Jazz stretched, rolled over in bed, and contemplated the lazy hours ahead. With everyone in the flat working shifts, you could never be sure how your day would pan out, but this time the timing was perfect. She would have the place to herself for most of the day and in the evening her flatmates would all be home together. Carlos and Georgiou had offered to make dinner for the girls if Jazz would pick up the ingredients. Georgiou had left her a list to take to the market, with strict instructions about tapping the melons to check that they were fresh and buying the right sort of oregano. He was always deeply suspicious about the quality of French produce, which the others found hilarious. But he was a wonderful cook who was saving to train as a proper chef so, as he kept telling them, they were lucky to have him. Jazz’s plan, now that she’d finally decided to wake up, was to indulge in a long bath instead of a workaday shower and go to the market around noon, when she would have coffee in the town square as well as buy food for dinner.
Although she loved the teamwork and conviviality that went with her job, she prized these hours of solitude. When the others were home someone was always playing music or shouting from one room to the next and phones were always ringing. Now she rolled out of bed without bothering to check her own phone and padded out onto the balcony. She had chosen a shared room for the pleasure of this tiny, railed space with its curling vine and its view of distant mountains seen between neighboring rooftops. She and her roommate Sarah seldom worked the same shifts so, in practice, it wasn’t really a room-share; and, anyway, they always got along. In fact, except for the occasional spat or sulk and the times when Georgiou raised the roof about the state of the oven, it was a remarkably successful household. You never knew how things might turn out when you got together via one of the notice boards at work, but this flat had worked well from the start. Jazz’s nan had gone ballistic, though, when she’d first heard about it.
“You’re moving in with a crowd of strangers you met on the Internet? Are you mad out of your mind or do you never read a newspaper?”
It had made no difference to explain that the notice board was on the staff section of the airline’s website: Jazz had even opened her laptop and demonstrated that the board could only be accessed by employees, who could only post on it via a moderator, but Mary Casey hadn’t been impressed.
Actually, Jazz’s mum had been the only one who’d been sensible. Her dad had gone all flinty-eyed when he heard about the flat-share and even offered to pay the rent for a place of her own if Jazz would back out of the arrangement. But then Dad hated her job at the airline anyway. They didn’t exactly argue about it. Dad didn’t do arguments, mainly, Jazz reckoned, because he couldn’t bear to lose them. Still, his flinty-eyed state had continued for several visits, so it was just as well that, early in life, she had taught herself to ignore it. Crossing Dad was a waste of energy, the best thing to do was to smile and go your own way. Sooner or later he’d give in and smile back, because he’d have no other option. Or, at least, that’s how it worked where Jazz was concerned; they loved spending time together, and, in the end, he could never bring himself to jeopardize that. Years ago he had told Jazz that the most important thing in life was to be happy. Even at the time, that had struck her as a dangerous kind of philosophy: unless you lived in a box, your happiness depended largely on other people; so if happiness mattered more to you than anything else, your life, whether or not you realized it, was largely in other people’s hands.
Jazz herself saw things differently; the most important thing to her was experience—good, bad, and indifferent—and to explore arguments, not win them. When she was at school everyone had just assumed that she’d go on to university. Dad had wanted her to go to his old college in Cambridge where Grandpa George had gone as well, back at the dawn of time. So for most of her life Jazz had assumed that that was what would happen. Then, in the upheaval of the sudden move to Ireland, it had felt somehow that all bets were off. She had hated the move at first, and been fairly flinty-eyed herself for a while but, as time went on, her new surroundings had opened up new possibilities. At her private school in London everyone had been headed down the same narrow track: an Oxbridge degree, a prestigious internship—probably bought and paid for by Daddy—and a career that ensured a steady rise in income year on year. By contrast, the people she went to school with in Lissbeg had all kinds of aspirations, few of which involved certainty. Maybe it was because their role models were different. Mostly, their parents were farmers or fishermen whose livelihoods depended on the weather, or people whose businesses changed and evolved according to the economic climate. Some of her classmates did plan to continue their studies. Others just laughed and said that they couldn’t afford to. Why not get out there and get on with something instead of getting stuck with a big load of student debt? And there were people like Conor McCarthy who had families to consider. Conor had always fancied going to university, he’d told her, but the way things were, there wasn’t a chance of it: he and his brother, Joe, had to keep up the farm.
“All the same though, it’s probably just as well. If I did go to college my dad would have me doing agriculture.”
“And you wouldn’t want to?”
“God, no. Half the stuff they teach you is about expansion and rationalization and things that wouldn’t interest me at all. That’s agribusiness, not farming.”
What he wanted was to be a librarian like her mum. Jazz didn’t see the attraction. The library in Lissbeg appeared to be empty half the time and Mum seemed to get no fun out of her work.
