Summer's Lease: Escape to paradise with this swoony summer romance: (Shakespeare Sisters)

by Carrie Elks

  ‘That might be my next job,’ Cesca said grimly. ‘Except they probably wouldn’t even give me a chance. Not with my history.’

  She sat back and took a look around Hugh’s beautiful apartment. The red brick building in Mayfair couldn’t be further from Cesca’s dismal flat, although only a few miles separated them. In lifestyle, though, they were oceans apart. Hugh came from old money, and his late mother had willed this apartment to him when he was in his twenties. The furnishings inside were family heirlooms. The chairs ranged from the Regency to the Victorian period, and despite their age all the tables looked almost new, their wood polished and shiny. Even the walls held evidence of his ancestry, with his long-dead great-great-grandfather staring down at them from a painting above the fireplace.

  ‘This has to stop. You know that, don’t you?’

  She whipped her head around to look at Hugh. ‘What do you mean?’

  He looked pained, but resolved. ‘You know exactly what I mean. I’ve watched you hop from job to job for too long. It’s not right. I promised your mother I’d look after you. I hate breaking promises.’

  ‘You do look after me,’ Cesca told him. ‘By being here, by listening to me moan. Most people would have given up on me.’

  Hugh topped up their cups, holding the china pot carefully. ‘You need help, poppet, not a listening ear. If I were an American I’d have staged an intervention by now.’

  For the first time since she’d walked into his apartment, Cesca smiled. ‘You’d hate an intervention. All that talking about feelings and making me cry. The only thing you like staging is a play at the theatre.’

  He looked up and caught her eye, and Cesca realised she wasn’t going to get out of this conversation easily. ‘That’s the only thing you should be thinking about, too. You have the theatre in your blood, yet you’ve been running away from it for six years.’

  She felt her chest constrict. ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’

  ‘And I thought I was the one with a stiff upper lip. That’s your whole problem, don’t you see? Maybe if you talked about it, and really worked things through, you’d have got over it by now. Instead here you are getting sacked from dead-end jobs, and squandering your talent.’

  Her mouth felt dry, in spite of the tea. ‘Shit happens, and it happened to me. I had my chance and I’m not good enough for it to happen again.’

  Hugh slammed his cup down, causing tea to spill over the sides. ‘I don’t want to hear you say that! You were eighteen years old; the world was at your feet. And yes, “shit happened”, as you so elegantly describe it. But that doesn’t make you any less talented.’

  ‘My play bombed.’ It still hurt to say it, even after all these years. ‘They closed it down after a week. The producers lost all that money.’

  ‘Damn it, Cesca, it wasn’t your fault. The play was good, you know that.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. If nobody wants to come to see it, if everybody returns their tickets, then I may as well not have bothered.’

  ‘They returned the tickets because the leading man disappeared. And that wasn’t your fault either.’

  No, it wasn’t her fault at all. It was Sam Carlton’s fault, the good-looking, talented bastard. ‘I should’ve known it was all too good to be true. I mean, what kind of man leaves town after press night? Before the play even opens?’

  Hugh shrugged. ‘I know he left at the wrong moment, but it wasn’t personal.’

  She slammed her hand on the table next to her. ‘Of course it was personal.’ Tears stung her eyes. ‘Everything about that play was personal. I bled those words out. And he just left, Hugh, without saying a word. He left us all in the lurch the day before we were supposed to open. So don’t tell me it wasn’t personal, because it was.’

  ‘You’re being irrational.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘I know I am. You must think I’m an idiot. And I know it’s not his fault the understudy sucked, or that the play closed. But look at him, he’s disgustingly successful, and I’m . . . well, I’m me.’

  Leaning back against the cushions, she closed her eyes. The tears pooled behind her lids. ‘The play meant everything to me,’ she said quietly. ‘It was meant to be my memorial to Mum. It was supposed to show everybody how wonderful she was, how much we missed her.’

  ‘There will be more plays. You have a talent.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter whether I have a talent or not,’ Cesca replied. ‘I haven’t been able to write a single word since.’

  Hugh winced. ‘You have a gift, Cesca. That isn’t something to be squandered.’

