“I can. And you know, it sounds great but … Oh Henry, an English guy, teaching Australians how to surf? Really?”
“Listen, I want to bring home the trophy. Show them it’s not just cricket we can beat them at. I want people to say – hey, there’s this great surf instructor, best I’ve ever had, and you know what? He’s English.” He grinned. “Truthfully, of course I know. And I’m only going for a trip. But the thought of Australia … ”
Cecily nodded, equally wistful. “Take me with you.”
Henry looked at her.
“Take you with him where?” Gil arrived beside them, buzzing with just the right amount of beer inside him and the scent of new woman in the air.
“Australia,” Cecily said, watching his reaction.
“No kidding?” Gil looked from one to the other. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Who’s the blonde?” Henry said.
Gil laughed. “She’s stunning, isn’t she? New in town, opened a business on The Walk a few months back. Very cool, very together, sort of - ”
“What’s her name?” Cecily asked him.
He took a breath, frowned.
“You know, Gil, if you can’t remember her name it all ends here.”
Henry shrugged. “Ah, you don’t need to remember their names when you have saturnine good looks.”
Gil grinned. “Fuck off.”
Cecily tensed, her body reacting instinctively to the opening bars of the next dance tune before her brain had registered what it was. Los Lobos, La Bamba. Gil heard it too, held out his hand to her. “No,” she said, though she was half out of her seat. He waited. “No, no. I can’t, I can’t. Oh all right then.”
He led her into a small space on the dance floor, and as the music rose and the press of other people’s bodies closed in on them she remembered how this felt, giving yourself up to the rhythm and the beat, twisting and turning, letting go. Gil twirled her, his hand lightly on her waist, her hip, edging back to give her room. She stretched and clapped, clicked her fingers, shimmied and spun. She wanted the floor to herself, wanted to dance as she had danced twenty years ago but at the same time that didn’t matter; this moment was enough.
When it was over Gil smiled, winked at her. Henry, six feet away, was on his feet, applauding. “It was one of her favourites,” Gil explained. “Back in the day.”
“Cheesy but irresistible,” Cecily agreed.
Gil read Henry’s admiration and grinned. “She’s an amazing dancer, isn’t she?”
“Not so bad yourself,” Cecily said.
“Oh, I just jig around.”
Henry stared at her, remembering. “You were a dancer.”
“I was. I told you once, I think.”
“Wow.”
She hitched back onto her bar stool, reached for her drink. The cool, together blonde had returned to the bar and Cecily met Gil’s eyes. “Thank you,” she said to him, as Buz and Radar hoved inexorably into view. “See you tomorrow.”
Later, walking home through the dark with Henry, their footfall and voices soft in the quiet streets, he said, “Did you train, to dance?”
“I did, in London. For a few years I did all the usual stuff, clubs, a few small shows, the odd cruise. It wasn’t as romantic or as glamorous as it sounds. It was exhausting and insecure and painful. But I loved it for a while.”
“Why did you give it up?”
“It was hard. I was nothing special and there’s such competition and then, well.” She shrugged. “Life happens. It was a long time ago.”
“And Gil knows all this?”
“Gil knows everything.”
They emerged into the square, shops shuttered now, the last drinkers trailing from the pub into the cool still night. She gazed around and her heart contracted with misgiving. “I love this place,” she said. Henry nodded. “Love my café.” Her voice was louder than she’d intended in the emptiness and she sighed. “I’m a bit drunk, you know.”
“I know.”
“Are you coming in?”
“Better not.” He smiled. “Good night, Cecily.”
“Good night.” Her hand curled around her key in her pocket, but she stayed on the doorstep, watching him walk away, his lumbering figure slowly swallowed up by the shadows.
