Under the Sun Read online

  Lottie Moggach

  Under the Sun

  PICADOR

  For my nieces, Lyra and Meri

  Contents

  Southern Spain, August 2008

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  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  Acknowledgements

  Southern Spain, August 2008

  From bed, Anna listened to her houseguests next door.

  ‘Fuck, it’s hot already,’ Farah was saying. ‘Did you manage to get online?’

  Anna couldn’t hear Kurt’s reply, only a cough of water as a tap was turned on. She imagined him stooping at the sink in the corner of the guest room, the antique copper basin from Marrakesh that was too small to wash in comfortably.

  ‘I don’t know why they bother having a password here,’ Farah continued, her patrician voice carrying clearly through the stud wall between the bedrooms. She was a human rights lawyer, used to projecting across international courtrooms. ‘Do they think the geckos are going to steal their broadband?’

  Again, Kurt’s response was inaudible, but whatever he said provoked a gale of mirth so loud and theatrical Anna wondered whether Farah was, in fact, performing to be heard by her hostess. Anna had woken to find Michael’s side of the bed empty, as was usual these days. She hadn’t made a sound herself – just lay on her back, hands on her chest, as neat and still as a recumbent effigy.

  Farah recovered and Anna heard the guest bedroom latch lift. After a passage across the sitting room, muffled by kilim rugs, there came the heavy slam of the front door. Then, perfect silence.

  Was Michael out there, sorting breakfast? Farah and Kurt were very much his friends, after all; mates from Oxford, close for twenty years. Nonetheless, she should get up and go out. But she felt pinned to the bed by the strength of reluctance she hadn’t felt since childhood: profound, unequivocal, undiluted by reason. She thought of their neighbour Alfonso’s old donkey the month before, being yanked onto a truck headed to the knacker’s yard.

  Couldn’t she just lie here for two days, until Farah and Kurt – ‘K’, as Farah and Michael called him – returned to London? Or even longer, until this terrible, slow landslide of her life with Michael had finally come to a halt?

  No one had opened the shutters in the sitting room. They fitted imperfectly and let in chinks of sunlight, fluorescently bright, as if a nuclear explosion had occurred outside. The smell of Kurt’s cigarettes still hung in the air from the night before – there must have been twenty butts in the fireplace, although the couple had only arrived at 9pm – mingling unhappily with the trapped heat and a sour, jammy note from the unfinished glasses of red on the table.

  Anna went to the front door. Nothing could be heard from outside: the outer walls of the finca, two hundred years old and two feet deep, were as effective at cancelling noise as the interior ones were feeble. She stalled, reluctant to leave this dim and undemanding place. On the wall beside the door, a collection of Michael’s sketches hung from a piece of string, like washing on a line. Love tokens he’d drawn for her over breakfast, each a single image representing what lay ahead for her that day. Most of them dated from London – a book; a theatre curtain; an art opening; the pair of shoes he wanted her to wear when they met that evening. There was a handful from Spain, but they soon stopped. He said the images were getting too repetitive: the sun, a tomato, a glass of wine.

  A couple of the sketches had fallen to the floor, and Anna picked them up and carefully re-pegged them. Next to the door was a mirror: she checked the dark shape of her reflection, features indistinguishable in the gloom. Then, finally, she pulled at the oak door and stepped out onto the over-lit, over-heated stage.

  When her eyes had adjusted to the brightness, she saw the others breakfasting under the fig tree, as she’d expected. Only no Kurt, just Michael and Farah. They were sitting at opposite ends of the table and had pulled their chairs out of the shade to bask. Michael was sunk low and straight in his seat, arms folded over his chest, like someone dozing at the cricket; Farah’s sturdy brown legs were braced against the table. Both had their eyes closed and were smiling, presumably at something one of them had just said.

  The sight of Michael looking relaxed and happy was so rare and longed-for that Anna smiled, despite it being nothing to do with her. She walked over, crouched down beside him and stroked his forearm with a finger. He started, eyes flicked open.

