Under the Sun Read online

  Michael led the way up the hill, and they stopped at the top. Anna did not join them in gazing out over the view. Instead, she looked at her feet, and closed her ears as Michael explained the thinking behind his latest work, about how he wanted to explore the dichotomy between nature and man’s desire for convenience and disregard for beauty.

  Kurt started talking about EU subsidies. Anna closed her eyes and felt an intense longing to be back, alone, in her studio flat in London, even with its bifold bathroom door and wet rot.

  Eventually, Michael said, ‘OK, let’s go the pretty way now, for Anna.’

  He led them back through the almond grove and then into the valley, facing towards that slice of ocean. Michael walked ahead with Kurt, Farah a few metres behind. Just in case Farah felt compelled to hang back to walk with her, Anna pretended that her espadrille had slipped off.

  ‘You go ahead!’ she shouted. But of course Farah was going ahead. She didn’t even look round to see where Anna was. Michael did look, but didn’t wait. Anna knew which was worse.

  Anna watched Michael walking ahead, laughing with his friends. He was wearing a blue-and-red checked cotton shirt which he’d had for years; on one of their early dates, he had teamed it with a diamond-patterned yellow waistcoat, ostentatiously clashing.

  Was that shirt the only thing that remained of the old Michael? Maybe he really was a stranger now, every atom of him replaced since three years ago, when they had first come across each other in a gallery in Bethnal Green. But she had been a different person then, too, hadn’t she? That day she was wearing a backless top that showed the whole length of her bare spine, even though it was only an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.

  Anna had been hired by the gallery to redesign their logo, and was in for a meeting with the owner. Michael was one of the gallery’s artists, soon to have a show open there, and that day had been sitting on the floor, crossing things out on a piece of paper. Of course, Anna noticed his beauty, but there were a lot of beautiful men around in East London. What really struck her was his focus on that paper. She later discovered he was rewriting the press release for his show. She admired the fact he took his work so seriously. But back then, she admired everything about him.

  The gallery owner was on the phone and showed no signs of hurrying the call. Anna stood by the front desk and watched Michael’s profile as he scribbled away, ignoring the deer legs of the twenty-two-year-old gallery girls as they stepped around him, waving away offers of a chair, not realizing or caring that he was in the way.

  As she looked at him, Anna thought: I want to be inside your head. In the three years since, she had never stopped yearning for access to what lay inside that narrow, perfectly shaped skull. Even at the beginning, when he was so responsive to and thrilled by her, she was aware that there were whole parts of his mind that were out of bounds to her. That was, of course, a large part of the attraction.

  Back then, at the gallery, he had suddenly looked up at her, the only other person in the room who was silent and still, and smiled. And she had smiled back, holding his gaze. It so happened that this moment had come at a good time in her life: after years of house-shares and saving she had recently bought her tiny, lovely flat just within the bounds of Zone 2, she was getting interesting work, it was the start of spring, and she had been cycling around feeling like she had earned her place in this city of progress and opportunity. For the first time in her life, she felt naturally confident. Were it the year before – even the month before – she might have looked away from that direct stare and, when he had come over to talk to her, sabotaged the encounter, feigning indifference, unsure of how to deal with someone like him taking an interest.

  At the time, though, it felt utterly inevitable. Of course he would smile at her, and of course she would smile back, and of course he would come over and start a conversation (asking her whether she knew the spelling of verisimilitude), and of course they would have gone to the dive bar on the corner and sat outside for four hours, barely touching their Leffe Blonde. They couldn’t stop talking. That very first night she found herself telling him stuff she had never told a soul, and saying clever, funny things she didn’t know she had in her until that moment. They kept bursting into laughter at nothing at all. Just laughing at the wonder of it. He took her hand and turned it over, touching her fingers, and then gazed at her from under that heavy brow, silent for a moment, and her heart turned over.

