Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon

by Sophie Green

Genres: Friendship; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Four women. Four loves. Four life-changing stories. At a little salon by the sea - on the windblown coast of 1980s Australia - four different women with intertwined lives will find themselves through love, heartbreak and learning to love again.

Lost love: Trudy, 57, owns Summertime Salon in the sun-soaked Central Coast town of Terrigal. She loves her job and her clients. Her colours, perms and Princess Di cuts bring joy and confidence to regulars and tourists alike. But since Laurie died, life hasn't been the same.

Love on the rocks: Anna, 42, brings her mother to Summertime Salon every Monday morning but never gets her own hair done. With two children and an absent husband, she doesn't have time for vanity. When Anna kicks Gary out, will she also rediscover the joys of caring for herself, starting with highlights?

Unrequited love: Hairdresser Evie, 33, has never had much luck with men. As a single mother, love is the last thing on her mind. Then, new hire Sam joins the salon - he's handsome and kind, and he and Evie hit it off immediately. But is their relationship all that it seems?

First love: Apprentice Josie, 19, is seeking independence. She's determined to make her own way in the world, especially when she meets sweet surfer and mechanic Brett, who she can't quite believe is silly over her. How long can she keep him a secret from her overprotective parents?

Uplifting and heartwarming, Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon follows four women on their journeys for love - in all its beautiful and bittersweet forms. Sophie Green is the bestselling author of The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle and Weekends with the Sunshine Gardening Society.

Praise for Sophie's novels:

'Uplifting' WOMAN'S DAY

'Delightful' BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS

'A warm treat of a novel' WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN

'Reading a Sophie Green book is the greatest escape' WHO MAGAZINE

'Fulfilling and Australian as a lamb roast and full-bodied shiraz' THE AUSTRALIAN WOMEN'S WEEKLY

'Reading this book was like snuggling beneath a warm beach towel after a bracing dip in the ocean' JOANNA NELL

Release date: July 30, 2025

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 400

Sample

‘Pet, hand me those scissors, will you?’ Trudy takes the cigarette out of her mouth and, with her other hand, takes the scissors from Evie, who has already whirled back to her client, who’s sitting there with wet hair over her face, awaiting a fringe.

Stephanie, her name is. Came in saying she wanted a haircut like The Princess of Wales has and Evie tried to tell her that Diana has really thick hair that layers nicely whereas Stephanie has fine hair that won’t sit the same way, but Stephanie insisted.

At that point Trudy stopped paying attention. She’s seen it all before. In thirty-odd years of running the Seaside Salon she’s had clients requesting all sorts, and usually whatever it is can’t be done. Being a hairdresser means being an expert in managing unreasonable expectations while still trying to make the woman look beautiful. Because that’s all they want, isn’t it? To look beautiful. So that someone can notice them and give them a little lift in their day.

Trudy always hopes the salon itself will give her clients a lift in their days. When she opened it – a few decades ago now – she decked it out in peach: peach walls, peach benches, cream accents. She considered calling the salon Peaches and Cream, but her father advised against it. ‘What if one day you wake up and want to change the décor?’ he said. It was a reasonable question. And, sure enough, one day she decided it needed a change. In fact, she changes the décor of the salon about once a decade. In 1984 the walls became orange and the benches pink. Some might say it’s a lurid colour scheme – and, true, the decorator thought Cyndi Lauper was the acme of style – but the clients love it.

‘Ooh, Trudy,’ one of them said the other day. ‘I smile just thinking about this place. The bright colours make me happy.’

So, yes, Trudy gives her ladies a lift in their days, and that lifts her in turn. Even if sometimes she has to not so much lift them up as put them in their place.

Last week one of her regulars came in saying she wanted to look like that Krystle Carrington in Dynasty. Silly show. And, yes, Trudy watches it. Entertainment is a priority these days.

‘You can’t do that look, pet,’ Trudy told her. ‘You need more length on the sides and you just don’t have it.’