“Well, yeah, maybe and—now, I’m not saying a word against her, mind—but I’d say she could make it different if she wanted to. Really change the vibe, like.”
It seemed to Jazz that the big convent building with its closed-off rear section, derelict school yard, and temporary council offices, could never be other than gloomy. So how could the library, which was stuck in the old school hall, turn into the vibrant hub of energy that Conor envisaged? It hadn’t seemed fair to challenge him, though. The poor guy was stuck in Lissbeg with his fantasies while people like herself could just get up and go. That had been one of the attractions of the airline job. She could travel the world and live wherever she wanted, discover new ways of thinking and eating and arguing and experience stuff that her school friends in London could never even imagine. Admittedly, at the moment, she was seeing an awful lot of out-of-town airports and very little else. But she’d only been in the job for six months and here she was, living in France in her own flat, with a courtyard, a vine, and a balcony, even if all of them were shared.
The bathroom was gleaming, which meant that Georgiou had been the last person to use it. Jazz ran a bath and sank back happily into deep, scented water. Her mum’s only reaction to the plan for a flat-share was to ask how many bathrooms there were and, on hearing that there was only one, to laugh and warn Jazz to clean up after herself.
“The worst rows you ever have in a flat are about rings around the bath and wet towels on the floor.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I remember them.”
Apparently Mum had shared with three girls somewhere in London before she had married Dad.
“Where was it?”
“Near Paddington Station.”
“Cool.”
“Not at the time. It was a bit grubby and very dusty and we kept being woken by police sirens.”
“Did you like it, though?”
“Of course. We were young. It was my first flat. Well, my only flat. After that I moved in with Dad.”
“What, before you were married?”
“It was the eighties, not the Dark Ages. He had a flat near Sloane Square—which was very cool, by the way—and we lived there before we found the house.”
“I thought it was you who found it.”
“Well, yes, it was. I had the time to go looking for it.”
“And then you did it up.”
“Yes.”
“Dad always says you were a genius designer. Why didn’t you do that as a career?”
“Well, because . . .”
“. . . I mean you were married for ages before you had me.”
Jazz had never really thought about it before, but it did seem odd that Mum had never worked. And why was she working now, when she didn’t have to? She must have plenty of alimony from Dad. Perhaps it was because she was bored in Ireland, or fed up being cooped up with Nan. Come to think of it, why was she taking out a loan from the Credit Union? Surely Dad would lend her the money she needed for Maggie’s place, to save her paying interest? In fact, if Dad was happy to throw money at a flat for her in France, why wouldn’t he just give Mum what she needed to do up her house in Ireland? Jazz held her sponge at arm’s length in the air and squeezed a stream of water onto her face. The sun was blazing through the open bathroom window and there were house martins dancing in the air outside: you could see from the courtyard below that there was a nest of them up in the eaves. Later on, she thought, she might dig out the large terra-cotta pots in the courtyard and replant them with new plants from the market. The geraniums she had planted ages ago had long given up the ghost for lack of watering. None of the tenants in the building felt any particular sense of ownership about the courtyard, which was why the pots were usually full of dead flowers. Only the vine, which was rooted in a bed by the door, flourished on neglect. Eventually the management company would probably hack it back to preserve the gutters, but for the moment it continued to curl up the exterior of the block, twisting around balconies and making for the martins’ nest.
Having emptied her bath and dutifully cleaned the bathroom, Jazz hung her towel over the balcony rail, which, strictly speaking, was not encouraged, and dressed for her leisurely walk to the market. Downstairs, she called a hasty “Bonjour, Madame,” to the concierge, who was talking on the phone, and slipped out the front door, conscious of the bath towel flapping above her.
Strolling down the hill toward the town square, she wondered about her mum’s new project. According to Nan, it was a disaster waiting to happen, but that was probably just Nan, who loved a bit of drama. Jazz sometimes thought that it couldn’t have been easy for Mum growing up with Nan’s negativity. Whatever anyone might plan or want, Mary Casey was sure to find a flaw in it. Mostly that was just funny but sometimes it pulled you down. Mum seldom said anything, but Jazz had recently come to suspect that it bothered her more than a little. Before they moved to Ireland, Mum had sailed through life looking serene and well dressed, organizing dinner parties for Dad’s friends in London and dispatching weekly food baskets to the cottage in Norfolk from Fortnum and Mason’s Food Hall. Even during the long summer holidays that they’d spent in Ireland when Jazz was little, Mum had been cheerful and relaxed. But Granddad was alive in those days and perhaps that had made a difference. Anyway, whatever the reason, there was nothing serene about her now. So perhaps moving out of Nan’s and having her own space was a good idea. It just seemed weird to choose a place that sounded like some sort of ruin. Next time she was home, Jazz thought, she’d have to go round to see it. The chances were that Nan was just being a drama queen and that the house would turn out to be picture-postcard perfect, with honeysuckle nodding at the door.