The Beach Hut Next Door Read Free Page A

close-cropped black curls and his green eyes and his Celtic freckles, but there was something about Vince that women found irresistible. Maybe it was Vince’s total self-containment and his apparent lack of interest? Murphy could never feign that as long as he lived. He was borderline obsessed with women and could never disguise it. He just couldn’t help himself. He still couldn’t. Even now, when the two of them went out to the Ship Aground in Everdene, Murphy would be chatting up girls until closing time, even though he was happily married with two daughters of his own. Vince wondered how many times he had picked up the pieces over the years. Or calmed some sobbing female who had been the victim of one of Murphy’s flirtatious overtures. Not that they ever came to anything. If he’d been a girl, Murphy would have been called a prick-tease.
    ‘You can’t play with people for your own amusement,’ Vince told him repeatedly. ‘Or to feed that bloody ego of yours. And it’s not fair on Anna.’
    Anna. Vince’s heart always missed a beat whenever he thought of her. Vince didn’t think he had ever met anyone as serene and beautiful and calm. With her silver-blonde hair and her milk-white skin, she was as pale as moonlight, her eyes large and lambent in her face.
    Anna was a piano teacher. She gave lessons on the baby grand in the bay window of their living room in Chiswick. She was booked solidly, with an endless waiting list. Mothers and fathers fought between themselves to bring their darling ones to her lessons, and were so entranced by Anna they often found long-dead ambition rekindling and a sudden burning desire to play Chopin or Debussy.
    Vince loved the Murphy house. It was filled with music and candlelight and laughter. Everything was pale and beautiful, like Anna. Bleached wood, voile curtains, lace tablecloths. He imagined heaven a bit like this. Murphy himself was the only thing that didn’t seem to fit there. Even their daughters were mini versions of Anna, drifting like moonbeams around the house, pensive and other-worldly. Amongst the three of them, Murphy crackled with pent-up energy, restless and wired. But then, Vince told himself, opposites attract. He himself, with his calm introspection, was probably too like Anna to capture her interest. She just laughed at Murphy, who she called Smurph and never took too seriously.
    Their symbiosis intrigued him, and he wondered if there was a girl somewhere for him who would balance him out in the way Anna balanced out Murphy. He was never short of offers, but no one intrigued him the way she did. Although he suspected that together they would sink into nothingness. There would be no traction, no momentum. They would drift.
    Whenever he went to visit them, he didn’t want to leave.
    ‘You should come and live up here for a while,’ Murphy had told him a few years ago. ‘Everyone should live in London at some point in their life.’
    ‘And do what?’ asked Vince. ‘Not much call for a lobster fisherman in Chiswick.’
    That was back in the day, when he could have left if he’d really wanted to. Now, he reflected, as the boat chugged out into open water and he steered it towards Lundy, towards the deep, cold water where their bounty lurked, he had no chance. His life had certainty and rhythm, but no hope of escape.
    Though maybe whatever it was Murphy was going to propose would provide a distraction at the very least. After all, his last great idea had been a stroke of genius. Murphy, who had his finger on some mysterious pulse that gave him the heads-up on everything from VIP Glastonbury tickets to shares that defied all trading records, had been offered two beach huts, side by side, on Everdene Sands, for a steal. And being a friend, he’d offered Vince one, instead of selling it on at a substantial profit. Vince was eternally grateful that he had given him the opportunity, not because the huts were now worth double, but because his hut had provided