Did the client listen? No. So Trudy did her best. That’s all a person can ever do, isn’t it? She put some streaks in the client’s hair and layered on top and flicked the fringe out to the side, and the client was happy even though Trudy told her she’d need to spend an hour with a blow dryer at home to get the same effect. For all she knows the lady is wandering around the local shopping centre looking like a half-done Krystle Carrington and thinking she’s the best thing since sliced bread. And why shouldn’t she? Why shouldn’t they all?

Trudy sighs as she starts trimming her client’s hair. The woman is loud – she’s new, and not local, which they know because she keeps saying she’s up from Sydney, and don’t they know that Sydney is just so busy and it’s so nice being in quiet little Terrigal on the Central Coast for a few days instead. She probably thinks she’s paying them a compliment but somehow those statements end up sounding like the person is looking down their nose at poor old Terrigal. If another person wants to take it that way, of course.

Trudy isn’t offended. As her Laurie liked to say, everyone is entitled to their opinion.

It’s been two years since he said anything like that. Or anything at all.

Two years since she lost the man who had been by her side, supporting her as she ran this little hairdressing salon by the sea. Originally it was called Trudy’s – after she abandoned Peaches and Cream – and it was Laurie who suggested she change it to Seaside Salon. He thought it was reassuring – like a good memory, he told her.

She wished she could say she had only good memories of him but he was so sick in those last months that she has to work hard not to think of him thin and sallow as his body tried and failed to combat the cancer that snuck up on him. On them both. It’s a cruelty, she reckons, to have your mind full of images of the man you love at his worst. With time, she hopes, the shock of his illness and what she saw, what she felt, will wear off and she’ll be left with thoughts only of his big smile and his bushy eyebrows and that uneven shave he always had.

They used to go walking on the beach after she closed the salon for the day. That’s a good memory. Every time she smells the salt air she thinks of him; she’s been smelling it since she was a child, yet it reminds her of Laurie more than anything.

Some might say, then, that she’s torturing herself by working so close to the ocean. She wouldn’t change it, though; wouldn’t leave it, even if it causes her pain. Who would? Terrigal is a glorious spot and she knows she’s lucky that her father helped her buy this building in Church Street – one road back from the beach – in the 1950s, at a time when the place comprised not much more than a few fibro shacks and a dozen fishermen.

It’s come a long way, this village she has known and loved all her life. For so long it was a well-kept secret, then the Sydney people found out about it and started coming here for their weekends and their school holidays. Now the population of Terrigal is like the tide, always coming in and going out, and she’s used to it. Likes it, in fact, because the incoming tide brings more clients and some of them return each holiday, and she likes that too, the consistent inconsistency of it. The way they’re happy to see her. It makes her feel useful. There’s still a place for her in this world even without Laurie in it. Even if there are days when she wonders what she’s going to do with herself.

‘We’re out of Nescafé,’ Evie mutters in Trudy’s direction.

Trudy snaps back to attention. Someone wants a coffee, obviously. Probably Stephanie.

‘There’s a tin of International Roast in there,’ Trudy mutters back, but obviously too loudly, because Stephanie makes a face that is visible even above the smoke coming from the cigarette she holds. Trudy lets the clients smoke in the salon because she’s not about to give it up herself – losing Laurie was one thing, losing cigarettes would be one insult too many in a lifetime – and she can see from Stephanie’s choice of slender cigarette and request for Diana hair that she fancies herself a classy lady and International Roast just won’t do. Trudy understands, but sometimes circumstances warrant a compromise.

Evie makes a face as well. ‘Really?’

‘It’s that or Bushells. Take your pick.’

Since her other hairdresser, Jane, left, it’s been only Trudy and Evie in the salon, and when they both have clients there’s no one available to run out for more Blend 43.

Jane was with her for ten years. Her best cutter, she was. Jane could take a lady with dead-straight hair and turn her into a Charlie’s Angel with some artful layering – and a regular blow-dry, of course. Trudy thought of Jane as the daughter she never had. They confided in each other. Right up until the day Jane resigned, saying she needed to take a break.

