The Summer Without You (16 page)

He grinned, watching her pert derriere, before looking back to Ro like she was a partner in crime. Another bloke. ‘And that’s what I love about this place: ambition in a bikini,
everywhere you look.’

Ro groaned. ‘Am I going to have to hand this mat back already?’

‘Nup, you’re good . . . for now.’

A small timer beeped on Bobbi’s phone and she turned it off, rolling onto her tummy in one swift movement. ‘You were saying . . . the job,’ she prompted.

‘Oh yes. So, it’s not a Marmalade commission, sadly. I met a woman on the beach yesterday evening as I was on my way home. She’s a local councillor—’

‘Don’t tell me – Florence Wiseman, right?’ Hump interrupted, pointing his hand at her like it was a gun.

‘Yes! How did you know?’

‘Aaaagh, everyone knows Florence. She’s one of East Hampton’s matriarchs; what she doesn’t know about this place isn’t worth knowing. She knows everyone, is on the
board of everything. She’s not everyone’s cup of tea, not once she gets on her soapbox, but I’ll give her this: the woman’s got balls.’

‘Hump!’ Ro shot him a disapproving look. She knew the point he was trying to make, but Florence had too much elegance to be described like that.

‘What?’ Hump shrugged, palms outstretched in sincerity. ‘I mean it as a good thing. I can’t even imagine the policies we’d end up with without her. She’s old
school. Cares about the town, not just the real-estate prices, unlike every other person on that board. I came up against some of ’em when I first floated the Humper concept.’ He shook
his head. ‘They thought I was going to bring down the tone of the place; they didn’t hear anything about me promoting local businesses.’ He shook his head. ‘She gets my
vote, for sure. The gossip columns can go hang.’

‘I don’t know the woman. Heard of her, though,’ Bobbi offered, her voice a protracted mumble.

‘Well, I really like her. She’s asked me to shoot her seed-bombing campaign.’

‘Her
what
?’ Bobbi drawled, lifting her head to break her near-comatose position.

‘Seed-bombing. They’re little balls packed with dune-plant seeds that you scatter randomly to help revegetate and strengthen the dunes. Florence says the dunes are one of the most
effective defences against the storms that come in off the ocean.’

‘Cool,’ Hump nodded.

‘No, not cool,’ Bobbi contradicted, pushing herself up onto her elbows. ‘Dunes can’t do diddly-squat against a hurricane. People go on about this year after year.
“What can we do? What can we do?” they cry. Jeez, they drive me crazy. They build jetties, they build revetments, they sink old subway cars to create reefs as offshore breaks, but the
truth is, nothing’s going to keep that ocean from creeping forward. And all those houses sitting on the shore? They’re going to fall in the water sooner or later – ten, twenty,
fifty years from now, they’ll all be gone. I swear to God I could set up here specializing exclusively in strategic retreat. I’ve thought about it more than once.’

‘Strategic retreat? What’s that?’ Ro puzzled, finishing off the Coke and unable not to stare at a girl walking past in a flesh-coloured bikini that was nothing short of
alarming from a distance.

‘Knocking down the existing properties and resiting them at the back of their own lots. Might buy you another hundred years before it’s a problem again, but by then it ain’t
your
problem, and in the meantime you’ve protected your real-estate value.’

‘But surely that’s incredibly expensive, knocking down and starting from scratch?’

‘The lot’s the thing, not the property.’

Hump gave a small snort. ‘Besides, down the road in Southampton, they just raised a twenty-four-million-dollar levy against a hundred and twenty-five ocean-front householders to pump two
and a half million tons of sand onto the beaches to replenish them. Twenty-four mill divided by hundred twenty-five? Now
that’s
expensive.’

Bobbi tutted disgustedly. ‘These people, they’ve got money to burn,’ she shrugged, collapsing back fully on her towel again and turning her head away to tan the other
cheek.

‘Crikey,’ Ro muttered under her breath. And to think she’d been working up the nerve to ask Matt to consider extending the kitchen with a side return. (Pre-pause,
naturally.)

‘You want some?’ Hump was holding out some sunscreen lotion. ‘You’re going pink already.’

‘Thanks. Celtic skin, what can you do?’ she said, rolling her eyes and taking it from him. ‘So what time are you heading back to New York, Bobbi?’ she asked, squirting
too much cream on her face. Way too much. It had warmed in the sun and now ran out of the tube like milk.

‘I always get the seven thirty p.m. Jitney.’

