The Summer Without You

by Karen Swan

  ‘Ha! That’s it? Listen, Bobbi, Hump always has someone on the go. You’ve got no idea what he’s like during the week. It’s a new girl at breakfast three days of the week.’

  Bobbi clamped Ro’s arm closer in to her. ‘Yeah, so why keep it a secret, then?’

  ‘Same reason as you?’

  ‘He’s self-employed! He doesn’t have any bosses to hide it from,’ Bobbi shrieked excitedly as they crossed the wide road, trucks stopping to let them pass. ‘Nope, he lied for a reason, Ro. And I, for one, am going to find out why.’

  Greg was lying out in the garden when they got back, muscles gleaming like each one had been individually polished. Both Ro and Bobbi stopped talking and walking at the sight of him.

  ‘Hey!’ he said, shading his eyes from the glare of the sun. ‘Where have you been? Hump wanted to try to put a four together for tennis. Now that we have a champion in the house –’ he grinned, displaying his perfect teeth ‘– we thought we could show off at the Maidstone.’

  ‘They have courts there?’ Ro asked, walking out onto the veranda. Bobbi followed at a distance.

  ‘Grass. Perfect for your game.’

  Greg’s eyes tracked Bobbi in the shadows. ‘Get anything nice?’ he asked, clocking the expensive boutique bags.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Not really?’ Ro laughed in disbelief. ‘She just spent nearly two grand on one dress!’

  Greg’s eyes stayed on Bobbi, but his expression was cooler. ‘It must be an important event.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Care to share?’

  ‘Nope.’

  Greg looked back at Ro and gave a small half-shrug. Whatever. ‘Thirsty, Ro?’ Greg asked, leaning down and pulling a Coke from the blue cold box beside his lounger.

  Ro turned, just in time to see Bobbi storming through the back door, bags bustling about her knees like balloons.

  What could she do? She’d already taken on Melodie on her behalf, but she couldn’t fight all Bobbi’s battles for her, and no one could say she hadn’t provoked Greg into this eventual retaliation.

  He handed her the drink as she clambered onto the squeaky sunbed beside him and she picked up the well-thumbed copy of Dan’s Papers, the local newspaper. It had a colour-magazine cover, and Hump’s adverts were always prominently displayed on the inside front page. She began rifling through it noisily.

  ‘So, what are you up to tonight?’ she asked, scrutinizing the pretty girl in this ad. Ro was pretty sure they’d breakfasted together at some point. Laura? Lauren? Lowri?

  ‘It’s a big one, actually. I shouldn’t really be here. I ought to be helping out, but . . .’ He tipped his head back, angling his face to the sun for a moment. ‘Man, it feels so good just to stop for a moment, you know? Things are going to get crazy later and I really need to take a bit of time out and just get my head straight . . .’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ She flicked towards the back to the ‘House & Home’ section, where she’d paid for her Marmalade Media advert to be positioned between a custom closet company and . . . a rentable mechanical rodeo bull? She was sure they’d said it was an ad for an annual radio ball. She shrugged. There might be an overlap in their customer base . . .

  ‘. . . I hope you’ll join us. I’m sorry it’s such short notice now. I don’t know what happened to your invitations. I wrote them myself, but Erin’s just had so much to oversee, as you can imagine. They must have been put down somewhere and—’

  Ro squinted, paying more attention to what Greg was saying again. ‘Sorry? What invitations?’

  ‘For the charity cocktail party we’re throwing in Southampton tonight. Didn’t Hump tell you about it?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him yet today.’ He’d been too busy sneaking into the house, keeping secrets if Bobbi’s hunch was right.

  ‘Oh. Well, can you make it? It’s for a good cause, and I’d like you to really meet my friends properly.’

  ‘It sounds . . .’ She wanted to say ‘lovely’, but after the fiasco at the Gilded Heights – Hump’s affectionate nickname for Wes Turner’s place – tennis competition the other week, she wasn’t sure anything ‘big money’ was her bag.

  ‘It’s not going to be like the Wes Turner gala, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ he said. Thanks to Hump convincing his printer mate to run up a banner printed with ‘Ro *hearts* Wes’ and tying it to the stair banister, she hadn’t been allowed to forget that particular weekend. ‘In fact, it couldn’t be further from that. Tonight will be much more . . . subtle. And Hump’s coming.’

