Читать книгу The Potter’s House - Rosie Thomas - Страница 8

I am in Turkey, sitting on the sea coast and staring westwards.

I have almost forgotten why I am here, if there ever was a particular reason for coming. It doesn’t matter anyway. One place is much like another for the time being.

This is a skeleton of a hotel, pasted over with white concrete skin so that it looks smooth but brittle. There are big blind windows and flimsy balconies like pouches under a drunkard’s eyes.

I sleep as much as I can, in my hotel bedroom, behind closed curtains. And when I can no longer sleep I sit on the balcony under the shade of a parasol. Even though it is late in the season I don’t like the sun to touch my skin and my pale eyes water in so much harsh white light. I keep my sunglasses in place and try to read, and the time slowly passes.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when Dunollie Mansions stopped feeling like a refuge and became instead a place that I wanted to get away from. It was probably not very long after the dinner when Peter met Lisa Kirk for the first time.

He was busy in the weeks immediately after that night, working on a job that demanded longer hours and even more concentration than usual. He stayed late at the office, and seemed tired and distracted when he did come home. I should have interpreted the signs at once and spoken out about them, but the potential for that kind of conversation seemed already lost. Instead I tried hard to be less demanding, as if that might win his approval again. I embarked on some redecoration in the flat, and discussed colours and finishes with the painters. I went out looking for fabrics and spent time putting together colour boards for Peter’s approval.

‘Very nice,’ he said, pressing the rim of his glasses against the bridge of his nose with the tip of his finger, an indication of stress that I had learned to recognise long ago.

‘You like the green, then?’

‘Yes, if you do.’

I didn’t care about the green and I knew that he didn’t either.

Once or twice I had a cup of tea upstairs with Lisa in her flat.

There was no reason to refuse her invitations, nothing I could have identified except the thin squeak of hostility between us, and I was ready to think that that might be a product of my imagination, the murmur of my own madness. Peter apparently didn’t hear the sound, although he always had done so up until now and been able to take the right reassuring steps. He was too busy, or maybe he was simply tired of listening out for it.

Lisa didn’t choose to come again to my flat, Peter’s and mine, although I always invited her. We went upstairs instead.

Each time I saw her she seemed younger and warmer and more bursting with life. There were signs that she was making a home of Dunollie Mansions, but they were fairly limited ones – an armchair of steel and cowhide stood in the living room, with its paper and corrugated wrapping only partly removed; a patch of wall in the dark hallway had been experimentally striped with different paint colours.

‘What do you think?’ Lisa waved a hand as we passed on the way to the kitchen.

‘Pink?’

‘You’re right. Too sugary. Much.’ And then a sigh. ‘I’ll never have time to get this place together.’

We drank tea, sitting next to the big red refrigerator.

‘What’s happening about Baz and the girlfriend?’

She shrugged. ‘Idyll of delight, I suppose. I don’t care. Fuck ’em.’

Fuck my husband.

Was she doing it then, or did that come later?

There is someone at the door. Room service, with some meal I have ordered and will not eat.

The waiter is the one who always comes, day or night. He never seems to go off duty. When he takes the trays away he looks under the dish covers and sees that I have barely touched the food, and he sighs in reproach. He is very young, perhaps only fifteen or sixteen.

He puts the latest tray down on the low table, and makes a big show of displaying the food and unfurling the napkin for me.

‘Is good,’ he cajoles, ‘is very nice.’

I smile at him.

‘It looks delicious.’

‘I close the blinds?’

The light is fading over the sea. The sky is mushroom pink and the water is the same colour as the inside of an oyster shell.

‘No, leave them open. I like to look at the night.’

‘You need something else maybe?’

He hovers protectively and I am touched by his concern for me.

‘No, thank you.’

We wish each other goodnight.

The plan, if it was ever as conscious as that on my part, was for Selina and me to take this holiday together, a late-season two weeks on the Turkish coast in a pretty resort called Branc. Selina is an expert on hotels and she promises me that this one is good – Swiss-owned and run, but with a proper local feel to it.

‘The pool will be clean, the food close enough to authentic but without poisoning you.’

‘Why Turkey, Selina?’

She shrugged. ‘Why not? It’s fashionable. I’ve been everywhere else.’

Selina is currently between husbands. She has had three, or maybe four. I have known her since our modelling days and we have always kept in touch. It was her idea for us to make the trip.

