‘Or wives.’
‘It’s barely six weeks, since you came out here.’
‘You count the weeks?’
‘Yes,’ she said candidly. ‘I have.’
‘Well then?’
‘Oh, I love you. That’s not the problem.’ She looked down at Clare again.
‘Nor that either, then,’ I said. ‘Unless you think she’s taken against me. Or would do, if I took Willy’s place in that way.’
‘I don’t know. She likes you now, I know that. But if we lived together …’
Clare herself answered the problem later that afternoon, when we’d all swum out to a wooden raft, anchored fifty yards from the shore. She and Laura were up on the platform, I was still lolling in the water, my arms on the edge.
‘Come up!’ Clare said urgently. ‘Come up! Please!’
Yet there was nothing imperious in her tone. She was simply worried, frightened that I might sink or disappear or swim back to shore on my own. She put her small hands out, gripping my wrist, tugging at me strongly. I joined them, heaving myself out of the water and onto the burning wood so that the whole raft pitched and the water boomed and belched among the drums beneath.
We lay in the sun for five minutes, the light too bright in our eyes to look at each other for more than odd seconds. Clare knelt over my back, scooping up the sea beside her, trickling it through her hands so that it fell in little cool points all over my skin. I could just see Laura, the line of her body like a run of small golden hills against the light, stretched out in front of me, lying on her back, one arm across her eyes, the other barely six inches from my nose. I could see the fine hairs like a forest on her wrist.
The ocean warbled all round us, the sounds from the small beach drowned in the afternoon heat. Without looking at me Laura moved her hand, blindly searching out the features on my face, before finally letting her fingers come to rest on my lips. She spoke then — but softly, her voice lost in the sea murmur.
‘What?’ I looked up.
‘I said “Yes”,’ she said.
The garden in Cascais had some strange trees round its edges — strange to me at least: like overgrown olive trees, the branches extraordinarily twisted, with heavily crusted bark, the whole blown sideways from many years in the south wind. They were old cork trees, last remnants of a time when this slope that led down to the sea had been part of an estate attached to a large house on the hill immediately behind Cascais.
The big house was long gone and all the open land, too, cut up years before into half-acre plots and filled now with expensive villas, ranch-style bungalows, ugly hotels, or tactless modern apartment buildings.
But Laura’s parents, Captain and Mrs Warren, when they’d left England more than thirty years before, had bought one of these empty plots intact and kept it that way, a last completely rural garden, a largely overgrown retreat amidst the vulgar glamour all round. Their house had originally been a farm building on the edge of the old estate and, apart from a new terrace looking out over the little harbour, they had left the property as it had been, a simple two-storied whitewashed house with thick bright umber slates running down a single sloping roof above.
The house was comfy in a chintzy, old-fashioned British manner. But the garden beneath the terrace was something quite original, far from the shires, a range of scent and dim colour on that first evening a month before when I’d first come out here with Laura to meet her parents. A great purple bougainvillaea and a tree like a weeping willow but with tightly packed yellow flowers festooning its branches, formed a centrepiece in the middle of the long coarse sea-grass. A path wound its way through the exotic undergrowth, with a table and chairs halfway down almost hidden beneath the flowering branches. A swing hung from a cork tree to one side and Clare was out there now, pushing gently to and fro in the warm half light, where the colours were smudged together in a strange, blue tinted luminosity.
Thomas Warren’s wife, Laura’s mother, was almost crippled with arthritis. She lay out, a long form in a heavily cushioned steamer chair on the sun-baked terrace, greeting me faintly, a rather disordered, nearly old lady, her face lined with long pain and discomfort. She wrapped a loose straggly woollen cardigan round an old print dress as if she was cold; a crumpled copy of the Telegraph lay at her feet like a faithful dog.
‘Mrs Warren,’ I said. She could barely lift her hand. ‘Don’t move,’ I went on.
She humphed. ‘I’m not likely to, I’m afraid. Bring up a chair — give him a drink, Tommy — and tell me all the news from home.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve been away some time, over two months,’ I said. It seemed, in fact, like a year, and England as distant as a childhood memory. That summer I’d been trying to live again, longing for anything new.
‘Been away, have you?’ Tommy asked. ‘Travelling?’ he added hopefully, bringing me over a drink, a perfectly prepared, fizzing gin and tonic, though I’d not asked for that, with just the right amount of ice and a delicate sliver, not a chunk, of lemon, all served up in a cut-glass tumbler from a Georgian silver tray.
Tommy, very unlike his wife, was a small, sprightly man in slacks and a navy blue blazer, impeccably dressed, his hair so meticulously cut and groomed that it seemed almost a theatrical creation, something got up with glue and bootblack.
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I’ve just been wandering round Europe rather. Since the school term ended. Places I’d not been to before. The Rhine, Provence, Spain …’
‘At a loose end, eh?’ Tommy seemed enthusiastic about this idea.
‘Yes. I suppose so. Though perhaps it’s age, too. One wants to see the sights before —’ But I left it at that, realising I must have been nearly half their age.
‘See the sights indeed!’ Tommy said with relish.
Laura had joined us. ‘My father — I told you — he was in the Navy. Given him itchy feet. What were you? Practically an Admiral,’ she added affectionately.
‘What do you think of Mrs Thatcher?’ Mrs Warren suddenly interrupted us, bright-eyed, looking up at me. Her eyes alone seemed to have escaped the encircling pain in her face, clear, bright blue pools in the threatening landscape.
Mrs Thatcher? I don’t know. She seems to have —’
‘She’s an abrasive woman.’ Tommy came in sharply. ‘She won’t do. Simply not on.’ I was surprised at his vehemence. He seemed so quintessentially Tory himself.
‘Oh come now,’ Laura said. ‘Isn’t she going to resurrect the Navy? A new aircraft carrier?’
‘Just the opposite. It’s all too late,’ Tommy said.
‘Too late for you, Daddy.’
Daddy humphed now in his turn, before leaving us to gaze out over the bay. I saw a big brass naval telescope then, mounted on the edge of the terrace. Tommy was a typical old naval buffer, I thought, retired to warmer climes. But how wrong I was about him too, in the beginning.
‘Why didn’t you join the Portuguese Navy?’ Laura asked mischievously. ‘After all you’re a Portuguese citizen now in any case, aren’t you?’
‘I should have done,’ Tommy shouted back to us. ‘Damn good sailors.’
‘Daddy retired early,’ Laura explained.
‘I see,’ I said. Though I didn’t.
‘They took our house away,’ Laura went on. ‘The land, everything.’
‘The Navy?’ I was surprised.
‘No. The War Office — the RAF I suppose. During the war, in Gloucestershire, the village where we lived. They took the whole village over and the land all round for some secret aerodrome. They were developing something very hush-hush. The jet, wasn’t it? And they never gave any of it back. Compulsory purchase.’
‘It’s all still there?’