Her friend’s wife
her friend’s wife
On the jetty, on the lake, Ivana lies back with her eyes closed and allows the sun to wash over her.
She can hear the gentle lapping of water, the sound of a child laughing.
A man’s steady voice, in the distance. And this: the whack, pause, whack, pause, whack of arrows thudding into wood.
She props herself up on her elbows, wipes her brow.
Sweat pools in the dimple of her brown belly, on the crest of her top lip.
She squints over the water, towards the treeline.
‘Is she old enough to be using weapons?’ Ivana asks.
Clara, lying on her front across the jetty, doesn’t open her eyes. She waves a nonchalant hand. ‘Don’t question it,’ she says. ‘If they’re busy, they’re not bothering us.’
Ren, who has been seemingly asleep under a heavy pair of sunglasses, sits up a little and smiles. ‘Listen to you,’ she says to Ivana. ‘Always the lawyer.’
Ivana elbows her wife, then kisses her, and they melt back down on to the wood beneath them.
The late-summer getaway had been Clara’s idea.
The location, Ivana’s. She’d suggested a cabin on the Plitvice Lakes, in her home country.
At first, it was to be the four of them.
Then Ren had ventured inviting Maisie and family, and the numbers had swelled to eight.
The ninth name was put forward by Nora, and Clara hadn’t protested.
‘Who the hell is Seb?’ Ivana had asked.
Ren had found this hilarious. ‘How long have you got?’
So many names. So much baggage. Ivana wonders if love is simply messier when you’re no longer young, when you’ve collected years of make-ups and break-ups and you’re all tangled up in them.
A spider’s web of broken hearts and hungry eyes – and at the centre of it all, this guy, who was apparently once an actor, with his matinee-idol face and his brooding stare.
They’d all arrived at the cabin earlier that day, bags hoisted over sweaty shoulders, Maisie wrangling an overtired Priya, Nora and Finn bouncing ahead of them in search of their room and the bunkbeds they’d been promised.
Nora had picked Clara’s room. Then she’d picked Seb’s, its door directly opposite.
Ivana has kept her promise to Ren, which was an extension of Ren’s promise to Clara: they will not ask what’s going on between the two of them.
Now Seb stands in the woods with Finn and Nora, shooting handmade arrows at the stump of an old tree. In the swampy sun, Ivana feels as if she’s expiring. While Maisie lies under a parasol and keeps Priya occupied with the occasional spurt of a bubble gun, Nimesh swims lengths of the lake.
‘Does he ever stop moving?’ Ren asks.
‘Seb says he hates going on holiday with Nimesh because he can’t just lie on a sunbed,’ Clara says. ‘He has to be hiking or running or blending up smoothies.’
Maisie can’t resist. ‘Seb says that, does he?’
Clara bites her tongue.
‘Seb made the bow?’ Ivana asks.
‘The arrows, too,’ Clara says. ‘Reclaimed wood from the bar.’
‘That’s sweet,’ says Ren.
‘It’s psychotic,’ says Clara.
Maisie nods. ‘He could have made drumsticks.’
‘He’s good with his hands, then?’ says Ivana.
Maisie snorts, and Clara tells her to shut up.
‘Jesus was a carpenter,’ Ren says.
Clara looks between the three of them. ‘If you’re going to do this all week, I’m drowning you in the lake.’
Nimesh swims over to Seb and the kids, beckons them in.
They scream and splash, and then they’re swimming towards the jetty, Seb cutting a path through the still water with Nora hanging off his broad shoulders.
When they reach the ladder, he deposits her on to the wood above, then emerges himself, dripping wet and bare-chested, running his fingers over his shorn head as rivulets of water travel the length of his arms, his tattooed chest, his tanned belly.
Clara can’t keep her eyes off him. Ivana, Ren and Maisie can’t keep their eyes off Clara, though they break away briefly to share a look.
Then Seb stubs his toe on a splintered rung, and his Mr Darcy moment is broken as he windmills his arms and crashes backwards into the water.
Maisie bursts into laughter, and the baby in her lap chuckles along with her.
Nora runs to the edge in panic, but starts giggling when she sees that Seb is alright.
Clara makes no sound at all. She’s staring at Seb, running her fingers over the seersucker fabric of her swimsuit, lost in her own train of thought.
‘Nice trip?’ Ren asks Seb.
He whips her with his towel. Clara manages to capture Nora for just long enough to reapply her suncream, rigging her up with a network of armbands and rubber rings.
Then the girl is plunging back into the lake, Nimesh taking lifeguard duty.
Seb sits beside Clara for a moment. Then, he lies beside Clara.
Time passes. In the water, Nora and Finn shriek with delight. Maisie sits cross-legged and feeds Priya, running a finger through her dark, curly hair. The trees at the edge of the lake sway lazily as if slow-dancing with one another.
Ivana doesn’t notice the moment when Clara shifts so that she’s lying with her head in Seb’s lap.
She’s not sure Seb or Clara notice, either.
It’s like these things just happen, with them.
Now she’s propping herself on one elbow, tracing the tattoos on Seb’s bare arms and torso with a slender finger, taking extra care over the ones she doesn’t recognise.
A new date, beneath a pre-existing canine scribble.
A tombstone on his chest, with words inside.
Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.
‘Mum!’ Nora calls, and Clara knows her time is up. ‘And Seb,’ Nora adds.
Clara rises, pads slowly to the end of the jetty.
Ivana watches Seb’s eyes travel just as slowly up the backs of her pale legs, coming to rest on the window of bare skin cut out of the back of her swimsuit.
Clara turns, does not seem surprised to find him looking.
She runs her fingers through hair that is tangled, salty with sweat. She smiles at him.
