The Sunshine And Biscotti Club (2 page)

The hotel was exactly as Jessica had imagined it would be.

Quaint, she thought, as she stepped out of the taxi, sunglasses on, hair smoothed back into a low ponytail. There were twee green shutters on every window, flowerboxes on every balcony railing filled with gnarled white geraniums, an archway into a ground floor bar with dark wooden chairs and terracotta half pots as light sconces, a mildewed green and white striped awning. And painted down the centre of the building was a sign saying Hotel Limoncello.

‘God, I can’t stand Limoncello,’ a voice drawled from the taxi, and she turned to see Dex, Valiumed up to the eyeballs post-flight, lying across the backseat and staring up at the same view.

‘Can you walk?’ she asked, glancing down at him.

‘Certainly,’ he said, sliding himself along the leather like a caterpillar and then stumbling out onto the warm pavement.

‘Christ, even the pavement’s hot. It’s too hot, Jessica. I’m too hot,’ he said, pulling himself up to standing.

She held in a smile as she paid the taxi driver who’d hauled the luggage round from the boot and was now looking dubiously at Dex as he tried to hold himself upright.

‘This bag is ridiculous,’ Dex said, leaning against Jessica’s massive case. She had packed, as usual, for every eventuality.

Next to hers, Dex’s bag was tiny. Hand luggage only. He had packed, he’d said, what he always packed for any holiday: three pairs of shorts, three t-shirts, underwear, one pair of flip-flops, a hat, and a book.

She could hardly believe he could remember, considering that neither of them had been on holiday for the past three years, instead chained to their desks building the recently award-winning Waverly Design Agency. Which was actually where she’d quite happily still be, she thought as she glanced back to the hotel and felt the heat already burning her hair and her skin. And where she would be if it wasn’t for that Design Agency of the Year award.

Jessica had foggy memories of the ceremony, of Dex nudging her out of her seat to go up and collect the award while she was still perfecting her happy-for-whoever-won face. She vaguely remembered the surge of triumph, but then the champagne had been
popped and she had nervously drunk more and more as strangers came over to offer their congratulations. Amidst it all had been a phone call from Libby that had seen Dex and possibly Jessica herself, she couldn’t quite remember, shouting,
‘Italy! Of course! Why not? A celebratory holiday.’

Even while she’d sat next to Dex on the plane, his sedated charm offensive making the flight attendants giggle, Jessica was still perplexed that she had agreed to something quite so spontaneous. Part of her was wondering if Dex had filled in her inebriated memory gaps with his own Italy bound agenda.

Then a voice shouted, ‘You’re here!’ and Jessica was forced to stop trying to decode her current predicament as she looked up to see Libby running down the entrance steps to greet them. Dressed in a striped Breton top, black capri pants, and little red ballet pumps, and her glossy brown hair in a knot on top of her head, Libby looked perfect. Certainly not like someone whose husband had just left her, Jessica thought, as she was pulled into a hug that smelt of Pantene, Chanel, and lemons.

‘I’ve missed you,’ Libby whispered into Jessica’s ear. ‘I’ve missed you so much.’

Jessica, not one for hugely honest displays of affection, tried to pull away with a laugh but Libby didn’t let go, kept her captive in the hug, in the smells and scents of memories.

‘I’ve missed you, too,’ Jessica said in the end and was finally let go, as if she’d said the magic words. ‘Dex isn’t quite himself,’ she said, pointing to where Dex was trying to pose in his aviators against the suitcase, a dreamy smile on his face. ‘He’s flight medicated.’

‘Libby, my darling,’ he drawled, trying to stand up straight and stumbling. ‘Jake’s a god damn fool.’

Jessica winced.

But Libby just waved it away. ‘It’s fine. Completely fine. Far too much to do to think about it.’

‘Yes,’ Dex agreed. ‘We are here to work. At your service,’ he said with a woozy salute. ‘Though I may have to have a bit of a nap first.’

Libby laughed. ‘You can have a nap, Dex. Shall I show you to your room?’

‘Yes, please,’ he said. Then he held up a hand and added, ‘Just to let you know, the others will need rooms as well. I take it Eve’s not coming? Hasn’t left the deepest countryside since those kids were born.’

Libby frowned at Jessica. ‘What’s he talking about?’

Jessica shrugged. ‘I have no idea. I think he’s just rambling.’

