30
‘I’m going to miss seeing these mountains every day.’
‘Hampstead Heath isn’t quite the same, is it?’ Tom agrees, gazing out across the water to where the dark brown masses of centuries-old earth stand like sentries along the coastline.
‘The colours, too,’ I add, lifting my sunglasses so I can fully appreciate the fresh cobalt of the Mediterranean sweeping against the golden shore. The sky above us is the same piercing shade of blue that Disney animators choose for their princesses’ eyes, and so ever-reaching that it makes me feel dizzy to behold it.
We’ve been sitting on the sand for about half an hour now, having dropped Nancy off at the beach bar on the way down here, but both Claudette and Theo are running behind schedule. While I fully expect it of her, it’s not like our boss to be tardy, and I’ve been driving Tom mad by checking my phone every few minutes. I’m desperate to see him, but terrified at the same time. Will he even be speaking to me after I rejected his offer last night?
Claudette has obviously made up with Carlos, because a few minutes later she arrives on the back of his moped and kisses him goodbye for long enough to earn herself some puking noises from Tom and me. She’s also very clearly chosen to forget about the frostiness between the two of us yesterday, because after flinging her bag down on to the sand, she greets me with an enthusiastic kiss on each cheek.
‘Good night?’ guesses Tom, and she smiles knowingly.
‘That stinks,’ I remark, holding my nose as Carlos speeds away in a cloud of dust and petrol fumes, but Claudette doesn’t hear me because she’s too busy pulling off her dress over her head.
‘What?’ she demands, looking at Tom and me as we exchange a glance. ‘I need to make the most of this weather while we are still here. There is as much chance of proper sunshine in England as there is of Tom having sex again before he is forty.’
‘Nice,’ Tom deadpans, and I chuckle at the two of them, grateful that some of the past week’s tension seems to have finally eased. I’m still not entirely happy with Claudette for a number of reasons, but I just can’t muster up the energy to be annoyed with her today. My mind keeps straying back to Nancy and the phone call I overheard last night. She refused to talk about it on the walk up to Tom’s apartment, and then proceeded to persuade him and me to go to Diego’s restaurant for dinner. The cynical part of my mind suspected that, not content with spooning and doing heaven knows what else with Tom and fooling around with Ignacio, Nancy was now planning to have some more fun with my teenage amour. However, when we got there, she barely spoke two words to Diego all night. In fact, she was so despondent in her responses to his over-the-top flirting that I ended up feeling sorry for the guy.
‘Where is Nancy?’ is Claudette’s predictable next question.
‘At the beach bar,’ I tell her, pulling my vest top away from my back before it adheres itself to the sweat. The temperature is rising by the minute, and it’s so hot now that I’ve had to dig little holes in the sand for my feet to sit in because the top layer is burning my skin.
‘Where is our esteemed leader?’ Tom asks Claudette, but she’s now lying flat on her towel and so ignores him.
‘Should I call him?’ I say out loud, but not to anyone in particular. ‘I should, shouldn’t I? Just to check that everything’s okay.’
‘Whatever you think.’ Tom is dismissive. He’s wearing a cap today to keep the sun out of his eyes, and his hair is sticking out above his ears. I reach up to tuck it in for him as I press the button to call, but as soon as I do, a ringing sound comes from directly behind us, causing both Tom and me to jump round in surprise. Claudette, of course, hasn’t even flinched.
‘That was me, sorry!’ I tell Theo, getting to my feet so quickly that I don’t notice the fact that my skirt is stuck inside my bikini bottoms.
‘She was worried about you,’ puts in Tom, yanking it back out for me.
‘Worried? Why?’ Theo looks distracted, and steps past us before I have a chance to answer.
‘Tom!’ he barks.
‘Boss?’
‘Get the camera set up. We should capture these fishermen here.’
That’s Theo all over, noticing the human element of the setting while the rest of us are merely hypnotised by the view of the landscape. Well, I say the rest of us – Claudette has had her eyes resolutely shut since she arrived.
The fishermen are, in fact, fisher-boys, judging by their skinny little limbs and unlined faces, which break open in wide grins as I make my way along the concrete jetty to ask if it’s okay to include them in our film.
‘Sí, sí, sí!’ they trumpet happily, taking it in turns to flex their non-existent muscles and swing their rods into the air.
‘You’ll scare the fish!’ I tell them, but this only causes even more laughter, and I can sense Theo’s irritation burning a hole in the back of my skull. By the time I’ve managed to explain that all we want them to do for us is to sit or stand still, exactly as they were doing before, and quelled the inevitable demonstrative outpouring of argument that they all put up, a good fifteen minutes have passed. Add that to the forty-five or so that we were already behind schedule this morning and you’ve got yourself one grumpy Greek director.
