by Jenny Oliver
He nudged Claire to watch as well, then studied her profile instead of looking back. Eyeliner slightly smudged, eye shadow faded from the day, she looked beautiful.
‘Do you think we’re OK?’ he asked. ‘I know I’m not the best husband in the world but we’ll be OK, won’t we?’
Claire picked up a handful of sand and let it trickle through her fingers. ‘Some things will have to change, you know that, yes?’
Rory nodded.
‘You can’t be away as much as you have been.’
‘No.’
‘You can’t be on your phone all the time. People only need to read the news once a day, you know?’
He nodded again. ‘Yeah, I know,’ he laughed. Then he bit down on the corner of his lip as he traced a pattern with his finger in the sand. ‘Do you think I’m running away?’
Claire sighed. ‘No, Rory, I think you’re having a break. A rest. For goodness’ sake, go back in five years if you still want to, when this will all just be seen as funny – if it’s remembered at all. You can tell people how much you’ve grown as a result in interviews.’ She stared at him matter-of-fact and he nodded. ‘But you have to stop trying to get that bloody BAFTA. Because you don’t even want it, I don’t think. You just think your dad will like it, which he won’t. He’ll think it’s garish.’
Rory snorted a laugh. ‘He will think it’s garish.’
‘And you have to accept that you and I are different from your mum and dad.’
Rory buried his toes deeper in the sand. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘No,’ Claire shook her head. ‘Don’t just say “yes” like that. Believe it.’
Rory swallowed. He stretched his legs out and looked up at the sky.
Claire said, ‘I’m not your mum and you are not your dad.’
Rory closed his eyes, coloured jellyfish of light playing on his lids. He breathed out. Feeling like his body was a fraction less heavy. He opened his eyes. The sun had risen, blasting the sky with yellow.
He turned to look at Claire. ‘I know I’m not him. And I know you’re not her.’
She smiled. ‘And that’s OK.’
Rory nodded. ‘And that’s OK.’
Claire shuffled closer to him in the sand. ‘We’re our own family, Rory, and we’ll do it our way. We can buy things, we can not buy things. We can live here, we can live at home. We just have to be. And we have to do that together. I chose you then, Rory, and I choose you now.’
Rory nodded again, turning back to look at the view of the Summerhouse, at the pine trees and the walkers coming round the headland. And then up to the acres and acres of sky. Blue as far as he could see. It felt like the lid had been lifted off the world.
‘If you’re a dick, I’ll leave you,’ Claire added. ‘But only then.’
Rory laughed and wiggled his toes across so they met hers under the sand. Claire leant over and rested her head on his shoulder. And into the softness of her hair, Rory said, ‘I choose you, too.’
CHAPTER 30
Claire’s arrival marked a new order in things. A sense of routine, like the wind had changed and everything had settled. They’d all been floating around a little lost, but were now tethered into place.
The next morning, Ava woke up after the best night’s sleep of her life to find Tom wrapped in a sheet like a Roman, sprawled at one end of the sofa, and Claire, feet up on the coffee table, sitting opposite him and finding out all the behind the scenes gossip on Love-Struck High.
Getting over the shock of them both being there, Ava remembered. She remembered why she had slept so well. Why she had drifted into a nothingness of contentment as he lifted her bare feet up to rest them on his sheet-clad thighs.
Max burst in to sit with his mum, giggling when he looked at Ava and Tom covered only by sheets, doing fake kissing faces when Ava was the only one looking, to which she mouthed the word ‘Selena’, which shut him up because he didn’t want her telling his mum and dad who he fancied.
Rory came back, sweaty from his run, stuck his head into the living room, snorted a laugh at the fact that Ava had slept with Tom and said, ‘Five minutes, everyone, café won’t paint itself.’
