The House on Sunset Lake (10 page)

‘I wondered when you’d start bragging about that, pretty boy.’

‘They appreciated the music,’ he chided.

They listened to the shower pound against the windscreen.

‘Why don’t we sit it out? Go for a drink with the others?’

‘No, I should really get back,’ she said, thinking of her mother. Besides, she had no intention of seeing Tina again, could imagine her cornering Jim at the bar and didn’t even want to think where that might lead.

He glanced in his rear-view mirror and then jumped out of the truck. Jennifer shouted after him, but he was in the middle of the road, trying to hail a taxi in the pouring rain.

A cab screeched to a stop. Jim ran back, locked up the truck and helped Jennifer load her basket into the cab. As they set off, she gazed out of the window. The weather felt like a portent that all the good times she’d had over the summer were coming to a close.

‘Rains more than I thought it would around here,’ said Jim.

‘Atlantic hurricane season,’ she explained. ‘I mean, we don’t often get hit in Savannah, but it’s peak time around now.’

They were soon back at Casa D’Or, and as the house grew closer and closer at the end of the long drive, she felt a sense of a ticking clock, an urgency to do something though she didn’t know what.

Jim was only in Savannah for one more weekend, and besides, Connor was coming back for her twenty-first. And then he would be gone.

‘You know, I’ve never really thanked you,’ she said, feeling more and more sentimental.

‘What for?’

‘I think I might have been pressured back to New York if it wasn’t for you and your idea of the documentary.’

‘You’re no pushover. I had nothing to do with it. I should be thanking you for keeping me company all summer. At least I can now put “documentary research assistant” on my CV, because I haven’t got anything else to go on there beyond “enthusiastic drinker” and “Students’ Union darts champion”.’

‘Darts?’

‘I’ll have to show you sometime.’

They sat there, just a couple of feet apart, and looked at each other.

‘You are going to keep in touch, Wyatt,’ he said, not moving his gaze.

‘I know I am. It’s you I’m worried about. Once you get back to college and your friends and Emma—’

‘Emma’s gone. I told you,’ he said without his usual good humour. ‘It was never really that serious, if I’m honest. In fact it was never really anything at all.’

Jennifer frowned in puzzlement. ‘It was never really anything?’

‘I only said it because, you know, you had . . . have Connor. And I wasn’t sure if you’d want to be friends if you thought I was single. You might have thought I was just after you.’

‘After you?’ she said, feeling a little gallop in her heart.

‘You know.
Liked you
.’

She could feel her cheeks burning hot.

‘I wouldn’t think that. We’ve always been just friends.’

‘Of course,’ he said quickly.

The taxi stopped and Jennifer got out. Well that’s it then, she thought as she rifled in her bag for some money. When she looked up, the taxi was heading off down the drive and Jim was standing next to her in the dark.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I can walk from here,’ he said, looking embarrassed.

The rain had stopped. It was as if the thunder had pushed the clouds out of the sky and let the creamy moon spill its light over the grounds.

He shoved his hands into his pockets and lingered.

‘Do you want to come in?’

‘But your mum bites . . .’

Jennifer glanced back towards the house. There was little sign of life inside, just the faint glow of a lamp that had been left on somewhere. She racked her brain for another suggestion of something to do.

‘Most likely to be on the front cover of
Rolling Stone
 . . .’ she said, quite easily imagining his handsome face on the cover of a magazine. ‘And you’ve still not written me a song.’

‘Most likely to get married,’ he said, raising a brow.

‘Sorry if the thought of it is so hideous.’ She laughed, trying to deflect the tension, telling herself that they were just having fun, just teasing each other.

‘It’s not, actually.’ He said it so matter-of-factly, without embarrassment. ‘In fact we should make a pact, right here, right now. If we get to forty and neither one of us is married, we should, you know. Do it.’

‘Do what?’

‘Get married.’

She looked away and gulped. She could feel her heart racing but told herself that it was just a joke, that the suggestion didn’t really mean anything.

‘Do we have to be unmarried, or does being divorced count?’ she said, struggling to keep a lightness in her voice, struggling to hide how exciting this suggestion was to her. ‘Because you’ll be a rock star by then and on your third marriage . . .’

