The concrete ramp was wet and quite steep, and Susan almost lost her footing on the way down. I grabbed her shoulder and she regained her balance, but she didn’t say anything in thanks. She hadn’t really said anything to me since we’d left the restaurant. Her tone when telling me where she was going had been distant, almost irritable, as if she was annoyed at having to account for her actions. I tried not to take it personally.
When we got to the bottom of the ramp I stopped, swaying slightly. I peered owlishly at the stinking mud in front of us. Clearly, I thought, this was where the expedition ended. Susan felt otherwise. She stepped out onto the mud and started striding with as much determination as the ground and her inebriation would allow. I stared after her, feeling suddenly adrift. She didn’t seem herself, and I was afraid of something, of being left behind. Wincing, I put a tentative foot onto the mud and then hurried after her as best I could.
We walked a long way. The mud came in waves. For twenty yards it would be quite hard, and relatively dry, and then it would suddenly change and turn darker and wetter until, to be honest, it was like wading through shit. The first time this happened I tried to find dryer patches, to protect my shoes, but in the end I gave up. It was as much as I could do to keep up with Susan, who was striding head down towards the sea.
I glanced back at one point, and saw how far we’d come. When we’d stood on the front I’d thought the sea was a hundred yards or so away, but it must have been much further. I couldn’t see any lights in the houses on the front, or any of the streetlights. For an awful moment I thought that something must have happened, that everyone had turned their lights off so we wouldn’t be able to find our way back. I turned to shout to Susan but she was too far ahead to hear. Either that, or she ignored me. After another quick glance back I ran to catch up with her.
She was still walking, but her head was up and her movements were jerky and stilted. When I drew level with her I saw that she was crying.
“Susan,” I said. “Stop.” She walked on for a few more yards, tailing off, and then stopped. I put my hands on her shoulders and she held herself rigid for a moment, but then allowed herself to be folded into me. Her hair was cold against my face as we stood, surrounded by mud in every direction.
“What is it?” I said eventually. She sniffed.
“I want to see the sea.”
I raised my head and looked. The sea appeared as far away as it had when we’d been standing on the front.
“The tide must still be going out,” I said. I’m not sure if I believed it. Susan certainly didn’t.
“It’s not letting me,” she said, indistinctly. “And I don’t know why.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, and just stared out at the water. I wondered how much further it was before the bay deepened, how much further to the crop of rocks where the Aldwinkle presumably still lay.
In the end we turned and walked back, Susan allowing me to keep my hand around her shoulders. She seemed worn out. I was beginning to develop a headache, while still feeling rather drunk. When we got back to the ramp we climbed halfway up it and then sat down for a cigarette. My shoes, I noticed belatedly, were ruined, caked about a centimetre thick in claggy mud. I took them off and set them to one side.
“This weekend isn’t going quite as I thought it would,” I said, eventually.
“No.”
I couldn’t tell from Susan’s tone whether she thought this was a good or a bad thing.
We looked out at the water for a while in silence. Now we were back it looked little more than a hundred yards away, two hundred at the most. It couldn’t have moved. We simply can’t have walked as far as we’d thought we had, which is odd, because it felt like we’d walked forever.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“It’s out there somewhere,” she said.
I nodded. It wasn’t a direct reply, but in another sense I guess it was. “Was it the sea you wanted to see?” I ventured.
“I don’t know,” she said, and her head dropped.
A little later we stood up. I decided to leave my shoes where they were. They weren’t an especially nice pair, and it seemed less troublesome to leave them there than to find some way of taking them home in their current state and then cleaning them. On a different evening, in a different mood, leaving them might have felt like a gesture of some kind, something wild and devil-may-care. Instead I just felt a little confused and sad, as well as vulnerable and exposed.
***
Susan warmed up a little on the walk back along the front, enlivened slightly by a stream of weak jokes from me. After a while I felt her cold hand seek out mine, and I grasped it and did my best to warm it up. The village we passed in front of seemed to have died utterly during the course of the evening. The streets were silent and not a single light showed in any of the windows. It was like walking beside a photograph of a ghost town.
Until we got closer to our guest house, that is. From a way off we could see that all the lights seemed to be on, though dimly, and as we approached we began to hear the sound of car doors slamming carried on the quiet air. About fifty yards away we stopped.
The street outside the house, which had been empty when we’d arrived, was lined both sides with cars. The lights were on, on all three floors. They looked dim because in each window a shade was pulled down. The other guests had evidently arrived.
As we looked, someone moved behind one of the upper windows. The angle of the light behind him or her cast a grotesquely shaped shadow on the blind, and I found myself shivering for no evident reason. Quietly, and to myself, I wished that we were staying somewhere else. Like London.
I was fumbling for our key on the doorstep when suddenly the door was pulled wide. Warm yellow light spilled out of the hallway and Susan and I looked up, blinking, to see the old lady proprietor standing in front of us. My first befuddled thought was that we must have transgressed some curfew and she was about to berate us for being late.
Far from it. The old crone’s manner was bizarrely improved, and she greeted us with strange and twittering warmth before ushering us into the hallway. Once there she steered us into the sitting room before we’d even had time to draw breath, though we had no desire to go there. Susan entered the room first and glanced back at me. I opened my eyes wide to signal my bafflement. Susan shrugged, and we seemed to mutually decide that it would be easier to go along with it.
The old woman flapped us towards some chairs in the centre of the room and offered us a cup of tea. My first impulse was to refuse—I was beginning to sag rather by then—but then remembered that our room didn’t have so much as a kettle, and accepted. The woman clapped her hands together in apparent delight, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Susan glancing at me again. There was nothing I could tell her. None of it was making any sense to me either, and as soon as the woman left the room I turned to Susan and said so. I also observed that there seemed to be something gaudy and strange about the old woman. She looked different.
“She’s wearing make-up,” she said. “And that dress?”
The dress, made of some dark green material, was certainly not to my taste, and the make-up had been hastily applied, but it clearly spoke of some effort being made. Presumably it was the new guests, whoever they might be, who merited such a transformation. We looked round the room, feeling slightly ill at ease. On the table to one side of me I noticed something.
A pamphlet for the Dawton Festival lay next to the large glass ashtray. I looked across at the windowsill and saw that the one I had consulted earlier was still there. For want of anything else to do I picked it up and showed it to Susan. Flicking through the pages a second time failed to furnish us with any more information on what the Festival might consist of. When we got to the centre pages I nudged Susan, looking forward to drawing her attention to the oddity of a Dawton Beauty contest. But when my finger was pointing at the photo I suddenly stopped.