10

On the first day of the summer holidays I lay in bed extra-late, and when I drifted down in my pyjamas and dressing gown Mum was on the phone in the hall – she widened her eyes at me as she listened, then turned her back: ‘Oh, well, yes,’ she was saying, ‘that would be very nice.’ In the kitchen my breakfast was laid beside a heap of runner beans she was stringing and slicing for lunch. I shook out my cereals and soon the roar of the kettle obscured what Mum was saying on the phone until the dead jingle when she rang off. She waited a moment, perhaps writing something down, then rushed in saying, ‘Good morning – still – just about!’ and kissed me and hugged me. ‘Well, this is nice!’ she said.

‘Mum!’ I said, struggling but not minding.

‘Eight whole weeks!’ she said. It was as though she was the one on holiday and I saw for a confusing few seconds how much she must have missed me.

‘Who were you talking to?’ I said.

‘Oh . . .’ – she let me go: ‘it was Esme – Mrs Croft – going on, as usual!’

‘How is she?’ I said.

‘She sounds fine.’ She looked round for her apron. ‘Anyway, she’s coming to tea tomorrow, so you can ask her yourself.’

The next day I heard Mrs Croft come up the stairs, quiet talk in the hall, and ten minutes later Mum called up to me. I dawdled down in a fractional sulk of compliance. ‘Ah, Dave, good afternoon!’ Mrs Croft said when I came into the sitting room. ‘How nice to see you again.’

‘Hello, Mrs Croft,’ I said – I’d been David to her before. She was wearing a blue sleeveless blouse and white linen trousers, tight round her hips when she started to stand up.

‘Look, I’ve taken your place, Dave . . .’

‘He can change places,’ Mum said, in strange high spirits; she poured a cup of tea for me, and then went out to get more hot water.

I sat down on the Windsor chair. ‘How are your new loose covers, Mrs Croft?’ I said.

She stared for a moment. ‘Well, of course I’m jolly pleased with them. No, they’re marvellous. You must come and see for yourself – come and sit on them!’

‘Ladies in Waiting, I think, wasn’t it,’ I said. I saw the dining room overrun with their hoop skirts and bonnets.

‘I think you’re right,’ she said. ‘A touch of Regency elegance!’

When Mum came back into the room a brief silence fell, while we watched her refilling the pot, and Mrs Croft said, ‘Do you know, I was thinking, Avril, we should go away somewhere,’ in the capable tone I’d already come to know.

‘Oh, goodness,’ said Mum, ‘what, all of us, you mean?’

‘You deserve a holiday,’ Mrs Croft said. ‘Doesn’t she, Dave?’

I agreed she did, flustered at the idea of sharing it with someone we barely knew. ‘I think we’re going to Clevedon with Uncle Brian,’ I said.

Mrs Croft smiled and blinked in a brief show of respect for this plan. ‘I was thinking more of Devon. Sidmouth? Budleigh? What do you think?’

‘Devon! Gosh, well . . .’ said Mum, with a hesitant smile at me. ‘It’s a thought, isn’t it, love? I mean, Susan and Brian . . .’

‘I’ve just had my dividend,’ Mrs Croft said, ‘so you don’t need to worry about that.’

‘Oh, we couldn’t let you pay for us,’ Mum said, and looked across at me again.

‘Or, of course, there’s North Devon,’ Mrs Croft said.

‘Well,’ I said, caught, as I now saw I was, between the two women.

North Devon it was. At the start of August we drove down for ten days at Friscombe Sands: the Cliff Hotel, dinner, bed and breakfast, twelve guineas a head, as Mum let me know. In the Morris I seemed to have grown out of my carsickness, but in the back of the smooth stifling Snipe I rolled down the window and took in deep breaths against the tightening of my gut and spreading numbness in my fingers. ‘You should come in the front, Dave,’ Mrs Croft said, but there was martyrdom in my sickness too, and I stayed where I was. My half-useful trick was to think in great detail about something so private and absorbing that for minutes at a time I would forget to feel ill. Now, as the green drains and hedges of the Somerset Levels rolled past, I worked my way back to the dim basement changing room, and the time I’d been sitting there whitening my cricket boots when Roberts and Morgan came in – the incredible chance of being there unnoticed and watching them change into their white shirts and trousers, long glimpses, while I ran the soaked sponge round the heel and then trickily over the tongue of each boot, of Morgan’s legs and downy stomach and Roberts’s broad beautiful back. And then when they’d gone clattering up the stone stairs together in their studs, removing my own shoes and socks and slipping my feet into Roberts’s worn-down old slip-ons and dragging round the room to look at my changed image in the full-length mirror.

I’d pictured the hotel perched high up, but it turned out the cliff was behind it, a crumbling stretch of sandstone that loomed over the car park at the back. The hotel itself was painted white, with its windows and one or two fancy details royal blue. Mum and Mrs Croft had a twin-bedded room with a balcony overlooking the Bristol Channel; I was in a room that Mum agreed, when she knocked on my door, was very small but seemed almost to envy (‘so much quieter’), up on the top floor, with a window that looked out at the side wall of the pub next door. ‘You’re in a world of your own up here,’ she said, and closed the door behind her and went back downstairs. In fact I would be sharing the bathroom and lavatory with the two other rooms on this floor, and as I unpacked and tried to make the place my own I had a trapped and still nauseated feeling. The basin with its glass shelf and mirror was jammed in next to the door, the wardrobe swung open noiselessly ten seconds after it was closed. I sat, and then lay full length, on the bed, under the sloping ceiling, and wished we had stuck to our usual plans, or just gone to Weston by ourselves, as we sometimes had before. Then I got up and went down and knocked at the women’s door.

