Under the Sun Read online

  He jumped out and opened the rear door for Anna, like a chauffeur, his hand brushing her hip as she climbed in. He was wearing a brand new checked shirt, still with the creases in.

  ‘Why are you so happy?’ asked Anna from the back seat, as they pulled away.

  ‘I’m seeing you!’ he replied, exuberantly. It was their standard exchange when they saw each other; a little in-joke. Anna’s question was ironic – Tommy always seemed happy, jolliness was his default setting – and his answer earnest and adoring.

  Tommy turned left onto the coast road, and Anna realized that he was heading towards the Plaza del Sol, the abandoned development off the coast road where they occasionally went to have sex. Of course he would be; she hadn’t told him otherwise.

  ‘Actually, can we go up to Yalo? To my house?’ she said, leaning forward between the seats. ‘I need to do something there.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Tommy, and she saw disappointment shadow his face, before his smile returned. ‘Okey doke.’ He executed a U-turn and headed along the narrow coast road, towards the mountain turn-off.

  ‘So finally, I get to see the famous finca!’ he said. ‘It looks lovely in the photos.’

  He was being polite. When Anna had put the house on the market, she’d taken the pictures for the website herself, close-ups of the architectural details and windowsills, in an attempt to appeal to the arty mountain crowd. In thumbnail form, however, the pictures looked almost wilfully bad alongside the perfect finishes, bland expanses of marble and cobalt blue swimming pools the other properties had to offer. Tommy’s initial blurb on the Marea Moves website had stated that the place ‘needed updating’; Anna had insisted he change it.

  Anna felt a wave of apprehension at what they were doing, going up there.

  ‘So how was your Christmas?’ she said, deflecting. ‘The twins sweet?’

  ‘Oh, gorgeous!’ he sighed. ‘They got these mountains of presents, but then sat there playing with the wrapping paper!’

  Anna smiled indulgently. ‘I still can’t get over the fact you’re a grandfather.’

  ‘Actually, I read the other day that the average age of first-time grandparents is forty-nine,’ said Tommy. ‘So I’m bang on!’

  ‘How obedient of you!’

  ‘As I keep telling you, I’m entirely average,’ said Tommy. Anna reached through between the seats and squeezed his shoulder. One of the things she liked about Tommy was his good-natured self-effacement.

  Her affection for him diminished, however, as he started to tell her about his trip to Hampshire. For an unshowy man Tommy was, usually, a good storyteller. It was one of the things that had made her give in to him, during the succession of liquid afternoons the previous spring, when he had come to the bar by himself and patiently wooed her. Nursing a half, he’d told her wry stories about his neighbours at the urbanization, painting a Twilight Zone-like scene where families would come round for dinner, normal as ever, but then vanish overnight, flitting back to the UK under cover of darkness and leaving the keys to their worthless villas in the door. One man, whose house had been repossessed but had nowhere to go back to in the UK, apparently now lived in limbo at the airport, looking like a respectable traveller but then bedding down on plastic chairs and scavenging leftovers from cafe trays.

  When it came to his own family, however, Tommy’s anecdotes were softened by sentimentality. Now, he described games of Racing Demon so heated the neighbours complained about the shrieking. A new family tradition of an outing to a theme park on Boxing Day, where Tommy was made to hold hands with a giant plastic potato. He and Karen had even viewed a house near to their daughter’s, although of course they weren’t in a position to move back until their bloody villa sold.

  From the back seat, Anna looked at him as he spoke: the profile of his broad, freckled face; his coarse, sandy hair with its unfashionable wings. Creases were beginning to bank at his ears; the skin under his eyes was crinkled from half a century of amiability. His large, pink, freckled wrist at the steering wheel. The wedding ring embedded on his finger. It didn’t take much for Tommy to seem like a stranger to her, and for her to feel ashamed that she had returned his affection, just because he wanted her so much.

  ‘That phrase “family bathroom”,’ Anna said, suddenly irritable. ‘It makes me think of you all crammed in there together, soaping each other’s backs. Unable to bear being apart even for a moment.’

  Tommy laughed obligingly.

  ‘So, have you had any nibbles on the villa?’ she continued, although she knew that, if he had, it would have been the first thing he’d told her.

