Words were said in Spanish, a blessing Ava couldn’t understand. So she remembered instead her first taste of chorizo and chickpeas, and the sound of Padrón peppers sizzling in the pan, so incongruous in the little Ealing bungalow where her grandparents lived, the crazy-paved outside wall and the gnomes in the garden. Remembered the piping hot doughnutty churros and the pots of warm melted chocolate for breakfast that they ate in their sleeping bags in the front room on swirly brown carpet in front of the two-bar electric fire. And then summer holiday trips in the car, driving endless miles through France and across Spain to Mariposa, the beach town where Valentina Brown grew up. Home of the Summerhouse. Once a ramshackle fisherman’s hut – a place where their great-grandfather hauled his boats to store them for the winter and mend his nets – transformed into a little haven on the cusp of the sea by Eric Brown, Val’s husband, his pale English skin and dislike of sand keeping him happily indoors with his Black & Decker and PG Tips. Summer after summer the roof was tiled, the walls plastered, the bathroom and kitchen refitted, a little terrace added and a first-floor bedroom built into the wooden-beamed eaves. Ava remembered standing in the shade of the palm trees, handing her grandfather nails and spirit levels, while Rory mixed thick cement with a trowel and they both got told off for flicking each other with white paint. And as Eric carefully laid the pebbles for the front path, Ava wrote the words ‘Summerhouse’ in shells and a great discussion ensued as to whether there should have been a space between the words, Rory rolling his eyes at her stupidity and Val appearing to clip him round the ear before bending down and writing ‘Our’ in shells in the wet cement above.
It was the perfect summer hideaway. And when Eric passed away, Val decamped from Ealing to Mariposa full-time, and the Summerhouse became her everyday house. But for Ava and Rory it was still the place that holidays were made of.
‘She had a bloody good innings,’ Rory whispered as Val’s coffin was lifted.
Ava turned to look at him, snapped out of her memories. ‘It’s not a cricket match, Rory.’
He snorted under his breath. Ava looked away, out across the sea of mourners, to the hats and the white hair, the smiles, the open tears, the handkerchiefs, the cigarettes, the hipflasks, the veils and the bright pops of corsage colour.
She saw the fullness of a life take shape in the people come to mourn it and was struck by the single thought: I have been given a second chance.
She turned back to see the coffin carried towards its final resting place, waves of sunlight dancing on the carved wood while glitter-edged artificial flowers shone pink around the niche in the wall like a welcoming cocoon. And as the coffin slid inside the chamber, Ava reached up to wipe the first tear from her cheek.
The little tapas bar was heaving with people, Barcelona warming up for the night. Ava and Rory had been dropped off by their taxi on the way from the cemetery to the airport after Ava persuaded Rory they had enough time for a quick drink. Rory had huffed, reluctant. He didn’t like leaving the airport to chance.
The evening sun was hovering on the cusp of the rooftops. Sparrows jumped in the dust. A guy in the square opposite the bar was playing the guitar, tapping his foot gently, a cap for change at his feet. Ava leant forwards on the little barrel table she was sitting at to watch. Behind the guitar player a couple on a bench were arguing, while across the square little children yelped and shouted on a climbing frame. The coloured lights strung between the plane trees glowed fairground bright.
‘Bloody hell, it’s carnage in here.’ Rory appeared, balancing little plates of tapas on top of two sherry glasses, elbows out like chicken wings from battling his way through the crowd. His phone was ringing. ‘Take these,’ he thrust the drinks at her as he fumbled for his phone. ‘I have to take this. It’s work.’
Ava sat for a second, sipping her sherry, then, with nothing else to do, checked her own phone. Before she’d flown to Spain she’d sent an email to her friends about a dinner next week, the subject line: I’m alive!! Everyone had immediately said they could come. But now her friend Louise, who was thirteen weeks pregnant, was asking for it to be postponed because the date clashed with a midwife appointment. Someone else had agreed, relieved because they had a work do they’d forgotten about; another cited arrangements their partner had made without telling them. Ava scrolled through the emails, mocked by the I’m alive!! subject header on every decline.
She didn’t want to be upset. But this was starting to happen more often: the casual cancel. All she could think was that she rarely said no to an invite. Normally she would have been scrolling through her diary right now to try and find other dates that might work, might pull the group together, write some extra jolly response to keep the momentum going. Ava was constantly rearranging, juggling, to make sure that she could see everyone, do everything, make sure everyone was happy, and she hated the part of herself that wondered why, when she most needed it, they couldn’t do the same for her. Because she knew it was fruitless. They weren’t being callous – it was just the older they got, the harder it was to mesh their lives. They weren’t at university any more, nor loafing about in their first jobs, free and easy. Her friend Louise was expecting twins, for goodness’ sake.
And she wanted Louise to have babies. It was exciting. It would be lovely. But it put paid to Ava’s secret wish that Louise and Barnaby, her husband, might realise they hated each other, divorce, and then Louise would move back in with Ava, and all the fun they used to have would commence once more. Twins made the wish a lot less practical.
Rory reappeared, chucking his phone down on the table. ‘Bloody work. They’re completely incompetent. How long have we been gone? Twelve hours max and they manage to balls it up in my absence.’ He raked a hand through his hair. ‘I can literally feel the stress in my veins.’ Exhaling dramatically, he took a big swig of his drink.
Ava watched him take his seat again, barely pausing to appreciate the warm evening air, the buzz of the square, the sharp, cool sherry. It always amazed her to think of him as someone’s boss, as some bigwig revered documentary-maker, because really he was just her annoying brother who she remembered videoing himself doing embarrassing David Attenborough impressions in the back garden. Now though he was tipped for a BAFTA and was invited for dinners at No. 10. She’d never seen her father look so taken aback as the moment one Christmas when Rory announced that he had been invited to a bash at the Prime Minister’s. Their dad had absolutely no understanding of television bar the Ten O’Clock News, and seemed quite stunned that it could lead to something he would deem a serious accolade. He took himself off to his study, shaking his head with bemusement.
‘Shall we have a toast to Gran?’ Ava said, raising her glass.
‘Yes absolutely, nice idea.’ Rory clinked his glass to hers. They both took a sip.
The dry crispness of the sherry flamed her throat and nose as though she’d inhaled the scent. It tasted of Spain. Of nights sitting on her grandmother’s veranda, bare feet up on the railing, looking out over the little courtyard garden, the man in the house opposite watering the flowerpots on his wall with a tin can on a long bit of bamboo, the rustle of the palm leaves in the wind, the hoot of the gecko, the sweet ripe perfume of fat purple figs and the fresh-river tang of red geraniums.
The bar filled up around them, bodies squishing to get through, and Rory and Ava talked for a while about the ceremony, polite musings about how nice it had been, how much their grandmother would be missed. Then Rory said, ‘So . . . Gran’s house,’ fishing a small drowning fly out of his drink. ‘I’m thinking we get someone in to clear the place out, put it on the market as soon as possible.’ He looked up as he was ushering the fly off his finger on to the barrel table to check Ava was listening. ‘I could do with some cash at the moment. Our mortgage has skyrocketed and Max’s school fees just seem to completely ignore inflation. Yeah?’ He was still in work mode. Used to people doing exactly what he told them.
Ava had the fleeting thought, as