Читать книгу The Bed and Breakfast on the Beach: A gorgeous feel-good read from the bestselling author of One Day in December - Kat French, Kat French - Страница 8

Winnie checked her cross-body bag for the millionth time to make sure she had the keys to Villa Valentina zipped safely inside the side pocket.

‘We’ll have to get some more keys cut as soon as we can,’ she said, settling her bag into her lap on the hour-long ferry ride from Skiathos across to Skelidos. Now that they were almost back at the villa, her nerves had kicked in hard. Ajax had emailed to let them know that he and Nikolas had left for Athens a couple of days back and the place was locked up and waiting for them. They’d bought it fully furnished with several upcoming reservations already in the book, so for all intents and purposes they could just turn the key, open the windows and be up and running. It sounded quite easy, put like that, until a worrying thought hit her.

‘Oh, God! I hope someone has been feeding The Fonz since Ajax left!’ She looked from Frankie to Stella sitting on the opposite bench. ‘What if he’s starving, or dehydrated?’

Stella shook her head. ‘Donkeys are like camels, I should think. They retain water.’

Both Frankie and Winnie looked at her, taken aback. ‘Surely he’d need a hump for that?’ Frankie said, doubtful.

Stella shrugged and dropped her Aviators over her eyes; the donkey was the least of her worries. She’d had a job offer a couple of days ago from old business rivals of Jones & Bow; on the one hand it was reassuring to be head-hunted, but on the other they were offering a pitiful package and hadn’t even included a company car. She hated the loss of freedom being without wheels represented, and couldn’t help but feel that the derisory job offer had been designed more to put her in her place rather than to genuinely recruit her. It stung, and it rammed home the fact that she wasn’t as indispensable as she’d always allowed herself the indulgence of believing. She hadn’t replied yet. Her instinct had been to tell them where to shove their pitiful offer, but she was slowly coming around to the horrible realisation that she might not have the luxury of being so hasty. All in all she was thoroughly miserable, and much as the sunshine was welcome, she hated the feeling that she was running away. Stella Daniels didn’t run from anything or anyone. She’d take a week or so to recharge, and then decide what to do about the offer.

Frankie’s phone bleeped in her hand luggage, and she scrabbled for it in case there was anything wrong at home. The boys had both been unflatteringly thrilled at the idea of her moving to a Mediterranean island. She’d expected a wobbly lip or two, a ‘Please don’t go, Mum,’ but what she’d got from Josh was a ‘Go for it, Mum,’ and Elliott was already merrily planning his free holiday to Greece later in the summer. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad being apart from them after all; if they came to stay she’d get some proper time with them for a change. Family holidays had always had been British bucket-and-spade affairs when the twins were little, and in later years they hadn’t been at all enamoured of the idea of being stuck in a hotel with their olds. Maybe it would have been different if she and Gavin had been more in love; there might have been more laughter and good times. As it was they only really talked about things to do with the kids, and once they’d moved out they’d been left crunching toast in noisy silence at the breakfast table.

‘I’ve got a long-lost uncle in Nigeria who wants my bank details so he can wire me ten million pounds,’ she sighed, reading the phishing message on her phone.

‘Bugger. If only he’d texted you yesterday, you could have stayed at home and bought a mansion instead,’ Stella said.

Winnie fidgeted with excitement in her seat. ‘I’d still have come back here today, even if I’d won the lottery. Aren’t you dying to get in the villa and have a good nose around without Ajax and Nik?’

Frankie’s face relaxed into a smile as she tucked her phone away. ‘I’m heading straight for the bath in the Cleopatra Room before I do anything else. I splashed out on Jo Malone bubble bath especially for it.’

Winnie leaned her forehead against the warm window and looked out over the vast, still sea stretching out around them, and then up at the even bluer, cloudless sky overhead. It was the kind of sky that couldn’t help but fill you with optimism and hope; imagine a whole summer, or a whole lifetime, like this. With every extra mile she put between herself and Rory, Winnie sat a little taller and breathed a little easier. She dug in her bag again, pulled out her English/Greek dictionary and flicked through it.

‘What are you looking for?’ Stella asked.

