The Island Villa, page 15
“Pleased?” Adeline shot her an incredulous look. “They’ve been divorced for more than two decades. They decided their marriage was a mistake. That they weren’t meant to be together. But despite that—despite twenty years where they have functioned perfectly well apart—they seem intent on making that mistake again. It’s perplexing and upsetting.”
It was comforting to know that her sister was thinking all the same things she’d been thinking.
“I’ve never seen you like this before. Sometimes it seems as if you don’t feel anything.”
“Does it seem that way?” Adeline frowned. “I feel plenty of things, but I’ve learned to hide it.”
“I can’t hide how I feel. I wish I could.” Her phone pinged and she glanced at it. A message from Oliver flashed up on her screen.
You okay, Cass?
If he’d asked her an hour ago, the answer would most definitely have been no. But now?
She hesitated and then typed her reply.
Yes thanks. Just wanted to say hi.
“Who was that?” Adeline ate another piece of lamb. “If you need to make a call, go ahead. But be warned, I might finish the lamb while you’re distracted. It’s so good.”
“I know, although I’d probably choose the spanakopita for my last meal on earth. I don’t need to make a call. It was just Oliver.”
“Boyfriend?”
“No. Best friend. We live together. I mean, not actually together in a romantic sense. We share a house in Oxford.” A short time ago, she’d desperately wanted to be back there, but now she was glad she was right where she was. “How about you? Are you seeing someone?”
Adeline stared out at the ocean. “I was. His name is Mark.”
“Was?”
“We didn’t part on the best of terms. I broke up with him recently.”
Cassie finished her drink. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“Why not? I asked you about Oliver.”
“But Oliver is just a friend, it’s different. Were you in love with Mark?”
“I don’t know,” Adeline said. “I don’t think so. He hasn’t been in contact since that night, and I don’t care. That can’t be a good sign, can it?”
Cassie tried to imagine her sister madly in love. Giggling. Passionate. “Were you together a long time?”
“A year.”
“That’s ages. So he can’t have been the one. I mean, if someone is right, then you know, don’t you think?”
Adeline frowned. “I don’t believe in the one.”
Cassie didn’t know what to say to that. If they’d been having this conversation the week before, she would have said she absolutely believed in “the one” because look at her parents, but now she didn’t know what to think. If her father had been the love of her mother’s life, where did Adeline’s father fit into that? How could he have been the wrong person, if he was back on the scene? It was so confusing.
Her brain couldn’t decipher it, so she focused on her sister instead. “You said you and Mark didn’t part on good terms. You had a fight?”
“Not exactly a fight. More a disagreement.” Adeline finished her champagne and put the glass down on the sand next to the bottle. “He said he was seriously concerned about my judgment.”
“He actually said that?” In her mind, Cassie tried putting those words into the mouth of the hero she was writing, but they didn’t work. No matter which way you looked at it, that wasn’t a heroic thing to say.
“It was about me coming here, to my mother’s fourth wedding. He had a point. And if it hadn’t been for Dad, I probably wouldn’t have done.” Adeline’s laugh was devoid of humor. “Dad wanted me here. And I admired him for behaving in such a civilized way toward someone who broke his heart all those years ago. It didn’t occur to me that there was anything else going on.”
“Why would it? Why would either of us have thought that?” Cassie realized that Adeline felt as betrayed as she did.
“It’s always a shock to discover you don’t know someone as well as you thought you did.”
Cassie scrunched the napkin in her lap. “I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know what to say to our mother.”
“I don’t know either.”
“But you’re the psychologist. You’re trained for things like this.”
“It doesn’t make it any easier when you’re the one in the middle of it.”
Cassie didn’t know if that was comforting or alarming. “Are you going to leave?”
“Leave the island? I don’t know.”
Cassie thought about how it would feel if Adeline left and her heart flipped. “Please don’t.” She felt suddenly awkward and wished she could snatch those words back. She had no right to say them. They didn’t make sense, even to her. Up until today, she’d been hoping Adeline wouldn’t come. And now she was hoping she wouldn’t leave. “You must do whatever is right for you, of course. Ignore me.”