It turned out she was taking a break so she could set up her own salon. On the beachfront. Where all the tourists walk past. Yes, yes, Trudy knows she’s had a good run with Seaside Salon being the only salon in town and it was only a matter of time before another one opened. But Jane opening it … Trudy felt that like a physical wound. Jane knew how upset she was – is – about Laurie, and to go and do that was a cruelty Trudy truly didn’t think she deserved. How much grief can a person bear? She’s finding out. And it’s far more than she wants to, that’s for sure.

Trudy wishes – even more than usual – that Laurie were still here so she could talk to him about the other salon and what she can do to win back the regulars who followed Jane there. Although he’d probably tell her to let them go. Say they weren’t regulars if they could so easily take off elsewhere. That she should forget about them and concentrate on the people who stayed, not the ones who left.

If only she and Evie could manage the ones who stayed on their own. All it takes is for Evie’s son, Billy, to have a sick day and he’s home from school and Evie has to be home with him. Those are the days when Trudy has to cancel clients – and once you start doing that, word gets around. That she’s unreliable. Maybe she’s lost her touch. Maybe her business is going down the sink.

So Trudy needs to find another hairdresser, preferably a good cutter, and she’s looking for an apprentice too. Someone to do the washing and the sweeping, who can run around to the newsagent’s to buy the New Idea and the Woman’s Day and the other magazines the clients expect. And Trudy would quite like to reduce her hours if she can. Make time to see her son and his family in the city.

She becomes vaguely aware of Stephanie squawking at Evie and brings her attention back to the present.

‘How can you only have International Roast?’ Stephanie says.

‘My fault!’ Trudy sings out. ‘I’ve been run off my feet, pet. Haven’t made it to the shops in a few days. But don’t worry – coffee’s on the list.’

Stephanie huffs out a sigh then drags on her cigarette. ‘I suppose it will do,’ she says.

Trudy sees Evie smile tightly into the mirror.

‘Won’t be long,’ she says in that fake-chirp Trudy knows well. It’s the tone Evie uses when she’s fed up and can’t show it. They can never show it. Otherwise the client won’t come back and probably also goes away and says mean things to their friends.

Her own client – the tourist – has actually been a dream. So far. She’s been quiet, mostly; reading a magazine and letting Trudy get on with it.

Except now she’s staring at her reflection in the mirror.

‘I’ve never had a blow-dry,’ she says, sounding almost afraid.

‘Oh,’ Trudy says, looking down at the dryer in her hand. The woman had a shampoo in preparation for her cut and Trudy usually dries them when their hair is wet. Doesn’t everyone?

‘Would you like one today?’ she enquires.

‘Will it be … poufy?’ The woman’s brow knits.

‘Only if you want it to be.’

Her face relaxes into a smile. ‘Yes, please,’ she says.

‘Righto.’ Trudy turns on the dryer to its highest setting. She’s vaguely aware of Evie putting down a coffee in front of Stephanie and another in front of her. ‘Thanks, pet,’ she mouths over the noise.

Evie wrinkles her nose in response. It’s her cute little shorthand for ‘you’re welcome’. She always does it. Mainly because one or both of them are usually drying someone’s hair and it’s too noisy to speak.

After a few minutes the tourist client is patting her hair from underneath and grinning. Then she gives Trudy a tip on top of the fee and Trudy feels chuffed. The day is turning out better than she thought. Better than she’s had in a while. Maybe it would be all right to have some hope.

Once Stephanie has left with the best Diana do Evie could manage, Trudy sits down for a few minutes of respite before her two o’clock turns up.

‘You did well,’ she says as Evie sweeps up hair. ‘She was tricky.’

Evie shrugs. ‘She’s okay. Just has some unrealistic dreams.’

‘Don’t we all.’

Evie gives her a funny look – probably because they’ve never discussed their hopes and desires before.

‘What’s your dream?’ she says.

Trudy smiles sadly. ‘That my husband isn’t dead any more.’

‘Ah,’ Evie says, looking up to smile quickly. ‘I see what you mean.’

She keeps sweeping, away from Trudy, who is about to ask what Evie’s dreams are when the two o’clock arrives early.

‘Hello, pet,’ she says to one of her longtime clients. Then she sits her down, goes to the back room to get a cape, and the routine starts again.

