The Beach Hut by Veronica Henry Read Free Book Online

assistant to the managing director of a car showroom in Mayfair. Eight pounds a week.
     
    She found the manuscript when she was clearing out the house to sell.
    It made her heart jump. It skittered crazily in her chest, even more than it had when the police had knocked at her door and told her about Graham.
    She sat down to read it, the black letters on the yellowing pages as familiar as if she had typed them only yesterday. She felt she could almost have recited the whole book from start to finish, even though she had buried it in the recesses of her mind all these years. Fifty years.
    If Terence Shaw had left her with anything more than a hole where her soul should have been, it was a love of books. Reading had got her through her miserable, loveless marriage to a man she had thought was decent and honourable enough to do as a companion, but he had turned out to be far from that. Reading and children had got her through it - she had poured her love into them, a different love from the one she had been denied, but a meaningful and satisfying love nevertheless.
    Summers had been the best. Her mother had left her the beach hut, and she had taken the children down there for the whole of July and August, with Graham coming down there if and when he felt like it. It didn’t much bother her if he appeared or not, although she preferred not. And there she read, voraciously, while the children played. Bags full of books she had borrowed from the library or friends, bought from second-hand shops, ordered as a result of reviews she had read. She devoured the Booker shortlist every year. Ten years ago she had started a book club, which was still flourishing, and the other women were always astonished by the depth and breadth of what she had read over the years. She wasn’t a book snob - she loved a Danielle Steele as much as a Dickens, a Jilly Cooper as much as a J. M. Coetzee.
    They filled the hole in her soul.
    And so, as she reread the manuscript, she knew she was qualified to judge it.
    It was a masterpiece. It was an effortless, coruscating - she remembered the day she’d learnt that word - piece of writing that would speak to anyone who read it. It was timeless, universal, as relevant to her now as it had been when she had first read it.
    She set the last page back down. She felt ready. It would be wrong to deprive the world of this work any longer. Fifty years was enough. She’d had her revenge. Now Graham was dead, she was ready to move onto the next phase of her life. The last phase. She wanted peace. After all, she was old. Her body no longer raged in its quest to relive those feelings she’d once had. However long she had left, she wanted it to be calm, gracious and dignified. While she still had the manuscript, the silent feud would rage on.
     
    It was surprisingly easy to contact him. A website, a publicist, an email, a phone call from his people to arrange lunch. At a private members’ club in Soho - a dark blue door down a little alleyway. She rang the buzzer and gave her name over the intercom, then announced herself again when she reached the reception desk. A girl with shining long hair and a tartan dress made her sign the register, then led her through a maze of corridors to a small room. It was painted in the same dark blue as the door, lined with books, and had an assortment of small sofas and chairs arranged around coffee tables.
    He was sitting in a corner. She was astonished at how small he was. Where once he had towered over nearly everyone, now he was tiny, a shrunken little being.
    His eyes were the same. Hooded, burnt into his face. Only now the shadows underneath were a sickly yellow.
    She ordered a drink from the girl and sat down in the chair opposite him.
    ‘Jane.’
    For years she had imagined this moment. Him speaking her name.
    It left her cold.
    She put the manuscript down on the table between them.
    He stared at it for a full minute before he spoke. He reached out and touched it, flicked