the sea, tide in, lapping at the base of the cliff like a hungry dog. There was no shade. No one had thought to bring any water. By the time they got to the Coach and Horses they were all sweaty and sulky with thirst. Amy snapped at Rosie and Sonny to stop squabbling as she patted her skin with a tissue, checking in the window that her make-up was all still in place before they went in. Gus wondered if he had time to get a swift half in but thought he’d better not when Amy opened the door and all the locals greeted her with a big show of sympathetic enthusiasm. Gus thought he’d loiter close to the door instead. An old man by the bar gave Rosie a pound for the fruit machine which kept her and Sonny busy. Gus watched as a group of young surfer-looking guys hovered round Amy, hugging her, draping their arms round her shoulders, kissing her on the cheek and ruffling her hair. It was fascinating to watch. She seemed surprised to see them all and less comfortable with the attention than he’d presumed she might be, breaking the chat short to ask the barman if he’d seen her dad recently or noticed anything unusual.

‘Barely been in,’ the barman said. ‘Last couple of weeks haven’t seen him. Sorry, love.’

Amy nodded. ‘That’s OK.’

Behind her the fruit machine started beeping and flashing. Rosie yelped as coins started clanging into the tray. ‘I’ve won!’ she shouted.

The whole place turned to look. Amy’s friends laughed, a couple of them swaggering over to gawp at the jackpot. Gus heard them invite Amy to sit down for a drink but she declined, pointing to the door, inadvertently at Gus, saying that they had to go. Gus lifted his hand in a self-conscious wave. One of the guys raised a brow at Amy. She did a little shake of her head, ‘It’s nothing like that,’ then helping Rosie scoop coins into her pocket, ushered them all back out into the sunshine.

‘Right, to the high street,’ she said, pushing her sunglasses on and pointing up the lane, clearly on edge.

‘Race you, Cow Pat,’ Sonny shouted and ran ahead.

Rosie sprinted after him. ‘Don’t call me Cow Pat.’

Gus found himself side by side with Amy.

They walked in silence for a bit.

‘Everything OK?’ he asked, more just for something polite to say. She definitely seemed a bit odd but then she always seemed slightly odd to him.

‘Fine,’ she said, without turning his way.

Gus nodded.

A bus trundled by. They walked past a tea room and an antique centre. An old woman with a stick was deadheading her geraniums. ‘Oh, hello Amy, love. You all right?’ she asked.

‘Fine thank you, Mrs Obertone,’ Amy said, super polite, taking her sunglasses off and making a point of checking that Mrs Obertone’s children were well, etc.

Gus shuddered. He couldn’t bear the idea of everyone knowing him and everything about him again. Visits to his parents’ house were always accompanied by wind-ups in the pub about when he was going to take over the farm.

When they got to what Amy had referred to as the high street – a gallery, fish and chip shop, pasty shop, and pharmacy – Gus trailed behind her as she went into every shop and enquired about her father. And every single person enquired about her, a subject he noticed Amy expertly deflected, countering quick smart with questions about all the other person’s extended family. For Gus, it was painfully slow going.

Finally, they got to the Londis.

Gus ambled the aisles as Amy queued at the checkout to talk to the cashier whose name nobody could remember.

He found Rosie in the toy section holding a Barbie in a box. ‘Don’t you think she looks like Amy?’ she said.

Gus exhaled as he took the Barbie off her and stared, reluctantly, at the big blue eyes and the big blonde hair. ‘A bit.’

‘You don’t look like Ken,’ Rosie said flatly.

Gus laughed. ‘No, I know I don’t.’

‘Your nose is too big,’ she said, giggling naughtily to herself after she said it.

‘Thanks.’

Rosie looked confused. ‘I don’t understand why you said thanks.’

‘Because your aim was to insult me and it didn’t work.’

Her cheeks pinked. ‘Will you tell my mum?’

‘Yes.’

She looked panicked.

‘No,’ said Gus, rolling his eyes. ‘Why would I tell your mum? How old are you?’

‘Seven.’

‘Well, you’re old enough to learn. Don’t say bad shit about people’s noses.’

‘You said “shit”.’

‘Yes, I did. Got a problem with that?’

‘It’s not nice to swear.’

‘Are you going to tell my mum?’

Rosie giggled. ‘I can’t tell your mum.’

‘Here,’ Gus got his phone out his pocket, ‘ring her up, tell her.’

‘Noooooo,’ Rosie laughed, like he was the silliest person she’d met.

Gus put his phone away with a grin.

Rosie picked up the Ken doll box. ‘He actually looks like Uncle Bobby.’ She turned to look at Gus. ‘He died. Did you know that?’

Gus shook his head.

‘Surfing,’ Rosie said.

‘Oh right.’ Gus nodded. ‘And Uncle Bobby, that was your Mum and Amy’s brother, yeah?’ Part of him knew that that wasn’t going to be the right answer when he said it, but the part of him willing it to be right had overruled it. Because if, as he suspected, this Bobby character had been Amy’s husband then it suddenly added another layer to this person he’d inadvertently slept with. To this person he had intended to persuade to terminate the baby she was carrying. To this person who wasn’t really a person but just an airhead Britney Spears WhatsApp avatar.

Rosie made a face at him, a real winner of an are-you-completely-stupid stare and said, ‘Mum doesn’t have a brother. Bobby was married to Amy. It’s really sad. Amy was really sad. Bobby was really handsome—’

‘That’s enough, Rosie,’ Amy’s voice cut in on the conversation. She was standing at the end of the aisle, arms crossed.