  And he had been in awe of her, this elite man. How extraordinary was that? She was different to everyone he knew: unspoiled and fresh. He loved that she hadn’t gone to Oxford, like his old friends, and that she wasn’t part of the East London scene, like his recent ones. He was sick of art girls with their fashionable, borrowed opinions, who played hard to get but weren’t worth the chase. He liked the fact she came from the Midlands, and admired her for coming to London to carve a life for herself. She was a self-starter, an autodidact (he didn’t seem to count the fact she had degrees from Dundee and the RCA). He would talk for hours about art and abstract ideas and she would absorb it all. She wasn’t merely a mute admirer, however: she had just enough knowledge to contribute the odd thought and to ask the right questions, and when she did he seemed genuinely interested in what she had to say. He listened to her – and it made her feel she’d never really been listened to before.

  ‘You’re true,’ he’d told her, his hand on her cheek. She hadn’t liked to ask exactly what he meant.

  He had faults, of course, but they didn’t seem like faults then – rather, part and parcel of his brilliance. He had very fixed ideas of what was worthy of his time and attention and when she introduced him to her friends and, much later, her family, his high-mindedness was indistinguishable from a complete lack of interest in their small, ordinary existences. Anna had felt awkward on their behalf, but it hadn’t dimmed her love for him. After all, hadn’t he recognized her specialness? He took her up a level. With other boyfriends, Anna had hidden her true self in order to fit in with them. From the start with Michael, she felt he had unearthed a new, superior self, one she hadn’t known existed before.

  Now, looking at Michael’s long back as he walked ahead of her, Anna started again mentally raking over the past year, trying to pinpoint when and how things had changed. She felt she was searching a room for something lost, even though she had upturned it dozens of times before. How blithely unaware she had been! It couldn’t have been before their move to Spain: he was the one who had suggested the move in the first place, who had declared he’d had enough of London and wanted to get back in touch with nature and truth, go somewhere out of reach.

  Anna had actually taken some persuading. Despite a decade in London, she still found the place exhilarating. She felt she had cornered off a little patch for herself in the city and the bulbs she had planted were beginning to blossom. But the life Michael was offering won her over. Moving to Spain, building a house together: it was as good as marriage. Better. She would have him all to herself, them against the world.

  Decision made, she’d flown out to Spain alone to view potential properties – Michael had to stay in London to prepare for a show – and found the finca. She’d put in an offer on the spot. Michael had his own flat in Hackney but it couldn’t be sold because his mum’s company had a stake in it. So, it made sense for him to rent his place out and for Anna to sell hers, and use the money to buy their new home. It didn’t really matter who sold what, then.

  Did he suspect even then that they wouldn’t last? She had to believe that he didn’t. It was true that even before the move Michael had had moments of being withdrawn and non-communicative. But he was an artist, and artists were complicated; she had known that all along. So, when he had disappeared into himself, she had always given him the benefit of the doubt and left him be. That was what love was, wasn’t it? She was doing everything she possibly could to please and support him, in a laid-back, non-smothering way. Back then, he had recognized her maturity about his moods and been grateful for
it: when she excused him from attending her friends’ weddings before he’d even asked, he had solemnly thanked her. Occasionally he would announce that he needed to be alone and would disappear for a few days, but then always come back and apologize and tell her he couldn’t live without her. The unspoken deal between them, she felt, was that he could be occasionally difficult and she would understand, and he would worship her for it.

  Then, Spain. Despite the inevitable cock-ups and frustrations and discomforts – the discovery of the greenhouses; nights spent shivering under piles of clothes in the unheated caravan; wrangling a crew of sardonic, evasive builders; tedious dealings with access rights and JCB licences – Anna had never been happier than during that first six months. The finca was a great act of creation, and she didn’t even begrudge the stinging bills. What better use of her money than to pour it, quite literally, into their new home? Michael had seemed thrilled, too, taking endless photos of the finca and her. They would sit out with blankets and wine to watch the sun rise – or, rather, seep, as the light didn’t seem to ascend as much as inch across the valley towards them, tinting each mountain it passed before anointing them in their blessed spot, as if the laws of nature had changed just for them.

