“I’m sorry. I thought you needed to sleep.” It hadn’t occurred to me that he might be worried. And anyway where could I go, and how?
He lets out his breath. “I’ve settled up, at the café. Are you ready to move on?”
I nod, see that he has our rucksacks with him. We trail to the car, beginning the day as querulous and wired as we had ended the last. He chucks the rucksacks in the boot, slams the lid. We get in and I put the bag from the boulangerie into the well between our seats. He ignores it. After a long moment he says, “Where to?”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters! Jesus! We come all this way and now you want to be found?”
“I don’t know where to hide! We stick out a mile in places like this but who’d think of looking here? In the cities we’d be like any other English couple but it’d be easier to track us down. I don’t know where we should go!”
“Neither do I.”
Another long silence.
I press the heels of my palms against my eyes and feel her claws gouging my sockets. “Please let’s not fight.”
“No,” he agrees. “It doesn’t help.”
“Is it … ” I pause. “Let’s be realistic. Is it if we’re found, or is it when?”
He stares ahead. Neither of us can bear to look at the other. “It’s when.”
We both contemplate the bleakness of this, the futility of everything we have done the last twenty-four hours. I swallow. “Then the best we can hope for is time?”
He nods.
“So … let’s enjoy it. Let’s go to the south coast, stay somewhere beautiful.”
He considers. “We can do that. But you know there’s no running from what’s in our heads.”
“I know. But it has to be better than fighting and being scared all the time. It’s like we’re punishing each other.” My voice trembles and instantly I’m ashamed of myself.
He turns to me and I can see the old Gil in his eyes. “Oh God. I’m sorry. I’m so freaked out I’m all over the place.”
“Well me too.”
He holds my gaze. “Last night, finding you like that … ” He shakes his head, beyond words, touches my hair, my cheek, instead.
“So let’s be kind. We can’t change what happened, however much we want to.” It’s like rolling aside the stone which covers the mouth of hell even thinking about that. “All we can do is be kind to each other and live in the moment.” How am I saying this? Where has it come from? Is it sense, or am I just intent on delusion? Delusion as coping strategy. It isn’t as if I’m not experienced in it after all.
“Okay,” he says softly. He squeezes my hand. It feels more intimate, more full of promise and more reassuringly normal than all the hours of the night we’d spent pressed naked against each other. He smiles faintly. “Okay. South coast. Will that be left or right?”
We try to work back from the direction we came yesterday. He helps himself to a pain au chocolat from the bag. I suggest buying a map might be a good idea. In Roskoff, which feels like an eternity ago now, we’d been in too much of a hurry. We both remember a majorish road a few miles back and he starts the engine. As he reverses, looking over his shoulder, and turns the wheel, I catch sight of a smiley face sticker in the window of a dark grey Mercedes parked a few yards in front of us. It’s odd, I think fleetingly, that it didn’t go very far.
Chapter Ten
He groaned in frustration and disappointment, cursed himself, thought about crossing the pier to Patrick’s and getting drunk out of his skull then remembered that she might be here again tomorrow and his crippled-with-hangover look wasn’t going to charm anyone. He turned, intending to walk back up to the square via The Wharf and the beach, and suddenly there she was, leaning against the door of the boarded-up gallery, watching him.
“Hey.” He laughed in surprise. “How did you do that? I was just thinking about you.”
“You were?” She came a step or two towards him. Now she wasn’t sitting behind her stall he could see how slender she was, her black jersey harem pants and purple vest allowing glimpses of her small curves. She wore a leather lace tied around her upper arm, metal cuffs on both wrists, earrings glinting through the long darkness of her hair.
“Yeah, I was looking for you.”
“Thinking about me and looking for me?”
“Mm.” He smiled. No playing it cool now. “Was it a good day?”
“A really good day.” She was smiling too. “I might do it again.” Her eyes were soft and she was standing closer to him than she would if she thought him a complete loser and couldn’t wait to escape – but hey, you could never tell.
He said, taking that risk, “So … do you have any plans for this evening?”
“No.”
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“Another one?”
“Mm-hm.”
“I’d like that.”
“Well good.” They were both grinning, he thought, as if he were offering more than a drink, which maybe he was, and there was more going on here, which maybe there was. He wanted to laugh out loud. She looked so beautiful when she smiled.
He decided against taking her to Patrick’s. He didn’t want the guys giving her the once-over or Cecily asking if he knew what her name was and whether he’d shagged her yet. He didn’t want to expose her to any of that. Luckily Patrick’s was not the only bar in town.
Despite its name, printed in understated italic font, bluewave was more urban and sophisticated than anywhere else he frequented here, marble floor glittering beneath sapphire lights, baroque glass tables separating navy velvet sofas. “Wow,” she murmured as they stepped inside. “This is a surprise.”
“They do great cocktails.”
“Can’t wait.” She studied the menu, chalked up on the board above the bar. Gil, already familiar with it, studied her face, flushed with the day’s sun, the ends of her hair skimming her nipples, embroidered belt laced around her waist between handfuls of breasts and bum. He swallowed, his libido getting in on the act already. She smiled at him. “What do you recommend?”
