Summer Fever Page 2

  There are plenty of things she and Nick don’t discuss here. Along with the miscarriages, money is one of the most strenuously avoided. She’s had to come to terms with it: the various ways the move to Italy hasn’t fundamentally changed things between them. Perhaps she had been naive to think it would. But the booking – three whole weeks at the high-season tariff – has saved them. This is no exaggeration: they are down to their last fifteen thousand euros, all the spare cash from the sale of the London flat simply absorbed into the villa’s refurbishment. Now they’ll be able to pay six months’ worth of bills, if they’re careful. It means they aren’t going to fail. Not at this. Not yet, anyway.

  She turns round the iPad so Nick can see the screen. Madison’s posts reveal a self-consciously covetable life at home in California.

  ‘She’s, like, todally perfect,’ Laura says, in her best Valley Girl accent, as she scrolls down.

  Madison’s Instagram is as irritating as it is envy-making: a chequerboard of yoga, hiking, plates of clean food and a rescue pit-bull that balances pretzels on his nose. At least half the squares are blue: dark ocean, bright chlorine and faded denim cutoffs. She and her ‘hubby’ (Nick snorts at the endearment) live in one of the canyons, forty minutes from downtown LA when the freeway is clear. Madison imparted these exotic-sounding details in her second email.

  It doesn’t take much sleuthing on Laura’s part to find out what Madison and the hubby do. She is on every platform going.

  She nudges an almost-asleep Nick. ‘You’ll love this. She’s a wellness coach and he works in film production. Fancy that, in LA. What a shocker.’

  Without opening his eyes, Nick raises an eyebrow. ‘Do you think they’re making them somewhere, in Silicon Valley? These perfect Californian specimens?’

  Most of the posts feature Madison pulling the same expression and pose, her head tilted down, her hips twisted slightly. She prefers her right side, clearly. She is good-looking in a generic kind of way, with the glossy, streaky mermaid hair and long bones privileged American women always seem to have. Both Nick and Laura have put on a little bit of weight in Italy, despite the relentless chores. Too much pasta and bread and cheese. Way too much wine.

  ‘How do you think we should play it, when they come?’ She turns to look at him.

  ‘What do you mean, play it?’

  ‘Like, with meals and stuff. The website goes on about guests feeling as though they’ve found their second home, but what does it actually mean? We eat with them or we serve them? Do they think they’re getting full-board or what?’

  Nick yawns. ‘I thought you’d figured this out already.’

  ‘Well, I wrote some enticing copy. It was pretty vague.’

  ‘I think the home-from-home thing is good. It means it doesn’t have to be hotel-tidy all the time. I reckon they eat with us.’

  ‘Like friends.’

  He kicks off the sheet so his feet are poking out. ‘Yeah, exactly. Nice and laid-back.’

  ‘But they’re not friends. They’re total strangers. It’s a really weird concept when you think about it. They could be anyone.’

  Nick laughs. ‘Like inviting vampires over the threshold. Anyway, it’s a bit late to freak out now. How old, do you think?’ He’s squinting at the screen again.

  ‘God knows. Mid-thirties? Early forties if she’s had work? Or is handy with the filters.’

  ‘No kids?’

  ‘No. Unless they’re too un-photogenic to be seen.’

  ‘Where’s he, then? They’re all of her and the dog. I’m thinking someone in Wayfarers and white T-shirts. Top Gun but with tattoos.’

  ‘He’s probably the one taking the photos. This is clearly The Madison Show.’

  ‘Well, I don’t care who he is. Him and the blessed Madison have saved the day.’ Nick turns his head to grin up at her, mouth still purpled from the evening’s wine, though he’s brushed his teeth. ‘What a fucking relief. We have this amazing place and now we’ll earn some money off it too. I’m so glad we did this, Laur. I know I was resistant at first but you were right. You’re always bloody right.’ He stretches his arms above his head, sighing contentedly. ‘How sorted are we?’ he says. The emphasis is on the ‘we’.

