The Lemon Grove

by Helen Walsh

  She steps away from the standpipe and becomes aware of a figure in one of the upstairs windows, looking down at her. She puts her hand to her eyebrows to block the hard light shafting down, but there’s no one there.

  Greg is in the kitchen, tearing hunks from a baguette. Jenn can tell from the slight resistance of the flesh that the dough is fresh, still warm. She pulls a piece off for herself, chews it slowly, the aroma and the soft, moist feel of it making her reach for seconds almost straight away.

  She swallows the bread, clears her throat. ‘Emma’s mad at me.’

  ‘Oh really? How come?’ he says.

  He smiles with half of his mouth.

  ‘Don’t!’ she snaps. She is in no mood for levity. ‘You could have warned me.’

  ‘How? By beeping the horn?’

  He leans forward and kisses the top of her head. She shirks away.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were going for them?’

  He turns away, sheepish.

  ‘Last-minute decision. Anyway,’ he reasons, turning back to her, ‘the beach is awash with topless women. Your peep-show will make for a handy prelude for them both.’

  ‘He didn’t see me, though, right?’

  ‘Don’t think so. I was too busy dragging his bloody suitcase out of the boot to take too much notice.’

  He pulls her towards him, cups her chin gently.

  ‘Don’t take it to heart. You know how it is at that age. Em’s just keen to make the right impression.’

  He drops his voice, moves his mouth in close to her ear. ‘A bit bloody intense, anyway.’

  ‘Who? Him?’

  She jerks her forehead at the ceiling above them. Greg steps back from her and nods. The few times Greg had given Nathan a lift, he’d come away relieved, if a little frustrated. Taciturn, is how he’d described him, and she knew what Greg meant by that. The boy was your typical surly teenager. So the mixed message was that while Nathan might lack the magnetism to seduce his daughter or lead her astray, he wouldn’t enrich or inspire her teenage life either. Jenn had got the impression that Greg was happy enough with that; did she now detect some kind of a sea change?

  ‘Did you get my text?’ he says.

  ‘Oh, hang on – the one telling me you were on your way?’

  ‘No. The one about the Unmentionables.’

  Usually she’d laugh, but something about the way he says it prickles her. Jenn takes a glass from the cupboard, opens the fridge.

  ‘So, go on – what are we not to talk about?’

  There’s no wine. She sighs, hoofs the door shut with her bare foot, moves to the sink, fills the glass with water and drains it in two gulps but remains at the sink. She stares at her reflection in the window. Greg comes up behind her. It’s his coaxing voice; trying to make light of a tricky situation.

  ‘Okay, let’s see. There’s to be no talk of gymkhanas, ponies, lacrosse or any other activity you’d associate with a girls’ school.’

  A private girls’ school, Jenn wants to correct him. Fees circa eight grand per annum, fees she resents paying when there are so many perfectly great comprehensives on the doorstep, fees she’s long since given up bickering about. She forces a smile and turns to Greg. She has no wish to bicker today.

  Greg draws himself up. ‘And under no circumstances do we ever refer to her Chemical Romantics phase.’

  Jenn softens and tweaks his beard.

  ‘Chemical Romance,’ she corrects. ‘Anyway, I thought that was how they met – at a gig.’

  ‘Not a Chemical Romantics one, it would seem.’

  Jenn laughs, pleased that Gregory is on her side, for once. Whatever the crime and however hard his daughter nails herself to it, Emma can always depend on Daddy to dredge up some excuse for her: she’s working too hard; it’s her monthly curse; her mother died giving birth; her step-mother spends too much time at work; she has abandonment issues. Jenn has long since learned to accept it for what it is; the legacy of grief is a chronic affliction, not curable but manageable. And Jenn has managed it well. She wipes a cluster of crumbs from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Where is he, anyway?’

  Almost on cue, the wormed wooden beams of the kitchen ceiling give out a little creak and, moments later, there’s footfall on the stairs. There’s laughter as the lounge doors creak open, feet slapping across the terrace, followed by the riotous splash of their bodies as they hit the pool.

  ‘You sure? Doesn’t sound too intense to me.’

  She pours herself another glass of water. He takes it out of her hand, glugs deeply then passes it back.

