Henry’s voice followed him loud through the darkness. “What is it you know?”
“Nothing.” Gil climbed the steps. “I know nothing.”
Jem swung through the kitchen, along the hall and into the living room to find Alex sitting reading in his wing chair like the narrator in a Victorian drama. She dropped down onto an empty patch of the chaise longue, the papers beside her tipping to the floor and revealing the worn green velvet beneath. “Hello.”
“Hello.” He was regarding her with amusement. “Nice evening?”
“Amazing evening.”
“Coffee?”
“Coffee would be good.”
While he was making it she scooped up the fallen papers and stuffed them into a drawer of the bureau, catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror above the fireplace – bright eyes, flushed cheeks, hair dishevelled from her elated spin home. She thought, this is what Dad has just seen, but then she was, had always been, incapable of hiding anything. Her emotions showed in her face with the same immediacy and clarity as they tumbled from her lips.
“There you go.” Alex placed the mug in her hands, returned to his chair. “So what’ve you been getting up to then?”
“Having cocktails and dinner with Gil Hunt.”
“Have you now?” He was smiling. “How did that come about?”
She described the day to him: Gil’s first appearance on the pier like a benevolent local celebrity; his return hours later to focus his attention entirely upon her; the evening they had shared at bluewater and how talking to and being herself with him had felt not only possible but natural and right; their walk afterwards on the beach, the taste of his mouth, his breath against her skin. These last details she did not share but held in her thoughts to guard and polish like secret jewels. “We have,” she finished, “so much in common it’s unnerving.”
Alex had listened, intent, reacted precisely as she would have wished and foretold. But now he said, “Be careful.”
She frowned.
“It’s lovely to see you so excited about someone and I’m sure he’s a good man. But dads have to say these things. And I’m saying, be careful. You’re vulnerable, remember.”
She said nothing.
“Did you tell him?” he persisted.
“No.” She felt tears in her throat. “I just wanted to be normal, for a bit.”
“Of course you do.”
She waited a moment, until she felt capable of speaking without crumpling. “He’s really nice. I really like him.”
“I know.”
“You’d like him too. You should meet him, actually.”
Alex smiled. “Don’t frighten the poor man off.”
She smiled too, albeit waterily. “I’m scared of frightening him off. I’m scared of seeming needy. I’m delving deep to find the person I was last summer, before … ” She let out her breath. “Because that was still me, wasn’t it?”
“That is still you.”
She thought about it.
“Now,” he said, watching her, “when are you wanting to go through that cupboard with me?”
She remembered her plans for her mother’s jewellery as if she’d had the idea months rather than days ago. “Soon.”
“Before I go?”
“Maybe.”
“Ah, listen to you, with your new priorities.”
“Shut up.” She smiled, uncurled herself from the chaise longue and leaned over to kiss his forehead. “I’m going to bed.”
“Good night, Puddle.”
She lay awake, reconstructing her evening, Gil’s tales of his past, his musical taste, his humour, his perception and intelligence and honesty. The shape of his mouth, the dark arch of his brows, his hands in her hair when he had kissed her. I will come and find you, he had said. She had wanted to reply, you have already found me.
Chapter Eleven
Today has decided it’s an Indian summer. We sit on the terrace of the beachside café and the sun is as warm, the sea as blue as it is in Cornwall. If it weren’t for the taste of the coffee and the murmur of other tongues, I could be home. “I think I need,” I tell Gil, “to be close to the sea.”
He nods, with sympathy. We’ve calmed down a bit this afternoon, the two hundred mile drive quiet and beautiful enough to soothe my fears and his temper. We’ve even managed to talk a little, the inconsequential commentary which, a lifetime ago, we wouldn’t have given a second thought. Now we stretch out and drink our coffee and stare at the sea and my thoughts turn, in survival mode, to possibilities. “This morning,” I remind him, “when you said it’s when we get caught, not if … ” He looks at me, knowing what’s coming. “ … what if it isn’t?”
He sighs. “You want to plan for a future we don’t have?”
“What if we do have it?”
“There are extradition laws in France, you know.”
“Is there anywhere we can go that there aren’t?”
“Oddly enough, it isn’t something I’ve ever had to give any thought.” But he says it wryly and without censure. “Go on, then.”
“Well … what would we do?”
“I suppose … find some sort of itinerant work that pays cash and doesn’t ask any questions. Rent or squat somewhere. Go quietly mad.” He almost smiles.
“But if we were left alone, we’d relax into it, wouldn’t we? After a while, it’d just become our way of life.”
“Wouldn’t it just become a different kind of life sentence?”
I gesture towards the view, the tranquil sea and the rocks, the line of restaurants, the hillside mansions. “Does this look like a life sentence to you?”
Gil pauses. “Inside my head there’s a horror movie running on an endless loop. There’s such rage and terror and grief I want to smash my skull against the wall to make it stop. That’s the life sentence.”
My eyes fill with tears.
“Oh don’t.” He takes my hand into his.
