Precocious Read Free Page A

it was worth it when we got to the warm, bright blue. ‘So, this is why they call it the Cote D’Azur then,’ I murmured. I sat at the shoreline, half in, half out, my legs being lapped by the waves. Frothy tendrils crept up my thighs then shyly retreated, leaving my wet skin to sizzle in the late afternoon sun. All around, glossy heroines looked out from the covers of fat paperbacks strewn on sunbeds, were pored at through Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses. For a few moments I almost felt like one of them; I felt as though I belonged.
    In truth, our Nice was a ten minute walk, four flights of unlit stairs and a world away from the shimmering seafront. The room we had secured with the help of Dave’s barely remembered schoolboy French was high-ceilinged but narrow, with a worn-out carpet and a flickering shaving light over the sink in the corner (the sink had cost us an extra fifty francs). The bedding, at least, was clean. When we pulled back the plucked pink curtain we found we had a balcony. It was no more than six inches deep, we could barely stand on it, but we could lean out. I pressed myself into the black iron railing and breathed in the smells of the street below, from fresh bread and coffee to the over-ripe smell of the drains, and if I craned my neck I could see the sea.
    Dave aspired to be the people on the seafront, in the impossibly grand hotels with white facades and cool marble floors. He wanted a pool (he never swam in the sea – too much salt), room service, doormen, à la carte dinner and fine wines. By the time of our honeymoon, the resort was different (Dave never liked to go to the same place twice – waste of money, he said), but we had all of the things he’d wanted.
    So inevitably we ended up in the big hotels. Then we ended up in our own little hotel, our castle, our cabin, our casa, our so-called home. As love grows, dreams shrink. They get local. Instead of wanting to see the world together we wanted to make our own little world. After all, you can’t just backpack forever. Can’t keep ‘staying over’, like children, leaving a toothbrush there and just one drawer full of stuff. Eventually we were spending every night together anyway, and when I woke up late, again, with an extra half hour’s drive to work ahead of me, and found I had forgotten to bring a clean shirt so had to scrabble on the floor for last night’s crumpled top and spray it desperately with his deodorant, then the novelty of having two toothbrushes started to wear off.
    This is how big decisions are made.
    You can’t have backstreet France forever.
    You have to do the done thing.
    Dave had bought the house with his ex-fiancée but they’d never moved in – they were waiting until they got married to start the renovations. Of course, the wedding never happened and the stately Victorian terrace sat gathering cobwebs while Dave stayed in his little rented flat. The ex continued to pay half of the mortgage for a while, perhaps out of guilt for leaving him, if not quite at the altar, then virtually en route to the church.
    They had it on the market and when he asked if I’d consider moving in there, I think he was surprised when I said yes. I agreed to go and look at it, at least, and as it was the first time he’d seen it in months, he said he wasn’t even sure whether he really wanted to live there.
    ‘I was worried you’d think it was too full of ghosts,’ he said as he put the key in the door and pushed it open with a creak, but as soon as we stepped inside I could see from the shine in his eyes that he
did
want to live there, that the house had been his choice, his dream, and I knew in a rush that he, that
we
, could make it a home.
    ‘No ghosts.’ I slid my arms around him, no idea why I was whispering the words except that I was afraid they would bounce too loudly around the high ceilings and cornices. As we crept from room to room, as if afraid to disturb the spiders who had been busily crafting their gossamer