“Why would I ignore you? We’re in this together. We’ll figure it out together.” Adeline shifted closer to Cassie.
Their arms brushed and Cassie felt the first flickers of warmth. They’d never been in anything together before.
It felt good.
12
Catherine
Catherine sat on the lounger in the darkness. In front of her the pool lay empty and still, a slash of bright turquoise, illuminated from beneath by tiny lights. It was three in the morning and she’d given up on sleep.
When was she going to learn that real life wasn’t like fiction? You could never predict how people were going to react.
If this were a scene in her book, she would have deleted it (always a painful experience, but occasionally necessary. Once, she’d deleted thirty thousand words and had to lie down for an entire day to recover). She would have hacked out those words and started again because the whole thing wasn’t working the way it should.
She stared at the pool. The air was oppressively warm and scented sweet from the flowers that tumbled from terracotta pots around the terrace. Apart from the rhythmic call of cicadas and the sound of the sea, everything around her was still and quiet. Inside, her emotions churned like the ocean in the middle of a storm.
Andrew was fast asleep in their bedroom (it was one of the many injustices of life that whatever the crisis, men always seemed able to sleep) but Catherine’s mind had been as active as an elite athlete in a training session. She knew from experience that the chances of sleep were zero, so she’d chosen to get up.
Why her brain always chose to be active at night she had no idea, but the moment she closed her eyes, her mind raced into overdrive. Dark thoughts nudged at her brain, refusing to allow her rest. During the day, she managed to keep reality at a distance, but at night it descended, ugly and undisguised, pressing itself into her consciousness. Avoid me if you must, but that doesn’t mean I’m not here.
The evening had not gone as planned, which shouldn’t have surprised her because since when did life ever go according to plan? But this time, she couldn’t blame fate. The blame, if that was the right word, lay entirely with her. Her weakness had always been her tendency to reshape reality into something she found palatable. She’d had a clear image of how the evening would go and only now could she see how naive she’d been. She’d gone straight for the happy ending and tried to skip all the conflict and tough stuff that came before.
Adeline had said that to her once. Your whole life is fiction! And maybe that was true. When she didn’t like what was happening, her brain imagined a different reality. She saw things the way she wanted them to be, rather than the way they were. It was the reason she was about to embark on her fourth marriage, and the reason her daughters weren’t currently laughing together and enjoying their second or third glass of champagne while they celebrated the happy news.
Instead of considering the possibility that her daughter would be upset by the revelation that her parents were planning to remarry, she’d pictured Adeline’s delight. She’d thought, optimistically, that her eldest daughter would be thrilled. Adeline and her father were close. She’d hoped that Adeline’s unconditional love for her father might spill over and land on her, drawing them together. She’d imagined Adeline thinking, If my father forgives her, then I forgive her.
That wasn’t what had happened.
Adeline’s voice rang in her head. I can’t believe you’d put yourself through this a second time. She cheated on you! She had an affair. She got pregnant and had a baby.
Catherine winced as she remembered those words. They were all true, and when you distilled it down to a few bare facts, it sounded awful. But life was always more than a few bare facts just as a human body was more than a skeleton. Flesh, blood, mistakes. Those were the things that made someone human. She’d made more mistakes than most.
It was embarrassing to admit that she wasn’t good at relation9ships, given that she made her living writing about them, but writing about them gave you the chance to delete scenes and change the past. That wasn’t an option in real life.
Three, soon to be four, marriages and two daughters, neither of whom were currently speaking to her. Even her brain couldn’t reshape that into a scenario where she was a blameless victim.
In hindsight, perhaps it had been too optimistic of her to assume Adeline would be delighted. Perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that it hadn’t turned out that way.
Still, she wished her daughter had chosen her words more carefully.
Cassie had obviously been hurt badly by her sister’s thoughtless outburst or she wouldn’t have gone running off. Catherine had wanted to go after her, but she’d had Adeline to deal with, and when Adeline had also stormed off, Andrew had insisted on giving both girls time to settle down and digest the news before having further conversation.
It had almost killed Catherine thinking of Cassie alone with her distress, but she knew that given time Cassie would accept the situation. Cassie was always fine with everything. She’d been the easiest child and seemed to find happiness and hope in every situation.
