by Jenny Oliver
‘Uh-huh,’ he said, face taut with concentration as he focused on his neat edge.
After a few more minutes, as the sun danced across them in fading ribbons of light, he added, ‘And how does it make you feel? This affair?’ He did the final flick of his paintbrush along the doorway and looked up, brow raised.
Ava dunked her brush in the paint. ‘I don’t know. Stupid, I think.’
Tom paused. ‘Why?’
‘Because everyone seemed to know except me. Because I have lived forever thinking that she left because of her talent, and actually she just left for this bloke. She wasn’t this great star that I thought she was. Or she was, but it wasn’t for the reasons I thought it was. Oh I don’t know.’
Tom glanced down at her brush. ‘Try not to get drips on the ground.’
‘I’m not!’ she said, defensive.
He smiled, face angled back towards the door. She could feel him breathing next to her, concentrating on his next perfect line along the bottom of the wall. She could see the muscles in his back through his T-shirt, the flex of his arm, the line of his tan.
The wind blew and rustled the leaves of the fig tree, making the air sweet in the last of the sun.
Ava shook her head and went back to her patch of wall. ‘Aren’t you going to say something?’
‘I’m thinking,’ he said, kneeling on the floor, eyes still concentrating on his painting. Then he paused and sat up, brush resting on the side of the can. ‘I’d have thought maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to have found out.’
‘Really?’
‘Well,’ he shrugged, ‘surely it makes her more human. Isn’t that quite a relief?’
Ava frowned and went back to her wall. The white lines fat and glossy. She blew a frantic little spider out of the way so he didn’t get smothered. Was it a relief? ‘I suppose I just don’t know what was real. I feel like it changes all my memories. I feel like if she was weaker than I thought she was and I spent so long trying to impress her, where does that leave all those things? I don’t know. Let’s just paint.’ She swirled her brush in the can.
Tom was watching her. Ava looked away at the spots of paint she’d dripped on the ground and tried to wipe them away with her flip flop.
‘Ava, your life and her opinion of you have to be separate.’
‘I know,’ she nodded. ‘It’s just easier said than done.’
She looked across at him and smiled, and realised for the first time that she didn’t see the chocolate-box perfect face as it had been on Louise’s pillowcase, she saw just a face, a friend with familiar blue eyes with a few lines of green, a mouth calm and serious, and a groove between his eyebrows that she knew when relaxed was white from lack of suntan.
The door opened, bashing Tom hard on the back. ‘Ow!’ He turned to see who had thwacked him.
‘There is more talking than painting going on out here!’ Gabriela was craning her neck round the door.
‘You’re all chatting inside,’ Ava said, her argument voided by Gabriela’s unimpressed inspection of her wall.
‘And we’ve got half the place done!’ Gabriela said, incredulous. ‘If you flirt less and paint more, so would you too,’ she drawled, before slamming the door shut.
‘Gabriela!’ Ava felt herself blush.
Tom was loading up his brush, a smile playing on his lips.
Ava glanced inside and saw Gabriela and all her friends, heads together, giggling.
‘She’s unbelievable,’ said Ava, shaking her head, doing big sweeping strokes with her brush, embarrassed, aware, awkward.
Tom stood up, leaned against the doorframe. ‘Come on then, tell me why you left last night.’
Ava paused. She bit her lip, a little sheepish, and could barely meet his eye. ‘Because I worried maybe I was with you to impress my mum.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ Tom laughed in disbelief. ‘Are you kidding me?’
She shook her head.
‘OK, look Ava, I like you. More than most people I meet, actually. But that’s beside the point. It was just gonna be a kiss. You didn’t really even have to think about it,’ he said, hand pushing his hair back, eyes still laughing.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I know.’
‘Do you want to kiss me?’ he asked.
She nodded. Without even thinking about it. ‘Yes.’
‘Right,’ he said, and laying their paintbrushes down, he took her hand and led her across the café terrace, over the little path and round the back of the giant leaning fig tree, walking with purpose towards the crumbling wall.
