The Lemon Grove (8 page)

They pass the roadside restaurant that, every year, they say they must visit. They reach the T-junction by the garage and turn left into the bumpy old Valldemossa road. Pines spring upwards and directly outwards from the road, splitting the surface and gnarling it with blisters. Greg swerves to avoid the tree roots, holding his glasses to his nose as he negotiates each bump and pothole. Jenn has a flashback to him swinging the wheel from left to right, all the way down this road once, sending Emma into fits of giggles. They were a family, then. She was Emma’s Mummy.

He slows right down as they approach the market on the left where crones in identical-shaped pinafores are already thronging the stalls for bargains. He zaps down the windows, for Nathan’s benefit, she assumes, and it
is a sight to behold. The accent of the market is on Mallorcan heritage crafts and, as they crawl bumper-to-bumper through the little town, each stall lays out artisan wares. There’s a pottery stand selling hand-painted sangria jugs; there are wooden toys, porcelain crockery, baskets full of colourful sweets and lollipops; there are fine, made-to-measure shoes, glass-blown figurines, and row after row of local pastries and delicacies. One stall sells only the emblematic
ensaïmada
pastry; next to it a specialist
sobrasada
outlet. The medley of aromas wafts in through the window, mingling with the nutty scent of fig leaves that spices every breeze. In her wing mirror Jenn can see Nathan’s face, dancing. He nudges Emma.

‘Doesn’t half make you hungry.’

‘You’re
always
hungry.’

Jenn makes a thing of being lost to the world outside her window but every now and then she steals a glimpse. As the road curves upwards and out of town there’s a secondary market in a car park, more colourful and hippyish in feel. It’s more for the tourists, this one, with the cross-legged bongo players beating out their Balearic rhythms as visitors browse racks of tie-dye tees, lizard sculptures fashioned from driftwood, jewellery stores specialising in amber and beaten silver. Towards the top end of the car park, there’s a whole section of the market displaying the paintings of local artists and here
something catches Nathan’s eye. Jenn watches him in the wing mirror as he cranes his head out of the window until they’ve almost passed through the town.

They park up on the outskirts, get out and stretch. Nathan’s crimson polo-shirt is already sticking to the mounds of muscle beneath his shoulder blades. They walk back down towards the monastery. Greg points over, for Nathan’s benefit.

‘Built as a royal residence, originally,’ he announces. ‘Then the Carthusian order took it on as a monastery. That’s where Chopin and George spent the winter, a year or two before he died.’

Jenn and Emma quicken their step – they’ve heard all this before. Nathan is not so fast. Greg blocks him off.

‘George Sand. Have you read her?’

‘Never heard of her.’

‘Oh, Nathan, Nathan, you’re missing out. One of
the
great temptresses of the nineteenth century.’

Emma stops and turns. ‘So not one of
the
great feminist thinkers of the nineteenth century?’

‘Definitely not.’ Greg smiles. ‘Much more efficient man eater. And womaniser. Chopin died of a broken heart when she left him for that actress.’

‘Thought you said he died of TB?’

Jenn can sense her husband floundering, and this time she’s willing it to happen as she inwardly cheers Emma on.

‘Well, cystic fibrosis, technically, but—’

‘Ha!’

Victorious, Emma flounces off again. Jenn catches Emma’s eye and winks. She can sense her husband blushing behind his beard, muttering some excuse to Nathan. She flits her head round, ready to intervene, but Nathan isn’t even listening. He’s craning his neck back in the direction they’ve come from, fobbing Greg off with an ‘mm’ and a ‘right’ as the disquisition starts up again. Before she can look away, Nathan turns back to her – catches her watching him. She gives him a smile, playful but nervously hopeful of reciprocation. He holds her gaze, but his face gives nothing away. And then he nods and smiles at Greg and skips past to catch up with Emma. He slides an arm around her, steers her away to the other side of the cobbled street. It’s not a rebuttal to Jenn – of course it’s no such thing. Yet it’s confirmation that whatever took place yesterday, took place in her head. He carried her ashore, and that was all. They’d dug out her inhaler, got her breathing back to normal. But once she was fine, she had not been able to look Nathan in the eye. When she did so, it was a hang-dog,
sideways glance, like a pup expecting to be told No. Then almost immediately after that, Nathan and Emma had made their excuses and headed back to the villa. She and Greg had lain back as the beach began to empty, enjoying the last of the sunshine – that mellow sensation of having nowhere they needed to be, nothing they needed to do. All the sting had gone from the day and it was all diffused mellow light and soft, slow motion. Greg, soporific, had reached across and she’d taken his hand. Yet all she could think of was Nathan’s big hands on her waist. Nathan, back at the villa, naked. With Emma.

