The Carlo Catering boys return in the evening. Anette has mellowed and is especially nice to Bianka; perhaps she’s clever enough to understand that it’s a good idea to stay on friendly terms. Bianka chuckles to herself and eyes Ricky appreciatively as he flips the steak in the air, his biceps flexing. Bianka asks Anette whether, if she wasn’t married, would she want to take this guy for a bit of a ride.
Anette responds deadpan, ‘I’m getting a divorce, actually. But it’s not like I’d want to sleep with some random guy half my age.’
‘Why not?’
Anette stares at her, then bursts out laughing and Bianka feels hopeful she’s finally winning her over.
Anette is more animated than Bianka has seen her before and is definitely the person driving the rowdy conversation after dinner.
‘Okay,’ she begins, her light eyes travelling around the table to each of them in turn. ‘Let’s play a drinking game. Never have I ever. You know the rules, we each say something we’ve never done and if you have done it, you drink.’ Everyone laughs a little and Bianka notices Charlotte glancing over at her, perhaps wondering whether she thinks she and her friends are weird playing this game as middle-aged married women. Bianka winks at her; she doubts they’ll surprise her with any juicy stories she hasn’t heard before.
‘Never have I ever slept with someone more than ten years older or younger than me,’ says Charlotte. Nobody drinks except Linda, whose husband is a decade older. ‘Okay, your turn,’ Charlotte says to Linda.
‘Uh, okay. Never have I ever slept with two people in the space of a week.’ Anette, Bianka, and Charlotte all drink, then burst out laughing.
‘Okay, your turn, Anette.’
‘Never have I ever slept with a woman.’
Bianka waits a while, gauging the others, who all seem to have grown still, then she drinks, a deliberately slow and long sip, before placing her empty glass on the table with a little clang. The atmosphere seems to shift when Charlotte, too, takes a big sip of her wine, emptying her glass. Anette’s mouth drops open in surprise. Linda looks as zen as ever. Charlotte laughs and Bianka loves this sudden brazen version of her.
The game continues for a long while until eventually, after another bottle, Linda makes her excuses and heads up to bed.
‘Poor thing,’ says Anette. ‘Imagine going through IVF at our age. I’m heading up too.’
Bianka and Charlotte finish their wine and then stand up and, without speaking, head back down to the beach. Later, much later, they return to Can Xara, still mellow from all the wine, loosely holding hands and laughing quietly so as not to wake the others. On noticing that the van from Carlo’s Catering is still parked in the driveway, they exchange a confused glance, but when they head upstairs, Ricky, the sexy man child, emerges from Anette’s room, fumbling with the buttons on his linen shirt and looking mortified to bump into them. Bianka and Charlotte slip into the master bedroom in fits of laughter.
Nineteen
Charlotte
Two days pass in a blur – it’s all about her, being close, and closer still. I’ve never known anything like this before, a quest for complete possession; I’ve never experienced someone’s touch as confident and pleasurable as my own. She kisses my lips raw, she dislodges bubbles of laughter that must have been hiding deep inside of me, so they constantly burst to the surface. I don’t think of myself as unhappy but I realize I’m far out of touch with simple joy.
I try to spread myself evenly between my guests, but in truth, all I want is Bianka, Bianka, and more Bianka. Today I made a conscious effort to stay behind at the house with Anette while Linda and Bianka went to the beach. And all the while we sat by the pool, flicking through fashion magazines and sipping rosé, I couldn’t stop thinking about my excursion to the sea with Bianka the other night, how free I’d felt zipping up the road, how good it felt when Bianka’s hands closed around my waist. And after, in the sea, watching Bianka dip beneath the surface to find me with her tongue, how I closed my eyes and tipped my head back, the sun beating down on my face.
*
By now, it feels like it’s almost a given that Linda and Anette head back to the house after dinner and Bianka and I stay for another round of drinks. Since the night when Anette cut her foot at Platja d’en Bossa, she’s been noticeably cool with me on occasion, especially if my attention has been specifically on Bianka. I pretend not to notice – we’re presumably all adults here and I’d like to think I’m allowed to hang out with whomever I please.
I watch Bianka carefully as dinner draws to an end, plates are cleared, drinks finished. I’m pleased to notice Linda suppressing yawns before the exorbitant bill is even placed on the table.
‘Well, that’s a shit ton of money for some chickpeas,’ says Bianka, and I can’t say I disagree, not that I would ever touch chickpeas. Lou’s Ocean Bar is a trendy vegan restaurant a little further down the coast from Can Xara, where people pay for the pretty faces and incredible ocean views rather than the food.
