by Beth O'Leary
He doesn’t come back for so long I risk a swim in the meantime – Cherry’s mum says we can if the guests aren’t around. I’m back in the flat and wringing out my hair in the sink when there’s a knock on the door.
I look down at myself. Eep. Wet bikini, that’s it. I rush through to the bedroom and scrabble around in the wardrobe, which is pointless, because all the good clothes are on the floor or in the wash. Another knock. Shit. I grab a crumpled ball of orange fabric – a swing dress, no obvious stains, it’ll do – and pull it on as I dash back to the door.
I open it, and there he is. The man upstairs. I’d imagined him all wrong. His eyes are the first thing I notice: they’re pale green, almost yellow, kind of sleepy-looking. His lashes are way longer than you’d usually see on a guy, and his hair is floppy and sun-kissed brown. The only thing I got right was the shirt: it’s pale cheesecloth, crumpled and unbuttoned way too far down.
No heirloom around the neck, but a gold signet ring on his little finger. Behind him I can see the trail of my wet footprints, leading from the pool to the front door of the flat.
‘Oh,’ he says, double taking with a flick of his hair. ‘Hullo.’
‘Hi.’ I swallow the Mr Abbott at the end of the sentence. It feels weird to call a guy my own age mister. My wet hair drips down my back, and I’m grateful for it cooling me down – I’m flustered. All that dashing around.
He gives a slow, small smile. ‘I had you down as a wrinkled old man, phantom caretaker.’
I laugh. ‘Why?’
He shrugs. The flustered feeling isn’t easing – I think it’s him, maybe, the green eyes, the unbuttoned shirt.
‘Caretaker. It just sounds . . . wrinkly.’
‘Well, you’re not what I expected either.’ I stand a little straighter. ‘“The Abbott family”. It just sounds . . . oh, I don’t know . . . like more than one person?’
He pulls a face. ‘Yes. That. The rest of them bailed, I’m afraid, so you’ve just got me. Thank you for fixing my shutters, by the way. You’re a miracle worker.’
‘They just . . .’ I trail off. ‘You’re welcome.’
We look at one another. I’m very aware of myself: how I’m holding my shoulders, the wet bikini soaking through my dress. He’s watching me steadily. A slow, confident stare, the sort that snares you across a bar as you wait for a drink. It’s a little bit too practised, a little too deliberate. Like he’s seen someone else do it but never actually given it a go himself.
‘What can I help you with?’
I adjust my dress. It clings to my bikini.
‘Well. For starters, I lost my key.’
That slow stare shifts for a moment, turning boyish. Much better. He’s cute, in a scruffy, hapless kind of way. Like a Yorkshire Terrier puppy. Or a member of an X Factor boy band before they’ve made it big.
‘I can’t be trusted with keys,’ he says.
‘I can sort that, sure.’
‘Thank you. You’re very kind. And . . .’ He pauses, looking at me, as if making his mind up. ‘I’m looking for someone,’ he says.
‘You’re . . . what do you mean?’
‘I’m trying to find somebody, and I think you might be able to help?’
I tilt my head, curious. My pulse flutters a bit faster. Maybe he’s very cute, actually. His eyes flicker to the wet patches on my dress, and then up to my face again. All very quick, like he didn’t mean to look and he’s worried I’ve noticed. I press my lips together to hide a smile. I wonder if he’s smoother when he’s sober or if he’s always like this.
‘Do you have a car?’ he says.
I nod.
‘Do you think you could drive me somewhere?’
Dylan
She’s like a water sprite, with her dark, wet hair and her river-blue eyes. Finding her here in this little flat, buried underneath the house . . . It’s as if I’ve unearthed her, as if she’s been waiting for me and at last I’ve come to free her from her windowless existence.
It’s possible I’ve drunk a little too much. I hope she can’t tell. I’m trying to do the good kind of staring, not the leering kind, but I’ve had three quarters of a bottle of wine while reading Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella in the hills above the villa with lunch, and I have to confess I don’t entirely trust my judgement.