‘Come on, Dex, let’s get you to your room.’

‘You have to wake me up when Jimmy and Miles arrive,’ he said, attempting to pick up his case.

Libby looked confused. ‘Jimmy and Miles aren’t coming, Dex.’

But Jessica knew that look on Dex’s face, had worked with him long enough to know when he was lying, and this wasn’t one of those times. She felt herself swallow down a sudden lump of worry.

‘They are.’ Dex nodded. ‘I invited them.’

Libby didn’t have anywhere to put Miles and Jimmy if they really did turn up. None of her rooms were ready. She’d struggled to pick the best two for Jessica and Dex. Maybe Jimmy could camp in the back garden. That was his kind of thing. Last Libby had heard he was sailing round the Venezuelan coast.

These were the thoughts going through her head as she went to pick Eve up from the airport, driving the winding roads that sliced through mountains and curled precariously around sheer vertical drops, where the sun made towering shadows from the looming cypress trees and the pale green leaves of the olive trees spread in groves as far as she could see.

Those thoughts stopped Libby from thinking about the fact that the only time she’d ever asked Eve for help—called her and asked her to come to Italy—Eve had said no. And now Eve was at the airport having changed her mind because she and Peter were suddenly on a break.

She’d half wanted to say, ‘No, you can’t come,’ when Eve had WhatsApped to ask if the invitation still stood.

Of all the girls in the group they had been the closest. From the first day of secondary school when they eyed each other with wary interest as they sat down at adjacent desks, to arriving in London together, post-university, ready to start their first proper jobs, ready to be cool, hip, twenty-somethings who drank cocktails after work and wore pencil skirts. They had been the ones to rent the flat in South London. It had been their adventure. They had advertised for tenants and ended up with quiet, awkward, but sardonically funny Jessica who arrived at the interview flame red curls all awry with just a rucksack of possessions and five hundred pounds cash and basically begged them to take her because she needed somewhere to sleep that night.

Little did they realise then that Jessica had spent a lifetime carving out a tiny personal niche for herself in a world suffocated by strict religious parents so fearful of the world around them they had built a shelter in the garden and stocked it with six months’ worth of survival supplies ready for Armageddon. At twenty-one, Jessica had finally broken free. And it was Libby and Eve who got to witness her humour, her verve, her personality as it was allowed to flourish unshackled. Watch her awesome highs as she would almost check to see if life was allowed to be this good, but then want to hide their eyes at her crashing lows as she experienced
the turbulent relationship emotions that everyone else had been allowed to experience in their teens.

And then there was Dex, who pretty much told them he would be moving in because that was his way. He wouldn’t be there long, he’d said, he’d go when his cash was flowing again, but at that time his father had cut him off for hacking into his university’s computer system and changing his degree to a First—the result he needed to be gifted a Ferrari—and he’d been sent out to fend for himself over the summer. However, in some twisted logic, he’d been allowed to keep the Ferrari and whiled away most of time cruising the streets of Chelsea picking up rich, beautiful women and then having to apologise for the humble flat he was bringing them back to. Libby had spent many a morning having breakfast opposite a girl in some flash designer dress, It bag on her lap, tapping away on her phone while casting haughty sneers at Libby’s Primark pyjamas.

But Dex didn’t move out after that summer; in the end he stayed for as long as they all stayed. It transpired that his billionaire dad wasn’t as squeaky clean as his punishment of Dex implied when one morning every building he owned was raided at dawn by armed police, including their flat, simply because of the connection to Dex. Libby, Eve, and Jessica stood sobbing with terrified shock as Dex went mad, desperately trying to protect them, swearing to the police that he had no clue where his dad was, the phone going to voicemail, trying
to hold back tears as a lifetime of hero worship was shattered in just under an hour.

The raids turned up nothing, as his dad, on the phone from southern Spain the next day, assured Dex that they would, but the damage was already done. Dex drove the Ferrari to a multi-storey carpark and never went back for it.

For three years Eve, Libby, Jessica, and Dex lived together in their second floor flat underneath medical students Jimmy and Jake and aspiring musician Miles. And over the course of those three years all their lives intertwined like vines. But it was the link between Libby and Eve that always remained the strongest. From the first day they’d met they had burrowed beneath the other’s surface. They had understood one another with a look, a laugh, an infinitesimal raise of an eyebrow.

