by Helen Walsh
He is right across the bay, in the place where the hippy chick dived in. He appears to be heading for the rocks, below the hippy cave, where kids with nets and buckets now patrol the rock pools. He moves through the water in slow, strong strokes. Jenn takes off her sunglasses, wipes them on her shirt and puts them back on. He pulls himself up onto a little plateau with an effortless grace. He has his back to her. He smooths his wet hair back. Seawater trickles down his neck and shoulders. He stands and plunges back into the water, cutting through the waves with an easy prowess. There’s no performance – he’s exhilarated, out there. She follows his rhythmic strokes across the bay, back to the flat diving rocks. He drags himself out again, and shambles across the rocks. Jenn’s eyes go with him – only to find herself staring at Emma, sitting in the shallows. She is being watched, watching him. Sheepish, found out, Jenn waves over; an embarrassed splaying of the fingers. Emma grins and cups her hands around her mouth.
‘Come on in!’ she shouts. She beckons her over with a scoop of her arm. Gregory, drowsy from the wine, smiles and pokes her.
‘Go on.’
Emma swings the arm again. ‘Come on! It’s lovely!’
Another dilatory prod.
‘You should be flattered. I don’t hear them calling for me.’
Jenn twists her upper body round, pokes him back.
‘They know their level.’
‘Touché. Young Rimbaud’s certainly not shy, is he?’
She watches as Nathan guides Emma over the sharpest rocks. They overbalance and tumble into the sea, Nathan laughing, Emma shrieking. She turns back to Gregory.
‘They make quite a handsome couple, don’t you think?’
Gregory props himself up on his elbows for a moment, observes his daughter and her beau. He wrinkles his nose.
‘No. I do not.’
‘Know what, Greg Harding? You’re a snob.’
He manages a sleepy sigh and lowers his back down to his pebble-pit. She pecks him on his crown.
‘But if it’s any consolation at all, I don’t see those two lasting. Really. So in the meantime, try and cut them a bit of slack. It will have blown itself out by the end of the summer. Let’s just hope they last the holiday, hey?’
He rolls over, takes hold of her wrist and squeezes.
‘I love you,’ he says.
She begins unbuttoning her blouse. He reaches for her. She pulls away, smiling, continuing with her buttons. Greg’s denim shirt begins to vibrate as his phone rings in his pocket. His face drains in an instant.
‘Shouldn’t you get it?’
‘No. It’s just work. Fuck them.’
She stretches her arms behind her neck.
‘Everything OK?’
‘After a fashion. They want to know if we can Skype.’
‘Skype! Why? You’re on holiday.’
Greg shrugs.
‘Your guess is as good as mine.’ He digs out his phone; stares at it. ‘I should just call them.’
She takes it out of his hands; puts it in her bag. ‘Don’t you dare! You’re right. Fuck them. You left your phone in the villa and we’re lost at sea for the next six days.’ She throws her blouse over his face. He lifts it off with one lazy finger, eyes his wife in her swimsuit.
‘You have the most magnificent breasts. Come here.’
She laughs, kisses one finger and turns it towards him and picks her way down to the shore.
The water is colder than she’d anticipated. She wades, one, two, three steps into the sea, then, feeling the shock of the first wave against her groin, she flings herself in and stays under as long as her lungs will hold out. When she comes up for air she finds herself in the shadow of the overhang. The dark water is perfectly still and foreboding. She strikes out, keen to get back into turquoise seas, under the sun. She makes slow progress towards Emma in her trademark, self-conscious breaststroke, her head and shoulders visible above the water’s surface. Emma’s face splits into a smile as Jenn finally splashes up beside her.
‘Wow! It’s surreal isn’t it?’
‘Gorgeous.’
‘Come on. Wait till you see this.’
Emma lowers her head to the water and kicks off, and Jenn follows. Together they swim out to a cluster of rocks jutting out of the shallow sea. A shoal of fish darts in and around their feet. Emma treads water, breathless, grinning.
‘Told you.’
‘Beautiful.’ Jenn smiles back, but she can hear the asthmatic rasp in her voice. Her ribcage heaves under the swimsuit as she fights for breath. She allows the ebb and flow of the sea to drift her backwards onto a partially submerged rock ledge, and sits back to rest; to regulate her breathing. Emma treads water in front of her, smiling right into her face. She’s seldom seen her looking so elated and, somehow, the notion pains Jenn.