He ordered Alabama Slammers. She watched the barman pour quantities of Southern Comfort and sloe gin, amaretto and orange juice into the shaker, fill their glasses with ice. “Why is it called a Slammer?”
Gil said, “You can have it as a shot, slam it on the bar with your hand over the top and drink it while it’s still fizzing. Gets you drunk really fast.”
“Ah.”
He smiled, paid for their drinks. “If you’ve never been in here before, we have to sit upstairs.”
A spiral staircase opposite the bar led to an upper floor whose tall windows opened onto wrought-iron balconies. A table at one of them had been recently vacated and Gil deftly cleared the smeared glasses and crumpled napkins onto another. She sat, glancing down into the pedestrian traffic of The Walk. “I must have passed here a thousand times and it never occurred to me it might be like another world inside.”
He knew what she meant. “It’s unexpected, isn’t it.”
“And also when you live here your perception of it is different; it’s as if it exists in another dimension for you than it does for the tourists.”
“You live here?”
“I do. You visit?”
“Every summer for the last nine years.” He laughed. “Why haven’t we come across each other before?”
“Well … ” She sipped her drink. “We have. Twice in as many weeks.”
“I mean, before that.” He realised he was talking to her already as if their meeting had significance, assuming she shared his sense of recognition.
She looked at him over the top of her glass. “Maybe we just weren’t meant to.”
“Fate?”
“You don’t believe in fate?”
“I like to think we’re in control of our own destinies.”
“I don’t know which is more comforting. To have control or not to have it.”
He smiled. “This is
deep.”
“Sorry.” She smiled too, embarrassed. “I don’t do smalltalk very well. I always leap right in there and go for the profound stuff. It’s unnerving. I’ll shut up.”
“No. Don’t shut up. I like two o’clock in the morning conversations.”
She rested her chin in her hand, looking at him. “It said in the newspaper you’re an artisan.”
“Ah.” His turn to be embarrassed. It had said in the newspaper he was a lot of things. “You saw that. She has a romantic vocabulary, that woman.”
“So you’re not?”
“No, I … ” He explained: his love of and apparent talent for turning a lump of wood into an object of use and beauty; his parents’ frustration at his lack of interest in academia when he’d been predicted top grades; his years at Goldsmiths and the apprenticeship to a cabinetmaker which he’d wrecked through his own waywardness. He described to her his redemption through work and the business he was building for himself. He spoke with humour and honesty and she listened, rapt, to every word, as though what he was saying was of interest and value. As though she understood.
“It’s the same for me,” she said. “I couldn’t work for anyone else. I don’t have much but what I do have is mine, on my terms. It’s a kind of freedom.”
“It’s more than that - in the words of the late, great Freddie Mercury - it’s a kind of magic.”
“I love Freddie Mercury.”
“Oh me too, all the old stuff – Queen, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac.”
They both smiled. She looked at their empty Slammer glasses. “These are really good, aren’t they?”
He ordered another round. And later, another. They talked seventies rock as the pinnacle of musical achievement, discovered that five years ago they had both been at Glastonbury, their tents pitched possibly minutes from each other. “The guy I was with,” she told him, “was a friend from uni. Only that weekend it turned out he didn’t want to be just a friend.” She wrinkled her nose. “It all got a bit … messy. I thought for ages afterwards it had been my fault, that maybe I’m just not very good at reading people.”
Gil decided not to admit that he could understand a man wanting more from her than friendship. “Yeah, but blokes can be a pain like that. At the risk of tarring us all with the same brush, we’re not very good at intimacy without sex. You blur the line between friends and lovers and we think we’re getting mixed signals.”
“And are you? Tarred with that brush?”
He thought of the two serious relationships he’d had in his life and how they’d ended, the one night stands and casual flings, the line between sex and friendship he’d blurred him-self. “I think I’m pretty good at reading signals. I have three sisters so no excuse for not being a bit clued-up. But sometimes, yeah, I get it wrong.”
“Three sisters?”
“Two older, one younger.”
“Are you close?”
“I guess. We were, growing up. We all still like each other.” He smiled. “How about you?”
She shook her head. “I’m an only child.”
“Close to your parents, then?”
“Very.”
A subtle and fleeting shift in her expression, a barely perceptible lift in her voice. But something there, he thought. Something more than she wants to say to a guy she doesn’t know, the first time she talks to him. She intrigued him, the rock chick thing she had going on, the connection there seemed to be between them, this hint of something unspoken. And beneath it all, beating through his veins, the steady pulse of desire.
She was looking at him, her head tilted slightly. “Can I ask you something?”
He gestured – anything.
“When you rescued that boy from drowning, what went through your mind?”
He paused. The first time he had discussed this he had been exasperated and defensive. The second time he had felt it sensationalised for someone else’s ends. Maybe, this time, it would come out right. He said, “Nothing. Nothing went through my mind. I saw him in the water, I jumped in, dragged him out.”
“So it was instinctive?”
He shrugged. “I guess I just I didn’t see the danger.”