Jake always said that Libby placed too high an expectation on their friendship. That she set the bar and waited for Eve to fall short so she could feel hard done by. But she wasn’t convinced. To her, a mark of a true friend was how far you would put yourself out to help the other. And Eve, as always, was wrapped up tight in Eve world.

By the time Libby pulled up at the airport, in her mind Eve had become a giant monster, so it was a surprise when the car door yanked open and instead of the vivacious, effervescent, self-absorbed blonde she was expecting, there was Eve. Tall, willowy, tired-looking.
Shaggy pale hair. T-shirt half off her shoulder. Bulging handbag.

‘God, I always think I’m going to get done at airports,’ Eve said, breathless, chucking her bag into the backseat. ‘It’s my parents’ fault. Do you know what they used to do? Bags of weed in my teddy bear. Of course you know. I must have told you? Have I told you that? Can you imagine doing it now? Can you imagine if I was like: Maisey, Noah, just so you know, there’s a couple of hundred quid’s worth of drugs in your teddy. God, now I get nervous if I forget to even turn my phone off. Shit, that reminds me, I need to turn it back on.’ She rifled through the contents of her bag at top speed. ‘I think I’ve lost my phone. No, here it is.’ She dropped it back into her bag and then sat back with a sigh, her eyes closed for a moment. ‘Sorry. Hi,’ she said, clicking her seatbelt and leaning back against the headrest. ‘Sorry. I get so nervous at airports.’ She breathed out. ‘How are you, are you OK?’

Libby felt suddenly a bit shy. Sitting next to her once best friend. Acting over-polite as a result. ‘Yeah, fine. Are you OK?’

Eve blew out a breath that flicked her fringe out of her eyes. ‘Fine. Apart from the on-a-break thing. We’re like a bloody sitcom, aren’t we? Although less funny.’

Libby couldn’t laugh along. It embarrassed her that they were both facing the same challenge in their
relationships. It wasn’t meant to happen like this. Libby was always the together one and Eve the shambles.

Eve tied her hair up, half of it immediately falling out because it was too short for a ponytail. ‘God, I’m all over the place. I feel really weird without the kids. No one has dropped anything on me or whacked me in the face. You know, that’s what they don’t tell you about kids. How often you get unintentional injuries. They sit up and whoomph, their head has smashed you in the jaw.’ She toyed nervously with her phone as she spoke. ‘Sorry, I won’t talk about the kids. I know it’s really boring.’

As Libby pulled out of the maze of airport roads and onto the motorway she couldn’t resist a glance across at Eve’s profile. She was fascinated by how many lines she had round her eyes and the grey tint to her skin. Eve used to glow, that was her thing. Her skin shone like a mermaid’s. Her hair was the envy of everyone. She’d do those big messy plaits in her hair, all intricate and knotted, that would have taken Libby two days to achieve while Eve would do it watching
Countdown
. Now she had almost half a head of black roots and it looked as if she’d done the blunt chin-length cut herself.

Eve seemed to sense the scrutiny and redid her ponytail self-consciously. ‘It’s all a bit shit really,’ she said, and Libby turned back to the road ahead saying nothing.

While Jessica waited for Dex to wake up so they could finish a work project they were meant to have done before they left, she decided to go for a walk. First she explored the local town which took mere minutes as it consisted of a shop, a church, and a square, but then she found the lake—the main attraction. An epic expanse of blue that stretched like a mirage out towards the Tuscan mountains in the distance, their peaks jutting into the horizon like fat kings on thrones.

Jessica stood and watched the glassy water from a slatted boardwalk that seemed to run the circumference. The wood was warm beneath her bare feet, like walking on soft leather; the water lapped gently against the pebbles and shivered through the reed beds, and the shimmer of the sun made her shield her eyes.

She knew she should be thinking that this was paradise. It was paradise. But Jessica had never been particularly good at relaxing. She could feel her hair starting to curl annoyingly in the humidity, her skin
smelt overpoweringly of coconut suntan lotion, and her mobile kept losing reception.

