she’d spent the next year trading an Aix-en-Provence atelier for an Archway bedsit, and camping with a tortured writer who never bought loo roll and who was in possession of so much body hair it was like showering after a gorilla. Wading ankle-deep through unsold drawings had soon become depressing and, following a series of short-lived bar jobs, the last of which had culminated in Olivia telling an aggressively sexist customer to fuck off, her bank account had finally run dry and she’d been forced to admit defeat.
‘No kidding,’ he droned.
She smiled brightly. ‘So did I miss much?’
‘Nah.’ Addy yawned, stretching so his chest opened before her like a casket of treasure. ‘The cove’s dead. Nothing exciting ever happens round here.’
‘It will now I’m back. I can’t spend the entire summer sitting under my mother’s caravan roof, you know.’ If it could be called that: parts of Florence Lark’s ancient Pemberton Static were tacked down with masking tape.
‘Guess you’ll be looking for a job?’
‘It’s why I’m here.’ She consulted the noticeboard. ‘Anything good come up?’
‘Dunno—haven’t checked it in ages.’
Every opening at the cove advertised at the Blue Paradise and the display was thick with flyers requesting bar staff, shop help, grape pickers at the Quillets Vineyard or muck shovellers at the Barley Nook stables … The list went on. Olivia had taken most as holiday earners when she was still in training bras.
‘Suppose I should,’ Addy commented boredly. ‘New horizons and all that.’
Her head snapped up. ‘You’re leaving?’
‘Maybe. I’m antsy. You know how I get. I need more out of life than sitting round here chatting up girls … It’s samey after a while, you know?’
She forced a smile. Was Addy aware of how she felt? Maybe. But then he could have the pick of any girl he wanted, and she was just his friend. She could make him laugh. She could surf with him in the rain. She could help him with his English homework because he had a fear of any book that was longer than fifty pages. What she couldn’t be was a six-foot blonde with legs that went on for miles.
Even though Olivia had known him since the beginning of time, the Addy fire burst before her now just as brilliant and dangerous as the first day she’d seen it. She’d been six and he’d been nine, and Addy’s little sister a regular at Tiffany’s tea parties. Olivia would spy him outside with his friends playing Gun Tower Home! and would long to flee the dinky dining room and china pots filled with nothing, and tear through the brambles till her dress ripped. Of course the boys had tried everything to shrug her off: locking her in the Creepy Shed, vowing that she had to be slave, racing on their bikes so she couldn’t keep up, setting up dares they never thought she’d meet … But Olivia was determined, and once she had accepted the ultimate challenge of sprinting across the field owned by Farmer Nancarrow, a shadowy, mysterious, darkly enticing character who had become in the children’s eyes more myth than man—he would shoot anyone who trespassed on his land and then cook them for supper!—they had finally accepted her as marginally all right for a girl.
It was a lifetime ago, and yet still only yesterday.
Olivia had hoped that seeing Addy again might have prompted an epiphany, a realisation that all these years he had tricked her into seeing what wasn’t there, believing what wasn’t true. But with Addy, just with Addy, always with Addy, it returned to the same. Olivia wasn’t stupid, but he made her crazy. She was solid; he turned her to mush. She was level-headed; with him she went wonky. Her love for him could be traced back to twelve, eleven, ten, maybe before, when they had made hideouts in the ferns and she’d started noticing his eyes were blue, not grey, and her mum would pack them fish-finger sandwiches, and each time Olivia gave him a sketch, of him, of her, of the swinging tyre they had rigged above his parents’ lake, folded tight and slipped into his pocket, it had felt like losing a tiny piece of her heart.
‘There’s tons of stuff on here,’ she said, without conviction.
‘No offence, Oli, but I’m aiming higher than the cove. I haven’t bothered with that waster pinboard.’ Addy scratched his chin. ‘I’m thinking big.’
Olivia almost didn’t see it.
A leaf of paper obscured by a yachting brochure, but where its edges escaped it bore the unmistakeable crest she remembered from her youth:
Usherwood Estate seeks able & enthusiastic gardener Summer hours at competitive rates— please enquire
She frowned. As the stately residence of the former Lord and Lady Lomax, grand old Usherwood was a fairytale castle of turrets and wings, towers and acreage, a majestic relic of a forgotten time. The Lomax couple had perished in a plane crash thirteen years ago, and their sons, at that time only teenagers, had inherited. Cato, the eldest, was notorious, a Hollywood A-lister who had bolted after the tragedy, never to return. The youngest had stayed at the ancestral home, and was by all accounts a recluse.
‘Hey, Humpty, check this out!’
The voice was so upper class it sounded like there was a bag of marbles rolling around in its mouth. Olivia turned. A strut of city boys had located a window mannequin in a state of undress and one of them was making an obscene gesture at her nether regions. Lustell Cove attracted the Made in Chelsea set. With its lush, wild panoramas matched by higgledy-piggledy streets dotted with quaint Cornish cottages and tea shops, it was far enough from the capital to feel exclusive to the seriously wealthy, while its hot beach culture ensured it was anything but a stuffy hideaway.
‘Too funny, Ruffers, too funny.’ Humpty was sporting a pair of Hawaiian-print boardshorts despite Olivia’s suspicion he had never done anything in the water save a breaststroke—and that only if it promised not to get his hair wet.
‘D’you surf?’ asked Addy, not especially interested. Olivia saw his eyes scan the gathering for a hot blonde with a trust fund—she knew him too well.
‘My dad’s got a Maxus,’ Humpty replied, tossing his coiffed arrangement in the direction of the marina, which was bobbing with sleek white speedboats. His entourage of Hooray Henrys guffawed their approval. ‘Who needs a plank of wood?’
‘Can I help you, then?’ said Addy. ‘You know, with anything surf-related?’
One of them asked: ‘Dude, do you know the Lomaxes?’
Addy returned his attention to his phone. ‘Not if you mean Cato,’ he bristled. ‘Far as I know he hasn’t been back here in, like, for ever.’
‘The house is pretty creepy, huh,’ said Humpty.
‘Is it true it’s, like, the biggest house in England?’ enquired Ruffers.
‘I heard they’ve got champagne fountains in the gardens,’ said another.
‘And Cato keeps a monkey in the cellar,’ put in Humpty, ‘to bring him things. I read about it. Someone saw it swinging about in a gold waistcoat.’
There followed an inventory of increasingly extravagant fictions. Everyone was so busy talking that they didn’t notice when Olivia unpinned the Usherwood flyer and fed it discreetly into the back pocket of her jeans. She slipped outside.