  He shook his head. ‘A lady seemed quite keen. Came round twice before Christmas, we agreed to take another twenty thousand euros off, she said she’d be in touch. But nothing.’

  ‘God. How annoying. It’s been, what, a year now?’

  ‘Nineteen months,’ he replied, and then fell silent, concentrating on the road. Anna had successfully punctured his buoyancy but now she felt sorry for it; he was doing her a favour driving her, after all.

  ‘Hey, shall I get in the front?’ she said, leaning forward between the seats. ‘Live dangerously? I think we’re far enough away from town.’

  Tommy hesitated, before pulling in on the verge, beside a huge tangle of plastic wrap discarded from a lorry, the industrial tumbleweed that littered the coast road. Anna moved to the front passenger seat and touched his thigh in apology as she buckled up. She’d never been in the front of the Rover before. The seat was pushed back and as she leaned down to pull it forward, she realized that, of course, it was set to Karen’s height. This was her seat.

  Tommy kept a neat car, as necessary for a part-time cabbie, but Karen’s side pocket, out of view of paying customers, was surprisingly cluttered. Amidst a mess of tissues and receipts and handcream, Anna spotted a packet of the menthol cigarettes that Karen occasionally smoked, and a couple of baby’s dummies. She knew the grandchildren had never been to Spain – perhaps Karen had brought the dummies back with her to remember them by? She opened her mouth to make a silly comment, but, glancing at Tommy, saw that his hands were gripping the wheel too tightly. He was clearly disconcerted by her new position. He managed his guilt over his infidelity by glossing over the fact that he and Anna were doing anything untoward at all; the one time Anna had pushed him on the subject of Karen, genuinely interested in their relationship, he had first gone puce and then hidden his face in his hands, like a humiliated child.

  She changed the subject and told him about her Christmas, what little she could wring out of it. When she mentioned her Skype call with Marie-Anne and her dad, Tommy laughed.

  ‘I do find it funny that you and your sister have such similar names.’

  ‘Half-sister,’ said Anna. ‘Yeah, well, Dad forgot that he had me.’

  It wasn’t too far from the truth. When Marie-Anne was born, less than a year after Anna, her mother was unaware that Derek had recently fathered another daughter with another woman. Derek didn’t have the balls to tell her, or even the gumption to steer her away from a name that was so close to the one Janet had chosen.

  ‘And then I went down to the beach and had a swim in the . . .’

  ‘Jesus!’ said Tommy, slamming on his brakes. They jolted forward so sharply that Anna braced herself for the airbag. In front of the stopped car stood a small pack of stray dogs. Anna and Tommy stared at them and they stared back, unperturbed, before casually continuing across the road.

  ‘Suicidal dogs,’ said Anna.

  ‘I didn’t see them at all,’ said Tommy. A produce lorry beeped and overtook them, disappearing into a pink-tinted haze ahead.

  ‘A calima?’ said Tommy. ‘At this time of year? Has it been very warm?’

  ‘Quite,’ said Anna.

  The calimas – Saharan dust clouds – were much more common in summer, swirling over the Med and leaving a film of red dust in their wake.

  ‘Bugger,’ said Tommy. ‘We’ve got people arriving to view a villa thi
s afternoon. Mattie just cleaned it.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Anna, clicking her tongue in sympathy.

  ‘Now she’ll have to do the patio and windows again.’

  For a moment, sitting there in the front, Anna felt that she was Karen; this was the kind of conversation men had with their wives, not their mistresses. They drove on, Tommy now silent in concentration, passing through the row of huge greenhouses that were sandwiched between the coast and the mountains. Such was the dust, Anna could identify them only by the hiss of their sprinkler systems.

  She switched on the radio. It was tuned to the local English-language station, and the closing seconds of ‘Hotel California’ faded to an ident: ‘Warning, this product might contain nuts!’ The host then continued what appeared to be a long-running phone-in game, titled ‘What shapes are not what they seem?’

  A woman called in. ‘Trafalgar Square?’

  ‘Very good, very good!’ said the host, a one-time Radio One DJ from the eighties. ‘We’ve had that one already, but it’s a great one!’

  ‘I’ve got another,’ said the woman. ‘The Bermuda Triangle.’

