And it makes her sad how even that seems to be enough for Lara.
“Mari!”
She turns to see Johnnie sitting on the lawn, his long legs stretched out in front of him. He waves at her cheerfully, and, relieved, she goes to sit beside him.
The grass prickles her legs through the sundress she’s wearing, and she shades her eyes with one hand, wishing she’d brought some sunglasses.
Reading her mind, Johnnie pulls his own pair off his face, handing them to her. “Here ya go,” he says, and she takes the glasses with an embarrassed little laugh.
“You don’t have to,” she says even as she slides them on her face, and he shrugs.
“Want to.”
She’s been at Villa Rosato for two weeks now, and Johnnie remains something of a mystery. He has a guitar—Mari has seen him with it, although she hasn’t heard him play—and she still wonders what Noel meant by “entertainment director.”
And while Noel has called him his friend, the relationship between them seems more contentious than anything else. Noel loves his barbs and quips, but the ones he throws at Johnnie seem especially pointed, that current of cruelty she picks up when he speaks to Lara shooting through each word.
She thinks again about Noel’s eyes on Pierce’s body this morning and feels her face flush. Is that it, then? Is Johnnie Noel’s lover?
But then she’s gotten used to these sorts of men. Boys, really. She used to see them at her father’s house, and she sees them in her flat now. Eternal outsiders, drifting on the edge of a group, but never firmly inside of it. Drawn to the lifestyle of art and freedom （and yes, also sex and drugs）。 There one week, gone the next. Johnnie has that air about him, that slightly hazy quality like she could blink and he’d suddenly vanish.
There’s another shout from the pond, this one from Pierce as the boat tilts precipitously to one side. Noel is still standing, his arms spread wide, his head tilted back to the sky. He’s wearing a pair of sunglasses with bright blue frames, a cigarette clenched between his teeth, his smile positively wolfish. Mari sighs.
“He came and got Pierce out of bed so they could write,” she tells Johnnie. Gesturing at the cavorting on the pond, she needlessly adds, “But this doesn’t really look like writing to me.”
Johnnie nods, clearly weighing his words. “He’s not always like this,” he finally says.
When Mari only looks at him, he laughs, pushing his dark hair out of his eyes. “Okay, he is, but the thing with Noel is that there are always … levels, you know? General baseline of Noel-ness. Some days he’s at a four, others at a ten.”
Mari understands that well enough. Pierce is always Pierce—dreamy, passionate, in love with the world—but there are times when those qualities seem more overwhelming than others, or somehow out of balance.
“Is he—” Mari starts, and then stops, her tongue thick in her dry mouth. “That is, are … are the two of you—”
“Are we shagging?” Johnnie asks, squinting at her, and Mari hopes he assumes that the pinkness of her cheeks is due to the sun.
Some rebel you’ve turned out to be, she chides herself. Can’t even ask a simple question if it involves sex.
“Well, I wasn’t going to put it so bluntly, but I guess that’s what I was asking, yes,” she says, drawing her knees up and tugging her dress over them.
Johnnie laughs, reaching up to ruffle his hair, so black it’s nearly blue in the sunlight. “We’re friends. Kind of.”
“Why only kind of?” she asks, noting that this is not really an answer to what she asked. Out on the pond, Noel shucks off the flowing white shirt he was wearing, letting it drop carelessly into the water.
“He doesn’t trust me,” Johnnie says. He nods out at the pond. “Thinks I’m some sort of spy.”
Mari laughs. “A spy?” she repeats, incredulous. “For whom?”
Johnnie shrugs. “Depends on the day, really. Sometimes it’s for the record company or Tom, his manager. Sometimes it’s for his ex. The day before you lot turned up, he went on quite the epic rant, accusing me of phoning Arabella in the middle of the night, reporting back on what he’s doing. I told him, ‘Mate, I’ve never met your missus, and even if I had, I doubt she’d be all that interested in hearing that you’re drinking yourself to death and fucking Italian birds.’”
Mari actually has met Noel’s ex-wife. Or rather, not-yet-ex-wife, because as far as she’s heard, there’s no divorce, just a sort of extended separation, with Noel in Europe, and Arabella living with her parents in their country pile in Devonshire.
She was pretty, Arabella, if desperately serious. Mari had only exchanged some pleasantries with her at a party in Mayfair, the sort of thing that she and Pierce were usually not invited to, but one of Pierce’s old friends from Eton had insisted they come. All in all, it had been a boring night, Pierce sliding back into the person he must’ve been before she met him: rich, slightly posh, drinking too much, and talking too loudly.
Mari had hung on the edges of the room, and that’s where she’d found Arabella Gordon. She remembered wondering how on earth two such different people had ever decided to get married, but now that she knows Noel a little better, it makes sense in a strange way. He’d probably needed the calm solidity that had been radiating off the petite brunette, and Arabella … well, who wouldn’t want to be the one to tame the wild Noel Gordon?
Hadn’t taken, of course.
Looking at Noel now, draped at the end of the rowboat, shirtless and very clearly flirting with Pierce, Mari wonders how Arabella could have ever thought it would. “S’ppose the next thing will be that I’m working for the papers,” Johnnie continues, leaning back on his hands. “Or the government. He comes up with some wild shit, let me tell you. If he put half as much thought into his music as he does into wondering who’s keen to fuck him over, he’d have three albums out already.”
Lara has perched herself on the end of the pier now, her bare feet dangling in the water. She’s singing something Mari vaguely recognizes, a Judy Collins song Lara was obsessed with a few months ago. Lara’s always had a lovely voice, pretty and clear, strong enough that Pierce has invited her onstage a few times to sing with him.
The song carries across the grass, and even though Lara’s giving a good performance of someone singing solely for the pleasure of it, it’s clear this is another attempt at drawing Noel’s attention.
It’s not working, from what Mari can tell, and next to her, Johnnie makes a sound of disgust, ruffling his hand over his hair as he sits up. “Anyway, this is the first time I’ve got you to myself since you got here, don’t want to talk about bloody Noel.”
Surprised, Mari looks over at him and realizes for the first time that his face is a bit pink, too, even beneath his tan.
“Is it completely inappropriate to tell you how gorgeous your hair is in the sunlight?” he asks.
That was the last thing she expected him to say, and now she searches Johnnie’s handsome face for some sign that he’s just taking the piss, but his expression is so serious it almost breaks her heart.