As I climb into the passenger seat of the blue-eyed caretaker’s rental car, I try to sober up and listen to what she’s saying – something about the shutters – but my mind is busy stuttering over a new idea, something about quick little hands with bitten-down nails.
As we pull out of the villa’s gates, I cast another look at her profile: a delicate, turned-up nose, a hint of freckles on her cheekbones like fine droplets of water on sand. There’s a quickening in my stomach, half fear, half excitement, or maybe just desire. I knew this summer was going to be magnificent, and here, now, with the wind tearing in my ears and the sun’s heat pressed to my cheek, with a dark-haired beauty beside me, her pale thighs bare against the leather seat, her—
‘You’re going to break the fridge door, by the way,’ she says.
I startle. ‘Hmm?’
‘The fridge door. You keep yanking it from the bottom of the handle. Try pulling from the top, would you – otherwise Deb and I will have to sort someone to fix it and all the tradesmen around here think we’re morons. We’ll end up having to try and do it ourselves.’
I deflate a bit.
‘How can you tell?’ I ask, rallying. ‘Have you been watching me, little phantom caretaker?’
She looks at me, her blue eyes sharp. She has a mole on the top of her lip, just left of where her Cupid’s bow mouth rises in soft peaks.
‘Don’t call me little. It’s patronising.’
I waver. The feeling of grandeur, of magnificence, it slips. Am I playing this all wrong? She is little, in my defence: fine-boned and fragile, her collarbone pressing against her skin like a root, her wrists so narrow I could circle them both with one hand. She turns back to the road, smiling slightly; I think she saw me waver.
‘And I wasn’t watching you,’ she continues. ‘Just listening. All the pots on the top of the fridge rattle when you yank it that way.’
‘Listening?’ Hmm. I have spent much of the last two days loudly reciting lines from The Faerie Queene – my primary inspiration for the poetry collection I’m working on, a sort of homage to Spenser. And yesterday I sang the whole of Taylor Swift’s ‘22’ to myself on the terrace with a bottle of wine as a microphone.
‘You have a lovely singing voice,’ she says, biting her bottom lip. I watch her white teeth pull at the soft pink skin and for a hot, bold second I imagine those teeth digging into my bare shoulder.
‘Really?’
She glances at me incredulously. ‘No. Of course not. You’re rubbish. You can’t possibly not know that?’
I swallow again. Rallying is getting somewhat harder. ‘You’re a little rude; did anyone ever tell you that, phantom caretaker?’
‘My name is Addie,’ she said. ‘And I’m not rude. I’m . . . blunt. It’s charming.’
She says it as if she’s just figuring it out herself, then flashes me a smile that zips right through me. The line of poetry I’d been playing with is lost as my mind sharpens in on the curve of her lip, the way that dress clings to her breasts. The unsettling way she keeps setting me back. I’m reassessing: she’s like a water sprite, yes, but a fierce little one with teeth and claws, half sweetness, half wild. Marcus would love her.
It’s odd being here without Marcus. He and I have been travelling together all summer – I’d intended to take three weeks out from our trip for a family holiday here at Cherry’s villa, but my relatives all cancelled after a classic rerun of an Abbott family favourite, the perennial ‘everyone is a disappointment’ dispute. This old gem invariably ends with my father screaming spitt
le and invectives at us all, and my brother and I promptly spending reckless amounts of cash to spite him. This year I have gone easy on him: I’ve merely robbed him of the opportunity to get his money back by attending this holiday solo.
Mum is still leaving me voicemails three times a day. They’re all the same: Dylan, my darling, your father is very sorry, please do call us back.
Funny how my father never phones me himself, given how terribly sorry he is.
My long summer in Europe was his idea. Like the classic English gentleman, I should go and sow my wild oats on the Continent before returning to the duties of real life. I have resolutely rejected this idea all summer, of course – I’m here looking for Grace.
But Grace is proving very hard to find. And here’s Addie, tiny and beautiful, living fairylike beneath my feet.
