THE beach party. There was always something not quite right.

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Ana had picked up negative vibes when she first heard about it some two weeks earlier, at a party given by Daniel’s expatriate friends.  But Ana López Garcia was a rational woman and a decisive one, she weighed up all her options before she decided. Once she made up her mind, she kept to it, and she was most definitely not a person given to premonitions. Something was off-key about it and she didn’t know what. True, she had another invitation but it was more than that,  she had told Daniel, more than just a simple conflict between two attractive propositions.  For once in her life she was undecided and Daniel was no real help to her.

On the morning of the party she woke early as the first rays of the sun reached the bedroom window.  Her restlessness woke Daniel, who wanted to know what was wrong.

“It’s entirely up to you, my darling.” he said.  “If you want to go, we’ll go together, and if you’d rather go fire jumping, then that’s fine too. I’ll be happy on the terrace, on my own, with a bottle of wine and some music. You do realise they will all get very drunk on the beach, and to be honest, they will have more fun if we don’t go. They love a good gossip and if we aren’t there then they can talk about us. Think what fun they will all have.”

“Cariño, you are so cynical since we moved here” Ana smiled but she, too, was less trusting of late.

23 June is the eve of the festival of San Juan, one of the most important Mediterranean summer festivals.  The nights are short at the time of the summer solstice. To celebrate the occasion she had the choice of accompanying Daniel to an elegant supper party on the beach with his friends or jumping over fires in the old town. There she could join her family and friends and all the town neighbours,  a myrtle crown on her head, revisiting the girl she had once been.

But the invitation from Daniel’s friends, these tall, confident, affluent couples, was an important step in her entry into their world. They clearly assumed that she would be delighted, feel privileged even, to join them. This was, she saw, the event of the year and only special people were invited to join their inner circle.  Did she want to feel that special? She wasn’t quite sure yet.

And so, on this glorious midsummer dawn, she woke unsettled and uneasy. But when, long afterwards, she thought about that morning, she asked herself what would she, what could she, have done, even if she believed in premonitions? Decided not to go to the beach party? Would that have changed anything? And how could anyone have foreseen that a drunken quarrel by the sea on a midsummer night would have such terrible consequences? 

So now she was totally awake.  She softly touched the cheek of the once more sleeping Daniel and crept from the bed, down the stairs and out into the garden, her special place. The scents of the flowers and the sounds of the early birds, busy in the trees, were part of the paradise that Ana had dreamed of in their small apartment in Brussels when she and Daniel had lived and worked near the European Commission. Then she had sighed for the sight of the sea and the scent of the flowers in her small Spanish town; it would, she had decided, be the ideal place to raise the family she wanted, now she had finally found someone she trusted to be the father of her children. But now it was dawning on her that, in part at least, their happiness together in Brussels had come from their sense of living their own lives, with the friends they had met there; a cosmopolitan couple amongst many others.  

She was beginning to wonder if it really had been such a good decision to move back.  She had felt the pull of family, old friends, old habits but in reality she had managed without them perfectly well for twenty years, long before Daniel came into her life.

She had explained her doubts to Daniel, who put an arm around her shoulder. “I know, my darling, and now we have my old friends to deal with, not to mention, of course, Lynette.” 

Thinking about Daniel’s ex-wife, Ana absentmindedly deadheaded the white flowers of the stephanotis plant which twined all the way to the top of the stone pillar, the white flowers and the bright green leaves a perfect contrast to the baked biscuit of the old stone, so warm and comforting to the touch. Admiring them briefly, she passed on to deal with the spent roses. This older, married Ana was very different from the girl who had left the town twenty years earlier. Older, she thought and, she hoped, wiser. 

Her best school friend, Maite Hernandez Rodriguez, had returned to their hometown the previous year when she was appointed the chief of the local police force. Maite had sounded surprised, shocked even, when Ana had phoned to let her know she and Daniel too, were moving back, in April.

“But, mi guapissima Ana, I thought you told me that your Daniel’s ex-wife still lives here. Won’t that be a little, well, French, for you all to live in the same town? The next thing, you will tell me that you will all socialise together. Now that really would be very French.”

Ana had explained that she and Daniel had found a house to rent on the edge of the old town, omitting to mention that it was Lynette who had organised it for them, through her house agency. Ana knew well that for Maite to call something French was not a compliment.
 

“But Maite,” she had protested, “all of that crowd live in the urbanisations. You know how little contact there is with the town, the foreigners hardly ever come over.”

Maite made one of those very ambiguous Spanish sounds, a mixture of ay, hay, uh, which to Ana meant that she was less than convinced and so they had passed quickly onto local gossip. Was it unusual, unwise even to decide to live in the same place as your husband’s former wife? But it had been this shared connection with the town which had drawn them together when they first met. They had been introduced by a mutual friend at a party and one of Daniel’s first questions had been to ask which part of Spain she was from. When she told him, adding that she supposed he would never have heard of it, it was so small, he almost spilled his drink over her.

Wiping the drops of wine from her hand with a beautiful white handkerchief, he had said “But that’s incredible! I used to live there. I can’t believe it. Do you think that’s why we have been drawn together? Or perhaps it might be your amazingly beautiful eyes?”

Later it became a private joke between them and Ana hadn’t given too much thought to Lynette in the two years since they first met. Dominic and Tony, Daniel’s sons, had come to stay in Brussels several times and Ana had become fond of them and they, she thought, of her. When they were all together Lynette was hardly mentioned and after all, she had said once to Maite on the phone, Lynette and Daniel have been divorced for five years. They would join the beach party tonight, she decided, as she waited for Daniel to join her. It was ridiculous to feel so nervous. She could always jump the fires next year and anyway, maybe she was too old for all that now.

Content at last with her decision, she set problematic thoughts aside and sat at the garden table, savouring the early morning air. Through the palm trees, she could see the sea, and she knew without a doubt that, although she had travelled around the world, Mediterranean light was the most beautiful, captured so perfectly by her favourite Impressionist painters. She bathed in its warmth, enjoying the time before midday while it was still possible to sit outside without burning. Behind her, the south-facing wall of the old white house reflected the sun, the blue and yellow stripes of the awning shading the open kitchen door. She had fallen in love with their rented house, just up the hill from the town, in a small cul-de-sac that might have been in the middle of the countryside. 

From next door came the mouth-watering smell of peppers simmering in olive oil and garlic, and she realised her neighbour was already preparing food for the fiesta. She was in the garden kitchen, making cocas, small individual pizzas cooked in the outside bread oven, and which brought Ana such intense memories of childhood parties. Her aunts would make them to celebrate birthdays and fiestas, and she recalled their smell and the feel of the hot pastry on her fingers, through the paper wrapping.

Daniel eventually emerged and joined her in the garden, bringing coffee with him. She told him that she had decided to go with him to the beach and celebrate with his friends, and he gave her a hug.

“I hope you didn’t think I was putting pressure on you, darling, by saying I wouldn’t go without you. I can see that my not wanting to go fire jumping with your chums is an added factor too.”

“Well, I have decided now, and that is that.  So the next thing is what food shall we take and then, of course, what shall I wear?” 
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