by Lucy Lord
‘I’d forgotten quite how awful it is.’ Bella kissed Daisy on the nose. ‘And we won’t really know what we’re going to do with it until someone’s ripped out all this horridness. There may be some wonderful treasures lurking beneath – who knows? That would be a lucky break for us all, wouldn’t it, my angel? But never fear, it’ll be spectacular once we’ve finished with it. Now . . . moving swiftly on . . .’
They walked back under the archway and Bella caught her breath. This was one room she hadn’t forgotten. OK, so the whitewashed walls were filthy and covered in graffiti, but its proportions were fantastic, with original wooden beams still intact, and light flooding in through the floor-to-ceiling French windows that led to the garden and pool.
Carmen had told them that the finca had been used as a hippy commune in the late sixties and early seventies – hence the graffiti, which comprised CND signs, badly drawn sunflowers and rainbows, and even ‘MAKE LOVE NOT WAR’ written in large loopy letters, with hearts where the Os should be.
‘It almost seems a shame to paint over it,’ Bella mused, more to herself than to Daisy this time. ‘So evocative of its era. But Daddy wouldn’t hear of it, of course.’ This bit was directed at her daughter. ‘And it’s going to take an awful lot of white paint. Mummy’s right arm will be killing her once we’ve got this room into shape. Oh but, God, it’s going to be worth it.’
She gazed around, her artistic mind already imagining the lovely, airy room, complete with wafty white cotton voile curtains, welcoming white linen sofas, bookshelves, rugs and a load of mis-matched bluey/greeny cushions to break up the all-whiteness, and bring some of the outside colours in.
‘Right – are we ready to go and have a look at the garden now?’
Daisy nodded. Bella had no idea whether her daughter actually understood a word she said to her, but her nods, grins and giggles encouraged her to carry on.
It was funny how your priorities could change in the space of a couple of years, she thought. She’d always been a bit of a good-time girl, often to be found disgracing herself in nightclub loos or the kitchen at parties. She’d had enough fun to last anybody a lifetime. But much as she’d loved her old life, she had never been happier than she was now; in Andy and Daisy she had everything she could possibly want.
Chapter 2
Being in the garden was even better than looking at it from the bedroom window. The smells! The colours! The tiny birds flitting from tree to tree! It was a shame about the mouldy state of the pool, but Bella was already seeing it sparkling turquoise, full of bobbing heads and happy faces.
She was pushing Daisy around it when they encountered their first orange tree. She reached up to pick one and inhaled deeply, savouring its sweet, fragrant tang.
‘Smell that, darling.’ She crouched down and held the ripe fruit to Daisy’s little nose. The baby grinned and gurgled in appreciation.
‘What a delightful sight,’ said a heavily accented French voice. Bella jumped to her feet, startled. Standing in front of her was a smiling old gentleman with a handsome, lined face. Wearing an artist’s smock, loose linen trousers, and a battered straw hat with a floral silk scarf acting as a flamboyant hatband, he fitted the surroundings beautifully.
‘I am sorry, mademoiselle, I did not wish to frighten you – oh pardon, I should say madame’ – he indicated Daisy in her buggy – ’but you look so young.’
Bella grinned. Compliments were gold dust when you were a relatively new mother. Everyone said how beautiful your baby was, of course, but the most personal comments that people managed tended to be ‘you’re looking well’, or a slightly forced ‘great!’ – which Bella took to mean ‘fat’.
‘Well, actually I’m not married, so technically, I suppose, I am still mademoiselle.’ The Frenchman frowned. ‘But I’m not a single mother,’ Bella added hurriedly. ‘Andy – that’s Daisy’s father – and I moved in yesterday. We’re from London. I’m Bella.’ She extended a hand and the Frenchman gallantly held it to his lips.
‘Enchanté, Bella. Enchanté. I should introduce myself also. I am Henri, your new neighbour. I live up the hill – a mere ten-minute walk. My son and I heard that finally some English people had come to live in Ca’n Pedro – such a waste, for such beauty to be deserted for so many years – so we thought we should come and say ’allo.’
