Live a Little Read online

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  The Inspiration Behind Live A Little

  Copyright

  To my dear sisters Tania and Thomasina,

  with love and gratitude for all the ways they enhance my life.

  Prologue

  Summer 1990

  YOU WOULDN’T HAVE SEEN THEIR hideaway unless you knew where to look. The entrance was down three stone steps and obscured by a tangle of ivy and clumps of flame-coloured montbretia. The garden outside – balding lawn, decaying wooden furniture and stumps of things in pots – hung breathless under a fiery blue sky.

  ‘It’s hotter than a witch’s arse out here,’ Tina said. She shifted a little and some of the water in the washing-up bowl slopped over the edge.

  ‘Stop wriggling. I’m not going back into the house to get more water.’ Lottie dug her elbow sharply into her sister’s side. ‘For your information, the correct expression is it’s colder than a witch’s tit. The whole point of witches is that they’re not human and therefore not warm-blooded.’

  ‘Did you know you say “For your information” about a hundred times a day?’ Tina said. ‘Anyway, you’re not in charge of words. If the witch didn’t have a top on but was wearing furry pants, she might have cold boobies and a hot bottom.’ Tina put her toes over Lottie’s and her sister jerked away as if she had been burned.

  ‘Keep your feet away from mine!’ Lottie said, shuddering. ‘It’s bad enough having to share the bowl with you. You probably have verrucas.’

  Beside them, Mia sighed. She was fourteen and well beyond the age when she should be sitting with her two younger sisters in a bunker with her feet in a washing-up basin. People with proper lives were seeing out the heatwave under umbrellas by stretches of water and drinking from tall glasses brought out to them on trays. Mia imagined the drinks sweating and misty from the fridge and the way the cubes of ice would ring as they hit the sides of the glasses, the sound prompting the women to tilt their sleek heads and suck from white straws.

  ‘Stop arguing about stupid things, and please don’t say arse and tits and boobies,’ she said. ‘It’s very immature, not to say derogatory to women.’

  ‘Yes, Tina, stop being so childish,’ Lottie said triumphantly.

  Tina frowned. ‘I actually am a child.’

  ‘I was a lot more mature than you are now when I was ten,’ Lottie answered, pulling up the neck of her T-shirt to wipe her forehead. She was a whole twelve years old.

  Although it was far cooler in the bunker than it was outside, where the sun was merciless, the air was thick and heavy with the scent of the earth. It wasn’t sweet the way soil could be when you dug into a new patch, but smelt as if there was stuff mixed up in it that was rotting.

  ‘It’s a bomb shelter,’ their father had said, when they had moved into the house the year before and walked the length of the garden together. It had been built a long time ago in the dusty, crumbled world they had seen on TV. They imagined London with hollowed-out houses and men in drab uniforms, their chests strapped across with webbing, and women with a battling look piling up the bricks and pulling the corrugated metal roof across, then covering the whole in rubble and turf so that it couldn’t be seen from above.

  ‘It’s probably best we get the shelter checked out before you go in,’ their father had said, although to their knowledge he hadn’t and they had used it as a refuge almost from the beginning.

  ‘Do you think that place is safe, Joe?’ their mother Lynne had asked once. She had been jolted out of her disinterest by the fact that her own children had invited the twins from next door into their den and she knew she was supposed to be in loco parentis.

  ‘It would have fallen down by now, if it wasn’t,’ their father had replied, shrugging. She had smiled the special smile that she only used when she was talking to him, the one that made her look softer and younger.

  ‘Do you think we can go back in yet?’ Lottie asked Mia. ‘The water in the bowl’s getting warm and I’m sure it’s riddled with germs from Tina’s feet. I want to fill the bath up as cold as it will go and sit in it up to my neck.’

  ‘I’ll go and check.’ Mia padded along the pathway to the back door of the house. Her wet footprints were sucked into the thirsty stones as soon as they were planted.