  But between then and now, as Anna’s savings were being converted into septic tanks and concrete underlay and eyelet curtains, his feelings towards her had changed. There were no huge rows, nothing to grasp onto; but his disdain could be felt like a drop in temperature. Anna was reminded of her few one-night stands, in which the encounter had an invisible hinge. How, the morning after, everything that had initially aroused and delighted her was suddenly and irreversibly repulsive. This seemed to be an agonizingly drawn-out version.

  The confusion and insecurity and anger leached her spirit, and she’d retreated back to her comfort zone of interiors, spending recklessly on unnecessary finishing touches to the house: an armchair covered in Josef Frank fabric that cost more per metre than her weekly London mortgage payment; a heavy oak table with grooves worn from the elbows of generations of almond farmers; a marble worktop for their outdoor kitchen, salvaged from an old pharmacy. If she bought the heirloom, the future might follow.

  When he was in his studio she spent hours online, keeping abreast of the news and reading contemporary art websites, so she would have something interesting to say that evening. She knew he shuddered at trivial domestic details, and so spared him all of that, even though such mundanity took up much of her day: changing gas canisters, destroying hornet nests, having to take freezer bags to the supermarket so the milk didn’t go off on the twenty-kilometre drive home, chasing up the company who delivered their water by lorry. Still, over dinner, during her carefully prepared takes on world news or humorous observations on their life in Spain, he would often look at her with glassy, unloving eyes, and either not respond or pick her up on something she said. She used to be teasing and glib, but uncertainty had squashed it out of her. She’d never been an intellectual, but she’d had the odd opinion, been capable of some insight, a fresh take on things, but now all that seemed as if it had been written in invisible ink, visible only under the glow of his regard.

  Occasionally, after wine, she would confront him, explaining that she had her own issues with him, that he wasn’t perfect, but that she compromised and gave him the benefit of the doubt. He’d hear her out, looking at her with that dark, sunken gaze, but offer no comfort. Instead, he’d shake his head, as if there was no point in trying to explain, or smile sadly, as if they both knew that she no longer had any power and her challenge was just a feeble pride exercise. And in the face of his implacability, her fury would again dissolve into confusion and self-doubt. It seemed biologically impossible that his love for her had just evaporated of its own accord. But what the hell had she done to cause it?

  The person who knew the answer, but chose not to reveal it, had now reached the top of a ridge, his cabal in tow. Anna lagged behind, the heat and her misery weighing her down like armour. She watched Michael turn and look back at her, and then say something to the others, who also stopped. Anna felt grateful for this crumb of concern from him, and despised herself for it. She picked up pace until she was level with them. They were in mid-conversation.

  ‘. . . It’s like the Spanish version of Las Vegas,’ Michael was saying. Anna knew he was talking about the vast working-class tourist resort that squatted on the coast, between them and the airport. From where they now stood, its glinting skyscrapers were just visible, surrounded by the seedlings of other buildings in mid-construction. Cranes lined the coastline like storks at a watering hole.

  ‘We went there for a few days last summer, when we arrived,’ continued Michael. ‘I liked it a lot, actually.’

  Anna didn’t remember Michael liking it, exactly. He had spent much of the trip taking photos – of the mobility scooters lined up on the sea front; the puce-faced young men with their unholy breakfasts of a pint of Carling and an Oreo milkshake; pensioners sitting with their stout white calves submerged in fish tanks, poor fish nibbling the dead skin on their feet; a sign for ‘cultural centre’ in front of an abandoned, quarter-built building. Anna, hanging back as he adjusted his zoom, had felt embarrassed about his patronizing attitude to these people and their playground.

  They had had a few nice moments, getting drunk on Sambuca and giggling as they watched barrel-shaped eighty-year-olds exercising unselfconsciously on the beach, but Anna didn’t remember the jaunt as being fun. But then, the trip had come not long after a conversation between them in which they’d been talking about Michael’s niece, whom he adored, and Anna had lightly suggested that maybe they too should have a baby. Michael had taken the comment as a joke – or pretended he thought it was, anyway – and replied, ‘Dammit, we forgot to tell the builders to put in a hallway.’ It took a moment for Anna to work out that he was referring to Cyril Connolly’s ‘pram in the hall’, and then she’d laughed with him – an in-sync couple whose first priority was their work! – whilst privately resolving to try him again another time.

