The Drowning River Read Online Free Page A

hopelessly against them turning mottled under your uniform without ever getting warm. The apartment was also colder than home, the terrible mildewed glass house built in the only cold, damp, north-facing site in the whole of the Ventoux by an experimental architect Ma had been having an affair with when she’d dropped out to paint – well, mess about – in the South of France, at nineteen, which happened to be exactly Iris’s age.
    A pov, they called her at school, in her discreetly hand-me-down uniform. If you hadn’t sent me there, she used to say to Ma, we could have rebuilt the house. Or put in proper central heating. Iris remembered falls of snow that killed olive trees, and hunters goingout on New Year’s Day in hard frosts, blasting away with guns on the hillside below them. Then, feeling herself getting all homesick, she forced herself to remember the days and days of rain, too, the water seeping under the cracked concrete floor of the terrible house. He was fairly famous, now, the architect, though Ma’s house was one of his projects that never got photographed for magazines. He had a shock of white hair and a wrecked red face, and he’d made a pass at Iris, once. She turned over in disgust at the memory, pulling the inadequate duvet over her head.
    Made a pass, that was one of Ma’s phrases, always delivered gaily, fondly. ‘Oh, lovey, David Bailey? Twenty years older than me and made a pass before he even knew my name.’ There would have been very little point in blowing the whistle on the architect, even if he had been something like forty-five years older than Iris.
    Ronnie’s mother had found the flat. Ronnie was short for Veronica. Being called Iris was bad enough, but she couldn’t imagine how anyone could come up with a name like Veronica for a girl born in 1988; Iris supposed that under the circumstances Ronnie was all right. Ronnie’s mother had racing stables outside Newmarket and a new boyfriend, and wanted Ronnie, mooching around at home between school and whatever was going to be next, out of the way.
    ‘Bitch,’ Ronnie had said as they unpacked their bags. ‘Why does it have to be stinking, boring Florence?’
    Ronnie throwing silk underwear around, chucking expensive boots on the floor.
And why,
Iris had thought as she looked at her own favourite dress, dark red rayon with a ruffle that was suddenly looking cheap,
do I have to come with you, Ronnie?
    They’d been default friends at school, and had exchanged emails since, Iris dutiful, nostalgic even, after coming home to France to do the International Baccalaureate because Ma had run out of money for school fees. Ronnie’s emails had been easy, boastful, condescending; Iris had the idea Ronnie’s mother, Serena, was telling her to write them. Serena had a thing about creative people and, Iris being from a creative family, she wanted Ronnie there for some screwy, snobbish reason to do with that. If you only knew, Iris wanted to say. The life of the artist.Ma illustrating children’s books for a pittance. Selling watercolours of Mont Ventoux in a crappy gallery in Aix, at the rate of one a month.
    But of course when it came to it, Ronnie
didn’t
want Iris to come with her to Florence, not much; it had not been her idea at all. It had been Serena’s, of course, and Ronnie didn’t try very hard to disguise the fact. Iris was going to be the sensible one who’d keep Ronnie out of trouble, and the creative one who encouraged her to keep up the classes. And most of all Iris was the one whose mother was so broke the offer of a course in life-drawing and free accommodation in Florence for three months would be snatched off the table.
    ‘Do I have to, Ma?’ Iris had said sulkily, then, hearing how graceless she sounded, pleading, ‘I hardly know her, these days.’
    ‘But it’s in Florence, sweetheart,’ Ma had said, a dreamy, faraway look in her eyes. Iris assumed from the look that passes had been made in Florence, too, and