It took two more days of renovations. Claire took over managing the interior design aspect, softening some of the glaring whiteness of Flora’s mood board. Suggesting a pale yellow for the far wall and bringing the outside in with a new lemon tree and an old gnarled olive in a terracotta pot that sat in the corner like a baby elephant bedecked in fairy lights. She also panelled over Ricardo’s ghastly spotlit bar with big mirror tiles, and almost immediately on entering the bar ordered Gael and Rory to haul up the black rubber floor. Beneath it, to Flora’s amazement, were nearly perfect original Spanish tiles that both Rosa and Gabriela suddenly remembered existed and couldn’t believe the travesty of covering them up. All their polyester-housecoat-wearing friends took to the task of polishing them up till the floor glowed in intricate patterns of turquoise, red and white.
It was on the second day that Claire asked Ava how much of her grandmother’s stuff she was keeping. ‘Only sentimental stuff,’ Ava said, ‘I’ve started making a pile over there.’
‘Not these pictures?’ Claire asked.
Ava shook her head.
‘Those ornaments?’
Ava made a face.
‘Mirrors?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Can you help me carry them to the café?’
Ava had to stifle a laugh. ‘Flora won’t be happy.’
‘She’ll just have to trust me. In the end she’ll realise I’m right,’ Claire said. And not for the first time Ava understood why she was the perfect woman for her brother.
Flora’s jaw dropped when she saw all of Val’s junk headed her way. ‘No thank you,’ she called. ‘Not in here.’
Claire just laughed, arms laden with pictures and lamps and a little statue of a poodle. ‘I promise, if you don’t like it, you can throw it all in the bin.’
The heavy gilt mirror was hung on the wall opposite the bar, above Flora’s little table, next to which was placed a black lacquered art deco standard lamp. The painting of the girl with the rose and four others made a higgledy collection on the yellow wall around the kitchen hatch. The little poodle was given a spot guarding the bar, while two big gold candelabras were screwed to the wall on either side of the optics. Each table now had a little antique vase or jug with a sprig of bougainvillea, and some of the more bonkers little ornaments peered secretly out of the orange tree pots – there to be discovered if somebody looked.
The morning of the third day, a man came to replace the awning with a new buttercup yellow one with Café Estrella printed along the front. Rory took his place in the kitchen, sous to the self-appointed head chef Gabriela. Flora took to sashaying about front of house, loving her new space, her freshly painted walls, her little lemon tree, her scrubbed tile floor and most of all her customers, chatting them up with her old joie de vivre.
Claire took a satisfied break and spent the rest of her family-emergency time off work sitting at Café Estrella, admiring her interior design skills and sampling her husband’s cooking while hiding from the aching heat, or lying under a sun umbrella reading a book. She spent the occasional evening waiting tables in the café, her I-haven’t-done-this-since-I-was-sixteen enthusiasm as yet unbroken, or sipping sangria, becoming the type of regular that people sat and told their life story to.
Tom and Ava packed up the house together, dressed in the fewest clothes they could decently wear but still ending the day damp from the cloying, sweaty heat. They packed everything, shoes boxed up and coats folded into bags, photographs removed from frames, papers shredded. Ava realised that the lonely, grey fear that had stopped her when she first arrived was nowhere to be found. Dissipating with another heartbeat to share the job with.
All while Max perfected his mono-skiing and his tan.
It felt like they could live like this forever. Tom and Ava sleeping crammed on the hot velvet sof
a, even while there was a huge house up the road that was his. They were a gang. No one wanted to leave.
CHAPTER 31
One morning Ava was returning to the house, trying to balance two take-away espressos and a little cardboard tray of churros, when the front door flew open.
‘The grapes are ready,’ Tom shouted, racing down the path. ‘The grapes are ready,’ he said when he got level, holding her shoulders, his whole face grinning. Taking his coffee and a bite of rapidly cooling churro, he added, ‘You wanna pick?’
Ava nodded, bemused, the energy and the great white smile infectious.
‘Right,’ he said, clapping his hands together, almost shaky with excitement, ‘let’s go and round up the troops.’
The regulars were all crammed into one corner of the café, gnarled hands slicing pastries as they eyed the tourists and beach-goers who now occupied the rest of the space with contempt; on the one hand pleased for Flora, Gabriela and Rosa and thrilled with the addition of the churros, on the other wanting their sprawling breakfast to return. Almost in rebellion, the chess players had edged themselves on to the path, bringing their own little stools and fold-out table. The sun was already burning scalps. The sand frying like it was in the pan. But the old men didn’t seem to notice, perched in the dappled shade of an orange tree, hats and waistcoats on.