After a pause, Winnie glanced up. ‘Evdaimonia,’ she said, faltering over her pronunciation as she closed the book and clutched it against her chest. ‘It means bliss.’

‘Remind me how to say bliss again?’ Stella huffed half an hour later, pushing her sunnies onto the top of her flat, frazzled hair as they all collapsed like a scuttle of red lobsters onto the shaded terrace of Villa Valentina.

Their taxi driver from the port had been in a tearing hurry and they’d assured him that they’d be fine moving their luggage from the roadside to the villa at the far end of the beach. It wasn’t all that far, but they hadn’t accounted for the fact that it was impossible to drag heavy-wheeled suitcases across deep, fine sand without feeling as if you’re hauling a dead horse up a hill. As a consequence, their return to the villa wasn’t at all the champagne-cork-popping experience Winnie had envisaged; it was more of a someone-get-me-some-water-before-I-die situation.

‘Evdasomething?’ she puffed, tipping her bag out on the top of her suitcase and plucking the keys out from amongst the clutter of sun cream, books, lip balm and hair bobbles.

‘Evian?’ Frankie croaked hopefully, taking off her sunhat and fanning herself with it. Her outfit had survived the journey surprisingly well; her long linen sundress had a certain safari chic to it and her trusty sunhat had done a decent job of keeping the worst of the heat away from her skin. She was one of those gamine girls who could carry off a pixie cut, all long limbs and pale freckled skin. Her mother always liked to claim they had French heritage, and every now and then when he’d had a few drinks Gavin had called her his Audrey Hepburn. It was one of the nicest things he’d ever said.

Winnie hauled herself up and then stretched out her hands to pull the others up.

‘Come on. Let’s all go in together for the first time.’

Stella brushed sand from the bum of her shorts. ‘I’m not carrying either of you over the threshold.’

‘Too right,’ Winnie snorted. ‘I tried that once with Rory and I think it jinxed us from the beginning.’

‘Gavin tried it too. I was seven months pregnant at the time and he put his back out for the first month of our marriage.’

‘You two are enough to put a girl off marriage for life.’ Stella took the keys from Winnie and studied the bewilderingly large collection. ‘Any idea which one it is?’

Winnie shook her head. ‘Not a clue.’ Studying the door, she added, ‘Probably something big and old.’

‘They’re all big and old,’ Stella muttered, sliding one after the other into the lock and giving it a hopeful jiggle. Finally, the last but one key slid into place more easily than the others, and it turned with a satisfying clunk. ‘Looks like we’re in, ladies,’ Stella said, turning the doorknob and pushing the door open.

Even though they knew what lay on the other side of the door, it felt completely different stepping inside Villa Valentina knowing it was their new home instead of their temporary reprieve from the daily grind. Frankie closed the door and they all stood in the centre of the high-ceilinged space, gazing around in silence.

‘Is it a bit eerie?’ Stella said, screwing her nose up at the stale air.

‘Don’t say that!’ Winnie said, frowning. ‘It’s just empty. It’s been waiting for us to arrive.’

‘Don’t go all hippy on us, Win,’ Frankie said, laying her hat down on the reception desk. ‘Let’s get some windows open and air the place through. It’s like a bloody oven in here.’

Frankie’s calm, practical approach got them all moving, flinging open windows and doors, then dragging their luggage inside. Winnie spotted an old radio behind reception and switched it on, instantly transported back to their first stay on the island by the familiar Radio Skelidos jingle. The mix of Greek and international pop music added life and movement to the place, wiping away the stillness that had spooked Stella.

‘I found the kitchen!’ Frankie called, and the others followed her voice down the hallway to the back of the building. Ajax had given them a brief guided tour, but it was a big old place and it was going to take some getting used to before any of them knew it like the back of their hands. Stella and Winnie found Frankie unscrewing a fresh two-litre bottle of water, and she’d magicked up three tall glasses and filled them with ice.

‘Ajax left the electricity turned on and a few things in the fridge for us,’ she said. ‘We have ice, we have water and we have wine. What more could a girl want?’

Winnie’s tummy rumbled. ‘Food?’

Frankie shook her head. ‘We need to go shopping.’