‘Two women on their own, darling? Free and independent? We will have a fine time. You get out of London and you’ll feel better, believe me.’

I agreed that we should go. It was autumn again in London, the time last year that Lisa Kirk arrived, and she and Peter had now been living together for five months. I had started to wonder how much longer it would be before she was pregnant. The child Peter had always wanted.

I didn’t look forward to the holiday with much enthusiasm. When I thought about it at all I imagined it would be like the holidays my mother and I took together, after my father left us and went off to the Steps and Halves. Two women consoling each other, solicitous about sun cream and making sure that the other was comfortable, but still locked inside themselves with separate, clamorous voices in their ears. Maybe my mother would put it differently, if she were here, but I can still see the white triangle of her face and the misery in her eyes. Nothing I did ever rubbed it out for long. Of course not.

I probably do Selina a major injustice. We might well have had a wild time together, sitting on bar stools and drinking lurid cocktails, and then tripping off to discos to enjoy the startled attentions of the local Lotharios, in the absence of any younger prey, like a pair of giraffes displaced from the herd and yapped around by hyenas. The comparison would have drawn one of Selina’s yelps of laughter, before she flicked her lighter to another Marlboro.

In any case, she developed appendicitis four days before we were due to leave. I could have cancelled, but I had somehow got used to the idea of going to Turkey. I was even relieved at the thought of being able to do it alone, and not to have to keep up the pretence of being cheerful and energetic.

And so here I am.

I think about Peter, of course.

I prefer to remember the early days, when we were first married, when he used to drive us off to the country for weekends. We would go to little hotels in Suffolk or Devon, and lie in bed late and then take unambitious walks before coming back for tea, and drinks, and dinner. He was always trying to make me eat, and my evasions became a joke and then a kind of game between us.

‘Scone, darling? With some home-made jam and clotted cream?’

‘Just the cucumber, out of the sandwich, thank you.’

Peter belonged to the National Trust, for God’s sake. Not even my mother was a member. I thought this was funny and delightful, and if we didn’t go for a walk we would look up some local great house or ruined castle in the book and drive in the Jaguar to see it. I remember the smell of warm leather seats and brake fluid.

All of this felt very adult and secure, after the way I had been living – on and off planes, in and out of clothes and studios and hotel bedrooms, with men around me and in me whom I didn’t like or trust. Whereas I loved Peter and I trusted him absolutely, and he had the knack of making me feel loved in return. His love balanced out my guilt: it didn’t take it away, nothing could do that, it just counterweighted it and allowed me to function while still carrying the old burden around with me.

Peter had a conventional exterior, which he enjoyed cultivating, and inside this there was a quirky and clever man unlike anyone I had ever met before. I adored his cleverness, and the way he could weigh up people and problems quickly, and act on his observations and deductions. He was decisive where I was tentative, and generous where I was suspicious.

He was also the most sensuous man I had ever known. He loved food and fine wine and beautiful old cars, and pictures and made-to-measure suits and sex. He was the best lover. In bed, as I noticed the very first time, when he took off the shields of his spectacles there was the different soft face of an alternative, exotic Peter who belonged to me alone. I liked to smooth away the creases hooking his mouth with my thumbs. The stroking stretched the thin skin of his lips into a secret smile.

The food on the tray has gone cold. I prod at it a little, then cover the plates up again and slide the whole lot outside the door.

The sky is dark now. I stand at the window and look out at the line of lamps that line the hotel garden, and their broken reflection in the sea. After three days of gazing at it I am familiar with the view. The beach, with a row of beach beds and yellow mattresses under jaunty yellow parasols, now furled for the night, lies just beyond the garden wall. There is the water and a rim of tarnished silver where it meets the sand. Across the water are the donkey-brown humps of some nameless islands in the Greek Dodecanese. Nameless to me, that is – I asked my waiter their names, by sign language, and he rattled off something unintelligible with a dismissive shrug. There is no love lost between these people and the Greeks.

I am surprised by how close the islands lie to the Turkish mainland. Selina would probably have known. Selina would have maps and guidebooks, whereas I, of course, do not. That would be Peter’s role.

Always, I come back to him and how crippled I seem to be without him. And it is exactly because of this infirmity that he is no longer here. At some point – it must have been one day, maybe even one hour, or during the course of one single conversation – the fine balance tipped again, this time coming down against me. My needs from him became greater than his pleasure in me. I was too much to look after. Or maybe we just knew each other too well and the function buttons became worn with too much pressing so the connections didn’t work properly. Is that what always happens, with long-term partnerships?