The sun had completely set, leaving just a last shiver of white on the horizon, the branches of the fig twisted in the darkness, the leaves flapping like washing on a line. The collapsing wall bowed under wooden supports, prickly pears and scrubby cactuses growing in the gaps holding the bricks in place.
Ava was frantically checking behind her to make sure no one was watching. Her mouth was taut with excitement, her hands shaking a little, her brain whirring with expectation.
Once in the shadow of the tree, Tom stopped and she careered into him as he turned. Holding her steady with one hand, he leant down and kissed her. Full square on the lips. Smelling of warmth and sun and lighting every synapse in her body that had been on edge, waiting for this moment. She felt herself relax, her shoulders drop, her hands reach up to touch his shoulders, feel the seams of his T-shirt under her palms, the press of his mouth on hers, the clash of their teeth and the sweet heady scent of the fig. And she didn’t think once about her mother or The Plaza. The only thought she allowed was a fleeting whisper of a giggle back to her teenage self as she slept soundly on her Thomas King pillowcase.
‘Where is everyone?’ she heard Flora shout, words cutting through the darkness. ‘Ava, Tom? Where have you gone?’
It was all broken too soon. They’d had merely seconds.
‘Guys, we’re breaking for drinks,’ Flora shouted into the nothingness. ‘Is that you? What are you doing over there? Is there something wrong with the tree?’
Tom sighed, his arm tightening around Ava’s back for a moment before letting her go. ‘No,’ he shouted, walking back towards the path. ‘Nothing wrong with the tree.’
Ava tried to follow all relaxed and as if nothing at all had happened, but she saw the moment of recognition on Flora’s face. The intake of breath, then the half-laugh, then, ‘Sorry, sorry, I just, urm . . .’
Tom shook his head, pausing to wait for Ava to catch up. ‘All totally fine. What are we drinking?’
CHAPTER 29
The drinks had an adverse effect on the painting. Especially when Igor mixed another jug of his infamous super-strength sangria. Gabriela wheeled her pug home to get some music and came back with a whole heap of old flamenco CDs. It transpired that she had been quite the dancer in her younger years and hadn’t lost the knack – she even produced a well-worn pair of castanets from her bag and took centre stage with Gael, clearly much more relaxed in his casualwear, dancing with loud, confident claps and energetic foot stomping. At one point Gabriela leaned over the table they were all sitting at and snarled passionately, ‘You see? This is el duende! Now get up here, you useless lot,’ and hauled Ava and Tom on to the dance floor.
Max and Emilio giggled into their Coca-Colas. Ava escaped Gabriela’s grasp for enough time to whisper something in Flora’s ear before she was dragged back again. Flora shook her head. Ava made big eyes at her. Then a few minutes later, Flora stood up, brushed down her paint-splattered old sundress, patted her hair into place and asked Everardo to dance. Everardo, clearly not a dancer, went bright red and refused, so Flora sat down again.
Ava made a sad face and decided that Everardo’s shyness was from a lack of dancers on the floor, so beckoned Max and Emilio to their feet along with all the other nattering grannies, while Igor did a marvellous peacocking flamenco with a clearly disappointed Flora.
The room bellowed with haunting melody and bewildered laughter. Rory watched it all from the bar, the camer
a next to him moving between Gabriela and Gael’s majestic dancing and Max and Emilio’s exaggerated impressions and wild, crazy twirling and whirling. It was the perfect excuse to stay on the sidelines with his beer.
He watched Ava’s matchmaking at work. The floor now busy enough for her to chance Everardo’s hand. To introduce herself and refuse to take no for an answer on the question of dancing, cajoling him up next to her. Pointing to Tom who was equally at sea. A quick grab of Flora’s hand to make her turn and see Everardo standing, shyly unsure. Rory watched the subtle shift that swapped Ava for Flora. Saw Everardo’s hand as it settled self-consciously on Flora’s back. Saw Ava step away grinning then be swept round by Tom, and for a moment, in the loud, raucous chaos of it all, he saw her look of complete unadulterated pleasure, and with it a shock of the same effortless magnetism that he remembered from his mother. That made her seem, when she chose to turn it on, larger than life. And in the rare moments he’d glimpsed it in his mum, he had basked in the radiance. Those were the moments he had lived for as a kid.