‘Don’t you wish we could stay out here, for ever?’ Emma ducks down like a seal, bobs up on the other side of her. ‘You should retire here.’
‘Retire? I’m really that old, you think?’
‘I didn’t mean it like that …’
‘What does your man think anyway? He liking it here?’
Emma gives a coy squint. ‘Said he’d happily live in a cave. We could live off the land.’
‘He said that?’
Emma nods, warily. Her eyes flash, just for a second. Her little nose is beginning to peel already and her face is sprinkled with sun freckles. You’re beautiful, thinks Jenn. I wonder if you know just how beautiful you are? Emma squeezes Jenn’s fingers. So rare is her touch these days that it tips her stomach.
‘Thanks, you know, for making this happen.’
Jenn is almost relieved when the fingers release her.
‘He seems like a really nice boy.’
Nathan has moved into their viewfinder now, back on the diving plateau on the other side of the cove. He’s looking in their direction, as though sensing he’s being talked about. Emma squints up at her through one eye.
‘He is, you know, Mum. He’s lovely.’
Jenn is conscious of her nostrils flaring; her eyes smarting. She tamps a rising frisson back down, and focuses solely on Emma. In this moment, her daughter is there, once again within reach. Jenn wants to hold her close, and tell her: come back to me. Come back, honey. She smiles and strokes her wet hair, breathing more easily now. Greg comes into view behind Emma’s bobbing head. He’s sitting up, dabbing his brow with Jenn’s blouse. She knows him too well. He’s hot and grouchy – but too indolent to join them in the sea. Emma follows her gaze.
‘Do you think Dad likes him?’
Jenn leans towards her and pushes a loose bolt of hair behind Emma’s ear.
‘You know what, chicken? I think he does.’
Emma flinches from the hair-tucking and furrows her brow, as though Jenn has overstepped the line again – that vague and ever-shifting line that declares then rescinds their friendship. Emma seems to realise what she’s done. Her head is bowed, her face contrite. She lowers her voice and whispers.
‘I didn’t mean to like snap at you before.’ She gives a little glance up. ‘After you made it all happen for us. Dad would never have let Nate come away if it wasn’t for you. I know that.’
Her forearms take her weight on the rock ledge now, her legs gently treading water. Her face is open, ready to give and receive – yet Jenn fears making the same mistake twice. She maintains the distance, but bestows a forgiving smile.
‘Shouldn’t I be apologising to you, anyway? I’m sorry about that, if I embarrassed you. I really wouldn’t have … I didn’t think you’d be there so soon.’
‘I wasn’t. Embarrassed.’ Emma eyes her, unsure for a moment. ‘But I think Nathan was.’
‘Nathan?’
Emma glances back to where her father lies comatose on the beach. The sparkle has vanished from her face altogether now. ‘Think I’m going to head back for a disco nap. Nate and I thought we’d walk up to the village tonight.’
6
Jenn still can�
��t bring herself to go back. She swims onwards and outwards, turning the revelation over in her head. So Nathan saw her topless. How long had he stood there? Why had no one said anything? The more she dwells on it, the more obvious it becomes. Nathan has only ever seen pictures of Villa Ana. The first thing he’d want to do, a boy of his age, would be to check out the pool. She picks up speed, if only to put distance between herself and the thought of him, but it slides back through her with the spray. She pictures his shoulders, the tight yoke of muscle. Child’s skin stretched over his man’s frame. She pictures his hands, the veins on his wrists; the feather of hair that trails from his navel to the trim waistline of his shorts. She swims on, curving her path back towards Deià Platja to avoid the flotsam drifting in on the tide. She can see the hippy girl shinning that shank of rock again. The sun glazes her. She looks like a goddess – mythic and burnished. Jenn turns onto her back to watch her, tarantula-like, scuttling up the cliff face. Gentle waves lap Jenn’s earlobes, warming her clavicle, her armpits, as she lies back and looks up at the azure sky and lets the lilting tide carry her away.
