Under the Sun Read online

  Anna had done little to make the place personal or homely, but there were now a couple of Christmas cards propped up on the table, both from customers at the bar advertising their small businesses. One was from Mattie, a handmade effort: a photocopied picture of herself in a sexy Santa outfit, brandishing a duster, with the strapline Keep it clean this Christmas! The other was from Karen and Tommy, who ran both a local estate agency and a minicab business. The image was an awkward amalgamation of these two services: a drawing of a villa, with a reindeer relaxing on a lilo in the pool whilst a cab waited for him outside. Karen had signed the card from both of them, in girlish, barely joined-up writing, and added a note: ‘Thank you, Anna, we value your custom.’ Anna imagined Tommy beside his wife at the kitchen table, wincing inwardly as she wrote.

  Tommy and Karen were spending Christmas with their daughter in Hampshire. He had texted Anna that morning to say Happy Christmas, accompanied by three exclamation marks and a dozen kisses. She imagined him excusing himself from the family festivities and sloping off to the loo to send it.

  The sole object of beauty in the apartment was the Josef Frank armchair that Anna had squeezed into the taxi, along with a few bags of clothes, on that final journey down from the mountains. When she wasn’t downstairs at the bar she was curled into the chair; she’d even taken to sleeping in it, rather than the hard, small double bed in the back.

  Mid-morning on the 25th, Anna was getting into viewing position, laptop balanced on the arm of the chair, when she heard the ping of a text. Her friend Jess. Merry Christmas doll! So jealous of you in the sun. Look what we’ve been reduced to . . . The text appeared to refer to a photo attachment that, mercifully, hadn’t come through. It would, Anna was sure, show Jess and Tim and their son Jack in an ironic novelty festive pose: all wearing matching woolly hats and pretending to shiver. Maybe even some tinsel tied around the bump of number two.

  She and Jess had been so tight, once, back in London. Then Anna had met Michael and been subsumed into him, and Jess had started seeing Tim, that guy she wasn’t entirely sure about, and the rails their lives had been running along, once so close they were touching, started veering apart. Jess had put an end to her ambivalence by accidentally getting pregnant. Then Michael had left, and Tim had turned out to be Superdad. Even if Anna was still in London, she felt, she and Jess would be living in different countries.

  Jess was the only person Anna had told anything near the full story of what happened up at the finca. Anna had gone back to the UK for Christmas the previous year and visited Jess at her and Tim’s new place in Walthamstow. Jess had expressed her shock and disbelief and said the right kind of things – Michael had taken leave of his senses; Anna was the best thing that had happened to him; he’d come crawling back. But her response had an impersonal, stock quality to it. When Anna had asked Jess about her life, Jess had dismissively claimed she had nothing to say, she was so boring these days, but her actions betrayed her. As her friend spoke, Anna watched her steal glances at Jack flicking through a book on the floor, and smile when he crawled over to place a proprietorial little hand on her leg. Ultimately, Jess couldn’t conceal the fact that now she was the one distracted by a love affair too intense and extraordinary for words.

  And now, all those years of intimacy and connection had reduced to fortnightly texts, postcards of little lies that were never challenged. Or, rather, one big lie: that 325 days of sunshine a year were a substitute for meaningful relationships.

  Feliz Navidad! Anna texted back. Gorgeous here. Give Jack a tickle from me xxx

  It was nearly 1pm UK time. Anna thought, vaguely, of those back home gearing up to lunch – a millions-strong army of strained Brits, sluicing the potatoes in their tray of goose fat, frowning at the still-pale mound of turkey, suppressing annoyance at their relations. This time last year, she’d been one of them, spending the day with her mother and stepfather, and it had been awful. It wasn’t long after Michael had left and, as they laid the table, Anna had asked her mother for a loan so that she could get back to London before selling the finca. Before she’d even finished her proposal, her stepfather Bill had barrelled in from the conservatory and told Anna how they couldn’t possibly spare anything. As buy-to-let landlords, they were up shit creek, too. Didn’t Anna know what was going on?