But I cannot stop. The tears spill down my cheeks, drip from my jaw onto my t-shirt and the table-top. I try to wipe them away but they’re falling too fast. “I love you.”
“I know.”
“And you loved me.”
“I did. I do.”
“But – ”
He says softly, “We can’t have this conversation.”
I’m still crying. “I never meant – ”
“Shh.” He kisses me to shut me up. “Stop now.”
After another minute or so I do. He’s right; there are things we cannot say because there’s the mouth of hell again, waiting for us. He fetches me another drink, strokes my hair. “Okay?”
I nod. “So … ” I swallow. “What sort of itinerant jobs?”
We stay at the café until dusk. Already the days are assuming a pattern: driving for hours through changing countryside; getting hopelessly and irritably lost; trying to find petrol; arriving desperate for food and drink and somewhere to spend the night. All this punctuated by our own alternating kindness and hostility. I think I need to stop for a while, but then maybe he’s right again and if we do hole up somewhere we will just go mad more slowly. While he’s paying the bill I hop over the low boxes of flowers which divide the café from the promenade and stand at the railings, gazing at the deepening blue of the Mediterranean. Like Dorothy, I want to go home.
“Ready?” He comes up behind me and touches my waist. “No trouble finding somewhere to sleep tonight.”
We walk back towards the car park and the long string of hotels. One of the other advantages of being on the coast is that communication is easier; Gil finds us a room in the first hotel he tries. It’s on the second floor, sparsely furnished but the bathroom is clean and the bed doesn’t creak. There’s even a television which he switches on, searching for satellite channels. I step out onto the balcony with its view of the street, of the little shops which are closing up and of the bars lit in anticipation of the night’s trade. On the opposite side of the road, parked outside the entrance to a shutter
ed droguerie is a dark grey Mercedes. I would not have registered it at all but for the smiley face sticker in its rear window.
It can’t be the same car. Can it? I peer down at the number plate, see that it is British and my insides twist painfully. But it’s a coincidence. It has to be. Or I’m imagining it, and the car I saw with the sticker this morning was dark green or navy or black. Surely. I hadn’t even noticed its number plate.
I think perhaps I won’t tell Gil.
Chapter Twelve
He was close behind her up the iron staircase, grabbed her at the top and pulled her to him, kissed her long and messily. Jem, stretching up to press her body hard against his and kissing back, remembered him dragging someone through the water, how strong he had seemed, how capable. Well now, she thought, he is rescuing me. She slid her fingers between his low-slung jeans and the heat of his groin. He groaned, fumbled at the door and they fell inside.
She was aware of a long, narrow room, of an uncurtained grandstand view of the sea and then Gil was kissing her again, his hands at her bum holding her hips against his, kissing her throat and her neck, lifting her silky camisole over her head, her hair tumbling back down. She unbuckled and unzipped him, both of them pulling out of their clothes until these were pools of cotton on the bare floor, and with deft urgency he rolled her with him onto the bed.
“So I’ve bought,” Gil had explained an hour earlier, laughing at his own madness, “this great hunk of wood.” He described its size with his hands. “And I haven’t a clue what I’m going to do with it. Inspiration eludes me and it’s crouching there, in my room, looking at me like ‘you loser’.”
Jem smiled. They were sitting at her favourite table in the garden of the inn above the bay, beside the palms and the lavender blue hibiscus, behind her the still evening blue ocean, in front of her Gil. Happiness and anticipation had been rolling and crashing within her since he had turned up at her stall this afternoon and not since left her side. She said, “What do you usually do?”
“Oh, animals, figures, abstract stuff. But it’s never enough, you know? I’m never completely satisfied with it when it’s finished.”
“But isn’t that always the way? When you create something, the reality of it never quite measures up to the idea, it’s always just as close as you can get. As if the inspiration for it is somehow god-given but we’re too mortal to be able to reproduce it.”
He was wry. “I think I’m just too fucking lazy to be able to reproduce it.”
She looked at him, knowing self-deprecation when she heard it. “How can you be lazy? You have your own business.”
“I … ” He let out his breath, said honestly, “I’m still easily distracted.”
“Is that what your school reports used to say?”
“Pretty much. ‘Gilman will never amount to anything until he gets his arse into gear and actually finishes something.’ ”
“And did you? Get your arse into gear?”
“Hey. A man has to eat.” He smiled. “There’s this Italian sculptor, Livio De Marchi, and his stuff just blows me away. He did a wooden Ferrari, life-size, and floated it on a canal in Venice. There’re pictures on the web. He sculpts clothes and the folds of fabric look so real it’s only when you notice the grain of the wood that you realise they’re not. Amazing talent. I would love to be able to do that.”
Jem, still thinking about his arse getting into gear, wondered whether it was possible and what it would cost to take him to see this Livio De Marchi’s sculptures. She sipped her wine. “So could you do that, with your log?”
He laughed. “I wish.”
“What, then?”
He considered, held her gaze for a long moment. The mood shifted, perceptibly. He lifted her hand into his, turned it over to trace a slow circle on her palm. She shivered. Every nerve in her body felt connected to that circle. He shook his head, smiled. “I’m trying but I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been having trouble thinking about anything but you.”
