Her (21 page)

It takes forever, dealing with the luggage carousel and the Avis madam with her lipstick and superior manner, but eventually we’re in the multi-storey car park, on the scent of the hire car. Ben’s excited about this bit: ‘Since we’ve saved so much on the accommodation, I thought we could have some fun.’ It’s a flash two-door model (what
was
he thinking?) with a sunroof that we’ll never open because of the sun.

While he attempts to get the air-con going, I start to load the boot and then break off to spoon the jar of butternut into Cecily. But there is a problem. Ben doesn’t know how to switch on the engine. There’s an electronic fob, rather than a key, and he can’t make it work. ‘Shall I go back and ask her?’ I say, sighing, remembering the queue of holidaymakers inching all the way back to the little stall selling Tic-Tacs and
Paris-Match
, featuring unknown personalities whose faked-up bodies and houses and families illuminate the shortcomings of our own.

‘It’s OK,’ says Ben, rubbing his sleeve over his forehead and paging furiously through the manual, searching for an English translation. ‘It’ll be here somewhere.’ Christopher starts tugging at Cecily’s buggy. ‘I’m thirsty,’ he says, getting the buggy moving, beginning to propel it towards the ramp. ‘I need a wee.’ I grab the buggy and kick down the brake. Cecily’s face puckers.
Oh, fuck’s sake
, I say under my breath, as Ben consults the diagram and – with an experimental, fatalistic air – waves the fob again, an inept magician conscious that he’s losing his audience.

I take Christopher off, smiling briskly at a neat French family who walk past while he is pissing in the bush next to the trolley depot, and when we return the car is packed and sealed and cooling down nicely.

According to the email Nina sent me, the journey to her father’s place should take no longer than an hour. It takes us over two: loo breaks and nappy changes, an argument over motorway exits, a dash around a supermarket for basics as we don’t know whether we’ll be able to buy anything locally tonight.

We’re all knackered, and it’s not yet 3 p.m. The road shimmers up ahead, liquid phantoms coming and going in dips in the tarmac. If you stepped on it, it would feel soft and slightly tacky; it would give a little under your weight.

When we drive through towns and hamlets, the windows in the ochre-coloured villas and low apartment blocks are firmly shuttered. All the shops are closed. Where do the people go in the heat of the day? I think of old couples silently sitting in dim poky kitchens that smell distantly of frying; I think of dogs flat-out on those speckly continental floors that always look a little dirty, no matter how often they’re mopped.

‘So it’s next right, and then straight on until you get to the yellow barn, and the drive is off to the left,’ I say, my finger on the print-out, the type faded now in the creases left by the constant superstitious folding and unfolding, like a treasure map.

An avenue of poplars, the yellow barn, and then we turn off onto a dirt track, the car bucking and growling, kicking up a tail of orange dust. Some small birds, surprised, take off as we come around a bend. The children fall silent. Ahead of us the steep rocky hillside tumbles away to reveal the sea, just there, just within reach: a curve of turquoise, perfectly glassy and tranquil, unmarked by wind or boats or rocks.

Ben parks as instructed, at the end of the track, beneath the pergola, and once the dust has settled around the car, coating the windscreen with a parchment film, we open the doors. There’s a little hot rush of breeze, and the air smells of ozone and thyme and pine. For the first time today, I feel as if my heart is beating, rather than grinding.

‘Looks alright, doesn’t it,’ says Ben, getting out of the car and stretching.

We bring the children up into the garden, a series of paths and terraces: scented shrubs, shallow channels of water trickling into troughs, metal planters spilling over with herbs, and here and there the rustling silver glitter of olive trees. There’s a lawn, surprisingly green, a faded hammock strung in the shade of two tall pines, and behind a long stone terrace is the house: low, discreet, an elegant series of pale interlocking boxes, the windows angled towards the ocean. The glass seems to hold it all – the sky, the garden, the terrace, the sea – just so, exactly so, exactly as it might look in a dream. And then, as we approach the house, our dishevelled reflections appear in its windows.

Ben drops his bag on the terrace and goes up close, pressing his face against the glass, hands cupping his face, trying to look in. I consult the instructions. ‘They’ve left the door at the end unlocked,’ I tell him, and I walk down the terrace and reach for the handle knowing that the handle will turn, the door will give. Everything will be just as she has said. And everything she has not told me about will be good, too.