‘We just have to be single. Which means if you’re very lucky, you might get a window of opportunity . . .’

‘Between
Playboy
models?’

He didn’t take his eyes away from her.

‘You think I’m that shallow?’

‘Absolutely, you’re a man.’

He took a step towards her and her heart started to thud harder, as if a glimmer of light had presented itself on the horizon.

‘But you’ll be a famous film director by then. Running around with all these handsome young actors, won’t spare a minute for your old mate Jim Johnson, the gnarly rock star.’

‘I’ll always have time for you,’ she said with a surge of courage.

‘You’d better.’

He looked at her with those eyes that were sometimes green, sometimes grey, and she knew right then that all she wanted to do was kiss him. That all she had wanted to do all summer was kiss him.

He pushed a lock of her hair behind her ear and their lips were so close she could smell the light whiff of beer on his breath. The mood shifted, the air vibrated, a shiver of possibility made her whole body prickle and she knew that from nowhere had come a night that she would remember for ever.

Instinctively she closed her eyes, willing him to come even closer, but as she felt his lips brush hers, she heard a noise behind her. The sound of the front door of Casa D’Or.

Her eyes snapped open and she turned and saw her mother, back-lit in the doorway of the house.

Jennifer could almost hear the pin pricking her little bubble of happiness.
Pop.

Sylvia walked to the edge of the steps.

‘I think you had better come inside,’ she said coolly, not even acknowledging Jim’s presence.

Jennifer glanced at Jim and muttered a goodbye, then ran up the steps, tripping as she reached the top. Too embarrassed to even turn around to see if he was still watching, she disappeared inside the house.

Silence settled around the dimly lit hall.

Sylvia looked immaculate in her expensive navy dressing gown. It was made of silk and chiffon and had the effect of making her look like a formidable Hollywood star.

‘Where have you been?’ she asked, crossing her arms in front of her.

‘The beach,’ said Jennifer, looking down at her still-damp-from-the-rain shorts and T-shirt.

‘You know Connor phoned the house this evening. He wanted to know where you were and I didn’t know what to tell him.’

‘I was with friends,’ she said, feeling herself wilt under her mother’s gaze.

‘Really,’ replied Sylvia tightly.

A sliver of moonlight shone in through the skylight window, and for a moment Jennifer thought her mother looked like the wicked queen from some wintry fantasy land. Her skin was as white as alabaster, her expression frozen in quiet contempt. She was waiting for the tension in the room to rise. Jennifer knew the script. Her mother would lift her fingers to her temples. Her voice would start to tremble with rage, climbing in pitch; her nostrils would flare and her eyes blaze.

Sylvia Wyatt was quite terrifying when she was angry – and from a young age, Jennifer had worked out that the best way to deal with it was to avoid her mother’s fits entirely, either by not upsetting her in the first place, or by getting out of the way of her fury.

Now, however, Sylvia released her arms and her expression softened.

‘You wanted to interview me for your documentary,’ she said finally.

‘Yes,’ replied Jennifer cautiously. She had mentioned the subject a couple of times over the past few weeks. On both occasions it was when her mother had seemed most relaxed and happy; once after a victorious game of tennis, another time when a particularly flattering photograph of her had appeared in one of Savannah’s society magazines.

‘Why don’t we do it now? Your father has gone to a party at Matthew and Brooke Lane’s house, but I had a headache and decided to come home.’

Jennifer frowned in puzzlement, but her mother pretended not to notice.

‘Come with me,’ she instructed.

Jennifer followed her up the long sweep of staircase. Her camcorder was on her dressing table, so she grabbed it and caught up with her mother, who had gone up to the next floor, to a part of the house used only for storage. They went into a room in the far wing that contained Sylvia’s winter clothes. The weather in Savannah rarely dipped below ten degrees even on dark December evenings, but it was here that she kept her riding boots and cashmere coats, the heavy wool dresses she would take on trips to Europe, her fur stoles and leather gloves, an Aladdin’s cave of feminine treasures that David Wyatt rarely ventured into.

