The Summerhouse by the Sea

by Jenny Oliver

  Rory glanced around, unable to believe that Flora had let this work of vegetable patch art go to such wrack and ruin, but then over the rickety fence his eyes landed on the bougainvillea-strewn railings of his grandmother’s house in the distance, reminding him of the little room of his mother’s stuff. His desire, as Ava and Max had leafed through dusty programmes, to gather it all up and throw it out the window. Treasure, like the garden, made toxic by the memory of the owner.

  Max was sidestepping the outside wall, keeping out of the sun under the watchful gaze of his father.

  ‘There’s something!’ he shouted, as Flora and Rory were about to forget it.

  In the far corner next to a pile of rotting corn stalks was a leaf the size of a dinner plate. Max bent down behind it and twisted something off the stem while trying to keep the camera balanced on his shoulder.

  ‘Be careful,’ Rory shouted.

  ‘Here!’ Max held up a giant courgette, triumphant. ‘You can cook with this, can’t you?’

  ‘God knows where that came from,’ said Flora, kicking off her high heels to step over what was now scrubland to take it from him. ‘Well done, Maxy.’

  Heartened by the courgette find, Rory reached up and picked some peaches from the tree next to him, then spotted a gnarled lemon on a tiny bush at the back of the garden. Max rescued the few edible tomatoes and Flora picked a great bunch of stinging nettles and some dandelions.

  ‘We’re foragers,’ said Flora when Max turned his nose up at her bunch of weeds. ‘It’s all the rage at the moment. There are restaurants charging thousands for a tuft of wild garlic and some road kill.’

  It was only when they were back inside that, on a whim, Rory checked the freezer. ‘Blimey,’ he said, lifting out great bags of lobsters, langoustines, tiny prawns and a spindly legged spider crab. ‘This is where all the food’s hidden.’

  ‘Well look at that,’ said Flora, taking a bag of langoustines and inspecting it with genuine surprise. ‘Who knew?’

  Rory realised then how little she had been in this space in the last few years. How dire her situation was with the café. He knew then that if they hadn’t come this summer they would never have seen this place again, nor glimpsed their forgotten selves on film. Everything suddenly felt a little more pressing. But was it possible to save a place that had two-year-old lobster in the freezer that the chef knew nothing about?

  CHAPTER 15

  Ava finally got to sample a croissant without Max running up to steal it from her plate. It would have been delectable – light, sticky, flaky, chocolatey – had she not been distracted by her annoyance with Rory.

  She was sitting at the table closest to the beach, furthest from the café doors where Rory and co. were filming in the kitchen. Her back was turned on the breakfast crowd, all of them piling in for their thick milky coffees and chocolate whirls. Gabriela had tried to strike up a conversation when she arrived, looking Ava straight in the eyes, but Ava had picked up the shoebox of her mother’s fan mail that she’d brought with her and pretended to be engrossed. Gabriela had made do with the walrus-moustache man, whose hard-of-hearing ‘what was that?’ questions drove her nuts. Ava’s croissant-eating was punctuated with Gabriela’s angry shouts for him to turn his hearing aid on.

  For a moment she imagined her grandmother among them. Always the peacekeeper, Val would have had a sharp word to Gabriela and a clap to walrus-moustache man to get on with it. As Ava glanced up from her letters she wondered if perhaps the group was missing its glue; the one who brought them all together, repeated stories when one of them wasn’t listening, pulled in the shy chess player, scoffed at the more damaging gossip, forced apologies and reconciliations. There couldn’t have been that many people at her funeral singing her praises and no gaping hole left in her friendship group.

  Ava suddenly felt a bit guilty for ignoring Gabriela.

  But then the chair opposite her was pulled out and once again Tom sat down.

  ‘Oh here he is,’ she said.

  Tom laughed, deep and self-satisfied. He pulled off his shades and squinted at the sun. His eyes a little red, his skin more pasty than normal.

  ‘Heavy night?’ she asked, surprisingly pleased to have him sitting there.

  He shrugged.

  She imaged scenes of debauchery in some bar in town where the girls danced in bikinis and the champagne fountains flowed.

  ‘My grapes are suffering from the heat,’ he said, and Ava had to pause, coffee cup halfway to her lips.