‘I don’t think I can face the walk,’ Stella grumbled, gulping down water. ‘The last one nearly killed me. Can I ride the donkey?’

‘Who do you think you are, the Virgin Mary?’ Frankie grinned, adding slices of lemon to their glasses as Winnie jumped off her stool and crossed to open the wooden shutters covering the windows.

‘We need to check on The Fonz,’ she said, craning her neck to look in the garden. ‘God, it’s a bit of a mess out there. I can’t see him.’ She rattled the back door and found it locked.

‘The key’s there,’ Stella nodded towards a hook on the wall and watched as Winnie grappled with the old lock and then threw the bolts. ‘Watch out for snakes in the long grass,’ she said at the last minute.

Winnie turned back, startled. ‘Really?’

Stella shrugged then shook her head. ‘Pulling your leg.’

Winnie rolled her eyes and stepped gingerly out onto the cracked, crazy-paved patio.

‘Donkey,’ she called, in an inviting, sing song voice. ‘Mr Fonz …’ She moved to check down the side of the building, and then ventured further across the parched grass. The garden looked to stretch back quite a way and be walled around the edge by a low, pale, rough stone wall. ‘I think we’ve got fruit trees out here,’ she called back. ‘But I can’t see any sign of a donkey.’

Perplexed, she picked her way along a path haphazardly tiled into the grass, making her way down the length of the garden to the wall at the bottom. Along the way she passed bright wildflowers that would be great on the tables out front and several different types of fruit tree, but no donkey in sight. God, what if he’d keeled over somewhere? She cautiously scanned the ground beneath the trees and bushes but to no avail. It was perplexing really, because there was no obvious exit for a donkey, and the waist-high wall seemed much too big for The Fonz to scale. Wandering back towards the villa, she made a makeshift apron from the bottom of her T-shirt, filled it with fruit plucked from the trees and pondered the missing animal.

‘Plums, I think,’ she said, giving up the search and unloading her haul onto the big, scrubbed kitchen table where the other girls were sitting. ‘And cherries.’

Frankie picked up one of the plump apple-green plums and sniffed it. ‘Greengages,’ she said, then bit it. ‘Oh my God!’ She rolled her eyes in bliss. ‘So sweet.’

The others helped themselves, and for a few moments they all sat around the table eating fruit from their garden and feeling the welcome rush of sugar in their veins.

‘I feel like Barbara from The Good Life,’ Stella said. ‘Have we got any chickens I can kill?’

Frankie loaded the rest of the fruit into a wide, shallow ceramic bowl on the table. ‘You wouldn’t be Barbara. You’d be the what’s her name, the neighbour. The posh one.’

Stella considered it for a second, and then laughed. ‘You’re right. Winnie can be Barbara and kill the chickens, you can be Nigella and roast it, and I’ll be the snooty one in the kaftan who drinks G&T.’

Frankie held her hand up and high-fived Stella silently.

‘I think I could get into gardening,’ Winnie said, warming to the role of Barbara. ‘And I have some cut-off dungarees. I can pull it off.’

‘Barbara wouldn’t lose her donkey though,’ Frankie said, shaking her head.

They all jumped as someone knocked on the back door.

‘Maybe it’s the donkey,’ Stella whispered, making them all laugh as Winnie crossed the kitchen and pulled the door wide.

It wasn’t the donkey. It was a man, and by the looks of his scowl, an unimpressed one. He looked dressed for farming in breeches, braces and a loose cheesecloth shirt, and if he wasn’t scowling he’d probably be quite attractive.

‘Kalimera,’ Winnie said, hesitantly trying out her rudimentary Greek.

He let forth a torrent of fast, unintelligible Greek. When he’d finished, she frowned and shook her head regretfully.

‘Err … signomi … my Greek is awful.’

He stared at her in irate silence.

‘Signomi …’

Winnie glanced over her shoulder for help from the others, but found them both wide-eyed and tongue-tied by the arrival of the stranger in their midst.

‘Help me out here?’ she muttered.

‘Feliz navidad?’ Stella tried from her seat at the table, and the stranger lifted his eyebrows and sighed heavily.

