Sometimes Ned managed to walk with her. In the beginning, she used to say: ‘You don’t have to walk with me, darling. I can walk the girls on my own.’
‘I want to walk with you,’ Ned would say. ‘I like being with you.’
He said this a lot now. In the beginning, Lou used to wonder if Emily had put him up to it, and then she realised her daughter had nothing to do with it. Ned had changed in a way that was very subtle. He wanted to be with her and he wanted her to know this.
He was making a Herculean effort at their marriage.
Lou was not sure if her leaving for Sicily had given him a shock or what had affected him, but Ned was a different man. She loved walking with him. They’d park on Mermaid Point, get the girls out of the car, and walk down onto the sands together, holding hands, but then they’d let go and stride along, laughing about how many steps they could manage.
Occasionally they’d meet other walkers with dogs that ran out into the waves. Lou found as a new dog owner she now knew the names of all the dogs because people called out the dog names.
‘Prince, stop drinking the water,’ someone would shout to a particularly energetic border collie.
Lola and Boo adored running into the water too, but Lola only danced around the edges.
‘She’s not waterproof,’ Lou told Ned, who laughed.
When she was there for the weekend, Emily always joined the walks and mother and daughter loved their time alone on the beach, walking miles over the headlands and talking about everything and anything. Emily sometimes talked about travelling after she got her degree and, nowadays, Lou found she could cope with the idea.
‘You need to travel,’ she said firmly. ‘There’s no point in me teaching you to be this independent woman if I cling to you.’
‘Mum, you don’t cling,’ said Emily. ‘We love each other. Do you know how wonderful that is?’
‘Yes,’ Lou said and squeezed her daughter’s waist.
Trinity and her aunt Dara had even come for a weekend. Trinity was blooming in pregnancy and had decided that she’d do a masters over the next couple of years.
‘Makes sense from a career point of view,’ she’d said proudly to Lou.
Her aunt was dying for the baby to be born: ‘Trinity was like my baby, but I didn’t have her in the actual baby stages,’ Dara confided. ’I can’t wait to be a proper granny.’
Whenever she could, Toni would join Lou and the dogs on the beach too. Toni and Oliver’s Dublin house was for sale. At least, Toni said, Oliver hadn’t managed to put a double mortgage on it so that, once it was sold, she’d have some money. Toni herself had moved out and was renting an apartment in Greystones. It was near the sea on the top floor of a three-storey block.
‘I love being near the water,’ she said. ‘The old house was too far from the sea. That’ll never happen again. I need the water.’
She now worked two days a week in Academy, the PR company run by Cormac’s friend, who’d given her such good advice on damage limitation.
The work was interesting. And well paid. She still had her TV show, but she was considering stepping down from it to work on documentaries.
‘My heart’s not in that sort of confrontational broadcasting anymore,’ she told Lou. ‘I like the idea of doing big, long stories where I can really take people into the details of something.’
She told Lou that she’d be working for a long, long time before she could make back even half of the money Oliver had lost.
‘He says he’s sorry,’ Toni said one day as she and Lou walked at speed along the curved golden sands of Whitehaven, Boo and Lola prancing around in front of them. ‘He knows it was an appalling thing to do.’
Oliver had gone to Los Angeles and was working in the film industry. He was not getting huge roles but there were small jobs out there and he was, he’d told Toni, determined to make their money back. He was still gambling and that made her heart ache for him.
‘You won’t make the money back, you know,’ she’d said to him on the phone when he rang her the night before flying to LA. ‘You won’t make the money back. You can’t.’
‘I can try,’ he said, sounding a little like the commanding King Lear he’d played in his last big play.
‘Oliver, you’re a gambler, you need help,’ Toni replied. ‘I’d love to have the money back. But be real about it. Don’t live in a fantasy world thinking you’ll get it all back the way you did every time you lost money. That’s what got you into this scrape in the first place. Please get help.’
‘I want to get the money back for you,’ said Oliver. ‘I’m home in a few weeks, Toni,’ he said, ‘and—’
‘No,’ said Toni, holding up a hand even though he couldn’t see it. ‘I can’t see you, Oliver. As far as I’m concerned, we’re over and I want my money back if we can manage that, but I don’t want to hear about your life. I don’t want to be a part of it.’
‘You’ve been very good to me,’ Oliver said in a low tone.