“You weren’t thinking of yourself.”
“It wasn’t like that, exactly. If I thought anything at all, it was that I was doing what needed to be done. But then it gets served up as heroics in the local paper and a friend of mine’s furious with me for putting myself at risk.”
She gazed at him. “I don’t think it’s about heroics. I think it’s about humanity.”
“Humanity?” He smiled. “Yeah, okay, I can live with that.”
“But you kind of wish you’d been able to do it without anyone noticing.”
“Kind of. But then there you were. And here we are.”
“Indeed.”
Their eyes held and suddenly he knew that this was going to go beyond a couple of drinks tonight. Possibly beyond great if opportunistic sex and end of summer promises to stay in touch. Maybe it even had the potential – and what had he said earlier about fate? – to turn out to be something special.
They ate – steak sandwich for him, salmon wrap for her – where they were because she said she didn’t want to stop drinking cocktails. Afterwards, when she admitted she really couldn’t drink any more cocktails, they walked along the beach. The same beach on which, twenty-four hours earlier, he had been arguing with Cecily. It felt a light year ago, and ridiculously unimportant.
Jemima had found a sharp pebble and, like a child, was writing her name in the sand. Half her name. “Jem,” he read. “Great name for someone who makes jewellery.”
“Yes, I had no choice,” she said dryly. “My future was set in stone.”
He laughed, groaned.
“Only my mother ever called me Jemima.”
“Jem, then.”
She straightened, stepped close and, very lightly, kissed his mouth. “Gil.” She spun laughing away from him before he could hold her there, walked backwards through the dark across the sand, the tide licking her bare feet. She was quite drunk, he reminded himself, and so was he. Intoxicated in all senses. He caught up with her, took her hand and pulled her towards him, her eyes huge with anticipation, he could feel the tremor of it through the whisper of space between them. He lifted her chin and kissed her, softly. Drew back to meet her eyes. Kissed her again, with intent. She pressed against him and kissed him too, melting into it.
He withdrew a little, his interest having become impossible to disguise.
“Sorry,” he laughed.
“No, I want to,” she said. “I will.” She kissed him again. “But not tonight.”
“Oh God, sure – ”
“I want to have something to look forward to.”
He smiled. She was amazing. “Those words,” he said, “will be in my head all night.”
“Good.” She smiled. “Mine too.”
He wanted to walk her home – or rather, he didn’t want to leave her at all, but taking her home seemed the best compromise - but she said no, I’ll be fine, let’s say goodnight in this perfect place. And he said, all right. All right and I will come and find you tomorrow.
He drifted up to the square, his head and his heart and his loins full with her. Then mildly worried that he had agreed to leave her tipsy on the beach, that being a gentleman had come second to doing as she wished. They hadn’t exchanged mobile numbers. Bugger, he thought, stopping in the middle of the square.
“Hey Gil.”
He recognised the voice before he saw its owner ambling towards him from the pub.
“Hey Henry.”
Henry slowed as he approached, his tone more carefully judged than it would, before the last twenty-four hours, have been. “Lovely night.” He indicated the clear and starlit sky.
“It has been,” Gil admitted.
“Been down at Patrick’s?”
He smiled. “You haven’t.”
“Nah. Fancied a change of scene.”
“Right.” He refrained from making the observation that the pub was also a hundred feet from Cecily’s door. Instead he went for - “Sign of age, you know. When you’re tired of Patrick’s, you’re tired of life.”
Henry frowned. “Is that a quote?”
“A misquote.” Gil sighed inwardly. He counted Henry as a friend but in the exertion of switching allegiances the guy had lost his sense of humour along with his cool. He took a step away, said amiably, “See you tomorrow.”
But Henry had something on his mind. “This party, on Saturday.”
Gil had forgotten. “Party?”
“Friend of Radar. He told us about it at lunchtime.”
“Ohh. Windsurfing Phil.”
“Yeah. You going?”
“Maybe.” Probably not. Hopefully not. He already knew where he wanted to be on Saturday night and it wasn’t in the company of drunk and sweaty surf dudes. “You?”
“Thought I’d give it a go.” He paused. “Thought I’d ask Cecily.”
He smiled. “Why not?” And then his memory kicked in properly and he recalled what else Radar had said about that party. Shit, he thought. And, stay out of it Gil. It isn’t your business.
But of course it was his business. He could spare Cecily the question and Henry the answer or himself Henry’s pique. And when had he ever been able to stay out of anything? He said, “It’s at the cove?”
“Yep. Phil and Nina’s house is at the cove.”
Gil took a breath.
“What?” Henry said.
“She won’t go.”
His face stiffened. “She won’t go because it’s me asking her, not you?”
You are so fucking predictable, Gil thought. “Doesn’t matter who’s asking. Ask her, if you want. I’m just warning you. She won’t go.” He raised his hands, took another step away. “But if you care, take her to Patrick’s instead Saturday night. Take her out to dinner.”
Henry said, “What gives you the right to tell me where I can and can’t take her?”
Gil paused. “Jesus, do what you want.” He turned and walked towards the iron stair-case leading to his room.