Claire, Rory and Max were sitting at a round table at the front of the café, all tanned and tousled. Max had been for a ski and insisted that Claire sit in the back of the speedboat videoing his achievements. He was watching himself on playback as he munched through an oil-dripping plate of pan con tomate.
Tom strode into the centre of the concourse and bellowed, ‘The grapes are ready.’
The tourists glanced over in bemusement.
The regulars stood immediately from their chairs, pastries left half-eaten. The chess players paused mid-checkmate, all of them rising as one.
‘They can’t be,’ Gabriela’s hand stilled on the chocolate pot she was filling, ‘it’s too early.’
Tom pointed to the burning sun. ‘It’s the heatwave. They’re ready.’
Rosa stopped the churros machine. Igor wiped his hands on a tea towel and started to take his apron off.
‘I’ll make some calls,’ said Gabriela, moving towards Flora’s café phone.
‘Hang on,’ said Flora, a tray packed with pastries and juice in her hands, ‘you can’t all go. It’s not like last year. We have customers . . .’ She nodded to the heaving forecourt.
Ava watched with interest, unable to believe anyone would want to pick grapes in this heat. She glanced at her brother who looked equally flummoxed.
‘You lot coming?’ Tom called over to Rory, Max and Claire. ‘You get paid in wine,’ he said, and suddenly everyone’s enthusiasm seemed viable.
‘What about me?’ Max asked. ‘I don’t like wine.’
‘You I’ll pay in cash,’ Tom said.
‘OK.’ Max was on his feet in a second. Waterskiing was a costly hobby.
In the café Flora was trying to pin down her team. She and Rosa would stay until breakfast finished, at which point Igor and Gabriela would return and swap with Rosa. Igor was not happy about missing the evening’s picking, while Ava couldn’t believe they would still be working that late. Flora made out like she was being really hard done by, but in the end said, ‘OK Igor, I’ll give Everardo a call, see if he can help me this afternoon,’ and sashayed off, clearly quite delighted with the excuse.
‘OK team!’ Tom rubbed his hands together, standing on the step of his tractor, face lit up with excitement, cap pulled low.
It was no more than half an hour after the first call had been given for the grapes, and amassed in the searing heat of the vineyard were maybe forty people. Along with all the regulars from the café, Ava recognised some of the faces in the group from her grandmother’s funeral; there was a similar low buzz of nattering gossip, phone calls, handshakes and cigar smoking.
‘First rule: be gentle with the grapes,’ Tom shouted above the chatter, voice serious. ‘Hands are kinder than machines, remember that.’
The group nodded as one. Ava looked dubious as she felt the sun scorch the back of her neck. Beside her Rory was nodding eagerly. She glanced at him in his running shorts, hair almost completely blond, skin gold, arm slung over Claire’s shoulders, hand on Max’s head. She remembered after the funeral saying that there was still time to ace his life. He seemed almost unrecognisable from that person; the thing about Rory was that, consciously or not, he could never turn down a challenge.
Up ahead, Tom introduced a huge bear-like man with a black bushy beard and the palest blue eyes Ava had ever seen: Matías, the vineyard manager. While Tom rattled through the rest of the instructions, Matías wove his way through the crowd handing out bottles of water, pairs of little secateurs and head torches. Ava snorted at the head torch; surely it was wishful thinking to believe this lot would be here past sunset. She gazed over at the rows of grapes. It wasn’t a massive vineyard. She reckoned they’d be home by cocktail hour.
CHAPTER 32
‘How are you doing, Ava?’ Tom asked, as she tipped her bucket of grapes into the back of the tractor. The sun was unrelenting. Bees buzzing on the crates of fruit.
‘I’m dying,’ she said, without looking up past the brim of her hat. Face pink, muscles burning, brain screaming as she trudged back to her row of vines.
