going to the seaside,’ he said.
It wasn’t Brighton, as Annie had guiltily pictured it.
Instead, they drove through the unravelling skein of East London, and Annie was intent on Steve’s face and voice, and she saw none of it.
But at last she asked dreamily, ‘Where are we going?’ and he laughed.
‘I told you. To the seaside. And to an East End boy like me, the east coast is the only seaside there is.’
Annie imagined Clacton then, or Southend, but they drove steadily further north, into a wide, flat countryside of huge yellow fields that tipped away at the edges under the arc of the sky. She looked curiously at the unfamiliar place names.
‘I’ve never been up here before.’
‘So it will belong to you and me, when you remember it.’
They didn’t look at each other for a moment after that.
They turned off the main road at last, down a side-road that seemed to lead nowhere. There was rough, open land on each side of them, humped over with gorse bushes, and black outcrops of wind-sculpted pines. Annie knew that they were coming to the sea, and then the road dipped suddenly and she saw it. There was a low huddle of houses and beyond them the North Sea, grey-blue even in the sunshine, and dotted with white horses whipped up by the wind. The little town was at the end of the road, with nothing beyond it but the sea. Steve drove to the sea-wall and they left the car in the shelter of it. In winter the waves would smash against the concrete and soak the street beyond with spray, but in midsummer the sea was a flat, sparkling dish. Annie and Steve climbed out of the car and leant against the wall to watch it.
The beach was big, rounded stones, slate-blue and dove-grey, black and shiny where the waves tipped over them. People walked slowly along the water’s edge, their shadows fractured in the moving water, and dogs bounded in and out of the foam.
Annie turned and saw Steve looking at her, and she breathed in the salt-fresh air.
The light slanting around them was clear and clean, painterly.
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘I think so, too. And it feels very remote.’
That’s right for us, isn’t it? Cut off from the world. Just for now, just for now.
‘Look.’
Steve turned her round to face inland. There was a little row of houses, painted pink and pale blue and eau-de-Nil, their wrought-iron balconies looking out over the sea. He pointed to a blue one, very trim with white-painted curlicues to the gable ends.
‘We’re staying in that one.’
‘Really? Aren’t they pretty? As if they’re painted on a backcloth for an end-of-the pier show. Let’s go inside and look at it.’
Steve produced a key from his pocket.
The little house had bare wooden floors and basket chairs that creaked, faded cotton curtains and a wood-burning stove in the room that looked out over the balcony to the shifting sea. It reminded Annie instantly and vividly of childhood holidays. She could feel the sand in her canvas shoes, and smell salt, and driftwood fires and tar. The complex of sensations and recollections overwhelmed her, and suddenly she felt almost painfully aware, all her senses newly primed. She walked across the room to the windows, touching the sun-blistered paint with her fingertips and with the salt-spray and dust from the curtains strong in the back of her throat.
I’m alive, she thought.
She turned to Steve again. He was watching her from the doorway, half in shadow, one side of his face bathed in the light off the sea.
‘Whose house is it?’
‘It belongs to a friend of mine.’
‘Have you been here before?’
‘Not like this.’
‘So it will belong to you and me, when you remember it.’ She echoed his words, confirming them.
‘Annie. Yes, Annie.’
They came together then, standing in the middle of the room where the brilliance from outside flickered over the ceiling. Steve took her face between his hands and kissed it.
‘Better than a hotel,’ he murmured.
‘Better.’
Hotels were for adulterers, Annie thought. For furtive, stolen times, while this little house was clean and innocent with the sand swept into corners and the beach stones arranged on the wooden mantelpiece. Was she dressing up the reality for her own comfort? Annie wondered. Perhaps she was, but for today, here and now, she knew that it didn’t matter.
‘What shall we do?’ Steve asked her.
She grinned at him. She felt like a child, excited, on its first day in a new place.
‘Let’s go out and explore.’
‘Let’s do that.’
They went out again into the intoxicating air. They walked along the beach, hand in hand, with their shoes crunching satisfyingly in the shingle. Annie stepped backwards to look at the houses along the front, and an unexpected wave washed around her ankles. She took off her shoes and poured the water out, laughing, and Steve carried them for her as they walked on. The ebbing tide uncovered runnels of glittering wet sand, and Annie left her footprints in them until the next wave came and left the sand smooth all over again.
Beyond the town there was a long shingle bank, and at the far end of it the high, round mysterious bulk of a Martello tower. Annie put her wet shoes on again and they walked along the track towards it. In the lee of the shingle bank there was a little yacht basin, and the dinghy’s rigging drummed out a sharp tattoo in the wind against the steel masts. When they reached the tower they stood for a moment staring up at the smooth, massive walls, and then looked past it at the line of coast that it had protected. It curved away into the distance, to the point where land and sea were indistinguishable.
They were dwarfed by the tower’s size and by the emptiness beyond it. Annie listened to the waves and the cries of the gulls, now amplified and now drowned out by the wind. She half-turned, away from Steve, and looked inland. Here there was empty marshland spiked with coarse grass and furrowed with muddy tide channels. Further inland, a long way off across the great flat space, she could just see the upraised finger of a church spire. The wind was cold on this exposed promontory, and she shivered. But she was exhilarated, too, by the remoteness of it, and by the noise of the sea and the wind that almost drowned their insistent thoughts. Under the vast sky Annie had a sense of their impermanence, a sense that they borrowed the majesty of their surroundings to reflect on their own small concerns. She knew that they were incapable of making even the smallest lasting impression. But the tower was solid, spanning the centuries, and the sky and the sea were everlasting.
And perhaps nothing else mattered so very much.
Suddenly