Whatever you like. I don’t know.

I can’t go on feeling crippled by Peter’s absence or by the things that happened long before I met him, that much I do know after my days alone in this white hotel.

It ought to be possible to rub out history. To start again with a clean piece of paper, to write on it with a fresh and optimistic hand. That’s what I am doing here – making sense of what has happened and needing to work out what shape my life will take from now on. Selina’s absence means that I have to face the definitions and decisions alone and therefore properly.

So I have come out of my room. It is the fourth day and I have ventured down to the beach. With the full complement of yellow beach towels and robes and tubes of cream and magazines and paperback novels, of course. I have arranged all this and myself under a parasol, and I am flipping through Vogue when a shadow falls across the sand beside me. I look up to see my waiter, with a tray balanced on his shoulder. His shabby black shoes look incongruous so close to the lazy waves.

‘Madam, you come to the sun. I am happy. I bring you water and Italian coffee.’

There is a bottle of mineral water, and a cappuccino complete with chocolate powder.

‘Thank you.’

We smile at each other and he carefully arranges the drinks on the little table under the parasol.

‘What is your name?’ I ask him and he flushes a little. His skin is downy, hardly darkened with hair except on his top lip. He is probably even younger than I estimated.

‘Jim,’ he says. With a hard ‘J’ sound that sounds quite un-Turkish.

‘Like Jules et Jim?’ I ask fatuously.

‘I am not sure. But is a good name.’

‘Very good,’ I agree. Jim begins to back away, with the tray hanging flat by his side, and then hesitates. ‘An Inglis man is here. In Branc. Maybe you go for a boat ride?’

I must look desperate, or desperately miserable, or both. However, an English man is the last thing I am looking for.

Very firmly I say, ‘Thank you for thinking of it, but I don’t want to meet anyone here. No one at all, Jim.’ And I put the magazine up in front of my face to shut out the threat.

‘Okay. Good morning,’ he says and crunches away up the sand to the garden wall. I know I have been rude and that he is offended.

When I was first married I thought I might become an actress. Because of the way I looked then and some of the people I knew, I was given small – tiny – roles in a couple of films, but I wasn’t any good at it. And if I wound up hating the scrutiny of the photographer’s lens, I hated the film cameras even more. After a year or so I stopped trying and it was a relief. I didn’t have to earn money, because Peter provided for us both. I didn’t have to do anything except be married to Peter and have a family.

I have always had an ambivalent attitude to my body. Its length and skinniness enabled me to earn a living, but I hated the way people stared. I knew that they were only looking at it, and not into me in order to judge what they saw within, but the knowledge didn’t lessen my discomfort.

Peter used to say that they were looking because I was beautiful and I should be glad.

‘Plenty of women’, he said, ‘would change places with you.’

Up until then, at least, the legs and arms and breasts and backside had done what I wanted them to do. They moved for the camera and showed off whatever garment I was being paid to parade.

But I couldn’t get pregnant.

Not properly pregnant, so the baby stayed inside and grew. I had two miscarriages, very quickly, but the doctors were still optimistic and reassuring.

‘Don’t worry, it happens. You’ll have your family soon.’

Peter took me home and fed me and held me in his arms at night.

Then there was an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured one of the Fallopian tubes. This time there was anxiety. My chances of conceiving were diminished by fifty per cent. I was too thin, they told me, I was anxious and tense and probably depressed. All these things counted against us in our efforts to have a baby. I must relax.

Peter took me away on holiday, to Italy.

Soon I was pregnant yet again and it seemed that this time it might take. I got to four months and we told our friends and dared a celebration. But I miscarried again, in hospital, a sixteen-week boy. It was the last time. The last time I was even able to conceive.

I did hate my body after that, with a cold anger that made me want to mutilate myself. I needed a scapegoat and I turned my womb into one. This reaction was explicable, even logical, to myself and other people, and I used it as an acceptable shorthand.

I do not now believe, however, that my damned body was the real culprit.

It was myself, wherever that reality might be lodged and whatever form it might take. I think I never really wanted a baby because I was afraid of what might happen if I did have one. I was afraid of history, and tragedy.

This is our baby, we love him, he dies, it’s my fault.

That was the reasoning and so every time my body conceived, my mind poisoned it. Out the potential big tragedy came in a wash of blood, only another small tragedy as yet. Not even named.