  ‘Are you going to ask Bobbi?’

  He seemed to freeze a little before he looked away, back to his paper. ‘She’s already out, right? The dress?’

  ‘Well, yes, but . . . it might be nice to invite her anyway.’

  Greg raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘We both know she’d rather eat wasps than say yes.’

  Ro’s mouth flapped as she tried to find a silver lining. ‘She’ll come round eventually.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s the end of July and we only have another six weekends here all together. I’m not going to hold my breath. I think it’s fair to say that friendship has sailed.’

  ‘That is terrible!’ she groaned, as he chuckled beside her. ‘Wow, have we really only got six weekends left, though?’ When she’d arrived, time seemed to have dragged, every day feeling like a week, the days long and empty, but now she was rushed off her feet and falling into bed at night like she’d been clubbed. Sometimes she didn’t even try to Skype Matt. How could time be so elastic, snapping away from her just as she was finding her rhythm?

  ‘I know,’ Greg nodded. ‘And I feel like I’m only just getting to know you. How are you doing, by the way? You know, since the—’ His eyes flickered down to her arms.

  There was nothing to see now. Her skin had returned to its usual unexfoliated pink and, guiltily, she was sleeping better since Florence’s revelations that the attack had been intended for her. It had abated her fear of crowds, at least, although of course now her mind was still worked up with conspiracy theories of one sort and another.

  ‘Fine, thanks. The sensitivity’s really settled down. Although I think Hump’s missing bossing me about.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Greg chuckled.

  She looked across at him, squinting into the sunlight so that she had to raise her hand to her eyes. ‘You know, I still can’t understand why he jacked in being a doctor. I mean, he’s good at the whole entrepreneur thing, I can see that – he’s got that buzzy energy and so many off-the-wall ideas. And any job that allows him to wear flip-flops day in, day out, of course he’s going to go for it. But I don’t know . . .’ she sighed. ‘It just seems to me that he was born to do medicine.’

  Greg let his paper drop. ‘But you never can tell how people are going to react to a curve ball like that.’

  ‘Curve ball.’

  ‘Hmm?’ He took in her puzzled expression. ‘It’s a baseball term.’

  ‘We play rounders.’

  ‘Right.’ He’d clearly never heard of it. ‘Yeah, when—’

  There was a sudden slam from inside the house. ‘You ready?’

  They both looked up. Bobbi was standing on the back steps, looking fierce in tennis whites.

  ‘But you don’t play!’ Ro spluttered, sitting to attention.

  ‘Not formally. Not, like, when people are looking. You said you wanted to play.’

  ‘Uh . . .’ Actually, she hadn’t. Greg had said Hump wanted to, but she saw the way Bobbi’s leg was jigging quickly as she stood there, her gaze flighty, a mottled stain growing on her cheeks.

  ‘You’d better go,’ Greg said under his breath.

  ‘Oh, right.’ Ro jumped up from the lounger and jogged across the lawn. ‘Where are we playing?’

  ‘The Maidstone. Hump’s at the court now, waiting for us.’

  ‘All of us?’ Ro turned back to Greg inclusively.

  ‘Actually, I’m on my way out,’ Greg said.

 
‘Hump’s got one of his driver friends to make up the four,’ Bobbi said at the exact same moment.

  There was a tense silence, Greg and Bobbi trying to shoot each other down with cold stares. Suddenly, those six weekends were feeling l-o-n-g again.

  ‘OK,’ Ro muttered, grabbing Bobbi by the elbow and steering her back towards the house. ‘Well, while I get changed, why don’t you . . . I dunno, refill the ice-cube trays?’

  ‘The fridge makes ice,’ Bobbi frowned.

  ‘So humour me!’ Ro shouted, bounding up the stairs.

  Five minutes later, she was doing her best Diana Dors impression in her tennis dress again, both of them hopping onto their bikes, racquets slung over their shoulders. They freewheeled towards the sun with smiles on their faces – Bobbi felt she had ‘won’ that encounter – the question that had been on the tip of Ro’s tongue before all but forgotten.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ‘Oh well. It’s all clear now, isn’t it?’ Hump said laconically, as they chugged up a carriage drive that had been designed for sweeping up only.