Adeline was more difficult.
Catherine felt a pang of guilt because she knew that the reason for her daughter’s strong reaction could be traced right back to childhood.
She was responsible for the upheaval Adeline had experienced at a young age. But for how long was she going to punish herself for doing what she’d had to do? She’d had no choice, at least none that she’d been able to see. And that one decision had affected both her life and her daughter’s.
Because of her, Adeline was wary of relationships. Her own and, it turned out, her mother’s.
Adeline didn’t understand of course, and neither did Cassie. Not only did children rarely see their parents as people with their own complicated lives and flaws (in her case, so many flaws) but it was human nature to form judgments based on the facts available, and she hadn’t given them all the facts and she didn’t intend to. And the ones she had given them, didn’t begin to hint at the whole picture.
Fortunately, most people didn’t bother looking for more. They didn’t ask themselves, What else could be going on here? It was something she thought about all the time when she was writing, the fact that a person’s actions were almost always motivated by something bigger than the moment. That behind every action was a chain of events that could stretch back into the far distance. There was always something more. When a woman snapped at a colleague, they might dismiss her as short-tempered, but maybe the truth was that things were terrible at home, her teenager wasn’t speaking to her, she was caring for elderly parents, she was so oppressed by the pressures of her life that there were days when she could barely breathe. And then she arrived at the office stressed by her life, emotionally stretched to the point of snapping, unable to handle one more thing, and a colleague asked her when she would finish a piece of work because the deadline was yesterday, and that was it. Snap. It wasn’t about the deadline or the colleague. It was all the things that had gone before.
But the people she worked with didn’t know that. They didn’t see how hard she was working to keep her family safe and together. All they saw was a missed deadline and a short-tempered colleague.
And when the world looked at her, Catherine Swift, they saw a wealthy, successful woman remarrying a man she’d divorced two decades before. They had no idea of the events that had brought her to this point.
Catherine took a sip of her drink and let her mind travel back to the day she’d first met Andrew Swift.
She’d been eighteen and working in a coffee shop. Unlike her school friends, she’d had no wish to go to university. All she wanted to do was tell stories. She wanted to write. Her first book had been accepted by a publisher (and she was only eighteen! With the optimism of youth, she’d truly believed she had this sorted). She’d assumed it was the start of a brilliant future.
She’d been woefully ignorant.
The publisher had paid her a small advance, but it would be another eighteen months before they published her book. She’d had no idea it would take that long. The idea of being paid to do what she loved was exciting, until she’d figured out that her advance would only cover her rent and food for two months. After that, she’d have to find another way to make money because writing wasn’t going to feed her.
She needed to get a “proper” job. But she wasn’t qualified for anything. And how was she going to write if she had a job? Where would she find the time?
She liked coffee and she drank plenty of it, so she walked into a fancy coffee shop in Covent Garden and talked them into hiring her. She figured that she could listen to conversations, observe people, develop ideas and scribble in her notebook on her breaks.
She’d been working there for a month when Andrew had walked in.
She’d been struck by two things: his American accent and his confidence. He had a sophistication that she hadn’t encountered before, and she’d immediately rethought the hero she was currently writing. He’d be American, she thought. With a warm smile and great eye contact. But behind that smooth exterior and apparently perfect life, he would be hiding a secret.
Her creative brain was alight with ideas as she’d delivered Andrew’s order to his table by the window. He’d thanked her (impeccable manners) and asked her to join him. She’d badly wanted to but hadn’t dared. The job was barely covering her rent and she couldn’t risk losing it, so she’d declined regretfully but served him an extra coffee on the house to make up for it and to show she was interested.
He’d come in the next day and then the next, and by the end of the week he’d asked her out.
She’d never had a real boyfriend before (she’d had plenty of fictional ones) and she felt as if she’d struck gold.
He was ten years older than her and rising through the ranks in his job in the city. She didn’t know exactly what he did, but whatever it was paid him enough to own his own apartment and take her to dinner in restaurants with fancy French names and incomprehensible menus.
