Summer Fever by Kate Riordan

Author:Kate Riordan [Riordan, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2022-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

She remembers writing this one so vividly. How she’d deliberated about that single ‘we’. Obviously I’m married, it said; a small prod to inspire regret. Someone else wanted to be with me for ever. And then the deliberate use of ‘I’ elsewhere, retreating back into the pretence that there were no barriers. A clear signal that she had remained her own person, rather than morphing into half of an impregnable unit.

In all of the messages, from the very start, she had been aware of walking a fine line, a tightrope strung high over a long drop. On one side, the depiction of an enviable life. Here I am, a success. I have sustained a grown-up, committed relationship. I am adored by a man with whom I have bought a piece of Italy. And on the other: I have never forgotten you. Take me.

She scrolls down the messages, away from the tentative early ones where she and Bastian took it in turns to present their biographies. This is my life, what about yours? She sees now that his are shorter, vaguer. He uses his to draw her out. Because Lou is there in the villa with her, she can’t help reading the messages as her friend would, if Laura allowed her to.

With the spectre of Lou reading over her shoulder, the tone twists into something new and uncomfortable. She reads her own words, the spill of them, open and giving everything away, as she always did. And then his: opaque, almost closed. They would seem uninterested if it wasn’t for all the questions. Questions that kept the conversation going and going until he arrived.

Since she walked into the garden holding a bottle of Aperol Spritz and saw him sitting there, time sticking and stuttering like an old VHS tape on pause, there have been hardly any. And while there’s an obvious logic to that – why would they be writing to each other when they’re under the same roof? – she knows it means something significant. It makes her uneasy in some indefinable way.

She skims the early ones again, hoping she’s being overly critical, seeing the words through the prism of her own thoughts. But it’s true. She hasn’t lied, exactly. It’s not that bald. She has exaggerated, though, in a hundred tiny ways that add up to something not quite true. Immersed in her emails, Luna Rossa rises, larger and grander than it could ever be. Their parcel of land – in many places steep and scrubby, basically unusable – rolls out, velvet green and abundant. It’s more like a tiny village! The money they made from selling up in London is also abundant. There are hints that, instead of being chewed up voraciously by the villa, there is still plenty of it sloshing around.

She’s almost boasting in the emails, and admitting that to herself now makes her cringe. Not only because she did it in the first place but because Bastian is now here, and must see the disparity.

There’s something else too.

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