be obvious he was deliberately ignoring her.
‘I’m Room 212,’ she says. ‘I’m thinking of staying a few more nights. Would you do me a deal if I did?’
Without speaking, he keys her room number into his computer and then wobbles his head from side to side in a small movement, pressing his lips together. ‘Can’t do anything on a sea view room, sorry,’ he says. ‘They’re in such high demand.’
Pointedly, she glances around the foyer, where the only other people in sight are a bulky white-haired man in a motorised wheelchair, and a tiny Asian woman she guesses to be his wife, who finishes tucking a tartan rug over his knees before turning and bustling to the Ladies.
‘Really?’ she says, turning back, fixing the young man with her gaze and thinking, Have you any idea how much I need a break, you skinny git?
He shakes his fine head. His fringe flops. She has the feeling that, if he thought he could get away with it, he might examine his nails.
She rests her arms on the shiny wood of the reception desk and leans forward, hoping her posture is indicative of a woman who is not likely to move away before she has been accommodated.
He gives a sigh that contains only the merest hint of melodrama. ‘Let me see what I can do …’ He taps away. ‘I could give you a reduced rate on a compact double. No view.’
The compact double has just enough room to walk around the bed, and when she looks out of the window, it is into the brick blank of a building she could touch with the flat of her hand if she lifted the sash and leaned out. But she can afford it for another three nights.
She walks a lot. She walks around the shops, the brash, loud chain stores in the Churchill Shopping Centre, where she passes clothes she isn’t looking at along the rails. In the pretty little Lanes, she pauses and stares into boutique windows, looking at the cashmere wraps in skin colours and shoes displayed at angles and chunky necklaces that look so cheap they must be really, really expensive. Occasionally, looking in those windows, she wonders about going inside, just to warm up, but the women behind the counters look back at her in a welcoming manner. She doesn’t want anyone to speak to her; she doesn’t want anyone to be friendly.
At least once each day, she goes down to the beach and stomps along it for a while, tipping forward as she forges against the wind, clenched and braced, enjoying the crunch and sink of the stones beneath her feet, until she is pleasantly exhausted and takes refuge in a café where she sips hot tea from a polystyrene cup and does some more staring. Staring is my job now, she thinks. I’m getting really good at it. This will work, she thinks. Walk all day. Watch telly in my compact cube in the evenings. Go to bed early.
Just before she goes to sleep each night, she picks up her phone from the bedside table and looks at it without turning it on, feeling the shape of it in her hand, the weight of all the messages accumulating inside. She puts it inside the drawer, next to the Gideon Bible, and closes the drawer very gently, as if the phone is a small, sleeping animal and she doesn’t want to risk disturbing it.
On the third morning, as she is crossing the foyer on her way to the breakfast room, the pale young man calls her over, ‘Miss Crossley,’ he says.
She greets him with a smile. They are almost old friends now. She struck up a proper conversation with him the day before, after she lost her key card on one of the beach walks. He ended up confiding in her that his wife is expecting twins, that she is from Romania, and they met over karaoke, that he is excited but nervous about becoming a father. She has worked out that his supercilious air is borne out of a touching if misplaced belief that the hotel he works for is quite posh. ‘Morning,’ she says, cheerily.
He hands over a hotel envelope. ‘Your brother left this for you.’
She takes it with an automatic hand and turns away, scarcely registering the young man’s brief look of disappointment that she doesn’t say thank you, when they got on so well the day before. She grips the letter in her hand as she crosses the foyer, and her knees are weak as she stands waiting for a table at the entrance to the breakfast room. Later, she will query her actions at that point, how swiftly she defaulted to automatic pilot, how normal that felt.
She doesn’t speak to the young woman who leads her to her table, hardly hears her as she puts the menu in front of her and reminds her to help herself to the continental buffet if she’d like fruit or cereal before her cooked option. She opens the envelope with shaking fingers and sees that inside it is a hotel compliment slip, folded in two. She unfolds it as the young woman pours her coffee, and doesn’t even acknowledge her with a look.
The compliment slip has four words on it, in blue biro.
I am you, remember?
Maria thinks, then, of how when her train arrived in Brighton three days ago, she felt such pleasure at the fact that the station was a terminus – she had come to the end of the line, the edge of the country, and from now on it was the open sea. And it is with a solid and unsurprised kind of feeling, a cold feeling, quite devoid of emotion or panic, that she looks out of the breakfast-room window and sees, standing on the steps of the hotel and looking right at her, a compact young man in a dark-grey coat, staring at her with a smile. He isn’t her brother.
The world closes down, as if a lid is being brought down on a coffin. She can almost hear the thump of the nails being hammered in. In the tiny, box-like room, with the view of the brick wall, Matthew guides her by her elbow to the bed and sits her down. She has the irrational thought that this would not be happening if she was still in the room with the view – as if, somehow, that would have enabled her to fly out to sea. He sits next to her and strokes the side of her face with the backs of his fingers while she looks straight ahead. He talks to her very gently, explains how disappointed he is, how sad he was when he came home to her note, how his first thought was to go down to the canal and sit by the side of it and slash his wrists and throw himself into the water with stones in his pockets to weigh him down. Was that what she wanted? Was it? He has missed her so much. He has been crazy with worry.
Afterwards, they lie together under the shiny eiderdown. He has pulled her close, and his skin feels clammy against hers – the room is stuffy. ‘The thing is,’ he says. ‘I am you. And you are me. We can never be separated Maria, because we are the same person. Don’t you remember? I told you. You were only half a person when we met. And then we met, and we joined, and we became a whole thing, and that’s the way it will always be. We can’t exist without each other.’
She lies next to him, breathing steadily. It has not been too bad so far. There will be more to come later, in two weeks or six weeks or six months. It will come, then. This is only postponement.
She props her head up on one elbow and turns to him, managing a smile. ‘How did you find me?’ she says, still smiling, as if it has all been an enormous game, and that is when his hand comes at her from nowhere, to grab the underside of her chin and force her head back against the headboard with a bang.
The pale young man who works behind reception is still on duty when Matthew comes to check Maria out of her room. Maria and Matthew have come down from the room together, but Maria sits and waits in the armchair on the far side of the lobby, her beanie hat pulled down low.
Matthew stands at the reception desk tapping the edge of his credit card on it while the pale young man looks at his computer.
‘No, it’s all paid for,’ the pale young man says, ‘your sister paid in advance when she checked in, didn’t she mention that?’ He glances past Matthew’s shoulder, across the lobby to
