brisk tap and slipping the card back into a pocket, ‘No, she didn’t, she must have forgotten.’ He slides the key card across the table. ‘We’re all done then.’
‘Was everything OK for your sister?’ the pale young man asks, looking down at Matthew and tipping his head very slightly to one side.
Matthew stretches a smile without parting his lips. ‘Lovely,’ he says, ‘she’s had a lovely break.’
Matthew crosses the lobby and takes Maria by her arm and guides her out of the main entrance, holding her backpack in the other hand. His car is parked in the small car park right in front of the entrance to the hotel.
As they reach the car, he stops and turns her to him, then moves his hand up to the back of her head. He laces his fingers in her hair and pulls her face towards his and kisses her with all the passion of a drowning man. Maria hears a passer-by, an elderly voice say, fondly, as Matthew’s teeth clash against hers, ‘Oh, look …’
After the kiss, Matthew releases her and turns to unlock the car door, and at that moment, Maria looks around and sees the young woman from reception in her navy jacket, standing in the hotel entrance, behind the glass-panelled door, looking out at them both. Maria is close enough to see her own reflection layered against the young woman’s face and to know that the young woman is, in that moment, seeing her for who she is. It would take no more than a couple of steps.
Matthew turns, puts his hand on her arm again and pushes her gently into the car. By the time Maria has put her seatbelt on and looked back at the hotel entrance, the young woman has gone – or maybe she is still there, and it is simply that Maria herself has moved away and is no longer reflected in the glass panel of the door. Perhaps it is just that the light is different.
Maria thinks, She will have forgotten me before she has crossed the hotel lobby, lifted the wooden hatch on the reception desk, and gone to join the pale young man who will talk about his twins.
On the long drive back up to the Midlands, Matthew chats away about what he has been doing, about how the cat threw up on the bedspread yesterday, but he was in such a panic about finding her, he left it. It’s going to be her job when they get back, sorry, but she can hardly blame him.
Maria sits with her head resting against the side window, staring at the flash and rush of the passing countryside as they speed up the motorway, and when she doesn’t respond, he makes a snort of disgust – she knows he will bring her surliness up later – and turns on the radio. He turns it up so loud that the signal is distorted and the music wavers and blares. He sings along, loudly, tapping the steering wheel with his fingers and accelerating as he changes lanes in a way he knows makes her nauseous.
Maria says nothing. She thinks about the sea. She thinks about the red flag that flew in the wind on the pebble beach, and the shush and crash of the waves, and how the sounds seemed to magnify on that first evening in the hotel, as darkness fell, as if they were all that there was, out there in the calm of night. She thinks of how the rise and fall of the waves felt like the rise and fall of her own heart, how she could see her body rising and falling in that water, arms splayed as she floated on her back, hair pooling around her head. She thinks about her reflection in the hotel-lobby door that morning, twinned with that of the young woman.
The young woman is called Anya; her pale male colleague is Neill. When Anya returns to the reception desk, she says, ‘Have you done the printouts yet?’ and Neill replies, ‘No I was going to go on my break now, I can do them later if you want.’
Anya shrugs, thinking that it’s so quiet, these winter mornings, they go by so slowly, she would rather be busy any day. ‘No it’s all right,’ she says, ‘go on your break, I’ll do them.’
Neither Anya or Neill will think again about the sallow young woman with dark curly hair and the brother who came to pick her up, not even when they hear on the news the next day about the accident that afternoon, the two fatalities on the M23. The inquest into the deaths, some months later, will blame the driver of the car, Matthew Burton, for changing lanes too quickly, but it will get little publicity and there will be no reason for either Anya or Neill to make the connection.
Neill’s wife will have given birth to their twins by then, a boy and a girl. Anya will never tell him that she has loved him since the first week they met on their training course two years ago, the same course where he met his wife, loved him distantly and without hope, as you might love a pair of shoes or a cashmere wrap you can’t afford to buy.
February passes slowly in Brighton. On the pebbled beach, the waves continue to lift and crash, the red warning flag flies for the rest of the month, and to Anya it seems as though winter is never-ending, just keeps rolling around and around, and that summer and the busy season is both a far memory and will never come.
THE MEN ARRIVED IN the afternoon with horns and with dogs. Rain came in swathes; mist was cold on my skin. I slipped out after lunch. There was only packing to be done, and I didn’t want to stand and watch. ‘You’ll like it,’ they told me, ‘you’ll see. Just give it time. You’ll learn to be a lady,’ they said. ‘Oh miss, such airs and graces, you’ll have – you won’t know yourself!’
It was this that concerned me. ‘But can I come back?’ I asked them.
‘Of course,’ they said. ‘But you won’t want to. You’ll be so busy with your new life there. It’s time you grew up, anyway. You’ve been left to your own ways too long. You can’t stay here for ever. It’s time you went into the real world.’
I was sure I would be content to stay here, amongst these fields and woods, this hill, for the rest of my life; I did not care if I never discovered the ‘real’ world, but I said nothing. I could always run away, I thought; if the new place was as bad as I imagined, I could run away and come back here. But then I couldn’t stay; they would send me back. Could I live in the wild? I wondered, as I watched them label vests and socks; What would I need to survive there?
It wasn’t sadness I felt that day, but disbelief that this could be happening. I had never lived anywhere but here. I didn’t know if I could. It seemed inconceivable. I wasn’t sure how my body would function. So there was no sadness, only shock, only amazement that such a thing was taking place. Stupor, I suppose.
I couldn’t stand around and wait for the car to come any longer, so I crept away that afternoon, despite the weather, and, hidden by the bare blackberry canes, stole down to the fence at the bottom of the garden. Nothing seemed real, though I strove to experience each and every thing as I never had before. I passed the place where I fell and scarred both knees when I was four, the tree where John the gardener had built the lookout for my seventh birthday, the orchard where every September we harvested apples, the place where I laid out supper for the hedgehogs. I touched lichen, caught the sharp stink of badger, noticed the colour, even now, of the dead leaves on the ground, stepped on mushrooms and heard the curious slippery squeak their flesh made as it sundered – and I saw, smelt, heard, and felt nothing. I couldn’t yet feel the rain, which was heavier now. Each drop left only a numbness behind it that might be cold or might be hot, a small presence then absence, a coming and going too slight and too numerous to keep count.
I reached the fence and looked over the land. There was not