  ‘Don’t you think I’ve tried?’ she said, remembering all those days spent in front of her computer, a blank screen sneering back at her as her thoughts turned to dust. It wasn’t so much a writer’s block as a writer’s mountain. ‘Every time I try to type, nothing comes out. It killed me.’

  ‘You know, Winston Churchill said that success is jumping from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. Well, something like that. Where’s your enthusiasm?’ Hugh demanded.

  Cesca sighed. ‘I managed the failures all right. It’s the success that’s elusive.’

  ‘You’re not going to bloody find it in a cat café, are you?’ He shuddered. ‘All that hair, and people drinking coffee. Disgusting.’

  She wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the cats or the coffee. In Hugh’s opinion both were unseemly, but coffee usually got the biggest rant.

  ‘I haven’t found it anywhere, Uncle Hugh. I’ve looked and looked and it’s gone. In the end there’s only one conclusion to make: I was a one-hit wonder. And that hit wasn’t even any good.’

  ‘That’s a load of poppycock and you know it. My God, Cesca, you won a national competition at the age of eighteen, with a play the judges described as brilliant. You don’t get those sort of accolades unless you’re hugely talented, you know that.’

  She didn’t want to think of those days. For a few brief months she’d been riding a wave of excitement, only to have it come tumbling down around her. Cesca had been in her final year at school when she’d entered the competition, absolutely certain that her play would end up at the bottom of the pile. To have it win Novice Play of the Year and then get picked up for production had been a dream come true.

  ‘Talent means nothing.’

  ‘So you’re just going to give up?’

  ‘I have to accept that I’m not meant for writing. So I’ll keep trying these jobs until something sticks.’

  ‘Nothing’s going to stick.’ Hugh stood up, striding over to the fireplace. He lifted a photograph, holding the silver frame between his fingers. Cesca recognised the portrait of her mother, standing on stage, holding bunches of roses after a spectacular first night. ‘Look at your mother. The theatre is in your blood, it flowed from her to you. And you can pretend it isn’t there all you like, because it won’t go away. Your mother was born to act, and she did it wonderfully. You were born to write, and when you wrote your first play it was amazing. Prize-winning. Don’t let the actions of an immature pretty-boy stop you from fulfilling your potential.’

  There was a truth in his words that brought the tears back to Cesca’s eyes. Of all the sisters, it was Cesca who had loved the theatre from the moment she was born. Cesca who had begged as a toddler to sit in the wings and watch her mother as she acted on the stage. She’d been hooked from the moment she’d smelled the greasepaint and musty old costumes.

  ‘I can’t do it. I promise I’ve tried. But every time I do, I hear these voices telling me I’m useless, that I’m lying to myself. That Sam Carlton leaving for Hollywood was a blessing, because I’m not meant to be a writer.’

  Hugh sat down beside her, his knees clicking as they bent. ‘We both know that’s not true. You just need to give yourself a bit of time and space. Somewhere to think, to breathe, to let the words flow.’

  She laughed. ‘Not really possible in London.’ At least not the part of London she lived in, surrounded by Susie and her
married boyfriends. It was hard enough to breathe, let alone process her thoughts.

  ‘Maybe you should get away.’

  Cesca smiled at him fondly. ‘Where to? I can’t afford to pay next week’s rent, there’s no way I can find the money for a holiday.’

  ‘I’d give you the money.’

  There it was again. She instantly tensed. ‘No. No thank you. I know you want the best for me, but I’ll pay my own way.’

  ‘What if there was another way?’ Hugh asked, looking suddenly crafty. ‘What if there was something cheap you could do? I could lend you the cash and you could pay me back.’

  ‘Unless it was exceedingly cheap, I’d never be able to pay you back. And as my namesake said, “never a borrower nor a lender be”.’

  Hugh smiled at her Shakespearean reference. ‘Then we’ll make it exceedingly cheap. Plus with the lovely writing you’ll be able to do, you can pay me back in no time.’ He leaned back and rubbed his chin for a moment, deep in thought. Then he sat straight up, clicking his fingers. ‘I’ve got it!’

  ‘What?’