  ‘Your grapes?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, confused as to why she didn’t get it.

  Ava realised she’d been doing too much Googling. Aligning personality to the famous cardboard cut-out sitting before her in his blue jeans and black T-shirt, his flip flops tapping on the cracked concrete. Stupidly she felt like she knew him. Knew almost too much about him. Too much Google. And of course it all seemed so definitely the truth.

  ‘I thought you found this part too stressful,’ she said.

  He seemed surprised that she’d remembered. ‘Yes, but all good plans go to waste. I do find it too stressful, but it’s impossible not to get involved,’ he said with abject sincerity. ‘I love my grapes.’

  Ava choked on her coffee as she laughed, having to pat the splashes away from her face with a napkin.

  ‘I have no shame in saying that I love my grapes,’ he said, staring at her with just a hint of amusement at the corners of his eyes. Then he reached over and picked up a couple of the letters on the table. ‘What are these?’ he asked.

  Igor the waiter brought over an espresso and a plate of pan con tomate that Tom had ordered.

  ‘Cheers, mate,’ he said, pouring the gloopy tomato all over the hot, oily toast. ‘I’m starving.’ He took a huge bite. ‘Go on then,’ he said, mouth full, waving a letter. ‘What are these?’

  ‘Fan mail,’ Ava said, reaching forwards to take the letter back so he didn’t get it all sticky with tomato. Tom held it out of her reach. He flicked it open and had a read.

  ‘For your mum?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, surprised. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Chats with Val,’ he replied, half-listening, reading the letter.

  ‘Everyone just loved her,’ Ava said proudly, sorting through the reams of envelopes. ‘These are all essentially love letters.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Tom said, not quite convinced, as if that didn’t sit well with the image he had.

  ‘Yes,’ Ava said firmly. ‘I know she could be a pain, but she was also amazing. It goes with the territory, doesn’t it? The artistic temperament.’

  Tom looked happy enough to be persuaded.

  ‘Look at this one.’ Ava held up a letter. ‘It’s from a man who came to see her fifteen times as Carmen. Fifteen times! Even I didn’t see her that many times as Carmen and we went a lot. I can see why he did though. She was incredible. You’d watch her thinking, wow, that’s my mother. And my gran, well, her eyes would light up when she saw her. She was so talented. I mean, you can’t ignore talent like that, nothing should get in its way.’

  ‘No?’ Tom asked, annoyingly non-committal.

  ‘No,’ said Ava. ‘She’s someone who had to follow her dream, otherwise it would have just eaten her up.’

  Tom was watching her as she nodded away, wanting him to nod in agreement.

  ‘She was,’ Ava said, emphatic.

  ‘I believe you.’

  ‘Good,’ said Ava, as though it was really important to have cleared that up, even though it was never a mess between the two of them.

  Tom leant forwards, pushing one of the letters aside to reveal a photograph of a baby. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Well, this woman, she named her kid Isabel after her, she sent a picture of the baby.’

  Tom picked up the photograph and made a face. ‘Not sure I’d be that happy with that,’ he said.

  Ava bashed him on the arm. ‘You can’t say mean things about babies.’

  ‘Why
not?’

  ‘They’re babies.’

  Tom laughed. ‘This one is a bit of a monster, come on! Give me another letter. Christ, it’s so hot, why are we sitting out here?’ he asked, wiping away the sweat on his forehead with the back of his hand.

  Ava didn’t want to admit that it was to be as far away as possible from her brother, so instead handed him an old flamenco fan of Val’s that she’d been using when the heat got unbearable. ‘You want this?’ she asked, a bit dubious as to whether he would be happy to use a frilly plastic fan.

  ‘Yes, definitely,’ he said. ‘And another letter, an interesting one, no more ugly babies,’ he added, resting his feet on the opposite chair, fanning himself with the ruffled Spanish fan.

  Ava flicked through the ones she’d already read. ‘This is from a French guy called Christian, he wants to marry her. They all want to marry her.’

  Tom read the letters, laughing from time to time. ‘They’re insane.’

  ‘They’re mesmerised,’ she corrected. Then she rested the letter she was reading in her lap and said, ‘You must have got stuff like this, didn’t you?’

