Page 49 of The Island Villa

She liked coffee and she drank plenty of it, so she walked into a fancy coffee shop in Covent Garden and talked them into hiring her. She figured that she could listen to conversations, observe people, develop ideas and scribble in her notebook on her breaks.

She’d been working there for a month when Andrew had walked in.

She’d been struck by two things: his American accent and his confidence. He had a sophistication that she hadn’t encountered before, and she’d immediately rethought the hero she was currently writing. He’d be American, she thought. With a warm smile and great eye contact. But behind that smooth exterior and apparently perfect life, he would be hiding a secret.

Her creative brain was alight with ideas as she’d delivered Andrew’s order to his table by the window. He’d thanked her (impeccable manners) and asked her to join him. She’d badly wanted to but hadn’t dared. The job was barely covering her rent and she couldn’t risk losing it, so she’d declined regretfully but served him an extra coffee on the house to make up for it and to show she was interested.

He’d come in the next day and then the next, and by the end of the week he’d asked her out.

She’d never had a real boyfriend before (she’d had plenty of fictional ones) and she felt as if she’d struck gold.

He was ten years older than her and rising through the ranks in his job in the city. She didn’t know exactly what he did, but whatever it was paid him enough to own his own apartment and take her to dinner in restaurants with fancy French names and incomprehensible menus.

He was glamorous, sophisticated (he ate oysters! Catherine had never met anyone who ate oysters) and fascinated by her. He told her that what he’d always wanted was to be an artist, but he came from a wealthy Bostonian family who had worked in finance for three generations and Andrew Swift was expected to follow the same. He’d told himself he could paint as a hobby, but his work left virtually no time for hobbies so in reality he rarely picked up a paintbrush.

He admired Catherine’s creativity, and was impressed that she had already written a book that was going to be published. She’d only realized much later that in her he’d seen the life he could have been living.

They’d married, and he’d insisted that she give up her job so that she could concentrate on being creative and writing full-time. He didn’t want her to work in the coffee shop. He wanted her to write. It didn’t matter that she didn’t earn much money. He earned more than enough for both.

His generosity had floored her. She was desperate to write and here he was presenting her with the means to allow her to do it. Not only that, but he believed in her.

Her first book was finally published (with the name Catherine Swift on the cover), and by traveling half way across London, she managed to find it in one store. But still that was a thrill. Her book! For sale. It was the biggest high. She’d stood in the store for two hours and finally someone had picked up her book from the shelf and bought it. It had taken all her self-control not to tap the woman on the shoulder and say, I wrote that.

And it was true that being a published author hadn’t at that point come with either fame or fortune, but still it was an unbeatable feeling. She’d felt vindicated in her life choices.

Andrew had continued to encourage her, and Catherine had continued to write. She had another book published, and then another. By publishing standards, she was doing well, but still she didn’t earn enough to make more than a trivial contribution toward their expenses. Writing, it turned out, wasn’t a route to riches although the public rarely understood that. For every author who made serious money, there were thousands of others barely able to subsidize their coffee habit.

It didn’t matter to Andrew, and because it didn’t matter to him, it didn’t matter to her either. They were happy. They laughed a lot. He immersed himself in her creative world, and in the evenings, they’d sit in their tiny garden and she’d talk to him about her plots and characters. He relished any conversation that didn’t involve the boring world of banking, which he increasingly loathed. A few years into their marriage, Adeline arrived, and Catherine somehow navigated the challenge of writing while caring for a child.

And then her books had started to sell. It wasn’t an overnight thing, more of a slow build as a reader discovered one of her books and then went back to read everything else she’d written. It snowballed. Finally, she was earning money, which delighted her after years of feeling like a drain on Andrew.

That was the point where things had gone wrong.

To be precise, she changed.

Success, she discovered, altered things in a way that wasn’t always immediately visible. She couldn’t look back and identify the exact moment it all started to go wrong. The decline of a marriage wasn’t always a seismic event. Often it began with small virtually undetectable ripples of discontent that shook the foundations of a partnership. Cracks appeared. The change in their circumstances chipped away at them.

She was relieved that she was no longer dependent on Andrew. The guilt that had always niggled melted away.

Now when they went to dinner parties, people asked her about her work and congratulated her. They joked that Andrew would soon be able to give up work and be a kept man.

She should have noticed sooner that Andrew was the only one not laughing.

It was on the way home from an evening with friends that they’d had their first proper fight. She’d wished many times since that night that she’d handled things differently. Maybe if she hadn’t had that extra glass of wine, or hadn’t just received the news that her sales had grown beyond all expectations, she might have paid more attention to him. She might have listened more carefully to what he was saying.

Instead, she’d interpreted his moodiness as envy. After all, hadn’t he always longed to pursue an artistic career? She’d thought he was resentful of her success and she’d been upset that he couldn’t celebrate what was, to her, the culmination of her hard work and dreams.

He’d tried telling her that night that he’d always felt that his job had a purpose, and that was to support her so that she could pursue her dream. Now she no longer needed his financial support, his job had ceased to have purpose. He’d confessed that he missed the old days, when struggle had bonded them. She knew now that what he was trying to say was that he no longer felt needed or important in her life, but at the time what she’d heard was him saying he wished her success had never happened.

The success of Summer Star was to be the final straw.

With the money she earned from the book and the movie, she bought the villa on Corfu (Andrew had said that it was her money, so of course she should do what she wanted with it). It was impossible for her to describe what the place meant to her. Not just the villa and the view, both of which were spectacular, but what it symbolized. She thought about her father (long dead, thanks to a collision between his skull and a cricket ball). She thought about Miss Barrett.

How could she be worthless when she had this tangible proof of her worth?

She spent as much time at the villa as possible. Andrew joined her when he could, but she was always in demand. She was expected to record interviews, to tour, and she arrived home one night to find that he’d flown back to London because there was no point in him being in Greece when she was somewhere else.

She’d felt resentful (she wished she could put the clock back and give her young self a sharp talking to). What was she supposed to do? Of course, she had to travel if she was asked to. This was her career. Having supported her for so long, why could he no longer understand that?

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