PS Olive You
Sun, sea . . . and a summer of endless possibilities.From the glossy streets of Chelsea to a tiny Greek hideaway, Faith Cotton is about to have a summer that she will never forget!Young, bored housewife, Faith Cotton, escapes her stifling Chelsea life when her husband suggests they decamp to a tiny island in the Greek Cyclades for the summer.He works for the foreign office and has the inside scoop on ‘the Greek situation’. Europe is pouring money into Greece and, far from going down the plughole, Andrew believes that the island of Iraklia will soon see a tourist boom.Faith is left in charge of finding them a permanent holiday home on the island, but things don’t go to plan – over the course of a summer, Faith’s doomed marriage begins to unravel, and far from finding the house she set out for, she finally discovers the person she really is. . .
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Published by Avon
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2015
Copyright © Lizzie Allen 2015
Lizzie Allen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008163600
Version: 2015–09–11
Contents
On the Christmas before the credit crunch exploded in our faces, my mother-in-law bought me a spectacular vanity case. A leather studded Versace with enough capacity for ten litres of age-defying products.
The following Easter she bought me a course of Botox. Clearly the ten litres had not been enough.
Bridgette was the sort of person who gaveth with the one hand and tooketh away with the other. Still desperately clinging to the notion I might conceive after four failed IVF attempts, she somehow conflated looking-younger with fertile eggs.
Behind my back she worked on Andrew to leave me for a younger woman and have a second go at gene proliferation. Who could blame her? I was only thirty-two but my ovaries were at least two hundred. Andrew was ten years older than me and needed to get a move on, or else he’d be mistaken for a grandfather on sports days.
How ironic that he’d selected a younger model to settle down with after screwing just about everyone his age in Greater London and the Counties, only to discover the younger model was a dud. It irked Bridgette beyond belief. I knew this because whenever I came into the kitchen and interrupted them over the Aga they’d both go silent.
Andrew leaving me was something I secretly feared myself although I never dared raise it. We didn’t share our insecurities.
Politics.
Economics.
The couple next door.
They were all up for grabs, but never our anxieties, our hopes and fears for the future. Especially not my ovaries. That would have been ‘dreadfully middle class’. Instead I tried to compensate by being the most pleasing wife in Chelsea. As long as other men desired me, Andrew would want me too. Vast quantities of money were dedicated to this end. I cooked haute cuisine, kept an immaculate house and dressed in a style that said effortlessly-classy-yet-sexy.
Glossy well-cut hair.
Plumped breasts.
Flawless skin.
On the night we left for Greece I packed enough sun cream to smear around the stratosphere three times and block out solar radiation for a year. I had no intention of returning from our little Hellenic adventure looking like a sultana.
Of all the places to buy a second property, a deserted goat-infested island in the Cyclades was not one I would have earmarked. What was wrong with Brittany where the weather was as shit as England and you had less chance of dying from skin cancer?
But after nine years of marriage, the penny was finally starting to drop that choice didn’t come in to it with Andrew. You simply got swept along on the tsunami of his enthusiasm, and woke up a few months later feeling resentful and irrelevant. His was the footprint in life we followed. He carried me on his back so that I needn’t get my feet dirty and leave any footprints at all.
The Greek adventure was partly prompted by the social circle we moved in. Andrew’s ex-Marlborough crowd were a well-heeled mob, the descendants of lords and ladies and cotton barons. Andrew was the son of an accountant. My dad owned a hardware store. That was before a multinational chain muscled its way into town and bankrupted him. That was before he developed depression, then cancer, then died and left me and my mum to fend for ourselves.
Our Chelsea crowd lived the high life. Yachts, summers in Saint Tropez, winters in Cloisters. The mandatory second home in Majorca, Ibiza, the Dordogne, with six bedrooms furnished by Jasper Conran. Andrew had been lamenting the second-home-shaped-hole in our lives for some time, but the playgrounds of the jet set were simply beyond our reach.