  ‘Morning,’ she said.

  He gave her the same quick smile he gave their builder.

  ‘How are you?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, OK,’ he said, closing his eyes again. His good humour disappeared. I shouldn’t have surprised him like that, she thought, miserably.

  ‘Hiya,’ said Farah, from the other end of the table.

  ‘Where’s Kurt?’ asked Anna, although she knew the answer: from the bedroom she’d heard him talk about an email from a radio producer.

  Farah gestured to behind the house. ‘Up the hill, on the phone to Today. They want him down the line tomorrow.’ She took her feet off the table and leaned forward to take a fig. ‘Fuck, it’s scorchio,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe you guys don’t have a pool. Isn’t that the whole point of living here?’

  This was, presumably, a rhetorical question, but when Michael said nothing Anna felt compelled to reply. Farah had this effect on her.

  ‘We ran out of money, but we’ll get round to it one day,’ she said. ‘Next summer maybe.’ She looked at him. ‘Won’t we, Michael?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, eyes still closed.

  Feeling marginally comforted, Anna poured herself some tepid coffee from a pink majolica jug. How come Farah was allowed to use a word like ‘scorchio’? If she had said that, Michael would have winced.

  ‘What’s the difference between a finca and a cortijo, anyway?’ Farah went on.

  Again, Anna waited for Michael to reply, and when he didn’t, she said, ‘Well, they’re sort of interchangeable, really. Both farmhouses with a bit of land. Cortijos are generally a bit posher.’

  Farah didn’t respond. Anna’s may have been the correct answer, but it was neither funny nor clever.

  Michael stirred.

  ‘The people who have moved here from Notting Hill call them cortijos,’ he said, ‘and the people who moved here from Islington call them fincas.’

  ‘. . . and the ones from Manchester call them haciendas,’ said Farah.

  Michael sniggered.

  ‘Gideon would call it an ager,’ he said.

  Farah hooted.

  Gideon was someone from their college who Anna had never met. She turned away from them and looked out over the valley. Even in her misery Anna could, abstractly, appreciate the beauty of the scene. The table had been positioned to make the most of the view: framed by fig trees, their glossy palm-shaped leaves straight out of Rousseau, through layers of tufty-bushed mountains to a tiny slash of golden sea. The sun was high and strong, and the light so pellucid that one could make out the details of tractors a dozen kilometres away; the window frames of the houses in the white villages that clung to the mountains like empty barnacles on a rock. There was no sign of movement: the valley seemed stupefied by the heat. The only activity came from the thick hum of bees at the nearby lavender bush.

  The breakfast table, too, looked lovely. The ceramics were a mixture of colourful vintage pieces, flecked with indigos and pinks, and austere, peasant earthenware, no two the same. There was not a hint of plastic packaging anywhere; aesthetics were important to them both, and Anna made sure to decant the butter and milk as soon as they were out of the supermarket bag
. Three figs sat on a saucer; there was a large plate decorated with slices of jamón, already curling in the heat, and thin wedges of sweating manchego. A dragonfly danced around a saucer of apricot jam. The slightly warped, bone-handled bread knife was dug into a huge round loaf that Anna had baked the afternoon before. Kurt’s packet of B&H was the only sign of the times.

  Sitting in the sun, in front of this view, peeling figs and shooting the breeze with brilliant friends: this was Michael’s dream of living out here, she knew. And hers too, she supposed. Only, not like this.

  It was just gone 10am. Many hot, unhappy hours lay ahead.

  Anna looked over at her boyfriend, his face in profile as he talked to Farah. His head was freshly buzzed – he must have done it this morning, in one of his secret hours without her. Unlike most men with shaved heads, Michael didn’t do it to pre-empt baldness, but for practical reasons: it was one less thing to think about so he could concentrate on his painting. An easy gesture to make when you had a face like his. He was half Israeli and his skin was now as rich and evenly brown as the crust on her loaf. When they were out in town he was often mistaken for a Spaniard, until he stood up and his height gave him away. On their trips he’d also been claimed as a local in Italy, Greece, Turkey, even Morocco – brazenly approached by women chatting him up in their mother tongue, pretending to mistake him for Zidane, completely unbothered that Anna was there beside him.

