The Lemon Grove (4 page)

‘Did you not have money for the taxi? Shit … your dad has the euros. Is he still not back from the supermarket?’

A trickle of sweat wriggles down her nose as she leans down and gropes for her bag. Her naked breasts hang loose. She snatches up her vest from beside the sun lounger. Her skin is hot and sticky and, as she tries to force her arms through, the cotton twists and tightens, snaring her upper body in the diving position. With her breasts now trapped under the hem, farcically round and exaggerated, she struggles to untangle the fabric. She concedes defeat, pulls the vest back over her head and starts again. Emma eyes Jenn’s freckled shoulders; runs her eye over her body.

‘Taxi? What taxi? Dad came for us.’

Jenn is shot through with anger, but strangles it there and then. She takes her time, slowly feeds her arms through, one at a time, then inches the fabric down with her thumbs. The ritual gives her time to compose herself.

‘That must have been a nice surprise, then?’

‘Surprise? Hardly. It was all arranged last night.’

This time Jenn can’t suppress the pang of hurt. ‘All arranged?’
When
was it arranged? While she was in the loo at the restaurant? It was certainly never discussed. She swallows it, straightens her back, gets up and envelops Emma with a hug.

‘Well, anyway – you’re here! You look fantastic.’ Emma pulls away, still eyeing her askance. Jenn takes no notice, claps her hands together. ‘So, honey. Where are you hiding him? Where’s your man?’

‘Inside. Unpacking.’ Her tone is glacial.

‘Oh. Okay. So. Lunch? How about a Spanish omelette?’

‘Tortilla. It’s called tortilla.’ Emma seems to enjoy enunciating precisely;
torrh-tee-ya
, she says.

Again, Jenn squashes the impulse to rise to the barb, counters it instead with an extra shot of jollity.

‘I can chop up some tomatoes and those jalapeños you love, instead of the onions, if you want?’

Emma tunes out, turns round to face the villa where Gregory is wheeling a suitcase across the terrace. Without turning back round she murmurs, ‘Thanks. But we ate on the plane.’

Did they have an argument? Is that it? Is this how it’s going to be for the rest of the week?

‘Come on. I’ll help you unpack.’

Emma removes her sunglasses; little, sullen dents appear in her chin. She looks close to tears.

‘Emma?’

‘Don’t act like you don’t know!’

‘What? Did you and Dad have a quibble, honey?’

‘You
knew
we were on our way! You had
loads
of time to … to
prepare
yourself! Do you
know
how that made me look?’

And now Jenn understands. ‘Honey – I’m sorry. Really. I fell asleep.’

Emma turns her head right round and holds it there.
Eventually she brings it back, she juts out her jaw, her top lip trembling.

‘Lying there … like that. It’s not what you should be doing at your age. Do you know what you look like?’

No; but she can guess. Emma thinks she looks unseemly; ropey; cheap. Emma is very near quivering with pique. Jenn can feel it coming. She focuses on her book on the ground; calmly picks it up. Turns it over as though considering it for the first time. But, when it comes it is worse, it is much worse than any of those jibes.

‘You look common. Really, really common.’

Unable to staunch the tears, Emma flounces off down the path.

Jenn does not attempt to call her back. She needs a glass of wine. She picks up her towel, wraps it around her waist; and, barefoot, hot-treads the flagstones back to the villa.

She doesn’t want to go inside. She stops at the standpipe, runs the tap, and realises at once that it’s this that she’s been dreading. Not the arrival of the boy, nor yet the relinquishing of her Me time with Emma’s father. For the past week she’s been living in ever-tightening anticipation of the continual treading on eggshells, the constant adjusting to the weather-vane of Emma’s moods. It’s been like this for the last two years, since
their daughter turned thirteen, but Jenn hoped that falling in love, properly, for the first time, might give Emma a different perspective, encourage her to think beyond the confines of her own selfish needs. Maybe Greg is right: maybe she should cut her some slack. Maybe she has cut her too much; tried too hard. Jenn laughs bitterly and scoops a handful of water to her dry lips. She snaps off the tap. She can admit it to herself, now – she’s scared; scared of the tension Emma’s mere presence can bring, even to a place as idyllic as this.

