The Things We Do to Our Friends(28)
I ignored his dig at Ava. “He just likes to look smart! I get your point, though. I’ll be careful, I promise. Give me the diary—I need a week off.”
“Students, always with the holidays.” But he laughed, bared his teeth in our shared understanding of a shark, and walked away.
I was thinking of Ava. It was one of the first times I’d seen her in action as she spun plates and juggled everything for Tabitha like it was the easiest thing in the world.
21
On a chilly April afternoon, we gathered in the New Town. A motley crew, skulking with an assortment of luggage—waiting for Tabitha.
Ava counted bags of tobacco into her case, the leather she usually wore swapped out for ripped dungarees. Imogen looked demure in a printed summer dress and an oversized straw hat that she kept batting at irritably as it flopped about in the wind.
Samuel was very dapper in pressed chinos and with a pair of sunglasses on his head—with a noticeable artificial orange tinge to his skin.
Finally, Tabitha emerged from the front door, locking it up and presenting herself to us for mass adoration—pared back like an off-duty Parisian model in a white cotton shift dress and faded espadrilles, her bare legs skeletal and surprisingly hairy, like furry cocktail sticks.
“You look nice,” Samuel said to her as she twirled round in front of us.
Imogen’s face darkened, but she didn’t quite dare to scowl openly at Tabitha; instead, she rolled her eyes at me, then almost immediately looked away, regretting the slip and the show of closeness. Things were better between the two of us, though. Imogen and I seemed to have reached an undeclared and silent truce since I’d upset her before Christmas, even though I still didn’t understand what I’d done.
“Clare!” Tabitha hugged me and then pulled back and squeezed her arms around herself. “Always so bloody cold here, even in April. The weather looks fantastic at Ma’s, it’s going to be an absolute blast. Did Ava tell you what we have planned?”
“She mentioned a project,” I replied.
“Un projet, yes. We can discuss it all there. Is that all you’re bringing? You can put things in the hold, you know.” She was laden with bags and she tossed one of them in Imogen’s direction. I just had a single canvas holdall.
I was jangly, my feet tapping, trying to keep it all together, and I saw Ava give me a quizzical look, an eyebrow raise, as if to say, “Calm down.”
Tabitha didn’t notice, and then we were off.
I couldn’t sleep or eat on the flight. I was sick to my stomach, sitting there on the plane. The others ignored me, oblivious to my nerves. I imagined how horrified my granny would be at me doing this, and what she would have said if I’d told her. Fear slithered up my throat, so I swallowed hard and long to push it down. I couldn’t help but think of my parents, of what they might be doing or what they’d say about my trip.
But there was only so long I could stay at the edge, all jittery and alert, before my body refused to participate and I crashed—dread was too exhausting. As we walked out of the airport in Limoges to hail a taxi, I smelled that musty rush of foreignness. The smell of a country when you don’t live there. I finally let go, felt the muscles in my back and shoulders relax, because we’d arrived and there was nothing more I could do.
We were all tired and tetchy in the taxi, barely talking as we wound round country roads, our bodies sweaty and pushed together too closely. I didn’t speak to the taxi driver as Tabitha and Imogen battled away, trying to engage him in jumbled French; I cringed at their bad accents and had to hold back to stop myself from jumping in. Tried to stay calm.
Each time we turned a corner, I felt like it couldn’t possibly be any further, surely not, but it was, and then it was dark and the road had turned into a dirt track.
After what seemed like hours, the house came into view, and Tabitha let out a deep sigh of contentment. The sigh of someone coming home.
At first it looked imposing—a huge, white country house. It changed as we got closer, and it was clear the grandeur resided in the sheer size of the place. On closer inspection, I noted the peeling facade and windows boarded up—a crumbling ruin, not the palace I had imagined it to be.
Tabitha rang the bell and a woman who was unmistakably her mother opened the door. Bone-thin to the point of nothing, her hair a graying nest of rats’ tails, she was bundled up in a soup of creased linen; her trailing circular skirt billowed and touched the floor. She reached for a pair of horn-rimmed glasses from a chain around her neck, and I saw the flash from a chunky diamond ring hanging off the skinniest of fingers.
“Ahh, darling Tabby. Come in, come in.” Long vowels, just like Tabitha. The words were a little slurred, and she stood back to let us into the house. Samuel pushed in front of the rest of us, forgetting his usual politeness and embracing her in a hug. I thought of the fond way he’d talked about her during our midnight car journeys, her dazzling beauty when he was a child, although I took everything Samuel said with a pinch of salt. It must have been strange for him, seeing her like that, but if it was, he didn’t show it in the slightest.
“Minta, thank you so much for having us. We’ve been looking forward to this holiday,” he declared loudly, more of a show for me than an actual exchange.
She didn’t move aside, and we all stood in the first room that led off from the entrance vestibule. It was cluttered with what looked like a whole club’s worth of tennis rackets. A dining room at one point, perhaps, but the space had become something else, dominated by an enormous desk with stacks of yellowing paper piled up high. Boxes and newspapers covered the floor, obscuring a rug that looked like the one in Tabitha’s flat back in Edinburgh. Dust and dirt had settled on flagstones beneath, and two huge white cats basked near an unplugged storage heater, oblivious to the chaos of it all. I remembered Tabitha’s words: the house in France would never sell.