Under an Amber Sky

by Rose Alexander

  Between Sophie, Anna, and Darko, they began to manhandle everything into the van, shoving in canvases, suitcases, the pushchair, and numerous coats, all of which Anna seemed to have been wearing.

  ‘Grief, Anna, what have you brought with you?’ Sophie was beginning to worry that they weren’t going to fit it all in. It was only a small van.

  ‘Everything,’ gasped Anna, breathless from the weight of a particularly large suitcase.

  ‘It looks like you’re moving in, not here for a holiday,’ joked Sophie, standing back to survey their progress. Darko was quietly rearranging things; Anna’s method of stowing stuff relied more on random heaping than any kind of systematic process.

  ‘I am,’ replied Anna, pausing to wipe the sweat from her brow. ‘Bloody hot, isn’t it?’

  ‘Compared to London, I guess so.’ Sophie realized she had almost forgotten about the weather back home, about how the cold, chill winds could blow until July, even all summer sometimes. And then what Anna had said registered. ‘Uh – can we just backtrack a moment? How long, exactly, are you planning on staying?’

  ‘Oh, sorry, Soph,’ said Anna, airily. ‘Didn’t I explain? It’s not a vacation; I’m here for the long term.’

  Sophie laughed, slightly nervously. ‘Right. I see.’

  ‘That’s OK, isn’t it? I thought you’d be glad of some company.’

  Sophie rolled her eyes; this was so typical of Anna. Assuming that because she had had an idea and thought it a good one, everyone else would agree, and forgetting that she might need to communicate said idea with those it affected. And then Tomasz flung his arms around her legs with a shout of ‘Gophie!’ and she had to smile.

  ‘Of course I’m pleased. Delighted! Absolutely.’

  Despite Anna’s foibles and idiosyncrasies, she loved her friend and her godson. And it would be good to fill up some more of the house, in which she and Frank did rattle around somewhat. Then something else occurred to her. ‘But what will you live on?’ Sophie still had money left over from the sale of her flat but it wasn’t going to last for ever, especially if she had two more mouths to feed. She had avoided thinking about what she was going to do about this situation in the long term.

  ‘I’ve got a bit of cash, actually.’ Anna handed Tomasz some water and watched as he drank thirstily. It really was very warm. ‘The council has given me a one-off payment for giving up my right to social housing.

  Sophie gulped. ‘So,’ she ventured hesitantly, ‘you won’t ever be going back?’

  ‘Nah,’ said Anna, decisively. ‘I’m done with London. If I go anywhere, maybe it’ll be back home. Or Australia. I quite fancy Melbourne.’

  The way Anna had always spoken about her hometown – as a godforsaken mud patch in the middle of nowhere in deepest rural Poland – had never led Sophie to suppose that she might go back there; she could hardly believe what she was hearing. And as for Australia – Anna had always been adamant that she couldn’t live any place where the people, however charming, clearly lacked the required degree of cynicism about life.

  But Anna was nothing if not changeable. Sophie had always admired her ability to adapt, to meld herself chameleon-like into any situation. Frequently, she had wished she herself were so adaptable.

  ‘And – as well as that nice little nest egg, I’ve sold a series of paintings to a gallery and they want more.’

  ‘Wow, well done.’ Sophie gave her a quick hug of congratulation. It had always been Anna’s ambition to get an ongoing contract that would give her stability. Perhaps that moment had finally come.

  ‘So – I’ll be here for the foreseeable future and not only will I be able to pay my way financially, Tomasz and I will brighten your life on a daily if not hourly basis. What’s not to like?’

  Sophie grinned and shook her head. ‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.’

  ‘All OK then?’

  ‘Of course it is. More than OK. Marvellously OK.’

  Whilst they had been talking, Darko had been continuing to rearrange the luggage in the van.

  ‘I was a bit worried about the customs officers on the way back,’ he mused, pondering where to put what looked like a large hatbox. ‘But now – they’ll take one look at this lot and realize that you are not smuggling designer goods out of the EU.’

  Anna opened her mouth to protest, her indignation demonstrated in dramatically raised eyebrows. Then she shut it again, and laughed. ‘You’re being very patient. Thank you.’