If you think that’s crazy – believe me, so do I.

‘I will be the judge of that,’ Peter said mildly on the night we met, when I told him that I was mad. And he chose to bring in a verdict of sanity.

It was a strange mistake, for a clever and perceptive man who is usually so accurate in his judgements.

When it became obvious that we were not going to have children, I lodged myself in Dunollie Mansions like a hermit crab in its shell. I loved the screen of summer leaves and filigree winter twigs across the windows. I loved the thick walls and floors, and the almost dreamlike sense of seclusion, and the way Derek soft-footedly took care of the building. I liked the other quiet, discreet couples and the safety of the solid doors. There was no shock or violence or mayhem here, nor could I ever imagine anything of the sort disturbing our calm routines. I became a recluse.

We still gave dinner parties, of course, and went out to dinners in return, and to the opera and weekends in the country and on holidays, but I became an emotional solitary. Peter and I continued to look after each other and no doubt loved each other, but the woman he had taken home from the photographer’s party ceased to exist.

Obliterated by history.

Then came Lisa Kirk, with her red TARDIS and trendy furniture and the full heat of youth, smarting from Baz’s rejection and wishing for the baby she thought should have been hers. She saw in Peter Stafford exactly what I had seen myself, all those years before.

As I say, it was therefore only a matter of time.

Until Christmas, I reckon, give or take a week or two. I never quite got to the bottom of how it began. When I put the question to Peter he answered, shamefacedly, ‘We met for a drink, that’s all. She wanted some business advice.’

‘Where did you meet for a drink? How did it happen? Did she call you at the office and suggest this assignation?’

‘Cary, does it matter? Why do you need to know?’

‘Because I do,’ I snapped. But he wouldn’t tell me and in fact I didn’t need to know. This is how things unravel, that’s all. It’s nothing unusual. I had even watched my mother go through it, when my father ran off with Lesley.

It was quite early in the new year, this year that has now turned to October, and Peter and I were driving over to Fulham to have Sunday lunch with our friends Clive and Sally. It was one of those colourless London winter days when the sky and the river and even the buildings lack definition, and everything seems looming, as at the onset of seasickness. My handbag was at my feet, in the carpeted footwell of the current old car: an Alvis, silver-grey. Although Peter has now replaced it with a new BMW 5-series, no doubt at Lisa’s instigation.

I looked down for the handbag, intending to blow my nose or swallow a headache pill or something, and I saw a fragment under the seat mounting. Peter’s cars are always so impeccably looked after, it surprised me to see a piece of litter that might have been a sweet wrapper. I picked it up and looked down at it lying in the palm of my hand. Peter was occupied with the traffic at South Kensington.

What I had found was a little golden label, reading ‘Bag Shot by Lisa Kirk’.

Like a business card, but more eloquent. I put it in my pocket and said nothing.

The signs had been there for some time and now I was able to read them.

I began a horrible regime of espionage. Whenever Peter was working late, or when he telephoned to say he had an unexpected meeting or a new client to see, I would slip up the well-swept shallow stairs to Lisa’s door. I would ring the bell and then tap on the thick swimmy glass but – funnily enough – she was never at home either.

On the evenings when Peter did come home I would listen. I had never been able to hear Mrs Bobinski moving around, but then I had never tried to. Now I could suddenly hear the faint creak of floorboards, the vibrating bass of her music, the click of a door closing. Lisa at home.

‘What’s wrong?’ Peter asked.

I know, but I’m not ready to let you know that I know. That’s what’s wrong.

I’m on the beach again, another day. The sea is very flat, aluminium-coloured under a high, hazy sky. There is no breath of wind. A sailing boat crosses the mouth of the bay, the masts bare and the engines drumming. A shadow falls across my book.

A tall man with a white shirt and loose trousers, and creased Moroccan slippers with squashed pointed toes. I can see a narrow crescent of suntanned foot, between the leather slipper and where the cuff of his trousers dips over the heel.

‘Hello,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a copy of The Times here. Finished with it. Would you like it?’

Inglis man.

He holds out the folded paper and I am so surprised that I take it.

‘Thank you.’

‘Nice to know what’s going on in the world,’ he says. And then he moves on, diagonally across the sand to the margin of the silver water, where wet sand makes a khaki ribbon. I watch him walk along the water’s edge, into the distance. The paper had bled a smudge of newsprint on to my palm and fingertips.