‘Hello, love,’ Mum said, ‘feeling a bit better?’ She was hanging up her skirts and her evening frock, and I saw I had to make a go of it for her. ‘The water here’s lovely and soft.’ She seemed tired, but refreshed by a wash, and the prospect of ten days without work of any kind. Mrs Croft could be heard in the bathroom having a wash herself – this was one of three rooms in the hotel with ‘en-suite’ arrangements, ‘Which I really insist on,’ she said. I went out onto the balcony and just then the clench of the carsickness lightened and I found myself squinting and almost grinning in the dazzle of arrival, of being here, sunlight and voices, breeze off the sea and the yacking of gulls. I took in the view, I felt excited and oddly conspicuous to the people in the street below, who had settled in days ago and all knew their way round. The hotel seemed to be at a point where things changed, where the long open road above the beach on the right turned a narrow corner to enter the old town on the left, with the harbour glimpsed from here over roofs of the buildings between. The beach was half a mile of silver and gold, bare now at low tide, the sea brilliant but far off; steps in the wall just opposite led down to the sand, which stretched away to a tumble of rocks and the reddish-brown cliffs that closed off the view to the north. Active swimmers and paddlers were distant silhouettes against the sheen of the wet sand; though all across the beach up to the low seawall a few yards away there were people with towels and umbrellas, stripy wind-breaks taut in the breeze, small children digging and screaming, the loose threatening knots of other families, and among them the dozens, I couldn’t start to count them, of almost naked boys and men. There were two men getting changed just below me at the top of the beach, easing wet trunks down under towels, and both of them looking out and then shouting, ‘Ollie! Oi!’ to a third man who jogged up towards them from the water, thick fair hair pushed back, a wide grin on his face, odd overlaid areas of sunburn and suntan on his arms and shoulders, and blue square-cut trunks that the sea had half succeeded in tugging off. It was as if Ollie sensed my helpless stare, he looked up as he reached for a towel, drew it round him and shivered and stamped as he talked to his friends, and I went quickly back into the room.

When I went down to fetch the ladies for dinner, Mrs Croft was still in the bathroom, getting ready. Mum was sitting in the little round armchair, changed and made-up, with her handbag beside her. The long window was open to the noise of the sea and the gulls and families trailing in from the beach. I slipped out onto the balcony again and under a broad show of drinking in the view I scanned the boys still playing on the sand; when I leaned out there were others coming up the pavement below, some I’d seen already this afternoon, in the street or in the tea-shop with their families, or quickly getting dressed behind the rocks. I heard Mrs Croft saying, ‘I don’t altogether trust that balcony . . .’, but Mum stepped out and leant beside me on the narrow iron rail. In the thick evening sunshine she looked like an actress, pale powder and strong red lipstick. ‘You look pretty, Mum,’ I said. ‘Hm, thank you,’ she said, and peered out at the beach. The tide was the obvious interest, everything unguessably covered as the waves pushed late sunbathers up and up towards the seawall. The sun itself was a dull glare, baffled in haze as it dropped towards the Bristol Channel. We watched in our usual freedom from having to say much. Sometimes the boys, the families they were with, looked up from the street, or from the beach below, and half took in the puzzle that we always represented. I felt the tidal movements of holidaymakers towards hotel lounges and guest house dinners, the rough unanimous rhythms of an English seaside resort, flow beneath us and catch us up too.

‘Are you happy with your room?’ I said.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, it’s a nice room.’

‘I thought you’d have your own room, Mum.’

‘Well . . .’ – she made a little grimace – ‘Esme’s paying, you know . . . By the way, she says she’d like you to call her Esme.’

‘Does she . . . oh, all right, then . . .’

‘She feels Mrs Croft’s a bit formal, now we’re all getting to know each other better.’ I’d never called an adult by their first name, even Mavis I called Mrs Watchfield. When we shuffled back into the room I called out, ‘Good evening, Esme!’ but the swagger of adult equality was undermined by the feeling of cheek. Hunting round for her handbag, Esme merely said, ‘Ah, Dave,’ and then we went down for dinner.

In the dining room we had a table in the window, something else it seemed Esme insisted on. That first night on holiday I felt a prey to waiters, all settled into their parts in a way I wasn’t; it was raw contact dressed up with rigmarole and an allowance of charm they could easily withhold. As new arrivals we were greeted by Terence the head waiter, a tall lean-faced Yorkshireman in a black jacket who clearly enjoyed the unexpected effect of his voice and his humour in the soft Devon setting. We watched him at work on the next table, telling an elderly couple what to order and writing it down left-handed, his paw curled round the pad. In a minute he was back, at the window table.

‘Good evening, ladies!’ he said, in a carrying tone.

‘Ah, yes, good evening,’ said Esme, ‘now, I’d like—’

‘Welcome to Friscombe, welcome to the Cliff Hotel’ – passing them small blue-bound menus, and smiling thinly at them. The third menu was tucked under his arm, and it was only after Esme had asked for a gin and tonic that his head jerked back and with a quick glance at the women, as if they were all in on the joke, ‘And who do we have here?’

Mum looked up with a frown, but also, in the forcefield of a joker, a quick regretted laugh. ‘This is my son, David.’

Terence’s head went back a fraction further. His shock was disguised in a quick-thinking silence of four or five seconds, as he stared out of the window. Then he leant in confidentially – ‘Let me know if he gives you any trouble, madam, won’t you,’ he said, and grinned at his own mischief and pinched the smooth back of my neck quite hard.

‘And I’ll have a gin and tonic too,’ Mum said.

