Page 7 of High Season

FIVE

SIX WEEKS BEFORE THE BIRTHDAY PARTY

When she was a child, Hannah Bailey used to collect stories about Evelyn Drayton.

This town, this stretch of coastline, was all that Hannah had ever known.

Her parents had met while backpacking in Thailand in the early eighties.

Her dad, an East Londoner, said he had found her mum impossibly glamorous, with her thick French accent and her harem pants.

Her mum said she had found him too brash, too boyish, and yet somehow, they had clicked.

They had traveled the world together until Hannah’s mum realized she was pregnant—an accident, as the story went.

That was when they had decided to move to this stretch of coast, far from the metropolises where they had each grown up.

A former holiday haunt of artists and bohemians that teetered with the promise of becoming the next hippie paradise.

But dominated by villas that belonged to old-money families who drifted in and out with the good weather, the offbeat Eden Hannah’s parents had hoped for never quite materialized.

The dive shop that they plugged all of their savings into survived off the occasional family who would placate bored teenagers with the promise of scuba lessons, or children with the inflatable rafts they stocked to the ceiling.

Some how, each summer trudged in and out, and Hannah and her parents were still here.

Hannah knew everything about this town. She was a watcher.

That was what her mother used to say about her.

She would often report that even when Hannah was a toddler, she was happiest sitting quietly and observing.

She would perch behind the counter of the dive shop, her eyes following customers, solemn and still.

Absorbing details until she understood the intricate dynamics between families and friendships.

Hannah knew everything about everyone, her mum once said. Hannah was good with secrets.

As far back as Hannah could remember, she understood that Evelyn Drayton was special.

She heard how people talked about her. The reverence in the way they said her name.

Even though Hannah didn’t really understand what fame was, couldn’t comprehend Evelyn’s past as a celebrated socialite, she understood glamor.

She understood that this woman was different.

That there was something fascinating about her.

Something that made Hannah long to be a Drayton.

Throughout her childhood, she collected stories about the family like a magpie hunting for bright, shiny things.

She learned that Evelyn’s name had once been synonymous with celebrity wild childs; that after she inherited her father’s vast fortune at nineteen, she had regularly been spotted falling out of nightclubs, memorialized in paparazzi shots of her holding hands with bad-boy actors and aristocrats that sold to the tabloids for hundreds of thousands of pounds.

She learned Evelyn had been married four times, twice to the same person.

That her first husband was rock star Rocco Mae.

That they’d had an infamously torrid and intense romance in the eighties.

That they’d married when she was pregnant with twins, the pictures of Evelyn’s rounded belly at their Vegas wedding splashed across gossip pages.

That they were often branded as the new Richard Burton and Liz Taylor, the new Sid and Nancy—couples whose self-destructiveness outstripped their romance.

Hannah learned that Rocco and Evelyn divorced when the twins were just babies, after rumors of infidelity on both sides, but had been unable to stay away from each other.

They had remarried in the nineties and divorced again three years later, when Rocco left for a supermodel ten years younger than Evelyn.

Then there was Evelyn’s second husband—technically also her third husband—who had been arrested for trashing a hotel room at the Ritz.

Evelyn’s youngest child, Nina, was born not long after their marriage, and not long before their quickie divorce.

She was the result of an affair—the papers speculating that the father was anyone from an heir to an ancient European fortune to the pink house’s pool boy.

Evelyn never confirmed either way. She bulldozed through the rumors by getting engaged to her fourth husband, a much younger American named Harrison Andreas, after just two weeks of a whirlwind romance.

“The Draytons are basically royalty around here,” Hannah had said when Josie’s mother landed the job of housekeeper at the pink house. “Everyone knows who they are.”

Josie had shrugged. It was the summer her dad left, and she had been quieter than usual. Spending more time at the dive shop, or down on the beach.

“So?” she had said. “That doesn’t make them better than us.”

And Hannah hadn’t answered, because Josie was younger, and she hadn’t lived here as long, and she didn’t understand yet.

She didn’t know what it meant, to be the Draytons.

What it meant to be talked about, recognized.