She heard Tom’s chuckle as he drove away, top off, hair slick with sweat, tractor bumping over the rough terrain beneath him.
It was two o’clock. The air was sticky with heat and mosquitos. Ava’s back felt like she was hefting a gorilla around, her posture now more comfortable when stooped. And she had never realised the relationship one could form with one’s water bottle. It was a thing of reverence. When she dropped it once and it started to roll away down the hillside she almost cried. Rory had stopped it with his foot.
No one complained though. Every person Ava reached, she was ready for a good old bitch about how horrendous the process was, to show them how cut and swollen her hands were, the scratches on her arms, to moan about the stickiness of the grapes or the annoyance of the bees. But no one was biting. Rosa and her pals just seemed to glide from one vine to the next, gossiping without seeming to pause for breath. Their chat as constant as the cicada hum.
Rory had said the word ‘invigorated’ more than once. Ava was almost wishing the old Rory back. Max was barely pausing to wipe the sweat off his brow; spurred on by the promise of cold hard cash, he and Emilio were practically racing up the aisles.
Claire was the only one to nod sympathetically when Ava showed her the trail of mosquito bites on her leg. But then she’d shown her own leg and seemed to have a million more, yet remained uncomplaining. Ava had sloped away.
She stopped at the furthest point of the vineyard with her black bucket on the floor beside her. Bees buzzing by her hands. She was hot and tired and everything hurt and she was not enjoying herself. She took a moment to sit down on a rock. The sun chuckled overhead. Sweat streamed down her temples. She looked up to see Tom striding towards her, T-shirt slung over his shoulder, cap stuffed in his pocket, boots half-undone and shorts covered in grape juice.
She didn’t want to see him. She didn’t have the energy to pretend she was enjoying herself.
‘That doesn’t look like working,’ he shouted, teeth sparkling as he grinned.
Ava shielded her eyes with her hands. ‘I’m slacking,’ she shouted back. ‘Go away.’
He came closer. She could see him trying not to pity-laugh.
When his shadow blocked the sun she shuffled over so he could share her rock. They sat together for a moment, Ava pretending to enjoy the view as Tom gulped from his water bottle.
‘You need any more water?’ he asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
She shook her head. ‘No thanks, I’m fine.’
He nodded, drank some more.
‘I don’t think I get
it,’ Ava said, ashamed of her failure, scratching the bites that dotted her legs.
‘No?’ he said.
She dabbed the corners of her eyes. She was so tired. ‘No.’
He frowned, his forehead crinkling in lines, his expression perplexed. ‘That’s OK. It’s definitely not something to cry about,’ he said, handing her his T-shirt in lieu of a tissue.
‘I’m not crying,’ she sniffed, wiping her eyes, smelling his sweat and soap and suntan lotion.
‘Just have a break. Enjoy the view.’ He pointed towards the light catching on the leaves and the twisted trunks, the big stone house, the acres of fir trees in the distance, the epic blue sky.
Ava nodded. Then after a second or so of watching everyone hard at work, she said, ‘I can’t look at any more vines.’
‘Well look the other way,’ he said, pointing between a couple of old almond trees at the sea.
From this vantage point it looked like the land just dropped into the sea, the cliff edge within walking distance, seabirds floating lazily on the warm air, in the far distance white boats cut through glassy water like models on a boating lake.
‘That is better,’ she said.
Tom tipped his head. ‘I’m glad you approve.’
They sat side by side until Matías called him back; there was a problem with the tractor. Tom waved a hand to say he’d be there in two seconds. He stood up and slicked his hair back, pulling his cap on. He drank the last of his water before saying, ‘Ava, this isn’t a test, you know. You don’t have to like it because I like it. I don’t care if you like it. Go back if you want, Flora’s there. Go and have some sherry.’ He looked down at her, his smile splitting his face in two, eyes eager with his absolute love for what he was doing. Backing away a couple of paces he added, ‘I’m not crazy about antiques. Call it even.’ Then with a wink he strode off, hand tapping the occasional vine leaf, back to where the tractor needed seeing to, the bees like fog over the sweating grapes.
CHAPTER 33