Summer Fever, page 32
Acknowledgements
Summer Fever began as a story about a marriage going wrong but ended up being as much about female friendship and solidarity, which is why I’ve dedicated it to the women in my life. With that in mind, I must first thank my brilliant editor Jillian Taylor, who always understands what I’m trying to do, and always makes it better. Huge thanks, too, to Grace Long, Sophie Shaw, Jen Harlow, Beatrix McIntyre, copyeditor-extraordinaire Hazel Orme, and fellow MJ writer Costanza Casati – who was kind enough to check my terrible Italian. Thank you also to my wonderful, endlessly empathetic agent, Becky Ritchie at AM Heath.
I’m always saying how grateful I am for my writer friends, and how they’ve been the best thing about being published, but it bears repeating. Thank you to Hayley Hoskins, Amanda Reynolds, Rosie Walsh, Emylia Hall, Emma Stonex, Katie Fforde, Katherine Webb, Jenny Ashcroft, Cesca Major, Sarra Manning, Iona Grey, Lucy Foley, Hannah Richell, Jo Harkin, Dany Atkinson, Kate Thompson, and all the amazing Swans and Stroud/Cheltenham writers. Big love also to The Novelry gang, particularly the inimitable Louise Dean, who helped me get a first draft of this book written in three short months. Lastly, a special mention for my best pal and bookish sister, Claire McGlasson. What would I have done without you last year?
Huge thanks and love to my family, whose unwavering support I so appreciate. Mum, Steve, Joan, Sarah, John, Sophie, James and of course Jasmine. And not forgetting my lovely dad, of course, who we lost in early 2021. He was so proud of me for getting published. Dad, you’re much missed. Big love also to my non-book friends, many of whom have been in my life for more than half of it now: Bruna Magor, Darren Loftus, Chris Spellman (see?), Jade and Josh Bell, Des Yankson, Tim Ovenden, Dwy and Rod Owen, Helen Hockenhull, the Keohanes, the Chapmans and the Laceys.
Author’s Note
I haven’t made explicit in the story exactly when it’s set but Laura’s age makes it 2019, just before the pandemic hit. I’ve also taken the liberty of entirely ignoring Brexit, which I can’t imagine many readers will mind, whatever they voted. Please excuse any errors on the finer points of Italian property law, land ownership and earthquake regulations – they are all my own. Perhaps it’s also worth pointing out that my depiction of Exeter University is fictional, and not drawn from my own experiences there, although I think there are many details my fellow graduates might recognize …
We follow the slower, narrower D roads after Lyon, sunlight slanting through long lines of poplars. I’d forgotten the meticulous commitment to signposting every minor village and hamlet, not just when you enter but when you leave too, the name slashed through with red. The countryside around us feels endless after London: age-softened farmhouses and the occasional shuttered restaurant marooned at the margins of vast fields. I glance over at you, drinking it all in. It must be so exotic to you, yet it’s where you spent your first four years.
The sun climbs as we drive, the car growing steadily hotter. You fiddle with the radio, snorting with derision at the terrible French pop songs but stopping when you find a station playing Edith Piaf. I wind down the window and, in the first blast of air, I smell the past. It’s indescribable. The closest I can get to it is hot stone, lavender and a distant note of something like panic.
Half a mile from the house, we almost get lost, which seems absurd given that I’ve lived more of my life in this part of the world than any other. A petrol station has appeared on a corner once occupied by a peach stall we used to stop at, and this throws me enough to miss first the turn and then the sign. It’s only when we’re suddenly in the heart of the old village – the dappled shade of the plane trees, the café’s round silver tables and the dusty awning of the boulangerie all utterly unchanged – that I realize where we are.
I turn the car around with a screech, not yet ready to be seen by anyone who might know me, and soon we’re bumping down the dirt road to La Rêverie.
Quite abruptly, more quickly than is comfortable, we reach the rutted track that winds down to the ramshackle barn where logs for winter fires were stored, along with the rusting rollers and ancient farm tools my father pointlessly hoarded. I don’t look at it, driving round to the front of the house instead.
