The Summerhouse by the Sea. Jenny Oliver
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to see his mid-contract iPhone sitting at the base of the loo. He had his sleeve rolled up and his arm in the water before he could even tune into her reply.
‘I’m trying to make you look at me, for Christ’s sake. I’m trying to make you exist right now with me and with Max. You’re never here any more, Rory. You’re never present. It’s like you’re always distracted. And Max is growing up and this bit is meant to be easier. Our life should be getting more fun but it’s not. It feels like it’s getting worse. I don’t want you to feel like you’re stuck with us, with this life. Because to me it’s precious. It’s all I have.’
‘I didn’t say I was stuck with you,’ he said, distracted, hauling the dripping iPhone out of the toilet, trying to get it to switch on, vaguely seeing an expression on her face and a tremor in her hands he hadn’t seen before, and feeling in the pit of his stomach that this was serious, that the ground beneath him wasn’t as stable as he’d presumed it to be, but the call from Bruce was, in that moment, more serious. ‘I’ve got to get a phone!’ Chucking the useless iPhone on top of the loo, he moved Claire to one side, hands on her shoulders.
She pushed him away with a stunned, ‘What are you doing?’
Rory wasn’t listening. ‘Max!’ he shouted. ‘Max, give me your laptop!’ He barged into the living room and commandeered the whizzy new laptop that he had no idea how to use. Rory was an Apple man – all the touch-screen shenanigans on Windows 10 was out of his jurisdiction. He handed it back. ‘Get me on Twitter.’ When Max paused he shouted, ‘Now!’
Max did as he was told.
And there it was.
BREAKING: Rory Fisher to eat #SwanLovesGoose for Sunday dinner!
The little village of Mariposa was exactly as Ava remembered it as a kid. A hidden treasure at the bottom of a winding path off the main road, it was a curl of golden sandy beach and turquoise sea. Houses lined the coast like Neapolitan ice cream: pink sandwiched between vanilla and chocolate, tall to the sky, their shuttered windows like eyes staring out to the bright blue of the Mediterranean. Ava wheeled her bag past the Café Estrella, keeper of so many of her family memories, its terracotta roof tiles speckled with moss, the awning a little wonky, tables spilling out on to a cracked concrete terrace, the sun radiating from the pavement in tentacles. As she’d walked down the slope to the tiny beach town she’d passed a new restaurant, Nino’s, heaving with lunch trade. In comparison, Café Estrella looked worryingly closed.
She paused to look back at the bustling restaurant, wondering for a second about the change, but then found her gaze distracted by the familiar view ahead of her – postcard perfect and etched on her brain for imaginary visits on cold winter days. The pale glinting sea receding to dark navy and melting into ice-blue sky. White fishing boats like gulls bobbing on the water. A line of yellow buoys marking a path for the watersports speedboat. Swimmers diving off orange pedalos, while sunbathers basked on golden sand. Blue and white sunshades with matching loungers. Dripping lollies, barking dogs, the rat-a-tat of bat and ball. The hiss of the shower. The gentle curl of the waves. The birds stalking up and down in the sand.
She pulled her bag further along the path and shielded her eyes to get her first glimpse of her grandmother’s house across the square, the small white villa visible through a rusting black wrought-iron fence. Behind it, like pastel footsteps, more ice cream houses climbed the hill. Their arched windows, geranium-strewn terraces and zigzags of washing lines leading the eye up and up till it reached a large house at the top – stone-coloured brick, shaded by huge sweeping pines, their branches like blackened clouds – and then across from that to the rows and rows of vines that marked the hillside like lines on paper.
Down on the beach, the air smelled of the orange trees in pots around Café Estrella, their leaves shiny as plastic, and the drunken fig that had crushed the wall and lay draped half across the path, its ripening fruit sweetening the air with a perfume so heady, so addictive that the more Ava inhaled the more she needed, as if all the breaths in the world wouldn’t satisfy the craving. Light-headed from all the sniffing, she bounced her case across the cobbles of the square in the direction of the rusty black gates. On the wall above the letterbox was a bell with a little light and the words Valentina Brown (Mrs).
She couldn’t quite believe she was here.
She had wavered slightly when she’d touched down in the UK. Wondered whether to back track and relegate the whole idea to a conversation topic about how her big bad brother had denied her this chance of a lifetime. She had actually half-presumed that her boss Peregrine would be the one to put the kybosh on it – unable to manage without her – but instead he’d been nothing but supportive, waffling on about her loyalty to the company. He could think of nothing more worthwhile than taking a break to find oneself and wished he had done it himself at her age. He and their intern – a dashing young up-start, Hugo, the incredibly self-assured son of Peregrine’s best friend – would hold the fort in her absence. If she was honest, she’d been a little put out by Peregrine’s blasé belief that the company could manage perfectly well without her, secretly wishing herself indispensable. But he clearly wasn’t worried, coming back from lunch with a travel diary, still in the Paperchase bag with the receipt, as a parting gift to seal the deal.
So here she was, unzipping the pocket in her bag for the key, still on the familiar little black bull keyring, a miniature version of the huge cut-outs that loomed high above the roadside on her taxi journey from the airport, reminding her that this was Spain.
She looked across at the Café Estrella. In the darkness a TV flickered. Two old men played chess on a table in the shade. The blackboards were tired and smudged. There was no one there that she recognised. The waiter was drying the cups, his glance flicking between the TV and his few customers. She remembered nights when they’d danced on the tables.
She turned the key in the iron gate lock and walked up the dusty path, past the bougainvillea trailing unchecked over the fence and the pots of plump green succulents. Her fingers were shaking slightly and at the front door she fumbled the key, dropping it on the threshold. Bending down to pick it up she saw the shells. Pressed into the cement by her and Val: Our Summerhouse. She paused and rubbed one of the little shells with her thumb before taking a deep breath, picking up the keys and going inside.
The corridor was dark. The shutters closed. It was stranger than she’d imagined, being there alone. No smells of cooking. No vacuuming or absent-minded flower-arranging or kettle boiling. No stray cats purring. No telephone ringing or swearing at the TV, no diary scribbling or wild gesticulations about making no noise and coming to the window to look at what was going on in the street outside.
Nothing, Ava noted as she pushed the door open, just some junk mail on the mat and dusty dried lavender in a vase.
It was empty, unlived in, musty.
She walked straight through to the living room and opened the windows, the air instantly filling with the salty breath of the sea. She stood with her hands on the sill, looking out at the beach, at the rows of bronze-limbed sun-worshippers and children digging holes in the sand. Then she turned her back to the window and took in the familiar sight of a million old Spanish paintings wonkily filling every inch of the magnolia walls. The sofa, threadbare, spilling with cushions. The coffee table stacked high with big art books, stains on the glass from coffee cups. The shelves toppling with family photographs. The desk by the window covered with papers. Everything exactly as she remembered it but coated with a thin layer of sticky dust.
In the kitchen she tore off a bin bag and went through the fridge, chucking everything out. Then did the same in the avocado bathroom, binning the half-used bottles of shampoo, the night creams and the flattened toothpaste tube. The little half-bar of soap by the bathroom sink, heartbreaking but unusable, too closely tied to the once living.
As she looked, Ava did her best to ignore the growing weight pressing down on her, trying not to dwell on the life that had gone. She blinked away the vision of someone finding her own half-bars