  Instead of replying, she nudges him affectionately with her elbow. Now that the enchanted hours have slipped away the question becomes literal in her head, the stress moving to ‘are’. How sorted are we?

  She scrolls on as Nick begins to snore lightly, his arms flung over his head like a child. She turns off the bedside lamp. The shutters are open and, outside, the stars have come on. The night sky here is of a different order from anything she’s ever seen in the built-up south-east of England. You can see actual galaxies here, milky eddies and swirls that make her dizzy.

  Carefully, so she doesn’t wake him, she gets out of bed, the iPad tucked under her arm. She wishes she could go outside with it, do what she’s planning under those ancient flickering lights, but it’ll be too chilly by now. She creeps downstairs and, still in the dark, curls up in the armchair she bought at a roadside sale and reupholstered herself.

  Clicking off Madison’s Instagram, she opens a new window. A memory of London comes then, rain thrumming on a glass skylight. She’d just got back from the clinic for the last time. The recollection stops her. She reaches for her laptop instead. She and Nick have taken to sharing his iPad here. The laptop is hers alone.

  LinkedIn makes her paranoid. She’s barely ever used it before – it’s always seemed so clunky and corporate. Yesterday she’d set it up to search privately, but hadn’t quite trusted it. She’d emailed Lou, her best friend, the person she misses most acutely in Italy.

  I went on your LinkedIn profile just now. Have a look and let me know if it comes up anonymously or not.

  Shit, was that you? came the reply. I was hoping it was that bloke from Bumble. I think he’s ghosting me. God, what a life.

  So the privacy settings worked, but she was still worried. If he sees it’s her, she’ll die. Or will she? Isn’t it just flattering for him rather than embarrassing for her? He’d looked her up once on Facebook, years ago, when she was still content enough with Nick, and though it had thrown her, made her dream about him that night even, she hadn’t done anything about it. It was enough to know he’d thought of her, then searched for her. She’d carried that little ego-stroke around, a hot flutter inside her, until it receded into nothing again.

  Nerves stir within her now, making her restless. She goes through to the kitchen to get the wine from earlier and pours herself a glass, finishing the bottle. Tomorrow she’ll try to have a day off the booze. She can feel the alcohol swimming inside her almost immediately, mingling with her blood, thinning and corrupting it. She feels hyper-aware of everything: the fridge’s off-key hum, every grain of grit pressing into the soles of her feet. The cool eye of the moon regards her through the window as she drinks.

  She and Nick are getting on better, now that they have a booking. They’d always pitied couples who bickered and sniped as a matter of course; they had always believed themselves above this, much too respectful of the other to point-score like irritable siblings. And then suddenly they were doing just that, and once they’d fallen into the miserable rhythm of it, it seemed impossible to stop.

  She’d watch him abandon one job on the villa to start yet another, and wonder how she’d got through the last twenty years with him when everything he did annoyed her so profoundly. She believed she was totally justified in this, while simultaneously hating her own pettiness – the way she would snatch up his sweaty socks and T-shirts and hurl them into the drum of the washing-machine. She suddenly understood why resentful women took scissors to their husbands’ suits.

  So she’s perfectly aware that it seems perverse to do what she’s about to do, when things are looking brighter. But perhaps that’s exactly why she’s doing it now, the lift in spirits from the booking giving her a taste for more, another hit of life. Though she’s been playing with the i
dea of sending him a message for a while, she’s not sure when it tipped into a real possibility. Her old diaries haven’t helped. Some days, sequestered in this beautiful place where she knows no one, where she feels like she’s living in a painting, the past trapped between their scuffed covers feels more real than the present.

  She sits down at the laptop again, the room shrinking to the rectangle of the lit-up screen. She goes to Settings, turns off privacy mode and types in his name, clicking on it before she can change her mind, the wine egging her on. Quick as a flash, as though it’s burnt her, she clicks into a different window. It’s BBC weather, set for Urbino, the nearest city. She stares at the row of yellow sun symbols without seeing them. Her heart thumps.