  He ignored her question. ‘Stay there, I just need to make a phone call.’ He stood, putting his cup on the table beside him.

  ‘I haven’t exactly got anywhere to go,’ she pointed out, as he walked out into the kitchen.

  Five minutes later he was back, a big smile on his face.

  ‘You look like the cat who got the cream,’ she told him, wincing at her own joke.

  He laughed loudly. ‘I just spoke to some old friends. I’d heard on the grapevine they were having trouble finding a house-sitter for their villa in Italy.’

  Cesca raised an eyebrow. ‘Well that’s convenient.’

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Hugh chided. ‘I’m not stretching the truth or making anything up, it’s simple serendipity. They have a live-in couple that takes care of the place, but they want to go away for a few weeks, and need somebody they can trust to stay in the house. You won’t have to do very much, apart from keep an eye on the place, so there’ll be plenty of time to write. Plus if you agree to it, they’ll pay for your flights and food while you’re there.’

  Sceptical didn’t even cover it. ‘And where is this villa that needs a messed up failure to take care of it?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s on Lake Como, just outside a pretty little village called Varenna. Villa Palladino – that’s where you’ll be staying – has been in their family for centuries. I’ve been there myself, it’s absolutely beautiful. What’s more, it’s secluded and quiet, and nobody will interrupt you there. You can breathe in the lake air, take lots of walks, you can even lie on the beach if you want to.’ He paused, glancing up at her again. ‘Or you can write.’

  She was so torn it almost hurt. Part of her wanted to get up and jump up and down, show some excitement and thank her uncle for saving her life. The other bit – the Cesca who had been running the show for the past six years – was telling her it was too good to be true, that things like this didn’t happen to her. She was being set up for a fall, and was going to let her godfather down once again.

  ‘I can’t hold down a job,’ Cesca whispered, ‘so what makes you think I can do this one?’

  ‘I know you can do it,’ Hugh replied, ‘because there’s nothing to do but write and get your head straight. It’s what you should have done all those years ago after the play folded. I should have insisted upon it. Instead you got yourself into this downward spiral, and you’re spinning so fast that nobody can catch you.’

  It was impossible to ignore the truth in his words, and Cesca didn’t bother to try.

  ‘If I do go,’ she said hesitantly, still not quite able to bring herself to agree, ‘then I’ll need to sort some things out. Like a passport, and clothes. Plus I need to work out what the hell I’m going to write.’

  Hugh gave her a beaming smile. ‘Those are the easy things, we can get them arranged tout de suite. Getting you to agree to it is the tricky one.’

  ‘Do you have a photograph of the villa?’ Cesca asked. ‘How big is it?’

  Hugh shrugged, glancing away. ‘Oh, it’s medium-sized. I don’t think I have a photo, they’re very private people. There’s enough rooms for you not to bump into the couple who look after the house while they’re there, but it’s not so big that you’ll be overwhelmed after they leave.’ Sensing her reluctance, he reached out for her arm. ‘Just give it a try. Do it for me, for your dad – goodness, do it for your mother if you have to, but get on a plane and go to Italy. If you hate it, I’ll talk to my friends and we can think again.’

  ‘I don’t know . . . ’

  ‘Stop thinking and just say yes,’ Hugh told her. ‘Look at this as rock bottom, and now you have a chance to start climbing back up.’

  He was right, she knew he was. It was crazy how little she had left to lose. There came a point in everybody’s life where you either accepted that things were never going to improve, or you took hold of the wheel and actually started thinking about where you were going. Sitting there, in that London flat, Cesca realised this was the moment for her.

  Could she ignore it? Could she bear to walk away and only look back with regrets? She already had enough of those to last a lifetime.

  ‘OK, I’ll do it,’ she said, causing Hugh to let out a relieved sigh. ‘I’ll go to Italy and I’ll look after that damn house and I’ll try to make some changes in my life.’

  Hugh pulled her up into an uncharacteristic hug. Stunned, Cesca returned the embrace, her hands on his back, feeling the bones pressing through his thin frame.

  ‘Good girl,’ he whispered, ‘I’m so proud of you.’

