Читать книгу The Sunshine and Biscotti Club - Jenny Oliver - Страница 16

Alone in her old lemon scented room Eve checked her phone. A text from Peter saying ‘That’s good’ in response to her previous ‘Landed safely x’. He hadn’t put an x. But then Peter never put an x. He had whole dinner party discussions about the fact it was an x not a kiss and that it was completely unnecessary and ridiculous to include on a text message let alone an email. She often wondered if the script he was writing was full of rants about the misuse of letters in instant messaging. He’d asked her to read it once a couple of years ago and she’d been so sleep deprived and so stressed with the twins that it had taken her two weeks to get round to it by which time he’d changed his mind and gone into her email and deleted it from her inbox and then her deleted items.

She wanted to write something back; her fingers hovered over the keys of her phone, but she didn’t know what.

In the end she thought it best to leave her phone where it was, get changed into more weather appropriate attire, and get outside to stop herself from dwelling on it all.

Wearing a pair of skinny blue jeans cut off at the knee, a yellow vest top that was showing its age, and an equally dilapidated pair of espadrilles that her daughter Maisey said made her feet look like lumps of cheese, Eve made her way out of the hotel, across the terrace, and down through the lemon grove in the direction of the lake.

The scent of citrus intensified the closer she got, the huge waxy great lemons hanging heavy from the branches, all knobbly and pitted. She wanted to reach up and take a bite straight through the skin; feel her eyes water as she squeezed the juice into her mouth.

It made her think of the first perfume she’d ever made—from a bag of Limoncello lemons Silvia had sent as congratulations on having the twins. There was a note that said, ‘The beautiful thing about women is they can change as many times as they like. You’re already a wonderful mother. Who will you be next?’

Eve had stood staring at the lemons. These wonderful fat things that weren’t to do with feeding babies or trying to work out why they were crying, or why she was crying as she sat alone in the draughty, crumbling cottage they had bought after she’d got pregnant. After she had been seduced by a photo in a Homes and Gardens magazine in the doctor’s waiting room of a picturesque village where everyone had chickens and rose gardens and muddy wellington boots at the front door.

The lemons connected her back to the world. Not the pre-pregnancy one where she worked in marketing for a massive beauty company in the city. Where so many people wanted to talk to her every day she would sometimes put her Out of Office on and go and sit on the fire escape with her laptop just to get some work done. But the one before even her marriage, where she smelt the rain in the middle of the night and the bark of trees.

So she had sliced the lemons and she had squeezed them and she had gone outside and chopped all the heads off the roses in the rose garden, and then she had found the unused wedding-present pestle and mortar in the back of the cupboard and started to see if she could capture it all in a fragrance. She had got to work on who she would be next.

Now, as she popped out from the lemon groves and onto the lakeside shore, she was suddenly stopped short by a voice saying, ‘All right, Eve.’

She had to take a second to get her breath back from the shock.

He knew her name.

The guy got up from where he was sitting cross-legged on the pebbles. ‘Didn’t mean to scare you.’

Eve turned. The sun was in her eyes.

The voice made her expect dreadlocks, an arm almost covered in ink, and eyes that could spear a person from a hundred paces.

A wisp of cloud passed in front of the sun.

Holy shit. The dreads were gone. The eyes were still the same.

‘Hello, Jimmy,’ she said, her mind almost short-circuiting at the sight of him.