Page 32 of The Mother-in-Law

‘No.’

I shake my head. Idoget carsick, but that’s not what’s bothering me. We’re in the car, on our way to the Goodwins’ beach house for a week. I understand, of course, that it is a privilege to be miserable about this. There are people with worse problems. Certainly, Ollie isn’t unhappy about it. He loves Sorrento. All year he romanticises it, waxing lyrical about how nice it is to have the whole family together under the same roof for a week. He is utterly oblivious to any undercurrents of tension. If I mention anything to him, he always looks baffled. (‘Mum, stressed?No. That’s just how she is! Sheenjoysthe stress.’)

Perhaps it’s just Ollie who enjoys the stress. He’s been whistling all morning, and his entire body is growing more spongy and relaxed as we inch along the foreshore in bumper-to-bumper traffic, catching the odd glimpse of sapphire blue through the coastal scrub.

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 clifftop 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 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 hatethat?’ Claire demanded recently. ‘I would kill to have a beach house down there 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 Goodwins’ place is entirely child unfriendly. 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,she would have said.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 chip shop, a pub, and a shop that sold beach chairs and umbrellas. For the entire month of January, old, bald men sat in deckchairs along the sand, exposing their bellies, and middle-aged women in sunhats stood in the shallows in frilly one-piece bathers and tie-dye cover-ups, offering children watermelon from Tupperware containers. Prior to visiting Tom and Diana’s place, I 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 plastic shoes inside the front door. But Sorrento is something else entirely.

‘The Greenans are coming for dinner tonight,’ Diana said on the phone to Ollie this morning. ‘You remember Amelia and Jeffrey, don’t you?’

Iremember Amelia and Jeffrey. Amelia is nice enough, but Jeffrey, a colleague of Tom’s, is properly awful. All of the ‘ists’: sexist, racist, classist. The first time we met (and within minutes of meeting) he asked me what school I went to, and when I said Bayside High, he scrutinised me a moment and then said (a little awed): ‘Wow. You’d never know.’

Another reason I’m delighted to be going to Sorrento.

When we arrive, Nettie and Patrick are still unloading their bags from the car. Patrick resembles a packhorse, lumbering under half-a-dozen 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, on top of the world. 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 asked Tom when he pointed that detail out, but he just seemed baffled by the question and moved on to detailing the next item on the tour. I suspected he himself wasn’t entirely sure.) Although it’s not exactly to my taste, there’s no denying the house has 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 have been ‘begged’ to feature the Sorrento house in several publications, but Diana has declined, calling it ‘vulgar’). Diana catches my eye now, fussing around in the adjoining gleaming white 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 tell. 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 your gorgeous grandson.’

A flurry of activity follows—Patrick appears, asking for some Panadol for Nettie who has a headache; Archie spots a bowl of nuts on the coffee table and upends them, spilling them everywhere, 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 mid-stride.

‘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’ll have a separate bedroom for Archie. If he cries during the night, it won’t disturb anyone. I can 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.

Nettie has been a godsend. When she heard we’ve been relegated to the downstairs rooms (admittedly ‘relegated’ is a little harsh; our room is grander and more spacious than most hotel suites), she promptly told Diana they would be moving their bags downstairs too. (‘We’ll make a party of it,’ she’d said, winking at Archie.) Patrick and Nettie are wonderful with Archie. All afternoon they took it in turns to play with him in the garden or swim with him in the pool while Ollie and I ate lunch and unpacked. In fact, I’ve hardly seen him all day.

‘What time does he go to bed?’ Nettie asks.