The Sunshine and Biscotti Club. Jenny Oliver
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scent of citrus intensified the closer she got, the huge waxy great lemons hanging heavy from the branches, all knobbly and pitted. She wanted to reach up and take a bite straight through the skin; feel her eyes water as she squeezed the juice into her mouth.
It made her think of the first perfume she’d ever made—from a bag of Limoncello lemons Silvia had sent as congratulations on having the twins. There was a note that said, ‘The beautiful thing about women is they can change as many times as they like. You’re already a wonderful mother. Who will you be next?’
Eve had stood staring at the lemons. These wonderful fat things that weren’t to do with feeding babies or trying to work out why they were crying, or why she was crying as she sat alone in the draughty, crumbling cottage they had bought after she’d got pregnant. After she had been seduced by a photo in a Homes and Gardens magazine in the doctor’s waiting room of a picturesque village where everyone had chickens and rose gardens and muddy wellington boots at the front door.
The lemons connected her back to the world. Not the pre-pregnancy one where she worked in marketing for a massive beauty company in the city. Where so many people wanted to talk to her every day she would sometimes put her Out of Office on and go and sit on the fire escape with her laptop just to get some work done. But the one before even her marriage, where she smelt the rain in the middle of the night and the bark of trees.
So she had sliced the lemons and she had squeezed them and she had gone outside and chopped all the heads off the roses in the rose garden, and then she had found the unused wedding-present pestle and mortar in the back of the cupboard and started to see if she could capture it all in a fragrance. She had got to work on who she would be next.
Now, as she popped out from the lemon groves and onto the lakeside shore, she was suddenly stopped short by a voice saying, ‘All right, Eve.’
She had to take a second to get her breath back from the shock.
He knew her name.
The guy got up from where he was sitting cross-legged on the pebbles. ‘Didn’t mean to scare you.’
Eve turned. The sun was in her eyes.
The voice made her expect dreadlocks, an arm almost covered in ink, and eyes that could spear a person from a hundred paces.
A wisp of cloud passed in front of the sun.
Holy shit. The dreads were gone. The eyes were still the same.
‘Hello, Jimmy,’ she said, her mind almost short-circuiting at the sight of him.
From her seat on the terrace, Libby watched Jimmy and Eve approach, the air between them like firecrackers popping in the sky.
Next to her, Dex and Jessica glanced up, saw Eve laugh at something Jimmy said, and then exchanged a look. Libby knew they were all thinking about the same thing. The casual flirting, the lazy hand-holding. How they’d roll in from some club together, Jimmy, with his arm slung casually round Eve’s shoulders, drunkenly rambling about getting free of the rat race, concocting starry-eyed visions of the two of them backpacking the globe, while Eve nodded along, fanning the flames of his dreams.
They were dangerous together; made more than the sum of their parts. Already Eve seemed to be burning brighter as she pulled up a chair, her hair glinting in the sun.
‘OK, so here’s the deal,’ said Libby when they were all seated. ‘I’m fully booked for the summer. I have just over a fortnight before the first customers arrive.’
Dex glanced around him and did a low whistle, his eyes taking in the lichen covered terrace, the rusted wrought iron tables, the chipped paintwork, the overgrown garden.
‘I know, it doesn’t look great,’ Libby went on. ‘And we certainly weren’t expecting it all to be perfect, but cash flow meant we had to open before we were ready. The main thing is that the outhouse is built. That’s where the courses are going to be.’
‘What courses?’ Jimmy asked, lounging back in his chair.
‘Cooking courses, for the moment,’ Libby said.
‘You should do yoga courses,’ he said.
Libby made a face to say that was the last thing she needed. ‘For the moment, Jimmy, I need to stick with what I know best and that’s baking. It’ll work as an extension of the blog and the supper clubs—you know, so you can come out here and have a slice of the life you read about. Soak up a bit of sun, learn to cook your favourite Italian foods, and go home relaxed and rejuvenated. It’s called the Sunshine and Biscotti Club.’
‘Very nice,’ said Jimmy, almost taken aback by the fact he was impressed.
Jessica nodded. ‘I came up with that. We’re in charge of design and marketing.’
‘Didn’t I come up with it?’ Dex said with a frown.
‘No.’ Jessica shook her head.
‘I really think I did,’ Dex said, leaning forward, elbows on the table.
‘You so didn’t.’ Jessica was aghast.
‘OK, OK, look, maybe you both came up with it. The important thing is that it’s going to happen in a couple of weeks,’ Libby said.
But Jessica wasn’t happy about letting the matter lie and was about to say more when an angry looking waitress appeared, arms crossed over her chest, and said, ‘Drinks?’
Jessica swung round in surprise.
‘Oh yes, that’d be lovely,’ said Libby, half standing in her chair. ‘Giulia, these are my friends, they’ll all be helping to get the place up and running over the next couple of days. Everyone, this is Giulia.’
Giulia stared at them all, her expression unchanged.
‘Giulia’s been here for years, worked for my aunt,’ Libby carried on brightly. ‘She’s a rock, I couldn’t do it without her.’
Giulia made a noise that could have been interpreted as a scoff of disdain. Libby could see the others glancing down at their laps or across to the lemon grove, as though the awkwardness in the air was something visible to look away from.
Libby kept smiling.
It had come as quite a shock when Libby and Jake had realised that, to all intents and purposes, Giulia had been inherited along with the hotel. There was no getting rid of her. She turned up every day at the crack of dawn to clean and polish, then at midday she opened up the bar. The idea that they might close the restaurant for any length of time had been actively laughed at by the residents of the village—all anyone wanted from the Limoncello was the food. Jake and Libby could mess about with their renovations all they liked as long as Thursday to Saturday the restaurant opened. Dino the chef trotted up in the afternoons to start prepping with or without Libby’s say so. Jake had been happy to let them get on with it as long as the money came in and he got a bowl of spicy tortellini soup or thick tomatoey fish stew at the end of the day.
To Giulia, the Sunshine and Biscotti Club was some ridiculous whim of Libby’s that she had absolutely no interest or belief in. Left to her, not an inch of the place would change.
‘Maybe a bottle of Prosecco, Giulia? So we can toast everyone’s arrival?’ Libby said, glancing round the eyes-averted table and then back up to Giulia who shrugged and stomped back inside.
‘She’s a keeper,’ said Dex with a raise of a brow.
‘Well, to be honest, I don’t actually know what I would do without her,’ Libby said. ‘I mean I don’t know how to run a bar or a restaurant.’
‘But you can learn though,’ said Jessica.
‘Yeah.’ Libby nodded emphatically, half