He was glamorous, sophisticated (he ate oysters! Catherine had never met anyone who ate oysters) and fascinated by her. He told her that what he’d always wanted was to be an artist, but he came from a wealthy Bostonian family who had worked in finance for three generations and Andrew Swift was expected to follow the same. He’d told himself he could paint as a hobby, but his work left virtually no time for hobbies so in reality he rarely picked up a paintbrush.
He admired Catherine’s creativity, and was impressed that she had already written a book that was going to be published. She’d only realized much later that in her he’d seen the life he could have been living.
They’d married, and he’d insisted that she give up her job so that she could concentrate on being creative and writing full-time. He didn’t want her to work in the coffee shop. He wanted her to write. It didn’t matter that she didn’t earn much money. He earned more than enough for both.
His generosity had floored her. She was desperate to write and here he was presenting her with the means to allow her to do it. Not only that, but he believed in her.
Her first book was finally published (with the name Catherine Swift on the cover), and by traveling half way across London, she managed to find it in one store. But still that was a thrill. Her book! For sale. It was the biggest high. She’d stood in the store for two hours and finally someone had picked up her book from the shelf and bought it. It had taken all her self-control not to tap the woman on the shoulder and say, I wrote that.
And it was true that being a published author hadn’t at that point come with either fame or fortune, but still it was an unbeatable feeling. She’d felt vindicated in her life choices.
Andrew had continued to encourage her, and Catherine had continued to write. She had another book published, and then another. By publishing standards, she was doing well, but still she didn’t earn enough to make more than a trivial contribution toward their expenses. Writing, it turned out, wasn’t a route to riches although the public rarely understood that. For every author who made serious money, there were thousands of others barely able to subsidize their coffee habit.
It didn’t matter to Andrew, and because it didn’t matter to him, it didn’t matter to her either. They were happy. They laughed a lot. He immersed himself in her creative world, and in the evenings, they’d sit in their tiny garden and she’d talk to him about her plots and characters. He relished any conversation that didn’t involve the boring world of banking, which he increasingly loathed. A few years into their marriage, Adeline arrived, and Catherine somehow navigated the challenge of writing while caring for a child.
And then her books had started to sell. It wasn’t an overnight thing, more of a slow build as a reader discovered one of her books and then went back to read everything else she’d written. It snowballed. Finally, she was earning money, which delighted her after years of feeling like a drain on Andrew.
It was comforting to know that her sister was thinking all the same things she’d been thinking.
“I’ve never seen you like this before. Sometimes it seems as if you don’t feel anything.”
“Does it seem that way?” Adeline frowned. “I feel plenty of things, but I’ve learned to hide it.”
“I can’t hide how I feel. I wish I could.” Her phone pinged and she glanced at it. A message from Oliver flashed up on her screen.
You okay, Cass?
If he’d asked her an hour ago, the answer would most definitely have been no. But now?
She hesitated and then typed her reply.
Yes thanks. Just wanted to say hi.
“Who was that?” Adeline ate another piece of lamb. “If you need to make a call, go ahead. But be warned, I might finish the lamb while you’re distracted. It’s so good.”
“I know, although I’d probably choose the spanakopita for my last meal on earth. I don’t need to make a call. It was just Oliver.”
“Boyfriend?”
“No. Best friend. We live together. I mean, not actually together in a romantic sense. We share a house in Oxford.” A short time ago, she’d desperately wanted to be back there, but now she was glad she was right where she was. “How about you? Are you seeing someone?”
Adeline stared out at the ocean. “I was. His name is Mark.”
“Was?”
“We didn’t part on the best of terms. I broke up with him recently.”
Cassie finished her drink. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“Why not? I asked you about Oliver.”
“But Oliver is just a friend, it’s different. Were you in love with Mark?”
“I don’t know,” Adeline said. “I don’t think so. He hasn’t been in contact since that night, and I don’t care. That can’t be a good sign, can it?”
Cassie tried to imagine her sister madly in love. Giggling. Passionate. “Were you together a long time?”
“A year.”
“That’s ages. So he can’t have been the one. I mean, if someone is right, then you know, don’t you think?”
Adeline frowned. “I don’t believe in the one.”