  Before Michael, Anna had presumed that people with ravishing partners became inured to their looks over time, but three years down the line, she still didn’t take his allure for granted. In fact, she’d become more conscious of it, and it pained her. When they first met, his beauty had seemed almost irrelevant; or rather, a glorious bonus to their extraordinary mental connection. In the fog of early love they’d felt parity on all things. When she’d asked him what it was like to be so attractive, he’d laughed and said, ‘You first.’

  But now, as that love was draining away – why? – his beauty had become a wall between them. She searched under that heavy brow to the dark wells of his eyes for clues; stared at his long nose in profile as he turned away from her. Once, his face was animated and engaged, accessible and responsive to hers; now it was as wary and remote as a celebrity’s. Except when he was talking to his old mates, of course.

  Just one proper smile, she thought. A squeeze of the knee. An arm casually slung over the back of her chair. A tiny gesture – the kind that, six months ago, was common and unremarkable. Now, just one would change everything. She would forgive him his coldness, his snobbery, his rudeness; she would put aside her hurt and anger at the cruelty of his about-turn. She wouldn’t forget, but she would rip this chapter from their life together and never speak of it again, if they could go back to how they were. Because the consequences of this not working – practical, emotional – were too horrific, and, like the boiling frog in a saucepan, she felt incapable of getting out herself.

  But there was no smile or squeeze. And of course Farah had noticed, slyly observing behind her shades, as she talked about how she and Kurt were considering an extension at the back of their Stockwell house. Had one of Anna’s friends started talking of such a thing – not that many of them had a side return to convert – Michael would have no doubt found the subject suffocatingly bourgeois.

  Anna had spent some time analysing Michael’s friends and had eventually realized this: by virtue of going to Oxford they had earned an authority in which anything they said was acceptable. It wasn’t that some subjects were permissible, and some not, as Anna had thought at the beginning. Rather, that they were allowed to talk inconsequentially or banally because they had already proved their intellectual worth, and everyone knew they were capable of much greater things, like a master pianist playing chopsticks.

  Farah was doing her laugh again. Her legs were still braced on the table, giving Anna a good view of the soles of her large, dirty feet. Farah and Michael had had a brief thing at Oxford, before Farah had got together with Kurt, and it had never bothered Anna before, even when she examined photos of them at that time: stylish, mannered pictures that could have been taken in the 1950s rather than mid-nineties. A heavy-fringed Farah curled in an armchair, pulling the sexy bluestocking look in a kilt and brogues. An outrageously beautiful Michael lying back on his forearms on a lawn, looking off to one side, his hair a mess of stiff curls. Photos fit for their biographies; so different from the ill-lit, self-conscious snaps of Anna’s lot at Dundee. Michael had said he hadn’t really fancied Farah, had briefly mistaken friendship for something more, and Anna could believe it. To her, Farah seemed mannish, with her broad shoulders and defiant grey streaks in her coarse hair, and just generally unsubtle. So different was she from Anna that it seemed impossible anyone could find them both attractive.

  Indeed, Anna had always taken it as a given that she, Anna, was better-looking. But now, out here, she wasn’t so sure. Farah suited the summer; the sun made her sallow skin glow, and in her denim cut-offs and vest she seemed vivid and definite. Anna was wearing an austere, shapeless, expensive cotton smock that, with her delicate pale limbs, was meant to lend her an appealingly wispy, babe-in-the-woods quality. Instead, next to the strong meat of Farah, Anna felt slight and anaemic; so understated she barely existed.

  Michael had once kneaded that slab of thigh braced against the table. Farah’s fingers had run through those curls that Anna had never seen.