‘Are you coming?’
As if it was ever a question. Seb leaps up, and she jumps into the lake, and he plunges in after her. The sound of gasping, of breath catching.
‘That water looks cold,’ Ren says.
‘Nice cold,’ Ivana says.
Ren sits, leans over and kisses her. ‘It’s nicer up here.’
Ivana runs a finger over Ren’s shoulder, which is already turning pink. ‘You shouldn’t be out in the sun.’
Ren rests her head on Ivana’s shoulder. ‘Why do you take such good care of me?’
As if that was ever a question, either. When they’d first met, Ivana had had the sense that Ren didn’t know what it was like, to be looked after.
She has seen photos of a younger version of her wife, her dark fringe swept over one eye, always looking so unsure of herself.
Clara was Ren’s best friend, before Ren had moved abroad, but she was not always the best of best friends.
Ren says that Clara has often had a blind spot when it comes to her nearest and dearest, failing to recognise that they have lives of their own that continue without her after a door is closed or a phone call is ended.
Lives that are worth something, even when Clara isn’t in them.
It had been during those years without Clara that Ivana and Ren had met.
Of course Ivana sees that meeting through rose-tinted glasses, but it would look like the plot of a movie to anyone.
Not the kind of movie that Clara would direct, but one of those schmaltzy Christmas films that Ivana’s mother watches back in Rijeka.
Ren with her practical pixie cut and overalls, running her own floristry shop in Amsterdam, content that she was becoming exactly who she was supposed to be.
And Ivana bursting right into it, the overworked attorney in heels and a pencil skirt and a hurry, looking for a bouquet to gift to a long-standing client and knocking over a display with her handbag.
Both of them, crouching to recover it, then locking eyes.
Ivana has always been clumsy. Ren has never been good at maintaining eye contact.
Their eyes meet again, now, over the cluttered table in the dining room of a candlelit cabin.
Nimesh can’t seem to help himself from starting to tidy before everyone else has finished eating.
Seb’s food was delicious, and a half-drunk Maisie keeps enthusiastically declaring so.
Priya is down for the night, after a battle.
Even Finn and Nora have stopped trying to climb out of their bunks and join the adults.
Ren launches into conversation with Clara, and Ivana can picture them as young women at university back in London.
She’d noticed Clara on the balcony earlier, in a quiet moment, drawing something in a sketchbook, and there had been something so peaceful about the image.
She can’t imagine Ren falling out with anyone, but sometimes you have to blow something up to expose its foundations.
Strip everything back to its roots, the gardener in her wife might say. Then it can grow back stronger.
‘It’s not a good name,’ Nimesh is saying, when Ivana tunes back in. ‘And you know I loved the guy.’
Seb looks affronted. ‘What’s wrong with a bar called Jasper’s?’
Ivana’s had a few drinks, too. She’s feeling bold. ‘Sorry, Seb,’ she says. ‘He’s right. It’s not a good name.’
Seb clutches his chest as if wounded. Ren laughs, then taps her glass.
‘A toast,’ she says. She looks to Seb. ‘To a new bar.’ Then, to Clara. ‘A new film.’ To Maisie and Nimesh. ‘A new baby.’ Finally, to Ivana. She nuzzles in. ‘And a new wife.’
Clara raises her glass. ‘To new beginnings.’ She’s addressing everyone, but her eyes are on Seb. ‘And old friends.’
After the plates are cleared away, they fire up the ancient stereo system and they laugh and they play games and, eventually, they dance.
Then, like people who woke up at the crack of dawn to travel here, they flop on to sofas and, eventually, after nightcaps, peel off towards their bedrooms, their beds.
Nimesh and Maisie are down the corridor, nearest the kids.
Ivana and Ren bid Seb and Clara goodnight, hear the click of two separate doors on two separate sides of the kitchen, then brush their teeth side by side in their en suite.
Ivana is only planning to head back out for a glass of water.
But when she opens their bedroom door, she has the perfect vantage point for what’s about to happen. She watches, and she sees.
A door on one side of the kitchen clicks open.
Seb emerges from it, still dressed, rubbing the back of his shaved head with one hand.
Ivana pulls her own door slightly closed, hears another click as a second door opens.
As Seb stares towards this other door, the door opposite his, he does not notice Ivana.
He sees only Clara, emerging in pyjama shorts and an oversized T-shirt, looking only for him.
They forget themselves. They are drawn together.
Seb crosses the room towards Clara, and Clara meets him halfway, and they crash into each other by the dining table.
He picks her up by the hips and she wraps her bare legs around his waist and they kiss, hungrily, impatiently, against the table behind them, knocking over candlesticks and flowers in the process.
‘We shouldn’t do this,’ she says, her voice muffled by his mouth.
‘No,’ he replies. ‘We shouldn’t.’
Ivana, open-mouthed, closes the door softly.
She grins to herself as she slips into bed beside her wife.
Ren can’t ask what she’s smiling about, because she’s already wearing a padded silk eye-mask, already halfway to sleep.
On the other side of the wall next to them, Ivana hears Clara’s door clicking shut again.
A moment. Then, the thump of a back against the wall, the sound of clothes being torn off and thrown to the side, of mouths meeting, of hands exploring places at once familiar and entirely new.
Seb groans with relief. Clara cries out like someone who has waited too long.
Ivana muffles a giggle, and elbows Ren like a schoolgirl, and whispers in her ear that she won’t believe what’s happening on the other side of the wall.
Ren reaches up one sleepy hand, puts a finger to her wife’s lips. ‘Shhhhhh,’ she says, with a dreamlike smile. ‘I’m trying to sleep.’