‘So who was it who saw your friend in La Roque-Alric?’ Addie asks, as we wind our way through the vineyards. There’s nobody on the road but the two of us, and even through the wind you can hear the crickets rattling out their strange song from the dry undergrowth bordering the tarmac.
‘Just a friend of a friend.’ I wave an arm vaguely. The truth is, the lead came from Instagram-stalking people who had liked Grace’s last post; I’d rather not share this with Addie. I’m sobering up a little – perhaps it’s the fresh mountain air – and without the edge of the wine, I’m beginning to feel somewhat out of my league here. Addie is sharp and self-possessed and has really quite phenomenal legs and I don’t think I put any product in my hair this morning. I surreptitiously check – no, nothing, damn.
‘Is she missing, or what?’ Addie asks.
I think for a moment. ‘She’s whimsical,’ I say eventually. ‘She likes to keep people guessing.’
Addie raises her eyebrows. ‘She sounds tedious.’
I frown. ‘She’s wonderful.’
‘If you say so.’
Grace was with Marcus for most of third year, though neither of them ever gave their relationship any sort of label. She’d flirted with me outrageously after a tutors’ dinner in Trinity term, and Marcus had laughed. Why not? he’d said, when Grace had climbed into my lap and I’d looked at him, drunk, a little lost. We share everything else. So Grace and I became . . . whatever-we-were just before the summer, and then she disappeared. Off to travel, boys, her note had read. Come catch me. G
It was exciting for a while, and it’s given a shape to mine and Marcus’s aimless wanderings around Europe, but we still haven’t found her, and the clues she’s been leaving us – odd texts, late-night voicemails, messages passed on by youth-hostel owners – are becoming briefer and fewer. I’ve been getting rather worried about her losing interest in the both of us and the trail running cold; once that happens, I’ll have no choice but to answer the question of what the hell I’m doing with my life, a question I am at great pains to avoid.
Ahead of us, the road winds its way up the hillside into dark woodland, then opens out again to reveal parched, chalky fields scored with vines. I don’t mean to be critical but Addie is driving far too slowly – these tailback roads are meant for speeding on, but she’s crawling up the hill and braking for every corner like an old lady in a Škoda.
‘You strike me as a man who gets driven more than he drives,’ Addie says. ‘But I can feel you back-seat driving.’
‘My father gets driven,’ I say. ‘I drive.’
‘Well, look at you.’ Addie laughs. ‘Aren’t you just a regular guy!’
I frown, irritated – with her, for a second, and then with myself – but before I can think of a suitable response we round a bend and above us is a village cut into the rockface, so beautiful it distracts me altogether. The rough stone of the cliff is dotted with houses in the same shade of pale, sandy yellow, their higgledy roofs slanting this way and that between cypress and olive trees. A castle sits atop the hill, the slitted windows of its turret turned our way like narrowed eyes.
I whistle between my teeth. ‘This place belongs in a fairy tale.’
‘It’s my sister’s least favourite place around here,’ Addie says. ‘She hates heights.’
‘You have a rather negative outlook on the world,’ I tell her, as we wind our way up towards the village. Fields of olive trees give way to dense hedges and stone walls cut into the side of the hill, with scrubby bleached grass clinging doggedly to the crevices.
Addie looks surprised. ‘Me?’
‘The fairy-tale castle is too high up, my whimsical friend is tedious, my singing voice is not to your liking . . .’
She pauses and purses her lips in thought. That mole shifts. Suddenly looking at her lips is too much for me: I’m gone, thinking about kissing her, thinking about her mouth against my skin. She catches my eye and her gaze seems somehow molten.
I swallow. She turns back to the road, shifting into a passing place as a rattling open-backed truck comes barrelling down the hill.
‘I don’t think of myself as negative. Practical, maybe.’
I make a face accidentally – still tipsy, then – and she catches it and laughs.
‘What?’
‘Just . . . ah. Practical. It’s the sort of thing you say about someone matronly and stout. An aunt with a knack for darning socks.’
‘Oh, thanks,’ Addie says dryly, pulling her sunglasses down from the top of her head as the road twists again, bringing us head-on with the low, fierce sun.
