to finish watering the plot. ‘Do I have algae on my face, Annie?’ Emily shouted.
Annie peered at her. ‘No.’
Emily looked back at Jack who had his head down and was supposedly concentrating on digging, but she could see the smirk on his lips. She opened her mouth to say something but didn’t know what.
No one. No one made her feel like Jack did. No one ever had. Like she was off balance. Not in control. Even his hair and his beard threw her off. Everything he did, everything he said, seemed to catch her on the wrong foot. It was all too calm, too slow, too all-seeing. He stood up and wiped the sheen of sweat off his forehead, saw her still watching him and leant against his spade to watch her back. ‘Does that happen to you often?’ he asked, tilting his head towards the river were the paparazzo had been unceremoniously dumped.
‘Fairly often,’ Emily nodded.
‘I don’t know how you can live like that,’ he said.
She shrugged. ‘We don’t all want to live on fishing boats.’
He snorted a laugh. ‘I need to talk to you about that actually.’
‘Why? If it’s to ask me to sail away with you,’ she said with a half-smile. ‘Then the answer’s no.’
As soon as she’d said it, she wished she hadn’t. Even in jest she knew it was an awkward, stupid thing to say.
He narrowed his eyes then sort of laughed, shook his head and went back to digging his hole.
‘Go on then, why did you want to talk to me about your boat?’ Emily said.
The soil cracked under the edge of the spade. ‘Because,’ he said with a pant as he dug deeper into the earth, ‘I’m kind of living on your property. On your mooring.’
‘Are you now?’
He stopped digging and looked directly at her, sky-blue eyes on a face dirty with sweat and mud. ‘Yeah. I didn’t realise the house had been sold.’
‘What, so I’m kind of like your landlady?’ Emily bit her nail. If she still knew Jack at all she knew that he hated being beholden to anyone. Almost as much as he hated rules and regulations.
‘Suppose so.’
‘Well I’ll have to work out some kind of rent, won’t I?’ she said.
‘Or you could just let me be?’ he said with a shrug of his shoulder.
A sly grin stretched over Emily’s face. ‘And where would the fun be in that?’
Everything Emily remembered about Montmorency Manor had been destroyed by its previous owners.
When they finally completed, she didn’t even need a key to unlock the door, just a code punched into a panel that had been chipped into the Georgian stone.
‘Bloody hell.’ Annie’s boyfriend, Matt, stood in the centre of the hallway and looked all the way around him. ‘What have they done to this place?’
Gone was the sweeping wooden staircase that Emily had slid down in a bikini one summer to get Jack’s attention as he was talking to Wilf, in its place was a glass-panelled effort with silver handrails and two giant silver statue newel posts. Gone were the flagstones and the huge antique rugs and the marble fireplace next to which the giant Christmas tree had stood as the fire crackled. Now the hallway was carpeted in lime shag-pile and the walls and ceiling were painted black. They’d ripped out the cornicing and spray-painted silver skulls on the walls.
The front door opened and Matt’s teenage son, River, sloped in with their pug dog, Buster, and hovered behind Emily and Annie.
‘What happened to you?’ Matt asked, glancing round Annie to see him.
‘Nothing, I was on the phone,’ River mumbled. ‘Can I go to the loo?’
‘Yes,’ Emily said, mimicking his grumpy teenage voice, but he didn’t find it funny, staring back at her blankly. Pretending to be chastised, she waved her hand in the direction of the bathroom and he slouched off, the dog trotting behind him, the spotlights along the corridor changing colour from red to blue to green as he went.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ Emily asked after he’d gone.
‘Girl trouble,’ Annie said. ‘He won’t talk about it.’
‘Ah, poor River.’ Emily did a sympathetic laugh.
‘Poor us, more like!’ Matt rolled his eyes as they walked through into the kitchen. ‘He’s a nightmare to live with.’
‘Don’t!’ Emily bashed him in the chest. ‘Young love is really hard.’
Matt just shook his head as if he’d had enough of it all and then whistled when he saw the kitchen. ‘Wow!’ he said, and went over to prod one of the huge leopard-print high stools bolted to the ground around a white island pod.
Emily put her hands over her eyes. ‘I know. It’s hideous,’ she said, remembering the open wooden shelves covered in Bernard’s paraphernalia from various trips abroad, the white pillar-box tiles, the Aga that they’d taken turns to see how long they could sit on as teenagers, the big wooden table covered with Bernard’s make-up equipment – tool-box style boxes filled with tubes of foundation, plastic pots of lipstick and glosses, tubes of mascara and leather pouches for brushes that were stained and marked from use. She remembered the first time he’d done her make up – the flick of the eyeliner, ‘Follow the line of the bottom lash and fill in the curl from the top’, the Russian Red on her lips, the tiny splodge of colour on the apple of her cheeks, ‘You could be in the pictures, my dear.’
She remembered when she started shadowing him on set. How he refused to admit that he needed any help, that it was starting to get a little bit much for him, but when the director of a small-time soap opera spotted Emily and asked her to audition for a role, Bernard was the first to jump in and say she was a make-up artist not an actress. It was only as she stared at this shiny, new kitchen, lamenting the loss of the old, that she realised he hadn’t perhaps needed her help as much as she had thought, but rather, perhaps he’d known how susceptible she would be to the film industry. The camera took quite a shine to the vivacious young blonde Emily and, of course, if it hadn’t nothing would have turned out the way it did.
‘They can’t have been allowed to do this?’ Annie said, pointing to where the original Georgian windows had been replaced by modern folding glass doors that opened out onto the garden.
Emily shook her head, ‘No I don’t think they were, but who’s going to enforce it? It’s overlooked by no one, they could do what they like. Wait till you see the bedrooms.’
River stalked back in, drying his hands on his jeans, ‘There are speakers in the ceiling of the toilet.’
‘There are speakers in the ceiling of every room,’ Emily said. ‘And the fireplace is now a video screen of a fire that you control on another wall panel. It’s ridiculous.’ She sashayed over to stand
