The journey back seemed free of obstacles and they were able to relax and enjoy the walk. The sea breeze flirted gently with them, taming the sun’s heat. Claire was able to laugh at one point, at some lame crack or other that Jonathan came out with. She did not care. The water that they had crossed had broadened and it soon became apparent they would have to recross it to get back to their cottage. It seemed much deeper, with a fast-running spine.
‘Shit,’ Jonathan spat. ‘We could swim it.’
‘I’m not swimming anything. I’ve got my sunglasses on and money in my pockets. And my watch isn’t waterproof.’
‘And God fucking forbid you should smudge your fucking make-up!’
Claire flinched from his rage and inwardly threatened herself not to cry. She would not do that in front of him again. She was not happy with her silence — a mute response might only goad Jonathan further — but if she opened her mouth she would start bawling. She could not remember how their relationship had started. It was as passionless and inexorable as a driver picking up a hitch-hiker on the road.
While he judged the depth and keenness of the water, she watched the tide in the distance, creaming against the slate-coloured sand at a tempo to match the beat of her resentment towards him.
‘I’m going to try this, try walking across. To show you. Then you’ll be safe.’
Do I hate him? she challenged herself, bitter with her redundancy in this situation and angry that he should be illustrating her uselessness by making such a sacrifice. My hero. Suddenly she did not care if he disappeared into the sand and drowned. She would not dive in to help him, she would not scream for assistance. She might just sit down on the sand here for a while and count the diminishing bubbles.
‘Nah,’ he said, waist-high in water, ‘sand’s giving way. Too dangerous for you.’
She gritted her teeth and looked back along the flow. She saw a place where it chuckled and frothed and padded over to it. Shallow land. She had skipped across to the other side while Jonathan was still struggling to free himself of the beach’s suck. She had to turn away from him to conceal her laughter. He caught up to her, red and soaking.
‘You might have told me, you twisted little cunt,’ he hissed into her ear, and strode off.
She watched him, his prissy little steps. Yes, she thought, yes I do.
Shocked and hurt by his attack on her, more than she wanted to admit, Claire rinsed her feet in the sink while Jonathan languished in the bath. It seemed his good mood had revived somewhat in the twenty minutes it had taken them to return. His hand was gripping the head of his straining cock.
‘Hey, baby,’ he said, in a mock cowboy voice. ‘Why don’cha mosey on over here ‘n’ milk my love udder.’
‘Fuck off,’ she muttered, leaving him to it.
She dressed and went downstairs. Ordered a drink from the bar. An hour later, Jonathan was with her. Her distress was a palpable thing, spinning out from her like barbed hooks: a blind, flailing defence against his insinuative cruelty. She felt subsumed by his personality, as if he were trying to ingest her. Maybe it was the drink, but she was convinced his feelings for her were as shy of respect and concern as she had suddenly come to realize hers were for him.
‘Sorry about that whole “cunt” thing. Bit strong. You know I love you. What shall we have for dinner?’
She picked at a chicken and apricot pie while he polished off a bowl of mussels. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘This sea air! I’m knackered!’ He looked at her hopefully.
‘I’ll stay down here for a while,’ she said. ‘I’m not ready for bed yet.’
He saluted and trotted upstairs. She swallowed hard. It seemed an age ago that she had been able to think of him as attractive and warm. As — God, had she really? — a potential life-partner.
She took a drink with some of the other tourists, middle-aged women in oatmeal coir jumpers and Rowan bags. They tolerated her presence, although she could tell she unnerved them for some reason. The landlady came in and lit the fire, asking everyone if they wanted any brandy and she was going to start a game of whist if anyone was interested.
Claire bid everybody goodnight and went up to her room, the skin of her nape tightening when she heard the word ‘blood’ mentioned behind her, by one of the women. Did you smell the strength of her blood? She thought maybe that was what she had said.
Jonathan was snoring heavily. The TV was on, a late-night film with Stacey Keach. She switched it off and went to the bathroom where she undressed quietly. And stopped.
Her period had begun.
Did you smell the strength of her blood?
‘Oh,’ she said, feeling dizzy. ‘Okay.’ She cleaned herself, applied a sanitary towel and slipped into a pair of pyjamas. Stealthily, praying she would not wake Jonathan, who would read her clumsiness as a prompt for sex — or an argument — she climbed into bed and willed sleep into her bones before her mind could start mulling over the steady, sour creep of their relationship. She failed. She was awake as the full moon swung its mocking face into view, arcing a sorry path across the sky that might well have been an illustration of her own trajectory through darkness. Jonathan’s ragged breathing ebbed and flowed in time with the tide of disaffection insistently eroding her from within.
As dawn broke, she managed to find sleep, although it was bitty, filled with moments of savagery and violence that were instantly forgettable even as they unfolded shockingly before her.
Gulls shrieking as they spun above the hotel awakened her. Jonathan had left a note on the pillow:
Did not want to wake you for breakfast — you were well out of it. Nipped out for a newspaper. Enjoy your toast. Love, J.
He had wrapped two pieces of wholemeal toast and marmalade in a napkin and left them by her bed. The gesture almost brought her back from the brink but she guessed he considered it a chore. If he mentions it to me later, she thought, I’ll know he’s after a reward, a pat on the back. I’ll know it’s over. She giggled a little when she thought the death of their relationship should come down to a few slices of Hovis but that was not really the case; it was just a tidy way to cap it all, a banal necessity to make the enormity of her realization more manageable.
An hour later, they were piling along the A149 coastal road, Jonathan singing loudly to a Placebo song. The sea swung in and away from them, lost to bluffs and mudflats before surprising Claire with its proximity. She did not like the sea here. It appeared lifeless and sly. Where it touched land, grey borders of scum had formed. It simply sat there, like a dull extension of the Norfolk coastline.
They pulled off the road for a cup of tea at a small café. While Jonathan argued with the proprietor, who was loath to accept a cheque under five pounds, Claire watched an old woman attempting to eat her Sunday lunch. Her hands shook so badly that she could not cut her meat; her cutlery spanked against the side of her plate like an alarm. The winding blades of an old-fashioned fan swooped above them all. Something about its movement unsettled Claire.
‘Come on,’ said Jonathan, imperiously. ‘We’ll have a drink when we get to Cley.’ He turned to the café owner, who was now flanked by her waitresses, alerted by the fuss.
‘Suck my dick, Fatso,’ Jonathan said, and hurried away. Claire raised a placatory hand but the proprietor only looked saddened. The woman at the table raised her jerking head and showed Claire what she was chewing.