  She glances at the clock in the corner of the screen. Ten minutes and then she’ll check. She’ll go back up to bed after that. Nick will have slept through her absence. Sometimes, when he’s out of it beside her, exhausted by the kind of manual work he’s never done before, she touches herself. Her movements are slight so she doesn’t wake him, her breathing kept silent and shallow. It isn’t forbidden, of course – Nick would probably love it if he caught her – but it feels like it. That makes it stronger when she gets there, back arching and eyelids fluttering in the dark. Sometimes, afterwards, her heart still racing, she cries, and she does that silently too.

  She glances at the clock again. Only four minutes have passed. At that moment, twin beams of light swing across the dark room. Still unused to the villa’s isolation after years in London, it takes her a second to remember they’re not near enough the road to see any lights from passing traffic. Someone must be coming down the drive. She stands, her first instinct to run upstairs and wake Nick. Instead she unbolts the heavy front door and tiptoes barefoot to the cypress tree that guards the gate. She can’t hear the engine over the rasp and saw of the cicadas. The headlights, veined by olive tree branches, begin to grow smaller and she realizes they’re reversing. Just a wrong turn, then.

  She remembers the waiting laptop and rushes back in. Eight minutes, but she can’t wait any longer. And there it is: a new view. There’s also a message waiting.

  Hello stranger x

  She slams the screen down. Then she opens it again, to check that the prompt for the password comes up.

  As she tiptoes silently upstairs, the stone steps chill underfoot, she tells herself she won’t touch herself tonight: punishment for her tiny infidelity, and the possibilities she’s lifted the latch on. Still, she can’t help thinking about him as Nick slumbers on beside her, his body turned to hers while she faces away, his breath between her bare shoulder-blades making her skin goose-pimple. Too abruptly alive to switch off, she doesn’t sleep until pale grey dawn outlines the shutters.

  The next morning she lurches into consciousness, eyes snapping open when she remembers the message. She usually takes a long time to wake up properly but not today. She doesn’t want to hang back from today.

  Hello stranger.

  She hugs her knees to herself, thoughts tumbling over each other. The bed beside her is empty, Nick already up. It’s late, maybe ten. She can tell by the light behind the shutters, white with mid-morning intensity. Suddenly hot, she kicks off the sheets. Her legs in pale blue chambray shorts look brown and smooth. She eases the shorts down over her hips, pulls off the matching top and inspects her naked self: the thighs that are a little fleshier than she’d like, but still quite toned; the stomach that’s always pretty flat, even when she puts on weight elsewhere. She stretches out T-shaped across the expanse of the bed, arms spread wide enough to touch the sides, toes pointed, and runs her hands down the mounds and dips of her body. She closes her eyes, just for a moment. Hello stranger. Her heart beats hard in her chest.

  She finds Nick in his usual spot at the kitchen table, head bent over the iPad, reading the news. She loves him more today, in spite of the message. Because of it. There’s no lasting guilt. Not yet. She’s not sure there will be. Not after what he’d done to them in December.

  ‘Morning,’ he says, without looking up.

  She kisses the top of his head and begins to massage his shoulders.

  ‘That’s nice.’ He can’t keep the surprise from his voice.

  He reaches round to squeeze her hand. It’s one of those suspended moments when she could tip it into more or walk away without offending him. She pictures herself leaning over him, pressing her breasts into his shoulder-blades, hair falling like a sheet in front of his face. He would pull her into his lap and they would start to kiss. He would taste of slightly stale coffee.

  She straightens instead, walking over to the counter to pour herself a cup. The door to the garden is wide open and the air is already warm enough to prickle the skin. The sun falls in a broad stripe across her bare feet, which look pretty against the old terracotta tiles, toenails glossy because she only painted them yesterday, the exact shade of pistachio ice-cream.

  ‘Do you want some breakfast? There’s leftover pastries.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Not hungry.’

  And she does feel full, the word replete arriving in her mind. Lou’s voice echoes in her head, as it often does here, now she doesn’t get to see her in real life. You always get thinner when you’re into someone, she says in her wry tones. You’re getting down to your hunting weight.