  ‘Absolutely. Thank God you were able to help him out,’ Ro murmured back, staring up at the old colonial-style ivy-covered mansion, two floors of arched windows centred with a portico, hatted with a slate roof that was the same depth as the walls, with dormers and four tall chimneys that acted like sirens – intended to be seen from a distance or from the air – heralding the incredibly grand fireplaces within.

  Hump stopped in the queue for the valets and looked across at her. ‘Todd so didn’t want Greg sleeping under the same roof as his girlfriend.’

  ‘Nope.’ She sighed heavily.

  They reached the front of the valet queue, just beyond the front steps, and Hump handed over the keys as one of the other valets moved to open Ro’s door. ‘It’s OK – I’ll help her down,’ Hump said quickly, running round to Ro’s side. The combination of a tight dress and a high car wasn’t a good one, and short of hiking her dress up round her waist, she couldn’t get in or out without assistance. He put his hands round her waist and lifted her down, a grin on his face. ‘Trust me, you’re going to need some protection tonight in that dress.’

  He laughed as he saw her expression change, Ro more worried by the compliment than flattered – there was nothing subtle about her figure, and if her teenage years had taught her one thing, it was that men lost their senses in her skintight and upholstered presence. She nervously smoothed the cherry-red sequins of her dress. It was all she had to wear that remotely fit the brief, but judging by the turn-of-the-century house, she had a feeling the women here would be wafting around in old-rose chiffons and nude silks and wearing white kid gloves.

  Hump held out his arm for her and she slipped her hand through, hugging him gratefully as they walked along the grassy garden path. ‘We should have just gone to the Surf Lodge,’ she mumbled, as they passed white-jacketed waiters holding gleaming silver trays. She loved their Saturday nights, dancing barefoot in the sand.

  ‘Agreed,’ Hump mumbled back, no more comfortable at these grand occasions than she. ‘We still could. We could duck out of here before anyone sees us.’

  ‘We can’t. We have to support Greg. We told him we’d come.’

  ‘Yeah, but there’ll be hundreds of people here tonight. He’ll never know if we—’ They came round to the terrace. ‘Oh crap.’

  It was perfect. Majestic oaks ran down the length of an enormous five-acre lawn, each blade so immaculate it would have made Wimbledon’s groundsmen weep. Deep, Andrew Jackson Downing-designed beds led back to mossy brick walls that opened up suddenly to archways cut through ancient domed yews, grassy paths behind curving round to private nooks that framed bronze sculptures. But it was the ocean that was the centrepiece, the perfect stretch of deep blue accessed first by a strip of pure white sand that – unlike Florence’s wild, grassy horizon – looked like it had been combed.

  Ro didn’t approve – far from it – but at least it was now obvious why Erin had chosen Todd over Greg. Hump had told her during one of their evening seed-bombing walks that Todd was the elder twin to David by three minutes. That three minutes meant all this was going to be his one day. That three minutes meant he got the house and the girl. If he’d been the younger twin, things would have been different – for his brother and probably for Greg.

  ‘Come on, let’s get a drink.’

  They walked slowly down the steps, Ro holding on to Hump’s arm and keeping her eyes down as usual. Normally she felt underdressed; today she felt overdressed – would she ever get it right? The tenor of this dress was wrong and she was going to stand out like a geranium in a bowl of white roses tonight.

  At least the grass was firm beneath her feet – a small mercy, as she found it difficult enough walking in heels, even wedges; she and Hump had had to make a pact before leaving that he wouldn’t wear flip-flops if she wouldn’t wear trainers.

  Hump retrieved two glasses of pink champagne, both of them looking around discreetly for Greg. Ro saw Erin first. She was standing with a small group of couples, wearing a mocha-coloured chiffon number that cascaded down her tiny frame in stepped tiers, bronze pearls at her ears and on one wrist. She was listening intently to another woman talking, her head nodding ever so slightly, her eyes sliding over the woman’s shoulder every few seconds, checking the new arrivals on the terrace. Ro watched as she graciously placed a hand lightly on the woman’s arm, stopping her mid-flow and excusing herself to greet a couple coming down the steps; Ro realized she and Hump had been ‘allowed’ past without a special greeting.