She steps away from the standpipe and becomes aware of a figure in one of the upstairs windows, looking down at her. She puts her hand to her eyebrows to block the hard light shafting down, but there’s no one there.

Greg is in the kitchen, tearing hunks from a baguette. Jenn can tell from the slight resistance of the flesh that the dough is fresh, still warm. She pulls a piece off for herself, chews it slowly, the aroma and the soft, moist feel of it making her reach for seconds almost straight away.

She swallows the bread, clears her throat. ‘Emma’s mad at me.’

‘Oh really? How come?’ he says.

He smiles with half of his mouth.

‘Don’t!’ she snaps. She is in no mood for levity. ‘You could have warned me.’

‘How? By beeping the horn?’

He leans forward and kisses the top of her head. She shirks away.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you were going for them?’

He turns away, sheepish.

‘Last-minute decision. Anyway,’ he reasons, turning back to her, ‘the beach is awash with topless women. Your peep-show will make for a handy prelude for them both.’

‘
He
didn’t see me, though, right?’

‘Don’t think so. I was too busy dragging
his
bloody suitcase out of the boot to take too much notice.’

He pulls her towards him, cups her chin gently.

‘Don’t take it to heart. You know how it is at that age. Em’s just keen to make the right impression.’

He drops his voice, moves his mouth in close to her ear. ‘A bit bloody intense, anyway.’

‘Who? Him?’

She jerks her forehead at the ceiling above them. Greg steps back from her and nods. The few times Greg had given Nathan a lift, he’d come away relieved, if a little frustrated. Taciturn, is how he’d described him, and she
knew what Greg meant by that. The boy was your typical surly teenager. So the mixed message was that while Nathan might lack the magnetism to seduce his daughter or lead her astray, he wouldn’t enrich or inspire her teenage life either. Jenn had got the impression that Greg was happy enough with that; did she now detect some kind of a sea change?

‘Did you get my text?’ he says.

‘Oh, hang on – the one telling me you were on your way?’

‘No. The one about the Unmentionables.’

Usually she’d laugh, but something about the way he says it prickles her. Jenn takes a glass from the cupboard, opens the fridge.

‘So, go on – what are we not to talk about?’

There’s no wine. She sighs, hoofs the door shut with her bare foot, moves to the sink, fills the glass with water and drains it in two gulps but remains at the sink. She stares at her reflection in the window. Greg comes up behind her. It’s his coaxing voice; trying to make light of a tricky situation.

‘Okay, let’s see. There’s to be no talk of gymkhanas, ponies, lacrosse or any other activity you’d associate with a girls’ school.’

A
private
girls’ school, Jenn wants to correct him. Fees circa eight grand per annum, fees she resents paying
when there are so many perfectly great comprehensives on the doorstep, fees she’s long since given up bickering about. She forces a smile and turns to Greg. She has no wish to bicker today.

Greg draws himself up. ‘And under no circumstances do we
ever
refer to her Chemical Romantics phase.’

Jenn softens and tweaks his beard.

‘Chemical
Romance
,’ she corrects. ‘Anyway, I thought that was how they met – at a gig.’

‘Not a Chemical Romantics one, it would seem.’

Jenn laughs, pleased that Gregory is on her side, for once. Whatever the crime and however hard his daughter nails herself to it, Emma can always depend on Daddy to dredge up some excuse for her:
she’s working too hard; it’s her monthly curse; her mother died giving birth; her step-mother spends too much time at work; she has abandonment issues
. Jenn has long since learned to accept it for what it is; the legacy of grief is a chronic affliction, not curable but manageable. And Jenn has managed it well. She wipes a cluster of crumbs from the corner of his mouth.

‘Where is he, anyway?’

Almost on cue, the wormed wooden beams of the kitchen ceiling give out a little creak and, moments later, there’s footfall on the stairs. There’s laughter as the lounge doors creak open, feet slapping across the terrace,
followed by the riotous splash of their bodies as they hit the pool.

‘You sure? Doesn’t sound too intense to me.’

She pours herself another glass of water. He takes it out of her hand, glugs deeply then passes it back.

‘Yeah, intense. Intense in the way that young people can be. The inherent corruption of the Establishment. Minimum wage. Workers’ rights.’