When he’d gone Esme sat gazing round at the room with a complicated expression, as the one who had picked this hotel, and wasn’t yet ready to confront its failings.

Besides Terence, who barely spoke to us again, there were two staff, a waiter and a waitress, who over the week and a half of our stay came to colour and unsettle our lives, and not only at mealtimes.

There was the Irish girl, Maureen, in a self-absorbed daze about doing things right, who made a dozen shy journeys from the sideboard to the tables, each time bearing a single item – a fish knife, a forgotten napkin, a pat of butter. Her procedure seemed to match the tempo of the kitchen, a semi-deliberate way of filling the long gap between ordering and serving. The wait for the starter felt the longest, measured out by Maureen’s well-meaning walks back and forth across the room and questions about who was having the soup. At last there came a point when the setting was complete, we had all the right cutlery, our bread roll and our water, in fact we’d eaten our bread roll some time ago and Esme was on to a second gin and tonic, and Maureen would stand in hesitant triumph by the table and enumerate the things she’d amassed on it. ‘You’ve got your knife, you’ve got your fork, you’ve got your other knife . . .’ until her climactic phrase, ‘You’ve got everything except your meal!’ At which Esme, with unusual sweetness, would say, ‘You’re absolutely right, dear.’

Esme said Maureen was a ‘sweet little homesick thing’, and followed her movements indulgently when the melon and two bowls of cream of celery soup were finally brought to the table. The evening sun streamed through the big window, and while Maureen was serving I gazed at the figure who passed from the shadow through its horizontal brilliance as he moved round the tables on the far side of the room. This was Marco, ‘from Bari’, ‘nineteen’, ‘first time in England’ – I picked up the facts from just-heard questions at other tables. Marco, here in the room, in and out of the shadows, back and forth through the swing doors of the kitchen, working in the section furthest from us, though sometimes he came over if called to a nearby table, or helped Maureen with the plates for a large serving. The food wasn’t at all what Marco was used to, and I noted the ways in which he wasn’t quite as charming as the guests expected. He answered pleasantly each time he was asked where he came from and how long he was here for, but he didn’t lay it on. Esme liked a stroll after dinner, just to clear the head, and when we came back to the hotel the dining room could be seen through the large seaward window, empty and brightly lit, and Marco, tie off and sleeves rolled up, setting places for breakfast, while Maureen ran the hoover in and out under the tables and got in his way. There was something illusionless in the scene, stage-hands at work now the audience had left. Once when we came in from behind the hotel, Marco was standing by the lattice fence that screened the kitchen door, smoking a cigarette, I nodded bravely to him, he raised his head and half smiled as he blew out smoke, and the question of what he did and where he went when he wasn’t working seemed to hang in the night air. By the third day at the Cliff I could tell if Marco was present, even with my back to the room. The pitch of his voice, glancing light of his accent on English words, wove itself through the air, and the air itself had the shimmer of his presence as he moved behind us – then a neutral feeling, of interest removed, till the waft of the kitchen door and his tart little laugh brought him back in range.

For a long stretch of every day we were on the beach, with the two light folding chairs, in different stripes, and the useful groundsheet that Esme had brought. Esme was fair-skinned, and got Mum to rub cream methodically into her shoulders and the white scoop of her back left bare by her swimsuit. Sometimes I saw to Mum myself, sometimes Esme said, ‘Let me do that.’ Mum was a strong swimmer, quick as a knife, and was soon off past the rocks and out of sight. Esme strolled into the sea as if looking for something else, fell forward and shoved around with her head held up high. When I swam by myself I left them in their chairs, or Mum stretched out perhaps at Esme’s feet, and ran off towards the waves in the lick of windy sunlight embracing and exploring my bare body. On the beach in high summer with the light behind me I was nearly a copper-tanned white boy – I felt less exposed wearing next to nothing, just my cherry-red trunks with white stripes down the hips. One day we went to Combe Martin, another to Croyde, with its hard ribs of sand at low tide, and breeze-ruffled ribbons of clear water waiting between them. There were beaches all around, each with its promise of new men to look at and the pang of missing Ollie and the others at the beach we already knew. Did the women catch even a hint of this? I dissembled by instinct.

When I swam by myself and came back up the beach, panting, heart racing with a new sense of power, I kicked past other nearly naked boys and men, in their family groups, glimpses keen and keepable as snapshots, and sometimes they glanced round too, unthinkingly curious as to who I was with, how I fitted in. I jogged up to Mum and Esme, in their low chairs. Mum shaded her eyes to look at me, and we chatted, all three, as I wrapped a towel round me and looked down on them, Esme large, white and firm in her red-skirted bathing-suit, Mum more exposed in her black one-piece, a smaller and leaner woman. There was scope for embarrassment for a teenage boy at the sight of their unsupported bosoms and bare thighs – something I sensed that I ought to feel and, fleetingly, did. They weren’t unlike other holidaymakers, several women in pairs or trios paddling together or sharing a table in the hotel dining room, but the difference was that these two had a foreign-looking child. I wondered sometimes what those others made of us – I was a refugee, perhaps, an orphan being taken to the seaside for a special treat.

Esme brought the Telegraph to the beach, and worked at the crossword, clicking her biro while she thought. Sometimes Mum leaned over with a dim smile, and Esme let her see the corner she was stuck with. After some hesitation Mum would say, ‘Not WOMBAT . . .? No . . .’ and Esme would stare and then write it in. Each day one of the clues was a quotation with a word missing, and these Esme read out loudly and slowly, as if speaking to a Frenchman. ‘ “In the south suburbs at the is best to lodge” (Twelfth Night). Eight.’ ‘At the Elephant!’ I said, and she raised an eyebrow and wrote it in. The next day I was keyed up about the quotation – but it turned out to be from Paradise Lost, which we hadn’t done yet, and I let us all down.