‘Uh-huh,’ she said, vigorously smoothing it into her cheeks. ‘And how long is the coach ride home?’

‘Three hours that time of night? Depends on traffic. So long as I’m back at my apartment by eleven p.m. latest . . .’

Ro started dragging the cream down her neck, trying to find more surface area. ‘Whereabouts are you in New York? Would I have heard of it?’

‘Tribeca.’

‘Oh. Uh . . .’ No. She took some off her forehead and began rubbing it into her arms instead, distracted from the conversation by the laboriousness of such a seemingly simple task.
Bloody hell, how much of that stuff had she put on?

Hump stood up suddenly, his eyes trained on something further up the beach, like a gundog pointing. ‘Hey, isn’t that Greg? Yo, Greg!’ Hump called, waving to a small group
playing volleyball a few hundred yards away. They had a gazebo set up beside them and some smart teak portable loungers arranged in the shade. There’d be no sandy bottoms for them.

Greg, tanned and muscled in navy and red shorts, turned. Seeing Hump, he waved and said something to his friends, before jogging over like a model from a designer deodorant ad. ‘Hi,
guys,’ he nodded, his hands on his hips as he stood above them all. ‘I hope I didn’t wake any of you when I left earlier. I tried to be as quiet as I could.’

‘Well, that makes one of you at least,’ Hump teased, and Ro dug him in the ribs with her elbow, knowing he was directing his words at her again.

She watched as Greg’s eyes skittered over to Bobbi, who was still lying on her tummy and appeared to be pretending to sleep. He caught Ro watching him and smiled back, a quizzical
expression on his face as he took in her alabaster-white complexion, and she hurriedly began rubbing her face again, this time using the heel of her hands to help drive the goddamned cream into her
skin.

‘So who you with, man?’ Hump asked, jerking his chin towards the volleyball players.

‘You know the Blaize brothers – Todd and David? And Shelley Anderton? She’s a VP at Goldmans in derivatives; Grace Elliman, Kurt Styler’s ex; and Erin Wesley.’

‘
Your
ex?’ Hump said with a small smile.

Greg nodded. ‘Yes.’ He looked back at his friends throwing themselves around athletically, long legs kicking up sand, arms outstretched, tummies taut.

‘And that’s all good?’

Greg looked at him, bemused. ‘We’ve stayed good friends. She’s with Todd Blaize now. Has been for a long time.’

‘I remember,’ Hump said neutrally, slapping him on the arm. ‘You want a drink?’ He pointed down to the cold box.

‘I wish I could. It looks a lot more chilled over here.’ He looked back at his friends again as though checking they weren’t leaving without him. Ro saw one of the women, in an
emerald-green bikini, jump high to punch down the ball, her limbs supple and elastic like a pro athlete. Ro tried to visualize herself in the woman’s place – jumping around, tiny bikini
– and gave a small shudder, rubbing the cream a little harder again. ‘But I’d better get back. David and Todd can get way too competitive if someone’s not there to diffuse
them. You know what brothers can be like, right?’

‘Totally,’ Hump nodded. ‘So when you heading back to the city? You coming back to Sea Spray later?’

Greg shook his head, but his stature deflated a little as though he was embarrassed. ‘I’m booked on the seven thirty p.m. I figure I’ll just shoot straight to the Southampton
stop from the Blaizes’ place. I’ve unpacked my stuff at yours now, so I can just leave it there. It doesn’t make sense to double back when I’m already at Southampton
anyway.’

Hump nodded excessively. ‘Sure. Well, hang loose, bro. We’ll get together again next weekend.’

‘For sure,’ Greg agreed, his expression intent. He looked down at Ro and Bobbi, frowning to see Bobbi hadn’t moved – frowning more at the sight of Ro’s shiny
face.

They watched him jog away again, Hump remaining where he was and turning a slow circle on the spot, scoping the beach – no doubt for hot single girls. Bobbi, by contrast, sat up and
reached inside the cool box for a fresh drink.

‘Sounds like he’s on the same Jitney as you, Bobs,’ Hump said, finally collapsing back on his towel and fishing in the bag for his Kindle.

‘No, I’m on the six thirty p.m.,’ she clipped, setting another alarm on her phone.

‘You said you were catching the seven thirty p.m. a few minutes ago,’ Hump frowned.

‘No, you’re confused. I said the six thirty,’ Bobbi sighed, rolling herself back down on the sand with impressive abdominal control. ‘Six thirty p.m.
Definitely.’