‘He’s fifteen! What does he know about workers’ rights?’

‘Seventeen, it would seem.’ Greg raises an eyebrow. ‘Quite adamant that he’s not going to university.’

Jenn snorts, shakes her head, undoes her towel from around her waist.

Gregory lowers his face to her and mimics: ‘The notion that university encourages critical and independent thinking is a myth. Academic institutions only stifle our naturally autodidactic nature.’ He pulls a face and points at her, thumping the table so hard that the lemons in the fruit bowl jump. ‘Such institutions show us not
how
to think but
what
to think!’

She stifles a guffaw; spits her water back into the glass.

‘He actually said that?’

‘No. She did.’

They raise eyebrows at one another. She tears off another chunk of bread for herself.

‘I’m off to shower, anyway. Hopefully the sun will have thawed her black mood by the time I come down.’

She pads off upstairs, wondering if her husband would have thought her intense when she was seventeen.

3

She is in the kitchen when she first sets eyes on him. Since Emma’s strop, the teenagers have made themselves scarce, glimpsed only in snatches and via intermittent bursts of sound: the creak of the wheelbarrow as he pushes her around the rutted gardens; the plunge of bodies in the pool; wet feet on the veranda, and those longer stretches of silence, filled in by the shallow puttering of iPods, the bleeping of phones. They are invisible and yet their presence is everywhere: they possess the entire villa. Jenn can hear them shuffling around upstairs. She calls from the bottom of the stairs:

‘I’ve made fresh lemonade. Lovely! Want me to bring some up?’

There is a fluttering in her throat as she anticipates the scurry of feet, the frenzied stretching and bending
of limbs as clothes are pulled on in haste, but the voice that comes back is bright and innocent.

‘Thanks. We’ll be down in a mo.’

So Emma is no longer mad at her, but they do not come down.

Jenn prepares lunch. She slices what’s left of the bread, the crust already hardened by the heat, and she dices and blanches potato cubes, chops and fries up tomatoes, peppers, jalapeños. There’s half a tin of sweetcorn in the fridge that she’s tempted to tip in, but instinctively, she knows that ‘tinned’ will grate with her daughter. She digs out a big, ceramic bowl, remembers where she’s put the eggs she bought from Berta.

‘No refrigeration,’ the maid had warned, ticking her off with her forefinger. Jenn had left the fresh-laid eggs in the cool of the walk-in pantry, just in case one of them hatched. She stands at the window, looking out across the lemon grove as she breaks the eggs into the bowl and begins beating them. She can hear Benni talking loudly to the gardener – when did
he
sneak in? Doubtless news of Emma’s arrival has filtered through, and he’s come to take his fill. She can see a slice of Gregory’s head under the umbrella, the bald oval on his crown reddening under the midday sun. His head is erect and motionless behind his newspaper. She feels his anger at Benni’s invasion, even from here. He’s trying to pretend
he’s engrossed in world events, but she knows Greg won’t be taking in a word of the print. She carries on beating the eggs.

‘Hi.’

The voice, coming from directly behind her, takes her by surprise and the bowl slips from her grip. She services the silhouette in the archway with a brief nod, before turning to the bowl at her feet, spinning but, miraculously, unbroken. It doesn’t bear thinking what monetary value it might suddenly accrue if Benni had to replace it. Some of the egg has splashed onto the waxed flags. She squats, simultaneously dabs at it with a tea towel and tries to assess if there’s still enough in the bowl to make omelette – there is – before her gaze moves back to the archway. The silhouette lingers a moment before stepping fully into the kitchen. Jenn is conscious of herself not quite controlling her reaction. She can feel her face slacken. She tries to compensate, looking down at the bowl and keeping her hands clamped tightly to her hips, as she gets to her feet. Surely this cannot be the same kid – the sulky bushbaby from the back of the car? He takes a couple of steps towards her, then stops dead. He is wearing a pair of plain blue swimming shorts, otherwise, he is naked before her. He is muscular, but graceful with it, balletic. He is shockingly pretty. She is aware of the seeming impropriety of registering these
details – he is seventeen – and yet she cannot tear her eyes away. He seems either faintly amused or embarrassed. He drops his head.