The room was in the eaves of the house. It was dark up here, with only a small light on the ceiling. There was a window seat at one end, underneath an arched panel of glass that looked out on to the swimming pool, shining turquoise in the night. Jennifer crossed the room to sit down as Sylvia picked up a hat box and opened it. Jennifer could barely see its contents; it appeared to be full of papers and knick-knacks, the sort of memory box that people kept for no reason other than nostalgia. It surprised her, as her mother had never appeared the sentimental sort.

Sylvia pulled out a book of the small, glossy hardback variety, with the words
Charleston Design
on the cover.

‘You want to know about me, about my life, about my hopes and dreams for my child?’ she asked, clutching it to her chest. ‘This book was my bible. I found it in a thrift store in Alabama, when I was a couple of years younger than you are now. No idea how it got there. Not much call for interior design in my home town, I can tell you. But the world inside this book . . . It was a million miles away from the place I grew up.’

Jennifer was taken aback by this personal revelation. She knew very little about her mother’s background and family. Jennifer’s grandparents had died before she was born, and there was a sister, Donna, whom Jennifer had apparently met, though her memories of her were so faint, she wondered if she had only imagined them. Donna was alluded to infrequently, a cautionary tale that involved drink and multiple partners and drifting around the world, but very little information had ever been revealed beyond the fact that Sylvia had grown up on a farm in Alabama and was to all intents and purposes an orphan.

‘This book brought me to Charleston. I came to learn about design and I fell in love with the city and the art of making things beautiful. And then I fell in love with Ethan Jamieson.’

She opened the book carefully, pulled out a loose photograph from within its pages and handed it to Jennifer. It was an old black-and-white snap, poorly developed and faded at the edges. But despite the quality of the picture, there was no denying the beauty of the subject.

‘Is this him?’ asked Jennifer quietly, too transfixed to even pick up her camcorder. He had dark hair and piercing eyes that reminded her a little of Jim.

Sylvia nodded and took the photo back.

‘I was twenty years old when I met him. I was living the life,’ she said with a soft, nostalgic smile. ‘I had an apartment above an antique store on King Street. I was young, pretty. There were a lot of offers of dates and nights out, and I enjoyed the attention. I’d met your father by this point too; we’d been on a couple of dates and I liked him.’

Jennifer knew that her father and mother had met at a party in Charleston over Christmas, but not even her father had elaborated on those scant details.

‘Ethan was exciting,’ she said with what sounded almost like disapproval. ‘Not just the best-looking guy in the room, maybe the most handsome man in the whole of Charleston. He was twenty-two, just graduated from Brown. He was a photographer and an incredibly talented one. Charleston was still segregated at this point. Legislation had been passed but it was slow to move, so Ethan was out there doing his bit for racial equality. He drank in bars that the coloured folk used to drink in, took pictures of the racial divides that still existed in the city and exhibited them in New York, Washington to show the ruling elite what was still going on. He was exotic, dynamic, and I loved his passion. In comparison, your father seemed a little dull and ordinary and I stopped taking his calls.’

Sylvia paused as if she were composing herself. Jennifer could only clutch her camcorder and stare at her. She couldn’t remember a time when her mother had spoken so openly or expansively and wondered how difficult it must be for her.

‘We dated for three months, Ethan and I. And then we didn’t. It turns out he had a girlfriend in Washington the whole time,’ she said, her voice returning to its usual brisk efficiency. ‘The joke, unfortunately, was on me, although a few weeks later I ran into your father again. I didn’t deserve a second chance but he gave me one. He moved back to Savannah, I came with him and we were married twelve months later.’

‘Did you ever see Ethan again?’ asked Jennifer quietly.

‘I read a story in the paper a few years ago. “Charleston war photographer dies”. It was Ethan. I looked into it on the internet. I thought maybe a bomb in Sudan or Iraq might have killed him. But he drank himself to death. He died alone, a divorced, penniless alcoholic in Mount Pleasant.’

Sylvia walked slowly towards her daughter, and for a moment Jennifer’s heart was hammering as she wondered what she was going to do. But she just sat down next to her.