I turn off the engine. You’re silent next to me. I reach out to tuck a loose strand of hair behind your ear: English mouse and a little ragged at the ends because you’re always trying to grow it longer. You’ve made me promise you can have it streaked when you turn sixteen. I want it blonder, you’ve been saying all spring. Not this nothingy colour.
‘Mum, I don’t think I remember this,’ you say now, your voice high and young. ‘I thought I did, when we turned off, but …’
‘It might come back,’ I say, hoping it won’t, that everything from that time has been permanently erased. You were so young when we left, and I tell myself, as I have so many times, that that’s why you’ve apparently forgotten everything.
We get out and the ticking under the car’s bonnet echoes the cicadas that fill the bushes around us. Their cries will get faster and more frenzied as the day wears on, the sun steadily climbing, the temperature rising. ‘Écoute, chérie. Écoute les cigales,’ my mother used to say when I was little, in a bid to stop me running outside and getting overheated. They’ll tell you if it’s too hot to go out today. I’d forgotten that.
The house is exactly as a foreigner would picture a maison de maître in the South of France: thick grey stone and a steeply pitched roof, tall symmetrical windows concealed by mauve-blue shutters, the paint powdery with age and the ferocity of the sun. The garden that surrounds it is walled at the front and topped with railings. I push back the metal gate, whose letter box still bears my maiden name in faded letters, and it swings in easily, as if used every day.
Inside, the bougainvillaea spills over the grass and the lavender bushes have gone woody and sparse, but it isn’t as unkempt as I imagined a garden abandoned for a decade would be. It still looks like the place I remember. Weeds grow up through the path to the door, but the dense column of cypress that casts one side of the house into deep shadow always needed cutting back, even in my earliest memories. I glance up at the furthest bedroom window, the one most obscured by the cypress’s deep shade, and see that one of the shutters has slipped its hinges.
By my side, you crackle with something: anticipation, mostly, but also a little fear. Perhaps you’ve caught it from me.
‘Was that her room?’ you ask.
I look sharply at you. ‘That’s right. Do you remember?’
‘Just a guess.’
You look at it hungrily then, as if the braver part of you wants to believe someone is up there now, watching you through the gaps in the shutters. The cicadas have stopped, and the silence is unnerving. Then, in miraculous unison, they start up again, even louder than before, and I stride determinedly towards the front door, fumbling in my bag for the key, knowing that if I don’t go in right now, I might drag you back to the car and drive straight home.
The church-cool air of the darkened hallway smells of mingled damp and smoke from the recent fire. Beneath them, faint but bone-deep familiar, I can just discern La Rêverie’s older scents: beeswax, butter-softened garlic and my mother’s olive soap.
I’m so struck by this that it takes me a while to notice that your breathing has changed. I scrabble in the inside pocket of my handbag, praying that the inhaler I carry from habit rather than necessity is still there. At last my hand closes around plastic. I pull it out and shake it.
You’re fine after a couple of puffs, though your hands are already beginning to shake – a side-effect of the drug seeping into your muscles.
‘Okay now, darling?’
You nod, just once.
‘It must be all the dust and damp,’ I say, and you nod again, though both of us know that your asthma is triggered by stress and not by allergies.
While you’re unpacking, I wander around the house, methodically opening each door, except the one I’m not yet ready for. The shutters scream as I push them back, revealing fat black flies in sinister piles on the windowsills. As the light floods in, dust swarms.
Last of all, I steel myself to go and look at the fire damage. I know it’s in the scullery off the kitchen – la souillarde – a small space housing little more than a sink, draining board and a couple of curtain-fronted cupboards that remains dark and cool however stifling it gets outside. Its window is no bigger than a sheet of paper, with chicken wire instead of glass in the frame.