  ‘Ooh, yeah!’ said the DJ. ‘What went on there, eh? Spooky stuff.’

  Anna glanced over at Tommy. He had on his dolphin-like smile, but there was no sign that he found the question ‘what shapes are not what they seem?’ absurd in any way. Maybe it wasn’t and everyone got it except her.

  As they approached the last garage before the mountain road, she asked him to pull in. The sight of the forecourt jarred her. She had come here almost every day during her time at the finca; not only was it the nearest place for food and fuel, it was where their mail was delivered. The same silent, wraith-like man was behind the counter and, although he didn’t say hello, he recognized her, and brought out a bundle of post from the back of the shop, handing it to her without a word. She paid for two gas bottles and lugged them out towards the car. Tommy was texting – presumably Karen or Mattie about the cleaning – and didn’t notice her for a few seconds, but when he did he jumped out to give her a hand putting them in the boot.

  ‘Do you want to know why we’re going up to the finca?’ she asked, when they were back on the move. ‘Someone’s renting it.’

  Tommy looked at her, finally torn away from thoughts of calima dust.

  ‘A Spanish guy wants to stay, for at least three months.’

  ‘Wow,’ he said, frowning. ‘Really?’

  ‘Great, isn’t it?’

  ‘On his own?’

  ‘I don’t know. With his family, maybe.’

  ‘Did he come through us?’ He looked over at her, alert. ‘Marea Moves?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Anna. ‘There’s a For Sale sign outside the house, on the gate, with my phone number on it.’

  ‘So he would have gone past the house and seen it?’

  ‘Suppose so.’

  ‘That’s a bit weird, isn’t it?’ said Tommy. They were climbing the mountain road now, and he winced at the sound of his exhaust pipe scraping the unpaved surface.

  ‘I don’t see why,’ said Anna. ‘Maybe he and his wife were on a walk in the hills and loving the scenery and thinking to themselves, wouldn’t it be nice to live up here for a bit, so the kids can build dens in the woods and Conchita can write that novel she’s been talking about, and then they passed a lovely looking house and saw a sign and thought, that’s fate . . .’

  ‘Yes, I guess,’ said Tommy. ‘Does he know you don’t have a pool?’

  ‘Yessss,’ said Anna, drawing the word out like a teenager. Then she heard herself adding, ‘Actually, he said he might buy it, afterwards.’

  ‘Oh wow!’ said Tommy. ‘Really? Amazing! Well done, darling!’

  He leaned over to give her a sporting kiss on the cheek.

  As they climbed the mountain, deeper into the pine forest, the light dimmed and radio reception cut out. The gradient suddenly became steeper, the road narrower, the bends sharper and more frequent. Anna looked out of the window at the tunnel of trees and thought back to her first time on this road with Michael, their first visit to the finca together after she had found the place. It was infinitely more magical than the photos suggested, and she was sure he’d love it as much as she did. And now, she was going to see his reaction to their new home.

  They’d stood side by side, gazing at that epic, soul-stirring view down the valley, and, more briefly, at the modest, derelict stone finca that had sat in this Elysian spot for centuries. The estate agent told them that the valley was known as the Magic Corridor, because it was on the migratory route for birds coming to and from Africa, and they were struck by the unexpected poetry. That’s exactly what it was. On the way back down the mountain, however, Michael had sunk into silence, and she’d started to worry that he was having doubts, that the place was too remote, the commitment too big, the renovation too huge a project. But then, he’d stopped the car at one of the passing places along the road, turned off the engine and wordlessly pulled her on top of him. As they fucked, a cat had appeared from nowhere and mewed outside the door, and Michael had whispered into her neck, ‘tu es mi vida’. It was the most Spanish she ever heard him speak.

  Then, there were all those journeys after they had moved in and were doing up the finca, when her ever-increasing familiarity with the twists and bumps of the road neatly coincided with the ever-increasing need to devote her thoughts to their relationship. Anna was barely conscious of the gear changes and hairpin bends as she turned over ambiguous things Michael had said, tried to second-guess his mood, mined her day for interesting anecdotes, planned how she could please him in bed that night. Later, towards the end, this road was where she got angry. Driving alone, she would howl and swear: the car was the only place in which she could safely vent her hurt and fury.