  ‘A long time ago,’ he said, fanning his fan while finishing off his toast. ‘I think this thing is more efficient than air conditioning.’

  He looked up and seemed quite pleased that he’d made her smile with his enthusiastic fanning, then folded the letter he’d been reading and put it back in its envelope. ‘I was very bad at this bit. The fan mail. I didn’t read any of them. There was a publicist who replied and I think there was probably a generic piece of paper with my signature on it. Or I signed them all. I have no idea. It was a very hazy time.’

  Ava raised a brow. ‘That bad?’

  ‘I have snippets of memory. Women would send me their knickers through the post.’ He laughed. ‘I remember those letters,’ he added, fishing about absent-mindedly through the fan mail box as he spoke. Ava resisted the temptation to bat his hand away, to tell him that this was precious cargo he was rifling through. ‘It was a long time ago. Another era almost. It’s all just a big blur really.’

  Ava pulled the box away from him and started to work through the next block of letters. ‘Good blur or bad blur?’ she asked.

  She tried to rise above her Googling. To not take as gospel the gossip column inches she’d read: the insider scoop from the angry ex left holding the baby; the photos of him stumbling out of clubs bleary eyed, next to rumours of rehab; the fights with top directors when trying to break Hollywood and storming off set.

  Tom shrugged. ‘It was like . . .’ He paused. ‘What was it like?’ he asked himself. ‘It was like going to bed and overnight everything changing. No one expected it to be as big as it was. I could suddenly buy my parents a house. And to be honest, I’m not sure they wanted a house,’ he laughed. ‘They had a house.’

  ‘You forced it on them,’ she joked.

  ‘I did! This great big thing. They were rattling around in it. My dad complaining about the cost of heating it.’ Tom sat back, hands behind his head, smiling. ‘Overnight our lives changed and my parents had no idea how to handle it. They were just normal people. I thought it was great, they didn’t.’ He stretched up and yawned, put his sunglasses back on, then took them off again and looked out at the beach. ‘So yeah,’ he said, watching the speedboat take off with a waterskier in the distance, ‘I just pretty much did what I wanted and the only person telling me what I could and couldn’t do was a manager who, in retrospect, possibly didn’t have my best interests at heart.’ He looked back to Ava and added with a regretful wince, ‘A lot of money was wasted.’

  Ava imagined herself relaying everything he said word for word to Louise, trying to etch it on her memory because this was Thomas King talking. But at the same time it felt like a window into a world that she only understood from being on the outside. The glamour of fame that echoed the feelings of standing in her mother’s dressing room as a teenager in some of the grandest theatres in New York, staring at the black and white photographs tacked to the mirror and the roses deep velvet red, and the stage manager in black with a headset tripping over her in her hurry, sweeping her to one side because this was the five-minute call. Watching the curtain rise from her seat in the stalls and feeling the monumental divide between where she was sitting and where her mother was on-stage.

  Ava leant forwards, elbow on the table, chin resting in her hand, and said, ‘So really it was just a big blur of hedonistic consumerism.’

  Tom nodded as though he was pleased with her neat wrapping up of his life. ‘Exactly,’ he said, picking up his coffee. ‘All hiding the fact that I wasn’t really a very good actor.’

  Ava did a mock gasp. ‘You were a good actor,’ she said.

  Tom glanced up from his sip of espresso, brow raised, sly grin. ‘You think so?’

  She shrugged, knowing she’d been played. ‘You were OK.’

  ‘That’s a very polite way of putting it,’ he laughed.

  ‘Do you regret any of it?’ she asked, her fingers fanning through the letters, glancing from the rhapsodies about her mother to Tom, casually open about something that she had spent a life in awe of, an impenetrable world existing on a tier above her own.

  ‘Some of it,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I realised the impact it would have on my family.’

  Ava had a vision of herself waiting for hours in a hot dressing room surrounded by a fog of perfume, empty champagne bottles and discarded make-up, her grandmother subtly trying to check her watch.

  ‘You know I have this on my keys,’ he said, holding up a dirty old plastic figure on a keychain.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, staring at the odd little animal.

  ‘It’s Olly. One of the mascots from the Sydney Olympics.’ Tom stared at her, looking for recognition, but got none.