  Anna reached over Michael for the bread knife; he didn’t react or attempt to pass it. Suddenly she felt furious; she wanted to scream and upend the table, send the jamón flying into the bushes. Why should she be feeling like this, being ignored in her own fucking house by this awful woman and the man who was supposed to love her? Maybe she should do what Michael did when her mother and stepfather, their only other visitors, were here in the spring. Having been entirely silent throughout breakfast, he had, halfway through an admittedly tedious story from Janet about their journey through airline security, suddenly jumped up to announce he was going to look for eggs. Anna started to remind him that all their chickens had been killed by foxes three weeks before, but then realized and stopped herself. He hadn’t returned for nearly an hour, by which time Anna and her mum and stepfather were sitting in silence, conversation long exhausted.

  Afterwards, when they were alone, Michael explained, with real feeling, that he couldn’t bear the provincial way her mother spoke.

  ‘“I went into town for a coffee”. “I need to pick up some bits”. She used the word smellies, for fuck’s sake,’ he said, anguished. ‘I just can’t be around it, Anna. It makes me feel like I’m dying. You understand, don’t you?’

  And she had understood. But now, she was the one he couldn’t bear.

  ‘Oh, hello, he’s back,’ said Farah.

  They all turned to see Kurt emerging from behind the house. The walk up the hill to get a signal had left its mark on him: his nose was pink and sweat darkened his T-shirt. For once, Anna was relieved to see him: at least his lack of interest in her didn’t feel so personal.

  ‘All set?’ said Farah.

  Kurt nodded, and took a cigarette from the pack on the table. ‘Except – you’ll like this – they wanted to have me up against Elijah House,’ he said. ‘I told them, “If you actually bother to read his book, you’ll realize why that’s a shit idea. We’re in broad agreement on the salient points.”’

  ‘What subject will you be talking about?’ said Anna.

  ‘The politics of giving,’ replied Kurt.

  As Anna was thinking how to respond, Michael jumped up.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said. ‘I want to show you two something.’

  ‘Oh, Michael,’ said Anna, before she could stop herself. ‘Can’t we go the other way? The nice walk?’

  Michael stared at her with hawkish fury.

  ‘They’ll get it,’ he said.

  Anna and Michael hadn’t seen the greenhouses at first; indeed, it was a good two weeks after they had moved i
nto the finca that they spotted them. Anna was sure they hadn’t been there when she first saw the place. Admittedly, she couldn’t actually remember looking behind that particular hill – it was the least interesting bit of the land and her attention had been drawn towards the view, the almond grove, and the stone shell that was to be their home. But she must have done. She wouldn’t have made such a big decision without thoroughly checking out the area, would she?

  But the fact remained that during a walk in those early days, she and Michael had climbed a small hill beyond the almond grove and were shocked to discover a clutch of plastic greenhouses. They were some way off, but a blight nonetheless: they covered an area the size of a football pitch, supported by metal frames and the plastic tired and grubby, as if they had been there for years.

  They were both stunned. Anna could still recall the sunken look on Michael’s face as he gazed out over them, glinting in the sun.

  It turned out that their solicitor hadn’t picked up on a tiny point in the lease that stated a certain section of the valley had been allocated to plasticulture, intensive crop-growing. Anna had gone over the documentation, being vaguely proficient in Spanish, but had not noticed it either. They had had their first proper argument over it. Michael said she should have picked up on the clause; she ventured that maybe he should learn some Spanish so these sorts of things weren’t always down to her.

  In any case, there was, apparently, nothing they could do about it. After all, it wasn’t their land. Alfonso, their neighbour, said it belonged to some Spanish businessman.

  After the initial shock, Anna had tried to be breezy, for Michael’s sake. ‘Oh well, we don’t have to actually see it,’ she’d said. ‘We’ll forget it’s there, soon enough.’

  ‘I won’t,’ he had replied.

  A week later, he had announced he was making the greenhouses the subject of a series of paintings: turning his gaze from the natural beauty in front of the house to the ugliness behind it. The fact that the sight had inspired him did not, however, detract from the fact that it was Anna’s fault that he was having to tackle this subject in the first place.