When the puzzle was finished, more or less, she turned to the share prices listed in tiny print at the back of the paper. ‘How are my Town and Country doing today?’ she would say, and pull a face when she found the entry and its plus or minus figure. She also had shares in something called Malahide, which were on the up and up. ‘They seem very strong, Dave,’ she said, ‘but it was a tip from Gilbert, so I don’t wholly trust them.’

‘You could always sell them,’ said Mum, bored by Esme moaning about money when she seemed to have so much of it.

‘Well, I could,’ said Esme, and gazed forgivingly towards the sea. A minute later, ‘A pretty little thing,’ she said, with a nod to draw Mum’s attention to a woman settling further down the beach.

‘Mm . . .’ said Mum, in the bland screened tone she had at times with Esme.

‘Though the husband looks rather a brute.’ It was the beautiful husband I’d been watching already, as he changed under a towel, very deftly, just a glimpse of bare bum, and then knotting the drawstring of his tight blue trunks, and now I peered at him strictly, as if weighing up what Esme had said. The man trotted down to the water’s edge while the pretty wife folded his clothes and put on a hat.

There was an odd sharing or not sharing of talk between the three of us on the beach – me and Mum, Mum and Esme, sometimes Esme and me, rarely all three of us. I lay sunbathing, on my back then on my front, with Washington Square, which I wasn’t really taking in. Esme chatted, in her forthright fashion, and Mum, sitting back in a stupor with her eyes closed, smiled distantly, and murmured in a way that seemed both intimate and evasive, as if conscious that I could hear. ‘Did I say I had a letter from Bobs?’ Esme said. ‘Mm . . . no, you didn’t,’ said Mum, with a pinch of a smile on her upturned face: ‘how is she?’ Esme sighed. ‘Well, I don’t think it’s been easy for the old sausage. That house in Fulham takes a great deal of work.’ ‘Yes, it’s a large house, isn’t it.’ ‘And you remember Betty Matthews, dark little thing, reminds me just a tiny bit of you.’ ‘Did I meet her?’ ‘She was at Bobs’s party that night.’ ‘There were so many people there, weren’t there . . .’ Mum said, and then, ‘Oh, yes, of course!’ in a tone of such certainty that I knew she couldn’t remember this woman at all, but didn’t want Esme to describe her further: ‘Yes, Betty.’ At which point, turning over, I said, ‘I didn’t know you’d been up to London, Mum’ – and she opened her eyes and looked at me with a slight concern. ‘I’m sure I told you,’ she said. I was teasing her, wounded a little by the fact she’d kept it secret. Esme had a disconcerted frown, as if sensing she’d put her foot in it but not exactly knowing how. ‘Well, it was some time ago, wasn’t it,’ she said, ‘I mean when was it, back in May probably.’ ‘No, you didn’t tell me,’ I said, ‘I’d have remembered.’ Mum sat up then and smiled at me in a private way that seemed to call on some family understanding, and need for tact. Esme said, ‘Do you care for London, Dave?’ ‘Well, I’ve only been a couple of times,’ I said; ‘we went to the National Gallery.’ This set Esme off. ‘Do you remember what Betty said that time – when she got back from London and Derek said, “Well, where did you go? Harrods? Or the National Gallery?” And she said, “Oh, Derek . . . you can’t expect me to remember things like that!”’ ‘Anyway,’ Mum said, teasing me in turn, sitting back and closing her eyes again, ‘I don’t have to tell you everything I do.’ ‘Of course,’ said Esme, ‘we all knew where she had been. Poor Derek . . .’

A little later, when Mum had gone into the sea, I said, ‘Do you have a party line, Esme?’

‘For the telephone, you mean? Oh, no, Dave, no – can’t stand the things. The number of times I’ve tried to ring your mother and there’s been these other people on the line – I don’t know how she puts up with it.’

‘Do you know who they are, then?’ I said.

‘Some man in the town, isn’t it – I think your mother knows. He seems to spend half his life blathering on the phone. Probably someone we see all the time without realizing it.’

‘Yes, I wonder if it is,’ I said, and rolled over and gazed out to sea, with the bright floating thought that I could find out who Lovey was, and beyond it the other, not really surprising, disclosure that Esme was always on the phone to Mum.

‘You still haven’t told me about Burma,’ said Esme, at dinner that night, ‘not really.’ It was about halfway through the holiday.

Mum shook her head and looked down, ‘No . . . well,’ she said.

‘I suppose you weren’t there all that long.’

‘No, I wasn’t.’

‘Sort of how long?’ said Esme, distracted briefly by signalling to Maureen with her wine glass.

Mum sighed, reluctance half-disguised as thought. ‘Well, less than a year, you see.’

‘You were a secretary, I think you said . . . or perhaps something more?’ Esme narrowed her eyes at me, as if we were colluding in dragging secrets out of her; though to me, to Mum as well, it was one of those alarming occasions when an outsider saunters unawares into a subject very rarely mentioned at home. At passing moments Burma was allowed to be beauty and adventure, but mostly it was an avoided subject. ‘Do you think your mother was a spy?’ Esme said.

‘Mm, I expect so,’ I said.

Mum sniffed at this. ‘Nothing so exciting,’ she said. ‘No, I was just a typist really, in the governor’s office, though he liked me and, you know, sort of took me under his wing.’

‘Indeed,’ said Esme.

‘He was a nice old boy.’

‘Who was he?’ said Esme.

‘Well he wasn’t the governor for very long, of course – he was the one who handed over to the Burmese. Sir Hubert Rance.’