  Yes, Anna knew. A week after Michael bailed out, she’d sat in a bar in town and stared at the muted TV footage of the Lehman Brothers employees with their boxes. Through her film of misery, the news had come as no surprise. The world was falling apart? Of course it was. And she’d felt it herself, in Spain, when the estate agent told her that she had little chance of selling in the foreseeable future. But she was still put out that this incomprehensible, faraway event had so quickly sealed off her only escape route – and that her mother offered no resistance to Bill, even though that had always been her way.

  Point made, Bill had pressed it home by spending the entire lunch talking about interest rates and negative equity. Whenever Anna started to say something, her mother had nervily interrupted to remark on what the dog was doing.

  When they were alone again, over the washing up, Janet had apologized to Anna for not being able to help. ‘Maybe you could use the money Grandma left you?’ she’d added, and Anna had said nothing, too upset to admit that that quite substantial inheritance had been ploughed into the finca, too.

  Wasn’t Anna lucky to be spared all that now? She fired up the DVD of Lost, watched one episode, cooked her sardines, and then ploughed through another two. She was down to the last heel of a bottle and picking the soft fish bones out of her teeth, when the Skype icon started hopping on her laptop screen. Marie-Anne.

  Anna was minded to ignore it, but knew her half-sister would keep calling and calling, unable to countenance the fact that Anna was at her computer but not answering. She pressed pause on the DVD and fixed on a smile to accept the call. Marie-Anne, her husband and their two daughters appeared on the screen, squashed together on a sofa. Anna angled the laptop so that the camera picked up the fabric of the chair rather than the porridge-coloured wall behind it.

  ‘Happy Christmas!’ they shouted.

  Marie-Anne was wearing a red velour slanket. Despite – or because of – her very grown-up job as a headhunter, Marie-Anne felt strongly about the importance of relaxing at home. Marie-Anne and Steve had a relationship unfathomable to Anna, in which mystique and sex appeal didn’t seem to feature at all. They openly discussed bowel movements; plucked each other’s grey hairs; bickered over the pick and mix at cinemas.

  ‘We’ve got a present for you, Auntie,’ said her oldest niece, with a sly smile. She waved to someone off-camera.

  A figure loomed into the screen, at first too close to identify: just a reddened neck and a chain. Then, it stepped back and a head of greasy grey curls came into focus.

  ‘Surprise!’ said Marie-Anne. ‘Derek, sit back here.’

  She reached up to pull the man back onto the sofa, sandwiched between her and Steve.

  ‘Dad!’ said Anna. ‘I didn’t know you’d be there.’

  ‘Neither did we,’ said Marie-Anne, tartly. ‘Did we, Dad?’

  ‘Where’s Elsbeth?’ asked Anna.

  ‘Back in Copenhagen, I believe,’ said her father. ‘Eating open sandwiches and telling her friends why they must never marry an Englishman.’

  ‘She’s left?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Derek. ‘Yesterday. Opened the last door of her advent calendar and it said, “dump the useless bastard”.’

  ‘Oh God, really? For good?’ said Anna, but couldn’t muster surprise, either that her dad’s third wife had finally tired of him or that he had already converted it into a glib anecdote. Or that he’d turned up at Marie-Anne’s, unannounced; he’d pulled a similar trick when his previous relationship ended, knocking on Anna’s door with a bag, disguising his need for shelter as an act of spontaneous fatherly love. Surprise!

  ‘She’d already talked to lawyers about money and everything,�
�� said Derek. He started detailing the proposed financial settlement, his offence at Elsbeth offering him a studio flat in Manchester. From Marie-Anne’s expression, Anna guessed that he had already discussed this subject at length. Her half-sister found it impossible to dissemble, nor would it ever cross her mind that she should do so.

  Anna noticed that Derek’s feet were squashed into too-small towelling slippers, rather than the pointy-toed boots he saw as his trademark, and imagined his grimace as his daughter asked him to take off his shoes at the front door.

  ‘You and me both, eh,’ Derek said.

  ‘What?’ said Anna, who had tuned out.

  ‘Ditched! By that horrible fella. All for the best, eh?’

  ‘Er, yeah,’ said Anna. She hadn’t spoken to Derek since the break-up; he’d never even met Michael. Marie-Anne must have filled him in. Her half-sister had been unbeguiled by Michael, from his conversation to his clothes; ‘That stupid big scarf, like a boa constrictor.’