‘How very neighbourly,’ smiled Bella, seeing no sign of the son and wondering if the old man may perhaps be a little doolally.
And then a dark-haired young man appeared from behind their largest almond tree; he had, until now, been obscured by both his father and the abundant blossom.
Bloody hell, he was good looking. Limpid dark-brown eyes looked up at her through ridiculously long and thick black lashes. His olive skin had that deep russet hue of a man who has lived his whole life in the sun, and full pink lips parted to reveal even white teeth as he smiled at her. He wasn’t particularly tall (well, you couldn’t have everything) but his sleeveless black T-shirt revealed the well-defined biceps of somebody who does something manly in the great outdoors. A gardener, perhaps, or a . . .
Bella shook herself internally. She loved Andy. No, she didn’t only love him – she worshipped him, adored him. They were soulmates, and as happy as two people ever could be in one another’s company. But there was no harm in appreciating a bit of beauty, she excused herself. All the same, she did wish she’d been able to have a shower and do something with her hair before her new neighbours’ unexpected arrival, and was overcome with a sudden insane compulsion to give her armpits a surreptitious sniff.
‘Buenos días,’ said the young man. He held out his hand and Bella shook it, keeping her arm as close to her side as she could.
‘Buenos días. Me llama Bella – um . . .’ She did know quite a bit of Spanish, having spent a large chunk of her childhood in Majorca, where her father still lived, but it had become pretty rusty of late.
‘It’s OK. We can speak English if you prefer,’ grinned the handsome young man. ‘Hi, Bella. I’m Jorge.’
‘Hi, Jorge, and thanks,’ Bella smiled back. ‘I really should be practising my Spanish, now we’re actually living here, but for the first couple of days, to ease myself in . . .
‘I like to practise my English too. Maybe we can take it in turns?’
‘Your English sounds pretty good to me, but yeah, sure – it’s a deal! And in the meantime some kind of weird English/French/Spanish Esperanto?’
‘Bienvenue a Ibiza,’ said Henri. ‘This form of communication is very common here. Mostly we understand one another.’
Bella laughed and lifted Daisy out of her buggy.
‘In that case, I think I should introduce you to Daisy. We’re hoping she’ll grow up bilingual. Tri-would be even better, of course.’
As he looked at the baby, Jorge went into raptures, tickling her under the chin, stroking her silky white-blonde hair and exclaiming, ‘O que rubia, que linda, que bonita!’
Henri smiled sadly. ‘My son loves the children. I think maybe it is because his own mother died when he was small. She was a local Ibicenco girl – very beautiful . . .’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that,’ said Bella. ‘But I’m not surprised to hear she was beautiful, looking at you two.’
Ewww. Did that sound like the compliment she’d intended, or slightly slimy lechery? Jorge had to be at least five years younger than her.
Henri opened his mouth to say something when Andy appeared at the French windows, laden with flimsy carrier bags so full they looked as though they might split any second.
‘Andy darling!’ She waved over at him with relief, totally forgetting the armpit situation. ‘Come and meet our new neighbours. We’re speaking English – for the time being, at least.’
Andy, smiling, put the carrier bags in the shade and made his way around the pool.
‘Hi, I’m Andy. Nice to meet you.’
‘Henri.’ The old man held out his hand.
‘Jorge.’ The young man held out hi
s.
Andy courteously shook both hands. ‘We were about to have some breakfast – I’ve bought plenty. Would you like to join us?’
Bella looked at him proudly. Andy had such good manners.
‘Non, non, it is very kind of you, but we have already eaten,’ said Henri. ‘And I am sure you would rather have your first petit déjeuner here without unwelcome strangers!’ Neither Bella nor Andy knew what to say to this, so they carried on smiling stupidly. ‘But I was thinking,’ Henri continued, ‘tomorrow – if you are free – maybe I could show you around the locality, show you some places of interest – the farm where we buy the best eggs, the most beautiful secluded beach, which will also be safe for la bébé, the shop that sells the best hierbas . . .’ He winked and gave a wicked grin as he mentioned the island’s potent local hooch.