Stunned, winded by our luck, we move through the kitchen and the sitting room. Even the children are silent, awestruck. Cecily, on my hip, inspects everything with sober intensity. In here, the sun is held at bay by the shade of the trees, the grey wooden louvres and the bleached canvas awnings that snap and strain fitfully in the breeze, like a ship’s sails.

‘It’s all very white,’ mutters Ben, taking in the sofas, the floor cushions, the drifting lengths of linen at the windows. I tell him what Nina told me: it’s all slipcovers and spare sets, a woman from the village comes twice a week, like the gardener, and when you’ve left she changes everything. Because of the half-sister, it’s all geared up for kids, though of course we’ve got to watch the water features.
Nina told me not to worry about sticky fingers
. I say it airily, with a conviction that I think persuades him, though I can’t quite believe it myself.

In the industrial fridge, we find milk and juice and white wine and cheese and a dish of stuffed aubergine in a tomato sauce, ready for the oven. Suddenly aware of my thirst, I pour mineral water into tumblers. We all drink, silently.

There’s the high chair. That box is full of toys.

Down the corridor, the two bedrooms assigned to us – the double with the linen chaise and the doors that open onto the terrace, the cot in the corner; Christopher is next door, in a small twin – are made up with smooth acres of ironed cotton: white and pearl-grey. The bathrooms, with their deep stone tubs and twin basins, look out onto the pine wood. There’s air-con, but what with the ceiling fans and the breeze, we probably won’t need to use it, we agree, pushing back the sliding doors, hearing the church bell tolling up from the village, a single austere note.

While Christopher finds the piano and starts to press the noise out of the keys, Ben and I separate and move on through the rooms, finding hidden doors that lead into pantries or laundry rooms or wet rooms or walk-in wardrobes. I can see what Charles has done here, I can see the way he has eliminated the clutter of everyday by editing it, pushing it out of sight; paring back to this simple, seductive tyranny of space, air and light. Much more than the house in London, this house is a manifesto, an idealised statement of how, properly, with discipline and taste, we should live. It’s a fair brief for a holiday house, I suppose, feeling the needle of jealousy beneath the delight that all this – for a week or so – is going to be ours.

In the master bedroom, Cecily on my hip, I pop open the cupboards and a few drawers – it would be strange not to be curious – and find pretty much what I expected to find: the stepmother’s capsule summer wardrobe (cotton dresses, some slim-cut, some full-skirted for evening, one in last summer’s particular shade of cobalt; a slippery tangle of bikinis in bold prints); the father’s Lacoste polo shirts in all colours, swimming trunks printed with seahorses from that ludicrous specialist store in the Burlington Arcade.

‘What did Nina say her dad did?’ Ben asks, appearing at the door, and I say he’s a composer of some sort. We find his name on a few envelopes collected on the kitchen counter: M. Paul Storey. Ben reaches into his pocket for his phone, but has no reception. He’ll have to google him later. ‘We must be talking big time,’ he says, wandering off outside. Then, a moment later, I hear him call for me.

He’s found the swimming pool. It stands in its own gated courtyard between banks of dwarf lavender, the purple heads bowing and beginning to turn dusty. Pale grey cushions on the loungers, pale grey sun parasols. The pool – that long unruffled expanse of water – is tiled in grey: but a darker grey, closer to charcoal, nearly black. A dark mirror surrounded by aching light. It’s the most glorious thing I’ve ever seen.

Christopher’s blond head appears at the gate, his small hand reaching up for the latch. He tries to lift it, but is thwarted by its height and weight. ‘You mustn’t come in here without Mummy or Daddy,’ I tell him as I let him in. ‘That’s very important.’

He says OK, and then he stares at the pool, the delicious spectacle.

In the house, we shove Cecily in the high chair with a breadstick and tell Christopher to keep an eye on her, just for a minute. And then we’re rushing back through the hot scented garden to the car, dragging the suitcases and shopping bags out of the boot and lugging them up the hill. The impatience of unpacking, of trying to locate the trunks and swim nappies and rash tops, of inflating Christopher’s armbands. When I’ve got everyone changed and ready, I still have to find my own swimsuit, a tired old khaki thing that gapes a bit at the bust; I meant to buy a new one before we left, but I never got around to it. Our bathroom towels are white; pool towels, left folded at the end of the beds, are slate. I wonder if Charles thought all this out, or if it was the French stepmother, Delphine.