  ‘How was lunch?’ Anna said, to change the subject.

  ‘Grand,’ he said. ‘Big old bird and some sort of fishy thing . . .’

  ‘Mackerel pâté,’ interrupted Marie-Anne. ‘We usually have salmon, but this year we had to cut back, what with everything . . .’

  ‘. . . And Steve took admirable charge of the decanter,’ said Derek. Anna noticed his knee jiggling. ‘Made sure we didn’t get squiffy.’

  He winked and nudged his son-in-law, too hard. Steve smiled thinly.

  ‘So, how’s the vida loca?’ Derek continued.

  ‘Oh, wonderful,’ said Anna, going onto autopilot. ‘As ever. I love it here.’

  ‘Cheap, is it?’

  ‘Yeah, really cheap. You can have a great quality of life.’

  ‘Had your grapes yet?’

  ‘What?’ Was this an uncharacteristically coy reference to wine?

  ‘No, that’s at New Year, isn’t it,’ he went on. ‘You eat grapes as the clock chimes, stuffing them in, no time to swallow. I did it once in Ibiza, with Julia. She looked like a hamster come midnight.’

  ‘Yeah, grapes are for New Year. Today I’m having dinner with a bunch of friends,’ said Anna, then added, gratuitously, ‘down on the beach.’

  Marie-Anne frowned.

  ‘In December?’

  ‘It’s boiling,’ said Anna. ‘Well, not boiling but, you know, T-shirt weather. There’s a guy here, Paco, who lives on the beach all year round . . .’

  ‘Oh yes, the old boy who discovered the shipwreck when he was a lad and makes paella,’ said Marie-Anne, annoyed. ‘You’ve told us.’

  ‘Christmas dinner on the beach!’ said Derek, closing his eyes in mock ecstasy. ‘Stop it! You’re making me want to go back to Bali!’

  Anna saw Marie-Anne twitch with disgust. Derek had spent the first two decades of his daughters’ lives AWOL in Bali, dropping unapologetically back on the scene when his luck ran out there.

  ‘Go back there, then,’ Marie-Anne said.

  ‘You’ll be in the bar, will you? For New Year’s?’ continued Derek, oblivious.

  ‘Course,’ said Anna. ‘Biggest night of the year.’

  By the time they hung up, Anna wished she’d ignored the call. She felt grateful Derek was there to deflect Marie-Anne’s more penetrating questions about what the hell Anna was doing with her life, but the news of his break-up had lowered her, flattening a section of the fencing she had erected around herself, and unwanted thoughts began to seep in.

  This was especially dangerous on the one day of the year when she could confidently picture what Michael was doing. She had spent the first Christmas Day of their relationship with him at his mother’s house in Highgate, a free-form, afternoon-long lunch in their basement kitchen with his imperious mother, actress sister and writer brother, and various stylish cousins and grand family friends up from Dorset. Michael claimed they loved her, although Anna hadn’t got that impression. They all had high, uncompromising conversational standards, and although they gave her a chance, asking her questions and inviting her opinion, by the time the goose came out Anna felt keenly aware that she had failed the audition to be a person of interest to them. She felt gauche, as if she kept on breaking invisible rules and being too eager to please, asking his mother for the recipe of her spinach and burrata tart and trying to engage the insouciant sister in a conversation about the themes of the Royal Court play she was appearing in (‘Hey, do you mind if we don’t? It’s my day off’). Still, her failure to crack their code hadn’t mattered, because Michael hadn’t seemed to notice, and, under the table, his hand had barely left the top of her thigh.

  Was there a new Anna there now beside him – fetching, flushed, near mute, thrilled to be the audience for this gilded, glamorous clan? Destined for the same fate, another three-year cycle? Or, far worse, had the new one been accepted? That’s her, the mother would be saying to him, sotto voce, as she ground cardamom seeds for the coffee. It took you a while, Bobo, but you got there.