She swallowed. It had taken a beat, this step over the precipice. “Me too.”
They lay, heart rates subsiding, panting and sticky. She said, “I want to do that again.”
Gil laughed. “Give me a minute.”
“A minute?”
He laughed again, cuddled her to him. She could see now, across his chest and through the semi-darkness, beyond a book and a lamp on the stool beside the bed, a monstrous shape squatting on the table in front of the window. “Oh my God. Is that the log you were talking about?”
He turned his head, as though it might be possible she were referring to something else. “That’s it.”
Jem raised herself to give it proper attention. “And how long would it take you to make something from it?”
His finger travelled lightly over her breast, across her stomach. “Well that depends.” He kissed her navel.
She slid back down to him. “You could do something amazing.”
“I just did.”
“Something … ” She frowned while he continued to caress her, to whisper a line of kisses from her ear to her shoulder. “Something almost spiritual.”
“Mm.” He paused. “You didn’t … ”
“It’s okay.”
“Let me.” He shifted her onto her back, knelt above her.
“Something,” she suggested, suspecting conversation was soon going to be beyond her again, “like the Tree of Life.”
Cecily bid the last of her customers goodnight and turned the sign on her door to Closed. She thought it rude to shut up the café around people and always settled for subtle background clatter instead. It meant more to do when they were gone, but she would rather that than give them the you-are-outstaying-your-welcome vibe most other places were happy to promote. Tonight, though, the floor looked as though it needed no more than a swift mop and brush, the tables clearing and wiping and the dishwasher would take care of the rest. An hour at most, she reckoned. Then bath with a glass of wine and bed with a book.
The tubular doorbells jangled before she had finished stacking the dishwasher. Her heart lifted a little and she called out – “Hello?”
“Hi!” It was Henry.
“Oh. Hi.”
He appeared beneath the arch. “Bad day?”
“No, no.” Guiltily she injected some enthusiasm into her voice. “Sorry, just a bit tired.”
“Ah. I wondered if you wanted to come out for a drink.”
“Well … ” She made the ‘not really’ face.
“Have you eaten?”
She paused, knowing that admitting to being hungry would be allowing him to provide a solution. But what the hell. She’d always been good at settling for less and oh God, that was a truly awful way to think of Henry. She said, “No.”
He beamed. “Chinese or Indian?”
“Surprise me.”
While he was away she finished loading the dishwasher, set it running, then nipped upstairs to shower and change into pyjama trousers and a t-shirt. She unpinned her hair from its day-time knot and shook it out, noticing that it seemed to have grown since she had tied it up there this morning, making her look less free spirit than ageing hippie. She sighed, regarding herself with dissatisfaction. You need, she thought, to be a bit more realistic.
Down in the café Henry was dishing tikka marsala onto her best square white plates and had set a table with candles and a posy of flowers which wasn’t hers. “Thank you,” she said, touched and guilty all over again.
He said solemnly, “You are very welcome.”
“Music?” She slid a James Brown CD into the player, scooped a bottle of wine from her rack. They sat at a corner table with the blinds lowered, one leg tucked beneath her on the wooden settle, her fork in her right hand. “So tell me about your day at the beach.”
He swallowed, took a mouthful of wine, described to her the morning’s surf, the further combined idiocies of Radar’n’Buz, the parents who expected him to turn their children into skilled surfers within the week. H
is observations were revealing, his humour dry. He was so much better, she thought, without his friends’ competing sexual magnetism or entertaining lunacy. Better when he was alone and his good sense and his kindness could shine. She said, “Have you run the Australia plan by your parents?”
“It wouldn’t surprise them.”
“They’d miss you though.”
“Same as your parents miss you.”
“Except they were the ones who went away.” She tore off a piece of naan bread, aware of him watching her.
He frowned. “Are you completely alone?”
“I have a brother in Orpington. Much use he is to me there. He’s older than me, an accountant, married, grown-up kids. We’re like strangers.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother. It’s funny isn’t it,” Henry said. “All the years we’ve known each other, we’ve known nothing.”
She shook her head. “We haven’t appraised each other of all the biographical facts. It’s not the same as not knowing each other.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Oh Henry. I spend more time with you than I do with my own family. What do you think?”
He smiled, topped up their glasses. “What’s your life like, September through till March?”
She looked at him. How much honesty did he want? She decided to put him to the test. “Quiet. Empty. The tourists disappear from these tables, you guys all melt back to your real lives. The weather changes. Everything becomes colder, in all senses. Cold and grey and a lot less fun.” He looked surprised and more concerned than he needed to be so she added, “Which isn’t to say I spend the winter steeped in lonely melancholy.”
“But it’s a hibernation of a kind?”
“Yes.” She laughed. “Yes, it is. Hibernation of the spirit.” But this year not even that. This year she had been knocked so far off kilter she was still staggering with the shock of it. Don’t go there, she told herself. Don’t so much as twitch the curtain.
Henry said, “Then we should make the most of the summer.”
“I do. Every single year.”