Cassie didn’t know what to say to that. If they’d been having this conversation the week before, she would have said she absolutely believed in “the one” because look at her parents, but now she didn’t know what to think. If her father had been the love of her mother’s life, where did Adeline’s father fit into that? How could he have been the wrong person, if he was back on the scene? It was so confusing.
Her brain couldn’t decipher it, so she focused on her sister instead. “You said you and Mark didn’t part on good terms. You had a fight?”
“Not exactly a fight. More a disagreement.” Adeline finished her champagne and put the glass down on the sand next to the bottle. “He said he was seriously concerned about my judgment.”
“He actually said that?” In her mind, Cassie tried putting those words into the mouth of the hero she was writing, but they didn’t work. No matter which way you looked at it, that wasn’t a heroic thing to say.
“It was about me coming here, to my mother’s fourth wedding. He had a point. And if it hadn’t been for Dad, I probably wouldn’t have done.” Adeline’s laugh was devoid of humor. “Dad wanted me here. And I admired him for behaving in such a civilized way toward someone who broke his heart all those years ago. It didn’t occur to me that there was anything else going on.”
“Why would it? Why would either of us have thought that?” Cassie realized that Adeline felt as betrayed as she did.
“It’s always a shock to discover you don’t know someone as well as you thought you did.”
Cassie scrunched the napkin in her lap. “I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know what to say to our mother.”
“I don’t know either.”
“But you’re the psychologist. You’re trained for things like this.”
“It doesn’t make it any easier when you’re the one in the middle of it.”
Cassie didn’t know if that was comforting or alarming. “Are you going to leave?”
“Leave the island? I don’t know.”
Cassie thought about how it would feel if Adeline left and her heart flipped. “Please don’t.” She felt suddenly awkward and wished she could snatch those words back. She had no right to say them. They didn’t make sense, even to her. Up until today, she’d been hoping Adeline wouldn’t come. And now she was hoping she wouldn’t leave. “You must do whatever is right for you, of course. Ignore me.”
“Why would I ignore you? We’re in this together. We’ll figure it out together.” Adeline shifted closer to Cassie.
Their arms brushed and Cassie felt the first flickers of warmth. They’d never been in anything together before.
It felt good.
12
Catherine
Catherine sat on the lounger in the darkness. In front of her the pool lay empty and still, a slash of bright turquoise, illuminated from beneath by tiny lights. It was three in the morning and she’d given up on sleep.
When was she going to learn that real life wasn’t like fiction? You could never predict how people were going to react.
If this were a scene in her book, she would have deleted it (always a painful experience, but occasionally necessary. Once, she’d deleted thirty thousand words and had to lie down for an entire day to recover). She would have hacked out those words and started again because the whole thing wasn’t working the way it should.
She stared at the pool. The air was oppressively warm and scented sweet from the flowers that tumbled from terracotta pots around the terrace. Apart from the rhythmic call of cicadas and the sound of the sea, everything around her was still and quiet. Inside, her emotions churned like the ocean in the middle of a storm.
Andrew was fast asleep in their bedroom (it was one of the many injustices of life that whatever the crisis, men always seemed able to sleep) but Catherine’s mind had been as active as an elite athlete in a training session. She knew from experience that the chances of sleep were zero, so she’d chosen to get up.
Why her brain always chose to be active at night she had no idea, but the moment she closed her eyes, her mind raced into overdrive. Dark thoughts nudged at her brain, refusing to allow her rest. During the day, she managed to keep reality at a distance, but at night it descended, ugly and undisguised, pressing itself into her consciousness. Avoid me if you must, but that doesn’t mean I’m not here.
The evening had not gone as planned, which shouldn’t have surprised her because since when did life ever go according to plan? But this time, she couldn’t blame fate. The blame, if that was the right word, lay entirely with her. Her weakness had always been her tendency to reshape reality into something she found palatable. She’d had a clear image of how the evening would go and only now could she see how naive she’d been. She’d gone straight for the happy ending and tried to skip all the conflict and tough stuff that came before.
Adeline had said that to her once. Your whole life is fiction! And maybe that was true. When she didn’t like what was happening, her brain imagined a different reality. She saw things the way she wanted them to be, rather than the way they were. It was the reason she was about to embark on her fourth marriage, and the reason her daughters weren’t currently laughing together and enjoying their second or third glass of champagne while they celebrated the happy news.