‘Rance . . . right,’ said Esme, and nodded knowingly at me.

‘He didn’t enjoy very good health,’ Mum said, in an oddly rehearsed tone. ‘The climate really didn’t agree with him. Horribly hot and humid, Burma!’ She looked round and smiled with relief at the sight of Marco approaching – and for me the air thickened and tingled.

‘It must have been exciting, though, for you, Av,’ said Esme. ‘Quite dangerous, too, I expect.’

‘Well it was – thank you so much,’ nodding gratefully at Marco as he set down her tomato juice. I caught the quick closeness of his sweat, the curve of his thigh as he turned away to the next task.

‘So glamorous!’ said Esme. ‘And there was I, stuck in the Pay Corps at Kidder . . .’

‘Mm, this was after the War, of course,’ Mum said, drawn into explaining things after all.

‘Yes, but still . . .’

‘In the War I was stuck in a typing pool in London, also quite boring, though probably more frightening.’

‘I don’t really see why you went to Burma, in that case?’

‘I went to Burma to get away from home.’

‘You’d already done that by going to London,’ said Esme. ‘Well, you clearly had a great sense of adventure.’

I thought for a moment Mum was going to snap, but her exasperation seemed as much at herself. ‘It was a foolish adventure,’ she said. ‘I was glad to come home.’

‘Despite leaving . . .?’ – but Esme glanced at me, and saw she couldn’t ask more about the man Mum had left behind.

‘There were lovely materials, of course,’ Mum said with a hurried smile. ‘The famous Mandalay silks.’

‘You’ll have liked those,’ said Esme.

‘Stiff silks, you know, and the colours . . .’

‘I sometimes feel there’s a touch of Burma in the things you make here,’ said Esme, in an encouraging tone. ‘What do you think, Dave? Am I right?’

Mum looked out, almost shyly, at the lawn beyond the window and the sea below. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I find most English women don’t really care for bright colours and patterns.’

‘I fear you’re right,’ said Esme robustly, sitting back as our melon arrived. ‘Well, you must tell me more about it all another time,’ and as we picked up our cutlery I had the troubling idea again of the talk they had had and could keep on having when I wasn’t there.

Later that night a heart-racing panic, the light suddenly on and the smash of the tooth-mug into the basin. He was very sorry, once he’d worked out that he was the intruder, not me. In a minute we found ourselves searching for bits of broken glass on the carpet, me in my pyjamas, the man in a cap and a light raincoat – which was when he introduced himself, Tim, down from Welshpool, which I hadn’t heard of but which was indeed Welsh, as was Tim. I stood and peered down as Tim knelt in front of me, talking on pleasantly now as he made sure there was no glass left to cut my feet. There was a smell of drink around him, confusion more than threat. He stood up and looked about. ‘It’s not a bad little room you’ve got here,’ he said, which I felt was moving us on to a new phase of conversation.

‘Well, thank you,’ I said stiffly, and then relented a little: ‘though I’m afraid I don’t have a sea view.’

‘Well, nor do I, David, nor do I. Estelle’s the only one with a sea view up here, have you met her, Estelle van der Hooper?’ He said the name carefully, almost satirically.

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Oh, a lovely girl, you’d like her. From Cheshire, as a matter of fact, though her family’s Dutch, of course, with a name like that.’

‘Well, yes, so I imagined,’ I said.

‘And where are you from, David, if you don’t mind me asking?’

‘Oh, from Berkshire,’ I said.

Tim looked at me a bit comically for a moment. ‘That’s a good one,’ he said, ‘I like that.’ And then, ‘Well, I mustn’t keep you.’

And with that he withdrew.

The following evening it was celery soup again. ‘As Gilbert once remarked,’ said Esme, ‘the food here’s inevitable. He could be amusing. Mind you, that was on our honeymoon.’

‘Did you come here then, Esme . . .?’ I said.

‘No, no, love. We had our honeymoon in Bude. I wasn’t sure why, but then it turned out Gilbert was a close friend of the man who owned the hotel – a very close friend, as a matter of fact. They’d been in the air force together. Of course it was still rationing then, it wasn’t easy.’ She looked around, raised her empty wine glass, and tried to catch Maureen’s eye.

‘What does Gilbert do, Esme?’ I said, going all out for first names; over the holiday she’d made Gilbert a presence – an irritant, an off-colour joke – in our lives, and questions about him seemed to be acceptable to her, in fact she quite enjoyed them.

‘Gilbert Croft?’ – she shook her head: ‘Mainly, these days, I suppose, he keeps the wine and spirits business going.’

I saw him, for a second, across a counter, wrapping bottles in white paper. ‘Oh . . .’ I said then, and smiled, and felt a little unsure, since Esme herself had admitted she looked forward to her twelve o’clock sherry from a moment not long after breakfast. I sensed there was something else about Gilbert, an essential fact, sat on with a murmuring half-amused censoriousness by Esme herself, and acknowledged by Mum with no more than a blink and a sigh.

‘Oh, I was well shot of Gilbert,’ Esme said.

‘He sounds rather . . .’ Mum said.

Esme spoke to me as a man of the world. ‘You know, Dave, he said most of the marriage vows he had no objection to at all, it was just the “forsaking all others” bit that never quite worked for him.’

‘Oh, I see,’ I said, and laughed, appalled that I’d been told this.

‘I have to admit he was bloody good-looking, but boy! did he know it.’