To know that you could enter a room and people would jump to make sure you were comfortable.

To not have to worry about what next year would bring, or the year after that.

The certainty of being part of a world where the rules were made to benefit you, where the parties were never-ending.

Where the schools you would attend, the jobs you would hold, and the people you would be friends with were all decided before you could even walk.

To Hannah, it sounded like perfection.

There was always a cocktail party the first night the Draytons arrived in the South of France.

To Hannah, it signaled the start of high season.

As darkness fell, the pink house would glow against the hillside, tiki lamps on the terrace, the glimmer of fairy lights.

Every room lit up after a winter of darkness.

A clear announcement that the Draytons were back in town.

Hannah had promised to arrive early this year.

There was a virus going around, and some of the local girls who had been hired to help were sick.

Patricia needed an extra pair of hands, and Josie would be tied up with her usual job of looking after Nina, keeping her out of the way of the adults.

But there had been a problem at the dive shop, a missing cash box, and by the time Hannah turned up, guests were already scattered throughout the hall, hired waitstaff offering up trays of cocktails.

Their eyes glazed over Hannah as she weaved through to the kitchen, sweat-damp from jogging to the pink house in an attempt to make up time.

It was a lifelong discipline, the art of spotting money a mile off.

The ease that it carried. The confidence that Hannah lacked.

To Evelyn Drayton’s guests, Hannah was almost invisible.

At the kitchen island, Patricia was lining up canapés on a ceramic platter, morsels of goat cheese smeared on top of figs and neat, square croustades, each crowned with a delicate fold of salmon.

“I’m so sorry, Pat—” Hannah started.

“Josie’s outside,” Patricia said, not looking up from her work, her hands moving rapidly. “By the pool. Here, you can take these out.”

She wiped her hands on a tea towel before opening the fridge, pulling out a plate of sandwiches.

“Nina won’t eat anything except cheese sandwiches at the minute,” she said, an exhaustion in her voice. “I’ve tried to put some cucumbers in so she’s getting at least a bit of something green. Josie might be able to persuade her. Nina listens to her, though god knows why.”

Hannah took the plate without saying a word.

Josie was not by the pool, where Hannah had expected her to be.

Hannah circled the terrace twice, weaving through clusters of women in long dresses and men in open-necked shirts, a waiter cleaning up a smashed martini glass.

She traced the familiar route through the inside of the house, across the broad entrance hall, the living room with views over the sea, the library that Evelyn’s latest husband, Harrison, had insisted they convert into an office, even though he had no discernible job.

She paused at the foot of the stairs, knowing that she wasn’t supposed to go up.

When the Draytons were back, the house that Josie and Hannah roamed through all the rest of the year became off-limits.

But then, Hannah had been told to take sandwiches for Nina.

She walked up the stairs quickly, two at a time, afraid she might be caught and questioned.

She paused at the top, listening for the sound of a child playing, the high-pitched murmur of Nina’s voice.

She could only hear the hum of music from the ground floor, the clinking of glasses, the buzz of conversation.

And then, a sound from the end of the corridor.

She quickened her pace, expecting to recognize Nina and Josie’s distinctive chatter.

Her footsteps slowed. The voices were unmistakably adult.

Urgent. She drew closer. The open door of Evelyn’s bedroom.

“I saw it. I saw you looking at her.”

“Bullshit.”

“I saw it, Harrison. Do you think I’m blind?”

A short, sharp laugh.

“I think that you’re crazy, Evelyn. That’s what I think. I think that you make shit up when you want attention.”

“How dare you? How dare you call me crazy?”

“Don’t fucking touch me.”

“I hate you. I hate you.”

“I said don’t fucking —”

There was a hard, quick sound, the brute noise of skin on skin.

Hannah instinctively took a step back, as if she herself had been hit.

Back into the doorway of the closest room, out of sight.

There was a silence. It was worse than the sound of them fighting.

It was terrible and vast. It felt like it would last forever.

“Evelyn.”

Harrison’s voice was weak this time. Appalled.

“No.”

“I didn’t—”

“Get away from me.”