Alex’s gallery overlooked the harbour, which was great in terms of inspiring panoramas and tourist traffic and less great in terms of nowhere to park and seagull shit. But then the latter could be said of anywhere in town and you had, Jem knew, to be grateful. She could see as she approached people browsing the paintings he’d hung on the wall, heads tilted, stepping back for a better view. Others turning slowly through the prints in the racks. The air of thoughtfulness and calm characterised not only the space but the paintings themselves. Alex didn’t paint to express violent emotions or political agendas or intellectual ideas. He painted to convey beauty in whatever form he found it. What set him apart was that it wasn’t always where you might expect.
Jem crossed the sand strewn floor towards him, standing in the doorway from the gallery to his workshop behind. The contrast between the two always amused her – here, ordered airy tranquillity, there a chaos of canvas and acrylics, newspapers and half empty coffee mugs. “Good morning?”
“Excellent morning. Sold two of the Minacks.”
“Ooh. Celebration.”
“Bills paid.” He smiled. “What have you been up to?”
“Oh.” She sighed. “Walking. Thinking. I’m trying to come up with something new. I’ve got people willing to take my stuff now and I want to show them there’s always going to be a surprise with me, something a little bit different. As well as the pieces that always sell, of course.”
“Of course.”
“But it’s just … eluding me, at the moment.”
“Plenty to do in the meantime.”
“Yeah.” She sighed. “Okay. I’m going to go home.” She kissed his cheek. “See you later.”
“See you later, Puddle.”
She took the winding road out of town, rising past the fringe of small shops and less prosperous cafés, through streets of guest houses and sugared almond painted terraces, until the spaces between the buildings grew wider and the road became a lane of hedgerows over which, were she tall enough, she could have glimpsed the sea. In her kitchen she poured the dregs of a bottle of white wine into a glass and took it up to her room, slid a CD into the player. 10cc: The Original Soundtrack. Music from her parents’ youth. Music from her own youth seemed manufactured and overblown by comparison, she had never been able to understand her schoolfriends’ passions for Robbie and Madonna, for Westlife and Kylie anymore than they had understood her still living a flower power life at the dawn of the new millennium. Many of those friends were wives and mothers now, she saw them sometimes wheeling buggies or Tesco trollies through their ordinary lives as though the world she knew, the world of freedom and creativity, were another dimension. But none of them, she thought wryly, would have been drifting through town half hoping to catch a glimpse of a man they didn’t know. A man she’d seen once at a distance on a darkened beach and again in a newspaper photograph. How could the thought of him have her distracted and unsettled? You are behaving, she told herself, like a teenager with a crush on a rock star. Or worse, like some sad stalker. Sad and mad. Mad, bad and dangerous to know.
For God’s sake, Jem.
She pulled out her sketchpad, which had yielded nothing helpful since her afternoon in the pub garden, took a sip of wine and listened to 10cc telling her they weren’t in love. In 1975 her parents hadn’t been in love. They hadn’t even known each other. They had been Alex Gregory and Marianne Rae and had met six years later at a music festival. Alex having already decided that painting was the only way he could live his life with any measure of integrity, they had spent their first year together renting a shack in someone’s garden and eating beans while the rest of the county embraced shoulder pads, mobile phones and the worst excesses of the Thatcher governmen
t. By the time Jem was born, Alex was selling enough of his work to manage a deposit on the cottage and Marianne supplemented her job at the tourist office teaching guitar and piano to anyone who would pay her. Some of Jem’s most vivid childhood memories were of sitting on a dusty floor playing with watercolours and thick stubs of pastels while her father painted, of the plinky plonk of keys and discordant twang of guitar strings from the room in which her mother spoke patiently to another ungifted child. She used to think it ironic that her sensible, practical father had hitched his livelihood to the whims of other people’s tastes while her mother, given to seasons of melancholia and wild imaginings, held down the nine-to-five. Later she had thought that they were finding some sort of balance, complementing their inner selves as they complemented each other. She recalled her mother’s trailing Indian cotton skirts and trailing fair hair, her sudden trips away from which she would return dizzy with excitement, carrying an air of other-worldliness and odd little presents she’d bought them. Alex hadn’t liked these trips; he’d be frantic then bad-tempered which Jem had thought unfair of him, but she had minded her mother’s absence too. She remembered the way she looked cycling down the lane to and from work, hair flying, body swaying with the rhythm of the bike, the clink of her bangles
the clink of her bangles
Jem sat up, sprung from her reverie.