In the end it wasn’t Peter I confronted. One evening when he was sitting in his armchair reading a report I left the flat and went upstairs to knock on Lisa’s door.

She had the grace to look startled and apprehension dawned in her wide eyes.

‘May I come in?’

She held the door wider and I marched inside. In the kitchen, with a yoghurt pot with a spoon stuck in it on the table – I felt that I was interrupting a child’s tea – I turned on her.

‘What are you doing with my husband?’

There are a dozen possible responses to a question like that. Innocence, affront, evasion, denial.

To her credit, Lisa only nodded quietly. After a moment’s thought she said, ‘Just what you imagine, I suppose.’

‘What does this mean?’

She pursed her lips and mournfully widened her eyes even further, a risible expression that was her attempt at high seriousness.

‘That we are in love with each other.’

I gaped at her for an instant, silenced by this mouthful of garbage. I remembered what she had said at the dinner weeks ago – oh yes, once I knew you – and how the airy assumption had infuriated me. But that was nothing compared with the ballooning rage I felt now.

What did this airhead know about love and what right did she have to claim Peter’s?

With one arm I swept the yoghurt pot and its spoon and assorted bits of crockery off the table. With one foot I kicked the red door of the TARDIS so that it shuddered. If Peter had been in our kitchen below he would surely have heard it. When I could speak I yelled at her, ‘Don’t talk such fucking crap. Don’t say another word.’

There was a mess of spilled yoghurt and broken crockery on the floor. But Lisa kept her eyes on me, and there was at last real shock and proper concern in her face.

I’ll teach you about feelings, you china doll.

‘You don’t know anything. You’ll never know anything about me or Peter. You are to leave him alone. To leave us alone. Do you understand?’

For extra emphasis I kicked the refrigerator again. There was a tiny dent in the lower corner of the door and my toes hurt.

‘Cary …’

Even in this absurd and undignified situation I could see how lovely she was with the light shining through her thin skin and the smooth flesh of her arms. Her thin fingers curled round the back of one of her uncomfortable chairs. Maybe she was contemplating how to lift it and bring it down on my head. Only she couldn’t have reached high enough.

‘Leave us alone,’ I repeated, with the anger starting to ooze out of me. I felt like a crumpled paper bag.

‘It’s too late for that.’

There was the confidence again, bred out of youth and arrogance. I wasn’t going to win. History decreed it.

What to do now?

‘I don’t care. It isn’t too late,’ I lied.

‘God, look. I love him and he loves me.’ Her words rang true now, suddenly, reality unleashed by my fury. Lisa Kirk wouldn’t let go. This wasn’t some monochrome Baz at issue; this was important to her.

But we weren’t just two alley cats fighting over a fish head, either. There was a third person involved in this. It was Peter who would determine what happened, of course. Briefly I felt the warmth of his familiarity around me, a security blanket. All would be well, because he had always made it well.

‘We’ll see,’ I said. I turned round and walked out of the kitchen, closed Lisa’s front door behind me and ran back down the stairs to our flat.

Peter was still reading. He hadn’t even noticed that I had gone.

I said nothing to him, not a word. I cooked supper and we ate together and watched the ten o’clock news. There was silence from upstairs. By being normal, I thought, maybe I could make everything normal. That shows how irrational I was.

There is a little covered souk at the centre of Branc.

I am lingering by one of the stalls, breathing in the scents of cumin and cinnamon. There are fat hessian sacks spilling out a dozen different spices and herbs, and heaps of glossy dates and dried figs. The stallholder is a fat man in a vast white shirt with a little striped waistcoat pinched around his shoulders. I am biting into the date he has passed to me to sample when a voice says, ‘I’ve got another Times, but not with me. I can drop it into the hotel later. If you would like, of course.’

Inglis man, again.

I turn round and we look at each other. He is wearing a loose shirt, pale trousers and the leather slippers. He looks ordinary, unremarkable, but familiar. He fits in here in the souk – unlike me – but I find that I can imagine him equally at home on a cricket pitch in Hampshire or in a restaurant in London.

‘Hello?’ he prompts. I have been staring at him.

‘I’m sorry. Thank you, that’s kind.’

‘Are you all right?’

The pretence seems more trouble than it’s worth. I say very softly, on an expiring breath, ‘No.’

‘No. Would you like to come and drink some coffee with me?’

Whatever my intentions might have been I find that I am following him. We duck out briefly into the white sunlight and cross a square to some tables under canvas parasols.