  ‘Yeah, intense. Intense in the way that young people can be. The inherent corruption of the Establishment. Minimum wage. Workers’ rights.’

  ‘He’s fifteen! What does he know about workers’ rights?’

  ‘Seventeen, it would seem.’ Greg raises an eyebrow. ‘Quite adamant that he’s not going to university.’

  Jenn snorts, shakes her head, undoes her towel from around her waist.

  Gregory lowers his face to her and mimics: ‘The notion that university encourages critical and independent thinking is a myth. Academic institutions only stifle our naturally autodidactic nature.’ He pulls a face and points at her, thumping the table so hard that the lemons in the fruit bowl jump. ‘Such institutions show us not how to think but what to think!’

  She stifles a guffaw; spits her water back into the glass.

  ‘He actually said that?’

  ‘No. She did.’

  They raise eyebrows at one another. She tears off another chunk of bread for herself.

  ‘I’m off to shower, anyway. Hopefully the sun will have thawed her black mood by the time I come down.’

  She pads off upstairs, wondering if her husband would have thought her intense when she was seventeen.

  3

  She is in the kitchen when she first sets eyes on him. Since Emma’s strop, the teenagers have made themselves scarce, glimpsed only in snatches and via intermittent bursts of sound: the creak of the wheelbarrow as he pushes her around the rutted gardens; the plunge of bodies in the pool; wet feet on the veranda, and those longer stretches of silence, filled in by the shallow puttering of iPods, the bleeping of phones. They are invisible and yet their presence is everywhere: they possess the entire villa. Jenn can hear them shuffling around upstairs. She calls from the bottom of the stairs:

  ‘I’ve made fresh lemonade. Lovely! Want me to bring some up?’

  There is a fluttering in her throat as she anticipates the scurry of feet, the frenzied stretching and bending of limbs as clothes are pulled on in haste, but the voice that comes back is bright and innocent.

  ‘Thanks. We’ll be down in a mo.’

  So Emma is no longer mad at her, but they do not come down.

  Jenn prepares lunch. She slices what’s left of the bread, the crust already hardened by the heat, and she dices and blanches potato cubes, chops and fries up tomatoes, peppers, jalapeños. There’s half a tin of sweetcorn in the fridge that she’s tempted to tip in, but instinctively, she knows that ‘tinned’ will grate with her daughter. She digs out a big, ceramic bowl, remembers where she’s put the eggs she bought from Berta.

  ‘No refrigeration,’ the maid had warned, ticking her off with her forefinger. Jenn had left the fresh-laid eggs in the cool of the walk-in pantry, just in case one of them hatched. She stands at the window, looking out across the lemon grove as she breaks the eggs into the bowl and begins beating them. She can hear Benni talking loudly to the gardener – when did he sneak in? Doubtless news of Emma’s arrival has filtered through, and he’s come to take his fill. She can see a slice of Gregory’s head under the umbrella, the bald oval on his crown reddening under the midday sun. His head is erect and motionless behind his newspaper. She feels his anger at Benni’s invasion, even from here. He’s trying to pretend he’s engrossed in world events, but she knows Greg won’t be taking in a word of the print. She carries on beating the eggs.

 
‘Hi.’

  The voice, coming from directly behind her, takes her by surprise and the bowl slips from her grip. She services the silhouette in the archway with a brief nod, before turning to the bowl at her feet, spinning but, miraculously, unbroken. It doesn’t bear thinking what monetary value it might suddenly accrue if Benni had to replace it. Some of the egg has splashed onto the waxed flags. She squats, simultaneously dabs at it with a tea towel and tries to assess if there’s still enough in the bowl to make omelette – there is – before her gaze moves back to the archway. The silhouette lingers a moment before stepping fully into the kitchen. Jenn is conscious of herself not quite controlling her reaction. She can feel her face slacken. She tries to compensate, looking down at the bowl and keeping her hands clamped tightly to her hips, as she gets to her feet. Surely this cannot be the same kid – the sulky bushbaby from the back of the car? He takes a couple of steps towards her, then stops dead. He is wearing a pair of plain blue swimming shorts, otherwise, he is naked before her. He is muscular, but graceful with it, balletic. He is shockingly pretty. She is aware of the seeming impropriety of registering these details – he is seventeen – and yet she cannot tear her eyes away. He seems either faintly amused or embarrassed. He drops his head.

