Free Brodmaw Bay by F.G. Cottam Page A

whether it was also welcoming.
    After spending the morning researching Brodmaw, James had lunch with his wife and son. Then he spent an hour invoicing clients and dealing with admin generally, before leaving the house for the fifteen-minute stroll to go and pick up Olivia from school.
    It was a hot day. Pollution lay in a shimmer from the road surface to the height of the roofs of the cars gridlocked on the route. Monday traffic throbbing at an angry standstill was so much a part of Bermondsey life he barely gave it a thought, usually. But in the heat he could taste the exhaust fumes, inhaling them as he knew his daughter would have to on the walk back home. He thought of clean sea air and a salt breeze teasing the tresses of Olivia’s lovely auburn hair. It seemed a seductive alternative to their present reality.
     
    Lillian Greer had made the decision to end the affair the moment she had entered the hospital room with her daughter and seen the expression on James’s face as he looked down at their stricken son. She had known at that second that her family was the most precious thing in the world to her and the thing above all else in the world she would fight most desperately to preserve.
    She knew that she had come very close to throwing it all away. She had been recklessly indiscreet with a man she could not count upon to behave predictably. Robert was capable, in rejection, of knocking on the door of their home and pleading his case in front of her husband. He was young and headstrong and completely selfish. The youth had seemed a quality attractive at the outset: vital and flattering. But he was too immature to accept the rebuff gracefully. He would plead for another chance. And when it was not given, could easily respond to the fact of defeat with self-destructive spite.
    That was why she had agreed to give serious consideration to the Brodmaw Bay proposal so readily. In a more sedate frame of mind she might have taken issue with the Little Englander reaction the assault on Jack had provoked in James. But this was not the time to be philosophical and she was in no position to claim any kind of moral high ground when it came to principles or politics.
    She had betrayed her husband and by extension her children too. She wanted to flee the problem, in Robert, she had inflicted upon herself. She wanted to escape to a fresh start somewhere that wasn’t characterised by claustrophobia and deceit and guilt. She thought that the Cornish coast would do very well. It was beautiful and, even better, it was remote. It removed her physically not just from the threat of Robert’s exposure of her adultery, but from the temptation of his company.
    She thought about this while she was not lavishing TLC on Jack because he had dozed off on the sofa next to her, halfway through something entertainingly puerile on his favourite television channel. The channel was called Dave. It had been new to her until today. She thought its output a bit pathetic, but not unendurable. It was mostly a very male cocktail of slapstick and testosterone.
    Ads for personal injury solicitors and lenders offering unsecured loans between the programmes were a strong clue as to the channel’s intended demographic. But Jack was only a child and had a very good reason for occupying his temporary couch potato role. His resting head had slid on to her lap. She twisted a lock of his hair between her fingers as his father researched a potential new life in the study behind them and she pondered on the affair from which she had yet formally to extricate herself.
    She had met Robert three months earlier. He was a successful children’s author. They had an agent in common. He had written the first of a proposed series of books about a solitary, slightly scary young girl who secretly – and sometimes not so secretly – possessed telekinetic powers. In the first story the heroine, a twelve-year-old Irish girl, lived with her parents in the county town of Ennis in