I take a breath. ‘Michel wanted to show you off to me – is my guess.’
‘You think he’s that egotistic?’
‘You. The boat. The book. The life. Not in a bad way. He wants me to know that he’s happy.’
‘He does?’
‘He knows that his happiness matters to me.’
‘Right.’
‘We’ve known each other forever. Did he not tell you that?’ Indeed, the amount of damage I could do right now, with a few salient memories, is dizzying. ‘Do me like a boy,’ indeed. Not that I will say anything. If history teaches us one lesson, it is that all breakages must be paid for.
‘Yet you fucked me.’
‘I did.’
‘I’m glad you did.’
‘Not as glad as I am.’
This, at least, raises a smile. ‘And Michel?’
‘It’s all right. You think I’m going to say something? I’m not going to say anything.’
She says nothing to that.
Christ.
‘Will you? Tell him?’
Hanna waves her hand, of course not. ‘Things happen.’
This is such an accurate echo of my own internal dialogue, I can’t help wincing at its vacuity. No. Things do not just ‘happen’. This is more than chance – this is choice, this was choice. ‘I wanted you.’
She looks at me.
‘I still want you. I know we can’t, but there you are. Because you’re gorgeous, Hanna. You’re gorgeous. Among your other qualities.’
Your tiny breasts. Your small brown hands. Your wit and your stupidity wound round each other like a mechanism set to shake itself to pieces. Little kisses and spread thighs. The drama in you. The impatience. The bloody life.
Bone-thin boats carve the cold green water under Mandy’s window as she dictates ideas into her laptop. I imagine her discussing her injuries on public radio, in sprung rhythm, wedged between a folk singer and the COO of a hospice charity.
Hanna, luckily, is much more interested in what I think about Michel. Whatever else you say about infidelity, it does bring problems into focus. And here they come, a whole parade of them. Has Michel always written? Will his writing find a market? What will a writer do aboard a boat all day? Will it be good or bad for his writing, this voyage they have planned? The more Hanna talks, the more anxious she becomes. She is as doubtful as I am about Michel’s commitment to their voyage. ‘The thing is,’ she says, ‘I can’t handle that boat on my own.’ She’s couching all this in practical terms, but the image I’m getting of her is of a woman already abandoned, as her man sails away on an ocean of his own invention.
Oh, let go, fool. Let go and float. Pay attention to the things of the present. Hanna’s small feet. Hanna’s small breasts. Hanna’s small mouth. Make it smile. Make it gasp. Again. Seize the day. Seize her. This moment will not come a second time. I reach over and stroke her neck, hit the button of her shirt, hold it between my thumb and finger, daring her to let me, daring her to say ‘Again.’ ‘When will Mick be home?’
She moves towards me. ‘How will he get home?’
She has a point. I undo a button. Michel’s among friends, and he will be able to cadge a lift eventually, but this place is hardly on anyone’s way anywhere. Most likely some roads are completely closed. A button comes free. He might not get here for hours. For days. The entire beach is cut off. A button. A button. The mainland has sunk. Here’s all that’s left. She shucks her shirt for me. I hold her hands. ‘What do you want to do?’
‘He’ll turn up eventually,’ Hanna says, without worry, without enthusiasm. I lie her down on the floor. She barely moves, and then, feeling me draw near to my climax, she paddles against me, wriggling clear. I won’t have it. I won’t. I come down on her, hard, her bone a hot bar across my erection as I fill her again. Her eyes are glassy with an emotion stuck uselessly between anger and hunger. I grip her, fixing her, and kiss her lips.
At last her mouth comes open.
And, after a minute or two of this, here they come, the bloody words. Too soon, too soon – I am still just about inside her, for heaven’s sake – yet I cannot help but vomit them up. ‘I know you want me to apologise.’
‘No,’ she whispers, hushing me. ‘No.’
‘It’s all right. I’m not bloody going to.’
I roll off her and she staggers to her feet – I have been very rough with her – and she goes to the window to study the sky, her figure outlined against the boat, the half-finished ketch that will, finally and forever, take her away from me.
And him. If she takes Michel away, I may never see him again, either.
‘Come see.’
I stand beside her, resting my hand on her hip. ‘Around here,’ she says, ‘the sea comes up higher than the land. You can see it sometimes. Some tides.’
So it is true. Last night – the swollen green dome of the ocean, rising above the shingle like the top of a monstrous head – it was not just a trick of the light. The sea impends here, and the land is a bowl, waiting to be tipped, to be dipped, to be filled with the sea. It doesn’t make sense, how the land bends here. Not falling away. Falling up.
The first line of Michel’s novel reads:
Why run off to sea when the sea will come for you?
NINE
Occasionally Michel came home with me for tea after school. Dad wouldn’t be home until six-thirty, and Mum was busy upstairs, so we pretty much had the run of things. The kitchen staff were old hands, they knew what they were doing, so at this time of day the hotel looked after itself.
Out the front, the hotel made a big display of its picket fencing and ornamental dry-stone wall, but round the back the grounds abandoned all pretension and blended with the surrounding farmland. The fence separating the hotel garden from the river track was rickety and loose. I held a strand of barbed wire for Michel to duck under. ‘Mind the ditch.’
The lawn needed cutting.
‘Now I see why you come to school looking such a mess.’
‘No I don’t.’
‘You look like you’ve been pulled through a hedge backwards.’
I didn’t argue. Knowing Michel he probably had photographic evidence. Michel’s love of photography caused him a lot of trouble at school. One of his community service clients had phoned up to complain.
In an effort to stem his voyeurism, the school had told his mother. Now Michel was without a camera and lived with the constant threat of having his photographs discovered. ‘I’ve got them hidden.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ll show you sometime. They’re wrapped in plastic. They should be all right.’
‘I mean, it’s not as if you were taking photographs of them in the bath or anything.’ I wanted to show willing, to be outraged on his behalf.
‘I did, once or twice.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Michel.’
‘I’m joking,’ he said.
Now Michel spent his Thursday afternoons helping out the school caretaker. Of course it was impossible for the school to impound every photograph he had taken. He still had his collection, buried away: ancient faces caught unawares, flesh rilled against the bone, and how the weight of life and time bore down on every dusty room.
I led him round by a crumbling brick path to the conservatory. Sunlight bleared over panels of dusty glass, framed in dark green wood. When the hotel had regular guests, this had been our breakfast room. Now it was Dad’s workshop. The heating was turned off. The pipe that ran around the circumference of the room was no longer the scalding-hot hazard it had been. (We’d lived in terror of a guest’s child one day getting a hand stuck behind it.) Now Dad was getting by with a bottled gas heater that made an obscene lapping sound whenever the bottle started to empty. Three cement stairs led to the house proper. Dad’s vests were hung up on pegs beside the door. A black padded chair sat in the middle of the room. A medical examination lamp leant over the chair, perching on shiny tripod feet. A workbench ran along the long wall.