And then we are sitting facing each other, with a tent of shade cutting us off from the heat and brightness. Little cups of Turkish coffee arrive, with glasses of cool water and a dish of almond kernels. I pick up a nut and bite it in half, examining the marks made by my teeth in the white flesh. Then I sip at the thick, sweet coffee and gaze across the square to a mosque and the needle points of the minarets. I realise with a shock that softens my spine that I am at ease in the man’s company, am not talking or laughing or fending off. I am just sitting, enjoying the shade and the view and the faint grittiness of the coffee on my tongue.

‘I have a boat,’ the man says, before I even know his name.

And I have agreed to go for a sail in his boat, still before I even know his name.

It didn’t take long for Peter to hear about my visit to Lisa. He came home early the next day, wearing an expression I had never seen before. A guarded look, edged with defiance.

‘Is it true?’ I asked him, once he had taken off his coat and put his briefcase down on the chair in the hallway.

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Although I did. ‘Are you in love with her?’

He spread his hands, a gesture of expiring patience that brought the first dart of dislike out of me.

‘No. Yes, I suppose so. I didn’t go looking for it. These things just happen.’

Like getting hit by a bus, I suppose. You are just standing there, minding your own business, when adultery comes along and runs you over. Although, when I thought about it, having Lisa Kirk set her sights on you must be not unlike being ploughed over by a bus. The dislike intensified and it made me want to cry. The idea of disliking Peter was so outlandish.

After that there was a predictable series of ugly events and confrontations.

I wept, Peter retreated, Lisa widened her eyes. Instead of a calm backwater, Dunollie Mansions became a place full of gusts of misery and disbelief.

In the end, after weeks of grief and entreaty, Peter moved out and into a flat in Baron’s Court. Lisa drifted there with him and I stayed put. It was as if my husband and his new lover had climbed into the red TARDIS, pulled the door shut behind them and dematerialised. Some time later Selina had the idea that the two of us might go on a Turkish holiday together.

And now I am going on a boat trip. It is another unseasonably hot day, although the sky is hazed with a layer of thin cloud. The white sky slides into a pearl-grey sea with no line of separation. There is a small boat waiting at the jetty near the corner of the bay, as Inglis man told me there would be, and as I plod towards it I can see the man lying on the roof of the tiny cabin, straw hat tilted over his eyes and ankles crossed, apparently asleep. His hearing must be supernaturally good, however, because I am still a way off and treading quietly over the rocks when in one fluid movement he sits up and raises his arm in greeting.

He takes my hand and helps me down into the cockpit. There are cushions on the seats and the space is shaded by an awning, and I sit down with relief to be partly out of the brooding heat. Through the cabin door I can see a neat area with narrow bunks separated by a folding table.

‘No wind,’ the man says, hunching his shoulders.

‘No.’

‘I don’t like moving under engine power, but I think we shall have to. Maybe we’ll pick up a breeze outside the bay.’

I look down into the water, which is so clear that I can see the rocks ten feet beneath the surface as if they were lying under plate glass, and then up into the colourless sky.

‘Maybe,’ I agree. I don’t mind whether we find a breeze or not, or whatever else may be going to happen. I’m happy to be here, rocked by the water and with the shipshape little wooden cockpit around me.

The man starts up the engine and a drift of blue smoke rises from the stern. He jumps on to the jetty and releases the bow rope, and as the prow swings outwards in a slow arc he unties the stern and leaps back to join me and the boat. A minute later we are heading out to sea. In companionable silence we watch the water, and my white hotel and its companions as they fall away behind us.

‘I don’t know your name,’ I say.

He tilts his head sideways and looks at me. None of his features is distinctive, nor is the composite they make, yet the suggestion of familiarity comes back again. I know that I don’t know him, but I feel easy in his company.

‘Mine is Catherine Stafford. Cary.’

‘Andreas,’ he says. He makes a small adjustment to the tiller to bring us round parallel to the shore.

‘There,’ he says with satisfaction. And then, gesturing to the tiller, ‘Do you mind, just for a moment?’

I slide across and take his place as he moves forward. He runs up a sail and at once the wind fills it. Water drums under the hull and a wake churns behind us and I tighten my grasp on the tiller. I lift my head to look at the masthead, and the wind and our quickening speed make me smile. When Andreas moves back again I start to move out of his place but he makes a sign to indicate that I should stay put.