  ‘I didn’t mean to startle you. Sorry.’

  His accent is hard, at odds with his feminine face. His voice jolts her out of her holiday idyll and for one moment she’s back at work, she’s back on the streets of Rochdale, where she grew up.

  ‘Can I help you with that?’ he says and trains his eye line from the tea towel in her hand, down to the kitchen floor, where a line of ants is already marching towards the yellow slick. Jenn stands there, frozen in the frame as the boy steps towards her and passes round behind her, to lift the smoking pan from the stove.

  ‘Oh shit. Shit!’

  He is smiling now. The air is thick with charred fumes; finally, the smarting in her eyes and lungs propels her into action. She takes the pan from him, sets it down by the sink and throws open the window. Benni is standing outside, grinning – a basket of figs and lemons in his hand. He waves cheerily; she doesn’t reciprocate. When she turns back, the boy is down on his haunches, mopping up the mess with a wet tea towel. She observes the tendons in his arms stretching as he wipes, back and forth. His shoulders are sprayed with freckles; his hair, thick and dark, cropped at the sides and weighty on top; the haircut all the young boys have – except this is no boy, is it? He is seventeen – but he’s a man.

  She reaches down and takes the towel from his hand. Her voice catches in her throat.

  ‘Leave it – it’s fine!’

  It comes out as an imperative – not her intention – and she compensates with a smile.

  ‘Really, Nathan. You go and find Em. I can take care of this.’

  She drops the towel in the sink, wipes her hands on her shorts. The boy gets to his feet. He’s going nowhere. Now what? Should she embrace him as she might any other guest, kissing him chastely on either cheek? He pre-empts her dilemma by holding out a hand. She shakes; his fingers are youthful and slender, the skin accustomed to holding hands with teenage girls.

  ‘So. How was the flight over?’

  Though she tries to control her voice, she can hear the accent of nervousness in it. She moves away from him and puts on a pair of rubber gloves, if only to do something.

  ‘There were babies,’ he says. ‘And a hen party.’

  Paah-eh. The accent jars with her again. She’d had no hint of this from the couple of times she’d chatted on the phone with Nathan’s mother, in the run-up to him coming away. She was softly spoken rather than well-spoken; there was no trace of a Manchester accent. She wonders what Emma makes of it. Is this why she kept him secret for so long? What do her school friends make of him? What about Harriet Lyons and the old gymkhana set? They’d be jealous for sure. They’d taunt her no end over his accent, if only to console themselves that even if a boy as beautiful as Nathan was within their reach, they wouldn’t be interested. And she knows Gregory. He may talk the talk of a left-leaning libertine, but he’s a snob. No wonder he’s been so reticent about the boy.

  She looks up, expecting a grin. His expression is serious; his green eyes wide and his pupils huge, like he’s been running. He perches himself on the edge of the big pine table; he looks strangely at home. He reaches round behind his back to scratch his neck. Jenn’s eyes are drawn to the thatch of dark hair in his pits.

  ‘Any of that lemonade? Sounded good.’

  Her ears are hot as she moves to the fridge and fetches the cold glass jug. She finds a glass, pours his lemonade. His eyes never leave her. He drains it in two gulps, his throat expanding like a snake’s as he swallows, mechanically.

  ‘So … what do you think of Deià?’ she says, dropping her eyes to the floor. Even before he answers, she’s cursing herself. How many times had she joked and bitched with Emma about parents who find chatting to their kids so awkward, that they begin every conversation with a ‘So …?’

  He smiles, as though he understands.

  ‘Well – there’s a lot of money,’ he says. But before she can counter, he hits her with those huge, earnest eyes. ‘I’d love to come here in the winter, though. Bet it’s wild.’

  Jenn licks away a drip of sweat from her lip and eyes him.

  ‘It is! We came here once in December when Emma was only little. It’s a different island – every bit as beautiful, but frightening too.’

  He is grinning – is he mocking her? She’s trying too hard. She reins in her enthusiasm, strives to keep her voice on an even keel.

  ‘It’s … I don’t know, you’re so much more aware that it’s an island.’ He’s nodding now. Closes his eyes in agreement.