  Darko smiled and nodded. ‘You’re very welcome. Any friend of Sophie’s is a friend of mine.’ He turned his back to wedge in a suitcase more securely.

  Anna quickly spun round to face Sophie and winked, exaggeratedly.

  ‘He’s gorgeous,’ she mouthed and then moved closer. ‘Not my type, obviously – too nice,’ she continued in a stage whisper. ‘You know I like my men a bit less polished and manicured. But absolutely yours!’

  A wave of hot annoyance mingled with embarrassment – in case Darko had heard – swept through Sophie. Surely Anna couldn’t possibly be imagining she and Darko were interested in each other? What kind of person did Anna think she was? She was so tactless, sometimes. Matt hadn’t been dead a year and already Anna was pairing her off with another man.

  On a pretext of getting Tomasz strapped in, she pulled Anna out of earshot.

  ‘Anna,’ she said, struggling to keep the anger out of her voice. ‘Please don’t insult Matt’s memory by assuming I’m already on the lookout for someone else. I’m not. Categorically. Darko is a mate! He hasn’t shown the slightest inclination towards anything other than friendship and the reason why I see him every now and then is because I’m working with him on a professional basis – he’s helping me with some translations. Which is his job, I might add.’

  ‘Are you paying him?’

  Sophie had thought that Anna might show some contrition, even apologize. This response she was not expecting.

  ‘Well – not as such, no.’

  Anna rolled her eyes heavenward. ‘Precisely.’ She nudged Sophie with her elbow. ‘Come on, get off your high horse and admit it! He’s tall, dark, and handsome; he’s got a great job and a very handy little van. I’d go for it, if I were you.’

  ‘Well, you’re not me,’ retorted Sophie. ‘And it’ll take more than four wheels, solvency, and employment to make me violate the sanctity of Matt’s memory.’ She folded her arms crossly in front of her. And then realized how incredibly pretentious what she had just said must sound and burst out laughing. The sun was shining; the weather was warm. The fresh breeze brought with it the hope of good times to come. In such circumstances, it was impossible to be cross, with Anna or anyone.

  Anna, too, was laughing. ‘Friends again?’

  Sophie nodded and they all piled in the van, Sophie insisting on taking the fold-down seat in the back so that Anna and Tomasz could admire the view.

  ‘You have to admit, Sophie,’ Anna said over her shoulder as Darko steered the van out of the crowded car park. ‘Sometimes, the truth can be hard to accept.’

  Sophie stuck her tongue out in retort.

  ***

  Back at the house, Darko helped them to unload the unseemly piles of stuff that Anna had brought and then sped off to return the van to his parents. It was only once they had everything stashed in Anna’s room, had explored the garden thoroughly, and were looking around the rest of the house – the empty rooms echoing with Tomasz’s joyful shrieks – that Sophie remembered she hadn’t mentioned Frank.

  ‘Don’t go into that room,’ she said quickly, as Anna went to open Frank’s door.

  ‘Whyever not?’

  It was too late and Anna was inside. She stopped, abruptly, at the threshold. Sophie joined her, peering over her shoulder into the light-filled room. She hadn’t been in there since Frank had made it his own. It was neat and tidy, and he’d painted the walls and scrubbed the floor as they had done with hers and Anna’s bedrooms. An uneve
n pile of books rose precariously beside the bed. Sophie saw that the top one was Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. So Frank was a bit of a philosopher? She’d had no idea.

  ‘Sophie!’ exclaimed Anna, once she had taken it all in. ‘What’s going on? Whose bedroom is this?’

  ‘Ah.’ Sophie nodded weightily. ‘This is where Frank the builder resides. He just sort of turned up one day.’ She looked around as if he might be in the room somewhere, hiding under the bed or behind the wardrobe, about to appear as if by magic once more. ‘He’s been doing the restoration.’

  ‘On his own?’ Anna baulked at the notion and Sophie felt pleased that the progress on the house was so impressive that Anna thought she’d had a team working on it.

  ‘Well,’ she said modestly, holding out her hands with their broken fingernails and blisters. ‘With a bit of help from me.’