‘Well, Andy has to go into town tomorrow, for some business stuff, but Daisy and I would love to take you up on your offer. It’s really kind of you. That should be OK, shouldn’t it, darling?’ Bella looked up at Andy.
‘Of course. And as Bella says, it’s very kind of you, monsieur.’
‘Parfait.’ The old man smiled at them from under the brim of his battered straw hat. ‘Do you know Bar Anita, in San Carlos?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Bella, smiling as the memories hit her. ‘I’ve known Anita’s for years.’
‘Formidable! Donc . . . shall we say Anita’s at – would eleven in the morning suit you, mademoiselle?’
‘That sounds great. Thank you, merci and gracias.’
*
The following morning, Andy was driving into Ibiza Town, a large smile creeping across his face as he turned up the volume on Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, one of his and Bella’s favourite pieces of classical music. It was another beautiful day and he could still hardly believe they’d actually done it.
Andy had always been the sensible one, had had to be after both his parents were killed in a car crash when he was a teenager. Bella was his best friend Max’s little sister and he’d had a crush on her ever since he’d first set eyes on her – she was seventeen, visiting Max at Cambridge, where he and Max both studied. He’d never considered himself in her league though – the wild child London art student, with her enormous, Bambi-lashed brown eyes, pretty face and messy long dark hair. What on earth would she see in an earnest, speccy geek like him?
But what he hadn’t known at the time was that Bella’s wild-child behaviour was the only way she could deal with the shyness that had afflicted her for most of her life; that underneath it she was sweet and kind and funny. When they eventually fell in love, he was engaged to marry his long-term Cambridge girlfriend, who he subsequently found out was cheating on him the day before the wedding. His antipathy towards marriage, as a result, was as solid as his commitment to Bella and Daisy.
When he and Bella got together, Andy had been an award-winning journalist on one of the better broadsheets. He was known for intelligent and insightful pieces exposing people-traffickers, practitioners of female-genital mutilation and child pornographers. He’d worked extremely hard for nearly two decades, his sense of burning injustice that the drunken truck driver who’d killed both his parents outright escaped with a suspended sentence spurring him on to write about things that disgusted him.
It was inevitable, of course, that writing about the things that disgusted him involved constant exposure to brutal, sadistic people who disgusted him, and the summer before last, before Daisy was conceived, he’d come to the conclusion that he couldn’t bear much more of the seedy underbelly of life. So he’d approached an agent with an idea for a history book.
Bella had been delighted – both of them working from home was ideal, as far as she was concerned; she worried incessantly about Andy’s accumulative knowledge of things more horrible than anybody needed to know, and she’d never been hung up on where the next penny might come from.
The idea to move to Ibiza had been hers – she’d been spending holidays there for as long as she could remember, and loved the island. By the end of a long, boozy lunch on Benirrás beach the previous summer she had managed to convince him that it was the right thing to do, that Daisy would have a far better upbringing there than in London.
Dear Bella, he thought, his smile widening further as he steered the jeep into the outside lane in preparation for turning off the motorway. Her arty impulsiveness was exactly what he needed in his hardworking, somewhat strait-laced life.
None of this would have happened without her, and for that – as though he needed further reason – he would love her for ever.
*
Anita’s was Ibiza’s original hippy bar, the place for the assorted long-haired peaceniks, draft-dodgers, artists, writers and plain old pleasure seekers to hang out in the Sixties and Seventies. Bella, whose imagination had always been fired by that era (she loved the music, the clothes, the whole make-love-not-war thing), liked to think that several of them would have been living in Ca’n Pedro.
It was still wonderfully atmospheric, with rickety wooden tables and chairs laid out under a vine-covered trellis, leading to a narrow bar at the back and an indoor restaurant that was generally deserted at the height of the season, when everybody wanted to sit outside. Now, a couple of months before the summer madness started, the inside was more bustling than out – though Bella, after yet another miserable English winter, was relishing the partially covered outside area.