She watches him and Emma conspiring; they’ll be off to do their own thing. She tries to close herself off to the notion stirring within, and yet she cannot stop herself. She cannot stop thinking about the way he rescued her yesterday. Why does she imagine that, almost too briefly to register, he’d pressed his pelvis against her? Why can she not drive that impression from her mind? It is madness. It did not happen – not intentionally. Perhaps his dick grazed her bottom, but it was the tide that pushed him; it’s impossible to balance on those slippery stones. Why was he hard, then? No. It did not happen. And yet the fact that no one registered
her struggle, that she’d managed to swim out so far, unnoticed, and that no one thought to look for her; that
did
happen.

Jenn watches Emma lean her head against his arm as they walk, and notes that he flinches a moment, before pecking her on the head. Emma faces him for a kiss. The way she looks up at him, God …

They share a joke about something. He has her head in a lock for a second, then he shoves her away, and slaps her bottom. Emma flips her head over her shoulder, laughing, as though the butt of their joke lies somewhere back here. They gradually increase their pace until it’s
fait accompli
that the four has become two. Greg is more cross than deflated.

‘What happened to the plan? We all agreed, didn’t we? Market; monastery; lunch?’

‘We’re not cool enough.’ Jenn smiles. She says it in jest, but she’s bruised by the reality all the same.

She lingers on it for a while, tuning out from Greg’s commentary as they amble down the town’s narrow streets, past blond stone houses towards the shadows of the monastery. She can hear the market, a low hum of chatter like an intermission between a play. The air is cooler here; Jenn’s disquiet calms. The cobblestones are waxy underfoot, centuries of footfall polishing them to a dangerous sheen. Greg extends an arm for her to hold
on to. He casts her a look that is pure affection, his face creasing into a crinkly smile.

‘Never tire of this place, you know? Never.’

She strives for the appropriate degree of empathy.

‘Me neither.’

Greg is drawing himself up to make some grand philosophical pronouncement when he’s interrupted by his phone. It has rung off by the time he’s able to prise it out from his breast pocket.

‘Work again?’

He nods; stares at the screen.

‘Phone them back.’

‘I thought you said—’

The voice-mail clarion blares out. He juts his jaw from side to side, still staring at the screen. Jenn hooks an arm around his waist.

‘Look. Go and sit on that bench. Call work. Whatever it is, sort it out, then have a little wander. Soak it all up.’

She goes on tiptoe and kisses his cheek.

‘I’ll meet you back here in an hour.’

She turns and heads down a short flight of steps and goes into a trot, lest he call her back. In the distance, she can still pick out Nathan’s T-shirt.

The hippy market is busy with tourists, young folk, mainly, and a few wizened old men wearing sarongs and sandals. She feels out of place for a minute as she pauses at a stall whose sole output is wood-carved wind chimes. The young assistant with dreadlocks tells her they’re carved from the wood of ancient olive trees from the garden of
Jaime I de Aragon
. He says it with conviction, but it’s tinged with embarrassment, as though he understands how ridiculous he sounds, and yet how often it works. She nods her head, slowly, casting her eyes out to see where they went. They’re over by the jewellery stands, heading towards a stall specialising in tie-dyed tees, but there is something about the set of Emma’s shoulders that tells Jenn all is not okay. She tells the assistant she’ll give him ten euros for the wind chimes and when he laughs in her face she doesn’t hang around to barter; she positions herself at the next stall along, this one specialising in hand-woven rugs. She tucks herself behind a stripy kilim, almost identical to the ones that adorn the walls of the villa, and observes.

Nathan is holding up a T-shirt. Even from here she can tell that it’s made from the cheapest fabric possible, yet he’s handling it as though it were an object of beauty, holding it in front of him and nodding his appreciation. Emma stands a little way back from him, her arms wrapped around her ribcage, her face tilted to the ground.
There is something unnatural about Nathan’s posture, it’s a little too masculine and contrived – and Emma seems threatened by it.

The
vendedora
leans across the rows of ruched and marbled fabrics at the front of the stall and offers Nathan a different-patterned T-shirt. Jenn can make out no more than her slender, brown arms and the beaded ends of her hair as they swing forward, yet there is something queasily familiar about her; something in Nathan’s smile and the self-conscious ruffling of his hair that is priming her for something unpleasant.

This particular design is a garish kaleidoscopic, but Nathan takes time to consider it carefully before declining with a tactful shake of the head. Jenn slips in and out of the rugs till she’s close enough to get a proper look at the girl. It takes a moment for the penny to drop, and when it does she is blindsided with a furious envy. It’s her, the hippy girl from the cave yesterday. She is flirting with Nathan and he is flirting right back. And in an instant her jealousy turns to anger, directed not at Nathan, nor the hippy girl, but at herself. It’s obscene, it’s
ridiculous
, that she’s standing here in the first place, spying on them. And yet now that she is, she cannot prise her eyes away. She watches Emma fixing her hair and letting it down as she tries to effect nonchalance. She wants to go to her. And yet, coiling around her
protective instinct, slowly strangling all parental concern, is a smug and sinister satisfaction at the sordid role play.