‘I might just go back to the house,’ she said. ‘Get some more sun cream.’
As Abby watched Ellie stalk up the steps, in what she knew to be barely suppressed anger, she felt a pang of anxiety.
Damn her guilty conscience. Not for the first time since she’d sent it, Abby was regretting her invitation. She was beginning to think the next six weeks with her sister might be the longest of her life.
THREE
As Ellie reached the top of the steps and Abby’s modest house came back into view, she felt as if it were mocking her for her earlier dismissive thoughts. It wasn’t about the house at all; it was about the house’s position, with its own goddamn path down to a private platform, from where you could swim in your own private bit of sea. Anytime you wanted. It was just another thing to add to Abby’s perfect, lucky life.
She stepped into the cool of the villa and took a long, deep breath. She had to stop letting everything that Abby had, and that she didn’t have, get to her. But it was hard when every day back home was a struggle, when she’d have to lug a bag full of marking home every evening – and, no, she couldn’t move to that place in Surrey that she’d already forgotten the name of, because the idea of carrying a ton of books back and forth on public transport made her want to cry. Even more so lately, after her recent bombshell. Something she hadn’t told anyone about yet. Truth was, she couldn’t bear to. She was always so tired, so very, very tired. And if she had to spend three hours a night marking essays written by teenagers who spent more time thinking up japes such as drawing a box halfway through their work with a ‘Tick here if read so far’ message, than they did putting any effort into the actual content, then why shouldn’t she treat herself to a nice bottle of wine to ease her through her evening? She deserved it. As she did the new yellow bikini for this much-needed holiday. And the gym membership so she could get out of the flat on the freezing, dark winter weekends, and the occasional massage to relieve the tension in her shoulders, and any of the other small treats she gave herself just to be able to get through the relentless uphill battle of the weeks.
Screw Abby and her judgemental attitude. It was easy to save if you could put enough away to actually make a difference; if you could envisage a goal that might be achieved within your own lifetime. It was even more galling that Abby was suggesting places she, Ellie, could live when Abby had refused to use some of her fortune to help her own sister get on the property ladder.
Ellie had been stunned when she’d received the point-blank refusal from Abby, without even a suggestion that they might discuss it. It had burned even more because Abby, being that bit older, had managed to get her own place over a decade ago. She’d had a decent job straight from graduation and during the recession of 2008, when prices had tumbled, she’d bought her first flat. At the time, Ellie had been earning next to nothing as a trainee teaching assistant and, even if she’d had a deposit saved, she wouldn’t have been given a mortgage on her tiny salary. Over the years Ellie had watched as the goal of being a homeowner had drifted ever further out of reach, with prices rising far higher than her pay. Of course, the value of Abby’s flat was also rising and Ellie had googled its worth one dark, miserable evening at home in her rented apartment. In two years it was worth over a hundred thousand pounds more than what Abby had paid for it. One hundred thousand pounds! Abby had acquired all that money by doing sweet nothing. Ellie had been so depressed at this sense of being left behind that she’d booked a weekend away in Istanbul to cheer herself up. It had been a much-longed-for dose of sunshine during a grey February half-term.
Ellie knew Abby still had that flat (now worth double what she’d paid for it), and she rented it out. To some poor mug just like herself, forced to line someone else’s pockets, as they couldn’t afford their own home.
Engulfed by resentment, Ellie poured herself a glass of cool water from the kitchen tap and drank half of it back. If she wasn’t going to go mad with envy during her stay with her sister she had to get a grip.
She placed the glass down on the worktop and climbed the stairs to go and get the sun cream. Then she would return to the swim platform, poised and calm. Dignified.
She paused outside the first room upstairs, which Abby had said was her and Matteo’s bedroom. She peeked inside, her eyes briefly lingering with curiosity over the light, airy room with its rustic furniture. Abby wouldn’t waste money on a decent dressing table or wardrobe. There was a simple wooden double bed with white covers and a chair with what looked like Matteo’s uniform tossed on it.
There was another room next door that Abby hadn’t shown her, and the door was shut. She opened it to find a small box room, in which an easel had been erected. Resting on it was a half-finished acrylic – amateur, obviously – a seascape drawn from the platform at the bottom of the steps. Ellie cocked her head as she looked at it – it had an earnest quality to it; the colours were too bright but it tried hard. Other canvases lay stacked against the wall, nearly all of them of the house, the garden and the sea view from the platform. Ellie wondered who’d painted them – Matteo or Abby – and then she saw the little signature in the bottom right-hand corner: ‘AM’. For a moment she wondered who that was, but then remembered that Abby was no longer a Miss Spencer like herself, but for three months now had been a Mrs Morelli – Signora Morelli. Ellie hadn’t been invited to the wedding – nor had their mother – as Abby had somehow persuaded Matteo she wanted something small and private, and they’d surprised Ellie and Susanna with an email and a photo of the happy couple outside Portoferraio town hall.
Ellie had been shocked. Not so much that her sister had got married on the quiet, but how much it had hurt. When they were small, all Ellie had wanted was for Abby to play with her, to make up games together in the garden, pretend they both had imaginary pet dogs that they could take for a walk around the small lawn, but Abby was always aloof, would go off and do her own thing. This continued as they got older, Abby always seemingly with her eye on some private goal, something Ellie knew nothing about. Abby would be building a den in her room, an idea that she hadn’t shared with Ellie; she would arrange to go to a friend’s house for tea when Ellie was hoping to ask her about her new make-up; she’d come back to say she’d passed her driving test when Ellie hadn’t even known she’d applied for it; and, of course, the biggest betrayal was the years and years she’d spent saving and investing, never once sharing her goal or her financial savvy with her sister. Then out of the blue – wham! – Abby announced she was leaving the workforce forever. See you later, sucker – that was the message she seemed to be sending, while Ellie had been left abandoned and feeling like an inadequate fool.
You’d think she would have become used to it, hardened herself to the hurt, but one memory was still imprinted on her brain and, even after twenty-two years, it had the power to move her.
Ellie had been in the first year of secondary school, a place she found isolating after her sporadic primary education. She’d been placed in the bottom set in every subject; the years of missed schooling had taken their toll, and she felt slow-witted and ashamed of not being anywhere near her older sister’s league. One group of girls in particular noticed this fact. There were three of them who went around in a pack, two lesser bitches flanking the ringleader, and they would mock her for her stupidity. When Ellie had been found crying her eyes out, hiding behind the temporary classroom block, and Abby had extracted a name, Ellie had followed her sister from a safe distance back to the playground, wondering what on earth Abby was going to do.