The party drifted on till the early hours of the morning. Out in the bay, fishing boats tempted curious little anchovies with their bright lights hovering over the water. At dawn the sky started to soften. Max and Emilio fell asleep on pushed-together chairs, and someone, Tom probably, suggested a swim while Gabriela called for a pedalo. And suddenly, like a herd of stampeding cows, the room cleared as Gabriela, Rosa and Gael led the way to the sea. Fully clothed, they splashed their way into the water, laughing, dripping, soaked to their knees. Gael and Tom pushed a great yellow pedalo out through the sand then helped Gabriela, Rosa and their friends aboard. Flora went in to her waist, skirt billowing in the water like a giant squid, while Everardo floated on his back. Igor had a cigarette in the shallows. Ava and Tom pushed out a paddleboard that they now sat astride, facing one another, chatting quietly, laughing, occasionally steering themselves with the paddle when they got too close to a moored boat.
Rory watched from atop a stack of padlocked sun loungers. His hands behind his head, his body clock all over the place, wide awake from an afternoon spent sleeping off his previous all-nighter.
The rising sun glistened on the water. Behind him the garbage van arrived and left. Someone tipped water on to the pavement. A tiny shoal of fish jumped, but Rory didn’t see because his eye had been caught by a figure walking towards him over the sand.
He squinted. It looked like her.
He scrabbled to sit up like an overeager dog and nearly fell off the stack of loungers as she got closer.
‘Well, this certainly looks like an emergency,’ his wife said, depositing her bag on the sand and pulling off her sunglasses as she stopped next to him.
‘Claire? You’re here,’ Rory said, standing up, straightening his T-shirt, trying to smooth his hair down with his hand.
‘I am, Rory,’ she said, head cocked, expression a little weary. ‘I was told by my son that you’d gone missing.’
‘Shit.’ Rory put his hand over his mouth. ‘Sorry.’
‘Yes,’ she said, sardonic, looking out at the frolics and fun on the water. ‘Don’t worry, Ava told me she’d found you. But I thought I should probably come and see what was going on for myself.’
Rory nodded. Felt a little foolish. Like he’d proved he couldn’t cope on his own.
Then he looked at her properly, barefoot in the sand, her blue jeans rolled up, sweater round her waist, vest top a little skew-whiff, make-up mostly rubbed away. Underneath the bravado she looked tired and worried.
‘Have you come straight from work?’ he asked.
‘Almost. The earliest flight was midnight. So enough time to chuck some stuff in a bag. I now know who shops at the airport,’ she said, holding up her tote stuffed with plastic carrier bags. ‘People whose husbands have absconded to internet cafés.’
Rory smiled.
She glanced at the sea then back to him, expression uncertain.
It all felt very polite. Like two acquaintances unsure what to say next.
Rory remembered all his promises to be more open. But in the flesh it was hard.
She tipped her head to one side and studied him.
Rory swallowed, looked down at his tanned toes in the sand. ‘Welcome to Spain,’ he said in the end, unable to jump the last hurdle, feeling himself close in like a tortoise into its shell.
So it was lucky, he realised, that he had been with Claire for ten years. That she had been in control when she married him. That she knew him better than he knew himself, because she gave him a small punch on the shoulder and then dragged him into a hug. ‘Rory Fisher, what am I going to do with you, you complete and utter idiot!’
Rory felt like chocolate melting into her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said into the tendrils of hair that had fallen loose around her neck, smelling the Chanel and the flash shampoo that she’d obviously restocked while he was away, the warmth of her skin. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
She held on a little tighter then pushed him away. ‘Let’s sit down.’
They sat side by side, cross-legged in the sand.
In the distance the pedalo was heading out to the horizon. Ava and Tom were paddling into shore. He knew that Ava had clocked Claire’s arrival but was leaving them to it, hauling the board on to the sand and sitting down in the shallows.
Rory wondered if it was possible for a brain to explode, his packed to bursting with stuff he wanted to tell his wife, yet he seemed unable to say any of it.
