suited them fine. They’d wake every morning at 7.30, like they did at home, then go to the restaurant for breakfast. The buffet was laden with every type of food: pastries, cereal, cheese, flatbreads, muesli, little bowls of chopped-up dates and several trays of cured meats (there were a lot of Germans, Derek pointed out with slight displeasure. Carol told him to stop being narrow-minded. ‘The war’s over, Derek, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ He’d had the grace to look shamefaced).
After breakfast, Carol would set up her sunlounger underneath a parasol by the pool, slather herself in lotion and take one of her thrillers out to read until lunchtime. For hours she lay there, stately as a galleon, while Derek pottered about indoors doing heaven knows what with his crosswords and his gadget-instruction manuals he’d brought over especially from England.
‘What do you want them for?’ she’d asked when she spotted him packing the leaflets into his leather satchel. ‘How to’ manuals for digital radios, microwaves, dishwashers, broadband connections and the like.
‘I don’t get a chance to concentrate properly when I’m at home,’ he explained, turning to look at her with an affronted expression. ‘I like to know how things work. No harm in that, is there?’
She smiled, patted him on the shoulder.
‘No love, none at all.’
At lunchtime, still full from breakfast, they’d waddle over to the poolside bar and have a salad or some fresh fish. Derek would drink a bottle of the local beer. Carol would order a fresh fruit smoothie. They’d retire to their room for an afternoon nap and then, in the early evening before dinner, they’d watch a DVD from one of the selection the hotel had on offer. On Golden Pond was a favourite. Carol cried when she saw Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda, all shaky with age and set in their ways. There was something so moving about people in love growing old. It’s a future you never imagine for yourself when you’re young. And yet she knew, without quite admitting it out loud, that the characters in the film weren’t that much older than her and Derek.
But on the third day, one of the hotel staff had asked if they wanted to go on an organised excursion to the desert and Derek had signed them up, even though Carol wasn’t sure.
‘It’ll be an experience,’ he said, holding her hand. She noticed the thinness of his fingers, the brittleness of his pale nails.
‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ she said. She was nervous of the unexpected. Derek thought it was one of her failings. No sense of adventure. People were always talking nowadays of the need to ‘get out of your comfort zone’ but Carol would really rather stay inside it, thank you very much. If you were already comfortable, why would you choose not to be? That would be like deciding to sit on a hard wooden chair rather than a big soft sofa. It wouldn’t teach you anything apart from the fact you didn’t like hard wooden chairs and she knew that already.
‘Come on, poppet,’ Derek cajoled. ‘It might be fun.’
His eyes were bright at the thought of it. She saw that he’d caught the sun without even trying: his cheeks were pinkish-brown and the tip of his nose was beginning to peel. He was still a good-looking man, she thought, even now, two years shy of his seventieth birthday. His face had filled out as he got older and the extra weight suited him, made him look dignified.
He was five years older than her. When she first met him, at her friend Elsie’s twenty-first birthday party, he had reminded her of a dark-eyed bird: rapid and precise in his movements, his face a combination of angles and planes, his nose beaky, and with a shock of brown hair that seemed to blow about even when there was no wind. He had been skinny, almost too thin, and yet she had seen something comforting in his shape as soon as he walked through the door, bending to fit his gangly height into the small, smoky room. She had felt, even then, that she could tell Derek anything and he would understand. He didn’t need to say anything and still he would be in tune with everything she thought.
‘All right then,’ Carol said, kissing her husband lightly on the tip of his peeling nose. ‘Let’s go to the desert.’
And in the end, it had been amazing. They’d been driven in an air-conditioned jeep across a Roman causeway that connected the island to the mainland and then on to Ksar Ghilane, an oasis lined with date trees and criss-crossed with shallow drainage ditches. The night had been spent in a spacious tent and, although Carol had been worried about the heat, the temperature dropped, and she found that she slept deeply, her dreams accompanied by the rhythmic tautening and loosening of the linen canopy.
The next day, the tour operators had laid on an evening camel ride into the desert.
‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ Carol asked, spearing a fresh chunk of pineapple on her fork over breakfast. ‘You know what you’re like with your leg.’
Derek smiled at her. ‘I’ll be fine, sweetheart.’ He leant back in his chair and stretched his arms out wide. ‘I feel like a new man.’
Getting on the camel had been the hardest part for both of them. The animals were trained to sit still while clueless tourists attempted to clamber on to the saddles, but then there was a moment as each camel stood up when you felt as though you were going to be pitched over and thrown onto the ground below. Carol shrieked loudly, much to the amusement of the Berber guides. But Derek took it all in his stride. He’d grown up on a farm, Carol reminded herself, feeling a little foolish at all the fuss she’d made.
They’d trekked for an hour, just as dusk was beginning to creep in across the flat horizon, giving the smooth, sandy slopes a reddish hue, lit up from the inside like paper lanterns. The desert light resembled nothing she’d ever seen: translucent, shimmering, as though the landscape had been freshly painted that morning and they were the first to walk through it.
Neither of them spoke for the length of the trek. They didn’t need to. They could sense, without talking, the calm happiness radiating from the other.
Later, they sat around a campfire and were given delicious couscous to eat in clay bowls. The Berber guides sang and played drums and encouraged the others to dance. Derek, exhausted from the ride, declined but Carol found herself wiggling and jiving and clapping her hands along with a pair of dreadlocked Scandinavian backpackers.
They slept in sleeping bags underneath the open sky. The stars, like everyone had said they would be, were brighter but Carol was most taken with the blueness behind them, which was clearer, deeper than at home. She sensed, if only she could reach out and touch it, the sky would feel like velvet against her fingers.
When they got back and printed out their photos, none of the images did justice to their shared memories. It is one of the things that makes her most sad, she thinks now, shifting uneasily underneath the duvet: the knowledge that there is no one else alive who would have experienced the same things as she had, with whom she could lean across the table and say, ‘Do you remember when … ?’ and be assured of a complicit smile, a nod of the head, a hand patted with familiarity and love.
Milton has stopped purring and fallen asleep. Carol, shifting her right leg, feels the jab and tingle of pins and needles. There is a moistness on her cheek. When she wipes at it with the back of her hand, she is surprised by the confirmation of tears.
Stupid, really, she tells herself. Stupid to cry over something that you can’t do anything about. She takes a deep, raggedy breath. She feels wide awake.
Admitting defeat, Carol looks at the alarm clock. It is one minute past five in the morning.