  ‘You’ve done well.’ Anna walked back out into the corridor, eyeing up the refurbished walls and floors as she went. ‘The only thing is that it’s a bit bare.’ She ran her hand along the new paintwork. ‘It needs something to break up the space – I’ll have a think about it.’ She paused and turned back to Sophie. ‘I still don’t understand why the builder has taken up residence, though. It seems a bit unusual.’

  ‘Let’s have a cup of tea and I’ll tell you all about Frank.’ Sophie led the way downstairs to the kitchen. ‘He’s usually here during the day, working – but he’s gone to check out some bathroom tiles today.’

  Sitting outside on the coffee stone, watching Tomasz delightedly running up and down the pier throwing pebbles into the sea, Sophie explained about Frank’s serendipitous arrival and the enormous amount of hard graft he had put into the house, all for not much by way of recompense.

  Anna, frowning and nodding as she listened, appeared satisfied by Sophie’s elucidation. This emboldened Sophie enough to make her suggestion.

  ‘So the deal I’d like to offer you is that in lieu of rent, you produce original artwork for every room in the house.’

  She could almost hear Anna’s brain whirring as she did the mental arithmetic about how many pictures that would be.

  ‘That’ll keep you busy for about the next year – alongside your other work,’ Sophie added, laughing light-heartedly in the hope of convincing Anna that it was a small thing she was asking.

  ‘OK, deal.’ Anna leant back against the warm stone walls of the house. ‘Although it’s going to be hard to even think about getting down to any serious painting when there’s this feast for the eyes right here.’

  A few minutes later, the bus sped past and screeched to a halt a few houses along. Frank emerged. On reaching the two of them, he held out his hand to Anna. ‘Frank,’ he said. ‘Frank Savill. Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘Anna.’ Anna tentatively shook the outstretched hand whilst looking Frank up and down, a suspicious look in her eye.

  ‘Good journey?’ asked Frank.

  ‘Satisfactory,’ she answered.

  Tomasz ran up and flung himself onto Anna’s lap.

  ‘And who’s this little chap?’

  Anna’s inexplicable air of misgiving mellowed immediately. Attention paid to Tomasz landed vicariously on her, and she enjoyed it much more than her son. She and Frank were soon in animated conversation and, to Sophie’s amazement, Anna was leading him out to the back garden to show him how she would like the outhouse converted into an art studio.

  ‘We need to open it out with doors and windows,’ she was explaining, as Sophie looked on, open-mouthed. There simply was no one else she knew with Anna’s audacious aplomb. ‘I need lots of light – all this beautiful sunshine must flood my workplace.’

  She listened to Anna’s instructions and directives, that were liberally interspersed with Frank’s stock phrases of ‘You don’t want to do it like that,’ or ‘That’s all going to have to be done again,’ and peppered with sharp intakes of breath. Sophie left them to it.

  But later that evening, once Tomasz was in bed – exhausted from the journey, the fresh air, and the excitement – and Frank had gone to the bar, Anna took the opportunity to quiz her about Frank’s life story. Sophie relayed an abbreviated version, but was abruptly pulled up by Anna once she got to Frank’s time behind bars.

  ‘He’s – he’s a criminal!’

  Sophie couldn’t help but smile at Anna’s outrage. ‘Well – he did six months in Pentonville for forging travel cards twenty years ago. That hardly makes him Magwitch, emerging from the swamp dragging his ball and chain behind him.’

  Anna frowned. ‘OK. Maybe I over-reacted. But I have to think about Tomasz.’

  ‘Of course you do,’ agreed Sophie, her voice placatory. ‘And look at how Tomasz immediately bonded with him.’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  Sophie tried another tack. ‘He’s quite sweet, isn’t he? You’ll soon find out that he’s dead soft underneath all the brash bravado. He’d be the lovable rogue character if he were in a novel.’

  ‘Ha!’ Anna laughed abrasively. ‘I don’t read that sort of novel.’

  ‘You never know,’ persisted Sophie, carrying their supper plates over to the sink. ‘You might find yourself falling in love with him. It doesn’t matter a bit that you’re taller than him!’

  Anna snorted dismissively. ‘As you know, Sophie, after Phil I said no more men.’

