At last he pushed back his chair and stood up.
‘Shall we go?’
I followed him and saw that he’d left an extravagantly large tip for the waiter. Guilt perhaps. He couldn’t pay me, so he left his money to a bald Moroccan who spoke English with an absurd American accent.
In the room he pulled the shutters closed. Light and the noise of the other diners and the city beyond filtered through the slats, but very faintly. He sat on the bed and carefully took off his shoes and his socks. They had been clean on after the bath – I had seen him take them from the rucksack and they had looked then almost as if they had been ironed. Had his wife done his packing for him? I stood in front of him, so when he looked up he couldn’t ignore me. He looked into my face, took my hands and pulled me onto the bed beside him.
He touched me like a blind man whose only understanding comes through the fingertips. A chaste and delicate exploration of my face and neck and arms. But with the heightened sensibility that had stayed with me since the ride in the palmery, I felt every movement over my skin in my gut. It was as if I was tasting it through my pores. Each touch an explosion, like sherbet in the mouth. He lifted me to my feet and pulled the dress over my head. He was patient, as I’d expected him to be, careful, but there was a desperation I’d not expected. He tried to control it but in the end he let rip, like a lad who’s been inside for years on his first night out with a woman. In the end it was a glorious, noisy, unsophisticated shag, which left us breathless and close to laughter. I thought his wife must be one of those frigid, overworked, exhausted women who’d do it once a month, and then only if the wind was in the right direction. We lay panting and sweaty, our arms around each other.
‘Well?’ I asked, fishing for compliments. ‘Did it live up to expectations, being seduced by a strange young woman?’
‘Absolutely. Now I can die happy.’ He turned so he was lying on his back, looking up at the ceiling. He seemed content, a sleek cat purring on a sunny windowsill. ‘What about you? Was it a terrible chore? An errand of mercy for an old man?’
‘Dreadful. Couldn’t you tell?’ I had to joke. I was on the verge of asking if we’d be able to meet again and that would spoil it. Even if he agreed, sneaky lunchtime meetings, evenings when he was supposed to be working, all that would become squalid and shabby. Better to live with this memory.
He rolled lazily onto his side and stroked my hair away from my face.
‘What about your dreams, Lizzie Bartholomew? What will you do next?’
‘Go back north again I suppose. I can always stay with Jess until I sort myself out. Get a job.’
‘With social services?’
‘It’s what I’m trained for.’ But I knew I’d never work with kids again, certainly not in a residential home. After what happened in Blyth I’d be given the boring stuff, if they let me loose on the public at all. I pictured myself in an area office with a caseload a mile long, dipping in and out of people’s lives, arranging a home help here, a stair lift there. Sticking-plaster solutions, never having the time or the resources to do anything well. The office would be open plan, with Snoopy posters fading on the walls and plants dying on the desks. The people would be frantic and frazzled and they’d expect me to be grateful for my one last chance…
‘That’s not a dream,’ he said. ‘Tell me about the dream.’
‘I want to work for myself. Doing something I care about. Making a difference. I still want to live on the coast. I want a room in an attic to work in. A sloping roof and a view of the sea.’
‘You’ve thought about it before.’
‘No.’ It had just come to me. Like a vision. I thought it was time to get back to Jess. I was going loopy and she’d bring me down to earth.
We fell asleep almost immediately, despite the noise of the amplified call to prayer from the mosque on the other side of the square, and the traffic and the people. When I woke, he’d gone. He left a note saying nice things about me, which I’ll keep for ever, but no address and not even his full name.
Chapter Four
I was going home. It was mid-afternoon on a grey, sleety day and the train was almost empty. Occasionally I’d conjure up that last night in Marrakech and feel a Cheshire cat grin spread across my face, but none of the other sad travellers noticed. Through the window I looked out for the familiar signs, like marker stones, which would point the way back to Jess. The red sandstone bulk of Durham Cathedral. The Angel of the North, rusted to a darker red, its wings open in an unconditional embrace of welcome. The Tyne with its bridges.
The train slowed to a crawl across the river. The tide was high. On the Quayside there were already lights in the bars and restaurants, reflected in the water. It was rush-hour busy. I saw pasty faces, hunched bodies wrapped against the weather that had nothing of the spring in it. I missed the Moroccan light, the startling colours, and had to persuade myself that I was glad to be back.
The trip from Newcastle to Newbiggin took more than an hour. The talk which eddied around the overheated bus was familiar – Newcastle United’s failure to achieve again, television soaps, the weather. There was room enough for my rucksack and me to share a double seat and no one spoke to me. Rain and dirt mixed on the windows, so I couldn’t see out. I must have dozed, and woke with a start to find the bus empty and the driver leaning out of his seat to yell at me.
‘This is it, pet. As far as we go.’
I’d missed my stop, but only by a couple of hundred yards. I stepped out and there was the smell of seaweed and mud, with a faint reek of fish in the background. The pavement was grainy from blown sand. I lifted the rucksack onto my back and walked away from the church. A gang of teenagers, skimpily dressed despite the weather, chased past me to catch the bus back into town. It revved like an old man coughing phlegm and drove off. The town was quiet.
I hadn’t told Jess when I was coming home. We weren’t family. There wasn’t that sort of obligation. I didn’t kid myself. She cared for all the dropouts and druggies who were dumped on her doorstep by social services. It was just that I’d stayed there longer, so she was used to me. And I was one of her first. I’d paid a month’s rent for my room in advance so she’d hold it for me. She had to live. I realized that in one sense the connection between us was financial, on her part at least. I liked to think that our friendship meant more to her than that, but it wasn’t something I could take for granted.
The stone house where she lived was at the end of an alley off the main street. There was a yard where the dustbins were kept and the washing line was strung, reached through a latched gate in a high wall. This was the back. The front faced the sea and you could only get there on foot along a promenade which the council had created in an attempt to tart up the town. There was a small garden at the front. It had a path of shingle and shells, a few windblown shrubs and a white bench with a view across the small harbour to the church. I’d done most of my reading for university finals there. I went in through the back, past the box of empty wine bottles ready for recycling, the piles of moulding newspapers tied up in string.