Page 11 of High Season
She takes a long drag on her cigarette and continues with a smoky exhale, her voice louder, an octave too high.
“I remember in the early eighties when the papers said that Blake’s father was having an affair with a European princess—an actual European princess! Well! It was everywhere, as you can imagine. Paparazzi outside of hotel rooms. The works. We ignored the whole thing. Didn’t say a word. It blew over, of course. Yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s fish-and-chips paper.”
“He probablywashaving an affair with a European princess, knowing Dad,” Blake says dryly. “And anyway. Nobody reads actual newspapers these days. And fish and chips don’t get wrapped up in newspapers anymore, either.”
“But people read stuff online,” says Nina. “And people watch true crime documentaries, and listen to podcasts, and that stuff stays on the internet forever. Nobody forgets about it.”
Evelyn taps her cigarette against the ashtray impatiently.
“Well, I don’t know about that, darling,” she says.
“And don’t you think we shouldwantto hear what they have to say?” says Nina. “If they think that this documentary could revealsomething new about what happened to Tamara, shouldn’t we help with that? Maybe we shouldwantto be a part of it?”
Evelyn flings her hands upward.
“Not this again,” she says. Her loud brightness has cracked, and her voice sounds strained. “First the bloody child psychology and now—”
“Nina.” Blake’s voice is firm now, speaking over their mother. “We know what Josie Jackson did. No amount of documentaries or amateur sleuths is going to change that. We say nothing. And we stick together. Like we always do. Like we always have done, all this time.”
Nina catches a look in his eye then. A promise.Later, it says.We’ll talk about this later.
“There’s no use spoiling our holiday,” Evelyn says. Her voice wavers on the last word. Her eyes are very wide, and she has a strangely childlike look to her, the threat of tears. “I’ve been looking forward to having you both here. Don’t ruin it, Nina.”
Nina’s mouth slides shut. She has the distinct impression that she somehow manages to spoil things. But what else can you expect when at five years old you were given information that had the power to wreck someone’s life?
“Come on,” Evelyn continues. “Drink up. We’re celebrating, aren’t we? The whole family here. Everyone back together.”
Nina picks up her glass. She is gripping the stem so tightly that she is surprised it doesn’t shatter.
“To summer!” Evelyn says.
“To summer,” echoes Blake, lifting his own drink.
When Nina raises her glass to her lips, Blake doesn’t break her gaze.
FIVE
2004
SIX WEEKS BEFORE THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
When she was a child, Hannah Bailey used to collect stories about Evelyn Drayton.
This town, this stretch of coastline, was all that Hannah had ever known. Her parents had met while backpacking in Thailand in the early eighties. Her dad, an East Londoner, said he had found her mum impossibly glamorous, with her thick French accent and her harem pants. Her mum said she had found him too brash, too boyish, and yet somehow, they had clicked. They had traveled the world together until Hannah’s mum realized she was pregnant—an accident, as the story went. That was when they had decided to move to this stretch of coast, far from the metropolises where they had each grown up. A former holiday haunt of artists and bohemians that teetered with the promise of becoming the next hippie paradise.
But dominated by villas that belonged to old-money families who drifted in and out with the good weather, the offbeat Eden Hannah’s parents had hoped for never quite materialized. The dive shop that they plugged all of their savings into survived off the occasional family who would placate bored teenagers with the promise of scuba lessons, or children with the inflatable rafts they stocked to the ceiling. Somehow, each summer trudged in and out, and Hannah and her parents were still here.
Hannah knew everything about this town. She was a watcher. That was what her mother used to say about her. She would often report that even when Hannah was a toddler, she was happiest sitting quietly and observing. She would perch behind the counter of the dive shop, her eyes following customers, solemn and still. Absorbing details until she understood the intricate dynamics between families and friendships. Hannah knew everything about everyone, her mum once said. Hannah was good with secrets.
As far back as Hannah could remember, she understood that Evelyn Drayton was special. She heard how people talked about her. The reverence in the way they said her name. Even though Hannah didn’t really understand what fame was, couldn’t comprehend Evelyn’s past as a celebrated socialite, she understood glamor. She understood that this woman was different. That there was something fascinating about her. Something that made Hannah long to be a Drayton.
Throughout her childhood, she collected stories about the family like a magpie hunting for bright, shiny things. She learned that Evelyn’s name had once been synonymous with celebrity wild childs; that after she inherited her father’s vast fortune at nineteen, she had regularly been spotted falling out of nightclubs, memorialized in paparazzi shots of her holding hands with bad-boy actors and aristocrats that sold to the tabloids for hundreds of thousands of pounds. She learned Evelyn had been married four times, twice to the same person. That her first husband was rock star Rocco Mae. That they’d had an infamously torrid and intense romance in the eighties. That they’d married when she was pregnant with twins, the pictures of Evelyn’s rounded belly at their Vegas wedding splashed across gossip pages. That they were often branded as the new Richard Burton and Liz Taylor, the new Sid and Nancy—couples whose self-destructiveness outstripped their romance.
Hannah learned that Rocco and Evelyn divorced when the twins were just babies, after rumors of infidelity on both sides, but had been unable to stay away from each other. They had remarried in thenineties and divorced again three years later, when Rocco left for a supermodel ten years younger than Evelyn.
Then there was Evelyn’s second husband—technically also her third husband—who had been arrested for trashing a hotel room at the Ritz. Evelyn’s youngest child, Nina, was born not long after their marriage, and not long before their quickie divorce. She was the result of an affair—the papers speculating that the father was anyone from an heir to an ancient European fortune to the pink house’s pool boy. Evelyn never confirmed either way. She bulldozed through the rumors by getting engaged to her fourth husband, a much younger American named Harrison Andreas, after just two weeks of a whirlwind romance.
“The Draytons are basically royalty around here,” Hannah had said when Josie’s mother landed the job of housekeeper at the pink house. “Everyone knows who they are.”