  ‘And if I said that, what would your reaction to me be?’ Without waiting for a reply, Sophie answered her question herself. ‘You’d tell me not to be so negative and that I have to open my heart and my mind to new possibilities and that I can’t live the rest of my life like a nun just because my husband has died at a tragically young age and dashed all my hopes and dreams. Good God, you’ve already tried to fix me up with Darko today. And you – you’re the very embodiment of living life to the full. So why so negative about love?’

  Anna poured them both a glass of water from the bottle on the table. ‘The difference is obvious,’ she said, passing one to Sophie. ‘Matt was taken from you by a terrible act of fate. You didn’t want him to leave you and he didn’t want to go.’ She slumped down in her chair, as if the weight of what she was saying was too great for her body to support it. ‘But Phil walked out on me, despite all the promises and all the assurances and all the declarations of undying love. He went, deliberately and of his own free will, without saying a word, and let me find out in the worst possible way.’

  It was true, Phil had updated his status on Facebook to ‘newly engaged’ without telling Anna, who’d found out when a friend sent her congratulations. The only trouble was that when she checked for herself, Anna had found that Phil’s fiancée was not her but a completely different woman. She’d rushed home to confront him, only to find out that he’d moved all his stuff out of the house and into the place belonging to his betrothed – who he’d been cheating on Anna with for the last six months.

  ‘And now every day I have to live with the fact that the man I love – loved – doesn’t love me but likes someone else better – so much so that they’re now married with two kids in two years. However much Matt’s death hurts, he didn’t betray you. He didn’t tear you apart and leave you to die from a broken heart.’

  Sophie took Anna’s hands in hers. ‘I’m really sorry.’ It was what people had said to her when Matt had died and it was as inadequate now as it had been then.

  ‘I would love Tomasz to have a father,’ continued Anna, sadly. ‘If I could find someone for him, if I could trust someone, I would do it for him. But it hasn’t happened yet and I’m beginning to think that it never will. I can’t help but be suspicious of everyone.’

  Her speech seemingly over, Anna lapsed into silence. Sophie couldn’t deny that the way Anna argued it did indeed make it seem as if she had had it worse. But somehow Sophie couldn’t quite believe that that was the case. Surely not many eventualities could be less enviable than having your young husband snatched from you totally out of the blue, with no t
ime to come to terms with it or even to say goodbye? But she had never been dumped, so perhaps she just didn’t understand.

  The faint sound of Tomasz calling his mother from upstairs provided a distraction. Anna went to deal with him, leaving Sophie with the thought that perhaps she had never really understood how the breakup with Phil had so affected Anna, enough to make her conceive Tomasz from an anonymous sperm donor.

  This was a major step for anyone, bringing up a child being the hardest job in the world and doing it alone as hard as it got. All the responsibility, time, cost, and energy were on Anna’s shoulders alone. Thank goodness she had come to Montenegro where Sophie could help share the burden.

  Chapter 14

  Anna, with characteristic energy, made her first contribution to the house by sorting out the internet connection.

  ‘How have you been living without Wi-Fi?’ she demanded, disbelievingly. ‘It’s the twenty-first century, you know.’

  ‘I just haven’t got round to it.’ Sophie grimaced apologetically. ‘And there’s free Wi-Fi in Kotor so I use it there.’

  ‘Not good enough,’ declared Anna, decisively. ‘I need to keep in touch with the gallery, and with my public.’

  Anna was active on Twitter, Instagram, and any number of other social media platforms that Sophie, who was not a digital wizard, was only barely aware of.

  ‘Are you going to be totally insufferable now you’ve got this commission?’ asked Sophie, teasingly. ‘My public indeed!’

  ‘Darling,’ said Anna, wafting past her, a tube of oil paint and a brush in hand, ‘you wouldn’t understand.’

  They both burst out laughing. Anna’s proactivity on the internet front spurred Sophie to take action to sort out the bills. She had managed to find the electricity and water offices and pay the money owing but she had shrunk from the task of getting the name changed from Mileva’s to hers and she hadn’t even approached the property tax issue. She asked Darko if he knew someone who could help and once again, without hesitation, he offered his own services.