by Beth O'Leary
‘You still won’t speak to me.’
‘Not speaking was never about punishing you, Dylan. It actually wasn’t about you at all. I needed the space.’
I look down at my hands. ‘I just thought you’d stop needing space eventually, I suppose.’
She glances at me; her eyes are unreadable through the sunglasses’ filter.
‘You were waiting?’ she asks.
‘Not . . . not waiting, per se, but . . .’
I trail off, and the silence rolls ahead of us, ribbon-like, too long. I catch sight of the expression of the passenger in the car across from us on the motorway – a middle-aged woman in a cap, staring wide-eyed at our car. I glance back at the others and imagine what she’s seeing. A motley collection of twenty-somethings cheerfully crammed into a bright red Mini at half seven in the morning on a bank holiday Sunday.
She has no idea. If one could harness secrets for energy, we wouldn’t need petrol – we’d have enough grudges in this car to take us all the way to Scotland.
THEN
Addie
I stare at the ceiling. The caretaker’s flat in Cherry’s villa is underneath the house – same size as the first floor, just at basement level. Beautiful, if you don’t mind not having any windows. When it means living in the south of France all summer for free board and a few hundred euros a month, I don’t mind not having windows at all.
A family arrived this morning, friends of Cherry’s parents. They got a cab from the airport, which is lucky because last night me and Deb drank three bottles of wine on the balcony of the master suite and stargazed until the sky got light. I’m probably still not legal to drive and it’s basically midday already.
I’m pretty sure this is the summer of my life. It’s like . . . there’s an epic backing track playing, or the saturation’s turned up. This summer I’m not little Addie, trailing behind. I’m not the person you forget when you’re telling your mates who’s at the pub. I’m not the girl you ghost because you’ve met someone better. I can be whoever I want to be.
This is my summer, basically. Not that you’d know it right now, because I’m too hungover to move much.
I frown up at the ceiling. Something’s up with this new family. The caretaker’s flat isn’t soundproofed – we always have a pretty good idea of exactly what’s going on up there. More than we’d like, generally. But now I can hardly hear anything. They’re definitely here – the cab woke me when it pulled up earlier. And there’s movement. Just . . . quiet movement. Like, one person’s worth of movement.
One set of steps making its way across the kitchen to the wine cooler and back again. One shower running. One window left open so that a bedroom door slams when the mistral blows through.
I wake Deb at quarter to two in the afternoon. She shuffles into the kitchen in sagging knickers and a French band T-shirt she picked up on a one-night stand in Avignon, then pauses, listening.
‘Where are they all?’ she asks.
‘No idea. I’m pretty sure there’s just one guy here.’
She yawns and takes the mug of coffee I hold out for her. ‘Huh. Weird. Maybe this guy killed all his family on the journey over.’
We can always tell if it’s a man or a woman from their footfall. Men are stompier.
‘That’s your first thought?’ I say.
Deb shrugs and begins sawing at yesterday’s bread. A spattering of crust fragments go flying like chippings in a wood shop.
‘What else have you got?’
‘Maybe they’re all coming later,’ I say. ‘Maybe they stopped off in Nice to see some pals, yah.’
This is one of those summer things that won’t be funny next year, but cracks me and Deb up right now. Ever since we got here we’ve collected the phrases we hear through the ceiling or drifting over from the terrace: pals, décor, blotto, divine. I’ve never met people like the Villa Cerise guests before. They don’t ask the price of stuff before they buy it. They drink champagne like it isn’t even a thing. They own multiple houses and animals and have opinions about literally everything. It’s almost too easy to mock them.
‘Cherry’s mum would’ve texted if they were coming late,’ Deb points out.
I pull a face, like, Oh yeah, true. Deb spreads butter on to her bread, laying it on as thick as a slice of cheese.
‘I don’t think he’s old, you know,’ I say. ‘He walks too fast.’
Deb’s eyebrows go up. ‘Maybe he’s staff?’
This is another new phrase we’ve learned. Staff as a job title.
