her through the steam.
‘And you read mine.’
They undressed each other, and lowered themselves into the welcome heat. Annie wound her legs around his, holding on to him. They took the soap in turn and washed each other, gently, as if their scars might open again. Steve leant forward and kissed her mouth, and then her breast as the bubbles of foam burst and revealed it. He stood up abruptly, sending a wave of scented water on to the floor. He lifted Annie out of the bath and wrapped her in a towel, and carried her through into the bedroom. They lay down as they were, wet and slippery, and they made love with all the urgency and pain and desperation that they had held at bay all through the day. And they lay in silence afterwards, not knowing, suddenly, what they could say to one another.
Much later, when they ate dinner together, it was with the spectres of the first afternoon in the restaurant watching them. Annie remembered that she had felt beautiful, and invincible, because of Steve. She looked at his dark face now with the weight of inevitability pressing down on her, and she pushed the unwanted food to one side of her plate, and drank too many glasses of wine. Instead of dulling her senses, the wine sharpened them. She could hear unspoken words and feel the touch of their hands, even though the rickety table separated them. Their hands were still clasped, as they had been at the beginning, but the real world was prising them apart and wrenching back the fingers, one by one.
Annie and Steve sat for a long time over that dinner. Not for the pleasure of it, because the silences that they were too careful of each other to fill were lengthening, but because they were like children, unwilling to let the day end. But at last Steve tipped the empty bottle sideways. It didn’t yield even a drop. He laid it on its side and spun it, and the bottle came to rest with the neck pointing away from them, out into the darkness. He shrugged, but Annie saw through the protectiveness.
She stood up, scraping her chair in the soft quiet, and went round the table to him. She put her arms around him and rested her face against his.
‘Don’t,’ she said. She was going to say, I can’t bear it, but she stopped short. You can, she told herself, because you must.
‘I don’t want to sit here any more,’ Steve said.
They looked at each other calmly. And then they went up the stairs, very slowly, turning off the lights behind them.
The wind was rising and the little bedroom was full of the sound of the sea. They lay down together once more, and they were glad of the darkness because it hid their faces. In the darkness they gave themselves blindly up to murmured words and to the touch of their hands, and then at last to the insistent tide that caught them up and carried them away.
When it had ebbed into sad silence they lay holding each other and listening to the real waves breaking on the pebbles below.
When Annie woke up in the morning she reached out her hand to Steve. The hollow of the bed beside her was still warm, but he had gone. She lay for a moment while recollection knotted itself around her, and then she got out of bed and went to the window.
The sky was veiled with thin grey summer cloud, and the sea was the same flat colour, almost white at the far point where it met the sky. There were people on the beach, sitting on the slope of stones or walking in ones and twos at the water’s edge. She watched them for a moment, seeing the more distant ones as little dark figures, matchstick people. One of them was standing still, staring out to sea. Annie saw that it was Steve. A couple with a dog passed by him, then a child, running, all arms and legs.
Steve was a long way off, diminished by the curve of the beach and the sky. He was a stranger amongst other strangers. Annie closed her eyes. When she opened them she saw him bend down to pick up a stone, and then pitch it in a wide arc into the sea. Abruptly Annie turned and went to the wardrobe. She began to take her clothes off the hangers, fumbling with them because the tears were blurring her eyes.
When Annie came downstairs Steve was at the front door. She saw him framed in the glass, a tall dark man whose face she knew as well as her own.
He opened the door and looked at her, startled for an instant and then seeing too clearly.
‘You have to go home today.’
It wasn’t a question, or a statement, but a confirmation.
The words spoken at last.
‘Yes,’ she said softy. ‘I must go home.’
He caught her hands in his then, unable to let her go as gently as he had promised himself he would. Out on the clean wide beach he had believed that it was possible. Now he didn’t trust himself any longer.
‘Annie.’ He tried for simple words. ‘I’ve never known anyone like you.’
Steve knew that to say more would be hurtful, and clumsy, but he couldn’t stop himself. ‘I want you to stay with me. I love you. Please don’t go.’
‘Oh, my love.’
Her face was wet, and she felt the last pain sharper than any she had suffered before. ‘I can’t stay. If I could change anything, if I could change this small, little world of me and …’
He stopped her then, his mouth against hers. ‘Don’t. I know that you can’t stay. I love you for that too, because you’re strong and I can’t be.’ They clung together, helpless, and the sun seemed to have left the sea and the horizon was a dull grey line, suddenly finite and fathomable.
It was Steve who moved at last. He turned away, making a pretence of putting things down on the table, tidying a tidy space. Annie watched him, her heart tearing inside her.
He said, ‘I’ll drive you to the main line station. There are good trains to London.’ That was all.
Annie nodded, and looked blindly away.
Now that the time had come they seized on the mechanics of preparing for travel, as if their busyness would keep it at bay. Steve brought down her suitcase and put it in the car while Annie telephoned the station. Within an hour, they had locked the door of the little blue house and turned away from the expressionless sea.
As they drove past the wide fields Annie commanded herself, Remember.
Remember the Martello tower, and the marshes and the skylarks, and the church by the pine woods. Remember the bedroom and the lighthouse beam sliding across the dim ceiling.
That’s all I can do, Tibby. Is that right? What is right, for any of us?
The miles to the station rippled past, as fast as in a dream.
Steve left the car in the forecourt and they walked into the ticket hall. At the glass hatch Annie bought one second-class single ticket to London. She put it into her bag without looking at it, and they went out on to the platform. It was crowded with shoppers going up to London for the day.
Steve jerked his chin impatiently. ‘Let’s walk up to the other end.’
They went, side by side, not quite touching one another. At the far end of the platform was the station buffet. Annie looked in through the glass doors at the hideous red plastic padded benches and steel-legged tables, at the perspex-fronted display cases with their curling doily exhibits, and the smeared chrome of the hot water geyser. The little sign hanging in the double doors said firmly, CLOSED.
When
