The Villa Read Online Free PDF Page B

cheeks, which meant she was about to meet him or had just received an illicit phone call. Ginny didn’t like Robin, who was too smooth, too conventional and too married, and she didn’t like what he was doing to her mum. But she figured that when her mother wanted her advice, she’d ask for it.
    ‘A party? Cool.’ Ben twirled the scissors. ‘I trust you’ll be inviting your favourite stylist?’
    ‘Consider it done,’ said Ginny. Bring it on. She could hardly wait. This could, she realised, be IT. Banish the Ball. Her First Sexual Experience. Way to Go …
    Ben turned on the hairdryer and began to blow dry.‘Hot enough for you?’ He raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow.
    He wasn’t joking. ‘Abso-bloody-lutely,’ said Ginny.

CHAPTER 5
    Tess knocked briefly and went straight into Lisa’s kitchen.
    ‘Come round for coffee,’ Lisa had suggested to her on the phone ten minutes ago when Tess started on her news. ‘It’ll be easier to talk. And I’m cooking supper.’
    Lisa, queen of multi-tasking, was wearing a green wrap-around pinny decorated with red elephants, over black jeans and a T-shirt. She was dark, petite and apparently unflappable. Tonight, she was stirring the contents of a massive tureen of chilli with one hand, directing the proceedings of various children – aged between seven and eleven – with the other. Tess watched and remembered her own experience with Ginny. No husband; an only child. Very different in so many ways.
    ‘Tess.’ Lisa offered a cheek for a kiss. ‘Come and sit down.’
    Lisa’s kitchen, with its spicy fragrance of chilli, its reassuring lived-in-ness and the warm glow from its ochre-painted walls, was a haven. When they had moved in next door to Tess’s own slightly run down, end of terrace Victorian townhouse and she’d first been drawn into Lisa and Mitch’s welcoming circle, Tess had hoped she could absorb and emulate this atmosphere that Lisa seemed to conjure up so effortlessly. An atmosphere of togetherness with Mitchand their children, of family and of home. She couldn’t, of course. How could she when she didn’t have a Mitch? Should she feel guilty about it? That she could give her daughter only so much; that she couldn’t provide a father? But maybe what she had with Ginny – that special one-to-one relationship – was only possible because it was just the two of them against the world.
    ‘I’ll be with you in a tick,’ Lisa told her. ‘Just got to—’ She addressed her offspring. ‘Get your books off the table now, you lot, if you want supper tonight.’
    Tess moved aside as three pairs of hands grabbed exercise books, pencil cases and what have you, chattering all the while.
Have you got my black felt-tip pen? Where’s my ruler? That’s my rubber, Android. Don’t call him Android
(that was Lisa). She shot Tess an apologetic smile. They were like a volcano in full flow.
Volcano
… Tess leant back in her chair. She and Robin could visit Etna. And Palermo. Old temples, cathedrals, deserted sandy bays … She felt a brief lurch of self-reproach. Could she just swan off for a week and leave her daughter here alone? Should she …?
    Ginny’s father – a free-thinking, guitar-strumming, surfer dude with long limbs and eyes as blue as the swimming pool where he worked as a lifeguard, had stuck around for the first six months of Tess’s pregnancy, before departing to Australia. He had asked Tess to go with him – he couldn’t stand another English winter, he said. But for Tess, the timing was crucial. She was only twelve weeks away from bringing a child into the world. Given the choice ofdeserting his lover or facing that English winter, David had chosen desertion. It hadn’t boded well for the future.
    And now her daughter was growing up rather quickly and rather scarily. Because there were, weren’t there, so many difficult decisions ahead, so many ways to go wrong. And Ginny was also growing, she supposed, away from her. She watched