Though the smells of fresh damage are strong when I open the door, it’s not as bad as I’ve been imagining since I received the letter. Two of the whitewashed walls are now marbled with black. In places, the marks are as high as my head. It’s hard to tell what is scorched and what is mould, the evidence mingling darkly. But whatever happened here, water must swiftly have followed fire. Otherwise the whole house would have gone up.
As evening begins to thicken around the house, you ask if we can go and eat in the village. We walk the ten minutes in, the tarmac soft under our feet, legs shiny with insect repellent in preparation for the evening’s emerging mosquitoes. The sun has already dipped behind the hills by the time we sit down at a table outside a pizzeria that wasn’t here before. We’re overlooking the tree-shaded patch of earth where the old men always played boules in their caps and braces, and doubtless still do, though they’re not out for the evening yet.
You ask me to ask the waitress for a Coke, too shy to try speaking in French, and I order a beer instead of my usual wine. When it comes, so cold that droplets of condensation have formed on the glass, I gulp it down like water and gesture for a second.
I catch your disapproving look and smile. ‘I saw that, my little puritan. It’s not like I’ve got to drive.’
‘It must be strange being back,’ you say cautiously, when you’ve finished your food. You’re swirling a plastic stirrer around your Coke glass.
I nod, though the second beer has made it less so.
‘Do you miss it now that you’re here?’
I look up, surprised at your perceptiveness. On leaving for London when you were four, I bundled everything into a deep drawer marked ‘France’ and slammed it shut, forgetting there was so much to love about home.
‘I’m sorry I’ve kept you from the house for so long. You were born here too. It’s as much yours as mine.’
You glow. ‘It is?’
I smile and squeeze your hand.
‘Mum, are you sure there’s no way of keeping the house? It’s such an amazing place. We could come here every summer. We could.’
I bat away a moth as it dances close to my eyes. ‘It’s impossible, chérie. I would need to buy out your aunt Camille and I can’t afford it. You know what she’s like.’
You frown, pulling your hand away, and for a split second you remind me of your sister. ‘I don’t think you’d do it even if you did have the money.’ And then, as if you’ve heard my thoughts. ‘It’s because of her, isn’t it?’
I dig my fingernails into the table edge. ‘Emma, do you have any idea how hard it is for me to be back here?’ The alcohol makes the words sharp and I regret them immediately. ‘Look, let’s not argue. I’m sorry I didn’t bring you before, but we’re here now, aren’t we?’
You don’t reply but after a while you nudge my hand in apology. Quite suddenly, I want to cry.
The walk back from the village is dark. No, not dark: pitch-black. The stars have been blotted out so thoroughly by clouds that it takes until we reach the turn-off before I can distinguish the shadowed bulk of the hills from the sky.
Despite the lack of visible moon, La Rêverie seems to stand in its own dim pool of light as we approach. Or perhaps it’s just our eyes, still adjusting to the countryside after years of London’s perpetually thrumming glow. It looks bigger by night, a monster of a house rising out of its dark moat of garden. I don’t look at the windows as we go up the path, keeping my head down, pretending to hunt in my bag for the key I’m already clutching.
Earlier in the afternoon, I had shaken out my mother’s soft old linen, only a little musty, and made us up a bed each: the creaking mahogany double Greg and I once shared, which was my parents’ before us, and one of the narrow twins in the bedroom next to it for you. Your old room has only its small cot-bed and I don’t want you in there anyway.
‘I remember this,’ you exclaim, in the room that’s been a spare my whole life, pointing to the faded blue toile de Jouy wallpaper, which, in one corner, has begun to peel. ‘I used to sit on the floor and make up stories about the people.’ You go closer, tracing a finger across the men in stockings, the ladies with their pompadours and fans. ‘I remember them.’
I wake at exactly three in the morning, the dimly glowing hands of my travel clock a perfect L. Downstairs, at the very edge of my hearing, I hear the ormolu clock in the salon as it chimes the hour. The bright, metallic ting is a sound older than memory to me, one that marked a benign passage through all the nights of my childhood, and I turn over, comforted. I’m just slipping into a dream of my mother winding it when I sit up, the bed groaning with the suddenness of the movement. I haven’t wound the clock.
