Page 9 of High Season
Nina shifts her carry-on bag from one shoulder to another.
“As long as they’re boyfriends, not husbands,” she says. “Lucky for you, you missed her husband phase.”
Ryan ducks down to plant a kiss on top of her head.
“Hope you’re not going to take after your mum,” he says. “I don’t fancy being the starter husband.”
Nina feels a dim pulse of pleasure. They’ve been together for almost four years, but the ease with which Ryan talks about them getting married still surprises her. He’s been like that from the start, telling her on their fourth date that he could see himself being with herforever.They’ve been to three weddings already this year, all friends of his, and only two weeks ago Nina caught him lingering over her jewelry box, fingering an opal ring that Nina recently had resized. She pretended not to notice.
Now, she thinks of how lucky she is. How, when she realized that Blake’s flight was fully booked, Ryan had been the one to find them seats for the next day. How he had calmly read through the email and offered to call his lawyer, talked about the whole thing as if it was something small and insignificant. An annoyance, rather than something that felt like it had the potential to upend her entire life.
“Thanks for doing this,” Nina says. “Coming out here with me. I know work’s busy for you right now, and—”
Ryan is already waving one hand, unlocking his phone with the other as he scans for new messages.
“It’s fine,” he says. “I was planning on working from home anyway. Working from your mum’s place won’t make much difference if it’s only for a few days.”
His eyes flit up from the screen.
“Itisonly for a few days, right?”
Nina nods.
“Yeah, yeah. Of course. I just want to talk to Mum and Blake about this in person. And anyway, my job starts next week. We have an excuse to leave if Mum tries to guilt-trip us into staying.”
Ryan doesn’t ask what she means by this. He knows that Nina hates coming back to France, hates that she is expected to return to the Côte d’Azur every year for her mother’s birthday party. She even missed her graduation for it, flying out when her coursemates were enjoying their last few weeks of university. While they were donning robes, Nina had been counseling her mother through a particularly dramatic breakdown about a dress that hadn’t fit her properly.
But then, three years ago, as Nina was complaining yet again abouther mum, Ryan had simply said:But what if youdidn’tgo back this summer?, and Nina had instantly felt a weight that she hadn’t known was there lift. In spite of the furious voicemails, the lengthy messages, Nina had not been back to the Côte d’Azur since.
She likes it better this way, and she knows that Ryan does, too. He is someone who believes that perfection is possible, who talks about optimization as though he truly believes that it is a thing that can be applied not just to his work projects but to his personal life. Nina’s family—her demanding mother, her dead sister—are things that he cannot fix, cannot optimize. He cannot make them neat, and good, and shiny in the way their London life is, and she knows that this bothers him. Theybothprefer to stay away from the Côte d’Azur, if they can help it.
The passport line begins to move forward, a shuffle of restless bodies, everyone anxious to get out of the artificial cool of the airport toward the promise of the summer air.
“It’s the right thing to do, to come back,” Nina says, even though she knows that Ryan is engrossed in his phone, no longer listening. “It’s something Ihaveto do.”
The house used to be beautiful.
It’s a landmark. Has been ever since Nina’s grandfather built it back in the 1950s. A gem on the Côte d’Azur. A villa of terra-cotta stone sprawling against the rough jut of the hill. A broad terrace that reaches out toward the ocean, as if the entire house is preparing to dive in.
Back when Nina’s grandfather had bought the land, this corner of the South of France was a secret. A strange place, almost untouched. A famous American writer had built a house down in the bay back in the 1920s and published a bestselling memoir about summers when the Jazz Age elite would descend on his home. Gatsby-esque parties and afternoons drinking Sidecars by the pool. Torrid affairs and drunken fallouts, intense friendships formed over pre-dinner cocktails.
By the time Nina’s grandfather broke ground, the famous writerwas dead from liver disease and a new elite had begun to move in. Hollywood actors seduced by the romanticism of European summers and British socialites tired of war-torn cities. This land offered the promise of glamor and escape, a not-so-long-ago past that now felt very far away. A golden age to be recaptured.
Nina’s grandfather was the legendary Conrad Drayton, a film producer who had made his money in the golden age of cinema. The birth of Nina’s mother, Evelyn—his only known child—was the result of a fling with a young, aspiring actress who had happily signed away her parental rights, worried that a baby would get in the way of her fledgling career. Within a few years, she would be a washed-up starlet with a drug addiction, and Conrad Drayton would be reveling in his latest—and in his mind, greatest—role as a doting father. Evelyn Drayton had grown up between London and the Côte d’Azur, passed around at parties before she could walk, drinking martinis with dinner by the time she was thirteen. Even now, she has a habit of namedropping the people that she holidayed with back then. Sixties supermodels. Retired Hollywood stars. She talks about secret parties, skinny-dipping at midnight, margaritas out on the balcony with people so impossibly famous that Nina has to double-check her mother has got their names right. Sometimes, Nina can feel the ghosts of them sipping aperitifs on the terrace, watching sunsets over the broad expanse of sea.
Evelyn inherited the house when she was nineteen, after a catastrophic heart attack had seized her father’s right ventricle as he sipped on a strong cocktail out on the terrace. The housekeeper, who had been away visiting her son, had found him three days later, still stretched out on a sun lounger as if he had only laid down for an afternoon nap.The heat had sped up decomposition, Evelyn would sometimes tell them after a few drinks. They had wanted an open casket, but couldn’t.
“Imagine the flies,” Ryan said to Nina, after Evelyn had regaled them with the story the first and only time, before now, that Nina had brought him out there. He looked thoughtful. “Still. It’s the best place to go, your favorite place in the world. That view? Better than a shitty nursing home, at any rate.”
Nina wasn’t sure about that. Sometimes she wondered why Evelynhad wanted to keep this house, which seemed steeped in bad luck. A place where death lurked beneath beauty.
There has always been a rawness to it. Something stark in the way that it protrudes from the cliff face. How great stretches of it sprawl out from the hillside, as though defying gravity. The unusual geometry—Nina’s grandfather insisted on designing it himself, and windows and artfully placed decks open onto vistas of sky, giving the impression that the world has fallen away, or that one wrong turn could send you toppling over the edge, cascading down toward the sea.
The house used to be beautiful, and in a way, it still is. But now, it also has an air of neglect, a feeling that it belongs to a different time. Salt has sped up the structure’s decay, vines crawling up the walls and knotting into window frames, plaster cracking where the house has performed a ragged breath, an expanding exhale in the midday heat and a retraction in the cooler months.
Over time, the sun has bleached the terra-cotta stone, the sea air ravaging the walls. The orange-red has faded to a shade of salmon, and now the locals call it the pink house.La maison rose.
Nina knows that Evelyn can no longer afford the upkeep, has never really been able to afford the upkeep. It seems, somehow, as if the house was always supposed to crumble into the mountainside. As if nothing so big, so sumptuous, so overblown is supposed to last forever.