Our mysterious solo guest moves into the kitchen, directly above our heads. We pause, me with a glass of orange juice halfway to my mouth, Deb with butter on her nose.
The fridge upstairs opens. Something clinks. The fridge closes.
‘A day drinker,’ Deb says. She pauses in thought. ‘If there’s only one guy here all week, do we really both need to be here?’
‘Are you ditching me again?’
Deb looks at me, frowning, trying to guess if I really mind. I’m not sure, to be honest. It was always the plan that while we were here, we’d each go off to explore France when we could. As it’s happened, though, Deb’s gone adventuring more than me. I do get it: she’s more easily bored than I am. And I love this villa – the infinity pool, the vineyards, the way the air smells first thing in the morning. Deb’s not sentimental like that. It’s just a house to her, albeit a big one.
Sometimes I like the extra space when she’s gone. But I also kind of hate being the one who’s left behind.
‘There’s a guy outside Nîmes with an empty house. Kind of a commune thing,’ Deb says. ‘But like, a party commune. Not the nun kind. Do you not want me to go?’
She’s never really got the concept of half-feelings, Deb. I turn away, irritated, and shoot ‘Of course you should go’ over my shoulder as I stare vaguely at the contents of the fridge.
‘If you need me here, you know I’ll stay,’ she says.
I glance back at her. Her expression is totally open. It’s impossible to stay irritated with Deb. She’s just got someplace else she wants to be, and in her head, why would that affect me unless I needed her here?
‘No, you go,’ I say, closing the fridge. ‘Find yourself a sexy French hippy.’
We pause again. Upstairs our solo guest has walked out of the kitchen and on to the terrace. He’s speaking. Muttering. I can’t quite catch the words.
‘Is he talking to himself?’ Deb asks, tilting her head. ‘Maybe a madman’s found his way in. Maybe we’ve got a squatter.’
I move closer to the door to our flat and crack it open. The villa’s built on a hill – our door is tucked away to the right of the building, hidden from view under the walkway that leads from the kitchen to the raised terrace with its infinity pool.
Through the gap in the door, I can see the guest’s lower half passing the balustrades around the terrace. He’s wearing stone-coloured shorts and no shoes. A half-drunk bottle of beer taps against his thigh as he paces. His legs are tanned pale brown. He doesn’t look like a squatter.
‘What—’
I shush Deb and try to listen. He’s reciting something.
‘Upon a great adventure he was bound, that greatest Gloriana to him gave . . .’
‘Is he reading out some Shakespeare or something?’ Deb asks in my ear. She shoves me aside and opens the door wider.
‘Deb, careful,’ I hiss. Caretakers aren’t meant to spy on guests. This job is the best summer gig I could have imagined. Every so often I’m hit with a pang of fear that one of us will screw up so badly someone’ll notice and call Cherry’s parents.
‘To win him worship, and her grace to have, which of all earthly things he most did crave, and ever as he – even as he . . . Fuck.’ The man stops and lifts his beer. ‘Fucking shitting fuckity shit.’
He’s posh – he
sounds like Hugh Grant. Deb covers her mouth to stifle her laugh. The man stills. I breathe in sharply and pull her back from the doorway.
‘Come on.’ I drag her back through to the living room. ‘Let’s not piss him off on day one, whoever he is.’
‘I think he’s fit,’ Deb decides, flopping down on the sofa. Like most of the furniture in the flat, it lived in the main house once, then got downgraded when Cherry’s mum fancied giving the place a new look. It’s dark pink velvet and has a massive red wine stain on the right arm – nothing to do with us, thank God.
‘You got that from his feet?’
Deb nods. ‘You can tell a lot from feet.’
This is the sort of Deb comment I’ve learned to just skim over, because you get into a whole world of weird if you start asking questions.
‘You going to stick around then? Now you’ve seen his sexy ankles?’
Deb pauses in thought, then shakes her head. ‘I can get posh boys in chino shorts back home,’ she says. ‘I fancy myself a long-haired French hippy.’
