On the beach it wasn’t possible to be squeezed side by side. But she found other ways: he’d feel a gritty sandpapery toe just making contact, or when she reached across him to hand out sandwiches, he’d get a scorch of the flesh of her arm against his shoulder. It was so subtle that no one, however scrupulously they watched, could ever have seen: it was a chain of innocent accidents only connected through his burning consciousness of her touch.
On the surface she was particularly nice to him, asking him about school, asking his opinions on things the others talked about, the boat, the weather. She chose him to explain to her the rules of racing demon; he had to play through the first couple of hands with her. When she leaned excitedly forward over the table to see what had been played — she was short-sighted but wouldn’t wear her glasses — she wedged him heavily into the corner, he smelled her sweat. His mother complimented Claudia on how she drew Graham out. He was supposed to be the shy one in the family arrangement: Alex was the brainy one, Phil the sporty one, and so on.
He began to be hardly able to look at his mother. She was like a humming black space where something familiar and unquestioned had previously been: he couldn’t hold her and Claudia in his mind at the same time. Passionately he began to love all the things Claudia did differently to his mother: she yawned when his mother waxed indignant about conservation or bureaucracy, she opened tins for her family’s supper (the chalet kitchen was primitive, but his mother would have done a slow-cooking casserole), she flirted with his father, leaning over him to see how the day’s painting had gone. She smoked cigarettes. She wore lipstick and stuff on her eyes, she smelled of perfume, she confessed carelessly that she wouldn’t know how to change a plug, let alone rewire a house (this was what Graham’s mother had done in the cottage, the previous summer).
One night, the last of Claudia’s family’s stay, there was a very high tide: the whole flat sandy bottom of the valley they usually walked down to reach the beach was flooded with the sea. They made a bonfire, cooked sausages and potatoes, and took it in turns to take a rowing boat out on the water. It was shallow and calm; they had to watch out for the current where the river flowed, but his mother didn’t believe in overprotecting them. The water that night was full of phosphorescence, tiny sea creatures that glowed in the dark: an enzyme-catalysed chemical reaction, their father told them.
Graham took Claudia out in the boat with her daughters: she sat opposite him while he rowed, and the two little girls cuddled on either side of her, hushed and still for once. Every time he lifted the oars out of the water they dripped with liquid light in the darkness, and where the oars dropped into the water they made bright holes and ripples of light went racing out from them. In the dark Claudia took her feet out of her shoes and put them on his. He was rowing in bare feet, he’d left his flip-flops on the sand. He rowed up and down, his stroke faultless, in a kind of trance, until eventually the others were shouting for them from the shore.
— Come on, you idiot! Don’t hog the boat! Give someone else a go!
And all the time she was rubbing her feet up and down his; he could feel the thick calloused skin on her heels and on the ball of her foot, her splayed brown toes and the hard polish of her nails, the sand she ground against him, that stuck to their ankles and calves in the wet bottom of the boat.
Then the next day she went, and he suffered. For the first time like an adult, secretly.
More than twenty-five years later, when Graham had children of his own, he saw Claudia again. The sixth-form college he taught at was sometimes hired out for functions out of school hours: one Friday when he’d had to stay late for a meeting, he met the delegates for some conference coming in as he left. His glance fell on the board in the foyer: a course on food hygiene. The woman who came up the front steps directly at him, her conference folder hugged across her chest, chatting with assurance to a friend, was stouter, and smarter (her buttons were all done up), and her hair was a shining even grey, cut in a shoulder-length bob. But it was unmistakably her: the pugnacious jaw, the upturned nose, the wide mouth. These things about her he’d forgotten for decades suddenly reconnected themselves into the unmistakable stamp of her.
The moment she had passed, he doubted it. He was hallucinating; some chance feature of a stranger had triggered a memory he hadn’t known he’d kept. He turned and saw her disappearing through the double doors. Then another woman with a folder came running up the steps, looking past him: she’d seen someone she knew. Claudia! she called. And the grey-haired woman turned.
That night when his wife came in from seeing a film with her girlfriends, brash and defensive from her couple of drinks in the arts centre bar, he told her about Claudia. He had been sitting marking a pile of school folders; he saw her take in the mugs with black coffee dregs left on the desk as if they were reproachful reminders of how austerely dutiful he was. Of his puritanism, as she called it.
He wasn’t sure why he told her about Claudia now. Carol had insisted years ago on confessing all her experiences with men, but he hadn’t really wanted to know, not out of jealousy but real indifference: how could these things be shared? But she leaned across him to collect the mugs and he caught the blare of wine on her breath: he imagined that she’d been complaining about him as usual to Rose and Fran, that the only things he ever got excited about were quantum mechanics and quarks. Then he felt as if he had cheated her out of some knowledge of himself without which she was vulnerable.
He told her when they were lying in bed together in the dark. She didn’t like his story. At first she didn’t believe it. — Oh, but Gray! You were just fantasising! Why would a grown-up sensible woman want.
Then she got up and put on the light, sat down at the dressing table and creamed her face, briskly and matter-of-factly, as if she’d forgotten to do it before she came to bed, working cream in with her fingertips against the downwards droop, concentrating angrily on her reflection.
— But what would you think if you heard about this. If you heard about a man, doing this to a thirteen-year-old girl, to your own daughter, to Hannah, what would you think? It’s horrible.
He didn’t tell her that he’d seen Claudia again.
He found out her address quite easily, by telephoning the conference organisers. He went to the house twice in his lunch hour when there was no one there. The house was tucked away down a little mews street, a square Georgian house with a modern glassy extension: when he peered inside he could see Turkish rugs on a stone-flagged floor, abstract paintings on the walls, a huge white paper globe for a lampshade. He checked the address on his piece of paper to be sure it was really hers: everything about the house was quietly wealthy, far beyond the reach of a laboratory technician, or even a university lecturer.
The third time he went after school and there was a plum-coloured old Jaguar parked in the courtyard under the flowering cherry, a few petals scattered on its bonnet. Claudia answered the door. She was dressed in a batik-printed kimono and he could smell the smoke from the cigarette she had just put down.
— Claudia? It’s Graham Cooley.
She was perfectly blank, searched her memory halfheartedly, accepting the hand he put out.
— It’s a long time ago. You came on holiday with us, stayed in our chalet in West Wales.
— Oh: Cooley! A long time ago! Goodness me! I do remember, I think. That family with all the boys. Which one were you? But that was in another lifetime! How extraordinary. And of course you’re grown up.