  Ava tilted her head to look at it from where it hung between his fingers. ‘Is it a duck?’

  Tom rolled his eyes. ‘It’s a kookaburra. Anyway. The summer I got it, I’d gone to Joan Peter’s Drama School, basically because my best mate had. It was just messing about really. I was waiting for lunch every day so we could watch the Olympics. This kid had a portable TV and we’d cram round the screen to watch. I love the Olympics. And that year if you drank enough Coke you could send off for one of the mascots – there were three of them; Olly, Syd and Millie. So I did. We all did, drank loads of the stuff and sent off for these.’ He held up the keyring. ‘They made us a little gang. It was all very sweet,’ he laughed, mocking the sentimentality of his story. ‘Anyway, then the Love-Struck casting agents came at the end of the term and, well, that was it. So I don’t regret it because if I’d turned it down . . . Well, then I’d be sitting here going, God, I was the idiot that turned down one of the biggest TV franchises ever made, wouldn’t I? And I’d be all bitter, sitting at my desk somewhere, and I’d hate bloody kookaburra Olly because he’d just represent a time before my terrible decision. But I suppose I have it just to remind myself that there was a person before it all.’ He paused, then frowned, rubbed his hand over his eyes. ‘You know this story was going to have some really momentous meaning but now I can’t actually find one. I’m really tired. Let me think. Maybe it’s just a reminder that if I hadn’t done it then I wouldn’t have loads of the things that I have, but I would have had other things instead. Does that even make sense?’ He sighed. Finished his espresso. ‘Basically, there’s no right path. There you go, there’s some wisdom.’ He laughed, hands outstretched like he’d hit the jackpot. ‘And now, well, I know what success feels like. Now I’m free to do my own thing.’

  Ava wondered if she was free. She would like to say that she was, but in reality she was tied by other people’s opinions, to being valued by her friends and congratulated in her work; she was tightly enmeshed in the routine and certainty of her life back home, and, she realised as her gaze flicked over the letters, obedient to the memory of her mother.

  She had a vision of herself standing centre stage, her own brief
moments in the spotlight. Dressed up like Shirley Temple with her little-girl curls and rosy cheeks, ribboned white socks and green velvet party dress, next to her mother in matching emerald but looking more Jessica Rabbit, slinky and skin-tight with a V slashed most of the way up her thigh. Her mother’s agent had leapt on their striking similarity, created the mother-daughter act as a great profile-raiser, and her mother had been sold the idea in an instant. Charity events, concerts, gala dinners, festivals at The Royal Albert Hall. Each time bigger audiences, bigger stages. Ava opening the show, singing shyly and out of tune, but so young it didn’t matter, doing bobbing little dance moves that delighted the audience as her mother’s voice wowed with crowd-pleasers like ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ and ‘I Feel Pretty’. Ava’s chubby legs shaking with nerves, but the feel of her small hand in her mother’s enough to keep her where she was. Her mother kneeling down at the end to envelop her in strong, toned arms, Ava’s little face pressing into her soft, perfumed neck, red lipstick kisses on her cheek and the sound of her mother’s squeal of delight in her ear as the crowd roared.

  A crash from the kitchen brought her back to the present, a pan lid dropped like a cymbal. Everyone turned. ‘Sorry! Sorry!’ shouted Flora, arm raised. ‘Our fault.’

  When she turned back, Tom was holding up a strip of photos from the letter he’d opened. ‘That your dad?’ he asked.

  Ava looked. Four black and white shots, all of her mother, big lips, nipped-in waist, short dark curls, sitting on a man’s lap, massive smile, eyes alight, his face buried in her hair, his arms tight around her waist.

  ‘No,’ she said, frowning. Reaching to take the photos from him and stuff them back in the envelope. She didn’t want to see them.

  Tom watched her for a second. She looked at him looking at her. His face seemed suddenly less famous. Aligned with the glamour of her mother, he looked positively normal.

  There was another noise from the kitchen, a flash and then the smoke alarm went off. ‘It’s OK, don’t worry,’ Rory shouted, climbing on to a chair to turn the alarm off while Flora wafted smoke out of the kitchen.