‘You think you’ll ever get bored of it?’ I ask her, hugging a cushion to my chest.
‘Bored of what?’
‘You know – only ever having flings.’
Deb stretches her legs out on the sofa. Her toenail varnish is chipped and there’s a bruise on each of her long brown shins. Deb inherited her dad’s skin tone – her grandfather on that side was Ghanaian – while I got the pasty white skin of mine. I find it irritating when people say we’re half-sisters. Deb’s my soul sister, my other half, the only person who understands me. I’m her anchor, the one she always comes back to. There’s nothing half about us.
When we were growing up, I always hated it when Deb’s father visited. He’d take her off somewhere, just the two of them, a trip to the park or the bus into town. Dad would look pinched and sad until Deb came home and wanted to build model trains with him and he’d light up again. As awful as it sounds, I was glad when Deb’s father argued with Mum and, eventually, when I was about eight, he stopped coming altogether. In classic Deb style, she’s written her biological dad out now. Deb doesn’t really do second chances.
‘Why would I get bored?’ she says. ‘I have endless variety.’
‘But don’t you want to settle down one day?’
‘Settle what down? What is there that needs settling? I know who I am and what I want. I don’t need some guy to make me complete, or whatever it is they’re meant to do.’
‘But what about kids? Don’t you want them?’
‘Nope.’ She scratches her stomach and lifts her head to stare at the ceiling. ‘That’s one thing I know for sure. No babies. Not ever.’
I wave Deb off as she heads to Nîmes in her dodgy banged-up rental car – I only know she’s going because I hear the car engine starting. Deb doesn’t really do goodbyes. She hates hugs, which has put her off the whole goodbye thing, since people always seem to expect them. Ever since we were kids, she and I have said goodbye on text, after the fact. I kind of like it – we hardly ever text the rest of the time, especially now everyone uses WhatsApp, so our text conversation is always a string of nice notes.
Bye, love you, call me if you need me, my message to her reads.
Ditto, kiddo, says hers. You need me, I’m there.
Usually me and Deb introduce ourselves to a guest as soon as they arrive, but this time I decide to wait until the evening, once she’s gone. No need to confuse matters by giving the impression of two caretakers when one of them doesn’t plan on sticking around.
I make my way up the servant’s entrance to the villa. There’s a cramped spiral staircase that leads from our flat to a small hallway just outside the villa’s kitchen. The door between kitchen and stairway is locked from our side, but I knock loudly anyway. I’ve been burned before, just walking in: I caught a beer-bellied Scottish guest helping himself to some crackers in the nude.
‘Hello?’ I call through the door. ‘Mr Abbott?’
No answer. I unlock the door and step through gingerly. Nobody here. The kitchen’s a tip: baguette ends, empty bottles, rinds of cheese, a whole slab of butter sweating in the evening sun. I tut, then stop myself, because tutting is exactly what my mother would do.
I gnaw at one of the baguette ends as I tidy. Whoever this guy is, he’s used to someone else clearing up after him. And he’s drunk, judging by the number of bottles. I swallow the last of the bread and pause in the middle of the floor. It’s quiet except for the constant static of the crickets outside. I’m not used to quiet up here in the house. Sometimes a family go out for the day, but they’re usually around in the evenings, and most of the time I have Deb with me anyway.
I’m a little spooked. Just me and a strange drunk man in the house. I count bottles. Five beers, a half-drunk bottle of wine.
I check the kitchen once more, poke my head out to see the terrace, then wander through into the villa’s grand entrance hall.
‘Hello?’ I call, more quietly this time.
It’s cooler here, with the big double doors closed tight, blocking out the sun’s heat. There’s a jacket pooled at the bottom of the stairs. I hang it back on the bannister. It’s soft denim lined with fleece – it must have been cold wherever he flew in from. You’d roast wearing it here. As I hang it up I catch its scent: orange-ish, woody, manly.
‘Mr Abbott?’