That night I came up with them to their room after the late walk round the harbour and drifted out again onto the balcony, with an anxious luxurious certainty that Ollie would be coming out of the pub next door and sitting with his mates on the seawall. But the street lamp below showed only a man and a woman leaning at the top of the stone steps, his arm round her waist, their words muffled by the thump and sizzle of the waves on the beach below. I thought they were only in their early twenties but they were adult and private, unlike the lads who shouted to each other the length of the street. I glanced back into the room, which cast its light across the shadow of the balcony, and I had a strange feeling of spying not only on the men but on Mum and Esme, now clear, now blurred as the breeze stirred the thin net curtain at the open window.

There was a knock at the door, and a distinctive voice it still took me a second to recognize – it was Maureen, and she smiled anxiously at me as I slipped back into the room. She was closer in age to me than to the grown-ups, and she looked between us with an uncertain sense of allegiance. She held a tray, with three very full cups on it, jogged a little into the saucers. ‘Lovely, just put it there, dear,’ said Esme. Maureen slid the tray onto the low coffee table and stood staring down at it, as if to say ‘You’ve got your cups, you’ve got your hot drink,’ until Esme opened her purse and drew out a ten-shilling note.

‘That’s too much, Esme,’ Mum said. ‘I’ve got some change.’

‘Well . . .’ said Esme. ‘She’s bending the rules for us, aren’t you, my dear?’

‘Still, you’re spoiling her.’ Mum peered in her own purse and pulled out a two-shilling piece. ‘There you are, thank you, goodnight,’ she said, and Maureen, caught between the two tips, was dumbstruck for a minute, then pocketed the coin and shot out of the room.

Esme opened the drawer in the bedside table where a bottle fitted neatly beside the Gideon Bible. ‘Not much left, I’m afraid,’ she said, holding up the familiar Martini Rosso and winking at me.

‘Oh, you finish it off,’ Mum said almost crossly, but Esme gave her a humorous look as she took a gulp from her cup and then filled it to the brim from the bottle. ‘I can tell what you’re thinking, Dave,’ she said. ‘I call it my “Ovaltini” – not to everyone’s taste, I dare say, but it sends you off a treat.’ Mum raised her eyebrows, but smiled, no point in protesting. Esme lifted the cup again with both hands and drew off a long sip. ‘It’s pretty disgusting to start with,’ she said, ‘but then like anchovies or something you get to like it. Straight Ovaltine tastes awfully sweet to me now.’

‘I don’t mind sweet,’ Mum said, and I said airily, ‘Perhaps I’ll try it, Esme, if there’s any left’; Mum made a funny face but again said nothing as Esme held the bottle upside down over my cup to shake the final drops into the chocolatey froth. I perched on the end of Mum’s bed, the sheet turned down by the maid during dinner and her red striped pyjamas laid out ready. Esme it seemed used a nightgown, pale blue with a frilly collar, somehow unexpected. She watched me as I sipped – it was like nothing I’d tasted before and I didn’t know what I thought of it, a dark contradictory taste that as Esme said might well take a while to get used to. ‘Mm, not at all bad,’ I said judiciously.

‘Well, there you are,’ said Esme. ‘Your son’s a sophisticate, Avril.’

‘Well, I know that,’ Mum said.

‘Ollie-Ollie-Ollie!’ came a loud drunk voice from outside, almost singing.

‘Trevor . . . you old poof!’ – very loud, laughing, the words sinking and warming inside me like the Martini Rosso and rising at once in a blush.

‘These Friscombe lads are really too noisy,’ said Esme, crossing to close the door onto the balcony, though sound still came in through the half-open sash window. ‘I imagine you two are more used to this kind of thing, living in the middle of town.’

‘Oh . . .? I don’t know, really . . .’ I said, unable to concentrate, looking down and sipping intently at my disgusting drink. The word ‘poof’ seemed to float, unfading and undiscussable, in the mirrored shrine of the dressing table, where Mum’s cream and powder were grouped on the left and Esme’s things, rather different, spread about on the other side. I knew of course Ollie didn’t really think Trevor was a poof, it was only the certainty he wasn’t one that made him able to shout the word out in the street, on a warm August night. But I also had a strange intuition that Ollie was voicing a secret wish and revealing, by accusing Trevor, that he was that sort of person himself.

‘So what are we doing tomorrow?’ Mum said.

‘There’s that old historic house, was it? you said you wanted to see, Dave,’ said Esme.

‘Oh, I really don’t care,’ I said, ‘perhaps if it’s wet.’ All I wanted to do was to be here, on the beach, in the shifting parade of the known and unknown men. I could still just hear Ollie and Trevor down below, with a third voice now, not their words much but their rambling rhythm, the glinting and disappearing thread of their sound among the other sounds of the night.

‘I just don’t want you to be bored, Dave, that’s all,’ said Esme.

‘I think he’s quite happy just mucking about here,’ Mum said, loyal but oddly remote.

‘Yes, I suppose I am,’ I said.

‘Well, fine,’ said Esme, slightly bewildered that the boring excursion she’d been ready to go on for my sake had now been turned down. ‘It didn’t sound particularly thrilling.’

‘Let’s see what the weather’s like,’ I said. And then, as soon as I could, and gripped by need, ‘Well, I’m going to bed.’

‘You must be tired, love,’ Mum said, ‘after all that swimming,’ in a quick bland tone I knew very well; it was the tone of my first morning in school kit, and the day, just as bad, when she closed the car door on the gravel at Bampton, turned the ignition, and a shaming, asphyxiating sob rose up in my throat as she drove away. It would have been worse if we’d made more of it. I stooped down and kissed her – I never kissed Esme, who went into the bathroom with a yawn and called back, ‘I’ll see you at breakfast.’ I went out, pulled the door shut with a click, and was halfway down the landing when I heard the key turned in the lock and the handle tested from the inside.