  She opened the door a little way and listened. It seemed quiet at first, but she had long ago become accustomed to the deceptive silences that seemed to mark an end but turned out to be only interludes for regrouping and rearming. Sure enough, it seemed the hostilities were not yet over. There was the sound of something smashing against a hard surface and then a screeching sentence – the words loud but difficult to make out – then the sound of agitated panting as if something was being gathered and marshalled before the next volley. Mia shut the door quietly and went back the way she had come.

  This time the stones burned the soles of her feet, but she barely noticed.

  ‘I think we should give it a bit longer,’ she said. She rolled up her jeans and placed her feet once more into the basin next to Tina’s wide toes, tipped with chipped pink varnish, and Lottie’s narrow, slightly bent ones, webbed on one foot between the first toe and the second. It was better here than it was inside the house, and at least they had each other.

  ‘We’re sister soup!’ Tina said, smiling.

  Chapter 1

  Present day

  TINA WAS IN THE WINDOW seat and Lottie had to bend across to get her first view of America. The bay was the colour of pewter and there was a dull, intermittent sheen on its surface. She could see the dense column of a rainbow, its arch hidden by low cloud, rising out of the water.

  ‘It’s a sign our trip is going to be incredible,’ Tina said.

  Lottie was less sure. ‘It’s the wrong sort of rainbow,’ she said, ‘you can’t see its curve.’

  Tina laughed derisively. She always got a little mocking when she’d been drinking, and she had started early at Gatwick Airport.

  ‘We’re on holiday,’ she had almost shouted when Lottie had tried to dissuade her from having a fourth glass.

  ‘You can multiply the effect of alcohol by at least five when you are on a plane,’ Lottie had said, and looked aghast as her sister grabbed the flight attendant’s hand to get his attention.

  ‘Definitely not gay,’ Tina had whispered when he had moved on, just a shade too loudly – and then, just like that, as if he had caught a virus from her red-wine breath, the blond, soft-bellied attendant was in her thrall. He brought her iced water and nuts she hadn’t asked for and then, with an agonised glance at his tight-haired colleague at the other end of the aisle, he slipped Tina his number on a napkin.

  ‘I shouldn’t really be doing this,’ he had said. His vo
ice had an eager sibilance that was off-putting, but Tina had laughed as if she was delighted.

  Later Lottie noticed that Tina let the number fall from the table and didn’t bother to retrieve it.

  Lottie thought that maybe the secret to attracting men was not to want them – that and having long legs and wide, deceptively limpid eyes and a delicately freckled face. Everyone always said that the sisters were very alike to look at, but Lottie knew herself to be a smaller, less glossy version – the freckles not quite as captivatingly spaced, her eyes set a little deeper in a narrower, less open face. They shared the same mouth – a narrow top lip that curved upwards so that even in repose they looked as if they were smiling.

  *

  ‘Valentina’s the beauty of the family,’ their mother had announced once. Tina had just bounded into the living room, her cheeks flushed by the wind and an hour of vigorous kissing. One of the twins from next door had turned from blotchy and silent into pale and enigmatic, seemingly overnight, and had become the object of Tina’s almost clinical attention. Even though she had only been about fourteen at the time, the youngest sister had launched herself firmly into the mysterious world of love – much to the disgruntlement of both Lottie and Mia, who felt that by rights she should have waited her turn.

  ‘Valentina has the unpredictable nature that all truly beautiful women possess. Carlotta, you’re the clever, grounded one. You will never take risks and no one will ever make a fool of you, and Mia . . . well, Mia combines the best of all of us. She gives herself to others. She’s my good, incorruptible girl.’

