OUT OF THE BLUE a gripping novel of love lost and found by Gretta Mulrooney Page B

he couldn’t swim. She had been astonished because to her, he’d had a privileged childhood, rooted securely in ‘old’ money; father a surgeon in the army, mother an ex-debutante — one of that breed who had been ‘presented’ to the Queen — who bred Labradors and had her own London property, a vast and gloomy mansion flat off Eaton Square. Douglas had been educated at Harrow and Oxford. Summers were spent in Switzerland and Gibraltar. The family home was a huge house in Sussex with acres of land, gardeners and domestic staff. He could ski, ride, play cricket, polo and golf but was frightened of being out of his depth in water. He’d informed Liv, in that mechanical voice he always used when speaking of his mother, that when he was two years old she’d thrown him into the sea off Brighton, just as she’d done to his siblings, to encourage him to swim. Unlike his brother and two sisters, he’d panicked and gone under, felt the water pressing on his skull, drank his fill of salt as he screamed. Afterwards, he’d developed a stammer that came and went until he was a teenager. Even then, telling her the story, it returned as a hesitancy, a pause between words and it occurred to her that he spoke in this way when he was in his mother’s company.
    Liv had spent a good deal of the holiday encouraging him into the sea, reassuring him that the shallow coast was perfectly safe. At the end of the fortnight, he was happy to doggy-paddle as long as the tips of his toes touched the bottom and she stayed near him. Watching him, she had enjoyed feeling nurturing, protective but later, when she reached the lowest ebbs in the marriage, she resented being trapped in the role of mother. I’m a mother with no children, she would reflect as she made excuses for him, forgave him, and waited up for him, cleared up the trail of debris he caused.
    She had never been able to warm to his mother, a brisk, excruciatingly thin woman who regarded Liv as a downmarket addition to the family. ‘Haven’t heard from you for a while, since you blew in with that dreary bird,’ she’d written to her son after their first visit, which had been an endless, chilly spring weekend of croquet, mysterious horsy business and tasteless meals eaten in a freezing dining-room. The days and nights had been filled with the yapping and scrabbling of dogs that Liv feared. She had been glad that Douglas rarely visited his parents, preferring to keep his distance. They visited now once a year, at Easter and she thought of it as her duty, similar to the doctrinal laws she had obeyed in her childhood when communion and Mass had to be attended.
    Bending, she picks up a handful of rough grass and soil, crumbling it in her fingers. This, she thinks, is what I want: simple days and nights. Today I’ll clean the house and poke about in the garden, see if there are any vegetables I can use, pick blackberries. I might see if they do an evening meal in Crowley’s. I’ll make cocoa and go early to bed and wake early. I’ll plan each day as it comes. No waiting for a key in the door and a smell on his breath, no half-truths and evasions and lies, no watching him push food round on his plate and missing his mouth, no having to look at the sheer heart-stopping stupidity of the smile on his lips.
    She lifts her face to the breeze and lets her unhappiness lie quiet, like a calmed baby who will grow fractious again when it wakes to the difficult business of living.

Chapter 4
    She’s itching and blinking from dust, in need of a bath. She has spent the day cleaning the cottage from top to bottom, dusting, sweeping with the heavy brush, scrubbing floors. She has washed all the kitchen crockery, cleaned the windows, cleared out the fire place and rinsed the curtains. She explored the shelves beside her grandmother’s bed/settee, sniffing the bottles and tubes of medications for rheumatism. They smelled of camphor, menthol and pungent eucalyptus. The eiderdown on the settee is