‘I can’t sail.’

‘You are sailing.’

And he is right, I am. Pleasure swells in me until I feel as taut as the white sail. We seem to skim over the water. I watch the coastline and the villages that run down into the bays like clusters of sugar cubes shaken in the fold of a napkin. The scenery is calm rather than beautiful, painted in shades of aquamarine and sepia. Andreas points out the places and tells me their names.

‘Do you live here?’ I ask.

‘Some of the time.’

After a while we pass a massive outcrop of rock, where cormorants shuffle against the sky. Immediately behind the rock, hidden by it except from an oblique angle, there is a tongue of sand between two steep rock cliffs.

‘That’s where we are going.’

‘It looks beautiful.’

He helps me to bring the boat round. In the shallows the water is brilliant turquoise. There are fish in synchronised shoals, flicking their shadows over the sand. Andreas lowers the sail and makes his boat fast to a small buoy.

‘Welcome to my bay.’

I am hot, now that we are motionless again, and the water looks enticing. I pull off the shirt that covers my swimming costume and stand up too quickly so the boat rocks wildly. Andreas puts his hand out to steady me and I cling on to his bare forearm, laughing. My own hand looks chalky against his suntanned skin.

‘Dive,’ he says and I look over the side into the water. Deep enough. We link hands and I scramble up on to the seat feeling the rough canvas of the cushions under the balls of my feet. The boat is still rocking and we are both laughing now. He puts his hands on my shoulders to steady me while I rise on to my toes and arrow my arms in front of me. Andreas’s touch is friendly, even brotherly, with no whisper of sex in it. He is protecting me and teasing at the same time. I feel a pang of loss with Peter at the centre of it, because he was my lover and I miss him so acutely.

‘Dive,’ Andreas repeats and to get away from the memory of Peter I launch myself from the boat. There is a smack and sizzle of water and I stretch, letting the momentum of the dive drive me down as far as the rippled sand. Then I am rising again and the cool water strips away the roughness of the last months and it is as if I am clean and smooth and in one piece again. When I break the surface in a dazzle of light, I notice that the sky’s white haze has receded and the sun is shining. Andreas surfaces next to me and shakes a glitter of drops from his hair. We swim together to the beach and then sit in the shallows, sun-warmed, looking out to the little boat and the slice of open sea beyond the mouth of the bay.

‘My favourite place,’ he says lightly.

‘I can see why.’

Later Andreas straps a knife to his ankle and takes a netting bag for a swim around the rocks while I lie in the sun. When he comes back the bag is full of black spiny globes.

‘Lunch.’

We sit under the boat’s awning.

There is coarse brown bread and a dish of tomatoes. Andreas cups the sea urchins one by one in his hand and twists the point of the knife into the underside. He piles them in front of me and I spoon the orange pulpy contents greedily into my mouth. The taste is pure sea and iodine.

When we have finished eating I lie on the cabin roof, letting the sun unpin me, and Andreas puts a tiny coffeepot on the blue flame of a gas cylinder. He brings me a little tin cupful and three figs, and I gnaw the fruit off ragged slices of skin while the juice runs down my chin.

‘This is wonderful.’

‘Good.’

‘But I don’t know anything about you.’ I smile.

He takes the last fig from me and neatly quarters it with the knife. ‘What do you want to know?’

I try to frame the questions – how old are you, where do you come from, what do you know and what are you doing here – but then the points of reference fade. There is nothing I need to ask because it is enough just to be here.

Andreas splits the flower-shape of fig segments apart, two for him and two for me. I look into his face and it is like looking into my own. As familiar as that.

‘Have you eaten enough?’

I nod.

‘Come ashore.’

There is shade under the east-facing cliff. We lie on the sand, facing each other, heads propped on our hands.

‘What are you going to do next?’ he asks quietly. It is as if he already knows about Peter. It is a relief not to have to fill in what has already happened, but to make an attempt at sketching out the future instead.

‘I won’t go back to London. I’d like to live somewhere different, where all those rocks of history don’t weigh me down any more.’

‘You could do that.’

‘I could do anything’ I start to say it with an ironic shrug, but looking into Andreas’s face the words come out with me believing them. ‘I’ll start living, instead of hiding. You know, something happened to me a long time ago – no, not happened, I did something and it changed everything that came afterwards, for me and everyone around me. I’d like to be the person I might have been, if … if that thing had never happened.’

His hand uncurls and he touches my mouth.