Ro sat slumped on the steps outside the studio, a bowl of granola on her lap and the sun on her face as she watched the cars gliding past towards East Hampton Main Street in
one direction and Montauk in the other, none of them stopping to browse in the pretty square. The designer homeware boutique seemed to make out like a bandit thanks to its highway frontage but if
it wasn’t for the faithful regulars darting into the spa and yoga studio, or the high school kids stopping by the ice cream parlour on their way home, she was certain no one would ever stop
by it at all.

She spooned the food into her mouth with depressed monotony, and only the ceramic Chinese runner duck for company. She had been here nearly a week now and not one customer had even wandered in,
coffee in hand and a curious look on their face. She paid her rent to Hump from the rent she collected from her own house in Barnes – after agents’ fees, she just about broke even
– but she still needed money for groceries and going out. All she had was the small advance she had been paid for Florence’s commission, and she had started work on it already, cycling
around the dune roads behind the beaches every evening after she’d left the studio, looking for angles and landscapes that sparked her creativity for the brief, although nothing was jumping
out at her just yet. White sand – while pretty – looks bland when there’s mile after mile of it, and besides, anyone could shoot that. Her brief was to find a way to get the
viewer to engage emotionally with it; she had to make people understand the dunes weren’t just somewhere people picnicked in films. They had a purpose, a real, ecological role; they were the
town’s first and last defence against the ocean’s advance and that affected everybody who lived here, not just the ocean-front homeowners: no beaches meant no tourists, and therefore no
jobs.

By her feet was a wicker basket filled with paper bags of the seed bombs, which Ro now collected every morning as she cycled past Florence’s house on the way to the studio. It had become
something of a habit, a new routine. Florence left the bags out on trays for volunteers to take from a painted wooden barrow by the gates at the bottom of her drive. Ro had decided to keep a basket
of them for her own customers to take too, but given that she didn’t actually have any customers, she had taken to scattering them herself on her sunset cycle back home as well, her camera
swinging round her neck. She had worked out, just before she fell to sleep one night, that she was cycling on average eighteen miles a day. Matt wouldn’t believe it when she told him.

‘Hello there.’

Ro turned with a start to find a tall, rangy woman in orange leggings and a khaki jumper that slid off one shoulder leaning against the porch post.

‘I’m Melodie. I run Insala Yoga next door,’ the woman said with a smile that reached her eyes. Her voice was deep and honeyed, and her skin had such a gleam to it, it looked
like it had been polished. But her hair – her hair was thick and wiry, and didn’t so much fall to her shoulders as spring just above them like bungee ropes, forcibly held back from her
face by a thick, twisted navy scarf that knotted at the nape. Soulmate! Ro liked the look of her immediately, maybe because – she too – didn’t fit the mould of a Hamptonite.

‘Hi,’ Ro said, clambering to her feet and slopping milk over her own flip-flopped feet. ‘Ro Tipton, Marmalade Family Media.’ Standing up, she saw how tall Melodie really
was – six foot surely.

‘Family Media,’ Melodie repeated. ‘I’ve been wanting to ask you about that since the sign went up. What exactly is Family Media?’

Ro smiled patiently. She spent her life explaining it to people – the downside of being first in on a new market. ‘Basically? It’s editing personal digital content and putting
it into physical form that families can actually enjoy – so photobooks, portraits, calendars, short films, slide shows as laptop screensavers, that kind of thing . . . Otherwise all those
images just sit unseen on a hard drive, and if the computer dies or is stolen, it’s so traumatic . . . I’ve had clients come to me after all those memories have been lost and
they’ve needed to start again from scratch. Their wedding photos or their pictures and films of their children as babies . . .’

‘That sounds like a rewarding enterprise, Ro. You’re really giving people something that enriches their lives.’

Ro was silent for a beat. Melodie’s words were so . . .
warm
for a moment she wasn’t sure whether she was being sarcastic.

‘You teach yoga, you say,’ Ro said, quickly changing the subject. ‘Do you do the hot one?’

Melodie smiled as Ro’s naivety on the subject was revealed in just those six words. ‘No, I don’t. Bikram is a bit too aggressive for me, and I find it attracts a certain type
of client who is really only interested in the most superficial aspects of yoga – namely weight loss. I understand why some people might choose that, but I prefer to really focus on the
connection between the body and the breath within the element of dynamic flow.’