The next morning I find you at the bottom of the terrace steps, barefoot in the long grass. I shade my eyes against the startling glare of the sun, my head tight from lack of sleep.
‘I found the swimming pool,’ you call up to me, full of glee. ‘I didn’t know there was one. It’s so cool.’
You don’t remember it from before. I try to smile: this is a good thing.
‘Perhaps we can see about filling it, if the pump’s still working,’ I make myself say. You’re a strong swimmer; I’ve made sure of that. I paid for years of lessons at an over-chlorinated municipal pool near our flat in London.
You look at me oddly. ‘It’s already filled.’
I know it was emptied ten years ago, when we left for good. Neither Camille nor I have touched it since.
But of course you’re right. The water glimmers mysteriously through the row of parasol pines my conservative father planted in the fifties for the sake of his daughters’ modesty. It isn’t the blinding turquoise of resort swimming pools but deep, darkling jade. On overcast days I always thought it looked like green ink.
I kneel at the edge and dip my hand in. Hardly yet warmed by the sun, the water runs like chilled silk through my fingers. There are only a few leaves and insects floating on the surface, clustered at the far end. Someone has cleared it recently.
I wonder if Olivier Lagarde arranged it. Perhaps he wound the clock in the salon too. I have the strangest sense that these things are simply the house welcoming us back. And perhaps trying to keep us here.
I glance at my bare wrist. ‘What time is it?’
‘About half ten, I think.’
I get to my feet. ‘I have to meet the solicitor at eleven, in the village.’
‘I’m staying here.’
I pause. ‘I thought you wanted to go to the hypermarket. You’ll have to come with me if you do. I’m going there on the way back.’
You grumble as we walk to the house but I know you don’t mind, really. You’ve never been the sort to put up much of a fight. My lovely biddable girl.
Only one other table is occupied at the café in the village – a couple, Dutch most likely: all long legs and hiking equipment.
‘Darling, why don’t you go and look in the tabac over there?’ I hand you a crisp ten-franc note. ‘Buy some postcards. The solicitor and I will be speaking in French.’
You blink, slightly stung, but go anyway, just as the waiter arrives.
Olivier Lagarde turns up just as you disappear into the shop across the square. He’s much handsomer than I’d expected from my dim memory of his father. It’s already hot and he’s rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, his arms burnished against blinding white cotton and the chrome of his watch. His grip when he shakes my hand is firm and warm. As he sits down, the Dutch woman’s eyes rake over him and I feel a little jolt that she might assume we’re together.
‘Madame Winters, thank you for meeting me today.’ He smiles easily, appreciatively, his eyes intent when I meet them.
‘Please, call me Sylvie,’ I say, looking away first. ‘And it’s Durand again, actually. I’m divorced.’
‘Bien sûr. Sylvie, then. You’ve seen the damage now, I gather, and that it’s really quite superficial. I hope that was clear in my letter. I didn’t want to worry you unduly. You were lucky, though. It could have been …’ He spreads his hands. There’s no need to say how it might have turned out.
‘Do the police know who did it?’
He shrugs. ‘Kids with nothing to do, who else? It happens all the time in the countryside. Especially when people know a house is standing empty.’
‘Have they arrested anyone?’
He shakes his head. ‘To them it’s a small thing. They couldn’t find any signs of forced entry. I’m sorry, Mada– Sylvie, but they weren’t very interested. One of them said it was probably the Gattaz boys.’
I nod. It’s a name I haven’t thought of since childhood. That and the French that comes so effortlessly is both liberating and rooting. No, confining. I wonder if this is how it’s going to be: the inexorable descent into the past; the years in England flickering and fading at the horizon.
I take a sip of my coffee: tiny, bitter and delicious. ‘I don’t remember you. From growing up round here, I mean.’
‘No, I went to school in Avignon. Stayed with my aunt during the week. My father insisted, but look how it turned out.’ He smiles wryly. ‘I ended up here anyway.’