In the hall I walked frowningly past the reception desk and out through the glass-paned front door into the street. It was cooler already than when we’d come in from our walk, and the night had slipped into a new phase. The sea was closer and louder on the rocks, and the people out and about, men mostly, were louder too. I went round the corner, into the view of the harbour, widely spaced street lamps and black drop to the water. The Admiral in the crowded half-hour before closing was a dimly lit hubbub inside, other figures in or out of the shadows on the pavement and over the road on the harbour wall. I was crossing a stage, now spotlit, now hidden, finding the right pace to go by the lads – headed somewhere but with time to stare, though a stare might last only a second. My magic was the fusing of images, the way I’d captured Ollie, though Ollie himself had no idea of this – how I knew him as the loud doggy-paddler, sea sucking at his trunks when he emerged from the waves, and as the after-lunch sunbather, lips parted, blinded and aroused by dreams, and now as the slicked-back beauty out at night, drunk, jeering, leaning on the wall with his mates in his loose blue jeans and short-sleeved shirt open to the furry navel. He caught my eye as I passed, caught it and let it go, as if I wasn’t even there, though the murmur and laugh among the lads a few seconds later undermined me like the locking of the bedroom door. I walked on to the end of the front, where the road turned abruptly inland, and when I came back past the Admiral five minutes later the wall was deserted, and Ollie and Trevor and friends had moved on into the next stage of their night.

The next morning the tide was coming in again by the time we found our corner, in the loose scruffy sand towards the top of the beach. It was the last full day of the holiday, and I peered round for Ollie as I helped Esme spread out the groundsheet and pin it down with the two deckchairs. ‘We should get another chair for you, Dave,’ Esme said, ‘it’s not at all fair.’ But I didn’t mind – I liked being free to sprawl at the women’s feet or to run off. I needed to be in the sea at once today, I had my trunks on under my shorts, and in a minute I’d peeled off and snaked through between the other couples, kids and parents, and into the first grim shock of the Bristol Channel – ankle-high, knee-high, over my head. I surfaced and spluttered and turned over to look back at the beach I’d just left. Then I swam on out, past the end of the concrete jetty, and with a memory, when I stopped and hung in the light swell and looked back at the land, of the long brown ribs and stacks of rock that I had clambered over yesterday, now covered to a not quite calculable depth underneath me. I waved at Esme and Mum, but they were huddled together, over the crossword perhaps, and a man I didn’t know waved back. I trod water there, between solitude and something colder. Then I came in again, a fast crawl, hoisted up and carried forward on the waves, I touched bottom, stumbled, knocked forward by the next wave – waded then strolled out over the shining sand and beyond it the warm and slipping sand towards the women, with the sea breeze shivering my back and the sun hot at once on my face and chest. I saw, coming up across the beach, how people took me in, brief smiles, the undecided welcome. Mum’s eyes were hidden by black lenses, but her mouth was amused and reassuring. ‘What’s it like?’ she said. ‘My turn next.’

There was a bottle of squash made up, out of the sun under a towel in the basket. I needed to do what I’d meant to have done in the sea – perhaps now behind the rocks, but I was, as Mum often said, so very fastidious. ‘There’s a public loo up there,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what it’s like.’

‘Yes, I know there is,’ I said. It felt a long way off, up on the main road in my damp trunks.

‘Just run up like you are,’ she said, practical as usual in the face of my reluctance. I felt annoyed by this and by the childishness of the situation. I buckled on my sandals and strode off and up the steps onto the road, cars parked all along and the blue and white guest houses on the other side staring seawards over their hydrangeas. The toilets were two hundred yards off, built in against the bottom of the cliff, the Gents’ entrance round the far side, screened by a wall. After the glare of the sun, the room was like twilight, but I could see an old man leaning at the urinal, and feeling next to naked I pushed the locked door of one cubicle, but the one beside it was free and I went in and slid the flimsy bolt.

I lifted the seat to pee, and as I got going my eyes were adjusting and I saw that the white words EVERTON F C and BRISTOL ROVERS with FUCK on top of it on the wall beside me were dimly surrounded by other writing, scribbled, overlapping, in felt-tip or biro on dirty grey plaster where earlier writing must have been scrubbed off. My eyes were still adjusting, and the words seemed to sink into shadow, or rise out of it. Little pleasantries they seemed at first, Fun Times, mutual fun, and then under them and further up, over my head, amazing words that were lurking there swam forward, will suck off . . . BIG COCK, 10 inches . . . meet here . . . 16-years guy, well-endowed, always ready . . . suck-off, with a crude enormous picture – my mind wouldn’t take it all in, but my body did, with a suffocating heat as I finished peeing and turned round in search of something less alarming, more alarming. There was my own shock and at the same time an anxious embarrassment at the thought of all the nice people, the uncles, the dads, who came in here for ordinary reasons and had to see all this, notice it, block it out in their own way. The men who wrote these things were nearby, you might not know them in the street, or on the beach right now, but at 6.45 p.m., 9 p.m. Tuesdays, the times scratched up here, they met in this small filthy cubicle and did things that I’d heard about, thought about, as well as others I simply couldn’t understand. And then I had a further more disorienting feeling that the uncles and dads, men of all kinds who’d been in the army and travelled the world, knew all about these things men got up to in secret, and took them for granted. In the two minutes, three minutes that I stood there and worked on myself, then sat down on the damp seat to finish myself off, it was the words themselves that went through me, drove me on with their overlapping humourless intensity, and the twitch of light, shadow, light again nonplussed me till I saw the round hole where some former fitting had been torn out and sitting forward lowered my eye guiltily to the hole and found an unblinking blue eye six inches away on the other side. Even when I tugged up my trunks and knotted the string in a panic I felt, as I was, almost naked and defenceless; it was worse, with the little delay, five seconds perhaps, as my ear picked up and my mind understood the hard click-click-click of a belt-buckle tapping the wall, and the fact that I’d been caught without knowing it in something so dreadful had me snatching the door open and striding very fast in my sandals down the esplanade without looking round till I was back on the beach. ‘Was it all right?’ said Mum, and Esme in her chair woke up and looked around. The children ran about in front of them, the experimental sandcastle was a little bit larger and fancier than it had been when I’d marched off five minutes earlier. There was a cavernous normality to everything, the absolute ignorance of everyone here about the world I’d just entered and escaped from.