Ben carries Cecily into the shallow end. She’s rigid with apprehension at first, her limbs stiff and doll-like, and then she’s squealing with pleasure and dancing in his arms, blinking in the spray. Christopher bobs between his orange wings, his hair slicked to his head, ghostly legs spinning beneath him. I hear the water gushing over the lip of the pool: an infinity edge, of course. Beyond it, the hazy indistinct line of the sea against the sky.

I walk down the stone steps into the blood-warm water and push off, feeling, as it rises over my shoulders, the tension falling away behind me, along with the heat and the anxiety and the irritation of the day. I dip my head under and kick down, swimming five or ten strokes, stretching, eyes blurred, ears full of a silent roar, my mind suddenly empty. When I come up and tread water in the deep end, droplets falling from my hair, it sounds like glockenspiels.

I flip over and float on my back for a while, considering the sky: the sort of sky where a cloud would be startling, an unexpected novelty. High up, a few birds are patiently riding the thermals in slow lazy spirals, making small adjustments to the angle of their wings while they wait for those tiny giveaways on the hillside: a pebble sent rolling, the twitch of grass, a sudden shadow.

I’m not sure what they are. Buzzards? Eagles? Ben will know. But I don’t want to ask him, not at this particular moment. There’s lots of time.

Dimly, through the water, I hear Christopher say, ‘You look like a marmalade, Mama. When your hair does that.’

Later, when the children are asleep, we sit at the table on the terrace and eat the aubergine dish left for us, watching the light going out of the sky and listening to the dogs barking along the headland. ‘We’ve really fallen on our feet here,’ Ben says. ‘I think the technical term is “jammy buggers”.’

I murmur agreement as he uncorks the second bottle. The air is full of white flowers and herbs, sweet and savoury; and through all this threads the agreeable scent of the mosquito coil burning at our feet. The wine is very cold in the big glass. When he kisses me, I kiss him back, my hands in his hair.

I feel, tonight, like someone else, the sort of person who goes on holiday to a house overlooking the sea, a house with curtains the colour of milk and a swimming pool tiled in slate. I used to know this person, I used to understand her; maybe I’ll get to know her again. Now that I’m here, the warmth on my skin and beginning to soften my bones, it seems almost possible.

As the days pass, the house tolerates our frailties without indulging them. Our damp towels slung over the balustrades. Boxes of cereal and crackers left out on the dining table. Toy trucks in the gravel. Before long, these little things look conspicuously wrong, and we find ourselves tidying up as we go along, as we never quite manage to do at home. And yet it’s an easy house to live in, everything so well-planned, so thought-through: so obvious, in many ways. It’s the sort of house that reminds you, inevitably, of the shortcomings of other houses, of Carmody Street in particular. We find ourselves marvelling at the water pressure and the kitchen drawers that close with soft, muted adhesion, like the doors of expensive cars.

Even as we fill the house with our noise and clutter, we are steadily succumbing, giving in to it and the way it suggests we live. Without quite realising it, we are being overpowered.

For the first few days, Ben is all go, reading guide books, consulting maps, working out when things will be open. We should go shopping in the village in the cool of the morning; in the late afternoon, we should visit an art gallery or the fishing port where Picasso had his studio (its harbour now filled with shiny black super-yachts that look like arrowheads of jet). Christopher complains as we buckle him into his car seat, and threatens to be sick as the car twists along the hairpin bends. He doesn’t care much for Picasso.

But on the third morning Cecily sleeps in until after nine, and so Ben and I wake of our own accord, a novelty that gives him time to reconsider. Perhaps we’ll just hang out for now. See how it goes. It’s in the quiet uneventfulness of the next few days that I begin to sense her – the other me, the person I thought I’d lost – and the flashes of the ease and happiness she took for granted. When Ben has taken the children for the first swim of the day, I make a second pot of coffee and carry a cup around the garden, discovering that one thought can still lead, quite naturally, to another. In the shade, the grass is damp from the sprinkler. As I step into the sun, I can feel the air rising around me, laden with moisture.