11

Since John had come back, if he dreamed about anything, it was the house near Alora.

He was walking now, while he slept, while he dreamed, along the dusty road toward it; a finca of olive trees on a hillside. The grit got into his shoes; he stooped and took them off, and carried on walking with the sandals in his hand. Sun was beating on his back, and the house was exactly as he had first seen it after Claire’s death.

It sat just below the brow of the hill, a bare block on a cement stand. No roof, no glass at the windows, just a half-finished project that someone else had abandoned. There was no driveway, just a rutted track turning off the lane that led to the farm on the other side of the hill.

He turned and looked back down the hill.

He wasn’t a visionary. He had never considered himself to be one, even when he had the art of concept. He could tell a client about his plans for their own house and see it in technical shape. But he had no visions, no emotion. Except, of course, with Claire. From time to time in Rotherhithe, he had experienced a flash into the future that had all the detail and warmth of actual life. But that had been very rare.

Yet now, as he stood in front of the abandoned house, the roofless block, he did have a vision, a sensation of himself as the man who could live here. He saw himself sitting here at night. He saw the pool he would build in the back; not a clean architectural device but a deep, green-walled bath, not pretty, not tiled, not terraced, and with no steps, but a shaded dark-watered tank under a ceiling of bougainvillea, with no formal garden, but the tamarisk trees growing wild around him.

And he saw the rooms. Cool plain rooms. A kitchen, a bedroom, a studio at the back where the sun only came late in the day. A wood-burning stove. A desk.

A year later, when the restoration in Alora was half completed, he left everything else to the tenants in Rotherhithe. It was so much easier to leave behind the house that he and Claire had shared in London. It had been four years, and he thought that he had her death in proportion.

He made the mistake of taking the china they had bought together. Unpacking it in the new Alora house in Spain a fortnight later, he had wept like a baby over the pattern, a stupid pattern of ribbons and oranges, a sentimental pattern that he found he couldn’t bear. He had gone down to the local market in Alora on the second weekend and bought brown plates and cups; red clay undersides and glazed brown tops. He found it hard to eat when he was first there—the loneliness was almost tactile, alive, like a snake coiled behind every door. But there was time, empty time he had never allowed himself before. And so he forced himself to stare it down, and then fill it, even though the ache of loss was more acute in a strange place.

He would stare for minutes at a time at combinations of colors. And it was not getting himself used to the broader, blanker silences on the hillside that eventually saved him, nor the technical work, building work on the farmhouse. It was the colors. Different shades of green as the light came across the valley in the morning. Food on his plate in primaries of pepper and tomato and lemon. The skin of aubergines and plums. The olives, when they came in season. Deep lilac shade that crossed his bedroom at night in summer.

And he saw himself there now, dreamed himself there now. He saw himself alone in the dark pool behind the house, the temperature over a hundred degrees, the country asleep in the dry heat that drugged the air, a sky of violent blue blazing above him through the trees. He had hauled himself out onto the side and lain on the baking stone, and he had seen Claire’s footprints, wet footprints, as if she had climbed out of the pool alongside him.

And he saw what he had not seen then. A body materialized next to him. He saw the shape of the naked woman’s shoulder in his dream, her skin reddened slightly by the sun, and drops of water running down her back. He pressed his mouth to the drops of water and felt the heat under the slippery surface.

In his dream, he ran his hands down her back. She turned to him, laughing, lying back, her hands touching his face, saying something, whispering something, as she pulled his face to hers and took his hand and guided him to her. Now wriggling upright, her hair falling over her face, wriggling upright to sit astride him, the sunlight flickering across her, the stone under him hot to the touch, the body warm and silky in his grasp. He put his hands on her waist and she threw back her head. In the arch of her neck he saw the artery pulse; he closed his eyes in the dream and he felt her enclosing him, burning in his breath.

He took her greedily, urgently, altering both his body and hers so that eventually she was on her back and he was above her on the edge of the pool. She kept his gaze; her arms were spread out at her sides, she wrapped her legs around him. Nothing had ever felt so good, so right, to be lost with her.

He looked in her eyes and closed his mouth on hers.

And in the very same second he knew that the woman wasn’t Claire at all, but Catherine Sergeant.

He woke with a jolt of shock to the cold darkness of his own bed.