The water gets choppy; colder. She flips herself over and she’s shocked at how far she’s drifted from the shore. She slides into a measured breaststroke, eyes on the distant pinprick of the beach café, the green flag billowing easily by the rocks – but her lungs have tuned in to her unease. Her windpipe is starting to tighten, her wheezing becoming more pronounced as she ploughs on. She thinks the people in the beach restaurant can probably see her, an illusion tossed among the waves. They throng the small terrace, their heads like little bobbing pearls on a necklace, but she’s too far out to shout. She hasn’t the breath to shout out anyway, and now her arms are too leaden to wave. She rolls herself onto her back again and slowly advances back to shore – listens to the squiggling sound waves of underwater thermals in her eardrums.
The water is warm again. She dips her toes down; the water is still too deep to stand. Back on the beach lies her tatty leather bag; in it, her lifeline – her iron lung. One blast and she’ll be fine. She pushes on. Rocks are visible deep below her, seaweed and anemones writhing in the crags. She lets a foot dangle down and, this time, she finds a wobbling rocky dais. She lets the water take her weight as she tries to balance on the loose stone slab, crouches low at first then, as the next wave propels her forward, she gets herself up, and onto the next big stone. There’s a slight drop, but then it’s shingle. She’s made it; she’s back. She wades slowly through the water. She’s coming in at the furthest end of the cove, but she’s still waist-deep and doesn’t have the energy to steer herself left. She lets the tide take her down the path of least resistance. She can barely lift her legs, when two firm hands take hold of her hips from behind.
‘Jenn! You okay?’
Fleetingly, the tide-swell drives his groin into her buttocks. She nods but her face must tell a different story. She turns to face him. He’s standing there, knee-deep, his eyes all over her. He smiles deferentially and offers a hand.
‘You sure?’
‘Am fine. Asthma attack,’ she manages. ‘Soon as I get my inhaler.’
He nods and bends to the task, moving in front of her and draping his arms out behind himself to pull her along. The water pushes on her thighs like a solid mass of silt. She focuses on the sea salt drying to a crust on his biceps. She can no longer feel the shell grit underfoot. Only the fingers squeezing around hers and the thumb kicking out to move across her wrist every so often keeps her anchored to the ground.
7
The sky is still low and the tips of the mountains shrouded in cloud as the car strains up the hill. Deià is deserted at this hour. As they pass through the village, Jenn nods at Jaume’s shuttered frontage.
‘We should book for our last night. The four of us.’
‘Mmm.’
Greg won’t meet her gaze and he pre-empts any further discussion of the subject by staring pointedly out of his side window, over-concentrating on the view down to the sea. He’d mooted the idea to Miki in the restaurant the other night, but he’s since changed his mind about sharing Jaume with Nathan, and he’s cross with Jenn for not running it by him before blurting it out. She stews on it, rankled by him – and yet she empathises too. He’s touchy about their special place. They have history with Jaume and Jaume with them. She can see how the intrusion of a stranger might spoil that symbolism for Greg.
The road broadens out into wide open countryside and she gives up musing, abandoning herself to the sun-starched fields, strewn with golden cylinders of newly baled hay … The lid of cloud has lifted now and the sun is warming the dirty grey Mediterranean to a shimmering cerulean. Greg veers off into the oncoming lane as he cranes his neck round to ogle the villas wedged into the hillside; one in particular that has fascinated them for as long as they’ve been coming here. A car beeps at him, and Greg holds up his hand – guilty – and swerves back to his own side. Emma is more reserved in front of Nathan, but Jenn can still sense her wonderment at the storied casa, standing sentinel over the land. In years gone by she and Jenn would make believe about the exotic lives played out behind those elegant, pine-green shutters. For one moment all four pairs of eyes fix on the traditional limestone house spread over four or five floors, almost as big as a hotel. They once harboured dreams of buying a house on the hill. Nothing as spectacular as the casa grande – but something. Over time, there was a gradual narrowing of aspiration and, for a while, that realisation embittered her. Not just the rude unveiling of the vanity of her dreams – their dreams – but also because Greg had allowed her to believe that anything was possible. She knows better, now. She knows there’ll be no fantasy home in Mallorca. She knows there’ll be no baby of their own. She knows all this yet there is still a part of her, not willing, yet – not ready to accept it.
They pass the roadside restaurant that, every year, they say they must visit. They reach the T-junction by the garage and turn left into the bumpy old Valldemossa road. Pines spring upwards and directly outwards from the road, splitting the surface and gnarling it with blisters. Greg swerves to avoid the tree roots, holding his glasses to his nose as he negotiates each bump and pothole. Jenn has a flashback to him swinging the wheel from left to right, all the way down this road once, sending Emma into fits of giggles. They were a family, then. She was Emma’s Mummy.