‘Shh. You can be, if that’s what you really want,’ he says.

And what he says is right. The certainty is soothing and I stretch myself out in the sand, suddenly drowsy.

‘I could sleep,’ I murmur.

Andreas yawns. ‘And me, too.’

We lie down side by side and I fall asleep with Andreas’s heartbeat and the ripple of water in my head.

That was how the day was. There was nothing complicated or buried or even unspoken about it; we were just easy in one another’s company as if we were old friends.

When I wake up the sky has clouded again with the morning’s thin white cover. There is only a hollow in the sand beside me and I sit up, panicky and still fogged with daytime sleep. Then I see Andreas in the cockpit of the boat and he lifts his hand to beckon me. The water feels chill as I wade in and unwillingly strike out. He helps me over the side and I wrap myself in my shirt.

‘The weather is changing,’ he says. Under the colourless sky the land looks bleak and the water is cloudy. It’s airlessly hot now, but a breath of fear makes me shiver.

‘What’s happening?’ I shake my head, trying to clear the sleep out of it.

Andreas is busy with the rope that has anchored us to the buoy. He hauls in the dripping length of it.

‘I’ll take you home.’

‘Home,’ I think and the notion was nothing to do with the white-skinned hotel. It’s somewhere else, somewhere I can’t yet locate. The sky has grown steadily darker and a few raindrops pock the water, but I hardly notice. Outside the confines of the bay there is just enough wind to stiffen the sail. We sit quietly and the coastline slides backwards until the beach hotels come into view.

We reach the jetty and he brings the boat alongside, passing a double length of rope through an iron ring to make us fast.

‘Thank you,’ I say uncertainly. The questions I dismissed earlier sound again. Who? Why?

Andreas says, ‘We will see each other again, but it won’t be another day like today.’

Why? Again, but I don’t ask the question aloud. I already know that there will be no answer, not now, no answer that would qualify as such. Maybe he is about to go away. Maybe there are other considerations that I don’t yet understand.

‘I had a very happy day, today.’

Already in my mind it is set aside, marked out with a memory. With the rhythm of Andreas’s company I have stopped thinking about Peter. There has been a whole chain of hours during which I have been completely happy and unmarked.

On the jetty, looking out at the brown hummocks of the Greek islands and the backdrop of pewter sky, Andreas briefly puts his arms round me and holds me close.

‘So did I,’ he says.

Then he kisses my forehead and lets me go.

I stand watching the boat slip away, but he has put his straw hat on and there is no glimpse of his face.

I am in my hotel room again. A handful of days separate me from the hours I spent with Andreas, but the effect of our strange encounter has stayed with me. I have been content with my own company, not needing to block myself out with reading or barbiturate-heavy sleep. My memories of Peter and our life together have been tender and untainted by bitterness. I am awake and anticipatory, and there is no weight on my back. I have walked on the beach and through the streets of Branc, looking at the people who live here and making up stories for myself about their lives. People have looked at me in return, nodding and smiling – casual greetings, just the way that ordinary people acknowledge each other. And I have not minded or shied away from the scrutiny. I feel that I have the freedom of myself.

Maybe this is normal, maybe this is the happiness of normality.

Maybe I have never known it since before my eighth birthday.

I can’t sleep.

The clock at my bedside tells me that it is a little after one a.m. The close, thundery weather has lasted for three days now, since I went sailing with Andreas. A storm would clear the air, but it never comes, and the nights are long and airless. I find that I don’t mind the absence of sleep, now, whereas only last week I would have obliterated myself with sleeping pills.

I slide out of bed and put on a pair of loose trousers, a thin shirt. I step noiselessly out of my room and walk down the hotel corridor, past the numbered and nameless doors, across the deserted lobby where the night porter is dozing in a chair behind the reception desk. Outside in the garden there is the faintest breath of wind and I pursue it down the steps on to the beach. The sand grates cool and pleasant under my bare feet. The sea is black, the sky starless. I walk for a couple of minutes, to the water’s edge and a step beyond, soaking my feet and ankles and the hems of my trouser legs. Then I pace along to the jetty where Andreas moored the boat. I walk to the end and sit down. I hook my fingers in the iron ring and dangle my legs over the edge.

There is stillness and silence except for the restless water.

I look back at the darkened town. There are few holidaymakers left, the bars and clubs are mostly closed for the season. It is as if everyone in the world is asleep.

I sit and wait.