‘You just wished me Merry Christmas in Spanish. It’s early May, and this is Greece.’

‘You speak English,’ Winnie said, thinking that he might have made that clear right away rather than let her struggle for his own amusement.

‘Better than you speak Greek, evidently,’ he said. ‘I take it you’re the new owners?’

Frankie came to stand beside Winnie. ‘We are. I’m Frankie, and this is Winnie. And you are …?’ Winnie admired her friend’s polite, cool tone.

‘I’m the guy who rescued your bloody donkey. Poor darn thing would have died in this heat without any water.’ There was an unmissable hint of an Australian twang to his pronunciation. ‘He’s in my olive grove with Chachi when you can be arsed to fetch him.’

Oh, right. Winnie felt her fists ball until her fingernails dug into her palms. ‘Look, Mr … I don’t know your name because you didn’t bother to tell us … we only arrived half an hour ago and I’ve already been out to look for the donkey. It isn’t our fault that Ajax didn’t make proper arrangements for him.’

The guy looked bored. ‘Typical women. Blame someone else and it’ll all be all right.’

Winnie drew in a sharp breath. She’d had enough of men pissing her off back home, there was no way some stranger was going to rain on her parade on the first morning of their brand-new life.

‘Typical man, shooting your mouth off without knowing the facts.’ She stuck her chin out at him and crossed her arms across her chest as Stella came to stand on her other side.

He looked at all three of them for a second, and then seemed to lose interest and turned to leave.

‘I won’t charge you for the olives he’s eaten. Consider it a neighbourly welcome-to-the-island gift.’

He didn’t even turn around as he spoke, and Stella said ‘Rude bastard,’ more than loud enough for him to hear as she closed the door with a pointed slam.

‘He’s our new neighbour?’ Frankie said, pulling three wine glasses out of the wall cupboard.

‘Sounds that way.’ Winnie reached to get the chilled bottle of white out of the fridge.

Stella rooted around in the cutlery drawer until she pulled out a corkscrew and waved it in the air in triumph. Flopping back at the kitchen table, she cracked the wine and filled their glasses. After a pause for them all to take a much-needed first sip, she held her glass out between them in a toast.

‘To our first day on Skelidos.’

‘And the fact that our donkey isn’t dead,’ Frankie said, touching her glass to the others.

‘And the fact that we have a grotty ass of an Australian neighbour,’ Winnie added. ‘Bloody man and his generalisations.’

Stella eyed Winnie slyly over her wine glass. ‘He was quite hot though. In a grotty-ass kind of way.’

‘Was he?’ Winnie took a good gulp of wine. ‘I didn’t notice.’

‘You so did,’ Frankie laughed. ‘All that red-faced, stuttery Greek and Lady Diana eye flutters.’

Winnie rolled her eyes. ‘All right, so maybe I thought he was OK until he opened his mouth. Now I just think he’s an arrogant gobshite who’s kidnapped my donkey.’ She shot a look at Stella. ‘At least I didn’t wish him Merry Christmas. In Spanish.’

Stella shrugged. ‘Pity I didn’t know how to say piss off instead.’

‘I’m going to learn before I go and get The Fonz back.’

Frankie started to laugh. ‘His donkey’s name is Chachi. Fonzy and Chachi?’

‘Someone around here was clearly a Happy Days fan.’ Stella grinned. ‘I wonder where Joanie is?’

Winnie reached for the bottle and topped up their glasses. ‘She probably upped and left because she couldn’t stand living with a misogynistic pig.’

Stella and Frankie both looked at her levelly across the table. They didn’t say as much, but Winnie knew from their eyes that they were hoping that she wasn’t going to stay angry for ever.

‘Shall we go and burn our bras in his olive orchard?’ Stella said.

Frankie nodded. ‘Or chain ourselves to his trees until he apologises?’

Winnie shook her head, laughing softly into her wine glass. She might not have much time for men at the moment, but these two crazy, fabulous women restored her faith in the world every damn day.

Pushing her chair back with a satisfying scrape against the stone flags, she stood up and rolled her shoulders.

‘Hold my coat, girls. I’m going to get our donkey.’