‘I thought it was fantastic,’ says Anette.
‘Me too,’ says Linda. I stare at the sea, at ripples of darkness twisting into its depths in between the last splashes of deep-amber sunlight fading on its surface.
Bianka drives again tonight. She seems to enjoy the Vespa and the undulating, bumpy road through the hills to Can Xara, and though we stayed for another couple of drinks after dinner, it’s still early and my heart sinks at the thought of yet another day here almost being over. I’ve been trying to steel myself for our time at Can Xara coming to an inevitable end and yet, I can’t bear to think about returning to London. How it will even be possible. With the exception of my children, I feel as though I wouldn’t care if I never went back to any of it.
I’m so deep in my own thoughts that I haven’t noticed that Bianka has pulled over by the side of the road and that the steady drone of the Vespa’s engine has been replaced with another sound. Bianka smiles and lifts the helmet off my head and I recognize it now – it’s the same haunting music that was playing the other day when we were down on the beach in the moonlight. It’s a kind of lounge music with a woman’s deep vocal overlaid on an insisting beat and a catchy hook, and judging by its loudness we can’t be far from its source.
‘House party,’ says Bianka, grinning widely. I glance around, trying to gauge exactly where we are. The stretch of road looks vaguely familiar, but so does every road around Can Xara. ‘I think it must be the property next to yours. You said they were French, right?’
‘Uh, yes. Hey, Bianka, look, let’s head back to the house.’
‘Pourquoi? There’s a party here somewhere. We should join.’
‘We haven’t been invited. Also, we’ve had an ongoing dispute with them, it’s not like I can just gate-crash their party. To be honest, I’m a little surprised they’re even having a party. They’re quite elderly. Maybe they’ve rented the house out.’ I try to summon Anne-Marie and Louis Dubois-Joseph to mind, but I haven’t seen them in many years. We may be neighbours but both Sa Capricciosa and Can Xara are big estates with a lot of land and it’s not like we bump into each other randomly.
I had the impression that the Dubois-Josephs were quite friendly with Ximena in the years before her death, when she first moved back to the island, but for a long while now Andreas and I have endured an exhausting legal dispute with them over the path that leads down to Cala Azura. I replace my helmet and get back on the Vespa. We’re just moments from home and it feels more tempting to sit upstairs on the roof terrace with one last drink than to gate-crash their late-night party.
‘Come on, Charlotte. Don’t be such a party pooper.’
‘No, Bianka. I’m really sorry, but there’s just no way I can go there.’
We hear another sound insisting itself into the gaps in the music; a car is approaching. It’s a green-and-white taxi from Eivissa, and from it spill three beautiful, flamboyantly dressed young women, laughing and chattering. They catch sight of us standing by the roadside, dressed in pretty dresses, and one of them, a stunning mixed-race girl with huge diamond earrings and blood-red lips, hooks her arm through mine and drags me along as though we are old friends. Bianka laughs and catches up, looping her arm through my other arm, and a guard waves us through the gates of Sa Capricciosa with barely a glance.
It’s my first time inside the Dubois-Josephs’ property. Sa Capricciosa and Can Xara were constructed before the headlands of Punta de Sa Creu and Punta Xamena were made into a national park, and I suppose it won’t hurt to finally see the house. I’ve only caught glimpses of it from my morning swims across the bay.
The music is so loud it feels as though it enters my body, becoming part of me, overriding my pulse with a new beat. The house is huge and sprawls on several levels around a light turquoise pool; a series of interlinked sections built in the traditional whitewashed Ibicenco style, with roof terraces on which people are dancing.
Bianka merges with a crowd dancing by the side of the pool and drags me along with her, pulling me close and pushing her hips into mine. She laughs and leans in, whispering into my ear, and I am so disarmed by her and by the moment that I can’t help but laugh.
Before this trip, I can’t remember when I last danced. It’s not like Andreas and I go out clubbing in London, though we did when we were much younger in Oslo – it was how we met.
I’d been dragged out to a new club in downtown Oslo by some friends from med school and felt instantly out of place as I took in the grown-up, chic crowd starting to fill up the dance floor. The women had thick, glossy blond hair and almost all of them wore variations of tailored little black dresses. In my quirky pastel slip dress and short, dark bob I felt like Amélie from Montmartre in a sea of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedys. I made myself laugh whenever someone spoke, and made myself dance, though I felt acutely self-conscious and my body felt wooden and lanky.
I became aware of someone’s presence next to me after I’d drifted to the edge of the dance floor, in need of a quiet moment to myself.
