‘Dolce Alla Napoletana,’ Ella said, as I put the cake on the plate.
‘Thank you, it looks lovely.’ I took a bite; it was delicious. I found it hard to believe it was vegan, and under different circumstances I might have questioned this – but didn’t want to rock the boat.
‘It’s from a super cute little bakery down the road. Me and Jamie bought them when we went for our run. It’s a sweet layer cake, eaten to celebrate Ferragosto, the mid-August celebration of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven,’ Ella said, like she was an expert in random Italian religious festivals.
‘Wow,’ was all I could say.
‘Joy and I are on a mission this holiday, Clare,’ she called over to me as I ate my cake.
‘Oh, that sounds interesting?’ I said.
‘Yeah, we’re going to create some really amazing new vegan recipes and start a joint Insta account.’
‘So you’ve converted Joy?’ I said, and my mother-in-law didn’t comment, just smiled serenely, which was so out of character.
‘Yeah. Joy and I are going to show you meat lovers that there are better options than eating dead bodies,’ Ella continued, which didn’t really make sense because Joy ate meat. The redder the better.
‘Eww, I don’t want to eat dead people,’ Violet squealed. This was chorused by Alfie and Freddie who hadn’t a clue what she was talking about but joined in anyway.
‘It’s not dead people… it’s food. Auntie Ella’s just being silly,’ I said, still trying to keep it light.
‘I’m sorry, yes, I was just being silly kids. Your mummy’s right.’ She looked at me with her head to one side, self-pity and hurt on her face. She did hurt very well – could conjure it up from nowhere in fact. To everyone else I must have sounded like a bitch, while Ella seemed perfectly reasonable, contrite even – but I heard the sarcasm in her voice.
We continued to sit by the pool, mostly in silence, with Dan throwing me daggers while the layer cake from ‘the cute little bakery’ sat in my gullet refusing to budge. He’d clearly heard me calling her silly, taken it out of context and was now judging me for it. Oh go away, Dan, I thought. Since when did he get to play the sanctimonious husband?
‘So, you must tell me where to find your new vegan Instagram,’ I said. ‘In fact, I don’t even follow your main account, what’s your name?’
‘It’s @EverythingElla123.’ She smiled proudly.
I picked up my phone and clicked on her profile. She had over twenty-five thousand followers – I’d somehow expected more for an influencer, but what did I know? ‘Wow, lovely photos,’ I murmured, scrolling through the selfies with sunsets, selfies in wonderful hotels in long-haul destinations, selfies in swimwear/tight dresses/tiny dresses, all relevant companies tagged for maximum marketing.
Only five minutes before, she’d posted a photo of herself in a long grey silk dress, standing in the villa. ‘Home at last! #Home #Italy #MyPlace’
‘And, Clare, don’t take offence, but I don’t follow back.’
‘No problem.’
‘I don’t want to fill my timeline with what you had for your dinner, how much weight you’ve lost that day, you know? Oh, and when I say “you”, of course I don’t mean “you”.’
‘No, of course not.’ She so did.
I sat up, still scrolling through all the photos, the beautiful clothes, the cars all tagged, and when I moved to the bottom of the page, I realised the account had only been running about six months. She didn’t have a lot of followers for an Instagram model, but she had a lot considering she’d only had the account for six months. ‘Do you mind me asking,’ I said, leaning over in her direction, ‘how you got so many followers in such a short time? We’ve had the Taylor’s account for years and I think we’ve only got about 500 followers.’
‘I know how to do it, know what people like…’
‘So what did you do before, if you only started this six months ago?’
‘The same. I just deleted the old account, wanted something fresh – no one wants stale old news, Clare. Like I said, you have to keep on top of things.’
I kept looking, trying to ignore what she was saying. It was clearly personal.
‘And how can you earn a living from this? I don’t mean that in a rude way. I genuinely want to know what an Instagram model is, how your career works?’
She shifted slightly. ‘Big companies get me involved in their ads…’
‘Big? Like who?’
‘Just… I mean make-up and beauty companies… and… you wouldn’t have heard of them.’
‘I might?’ I felt like she was avoiding the question, and I couldn’t help but think, what was she hiding – and why?
‘Too many to name,’ she said and, standing up, wandered over to Jamie, who was sunbathing, and curled up next to him like a baby on his towel. Meanwhile I was left trying to work out just who Ella was and wondering why no one else seemed to question her.
* * *
After I’d eaten, I felt obliged to take the others’ dirty plates from around the pool and wash up. But when Joy offered to help, I said, ‘No, you do enough, stay by the pool. Dan will help me.’
‘But that doesn’t make any sense,’ Ella piped up as she stood by her sunlounger, her breasts gently bouncing under a fitted T-shirt as she tied her hair in a messy knot.
‘Why doesn’t it make any sense, Ella?’ I asked, trying not to look at her buttocks in the tiny bikini as she now bent over to pick up one of the plates from the ground.
‘If you and Dan are in the kitchen, then Joy has to look after the kids… so she won’t be able to lie down and relax. Which is the point – isn’t it?’ she said, a sense of faux confusion on her face. I knew exactly what she was doing.
‘Oh okay, so what do you want to do?’ I asked, bored of her picking up on everything I said and sniping at me with that sickly smile.
‘Look, you and Joy stay by the pool. You look tired, Clare.’ I felt a frisson of irritation at this, the implication being that I looked rough, or old. She always tried to take the wind from my sails. Why was she so hell-bent on undermining me, stripping me of what little confidence I had? She took my plate from my hands. ‘I’ll help Dan with the washing up. We’ll soon have this cleared, won’t we, Dan the Man?’ she called across to him and he stuck his thumb in the air and heaved himself from his lounger. She then took her nearly naked buttocks and stood far too close to my husband and giggled pointlessly for at least forty-five seconds while he balanced a pile of forks and plates. He couldn’t exactly refuse to help, but he didn’t have to be quite so bloody eager.
I turned away from them and spotted Bob sitting in the shallow end up to his neck in water, holding Freddie, while the other two splashed around. Joy was now engrossed in her Barbara Taylor Bradford and Dan and Ella were disappearing into the villa with a few plates, and I settled myself down in the shallow end with Bob and the kids.
As I was now there, it meant that I could be with Freddie in the shallow end while Bob went a little deeper with the other two, Alfie on his shoulders. I’d been there a few minutes when Jamie suddenly got up from where he was lying and came to join me.