‘Someone got out of bed on the wrong side,’ mutters Tom under his breath as we eventually break for lunch. Theo has grudgingly agreed to stop for a quick bite to eat at a bakery-cum-café on the opposite side of the road to the beach, but not even the smell of freshly deep-fried churros seems able to rouse him from his melancholy. I wish I could cheer him up with a kiss, but I know it’s a bad idea. It’s as if his ill temper is holding up a hand, telling the three of us not to come any closer under any circumstances. Could it all be down to the fact that I refused his offer last night? I don’t have enough of an ego to believe it. So what, then?
Tom has apparently forgotten that he ate a pizza the size of a tractor wheel for dinner last night and has ordered himself another slice for lunch. I find that I can’t face food, which is very unlike me, so I order a fruit salad in a panic and then have to endure Claudette talking at length about how fortunate she is that she never has to diet.
‘I just don’t gain weight,’ she says breezily, and I’m sure I can hear the sound of twenty thousand or so women gritting their teeth in unison.
Theo ignores her and rubs his temples with two long, tanned fingers.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask at last, being sure to keep my voice at a murmur level.
Theo stops rubbing and sighs.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper, but he shakes his head a fraction.
The waitress arrives with our second round of drinks and a bowl of salted almonds to go with them, which Tom dives into despite the fact he’s still chewing on a mouthful of his main course.
‘Ah, almonds,’ Claudette cries, clapping her hands together. ‘Theo, shall we ask for some Manchego to go with them?’
There’s a loud crash as my spoon hits the bowl of fruit salad.
‘If you want,’ Theo says, eyeing his coffee but not picking it up, and Claudette lifts an arm to attract attention.
Manchego and almonds! my brain shouts at me, stamping its feet for effect.
‘Man …’ I begin, but the word withers and dies before it’s out of my mouth. Tom stops tackling the large, stringy lump of mozzarella that he was attempting to swallow and frowns at me.
She knows about the Manchego and almonds, my memory pipes up, this time settling for a large metaphorical elbow in the ribs. I haven’t picked up my spoon from where I dropped it, and now my cheeks have turned the same colour as the watermelon chunks in my salad.
‘Oh yum,’ Claudette says happily as the waitress returns with the cheese. ‘Cumin seeds as well – très bon!’
I watch in horrified awe as she snatches up Theo’s side plate and spoons a selection of nuts and Manchego on to it, before returning to her own lunch.
How does she know about this odd flavour sensation? Theo only told me – that night at the villa, the night that we kissed for the very first time.
But she knows about it, too. Claudette knows and either Theo told her, or she taught him. I’m not sure which is worse, but at this moment the idea of either explanation is making me feel like I want to throw up the few pieces of orange I managed to eat.
‘Hannah?’
I glance in Tom’s direction.
‘Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘I’m fine,’ I parrot automatically, reminding myself acutely of Nancy.
Why do people always say that? Is it just the inbred nature of all British people to tell another person that they’re fine when in reality they’re absolutely anything but? You could be in an ambulance with your torso on one stretcher and your legs on another, and you’d still try to persuade the bloke driving the thing to hospital that you were ‘fine to walk there’. Lunacy.
The thing is, Tom knows me far better than Theo or Claudette do, and therefore he knows that for some reason the bottom has just fallen out of my world, and now he’s trying to communicate with me across the table through the medium of mime.
‘Why are you flapping your arms?’ Claudette enquires, her words seasoned with a large spoonful of disdain.
Tom stops doing an impression of an injured pigeon and looks at me knowingly. What does he want me to do, stand up and announce loudly that I think Theo and Claudette have been having it off in between feeding each other nuts and cheese? That she knows things that he shared with me in an intimate setting?
In the end, I don’t get to say or do anything, because Claudette is suddenly up on her feet and is rushing towards the door.
‘Mon dieu!’ she exclaims, turning back to face us. ‘It is raining.’
‘It hardly ever rains here,’ I say stupidly, echoing what Elaine told me by La Fuente the very first time we met. It is raining, though. I can hear it. And now that Claudette has pushed open the doors, I can smell it, too.
‘There’s nothing like rain in a hot country to remind you just how hot it really is,’ marvels Tom, pointing down at the steaming pavement tiles on the other side of the glass. I have a sudden and utterly ridiculous urge to run out and start dancing in it, but of course I don’t. Not here, not when Theo is watching.
‘Shall we film it?’ Claudette wants to know, but our director shakes his handsome head.
‘No, I don’t think so. I think the magic of the rain here is as Tom says, in the smell and the feel. It will be difficult to translate that into film. I fear that it will simply look like rain, and the audience will associate it with the coldness they are used to in England. I don’t want that.’
It’s the most Theo’s said all day, and both Tom and I look at him in surprise.
I’m torn between reaching across the table to hold his hand and upending the bloody Manchego cheese with cumin seeds on his head. In the end, I settle for neither, which it turns out is a good decision because as soon as it becomes clear that this rain isn’t going anywhere fast, Theo looks me in the eye for the first time all day and tells me he’ll drive me over to Elaine’s studio for my next interview.
‘Oh no, I’ll be fine,’ I say. Predictable as ever.
He fixes me with one of those no-nonsense gazes of his.
‘I insist.’