Anna glances around her bedroom. Her marital bedroom, so it’s their bedroom. Their house. The house that she works so hard to keep lovely for Gary and their children. For herself too, obviously, because she wants to have a nice home. That’s how she was raised. Her mother did it. Her mother’s mother did it. Probably they all did it, back down the line, and while Anna occasionally likes to question things – religious beliefs, political-party platforms, the storylines of Sons and Daughters – she has never questioned that.

Which is, no doubt, a factor in her despair as she looks at Gary’s worn shirt, socks and underpants on the floor – he never puts his clothes in the laundry basket, although somehow their children manage it – and at the shoes that need shining and the bed she needs to strip. She thinks about the casserole she has to make for dinner. There are just so many things that go in to keeping a nice home and while she doesn’t expect someone else to do them, she wishes Gary wouldn’t make them harder. Does it take that much time to put a shirt in a basket?

There are also all the things she has to think about. Thank goodness she keeps lists, otherwise she’d never remember. Gary’s little law practice is busy – which is good for their income, but bad for their family life – and she resents the fact that he is so rarely home that he leaves her notes. Yesterday’s asked her to buy a present for his partner’s wife’s birthday. How is she supposed to guess what the woman would like for her birthday? She barely knows her.

She barely knows Gary these days either. He’s out the door when she’s in the shower and he comes home after she goes to bed. All she is for him is a machine to do jobs. All he is for her, for their children, is the payer of bills.

This is, she thinks – and not for the first time – no way to have a marriage. Or a family. When did they stop treating each other as lovers, as confidants, as people, and start being cohabitants, parents, washers of clothes and payers of bills?

Anna doesn’t know, and it makes her sad she didn’t notice the change, because these days when she thinks about Gary – the man she joyfully chose to marry when she was old enough to be sure of what she wanted – she pictures only an outline of the man she loved. He’s not filled in any more; not the way she knew him to be.

Maybe she isn’t either. Maybe they’re both husks, hollowed out by the demands of adult life and unable to locate the stuffing that once made them greet each day with anticipation rather than dismay.

It’s not the kids’ fault. She and Gary chose to have them. They discussed having them well before Anna became pregnant with Troy. True, they’d planned on leaving at least two years between children, and Anna shouldn’t have believed the women who told her that you can’t get pregnant while breastfeeding, because that’s how Renee happened. But they were both delighted to have a little girl.

No, the kids have been the lights of their lives. And perhaps that’s the issue: they shifted their attention to the children and took it off each other. Seriously, though, how was she meant to keep giving Gary the same amount of attention when she had helpless babies to look after? She was the one whose body was needed to feed them, whose time and care were needed to tend to them. Gary didn’t have to breastfeed. Changing a few nappies was not at all the same thing. Yet he switched off from her too.

Was it because her body didn’t look the same? She’s often wondered but never asked. Because she didn’t want to know the answer if it was ‘yes’.

His body looks the same: trim, lightly muscled, a good shape. He hasn’t even put on weight, whereas her body changes like the tide: ballooning with babies and periods, shrinking with breastfeeding and ovulation. It hasn’t felt as if it’s belonged to her for many years. It hasn’t felt as if it belonged to him either.

They used to love being lovers. He would take his time with her, making it clear he found her desirable, delightful. After spending her teens and twenties feeling as if she was the target of slightly – sometimes strongly – aggressive interest from men, Gary made her feel safe while also being clear that he wanted her. He may not have directly understood that this was the way to elicit a worshipful response from her, so that she would want him as much as he wanted her, but it was. Why don’t more men understand that? All the ones at the pub and the club who complain that ‘no chicks want me’ have to do is be kind, to see a woman as something to be cherished – not as a goal to be attained – and they’d have more luck. But maybe they can’t see them that way. That might be it, yes: women are only ever targets for them, not people.

Anna was someone Gary cherished. Once. Not any more. They stopped taking pleasure in seeing each other right around the time he opened his practice and felt the pressure of making it work. Over time, long days at the office turned into late nights when he wouldn’t come home until she was wiping off her make-up and getting into bed.