‘It was you who said practical,’ I point out. ‘I’d call you . . . feisty.’
‘Not if you didn’t want booting out of the car, you wouldn’t.’
‘No?’
I admit, I knew that would get a rise out of her.
‘How about bolshy? Sassy?’
She cottons on and a smile tugs at the corner of her lips. ‘You’re trying to wind me up, aren’t you?’
She likes to be teased, then. I file that away.
‘I’m showing you how enlightened I am. After making the mistake with little.’
‘And the judging of my driving.’
‘And that.’
I’m getting somewhere – her tone has warmed. We’re in the village now, and between the houses the view is breathtaking: distant, hazy blue hills behind tumbling fields of olive trees and grapevines. There’s something mythic about it all. It feels like a setting, rather than a place, as if stories are meant to be made here, and the sense of grandeur resettles on my shoulders as I breathe in the husky scent of olive trees on the air.
Addie parallel parks outside a little café. It has plastic tables underneath a bamboo awning; a group of Frenchmen sitting by the door watch us with mild interest as we make our way inside.
I ask the woman behind the till whether she’s seen a tall, hippy-ish young woman with pink hair down to her waist, gold piercings in her nose and a tattoo of an English rose on her shoulder. No, the woman says, so I try purple hair, or blue – Grace goes through hair dye the way Marcus goes through pretty first-year girls who’ve yet to be informed of his terrible reputation.
Oh, yes, the one with blue hair – she was here a week or so ago with a man, the woman at the till tells me. An older man with a big belly and a pocket watch. She sat in his lap and fed him cubes of Gruyère. No, she didn’t leave a message.
I narrow my eyes. As much as I’d like to say this doesn’t sound like Grace, there’s really nothing that sounds unlike Grace – she is wholly unpredictable. That’s what Marcus likes about her, I think.
‘Your French is good,’ Addie says as we make our way to one of the outside tables with an Orangina each.
‘It gets me through. How’s yours?’ I’m suddenly wondering how much of that exchange she followed.
‘Oh, pretty crap, really. But I understand enough to know she said there was a bloke with your friend,’ Addie says, looking sidelong at me. She stretches her legs out; I can feel the Frenchmen glan
cing her way, their eyes following her movement. ‘Does that bother you?’
‘Not especially, no.’ I run a hand through my horribly unstyled hair and try not to stare at Addie’s legs.
She quirks her eyebrow at me, that teasing smile returning. ‘Seems like you’re making an awful lot of effort for a woman who can’t even be arsed to send you a postcard.’
‘It’s not like that with Grace,’ I say, because I don’t want her seeing me that way, like a man chasing after a woman who doesn’t want to be found.
Addie takes that in with a tilt of her head. ‘How come your family aren’t here, then?’ she asks. I wonder if she’s nervous. If she is, she hides it very well; her delicate, elfin features are hard to read, smoothed out like a fresh page in a notebook.
‘Familial dispute. Nothing special.’
‘Where are the rest of them? At home? They’ve just skipped out on three weeks at Villa Cerise?’ She pauses as I shrug yes, and her eyes widen. ‘Who does that? The place is amazing.’
It is. I feel rather proud of myself for coming, now, and I say something vague about appreciating the privilege which makes Addie’s eyes soften. Her gaze holds mine for a moment too long; my pulse beats hot under my skin.
‘How have you been entertaining yourself, then, while you’ve been here?’ I ask.
She gives me a shrewd look that says she knows what the question really means.
‘Sex with guests,’ she deadpans. ‘Non-stop, really. Shagging all over the place.’
I watch her sip her Orangina through a straw. Just hearing her say shagging is embarrassingly titillating. I want her. I haven’t had sex for two months, and suddenly I can’t fathom doing anything else; I feel almost faint with the desire to lean forward and kiss her.
‘Really?’
‘No, obviously not. That would be disgustingly unprofessional.’
Oh, right. I pull up short, eyes flicking away from her lips.
She laughs. ‘I’m just messing with you.’