He slows right down as they approach the market on the left where crones in identical-shaped pinafores are already thronging the stalls for bargains. He zaps down the windows, for Nathan’s benefit, she assumes, and it is a sight to behold. The accent of the market is on Mallorcan heritage crafts and, as they crawl bumper-to-bumper through the little town, each stall lays out artisan wares. There’s a pottery stand selling hand-painted sangria jugs; there are wooden toys, porcelain crockery, baskets full of colourful sweets and lollipops; there are fine, made-to-measure shoes, glass-blown figurines, and row after row of local pastries and delicacies. One stall sells only the emblematic ensaïmada pastry; next to it a specialist sobrasada outlet. The medley of aromas wafts in through the window, mingling with the nutty scent of fig leaves that spices every breeze. In her wing mirror Jenn can see Nathan’s face, dancing. He nudges Emma.
‘Doesn’t half make you hungry.’
‘You’re always hungry.’
Jenn makes a thing of being lost to the world outside her window but every now and then she steals a glimpse. As the road curves upwards and out of town there’s a secondary market in a car park, more colourful and hippyish in feel. It’s more for the tourists, this one, with the cross-legged bongo players beating out their Balearic rhythms as visitors browse racks of tie-dye tees, lizard sculptures fashioned from driftwood, jewellery stores specialising in amber and beaten silver. Towards the top end of the car park, there’s a whole section of the market displaying the paintings of local artists and here something catches Nathan’s eye. Jenn watches him in the wing mirror as he cranes his head out of the window until they’ve almost passed through t
he town.
They park up on the outskirts, get out and stretch. Nathan’s crimson polo-shirt is already sticking to the mounds of muscle beneath his shoulder blades. They walk back down towards the monastery. Greg points over, for Nathan’s benefit.
‘Built as a royal residence, originally,’ he announces. ‘Then the Carthusian order took it on as a monastery. That’s where Chopin and George spent the winter, a year or two before he died.’
Jenn and Emma quicken their step – they’ve heard all this before. Nathan is not so fast. Greg blocks him off.
‘George Sand. Have you read her?’
‘Never heard of her.’
‘Oh, Nathan, Nathan, you’re missing out. One of the great temptresses of the nineteenth century.’
Emma stops and turns. ‘So not one of the great feminist thinkers of the nineteenth century?’
‘Definitely not.’ Greg smiles. ‘Much more efficient man eater. And womaniser. Chopin died of a broken heart when she left him for that actress.’
‘Thought you said he died of TB?’
Jenn can sense her husband floundering, and this time she’s willing it to happen as she inwardly cheers Emma on.
‘Well, cystic fibrosis, technically, but—’
‘Ha!’
Victorious, Emma flounces off again. Jenn catches Emma’s eye and winks. She can sense her husband blushing behind his beard, muttering some excuse to Nathan. She flits her head round, ready to intervene, but Nathan isn’t even listening. He’s craning his neck back in the direction they’ve come from, fobbing Greg off with an ‘mm’ and a ‘right’ as the disquisition starts up again. Before she can look away, Nathan turns back to her – catches her watching him. She gives him a smile, playful but nervously hopeful of reciprocation. He holds her gaze, but his face gives nothing away. And then he nods and smiles at Greg and skips past to catch up with Emma. He slides an arm around her, steers her away to the other side of the cobbled street. It’s not a rebuttal to Jenn – of course it’s no such thing. Yet it’s confirmation that whatever took place yesterday, took place in her head. He carried her ashore, and that was all. They’d dug out her inhaler, got her breathing back to normal. But once she was fine, she had not been able to look Nathan in the eye. When she did so, it was a hang-dog, sideways glance, like a pup expecting to be told No. Then almost immediately after that, Nathan and Emma had made their excuses and headed back to the villa. She and Greg had lain back as the beach began to empty, enjoying the last of the sunshine – that mellow sensation of having nowhere they needed to be, nothing they needed to do. All the sting had gone from the day and it was all diffused mellow light and soft, slow motion. Greg, soporific, had reached across and she’d taken his hand. Yet all she could think of was Nathan’s big hands on her waist. Nathan, back at the villa, naked. With Emma.