She’d waited for him, on so many of those nights. Waited for him to come home and see her. He didn’t. So she started taking off the make-up after she got the kids to bed, piling up her hair and making a cup of tea to sip while she read her book. The tea would be long gone before her husband came home.

Except it’s not home the way she wants it. A nice home requires more than having residents. It needs more than cooking and tidying and cleaning. A nice home needs a heart, and theirs has long since stopped beating. The question she now has to answer is: What am I going to do about it? Because she is not prepared to keep going like this. Not for one day longer. Not when she spends half the time wanting to scream at her walls with frustration that the life she thought they would be living has turned out to be an endless sequence of going through the motions, with no sense of what the goal may be other than to survive.

That’s not what she wants. It’s not what she wants for her children, either.

Sure, he’s around today. It’s Sunday. That’s the one day he doesn’t go into the office because his partner is religious and takes the Sabbath seriously. It’s the first time in Anna’s life that she’s found religion to make sense. Brought up Catholic, schooled by nuns, she always thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Yet she’s convinced that she and the kids wouldn’t see Gary at all if it weren’t for the Sabbath. He’s a local solicitor, not the attorney-general, yet somehow he needs to work six days a week. Keeps telling her that with all the property developments going on and people moving to the Central Coast, he has his hands full with conveyancing.

This morning Gary has taken the kids jogging along Forresters Beach because that’s another thing he does: fads. One year it was cold-water swimming. Another it was saunas. This year he has been insisting that the kids become runners, just because he wants to enter the City to Surf in August. For the past few weekends he’s bundled them out the door early each Sunday, waking them up on a day when they should be allowed to be a little lazy. And she’s let him, because it’s the only time they have with him, and she supposes she should be grateful he wants to do something with them given that she has friends whose husbands work a lot less than Gary and don’t even take their kids to cricket practice.

Anna thinks about this as she yanks the sheets from the bed and bundles them into her arms before stomping out the back to the laundry. She does a lot of stomping these days.

‘Wait,’ she says out loud, because another thing she does a lot of is talk to herself. That’s what happens when your kids go to bed at kid time and your husband doesn’t come home until vampire time. She inhales noisily as she shoves the sheets into the washing machine.

‘There’s something else going on,’ she mutters, then she walks back to the bedroom to pick up his dirty clothes and pulls clean sheets out of the linen cupboard and starts to make the bed.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she says to the air. What she means is that she can’t believe she didn’t figure it out before. She is who he doesn’t want to see. She is who he doesn’t want to be around. He is happy to spend time with the kids, obviously, because he’s been doing things with them. Getting them up early. Out of the house. Away from her.

That makes her feel a little sick.

She should have realised it earlier.

He’s having an affair.

That’s it. That has to be why he’s never here. Why he doesn’t want to touch her. Hasn’t touched her in months. Why he waits for her to be in the shower to leave for work. Why he comes home when she’s asleep. So he doesn’t have to see her awake.

Now she feels even sicker, to think he’s been running around with someone and she’s been too stupid to realise it. Is it his paralegal? She’s been there for a year or so. Her name is Donna. She’s at least a decade younger than him.

Oh yes, that sounds about right. It’s Donna. He’s staying at the office every night for Donna.

Do other people know?

No, she doesn’t care about that. What she cares about – what she needs to bring into effect, right now – is getting him out of the house. For good. He can leave his dirty undies on Donna’s floor. Anna is not going to keep making a home for him when he’d rather be somewhere else.

A noise at the back of the house tells her that Gary and the kids have returned from the beach. Which means she doesn’t have long to figure out how she’s going to handle this, but she is, indeed, going to handle it because suddenly she has reached her limit with this situation and she simply cannot bear the idea of Gary being in the house a minute longer.

‘Mu-um,’ Troy singsongs.

‘Can you take your sister to the garden?’ Anna calls. She didn’t know she was going to ask him to do this, but since it’s emerged from her mouth she must mean it. Funny how our minds can sometimes know things that we aren’t consciously aware of – like how she’s now sure her mind has been aware that Gary is having an affair and it took the rest of her this long to catch up. Or maybe it goes even further than that: her mind has known for years that he hasn’t really been interested in this marriage, which is why he’s spent increasing amounts of time away from her and their children, and she’s been too stupid to figure it out. Until now.