“I had the best idea,” she told Alex later, piling spaghetti onto their plates. “I don’t know why it’s never occurred to me before. I’m going to design a new range based on Mum’s jewellery.”
“Hm.” He considered. “Her style was very different to yours.”
“Oh I know, I was looking at some of her pendants and bracelets this afternoon. She went for more fragile, conventional things than I do. But it’s a starting point, isn’t it?”
Alex smiled. “It is. And it would be a lovely tribute.”
She nodded. “That’s what I thought. I was wondering, do you think there’s more of her jewellery amongst all the junk in the cupboard? It’s so long since we looked through any of it.” She spoke lightly, barely looking at him, allowing him to dismiss the notion without it becoming an issue. After her mother’s death, Alex had sealed all her belongings away and refused to deal with them. It had taken years and gentle persuasion before he would unpack and make decisions about any of it, and then almost everything had simply been stored unexamined in the landing cupboard.
“Well.” He opened the fridge, took out a can of lager. “I’m not sure. We could have a trawl through it together, if you like.”
She smiled, kissed his cheek as he passed her. “Before you go off for your wild week with Archie Fellows?”
“Leaving you here to have a wild week of your own.” He took their plates of spaghetti from her, put them on the table. “There are other avenues you could be exploring, you know. Not just for promoting your business.”
“Yada yada.”
“I’m not having you turning into a recluse.”
She cocked an eyebrow at him.
“Fair enough.” He sat down to eat. “But I am a grizzled old man and you are too young and beautiful to be holed up here morning, noon and night. How long is it since you took your stall onto the pier? We’ve been having more than ten minutes of sunshine a day for weeks now.”
“All right.”
“All right what?”
“All right I will take my stall onto the pier and I will talk to people. I might even pop into the bar afterwards and talk to people.”
“Steady now.”
Jem laughed, despite herself. “D’you know? I can’t wait for you to go.”
Gil knelt back from the fire, watched it for a moment, stuck in a few more pieces of driftwood. The flames were small but burning well; before long there would be enough heat to take the chill off the cool summer evening. It was past eight, the sun casting tall shadows across the beach, and already a couple of the girls had pulled cardigans around their shoulders and were inching closer to the fire. Gil passed round bottles of WKD and Smirnoff Ice, unearthed a Budweiser for himself. Lucy, whom he knew from Patrick’s, stood watching the guys kicking a ball around on the wide stretch of flat, hard sand between them and the gently frothing tide. She wore denim micro-shorts and Gil felt his attention drawn to her bronzed and slender legs as by an invisible yet powerful thread. Someone called to her to unpack the coolbag of meat for the barbecue and she bent from the waist in front of him. Gil groaned, dragged his line of vision back to the football, weighing up whether he wanted to jog over there and join in. Not really, was the answer. Instead he pushed to his feet, walked round to the other side of the flames and dropped down beside Cecily.
“Done with ogling Lucy?” she greeted him.
“I was not ogling.”
“Yeah yeah.” Cecily lifted her sunglasses up onto her head, catching her hair back from her face. She wore jeans rolled to her calf, her toenails painted deep red wine. “How did you get on with the woman at the party? The cool blonde?”
“Oh we got on very well. She was great. Then she told me about her fiancé stationed at Brize Norton and you know, the magic kind of went.”
Cecily smiled. “Time was, that wouldn’t have mattered. You used to prefer them spoken for. Less responsibility.”
“Did I ever actually say that?”
“You didn’t have to.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Have you shagged anyone since you got here?”