Instead of considering the possibility that her daughter would be upset by the revelation that her parents were planning to remarry, she’d pictured Adeline’s delight. She’d thought, optimistically, that her eldest daughter would be thrilled. Adeline and her father were close. She’d hoped that Adeline’s unconditional love for her father might spill over and land on her, drawing them together. She’d imagined Adeline thinking, If my father forgives her, then I forgive her.
That wasn’t what had happened.
Adeline’s voice rang in her head. I can’t believe you’d put yourself through this a second time. She cheated on you! She had an affair. She got pregnant and had a baby.
Catherine winced as she remembered those words. They were all true, and when you distilled it down to a few bare facts, it sounded awful. But life was always more than a few bare facts just as a human body was more than a skeleton. Flesh, blood, mistakes. Those were the things that made someone human. She’d made more mistakes than most.
It was embarrassing to admit that she wasn’t good at relation9ships, given that she made her living writing about them, but writing about them gave you the chance to delete scenes and change the past. That wasn’t an option in real life.
Three, soon to be four, marriages and two daughters, neither of whom were currently speaking to her. Even her brain couldn’t reshape that into a scenario where she was a blameless victim.
In hindsight, perhaps it had been too optimistic of her to assume Adeline would be delighted. Perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that it hadn’t turned out that way.
Still, she wished her daughter had chosen her words more carefully.
Cassie had obviously been hurt badly by her sister’s thoughtless outburst or she wouldn’t have gone running off. Catherine had wanted to go after her, but she’d had Adeline to deal with, and when Adeline had also stormed off, Andrew had insisted on giving both girls time to settle down and digest the news before having further conversation.
It had almost killed Catherine thinking of Cassie alone with her distress, but she knew that given time Cassie would accept the situation. Cassie was always fine with everything. She’d been the easiest child and seemed to find happiness and hope in every situation.
Adeline was more difficult.
Catherine felt a pang of guilt because she knew that the reason for her daughter’s strong reaction could be traced right back to childhood.
She was responsible for the upheaval Adeline had experienced at a young age. But for how long was she going to punish herself for doing what she’d had to do? She’d had no choice, at least none that she’d been able to see. And that one decision had affected both her life and her daughter’s.
Because of her, Adeline was wary of relationships. Her own and, it turned out, her mother’s.
Adeline didn’t understand of course, and neither did Cassie. Not only did children rarely see their parents as people with their own complicated lives and flaws (in her case, so many flaws) but it was human nature to form judgments based on the facts available, and she hadn’t given them all the facts and she didn’t intend to. And the ones she had given them, didn’t begin to hint at the whole picture.
Fortunately, most people didn’t bother looking for more. They didn’t ask themselves, What else could be going on here? It was something she thought about all the time when she was writing, the fact that a person’s actions were almost always motivated by something bigger than the moment. That behind every action was a chain of events that could stretch back into the far distance. There was always something more. When a woman snapped at a colleague, they might dismiss her as short-tempered, but maybe the truth was that things were terrible at home, her teenager wasn’t speaking to her, she was caring for elderly parents, she was so oppressed by the pressures of her life that there were days when she could barely breathe. And then she arrived at the office stressed by her life, emotionally stretched to the point of snapping, unable to handle one more thing, and a colleague asked her when she would finish a piece of work because the deadline was yesterday, and that was it. Snap. It wasn’t about the deadline or the colleague. It was all the things that had gone before.
But the people she worked with didn’t know that. They didn’t see how hard she was working to keep her family safe and together. All they saw was a missed deadline and a short-tempered colleague.
And when the world looked at her, Catherine Swift, they saw a wealthy, successful woman remarrying a man she’d divorced two decades before. They had no idea of the events that had brought her to this point.
Catherine took a sip of her drink and let her mind travel back to the day she’d first met Andrew Swift.
She’d been eighteen and working in a coffee shop. Unlike her school friends, she’d had no wish to go to university. All she wanted to do was tell stories. She wanted to write. Her first book had been accepted by a publisher (and she was only eighteen! With the optimism of youth, she’d truly believed she had this sorted). She’d assumed it was the start of a brilliant future.