  Lynne Ward had spent an important year of her life in Perugia – I found my true sensuality there – and ever since had espoused all things Italian, even in the selection of her daughters’ names. The younger girls had shortened them so they sounded less conspicuous, but Mia’s name didn’t lend itself to diminutives. Lottie often thought that ordinary Sunday afternoon, the fug of sweatshirt uniforms drying on radiators and the clock ticking down to Monday, was when who they were and who they were going to be had been laid down for all time. Tina made a virtue of her unpredictability, which often manifested itself as a kind of selfish disregard for other people. Lottie was aware of her own, often craven, cautiousness that she sold as being sensible. Right to the end, Mia too had remained in character.

  *

  Tina wobbled slightly as she pulled her bag from the overhead locker. ‘I think I’ll need a nap this afternoon.’

  ‘I expect I’m going to have to drive,’ Lottie said.

  ‘Well, that’s just the price you have to pay for not knowing how to have fun,’ Tina answered, not bothering to pull down the top that had ridden up during her exertions to reveal a taut stomach adorned at the belly button with a ruby stud.

  ‘What would have happened if we’d both got pissed?’ Lottie asked.

  But Tina either didn’t hear or had decided not to answer. She was already shouldering her way down the plane, people automatically moving aside to accommodate her. The smitten attendant’s smile faltered as she passed him without a glance.

  At the airport car hire, instead of the white Ford Mustang convertible that Tina had booked, they were offered a lurid yellow one.

  ‘I booked a white one. It absolutely has to be white,’ Tina said, drawing herself up to her full five-foot-ten-inch height and sounding more British than Dame Maggie Smith.

  ‘The yellow’s not so bad,’ Lottie muttered. She felt sorry for the young man with bitten nails and a face shaped like a spoon who was clearly struggling to maintain the appropriate American cheer in the face of such obstinacy. Her sister shot her a furious look. Lottie knew that Tina had set her heart on this particular car.

  ‘It’s the only vehicle suitable for a road trip of this kind,’ she announced.

  Tina could be a pain in the arse.

  ‘I’m staying here until the car I booked is found for us,’ she said with such decisiveness that it was futile to protest.

  Sure enough, after another ten minutes, the right car miraculously appeared. Tina was gracious in her triumph.

  ‘I knew there must have been some mistake,’ she said, smiling warmly at the young man. By then he had the softened, relieved look of someone who had been unexpectedly released from a pair of constricting shoes.

  ‘Enjoy your trip, ma’am,’ he said, as if he meant it.

  Lottie had little experience of driving on the right, nor of automatic cars. She was terrified as she navigated her way out of the airport with Tina issuing instructions from the satnav on her phone – often a little too late, causing Lottie to have to make sudden, sweating turns. She drove tentatively down Highway 101, ignoring the cars that overtook them with horns blaring. Tina stuck her finger up and grinned ferociously as they went by, which made Lottie feel even more anxious. After a while Tina got bored of glaring at the other drivers and put on the Spotify list she had created for the road trip. She started singing along to the San Francisco section – Chris Isaak’s ‘San Francisco Days’ and ‘Don’t Marry Her (Fuck Me)’ by The Beautiful South. She delivered the title line of this song with such enthusiasm that Lottie told her to shut up or she wouldn’t drive a moment longer.

  Lottie was so intent on the road that she barely dared look to the right or the left – but she could feel the sea alongside them. Then, in the far distance, there was the Golden Gate Bridge, with its epic, rusty stretch. She saw the word ‘DREAM’ made out in blocked, glittering letters against a hillside and thought perhaps she had imagined it. The sky was patched with cloud, brighter now than it had been on their arrival, but still shifting and unpredictable.

  With the roof of the car down, Lottie’s first impression of San Francisco was of its many odours – coffee, incense, cedar, spicy meat, garlic, weed, shoe leather – and the constant shifts of perspective, hill and then slope and sudden views of sea.

  ‘I remember it more than I thought I would,’ Tina said, looking around her as they drove.

  Lottie sighed inwardly. She knew Tina was enjoying the fact that she had been to America before and knew more about it than Lottie did. There had always been this rivalry between them – a kind of jostling for attention, a determination to make the other aware that they were in possession of greater knowledge or deeper feeling. She wondered whether it was what all sisters did. She couldn’t remember having ever felt it with Mia, but then Mia had been different.

