Page 8 of The Villa

It was a good line, but where was it leading? What kind of story followed that?

And did she even believe it, that houses had memories? Did the little house near St. Pancras hold on to Mari’s past? Did it see her mother leaving for the hospital one August morning, never to return? Did it see Mari’s father coming in the door, face ravaged with grief, the tiny, screaming bundle that was Mari herself in his arms?

Did it see her slipping out the front door in the middle of the night, just three years ago, her heart pounding, her smile giddy, as Pierce took her hand and led her away?

It’s a romantic sentiment,she thinks to herself, tapping her pen on the paper.But it could also be a sinister one, if the memories are bad. What if the house holds the bad memories inside with the good? What does that mean for whoever lives there?

Her pen scratches across the paper, but before she even finishes the sentence—Mr. Wells says that to her the first day—the music shifts from the living room, and Pierce launches into another song, this one even louder and more raucous, eliciting cheers from his friends. Mari’s next thought skitters right out of her head, like something sliding down a drain.

She puts her pen down.

Pierce is sitting on the arm of the sofa in the living roomwhen she walks in, his head bent over his guitar, his bare foot tapping out the rhythm as he plays, and he’s smiling. This is the smile that first made her fall in love, when she walked into the cramped but cozy front room of their house on that quiet street in Camden, to see her father holding forth with a group of university students. It wasn’t an unusual sight. Mari’s father had been a noted intellectual and writer in the forties, and while a good deal of his glamour had faded—and his literary production had all but stopped—his open-door policy and his love of a good debate meant that there were always some shaggy-haired young men sitting on the sofas: artists, or poets, or musicians.

Pierce was among them that September afternoon, and Mari had felt like she’d been struck by lightning. Only sixteen, she’d never felt anything like that before, hadn’t even known that feeling existed.

Pierce had come back to the house the next day, and then the day after that, and by the time she kissed him in her back garden on an autumn night, the smell of wood smoke and the damp wool of his jumper all around her, she was completely gone.

She’d known that he was married, but it hadn’t made any difference. She was never not going to belong to Pierce, and he was never not going to belong to her.

Mari had known that as well as she’d known anything.

She moves into the room, scooting in close so she can watch Pierce play. There aren’t quite as many people in the flat as she’d thought, just two of Pierce’s old university friends, a couple of girls she recognizes from the pub down the road, and a third woman she’s never seen before, one with long dark hair who shoots Mari a look she’s gotten very used to.

But she ignores it, just like she ignores the girl in the flatacross the way who always seems to be coming down the stairs just as Pierce is going up. It’s the price of being with him, and it’s not really even his fault. He can’t help the way people look at him, can’t help that he’s the sort of person people are naturally drawn to.

It’s what will one day make him a star.

That, and his natural talent. Mari’s been listening to him play for years now, in bars and clubs and smaller music festivals. Pierce Sheldon is a name people are starting to know, and if he’s not quite thereyet, it’s coming. She can feel it, this whole new life waiting right around the bend for them. If they could just get that big break…

They’d been close last year. Pierce had been the opening act for this American acid-folk band that was touring England, the Faire. They’d had a couple of top-twenty hits, and the shows were the biggest Pierce had ever played. It was a whirlwind of crowded vans and tiny rooms over pubs and late nights, but Pierce was the happiest she’d ever seen him, and every time he stepped onstage, it seemed like there were more people there just to hear him.

She still remembers standing in a field on a cool September evening, her baby in her arms, asleep despite the noise, swaying as people in the crowd sang along with Pierce’s lyrics. Lyrics he’d written for her, songs that had seemed so personal and private now on the lips of strangers.

It had felt like magic. A spell Pierce had conjured up spreading through the crowd, and even after all the awfulness that had followed, the memory of that night—it still gets to her.

Hestill gets to her.

And now, when he looks over at her and winks, she still feels that little thrill rush through her.

He’s mine.

No matter what, he was hers. And she was his.

The door to the flat opens, and Pierce lifts his eyes.

Mari doesn’t have to turn around to see who it is. She can tell from the way Pierce’s face seems to light up.

Lara.

Her stepsister lives with them, crashing on the very sofa Pierce is sitting on, and when Mari does turn to look at her, Lara is grinning, her dark eyes wide as she waves for Mari to follow her into the kitchen.

Mari untangles herself as Pierce keeps playing, stepping over his friend Hobbes, ignoring the way the man’s hand briefly touches her ankle, his touch hot and slightly oily on her bare skin.

Pierce has told her she ought to sleep with Hobbes.

“He’s fuckin’ mad about you, Mari, and you know you’re free to do what you like.”

She does, and she is, but what she doesn’t like is Hobbes, or the voice in her head that sometimes wonders if Pierce occasionally tosses her at his friends so that he doesn’t feel guilty about his own indiscretions. But then that feels unfair. Pierce has always emphasized the importance of freedom, how just because they choose to be together, that doesn’t mean he owns her or has any say in what—or who—she chooses to do. It’s been that way since the very beginning.

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