  Anna fetched another bottle from the windowless galley kitchen, which now reeked of sardines. It was the hinge of the afternoon; the light had shifted, and the ridges of the textured paint cast tiny shadows on the walls. In the square, church bells rang three times. As usual at these moments, Anna’s anger with Michael was quickly subsumed by mourning for the life that didn’t happen, and self-pity for the one she appeared to be inhabiting. She curled herself up tight in the chair, hiding her face in the arm, like a Pompeii victim, wincing as she heard the laptop slip off the chair arm onto the tiled floor. The muted chattering from the square outside seemed to increase in volume, until it was so loud that people might as well be promenading around her own sitting room.

  In a sudden movement, she straightened up. She’d been here before, and knew what she had to do.

  Come on. Up. Out.

  She drained her glass, stood up unsteadily, and set about finding her shoes.

  Anna lived on Marea’s old square, which abutted a promenade overlooking one of the town’s several photogenic coves, and within thirty seconds of locking her door she was facing the Med.

  She’d never really understood the spiritual allure of the ocean, especially the stretch that bordered Marea. In contrast to the coursing, mutable Thames, throwing up fragments of human history with every tide, the water here seemed to her just a vast, placid pond, every interesting creature within it long since fished out. But the salty air had its uses. Reaching the handrail of the promenade, she leaned forward towards the sea, its steel blue surface like a hurriedly ironed sheet, and breathed deeply, drawing in the minerals and expelling the booze from her system. After a few minutes of dizziness she felt – not sober, no, but revived. Back on track.

  Anna wasn’t the only one out; the square and promenade milled with Brits and locals on postprandial turns. She hadn’t been exaggerating to people back home about the warmth. There was a slight breeze but it was definitely clement, and the unclouded sky and egg-yolk sun seemed to be preparing themselves for the high season. Amongst the Brits, jumpers had been tied around waists; sunglasses put on. Above her head, planes cut through the blue, descending towards the airport; even on Christmas Day, there was regular traffic. The palm trees lining the promenade welcomed the new arrivals, their balled fronds outstretched like stilled cheerleaders. Muzak Christmas carols issued from a speaker somewhere in the square, joined by a tinkly tune from the coin-operated train ride stationed on the promenade; the train was dutifully rocking back and forth, a local child onboard, having a Christmas treat.

  A man strolling past with his wife bellowed ‘Happy Christmas, lass!’ to Anna, and she smiled and waved back. Someone from the urbanization; she couldn’t remember his name. They blurred together, these British male retirees, with their ice-white hair and pink, amiable faces. The difference between the Brits and locals was most pronounced on high days like this, she thought: the expat couples in their fleeces, near silent, long past the need to impress, and the Spanish families in Sunday best, their fas
t chatter bouncing off the tiled surfaces of the square. And of course, with the Spanish came kids. Practically all the expats left were over fifty; the young families, dependent on work, were the first to flee back to the UK when the economy crashed. Out here, Anna was considered young; a babe.

  Amongst the Spanish, Anna spotted the woman who worked at the You Chic gift shop opposite the bar. The woman was now wearing a suit and a little hat, like someone from the 1940s, and laughing with an older man – barely recognizable from the beleaguered-looking person who emerged from the shop each morning to hang up dusty novelty T-shirts and watermelon-shaped handbags, and who rarely responded to Anna’s greeting.

  A quartet of pensioners sat around the fountain in the centre of the square – more a sculpture now, really, as water hadn’t flowed from it for a year, since drought was officially declared and the council banned unnecessary water use. A flock of tiny birds permanently hopped around its base, ever hopeful it might restart. Anna watched as one man crumbled a biscuit to feed to them. Then, the birds scattered and a flurry of barking heralded the arrival of half a dozen mongrels straining on their leads, and, dragged behind them, a middle-aged English woman. The woman had harshly henna-ed hair and was wearing a poncho that was too warm for the weather. This, Anna knew, was Caz, an eccentric who rescued dogs abandoned by expat owners who had fled back to the UK. Caz and the dogs took a daily turn around the square, and occasionally she’d stop by Anna’s bar, sipping a red wine and lemonade in silence, resolutely unclubbable and resistant to the laboured jocularity of the other expats around her, as if engagement with humans would somehow detract from her mission.