‘Flora!’ Ava turned in the direction of the woman wandering up from the beach. Her hair wet from the sea, an old black sarong with faded pink flowers tied across her chest, ratty old plastic sliders on her feet.
‘May I?’ she asked when she reached Ava’s table, pointing to a chair.
‘Of course,’ Ava nodded. ‘It’s your café,’ she added with a laugh, surreptitiously closing the TripAdvisor page of glowing reviews for Nino’s.
‘I barely saw you at the funeral,’ Flora said, squeezing the water from her hair.
Ava remembered spotting Flora in a veiled black hat and waving across the throng of mourners. Now though, she had to suppress her shock at how much Flora had changed. This was a woman who Ava had seen reduce grown men to gibbering wrecks. Her own brother had spent a summer filming the café for his degree show and followed Flora around like a puppy.
A British food writer, Flora was famed for her looks. Her figure. Her glossy blonde hair and perfect pout. But instead of the voluptuous glamourpuss, sitting in front of Ava was a really tired-looking middle-aged woman with weathered skin and hair in need of a retouch.
‘How are you?’ Ava asked.
‘Hot,’ Flora said, crossing her legs and sitting back in her chair, fanning herself with the menu. ‘Old.’
Ava shook her head as if she didn’t know what she was talking about.
Flora called to the waiter to bring over some drinks. ‘Sherry?’ she said to Ava, who nodded.
Ava was struggling to work out what Flora was doing late-night swimming while her café slowly faded away, losing all its trade to the place on the opposite side of the path. ‘They’re new,’ she said tentatively, gesturing towards the heaving restaurant.
Flora didn’t turn to look. ‘There’s three of them who run it. City boys. Came from Barcelona. Stole my business.’
‘Oh,’ said Ava.
‘Yes,’ said Flora. Then she sighed. ‘No. Who am I kidding? It hasn’t been the same since Ricardo left and now I’m stuck with the bloody place.’
Ava did a sort of half-neutral, half-sympathetic face. While it was public knowledge that Flora Foxton had fallen head over heels for up-and-coming Spanish chef Ricardo Garcia on a cookery show she’d filmed across the Mediterranean, Ava wasn’t sure how much she was meant to know about events leading up to Ricardo’s departure. It was safe to say she knew every single minute detail, as relayed by her grandmother in unnecessary whispers over the phone, as if Flora might hear them through the wall, across the path and all the way over at the café.
Valentina Brown had never trusted Ricardo. She had scoffed on the phone when he had presented Flora with a knot of turquoise thread instead of an engagement ring. Ava had said that she thought it was quite romantic. As had Flora, clearly, as she proceeded to solely finance the set-up of the very successful Café Estrella from the profits of her once-bestselling cookery books, to allow Ricardo to show off his modern take on classic tapas. The critics mocked the location but Ricardo drawled in interviews that ‘People will travel for the best’ and refused to budge from his little beachside idyll. It was this same arrogant passion that had made Rory’s graduation film such a success. And Ricardo had been right. People had come. The café had garnered a coveted Michelin star. But while whipping up his fancy new tapas and proclaiming himself the saviour of Spanish cuisine, Ricardo’s growing reputation had put him in the spotlight of the rich and famous, who whisked him off to prepare birthday feasts on mega yachts and cater weddings in the Hollywood Hills – all a world away from Flora and their little beach café.
When Flora told Val that Ricardo had left her for a very young American underwear model who he was now living with in Chicago, Val had whispered on the phone to Ava that she was not surprised one little bit, and added with quiet confidence, ‘Never trust a man who gives you a piece of string instead of a ring.’
Now, as Ava sat opposite Flora, she saw the heartbreaking reality of what had previously just been idle gossip. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said.
‘Well, what are you going to do?’ Flora sat back in her chair, piling her damp blonde curls on top of her head and wrapping them with an elastic band from her wrist. ‘People came here for him and, well, he’s not here, is he!’ She looked round at the empty café tables. ‘And that lot, they’re young.’ She nodded her head backwards towards Nino’s. ‘They’ve got the energy to triple fry their chips and serve their oysters in shot glasses. Which frankly, to me, sounds disgusting anyway, but people seem to like it. They talk about it a lot.’ She gave Ava a wry little look and then, glancing out to the sea, said, ‘I just hide in the back nowadays, ghost-writing cookery books for skinny celebrities and avoiding my accountant.’
Ava laughed.
Flora smiled. ‘But it’s OK. How are you doing? Missing Val? She was bloody annoying half the time but it’s not the same without her.’
‘I know.’ Ava nodded. The sherries arrived, the waiter setting them down on little paper coasters, half an eye on the beach, studiously ignoring them. ‘Thanks,’ Ava said. He didn’t reply. Flora rolled her eyes as if there was nothing she could do about him. Ava smiled into her sherry, then waited until they were alone again to say, ‘It’s harder than I thought, being in the house. There are just so many memories.’
Flora took a sip of her drink. ‘And she had a lot of crap.’
Ava, who had been expecting sympathetic words of advice, snorted into her drink. Flora laughed, as if she’d taken herself by surprise.
‘She does have a lot of crap,’ Ava agreed, liberated. She didn’t mention her mother’s room; like stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia, it was her precious secret to keep.
Flora smiled. ‘Just go in, ruthless, and chuck it away. I think it’s the only way. Val wouldn’t want you poring over her stuff. She knew it was tat, half of it. I was with her at the boot sales when she bought it. Bag it up, bin it and enjoy the sunshine. That’s what she’d have said. Don’t you do this kind of thing for a living?’
Ava thought about her job. She tried to compare Val’s house, with all its knick-knacks, to the palatial New York townhouses and cliff-top ancestral piles in the Scottish Highlands where she would pitch up for valuations and contents auctions. Places where she was handed plastic shoe covers at the door and white gloves to wear when inspecting the art or browsing the library. While she did think about who had sat in the pair of French Louis XIII armchairs she was bidding ten grand on, or who had lit the £20,000 Italian Baroque candelabras, their lives were more often than not secondary to the wealth. What they left behind was more valuable than their memory. Whereas with Val, every item was a manifestation of her self. Every chipped vase and tacky flea market print seemed to carry her voice. ‘There’s no more room in my house. But I like it. You like it? Not fancy enough for your lot of course. I’m going to have it. Where I’ll put it? But I’m going to have it.’
And then there were her mother’s things. Ava could price a regency giltwood mirror or mid-century Murano chandelier with her eyes shut, but that little room was beyond value.
Flora took another sip of her sherry, flumped her wet hair with her hand and, glancing around said, ‘I’ll tell you who does have some interesting stuff, have you met Tom yet? Bought the vineyard on the hill. He’s poured some money into that house. It was practically derelict when he bought it. You wouldn’t recognise it now.’
Ava shook her head. ‘I’ve never met him,’ she said, but she’d heard all about Tom-On-The-Hill as well. Retired actor. Kept Val up with all the drilling and banging during the renovation, but made up for it with a bottle of expensive brandy when she climbed the steps to complain. They’d smoked cigars on his terrace together apparently, and Ava had always wondered if they were having an affair.
‘He’s over there by the bar,’