  ‘So what’s this in aid of, anyway?’ Ro asked, tearing her eyes away – reminding herself of her own, actual victory over Erin – and looking out to sea.

  ‘Who knows? There’s one a week in this lane alone. It’s hard to keep up.’

  ‘Why’s it called Gin Lane? Because the bored, spoilt women in these houses pour it on their cornflakes?’

  Hump laughed. ‘Probably. This is the pinnacle, baby. Old-school WASP. Anything goes here. They’ve seen it and done it all.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  Ro let her eyes roam the crowd. There was enough space here for her not to feel overwhelmed by the proximity of strangers, although it wasn’t a stranger who made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, and he was looking straight back at her.

  ‘Well, well, I see Long Story’s here,’ Hump drawled, noticing as she turned away with a start and following the line of her sight. ‘I thought you two were friends now.’

  ‘We . . . we’re not. I mean, we were never friends. He’s a client.’ The truth was, she didn’t know what he was anymore – he had been at various times her enemy, her client, her hero, her suspect. He was still that, even if he did look good in a dinner suit.

  Her eyes fell to his hand, intertwined with Julianne’s: a casually protective, reassuring, loving gesture, one that belonged to the man on the videos. How could that same hand belong to a man capable of manipulating – possibly defrauding – her friend? Then again, she thought, as a waiter approached their group with fresh drinks, didn’t the titanic fortunes required to fund estates like this almost invariably require crossing lines of one sort or another? Was he one among many tonight?

  ‘His wife’s pretty.’

  ‘She’s not his wife. Well, not his first one, anyway,’ Ro snapped, her eyes flitting over to Julianne, who was looking elegant and discreet in an ivory satin dress that stopped mid-thigh, the hint of breeze making it cling to her revealingly and showing off a lean physique Ro hadn’t even had as an eight-year-old.

  Ted nodded by way of greeting to them both across the lawn and Ro nodded back. The last time she’d spoken to him had been at the Fourth of July party. Things had been cordial back then; she had still been in the dark about his actions around Florence at that point, and she couldn’t afford to alert him to her new suspicions. Not yet. But why had he been invited? Who did he know here? Was it Todd? Was it Erin?

  She bet it was Erin. They
looked like they should know each other; they probably went way back. She could just imagine the two of them growing up together, playing state-level tennis at the Maidstone’s perfect courts before sipping chilled cocktails overlooking the ocean. Maybe they had dated each other. Probably long ago lost their virginities to each other and been the prom king and queen thingies.

  ‘And I guess that’s another long story, is it?’

  Ro turned back to him, remembering suddenly Bobbi’s words this morning. A smile flickered on her lips. ‘I’ll tell you what’s a long story, Hump. The one Bobbi told me this morning. She thinks you’re seeing someone.’ She jabbed his chest lightly with her finger.

  ‘What? Me?’

  ‘Yeah. Bobbi reckons you lied to her this morning, but I know you wouldn’t lie to me.’ She grinned, holding him with her eyes, determined to leave him nowhere to hide.

  ‘I never could, nor never would lie to you,’ he replied earnestly, slapping a hand over his heart by way of oath.

  She cocked an eyebrow. ‘That’s not an answer.’

  ‘What was the question again?’

  She laughed – certain now that Bobbi was right – just as Greg made his way over, his eyes alive with delight. ‘I’m so glad you came,’ he beamed genuinely, kissing her on each cheek and gripping Hump’s hand firmly, one hand on his shoulder. He looked so handsome in his dinner suit. Ro felt a rush of pride to be connected with him, even if it was just for a summer.

  ‘Dude, why didn’t you say something before? No wonder you’ve been running back to Sea Spray Cottage at every given moment!’ Hump remarked drily. ‘I mean, what a dump!’

  Greg laughed, a strong, exuberant sound that made women turn. ‘I know. Just keeping it real.’

  ‘So, what’s this little gathering in aid of, then?’ Hump asked.

  ‘Lungworm.’ He held up his hands. ‘Not the fashionable choice, I grant you, but there needs to be more awareness of it. Erin lost her schnauzer to it last year, so it’s a cause very close to her heart.’