Jenny Oliver - The Sunshine and Biscotti Club

‘You want to come in for a drink?’ he asked, his presence like a looming shadow beside her.

‘No,’ she said, annoyed with her blush, annoyed that he’d had any effect on her at all.

His mouth quirked as he watched her with his lazy gaze. ‘Do you ever say yes?’

‘Yes,’ she said and then turned away to carry on along the boardwalk.

She felt him still watching.

It was like being stalked by a tiger. He was somehow primal. The word made her snort as she strutted away.

Primal. It was a word her mother had used once about the new postman. She would refuse to open the door to him when he knocked. Jessica had never understood what she was on about.

‘Are you staying at the Limoncello?’ she heard him call after her but she didn’t reply.

She heard him laugh and kicked herself for not just saying yes.

She could hear her mother, ‘Say one thing to him and he’ll be in your bedroom window at night.’

Jessica hadn’t thought about her mother so much in years. But it stood to reason that as soon as she lost her sense of self the insidious voice would creep back in. All her good work ruined. She caught sight of one of the bright red curls that had come loose from her ponytail, remembered her mother pulling one like a spring when she was naughty and telling her it was the devil inside her. She pushed the curl back into the elastic band and blew out a breath.

It was holidays. She blamed holidays entirely. They made the mind run wild with too much free time. Really, she hadn’t allowed her mum into her head since she’d walked out of the door to the sound of her pleading, ‘You can’t leave, Jessica. You can’t leave us.’ Then, ‘You always were a bad girl. We tried. Leave and you won’t be coming back. You hear me? You won’t be welcome.’ To finally, ‘I’ll pray for you.’

Jessica shuddered. Then to make matters worse an image of Miles arriving popped into her head and was only dispelled by the guy shouting, ‘It was a pleasure to meet you. Hopefully I will see you around.’

Jessica turned and walked backwards a couple of steps on the boardwalk. ‘Not if I can help it,’ she shouted.

And he laughed, loud and booming, hard enough for her to see his shoulders shake.

Until she saw it again, Eve had forgotten how much she adored the Limoncello Hotel. If, at that moment, she had been asked to list her top five places in the world the Limoncello would fight for one of the top spots.

She remembered the summers she’d spent here with Libby, as she followed her up the steps to the entrance hall. She could picture the red and gold wallpaper, dark and imposing, the wooden chandeliers flickering with fake candle lightbulbs, the blackened oil paintings of shipwrecks. She remembered the wide-armed welcome from Libby’s eccentric, outspoken, lovely aunt Silvia who was desperate to know the gossip, to know who they were having sex with, what their ambitions were for the future—always probing, always pushing. Here they played at being adults. Straight out of school they sipped Campari on the terrace and pretended to like it.

Eve knew that for Libby it was a welcome escape from the chaos of her family, a chance for her to lie on her back in the lake and talk to no one, to spend evenings in the kitchen with her aunt as she worked—hissing up clams and squeezing lemons so the pan smoked—to make a spaghetti vongole that left diners lifting the bowls to their lips to drain the last of the sauce, or preparing tiny tortellini packed with sweet tomato ragu.

But, for Eve, it was a wonderland. A lesson in possibilities. They trawled antique markets together, lazed in the sun by the lake getting drunk, swam into the derelict boathouses—the water pitch black and the broken rafters filled with bats. Eve would stroll the corridors peering at the art on the walls and Silvia would appear by her shoulder saying, ‘I won that in Monte Carlo, idiot couldn’t pay his debt. Do you want it? Take it, I’ve looked at it for far too long.’ Eve would never dream of taking anything. It belonged there, at the Limoncello. But it wasn’t just the art, it was the smells; the scents of the place. Silvia would lead them into the lemon grove and make them smell the bark of the tree, the leaves, the fruit as it hung gnarled and pitted on the branches. She would give them neat lemon juice to drink that made their eyes water. She would wake them up in the middle of the night when it was raining and make them stand on the terrace to sniff the air. Everything was a sense: a taste, a smell, a mood. Silvia would waft down the corridors, the scent of warm wax polish and lemons heady in the air, the dust swirling in the sunlight and say, ‘If I could bottle this, girls, I’d be the happiest woman alive.’

Now, though, when Libby pushed open the big wooden front door and said proudly, ‘So here we are,’ Eve found herself rigid, frozen to the top step in horror.

What had they done?

‘Little bit different to how you remember it, I think,’ Libby said with an expectant smile.

Eve felt her hand go up to cover her mouth.

White walls, white tiles, no pictures.

‘It makes such a difference, doesn’t it? Opens the place up. Makes it look much bigger, don’t you think?’ Libby went on, seemingly talking until she got a reaction from Eve. ‘Just all clean lines. That’s what we were looking for. Why are you looking at it like that? Don’t you think it’s lovely? We really like it.’

We.

We. We.

Eve knew it wasn’t we. This was Jake. It was Jake all over. If Jake could whitewash the whole bloody world, he would. He hated mess. He hated clutter. He had to have everything just so.

‘Yes, it looks lovely,’ Eve said with as much enthusiasm as she could muster when all she really wanted to do was shout, What have you done? You’ve ruined it, you idiots!

Libby tipped her head, could clearly sense Eve’s reticence. ‘Eve, look at it. Come further in. It was so dated before. No one had touched it in years.’

‘I believe you, I know. I said, it looks lovely.’ Eve nodded and smiled. ‘Really lovely.’ She didn’t need to look at it. She knew what it looked like. Cold and white.

‘Honestly, Eve. It needed freshening up,’ Libby pushed. ‘People don’t want that kind of décor any more.’

Eve nodded but all she could hear were Jake’s opinions in Libby’s voice. ‘Libby,’ she said, ‘if you’re happy with it, that’s all that matters. You don’t need to persuade me. And I really like it, anyway,’ she added, an unconvincing afterthought.

Libby swallowed and turned away. ‘Well, yes. Yes, we like it,’ she said and started to walk forward, leading Eve to her room.

They walked up the stairs in silence, Eve staring at the walls willing the pattern of the wallpaper to come out from under the paint.

‘Where are the pictures?’ she said.

‘In the garage,’ Libby replied. ‘With the carpet.’

Eve could concede on the carpet. It was old and swirly and fairly hideous, but the rest of it … She looked up at the light fittings and winced when she saw long metal strips of halogen bulbs. The surfaces were bare, trinket free. The windows were curtainless, now just covered with simple white blinds.

‘I put you in your old room,’ Libby said as they reached the furthest room along the corridor. She put the key in and turned the door handle. ‘You’ll be happy—it hasn’t changed.’

Eve could remember it perfectly. Lying on the bed like a penniless monarch, her grandeur falling down around her. She’d left the plaster bare in her ramshackle conservatory at home and let the ivy grow in through the roof to conjure up the feeling of this room.

She glanced inside and breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of the huge wooden wardrobe, the damp patches on the peeling wallpaper, the big bed with the chipped gold paint, and the heavy brocade curtains. And then the wind rustled the trees and she smelt the lemons waft in through the open window.