  Lottie had a sudden memory of another trip: the three of them in the back of the unreliable family car. She couldn’t remember where they had been going – all the journeys that took them from one barely known place to another had merged in her mind. Their parents had been shouting at each other; being in a car had been one of their many triggers into acrimony. She had been scared that they were going to crash and Mia had taken her hand under the ragged travelling blanket. She, in turn, had held Tina’s sweaty little palm. They had been comforted by the touch that linked them, knowing they were strong enough to withstand anything as long as they had each other.

  *

  Lottie stole glances out of the window as she navigated the roads. There was a sign announcing a yard sale – a great number of dusty velvet lampshades were lined up on some porch steps, watched over by a man smoking a joint on a battered leather sofa. There were girls with tight bottoms and loose, sun-kissed hair, and houses painted the pastel colours of nursery bedrooms. Gaudy bougainvillea arched here and there, and small trees filled the fronts of houses in smoky clouds of gauzy pink. Shops advertised cures for all ills – indigestion, acne, menopause and heartbreak.

  ‘Were you happy here?’ Lottie asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Tina said. ‘I had a great year.’ She had put on an enormous pair of sunglasses so it was hard to read her expression, but she seemed suddenly subdued. ‘It’s the perfect city to set off from. This time tomorrow we’ll be on the road.’

  ‘When are Tim and Rachel expecting us?’ Lottie asked.

  ‘Around about now.’

  Lottie stopped
rather too suddenly at an intersection, to let a group of men in red dresses and pigtails cross the street in a great whooping rush. Tina clutched the handle on her door with an exaggerated intake of breath.

  ‘Feel free to take over if you think you can drive so much better,’ Lottie snapped. She was tired from the journey and was experiencing the unpleasant, muffled feeling in her ears that flying always gave her. She thought longingly of tea and her bedroom at home, with its peaceful shades of grey, and wondered again at the impulse that had made her agree to this crazy expedition. It wasn’t as if she had the time to spare. She was getting married in three weeks and there were a thousand things that needed her attention. She began to itch at the thought of the wedding favours as yet unselected and the honeymoon outfits she hadn’t packed.

  ‘Keep your hair on,’ Tina said, flicking up the mirror in the visor to check her face. ‘We’re almost there. I think it’s a left turn after that warehouse-type building.’

  They drew up at a house painted cream and brown with steps up to a railed veranda. They pulled their cases from the boot – Lottie’s neat and black with efficient wheels, Tina’s grubby and straining at the zip, making a great rattling sound as she pulled it along the pavement.

  ‘Do you think it’s all right that we’ve left her in the boot?’ Lottie asked.

  ‘We can’t schlep around with her every time we stop anywhere.’

  ‘But what if someone steals the car?’

  ‘I’ve decided it’s OK and so you have to, too,’ Tina said loftily.

  I must have been stark raving mad to agree to this trip, Lottie thought. It’s going to be a slow, agonising torture. They barely had time to knock on the door before it was opened and a tiny woman dressed in blue hurled herself at Tina.

  ‘Oh my God! You look exactly the same! Still absolutely stunning.’ Rachel smiled. ‘Come in, come in. This must be your sister. Isn’t she just like you? Did you have a good journey? I’m so, so happy to see you.’ All this was said without drawing breath and while hustling them inside. ‘Is it too early for a proper drink? Yes, it probably is. But who cares? We have to celebrate. Tim will be back from work soon. He’s just dying to see you. If I remember right, you were more than a little fond of a gin and tonic. Can I make you one now? Or do you want to eat? I have lasagne. I’ve actually cooked in your honour. You know I don’t do that for just anyone.’ She gave a great, rumbling laugh – a sound that was startlingly odd coming as it did out of such a diminutive person.