the question, the younger one excited, the older one full of disbelief.
‘It goes,’ Kate said defensively.
‘I think it’s super,’ Hamish announced. ‘Like something out of a storybook. Has it got a name?’
As a person who thought giving names to inanimate objects was stupid, Kate longed to say no, but if she did, the car would probably hear her and refuse to start.
‘My father called it Molly,’ she admitted, hoping maybe Angus, who was walking around it, examining it the way one would an antique, hadn’t heard, but just in case he hadn’t, Hamish made sure he knew.
‘Did you hear that, Dad? We’re going for a ride in Molly.’
He was patting the car’s pale blue paintwork, his little hands leaving prints in the dust, so Kate was squirming with embarrassment before she’d even opened the doors. She did that now, helping Hamish into the back seat, pulling down the booster seat and fastening the seatbelt around him, then getting in the car herself.
‘Molly?’ Angus queried softly as he slid into the passenger seat beside her.
‘My father named her.’ Defensive didn’t begin to describe how Kate felt, until she remembered—‘And if you want to borrow the car to visit your dog at the weekend, then I don’t want to hear another comment, thank you.’
Before Angus could reply, Hamish began chattering about McTavish and how much he would like a car called Molly, and the child’s innocent delight in the situation eased Kate’s tension, so by the time they’d driven around the immediate neighbourhood and arrived at the beach at Coogee, she’d even stopped worrying about Angus seeing her in a swimming costume.
He’d have been better not having seen her in a swimming costume, Angus decided as their chauffeur slipped out of her shorts and shirt, revealing a pale but perfect body. All of his mother’s figurines were decorously covered, so it wasn’t a similarity to one of them that sent his heartbeat into overdrive.
It must be the prolonged period of celibacy his libido had been suffering. His last female friend had fallen out with him six months ago over the amount of time he spent with Hamish. The argument had been fierce, mainly because Angus knew he spent the time with Hamish in an attempt to make up for what he didn’t give the child. Not love, exactly, for he loved him deeply, just…He didn’t know what the ‘just’ was, except that it was there—a missing link.
But the outcome of that argument had been that he’d decided it was easier to stay out of relationships for a while, especially as by that time he’d been offered the job in Sydney and had known he’d be moving on.
So, have a swim and settle down, he told himself, shucking off his own shorts and polo shirt, then following his son and Kate down to where green waves curled, then broke into foaming swirls that slid quietly up the beach.
‘These are big waves.’ The awe in Hamish’s voice made Kate smile. ‘In Scotland we have little waves and in America there aren’t any beaches.’
‘Not where you lived,’ Kate reminded him, forbearing to point out America had thousands of miles of coastline on two oceans. He was jumping the waves as they washed towards him, shrieking with glee, and Kate’s heart ached with wanting. To have a child, her own child—any child, she was beginning to think.
Although it was a baby her arms ached for…
‘Want to go out deeper?’
Angus scooped up his son and strode towards the curling waves.
Presumably Angus could swim.
Kate watched them go, the ache still there—stronger if anything. It was all to do with family. Were Angus and Hamish a family? Was the base of family solid beneath the little boy? Had it not been solid in her case, even before Susie drowned? Had her family been doomed to disintegrate like so many families did these days, even before Susie died?
She could see the pair in the deeper water, ducking under waves, and remembered times, after her mother died, when she and her father had come to the beach. He would take her out into deep water and throw her over the waves. He’d loved her, Kate had no doubt of that, but it had been a detached, distracted kind of love, the kind one might give to a specially favoured pet, the concept of family perhaps as unfamiliar to him, another only child, as it was to Kate.
Enough! She dived beneath the next wave, surfaced for a breath, then dived again, coming up beyond the breakers, feeling the water wrap around her body, cooling and soothing her, reminding her of all the wonderful things in her life, counterbalancing the aches.
A good wave was coming, rising up above the others, curling early. Swimming hard she caught it and rode it to the beach, aware of passing Angus and Hamish on her way. She lay where the wave had left her on the sand until an excited little boy joined her.
‘Will you teach me to do that, will you, Kate, will you?’
Kate rolled over and smiled up at him.
‘I surely will, champ,’ she said. ‘Next time I’m at the shops I’ll get you a little boogie board. It’s easiest to practise on that in the shallows, then I can take you out in front of me on my bigger board. One day when you’re older, if your Dad decides to stay in Sydney, you might learn to surf. See the people at the far end of the beach, standing up on their surfboards?’
‘Can you do that? Can you teach me that?’
His excitement had him hopping up and down, splashing her with water.
‘There are better teachers than me, for board surfing,’ she told him, sitting up and looking around for Angus. Perhaps she should have asked if he could swim! Then his body, sleek as a seal’s, slipped onto the beach beside her.
Angus sat up and shook the water from his hair.
‘I didn’t catch it way out where you did,’ he said to the woman he’d been watching since she was deposited on the sand, a slim white mermaid in a green bathing suit. ‘I just surfed the broken bit. It’s been a long time since I caught a wave—student days at St Ives in England, an annual summer pilgrimage.’
He’d flopped onto the tail end of the wave to stop thinking about her, but now, this close, not thinking of her was impossible. The beautiful skin, so fine and pale he could see the blue veins in her temples, and in the slender lines of her neck, then the fiery red hair, darker now, wet and bedraggled, framing her face like a pre-Raphaelite painting.
‘Kate is going to teach me how to ride on the waves,’ Hamish announced, and now colour swept into her cheeks.
‘I wasn’t sure if you knew how. He asked me, but of course, you’re a surfer, you can teach him.’
‘Maybe we could both teach him.’
Angus heard the words come out and wished there was some way he could unsay them. How could he include someone else in his family before he’d made sure it was a family? It had obviously embarrassed her, as well, for the colour in her cheeks had darkened, and she stood and headed back into the water.
‘I’ll just catch another wave.’ The words floated back over her shoulder before she dived beneath the breakers.
‘Can