She can’t hit him with that straight up, though – he’ll deny it. Why wouldn’t he? If he’s got away with it for this long, what reason does he have to own up to it now? No, she needs to find another lever to get him out. Because that’s what she’s decided to do. If he wants to be with someone else so badly he can spend all his time out of the house, he may as well be permanently out of the house.

Gary appears in their bedroom door, where she’s pacing, hands on hips, her face so tense she feels as if she’s going to grind her teeth to dust.

‘G’day, love,’ he says cheerfully, as if everything is wonderful. Probably because it is, for him.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she says, keeping her voice down even though their bedroom is the furthest room from the garden, where she has sent the kids.

His brow furrows. They’re the only lines on his face, and even then they’re temporary. Sometimes she hates him for that. He has smooth, olive skin and a great head of thick hair, long eyelashes, full lips. Lovely cheekbones. He was stunning when they met and he’s aged so well. Unlike her.

Yes, all right, she’s superficial and she initially went out with him because he was the handsomest man she knew and she couldn’t believe he was interested in her. She was a secretary in the legal office where he was a junior solicitor and he asked her out to dinner one night, and it went from there. Marriage. A house. Children.

It’s the children who deserve better than a worse-than-part-time father – by which she means they deserve a mother who doesn’t spend so much time worrying about why their father doesn’t come home, and if Gary isn’t living here any more she can stop worrying and just focus on being the best mum she can be. If she’s going to be doing all this housework at least she can do it for people who don’t leave their clothes on the floor.

‘What do you mean?’ Gary says, those lines still on his forehead.

Anna wonders if his mistress likes them.

‘Sunday is the kids’ only day off,’ she says, setting up her argument. ‘They don’t want to go running.’

‘Sure they do,’ he says lightly.

‘How do you know?’

‘They didn’t complain.’

‘Gary!’ she shrieks.

He jumps.

Fair enough, she’s being a little dramatic. Because she feels a little dramatic.

‘They see you so rarely,’ she goes on, ‘they’re glad for any scrap of time you give them.’

The brow furrows deeper. She remembers the days when she used to kiss those furrows, laughingly saying they’d set in stone if she didn’t. That was so long ago.

‘What do you mean?’ he says again.

‘You are working seven days a week,’ she says.

‘No, I’m not – I’m home today.’

‘And last Sunday?’

‘Um …’ He shrugs, looking sheepish.

‘What about Saturdays, when I’m running them around to sport?’

‘I told you, it’s busy at the moment.’

‘Well, I’m busy too. With our children.’

He laughs lightly. Too lightly. Because he has no idea what’s coming.

‘I’m bringing home the bacon,’ he says, like it’s funny. Like it’s the best reason for never being here. Except it’s never been a reason for her. It certainly wasn’t the reason she married him. Laughter, lust, companionship, shared values – or so she thought: these were why she married him. Oh, and love. She loved him. Loved how he made her feel protected and safe. Instinctual things she’d never known she wanted but when she felt them around him – when she felt he would take away her worries, make her feel she could just be her – it was so strong she wanted to preserve it forever.

That’s what has disappeared: the feeling of being protected. Of being safe. Without him here – when he’s at the office most hours of the week – she has felt exposed. Vulnerable. And stressed. If she is going to feel vulnerable she can do without the extra stress. She’s making a decision to put her wellbeing first, for once, knowing that what’s good for her is good for the children, because if she’s not functioning properly she can’t look after them properly either.

‘I think it’s best if you move out,’ she says.

‘What?’ He says it so softly it’s as if he has no air left.

‘Move out. You clearly don’t want to be here. And I don’t want to just be your maid.’ She’s tacked this on because it sounds like a rational argument, whereas you’re having an affair does not.

‘You’re not –’

‘Gary, I am.’ She feels calm as she says it. Strong. Maybe she doesn’t need him after all. Maybe all this time she hasn’t needed his pr. . .