She knew she should enjoy the fact that she was unreachable. Even though she loved her job, thrived on it, she knew that just for a week she should wallow in being decision-less. But she liked the routine of work, the purpose it gave her. Every time she went away she would draw a blank at what exactly she was meant to do. In the back of her mind was always her mother’s voice as they arrived at the Isle of Wight caravan, never wearing anything less than skirt, tights, and blouse, refusing ever to be seen without her shoes on, sitting in a deckchair saying, ‘Well what’s the point? It takes a week to settle in and by that time I’m ready to go home.’

All that on top of the fact that Miles was or wasn’t about to appear made it almost impossible for her to relax into the moment. It made the view feel like a canvas rather than reality, like the screen at the front of her spinning class that was meant to make it feel like they were cycling a lush mountain road rather than pedalling in the sweaty old gym. It made her barely acknowledge the beautiful old white boathouse when it rose before her like a floating castle as she walked further along the boardwalk. It was only the stone-spitting skid of a motorbike drawing up at the front that made her stop short and take notice.

The building shone with fresh white paint, the windows gleamed with diamonds of stained glass like
boiled sweets, and a huge, green wooden door was propped open with a beer barrel. From the soft chill out music wafting her way and the white cushioned couches she could glimpse, she deduced it was some sort of languid café bar full of people posing with martinis—not really her thing.

‘You are lost?’ the man on the motorbike said, lifting one leather-clad leg over his great red Yamaha. He was fractionally taller than her, cropped haired, receding slightly, week old stubble on his jaw, nose like a Roman soldier.

Jessica glanced surreptitiously behind her to check he was talking to her before saying, ‘No,’ and pulling her sunglasses off her head ready to slip them on and walk away. But she’d forgotten her hair had started to curl, had forgotten that sunglasses caught in curly hair. And as she tried to untangle them she fumbled her hold and they dropped to the ground. Taking a step back to pick them up from the gravel she lost a flip-flop and had to steady herself on the barrel propping the door open as she slipped it back on again. The fumes from the bike were making the sun somehow hotter and she had to fan herself as she finally stood up straight and pushed her sunglasses on.

There was a smirk on the guy’s lips as he watched the whole little routine while pulling one leather glove off, then the next, and tucking them under his arm. ‘You’re not looking for the bar?’ he said.

‘No,’ she said, retying her hair. ‘I’m just walking. This way.’ She pointed ahead about to walk away but she was caught by his expression; his eyes looking her up and down. Never before in her life had Jessica felt someone so clearly imagining having sex with her from just a look. She was momentarily stunned. Felt like she should tell him to stop looking. And then to her horror she found herself blushing.

‘You want to come in for a drink?’ he asked, his presence like a looming shadow beside her.

‘No,’ she said, annoyed with her blush, annoyed that he’d had any effect on her at all.

His mouth quirked as he watched her with his lazy gaze. ‘Do you ever say yes?’

‘Yes,’ she said and then turned away to carry on along the boardwalk.

She felt him still watching.

It was like being stalked by a tiger. He was somehow primal. The word made her snort as she strutted away.

Primal. It was a word her mother had used once about the new postman. She would refuse to open the door to him when he knocked. Jessica had never understood what she was on about.

‘Are you staying at the Limoncello?’ she heard him call after her but she didn’t reply.

She heard him laugh and kicked herself for not just saying yes.

She could hear her mother, ‘Say one thing to him and he’ll be in your bedroom window at night.’

Jessica hadn’t thought about her mother so much in years. But it stood to reason that as soon as she lost her sense of self the insidious voice would creep back in. All her good work ruined. She caught sight of one of the bright red curls that had come loose from her ponytail, remembered her mother pulling one like a spring when she was naughty and telling her it was the devil inside her. She pushed the curl back into the elastic band and blew out a breath.

It was holidays. She blamed holidays entirely. They made the mind run wild with too much free time. Really, she hadn’t allowed her mum into her head since she’d walked out of the door to the sound of her pleading, ‘You can’t leave, Jessica. You can’t leave us.’ Then, ‘You always were a bad girl. We tried. Leave and you won’t be coming back. You hear me? You won’t be welcome.’ To finally, ‘I’ll pray for you.’

Jessica shuddered. Then to make matters worse an image of Miles arriving popped into her head and was only dispelled by the guy shouting, ‘It was a pleasure to meet you. Hopefully I will see you around.’

Jessica turned and walked backwards a couple of steps on the boardwalk. ‘Not if I can help it,’ she shouted.

And he laughed, loud and booming, hard enough for her to see his shoulders shake.