  His words touched her, and made her feel wistful. There was a time she was proud of herself, too. If only she could feel that way again.

  ‘When do you leave?’ her father asked, looking at her over the rim of his mug.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Cesca told him. ‘I catch a flight from Heath-row in the morning.’ She glanced around the kitchen. The walls were shabby, paint peeling away from the plaster. The sink was piled up with dirty dishes. It was crazy, really. The house itself was worth a lot of money, but Oliver had neglected it for years, more interested in studying insects than the interior decor.

  She felt a twinge of anxiety about leaving her father behind. Though he was still a good-looking man, sitting across the kitchen table from her he looked frailer than she remembered. Older.

  ‘Have you told your sisters you’re going?’ he asked.

  ‘I spoke to them this morning. On Skype.’

  ‘On that video phone thing?’ Oliver questioned, shaking his head. ‘It’s amazing how you can all see each other, even though you girls are scattered far and wide.’

  She smiled softly. She’d never get used to sitting in this kitchen without them. It held so many memories for her. Lucy desperately trying to make their packed lunches for school, Juliet painting a picture on the old wooden table. Kitty glued to the ancient television perched on the kitchen counter. It felt so quiet now, in comparison. As a child, this house had been full of life. The Shakespeare sisters had been vibrant and noisy. But now all that was left were the ghosts of their past.

  She could almost see her mother in here, too. Looking as glamorous as ever, leaning down to kiss each one of them before leaving for the theatre. She’d always smelled delicious, like a bouquet of flowers. Sometimes, Cesca caught a whiff of that same perfume and it brought everything back.

  ‘Will you be OK while I’m gone?’ she asked her father.

  ‘Of course I will. I’ve got my work to keep me busy. Plus Hugh called to invite me to dinner. Oh, and Lucy will probably pop down from Edinburgh at some point.’

  Thank goodness for Lucy. Their oldest sister always seemed to have everything under control. ‘I’ll try to call you,’ she told him.

  He waved his hand. ‘I probably won’t pick up. And I still can’t work that damned answering machine. Why don’t you send me a postcard instead?’

  ‘I can do t
hat.’

  He was looking down at his crossword, tapping his pen against his mouth. She’d lost his attention again. ‘Dad, you will take care of yourself, won’t you?’ she asked, aware of the irony of her words. ‘Make sure you eat properly.’

  Pulling his pen from his mouth, he scribbled an answer. ‘I always eat properly,’ he said. ‘Though not as well as you, I expect. Italy has some wonderful food.’ Finally, he looked up at her. ‘What are you going to do over there anyway?’

  She sighed. ‘Like I told you, I’m going to look after a villa. And I’m going to try to write again.’

  For the first time, his face lit up with interest. ‘A play?’ he asked.

  ‘If I can. I’m a bit rusty though.’ Understatement of the year.

  ‘That’s wonderful news. Your mother would be so proud if she was alive. She always dreamed that one of her daughters would follow her into the theatre.’

  ‘I know.’ Cesca looked down. ‘I don’t think she’d be proud though. I’ve turned out to be a disappointment.’

  ‘Of course you haven’t.’ Oliver shook his head. ‘All you girls, you’ve done so well. It wasn’t easy for any of you after Milly . . . ’ He faded out, tears springing to his eyes. ‘Well, anyway, do your best. That’s all you can do.’

  For a moment there she’d thought he was going to open up to her. But she could see him withdrawing in front of her eyes. He carried on filling in his crossword puzzle, as she finished her mug of tea.

  He was right, though. Her best was all she could do. But would it be good enough?

  3

  I was in a better place; but travellers must be content

  – As You Like It

  The Italian sun was beating through the huge glass windows of the airport, as if to welcome her. She basked in the radiated warmth, trying to work out which group of people to follow, attempting to understand the foreign words on the signs overhead.

  Everything sounded better in Italian. Words such as Imbarchi, Attenzione and Partenza seemed to drip off the tongue like honey. Sadly she didn’t understand any of them, not even when she finally located her guidebook and started to leaf through it, hoping there might be a map of the airport somewhere. It was only when she looked again that she saw each sign had an English translation. Stupid? Her?