She’d been woefully ignorant.
The publisher had paid her a small advance, but it would be another eighteen months before they published her book. She’d had no idea it would take that long. The idea of being paid to do what she loved was exciting, until she’d figured out that her advance would only cover her rent and food for two months. After that, she’d have to find another way to make money because writing wasn’t going to feed her.
She needed to get a “proper” job. But she wasn’t qualified for anything. And how was she going to write if she had a job? Where would she find the time?
She liked coffee and she drank plenty of it, so she walked into a fancy coffee shop in Covent Garden and talked them into hiring her. She figured that she could listen to conversations, observe people, develop ideas and scribble in her notebook on her breaks.
She’d been working there for a month when Andrew had walked in.
She’d been struck by two things: his American accent and his confidence. He had a sophistication that she hadn’t encountered before, and she’d immediately rethought the hero she was currently writing. He’d be American, she thought. With a warm smile and great eye contact. But behind that smooth exterior and apparently perfect life, he would be hiding a secret.
Her creative brain was alight with ideas as she’d delivered Andrew’s order to his table by the window. He’d thanked her (impeccable manners) and asked her to join him. She’d badly wanted to but hadn’t dared. The job was barely covering her rent and she couldn’t risk losing it, so she’d declined regretfully but served him an extra coffee on the house to make up for it and to show she was interested.
He’d come in the next day and then the next, and by the end of the week he’d asked her out.
She’d never had a real boyfriend before (she’d had plenty of fictional ones) and she felt as if she’d struck gold.
He was ten years older than her and rising through the ranks in his job in the city. She didn’t know exactly what he did, but whatever it was paid him enough to own his own apartment and take her to dinner in restaurants with fancy French names and incomprehensible menus.
He was glamorous, sophisticated (he ate oysters! Catherine had never met anyone who ate oysters) and fascinated by her. He told her that what he’d always wanted was to be an artist, but he came from a wealthy Bostonian family who had worked in finance for three generations and Andrew Swift was expected to follow the same. He’d told himself he could paint as a hobby, but his work left virtually no time for hobbies so in reality he rarely picked up a paintbrush.
He admired Catherine’s creativity, and was impressed that she had already written a book that was going to be published. She’d only realized much later that in her he’d seen the life he could have been living.
They’d married, and he’d insisted that she give up her job so that she could concentrate on being creative and writing full-time. He didn’t want her to work in the coffee shop. He wanted her to write. It didn’t matter that she didn’t earn much money. He earned more than enough for both.
His generosity had floored her. She was desperate to write and here he was presenting her with the means to allow her to do it. Not only that, but he believed in her.
Her first book was finally published (with the name Catherine Swift on the cover), and by traveling half way across London, she managed to find it in one store. But still that was a thrill. Her book! For sale. It was the biggest high. She’d stood in the store for two hours and finally someone had picked up her book from the shelf and bought it. It had taken all her self-control not to tap the woman on the shoulder and say, I wrote that.
And it was true that being a published author hadn’t at that point come with either fame or fortune, but still it was an unbeatable feeling. She’d felt vindicated in her life choices.
Andrew had continued to encourage her, and Catherine had continued to write. She had another book published, and then another. By publishing standards, she was doing well, but still she didn’t earn enough to make more than a trivial contribution toward their expenses. Writing, it turned out, wasn’t a route to riches although the public rarely understood that. For every author who made serious money, there were thousands of others barely able to subsidize their coffee habit.
It didn’t matter to Andrew, and because it didn’t matter to him, it didn’t matter to her either. They were happy. They laughed a lot. He immersed himself in her creative world, and in the evenings, they’d sit in their tiny garden and she’d talk to him about her plots and characters. He relished any conversation that didn’t involve the boring world of banking, which he increasingly loathed. A few years into their marriage, Adeline arrived, and Catherine somehow navigated the challenge of writing while caring for a child.
And then her books had started to sell. It wasn’t an overnight thing, more of a slow build as a reader discovered one of her books and then went back to read everything else she’d written. It snowballed. Finally, she was earning money, which delighted her after years of feeling like a drain on Andrew.