An old defunct phone box, which had once been the only one on the island, and a whole wall lined with individual post-boxes (many of them still in use) bore testament to the fact that the bar had acted as a kind of poste-restante – the only way for anxious parents to contact their wayward offspring – and added to its authentic charm. Anita’s was much more than a period piece though; its whitewashed walls were plastered with daily-changing posters advertising club nights from Pacha to Space, Ibiza Rocks to DC-10, Amnesia and the rest.
The people who worked there were efficient and friendly. The waiter who had brought Bella her coffee, as she waited for Henri under the vines with Daisy on her lap, had recognized them both from the previous summer and greeted them with warm enthusiasm, exclaiming how Daisy had grown, and commenting on her beauty just as Jorge had the previous day: ‘Que linda, que bonita, que rubia!’
It appeared that Spaniards adored blonde babies. Bella wasn’t quite sure how she and Andy had managed to produce one, both being dark-haired and dark-eyed themselves, but she imagined her daughter’s hair would grow darker as she got older – the same way her own had, in fact.
San Carlos, their local village, was small but perfectly formed. Aside from Anita’s, it boasted a simple whitewashed church, a little grocery that sold all the essentials (but was shut between 1 and 5 p.m.), a couple of very good restaurants, a pharmacy and a pedestrianized area lined with boutiques, an antique shop, a few more bars and a health-food store that also offered ayurvedic massages. Everything was beautifully kept, and the locals, who all seemed to know one another, were as friendly as the waiters at Anita’s.
It was also cool. One of Kate Moss’s best friends had had her wedding at the local church several years previously. Bella knew that it was extremely un-cool of her a) to know about this and b) to care, but there it was. She was living in rural bliss in one of the coolest villages in Ibiza, and loving it already.
‘Hola, Bella!’
Bella looked up from Daisy, at whose face she had been gazing with her usual rapt adoration, to see not Henri standing in front of her, but Jorge, his handsome son. Today he was wearing white jeans and another sleeveless, bicep-revealing T-shirt.
‘Hola, Jorge.’ She smiled and stood up to kiss him on both cheeks. ‘How lovely to see you again. But . . .?’
‘Papa asked me to give you his apologies, but he has important business to attend in Santa Eulalia. So I shall show you around instead.’
‘Well – thank you,’ said Bella. ‘If you’re sure you’ve got time. What about your work?’
‘Oh, it’s OK, I can take an hour or two off. I am my own boss,’ said Jorge with a gleaming grin that lit up his deeply tanned face. ‘I design people’s gardens, fix things that are broken – I suppose you could call me an “odd-job man”, but there is a lot of call for it around here. Many foreigners buying up old properties.’ He winked at Bella and she laughed. ‘I don’t do too badly,’ he added modestly.
‘I’m sure you don’t.’
Well, she’d almost been right about him being a gardener.
*
Jorge had very flash wheels for an odd-job man. As he drove Bella and Daisy around the winding tree-lined roads in his white convertible BMW, pointing out Las Dalias, where the hippy market was held every Wednesday (Bella already knew this, but didn’t have the heart to tell him), and various farmsteads, butchers and isolated, but apparently amazing restaurants, they chatted easily about the events that had led Bella and Andy to the island.
‘Andy’s a writer,’ she told him proudly.
‘Clever man. What kind of books?’
‘History books.’
Jorge let out a low whistle. ‘Wow. Very clever man.’
‘Yes, very! His first one, a political history of the Balkans since the Second World War, did brilliantly, so he was given a much bigger advance for his second one, and we thought we might as well go for it. Our flat in London was too small for the three of us, and we couldn’t buy anything like Ca’n Pedro for the same price there . . .’
‘. . . and you were lured by the magic of the White Isle.’
‘Well, yes.’ Bella laughed. ‘Got it in one, in fact. I’ve been coming here for years and have loved it more every single time.’
‘And you, Bella?’ Jorge briefly took his eyes off the road to look at her. ‘What did you do, back in London?’
‘I was . . . am an artist. I paint in oils mainly, but haven’t done much since Daisy was born. I was hoping that living here would start to give me some inspiration again . . .’