Rosie jumped and dropped the Ken doll.

Gus bent down to pick it up, slowly, all the time watching as Amy came forward and yanked Rosie over to the ice cream freezer.

Then he stood up and slotted the doll back on the shelf, pausing for a second, his hand resting on a Buy One Get One Free sign. ‘Shit,’ he muttered under his breath.

CHAPTER 10

Stella and Jack were halfway back from the fishing lake when the car broke down. The petrol gauge had been bleeping on empty since they left the house but a trip to the petrol station was in the opposite direction to the lake, and Jack had assured Stella that the Nissan Qashqai can run 43 miles after the needle hits empty on the dashboard. The lake was only ten miles away. Unfortunately, Jack hadn’t factored in a key road on the route being blocked by a lorry pouring concrete for building works and a diversion which then led off into a winding country lane maze outside Stella’s jurisdiction and unnavigable because iMaps wouldn’t load on either of their phones. When they finally got back to countryside she knew, they were out of petrol.

‘We should have got the sat nav fixed,’ Jack muttered, slamming the car door.

‘Or,’ Stella said, standing in the passing point where they’d managed to crawl to a stop, ‘we should have got some petrol.’

Jack didn’t reply. Just sucked in his cheeks, visibly fuming.

Stella scratched her head, looked around to get her bearings. It had been so long since she’d lived around here.

‘Which way?’ Jack said, his phone map still just a frustrating grey grid with a blue dot.

Stella shrugged. ‘Well, the house is that way.’ She pointed slightly to her right. ‘But the quickest route would be straight ahead to the sea and then along the cliff path. So up there.’ She pointed towards the high verge beside them that flanked the road. Jack looked dubious but didn’t argue, clearly still furious with himself about the petrol.

Heat bore down on them as they climbed. The humidity was reaching its peak. Stella slipped on the grass in her flip-flops. Her long blue skirt and white vest were not meant for trudging walks. Midges buzzed round her head.

She felt like she was walking through one of the polytunnels she’d watched out of the window of a coach journey once through the arid wasteland of southern Spain. It was years ago, in the early days of having Sonny when she had no clue how much sun the pale new skin of a baby could handle. Sonny had spent the week squeezed like a fat little sausage into an all-in-one sun protection suit and hat with a white baby-sunblock face. She’d watched other children running about naked. She remembered running about naked herself, but the sun was more dangerous now because of global warming – that’s what she’d read on Mumsnet when she’d googled it before they left. But then one of the posts had warned of babies having vitamin D deficiency nowadays because they were overly protected from the sun. She remembered sitting looking perplexed with Jack – both of them, she knew, secretly remembering the holidays when they could lie back for a nap or nip off to the bar for a beer. Jack did actually nip off to the bar for a beer, and alone with the sand-eating sausage baby, Stella had started to write, scribbling in the back of the paperback she had naively taken to read, and Potty-Mouth was born. The first column was called, ‘Holiday? What holiday?’ The first line: ‘I never believed anyone when they said a holiday with kids was “same shit, different place”. I thought they were just miserable bastards. They were. They had kids.’

She’d actually quite enjoyed the holiday in the end – staying up eating tapas while Sonny snored in the buggy in just his nappy, watching him giggle at the sea and be cooed over by grannies – and the article had gone full circle, ending on a high note but certainly not scrimping on the grizzle. The Sunday broadsheet magazine that she wrote for occasionally had run it, delighted by the angle – their readers loved a shocked snort with their weekend brunch, a nod of retrospective agreement ‘I wish we’d been able to say things like this in my day’ or a pass of the page over the table, ‘read this, it’s like that time it rained in Mallorca every day and the twins got chicken pox’. A flurry of letters arrived in uproarious response – some full-blown thank yous from people just relieved that someone else was finding it all as bad or worse than they were, others who didn’t find her funny at all, she tried her best to ignore those, because Potty-Mouth was hired.

Over the years her column had lost an inch to advertising space and a new editor had made it clear that the readers wanted the grizzle. The best of the bad bits wrapped up in a witty package that took just over three minutes to read.

‘I’m sweating,’ said Jack as he hiked the final few feet up the hill. The verge dotted with spiky gorse bushes and pink heather.

‘Me too.’

Jack wiped his brow with his T-shirt. Dark hair pushed up off his forehead. Face still rigid.

They stopped side by side at the top. Below them the scene dropped into fields of sheep and crops. Rows of cabbages and corn. A tractor was backing into the farm, then further out past a golf course and caravan park was the sea. Glinting and familiar. Pale as the sky. Stella inhaled through her nose, felt her shoulders drop slightly.

Jack shook his head. ‘This is madness. We’re miles away.’

Stella rolled her eyes. ‘It’s not that bad,’ she laughed, his annoyance working to deflate her own.

‘It’s pretty bad,’ Jack said, sweeping his arm to take in the endless view.

Stella shaded her eyes with her hand. ‘Well, look, that’s the Goldstone Caravan Park,’ she said, pointing at the rows of white static vans in the distance. ‘And the leisure centre.’ She squinted, gesturing to the right of the vans, to an ugly grey concrete building. ‘Once we’re there, we’re pretty much almost home.’ It was the distance between them and there that was the worry. ‘We just have to get across all those fields.’ She grinned.

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