He sighed heavily. “I really wish you wouldn’t use that expression. It cheapens the whole … profoundly spiritual … intimacy of … ” He gave up. “No.”
She drew in her breath, mocking him. “Losing your touch, Gilman.”
“Maybe this year I’m looking for something different.”
She frowned. “Are you? Seriously?”
He took a long swig from his bottle, fixed his gaze on the guys – and girls too now – and their five-a-side, Radar scooping the ball out of the sea, Henry launching it back across the sand, Lucy and her Barbie doll legs … “Are you seriously interested in Henry?”
She stiffened. “He’s a friend. Like he’s always been.”
“No, sweetheart, not like you think he’s always been. He has a massive crush on you. It’s tattooed across his forehead every time he looks at you and if you can’t see that … ”
“I can see it.”
“Yet you left with him.”
“Jesus, Gil. Yes, I left with him, but I didn’t take him to bed. He walked me home. I know it’s hard for you to imagine leaving it there but we did. Maybe Henry’s just more of a gentleman than you are.”
“I’m just saying be careful, that’s all.”
“It’s really none of your business.” Her tone was so hard she might have slapped his face.
“Oh right.” He swallowed. “Okay.” He drained his Budweiser, stood up and sprinted down to the game, the ball rolling his way as he ran. He booted it hard and it flew.
“Fucking hell Gil!” Buz called. “Making an entrance or what?”
As the sun sank they returned to the fire, cooked burgers and sausages to the requisite shade of black, downed bottle after bottle and lay replete in the sand. Buz fetched his guitar and continued to play House of The Rising Sun through universal groans and Radar throwing balls of paper at him. Henry lounged beside Cecily, engaging her in whispered conversation. Gil let alcohol assuage his resentment and Lucy stroke his thigh as he drifted in and out of the talk and the music around him. When he opened his eyes most people had gone, Lucy and Henry were walking together along the water’s edge and Cecily was chucking empty bottles into a plastic holdall.
“Jeez,” he said. “I went right out.”
“Yeah.” Though it was dark she had her sunglasses back on and he couldn’t read her eyes. “Pissed off or just pissed?”
“Both, I guess.” He didn’t mind apologising when things weren’t his fault if it restored the peace. He preferred continuing as if nothing had happened.
She sat back amid
st the remains of their evening. “You going to help me with this?”
“Sure.” They cleared the litter, stamped out and disposed of what was left of the fire. After a while he said, inconsequentially, “There’s a lot of change in the air, this year.”
“There is. You don’t like it.”
“I don’t mind change, but not if it isn’t for the better. I was in town today, went to visit this gallery I really liked, down on The Wharf. I’d admired the guy’s work for – well, years. Anyway, it was empty, all boarded up. It saddened me.”
“Sign of the times,” Cecily said. “You come down here every summer like it’s a holiday in some sort of frozen-in-time utopia. Well, this town isn’t your playground, Gil. It’s real lives. And people’s real lives are going down the tubes just now.”
The asperity was back in her voice and he was stung. “I appreciate that. And I don’t behave as if it’s my playground. Actually that’s pretty offensive. I love it here, it means a lot to me and I’m sad to see it going the way of – well, everywhere else these days. That’s all.”
“But once a year you swing on by here like you own the place and you party hard and you mess with people’s lives and then you just take off again.”
“Whose lives do I mess with?”
She was silent, concentrating far harder than she needed on bagging everything up, shaking out beach towels.
He stared at her. “Yours?”
“The girls you come here to fuck. You shag them and break their hearts and leave them with nothing.”
He shook his head, anger and disbelief fighting it out for first place. “Great memories, is what I leave them with. Anything else – not that there ever has been anything else – I’d deal with. They always have my number. Why are we even having this conversation? You know that better than anyone. Christ, you know me better than anyone.”
She said nothing. He watched her, dismayed. “Where has this come from? Why are you saying this stuff?”
“Because you think you have the right to tell me how to behave with someone.”