  ‘I came here in June once,’ he says. ‘Rained the whole time.’

  ‘Here? To Deià?’ She can hear the surprise – the near disbelief – in her voice. She goes to redress it, but he interjects.

  ‘Here? Ha! My ma would love that, yeah!’ He reveals a row of very white teeth. ‘Nah, other side of the island. Ca’n Picafort, we stayed.’

  ‘I don’t know it. Sounds nice.’

  But Jenn does know it and she feels her neck burning up. She rebuffs the urge to touch it.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s a dump.’

  She looks away, scrutinises the bowl as she picks it up and turns it round and checks for chips or cracks. A strange, unsettling energy snaps through her, just like that empowering rush she’d felt on the beach with the hippy kids the previous morning. Yet this low, tingly strumming unsettles her. It scrapes the skin on her neck, like a shock from their old TV. She is relieved – grateful even – to hear the slap of Emma’s flip-flops across the tiles. She breezes into the kitchen, devastating in an electric blue bikini – another new addition to her holiday wardrobe. A gold chain belts her slim waist; a dazzling fake sapphire studs her navel. Yet again, Jenn finds herself irked by the question of who’s paying for all this – she can hazard a good guess; and it’s not her beau. But overriding these petty concerns is a sense of awe at her daughter’s womanly figure. Where did those legs come from? And the breasts.

  Emma plants a kiss on Nathan’s lips and crosses one ankle over the other as she tugs at his wrist.

  ‘Come on. Beach. Last one in the sea buys lunch.’

  Nathan’s earnest gaze stays on Jenn, seeking not just her consent but also her approval. Whatever burned in his eyes before – whatever she imagined was there – has withered.

  ‘Think Jenn’s making lunch,’ he says.

  Emma whispers in his ear, loud enough for Jenn to hear. ‘We’ve only just got here. We can eat with the Oldies tonight.’

  Jenn tries not to show that she’s stung.

  ‘Go on – you two make a run for it before Dad kidnaps you.’

  Without a hint of protest they’re out of the door, Emma’s bikini briefs barely covering her bum. Jenn sighs and gives the heavy cast-iron frying pan a shake. She sniffs at the cha
rred vegetables and scrapes the lot into the pedal-bin. She loiters at the window and watches them pad down the path. Nathan’s arm drops down from Emma’s waist to cup her small buttocks as they disappear from view.

  4

  They find the lovers seated at the far end of the beach restaurant, out on the rocky precipice. They’re side by side, looking out to sea with their feet up on the low, whitewashed wall. That was me once, thinks Jenn, that was us. Wistful, she reaches down to find Greg’s hand and squeezes. Nathan’s arm is draped over the back of Emma’s chair, his thumb tracing an intimate curve from her neck to her shoulder. She wonders what Greg makes of the tender vignette as they come up the stone steps and into the restaurant. Does the same thought crash through his mind? Are they? And if so, for how long? Because the last time she looked, the last time she thought to look, Emma was still a kid. The highlights, the waist-chain, the navel stud – these are all red herrings, surely. This is a girl with a row of teddies at the end of her bed. A girl with a full thatch of pubic hair.

  They skirt the line of diners waiting to be seated and, ignoring their stares, pick their way across the floor. A large matron, sweat popping from her brown forehead, comes flaring towards them, wagging her finger. Gregory doesn’t break his stride but Jenn drops back to explain. She points out the teenagers and the waitress softens at once. She smiles and guides Jenn to the table, reeling off some platitude about amor and jóvenes.

  The table is fashioned from a hunk of driftwood and set on two stone pillars. Gregory wedges himself in at the far end of a wooden bench, his back to the sea. Jenn hovers, waiting for Emma to budge up, but she’s in a world of her own. She clocks Nathan’s hand drop down from Emma’s neck. He slugs his beer from the bottle and, once Gregory is settled, slides his hand over to her bare thigh where it rests, a finger’s width from her crotch. Jenn feels a clenching of the stomach; a quickening of the pulse. If they’re not doing it, then they are doing everything but. She strides to a nearby table and brings back a white, plastic chair. Seated, but still irritable, she puts on her reading glasses, picks up a menu.