The Mother-in-Law(31)
Whenever I tell anyone my in-laws have a beach house in Sorrento, they make appreciative noises. Sorrento, ooh la la. I understand why. Tom and Diana’s cliffside beach house is arguably one of the most spectacular houses on the Mornington peninsula, a 1900s sandstone braced into the cliff with manicured gardens and a whitewashed timber path built down to the beach. There is a pool, a tennis court and a three-tiered limestone patio with uninterrupted sea views.
I hate it.
“How on earth can you hate that?” Claire demanded recently. “I would kill to have a beach house that I could visit whenever I liked. I mean, I’d literally kill for it.”
I would kill not to have such a place. For one thing, the Goodwin’s place is entirely un–child friendly. Artwork, pottery and sculptures adorn every wall and surface. I can barely set Archie on the floor without Diana gasping. It’s so foreign to me. My own mother couldn’t have cared less about artwork or sculptures. If she’d had the chance to be a grandmother, all the artwork on her walls would have been painted by her grandchildren, and she only would have gasped when I told the kids it was bedtime. (“Don’t be ridiculous kids! You’re staying up late with Nana tonight.”)
Growing up, we’d spent our summers in Portarlington, a quaint beach town on the less glamourous side of the bay. On the main street opposite the beach was a fish and chips shop, a pub, and a shop that sold beach chairs and tents. For the entire month of January, old bald men sat in deck chairs along the sand, exposing their enormous bellies, and middle-aged women in sun hats stood in the shallows in frilly turquoise one-piece swimsuits, offering children watermelon from Tupperware containers. Prior to visiting Tom and Diana’s place, I’d always thought of a beach house as a place that had sand on the floor, beach towels on the rail of the deck, and a jumble of little plastic shoes inside the front door. But Sorrento is something else entirely.
“The Greenans are coming for dinner tonight,” Diana had said on the phone to Ollie this morning. “You remember Amelia and Jeffrey, don’t you?”
I remember Amelia and Jeffery. Amelia was nice enough, but Jeffrey, a colleague of Tom’s, was awful. All of the ists: sexist, racist, classist. The first time we’d met (within minutes of meeting) he’d asked me what school I went to, and when I’d said Bayside High School, he’d scrutinized me a moment and then said with a little awe: “Wow. You’d never know.”
When we arrive, Nettie and Patrick are still unloading their bags from the car. Patrick resembles a packhorse, lumbering under a dozen smallish bags while Nettie only carries her purse. Nettie looks a little green.
“Welcome!” Tom says, standing in the grand front doorway, his arms outstretched. “Diana, they’re all here!” He beams at us. Having all the family down at the beach house—this is his happy place. “Where’s my grandson?” he says to me. I put Archie down and he toddles over to Tom. “Well, hello there, my boy. Haven’t you grown?”
I kiss Tom and then walk past him into the house. I set my purse on the oak dining table, custom built to seat sixteen guests, (“Why sixteen?” I’d asked Tom when he’d pointed that detail out, but he just seemed baffled by the question and moved on to the next item on the tour. I suspected he himself wasn’t entirely sure.) Though it’s not exactly to my taste, there’s no denying the house has its wow factor. The soaring ceilings, the vast open spaces, the floor-to-ceiling windows with views of the sea and the cliffs. Walking in the door feels like stepping into the pages of an interior design magazine (and in fact, according to Tom they had been “begged” to feature the Sorrento house in several publications, but Diana had declined, calling it “vulgar”). Diana catches my eye now, fussing around in the adjoining gleaming-white and marble kitchen.
“Diana,” I say.
She smiles. “Hello, Lucy.”
“Hi, Mum,” Ollie says, entering the house behind me. He puts down the bags and plants a kiss on her cheek. Besides Tom, Ollie is one of the few people who is always pleased to see Diana. If the feeling is mutual, it’s hard to say. She always seems shy, almost embarrassed by the attention.
“Hello, darling,” she mutters.
Tom strides into the house, holding Archie up like a trophy. “Di! Come and see our gorgeous grandson.”
A flurry of activity follows—Patrick appears, asking for some acetaminophen for Nettie who has a headache; Archie spots a bowl of nuts on the kitchen counter and upends them, spilling them all over the floor; and Tom tries to figure out which remote control (there are six) opens the garage door. Meanwhile, Ollie picks up the bags again and walks toward our usual room.
“Ollie, wait!” Diana cries.
Ollie freezes midstride.
“I’ve set up the rooms downstairs for you and Lucy and Archie,” she says, with less certainty.
Miraculously, all the action stops and there is silence. Even Archie looks up from the spilled nuts, sensing something is up.
“I . . . thought you might prefer having your own space,” she says.
It’s a good suggestion, a practical suggestion. The downstairs area is huge, and we’d have our own bedroom for Archie. If he cried during the night, it wouldn’t disturb anyone; I could walk the hallways with him all night if I needed to.
So why does it feel so much like a slap?
That evening, we are bathing Archie when the Greenans arrive. Actually, Nettie is bathing him and I am sitting on the vanity with a glass of rosé. Out in the hallway, Ollie and Patrick are sitting on the floor with their backs to the wall, drinking cocktails that Patrick has made. I find, to my surprise, that I’m not having an awful time.