Page 74 of High Season
“Does it make you sad?” she says. “Being out here?”
Evelyn doesn’t look at her.
“Nina,” she says. “There are kinds of sadness that you can’t even imagine, until they happen to you. And then they happen, and you forget there’s any other way to feel. Do you mind if I smoke?”
Nina is so taken aback by the request that she only blinks at her mother. Her mother, who doesn’t ask permission for anything. Who isbarely seen without a cigarette in her hand, a wreath of smoke around her head.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Evelyn says.
She produces a packet of cigarettes, lights up, and takes a long, thoughtful drag.
“So no,” she says as she exhales. “I don’t feel any sadder here than I do anywhere else. Because it’s everywhere, that sadness. And you keep on moving because you have to. You survive, because you’re lucky to have been given the chance to do so. Because it’s all that youcando.”
In the distance the sea glitters. A bird dips and rises in the air overhead, a lazy, swooping dance.
“Did you think that I was telling the truth?” Nina asks. “About what happened?”
Evelyn looks right at her then. She’s bare-faced, besides the thin, faded tattoo of her eyebrows. For a moment, Nina can see the beauty that she once was. The eighties it-girl, the woman that the world fell in love with. The woman that Evelyn has never quite been able to let go of since.
“I think that in a situation like that,” Evelyn says, “you believe what you have to, to stay alive.”
Nina’s heart sinks.
“So you don’t really believe it?”
Her mother exhales a purple stream of smoke.
“Belief is a choice, Nina,” she says. “I choose to believe in my children. You have to. It would destroy you, otherwise.”
“But wouldn’t it be better to know? Wouldn’t you go looking for the truth, if you were me?”
Evelyn stubs her cigarette out, right on the border where the stones turn a lighter shade. Right where their lives changed forever.
“I think,” says Evelyn. “That the past comes back to you, no matter what.”
Something flickers across her face then. Her features rearrange, and all of a sudden, she looks distracted. Changed.
“Look,” she says. There’s something strained in her voice again. A forced brightness that wasn’t there before. “I didn’t come out here totalk to you about all that. There’s actually something I wanted to tell you.”
She sits up straighter. Rolls her shoulders back.
“I’m selling the house.”
Nina just blinks at her.
“What?”
“It’s been a struggle for years, darling. You know it has. It’s falling apart, the upkeep is madness. And my dad’s work will be out of copyright soon, and we’ll stop getting royalties, and… well. There’s not much left in the pot, otherwise.” She lets out a strange, strangled laugh. “You know I’ve never been good with money. There seemed like so much of it when I was younger and now… it just goes so quickly, doesn’t it? I should have been better with it really, invested or something, but… well, you just don’t think about it at the time, do you?”
There’s a tightness behind her words, as if she’s holding something back. As if, if the brightness falters from her voice, the fear will creep through.
“But you love this house,” says Nina.
For the last few years, Nina has watched as her mother downgraded her London townhouse to a two-bed flat. As she started to sell her vintage designer pieces. Let go of staff, until only Sandra remained. Nina has known for a long time that the money was running out, but she never imagined that her mother would sell the pink house. It is the focal point of their family. Their legacy. An entire mythology between stone walls and sea views that Nina assumed would last forever.
“Of course I do. Do you know what it’s going to do to me to sell this house? The decision alone has nearly killed me. But it’s impossible, Nina. And I know, I’ve been foolish. All those bloody divorce settlements, and all the houses, and the parties. I just didn’t realize the money would run out. I’ve always had it, you know? I’ve never known any different. I assumed it would be there forever, even when everything else… even when everyoneelse left me.”
She takes a deep breath.
