MORNING SERIAL
SHE was not leading me back to the house, however, and as we turned to head down to the pool we were also met with the billowing smell of barbecue. Down past the pool was a patio area, obscured from the path by poplar trees, and there on garden furniture was the other girl and the man.
“Our new company,” the man said without getting up. Also in this secluded den was a bar made out of timber, complete with refrigeration units and thatched roof. The girl who had fetched me went to it and asked what I would like to drink. I looked around – no Illie to be seen – and I felt that Hennessy sending shoots through my blood stream. I then noticed I still had the empty brandy glass in my hand. I put it on the table and politely asked for a coke.
As I took a seat the man introduced himself as Evgeny. “And these are my daughters, Dina and Darya. Hard to believe, I know, that I could have been responsible for such beauties.” He said this with a personable smile from behind aviators and a puff of smoke, but the smile was stale, it hung on his jaw like an ignored painting in a stately home. He was a markedly handsome man, with that cool demeanour Francis used to call ‘Vintage Vegas’. Next to their father, Dina and Darya looked like children, whereas away from his presence they came across as young women. That Russian bone structure meant they would probably look twenty-one until their mid-forties. Darya was the older, the one who had fetched me, with the slightly broader face and the eyes that had a somewhat more affirming glare to them. Dina was a few years younger – fourteen I was to find out later, and Darya was sixteen – and she was quieter for it, her eyes were often cast away to nothing or down to the ground. But for that she seemed happy, not dissimilar to any other fourteen-year-old girl. We talked idly for a while, Evgeny asking about me and then my work when I said I was an artist. It was Dina who was attending to the barbecue, a skill Evgeny proudly noted was amongst the many of his daughters’.