‘How was the job interview?’ he asked.
Claire buried her bare feet in the sand. ‘Terrible. They’ve given it to a twelve-year-old from digital marketing.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yeah.’ She looked at him, disappointed. ‘I knew when I walked in I hadn’t got it. I got really nervous and messed up my presentation. You’d have been rolling your eyes.’
Rory thought about how previously he would have asked her what went wrong, whether she’d looked at the brief from the right angle, suggested that perhaps the twelve-year-old from the digital marketing department had offered something fresher, and perhaps she should ask for an interview debrief. Instead he said, ‘They’re arseholes. The interview should have been a formality. You had the most experience.’
Claire looked at him, surprised. Then she laughed. ‘I did have the most experience. They are arseholes.’
Rory buried his feet next to hers. It felt nice to be on the same side.
‘I’m sorry about the job,’ he said.
‘It’s OK. Maybe I’ll get it in another ten years.’
‘Or maybe you should quit and we should come and live here,’ Rory said, realising as he said it quite how serious he was.
‘Rory, we’re not going to move to Spain.’
‘You said you’d love to.’
‘When?’
‘At home, when you were doing the washing up.’
She gave him a look like that was just dreaming.
‘Well why not?’ he said. ‘We’ve done everything the world has wanted of us corporately. We’ve done everything the way we were meant to do it. Maybe now we should do it the way we’re not meant to do it?’ He ran his hand over his face. ‘I don’t know.’
But Claire was intrigued. ‘What would we do?’ she asked, tentative, as if not wanting to scare off this new side of Rory.
‘I don’t know. Honestly, it’s a whim. Maybe you could freelance, set up some cool little magazine. Anything. Nothing.’ He chucked a handful of sand in the air. Ahead of them the watersports pontoon bobbed on its barrel floats, the skis and paddleboards neatly racked, the lifejackets dripping from their hooks on the wall. ‘We could rent the house out, live off that for a bit. Ava’s airbnb person is paying her rent. Who’d have thought Ava would sort stuff like that out . . . We could do that. Let someone else pay the mortgage. Even just for six months. A year. Live off our house.’
‘This isn’t what I was expecting you to say at all.’
Rory shrugged a shoulde
r. ‘What can I say, I’ve changed,’ he said drily. ‘I’ve watched Max here and he’s like a different kid. You know he’s been waterskiing every day, he’s learning how to drop a ski – he says this, I don’t really know what it means, but it sounds good.’
‘It does sound good. Not really like Max.’
‘No. Not a laptop in sight. If you’d asked me a month ago I’d have said good school first and foremost. That’s all that matters. But I went to a good school and I’m looking at my kid out the window, envious.’ Rory slung his arms over his knees. After a pause he said, ‘I’ve started cooking, in the café.’
‘Really?’ Claire smiled down at the sand.
Rory studied the familiarity of her profile. Thought how reassuring it was to have it in his life again. To understand so minutely another person’s expressions. ‘You knew that, didn’t you?’
She nodded. ‘Ava’s been keeping me updated.’
‘She was meant to be digital detoxing.’
‘She was. She’d ring me from the café.’
Rory stared out to where Ava was splashing her legs up and down like a synchronised swimmer in the rippling waves. He was quite taken aback at the idea of these two women looking out for him.
‘So go on then, tell me what happened this morning,’ Claire said, and Rory suddenly found he had the words to explain everything. Everything he felt about their life together, their marriage, about his mother, his father, about his realisation that he had packed their marriage full of things rather than ever telling her what he felt. Then at the end he said, ‘And the weirdest thing this morning, Max touched me on the shoulder and said that I was the best dad in the world, and normally I’d think it was because he wanted an ice cream, but in that moment the relief . . .’ He puffed out his cheeks. ‘It was like you wouldn’t believe.’
Rory put his face in his hands for a second then looked up at the view with a deep exhale, as though the air would never stop. Ahead of him the sun was just rising, like a huge fat orange pushing up out of the water. The pedaloers had stopped to stare.