  There had been more fraught journeys than joyous ones, but Anna’s memory leapfrogged over those, back to those first heady months. She looked over at Tommy; his sunburnt neck; the way he winced as branches brushed the side of the car. It was a mistake to come up here now with him. She should have taken a real cab, found eighty euros from somewhere – she could have sold some things at the car boot sale, like the others did. Her feelings for Tommy were fine down in Marea, but up here in the mountains, fondness was not enough. The contrast between her situation then and now made her feel quietly devastated, realizing that the intensity with which she had once loved and was loved by a dazzling man would never happen to her again.

  They approached the turning for the house. Wordlessly, Anna signalled to Tommy. The gate to the grounds was still secured by the inch-thick chains she had put on before leaving. A For Sale sign with her number, painted in leftover Vert de Terre, was propped against it.

  As they got out, she saw Tommy boggling at the front garden, so wild and overgrown that the yellow front door was only just visible. The view to the left, down to the valley, was impeded by the rampant growth of the rosemary bush. Beyond, the almond grove had been thickened by rustling weeds, almost as tall as the denuded trees.

  ‘Golly. I hope your new tenant has a machete!’ he said.

  Anna didn’t reply. She was looking past the tangle of vegetation to the house, its blonde stones like rows of crammed, uneven teeth. Beyond it, the barren surface of a horseshoe mountain that led into a range, the tallest of them topped with helmets of stone. Above it, a pale blue sky, with scribbles of cloud. The finca’s facade looked just as it had when she first saw it; as it had looked for centuries. Like the skin of an avocado, it gave no clue to its condition within.

  ‘Chilly up here, isn’t it,’ said Tommy.

  They each picked up a gas bottle. She unlocked the gate and led Tommy up the path to the house, the path that she and Michael had mapped themselves when drunk one evening, meaning it wasn’t a direct route but a meandering river of gravel that twisted inconsequentially before reaching the front door. The air was, unusually, dead silent: no buzz of insects, no growl of distant farm machinery, not even a strangulated d
og bark. The crunch of their feet on the stones felt horribly loud. She imagined the sound passing down the valley, the people in the next village pricking up their ears.

  The wisteria she had planted beside the front door when they arrived had inched obediently up the stones, but it was still far from covering the house. How foolishly optimistic she had been. She wanted to tell it not to bother growing any more.

  ‘Don’t you have any window grilles up, Anna?’ said Tommy.

  ‘It’s shuttered from the inside,’ she said, looking through the bunch for the right key.

  He exhaled theatrically.

  ‘You’re lucky no one’s broken in.’

  ‘Listen,’ she said suddenly, turning to him, ‘do you mind if I go in by myself?’

  ‘Oh! No. Of course not. I’ll clean the car,’ said Tommy, and gripped her shoulder before turning back. She couldn’t tell whether he was upset or not, whether he understood. She had told him very little about what had happened up here, just that it hadn’t worked out.

  She stared at the glossy buttercup paint of the front door as she listened to Tommy crunch back across the gravel, and the creak of the gate. Then, she turned the key in the lock and slowly pushed the door open. It was a heavy piece of wood; as the cold, trapped air from inside reached her, she felt she was heaving off the lid of a tomb.

  She stood on the threshold as light from outside washed the dim, shuttered sitting room. There had been no break-in. The place was as she had left it. Or rather, the furniture was still in position, pictures still hanging, jugs and books in place – but something essential had gone. The space felt embalmed; at once familiar and foreign.

  She was reluctant to step off the threshold. To the right, some bits of paper lay scattered on the floor. Michael’s sketches, fallen from their string. She walked tentatively into the middle of the room. Dust shrouded every surface, as if the calima had found its way indoors. Beside the Knole sofa she noticed a forgotten empty bottle, and there was the smell of cold ash from the last fire. That would have been from just before Michael left: that weekend when his friends, Farah and Kurt, came to stay. It had been far too hot then to have a fire; Anna had lit it for something to do, for a few minutes of distraction from what was playing out around her. She remembered kneeling in front of it, unnoticed, as Michael and his friends talked, putting her face so close to the flames that her cheeks scalded.