  The thought had been very much on her mind that weekend at the resort, though, and she was painfully aware of how bad an advert for children the place was. They had stayed in a vast, half-empty hotel, with dusty windows and stained walls, and at breakfast had sat in silence, hungover and stricken, whilst overweight kids bellowed around them, squirting artificial cream on their breakfast cereal.

  Michael continued, with feeling. ‘At least it’s honest. I much prefer it to that dump down there,’ he said, gesturing down to Marea, a much smaller conurbation a few kilometres along the coast. ‘This ghastly little genteel town, stuffed with retirees from the Home Counties. They live this entirely hermetic life, drinking themselves to death, but think they’re better than the oiks down the road because they have tapas with their beer once a week. So fucking middle-of-the-road and timid and dreary, full of nobodies measuring out their lives in Irish coffees and the Daily Mail. I hate it.’

  He looked over at Anna, for the first time that afternoon.

  ‘Anna likes it, though,’ he said.

  ‘That’s not fair!’ cried Anna. ‘I don’t like it. I just said it wasn’t so bad. The beach is quite nice, there are orange trees, some cobbled streets. It’s not hideous, that’s what I said.’

  The accusation stung, although it wasn’t untrue. Marea was OK. And she was more familiar with the place than Michael suspected. Since they arrived she had visited in secret to buy beauty products and get her legs waxed. Then, just the previous month, she had gone there to see a therapist who had advertised in the local paper. Do you need to talk? the advert asked, and that was exactly what Anna needed to do. She couldn’t bring herself to tell her friends and family that things out here had turned so sour, and she needed one person in the world to know how she really felt. The therapist, a fifty-something woman called Caroline, was entirely silent during their hour together, offering no guidance or thoughts at all as Anna ranted and howled. But Anna didn’t need a
ny more: just someone to hold the bowl as she spewed out her hurt and anger and humiliation.

  Now, Michael was pointing out the Strait of Gibraltar, and telling his friends about the bird migrations, how the raptors and storks used the rising air currents to soar across the Med at its narrowest point.

  ‘It’s meant to be amazing,’ said Anna. ‘We’re going to go to watch it in September, aren’t we? Down in Gibraltar.’

  Michael didn’t respond. Farah glanced at her with a quick, pitying smile.

  Kurt started telling them about the ancient and ingenious irrigation system established by the Moors in this particular mountainous region of Spain.

  ‘They revolutionized agriculture,’ he said. ‘And of course, water is an Islamic symbol of paradise.’

  Anna pretended her espadrille had slipped off again as the others moved on.

  When they arrived back at the house it was 3pm, and the heat was so fierce even Farah was subdued. It was decided not to bother with much lunch, in anticipation of the feast Anna had planned for the evening, and after a few slices of jamón straight from the fridge Farah and Kurt headed in for a siesta. Michael announced that he was going to paint and disappeared off to the barn. Anna was left in the outdoor kitchen, and the sheer pleasure of being alone temporarily soothed her misery. Her head empty, she sealed the beef and chopped the chorizo and unearthed the almonds she had harvested earlier that year; a hard-won and scanty haul, just enough for four bowls of soup. Geckos skittered on the wall beside her, catching their dinner. She was washing off the brine when the flow of water thinned. Someone else was using the supply. She turned off the tap and listened. There was the sound of the hose running. Michael was showering behind the barn.

  Anna frowned. These alfresco washes had become a habit in the past two months – Michael had even relocated his toothbrush to a tin cup in the barn – and, although a seemingly trivial change in his behaviour, it bothered her hugely. The bathroom was the room in the finca she had worked hardest on, and of which she was most proud. One of the few things she felt confident in was her eye, her ability to make things look beautiful. It was why she went into graphic design and also, she suspected, one of the reasons Michael had fallen for her. When he had first stayed over in her studio, he’d told her it was the loveliest 500 square feet he’d ever slept in.