But today would be different. Neither of us could stomach the thought of eight hours’ Christmas television, and by mid-morning we were in a hired car heading down towards the South Coast. I hadn’t driven for ages. Luckily South London was more or less empty of traffic, and apart from a close shave with a red Sierra and a bruising encounter with the edge of a roundabout just outside Surbiton, we managed to get out into the countryside without serious incident. Fiona had offered to drive, but I wouldn’t hear of it. Maybe this was silly of me, because she was feeling (and looking) better than she’d done for weeks, and if anything I think I’d been more upset than she had by the absurd mix-up over the results of her tests at the hospital, when she’d turned up for her appointment only to be told that it had been cancelled, and somebody was supposed to have telephoned her about it, and the specialist who was supposed to be dealing with her case was at a protest meeting to complain about the administrator’s decision to close down four surgical wards immediately after Christmas, and could she please come back in a week’s time when everything would be sorted out. I couldn’t contain my frustration when she told me this story, and no doubt my frenzy of shouting and foot-stamping had shaken her far more badly than her nervous taxi ride and wasted three-quarters of an hour in the clammy hubbub of the outpatients’ waiting room. I suppose I was out of practice when it came to dealing with a crisis. Anyway, she’d recovered — we’d both recovered — and here we were, gazing in rapture at the barren hedgerows, the converted farmhouses, the diffident rise and fall of dun-coloured fields, like two children from an inner-city ghetto who had never been let out into the countryside before.
We arrived in Eastbourne at about twelve o’clock. Ours was the only car parked by the front, and for a few minutes we sat in silence, listening to the wash of sea against grey shingle.
‘It’s so quiet,’ said Fiona; and when we got out, the opening and shutting of the car doors seemed both to shatter and to be absorbed by the surrounding hush: making me think — I can’t imagine why — of lonely punctuation marks on a blank sheet of paper.
As we walked down to the ocean our footsteps made a pebbly crunch; you could also, if you listened closely, hear a whispered breeze, sibilant and fitful. Fiona unfolded a rug and we sat at the water’s edge, leaning into one another. It was extremely cold.
After a while she said: ‘Where are we going to eat?’
I said: ‘There’s bound to be a hotel or a pub or something.’
She said: ‘It’s Christmas Day. They might all be booked out.’
A few minutes later, the near-silence was broken by the click and whirr of an approaching bicycle. We looked round and saw an old and very corpulent man parking his bike against the wall, then descending the steps and crunching his way towards the sea, a knapsack across his shoulder and a resolute look on his face. When he was about ten yards away from us he put down his knapsack and started taking his clothes off. We tried not to watch as more and more of his huge, pink, astonishing body came into view. He was wearing bathing trunks instead of underpants and, much to our relief, he stopped at these, then folded his clothes in a neat pile, took a towel from his knapsack and shook it out. After that he started picking his way towards the water, pausing only to glance at us and say, ‘Morning.’ He was still wearing his wrist-watch, and a few steps later he stopped to look at it, turned back towards us and qualified his greeting with: ‘Afternoon, I should say.’ Then another afterthought: ‘You wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on my things, would you? If you’re going to be here a minute or two.’ His accent was Northern: Mancunian, at a guess.
Fiona said: ‘Not at all.’
‘How old do you reckon he is,’ I asked under my breath, as we saw him wade, without flinching, into the icy shallows: ‘Seventy? eighty?’
In another moment he had submerged himself and all we could see was his reddened pate bobbing up and down. He wasn’t in for long, only about five minutes or so, starting off with some easy-going breast-stroke, then switching to a vigorous crawl as he charged up and down the same stretch of water ten or twelve times, and ending up on his back for a leisurely return to the shore. When he hit the pebbles he rolled over and clambered out, rubbing his hands together and slapping his flabby upper arms to restore the circulation.
‘Bit nippy in there today,’ he said, as he walked past us. ‘Still, it wouldn’t do to miss. Couldn’t do without my constitutional.’
‘You mean you do this every day?’ asked Fiona.
‘Every day for the last thirty years,’ he said, returning to his pile of clothes and beginning to towel himself dry. ‘First thing in the morning, as a rule. Of course, today’s a bit different: it being Christmas, and so forth. We’ve a house full of grandkids and this was the earliest I could escape, what with all the presents having to be opened.’ Fiona averted her eyes as he began the tortuous business of getting his trunks off while holding the towel in place. ‘Are you from round here?’ he asked. ‘Or just down for the day?’
‘We’ve come down from London,’ said Fiona.
‘I see. Getting away from it all. And why not. Couldn’t face a day of screaming children and Granny hurting her teeth on the walnuts.’
‘Something like that.’
‘Can’t say I blame you. Madness it is, round at our place this morning.’ He pulled his ample stomach in a few inches and fastened his belt. ‘Mind you, it’s the wife I feel sorry for. Turkey, roast potatoes, stuffing and two veg for fourteen people. That’s a lot to expect of any woman, isn’t it?’
Fiona asked if he could recommend somewhere for us to have lunch, and he mentioned the name of a pub. ‘It’ll be full up, mind, but the landlord’s a friend of mine, so if you just mention my name they might find you a corner. Tell them Norman sent you. I shouldn’t waste much time about it, either, if I was you. Come on and I’ll point you in the right direction.’
We thanked him and, once he had finished dressing and had repacked the towel carefully in his knapsack, followed him up to the road.
‘Crikey, what a lovely bike,’ said Fiona, as soon as she saw it at close quarters. ‘Cannondale, isn’t it?’
‘D’you like it? This is its maiden voyage. It was a present from my eldest: they sprang it on me this morning. I do know a thing or two about bikes — been riding them all my life, you see — and I reckon this one ought to be a beauty. Only weighs about half as much as my old Raleigh: here, look at this, I can lift it up with one hand.’
‘How does it feel on the road?’
‘Well, not as nifty as I was expecting, funnily enough. I’ve come from a little way out of town and it’s a bit of a climb. I was finding it quite hard going.’
‘That’s odd.’ Fiona knelt down and started to examine the back wheel. I looked on, bemused.
‘You’d think with seven gears I wouldn’t have any problem at all, wouldn’t you?’
She peered even more intently at a cluster of very intimidating-looking cogs and ratchets at the centre of the wheel. ‘You know, you might have the wrong sort of cassette on here,’ she said. ‘If this is designed for racing then the ratios may be too high for you. It’s all to do with the cadence. This’ll be designed for about ninety r.p.m. and you’re probably doing nearer seventy-five.’