Through to the reception room, the dining hall, the ballroom, the living room. They’re exactly as we left them when we prepared the villa for new guests. He’s upstairs, then. We never go upstairs when guests are here, unless they ask us up to sort a blocked drain or whatever. Bedrooms are their private space.
I’m kind of relieved. I retreat back to the servant’s staircase and lock the door behind me. The flat’s just as it always is: cosy, cluttered, zero natural light. I sink into the pink velvet sofa and flick on the telly. Some French drama, too fast-paced for me to follow, but really I just want the noise. Maybe I should have asked Deb to stay. I hate this lost feeling I get when I’m left on my own. I turn the TV up.
I’ll try meeting Mr Abbott again tomorrow. Not too early, though. He’ll need to sleep off that hangover.
He wakes me the next day with the slam of his shutters. He can’t get the hang of fixing them back, apparently. I snort, pulling the covers over my head. The mistral’s strong – he’ll smash a pane if he keeps letting everything slam in the wind like that.
He’s talking to himself in the kitchen. I can’t quite catch the words through the ceiling, but I can tell from the up-and-down of his voice that he’s reciting something.
I check my phone. It’s eight in the morning – too early for me to go up and introduce myself. The strange lost feeling that gripped me last night has gone, and I’m glad of the extra space in the double bed. Deb’s such an irritating person to share a bed with. The other night she started sleep-talking about Tory politicians.
I lie back and listen to our solo guest rattling about the house. I wonder what he looks like. I’ve not got much to go on – the waist down, basically, and the voice. I’m guessing dark curls and brown eyes; stubble, maybe; a loose-collared shirt. An heirloom on a chain around his neck.
He sings a few lines of something – a pop song I half remember. I grin up at the ceiling. He’s totally tuneless.
By the time I get out of bed it’s half nine and he’s on the terrace with his coffee. I heard the machine whirring away and his footfall on the walkway outside before I mustered the energy to roll out from under the covers. I overthink my outfit – shorts, skirt, dress? In the end, irritated with myself, I grab a tank top and yesterday’s shorts off the floor and yank them on, pulling my hair up into a bun and tying it there with one of my bracelets.
Mr Abbott’s nowhere to be seen when I get to the terrace. No coffee mug, so wherever he’s wandered off to, he’s taken it with him. I scan the dry, dusty
lawns and flowerbeds that Victor the gardener sweats over every Thursday, but there’s nobody in sight in the villa grounds. Maybe I misheard? I head to the kitchen, tugging my hair out of the bun again.
It’s tidier today. There’s a note.
Hello, phantom caretaker. Ever so sorry about the mess last night, I got rather carried away. Off out to explore now, but perhaps you could look at the shutters in my bedroom while I’m out. I can’t fathom how you’re supposed to stop them slamming shut incessantly. The noise is driving me mad.
Dylan Abbott
The noise is driving him mad, is it? I roll my eyes and screw up the note, shoving it in my back pocket. There’s no trick to the bloody shutters. If he looked at them for ten seconds he’d figure out where they latch to the wall to stay open. All the same, I head up to his bedroom to check. I know which one he’s in. I’m pretty good at telling which doors are opening and closing, now. Bathrooms three and four are tricky, and I sometimes get the eighth and sixth bedrooms muddled up, but the rest I’ve nailed.
He’s chosen the best room in the house, the suite where Deb and I stargazed on the balcony the day before yesterday. It has a four-poster bed lined with heavy blue damask and enormous windows that look out over the vines. The bed’s unmade and his clothes are tangled at the door to the bathroom, as if he stepped out of them before heading for the shower. The room smells the same as the jacket did: orangey, musky, male.
I open a window. The shutters are fine, obviously, no surprise there. I pin them back for him and consider writing a reply to his note, but what am I meant to say? Look at the shutters, and do that, next time? I imagine myself doing it, signing it off the phantom caretaker, but no. Summer Addie isn’t phantom anything. Instead, on a whim, I breathe a cloud on the window and sign my name there in the fog. Adeline. No kiss.