  ‘What are you smiling at?’ Nick has turned to watch her flexing her feet in the doorway, his expression half quizzical, half affectionate. He stands and opens his arms. ‘Come here.’

  She burrows into his embrace, her nose tucking into the cleft between his arm and chest, glad to hide her face. He smells more familiar than anything else she can imagine, of toast and sleep and, somehow, his parents’ house. A surge of emotion eddies up through her body to swell behind her eyes. She waits until the tears have retreated, then takes his face in her hands, kissing him quickly and chastely on the mouth before stepping away.

  ‘Love you,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah, cheers.’

  They both smile at the old joke. When they were first together he’d found conversations about feelings as embarrassing as she’d found them stimulating. She never minded, though – it was touching. Besides, it was so obvious he loved her that she didn’t really need him to say it. From the very start, even in this difficult last year, she had never, not for a second, doubted that he loved her.

  It was she who had asked him out the first time, though admittedly in the knowledge that he already liked her. It was the summer she’d graduated and they were both working at a pub in the Warwickshire town where they’d grown up. He worked behind the bar and she was a waitress. They’d gone to different schools and had never crossed paths before. Like her, he’d just finished university, though he’d stayed at home to save money on accommodation. Both of them were on the cusp of proper adulthood. Neither felt entirely ready for it.

  Every time they coincided in the pub’s kitchen, the chef would tease them about when they were going to get together. He did it with the barely contained aggression he showed to the food he cooked, and to the customers who didn’t like his hunter’s chicken or pie and mash.

  Nick had the sort of skin that flushed easily. He wasn’t really her physical type. But then, after a while, she found herself hoping they would be working the same shift. Whether it was him she liked, or how much he liked her, she wasn’t sure.

  One Saturday night, they had a lock-in to celebrate a week of high takings and excellent tips. After a few drinks, Nick began to reveal a different side. He was quick and funny; he could run verbal rings round Danny the chef. She observed him across the table and thought, Oh, why not?

  It was she who had kissed him after their first date, she who had led him to bed with a smile after the second. Oh, and the power that conferred on her, a total self-assurance that only made him want her more. Love like a warm bath in a safe house, door locked against dark night. Such a relief after what had come before, during her final term at university.

  Hello str
anger.

  As she swims laps in the new pool that’s only just become usable, the butter-coloured stones around it still waiting to be cemented into position, she thinks about what she’s going to write in her reply. She has already brushed away the possibility of not replying.

  For the first time, she forgets to admire the view towards the hills that change colour throughout the day but are richly green now, the air so clear that she could pick out every curving line of the millennia-old terraces if she bothered to look. Instead, her thoughts are turned inward. She gives up the lengths and floats on her back, hands circling slowly. High above is her favourite pine, the one with the cloud-shaped canopy that perfectly frames any photograph taken of the view. Beyond it the sky is turning a deep, hard blue.

  She doesn’t register those, either. She is thinking about his hands, strong and square rather than elegant. Large enough to encircle both of her wrists and hold them fast. She dives underwater and away from the memory that makes her insides contract, kicking hard to the bottom. Letting out her breath, she sinks. When her knees bump the tiles, she opens her eyes. They hate chlorine but she keeps them open, even when they start to sting.

  She waits until the men who are finishing off the pool arrive before she opens the laptop. She doesn’t know these two: they’re not Massimo’s usual men. Nick has joined them outside, ostensibly helping, though they would probably rather he didn’t. She’s noticed that when he inevitably leaves any of the builders to it, once the sun gets too fierce, they resume talking easily, the staccato rhythm of the language she still can’t penetrate curling in through the open windows, like the heat.

  All that signing and gesticulating with the locals, the linguistic long-way-round you have to go when you know only a few dozen words, she finds it exhausting. She hasn’t said so to Nick but she doesn’t think she will ever be good enough to convey or understand any nuance here. She misses being quick and finding the perfect word to describe something; she misses silly puns. In Italy, she feels slow and stupid much of the time. She suspects it’s the same for Nick and that’s why she doesn’t want to bring it up. If they start admitting to these little failures, where will it end?