‘I’m going in again!’ I said, and discarded my sandals and jogged off at once, ran down the last slope of damp sand into the waves, where I would be hidden from the man with the eye when he emerged from his stall and strolled with his terrible knowledge and purpose onto the beach.

At dinner that last night, Mum and Esme both seemed tired, and bothered perhaps about the packing and the journey the next day. Mum had a way of making remarks, comments on people in the room, too quietly, and when Esme said, ‘What’s that, Avril?’ saying in a louder voice, ‘Oh, nothing . . . It doesn’t matter,’ so that a dissatisfied mood built up. I tried to jolly them along, though the knowledge that after breakfast tomorrow I would never see Marco again squeezed my heart and almost made me ask for a drink, a proper drink, myself. ‘So have you enjoyed yourself, Dave?’ said Esme, and Mum seemed secretly to wait on my answer too.

‘Oh, I’ve had a wonderful time, thank you very much, Esme,’ I said, with a feeling, like treading water, of all the things underneath my sentence that Mum and Esme had no idea of, things more gripping and shocking than mere enjoyment. Then for the first time I wondered if Marco himself ever went to the Gents under the cliff.

In the lounge after dinner Esme asked Maureen to bring her a brandy with her coffee, and left a pound note tucked under the sugar bowl for her when we got up to go for our walk. ‘I believe in tipping good service,’ Esme explained.

‘Good service, I agree,’ said Mum, which I saw in a moment could mean two things, but again she said it quietly and it was hard to tell.

On the walk I had a horrible sense of excitement and constraint, as we passed along the harbour, the rising tide washing at the steps below, lights in ripples on the water, and the lads by now getting louder as they went from one pub to the next. I fell behind so that I could look for them without the women noticing. Thirty yards away a figure I thought couldn’t be Marco went from the street into the porch of the Britannia, suddenly bright as the inner door opened, and it was him, without a doubt.

No Ovaltini tonight, and I went up to my room in the grip of the urge that I knew would bring me straight down again ten minutes later. There was a party in the bar breaking up, but no one on reception at this hour, and I dodged out onto the road among the red-faced people leaving. A couple who’d seen me with Esme and Mum just before broke off and looked at me as I turned down to the harbour. I heard the man say, ‘Hard to tell, probably older than he looks.’ On a bench halfway along, outside the Britannia, where Ollie and his friends had gone the other night, Marco himself was sitting alone with a pint and a cigarette. His face was in shadow from the lights strung up outside the pub, but he nodded at me in a friendly enough way as he blew out smoke.

When I crossed the road and said, ‘Hello, there, Marco!’ I seemed to be observing the person I’d become, and wondering what he’d do next. The night walk, this second time, felt something like a habit, though the habit perhaps of someone else. ‘You’re having a drink, then, I see.’

Marco didn’t find this worth answering, but as I stood smiling at him he smiled very slightly back, and after another drag on his cigarette said, ‘You havin’ a drink?’

‘Oh, I’m not allowed to go into pubs yet, I’m afraid,’ I said.

‘How old you are?’ said Marco.

‘I’m fourteen.’

Marco laughed at this in a disconcerting way. ‘Why you out here now?’ I thought for a second that he knew the answer, then wondered if I knew what it was myself. I wanted to be with Marco, that was all, to be the friend of someone so beautiful and not just his customer.

‘Oh, I always like to get some air before I go to bed, I find it helps me sleep.’

‘Yeah? I never know your name,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I’m David – Dave,’ and mastered the awful fact of Marco not knowing as swiftly as I could. His little tilt of the head was a signal perhaps that I should sit down beside him. It was like being all alone with Morgan or Roberts but wilder, with no rules I was aware of.

‘Have some of this?’

‘Oh! . . . thanks a lot, Marco,’ I said, and leant against him as I took the pint glass, warm from his hand and the length of time he’d been nursing it. The liquid was bitter with a chemical aftertaste like a mild electric shock – I couldn’t imagine ever liking it, looking forward to the pub and a pint of it, and I handed the glass back to Marco with a nod, as if it had been just what I needed. ‘So you’re from Bari,’ I said, in my role, which Marco perhaps thought odd, as he looked at me, of the welcoming Englishman.

‘Yeah, I from Bari,’ he said, with a weary little laugh, not at Bari, but at the question and the answer, so that I sympathized – with each week’s new set of arrivals Marco went through what I went through all my life.

‘Marco,’ I said, ‘I couldn’t help wondering, you know, if you ever get homesick?’ Marco took a last pull on his cigarette, then flicked it towards the water, though it lay and glowed for five or ten seconds on the granite-like edge of the harbour.

‘I’m not sick,’ he said, with his sour little laugh.

‘No – good!’ I said, ‘good.’ It was too hard, and too obscure, to explain: I saw that. We sat forward, side by side, in the posture of friends talking over something private, our knees lightly pressing, Marco’s warm forearm brushing mine when he raised his glass. He smelt of the long day’s work in the dining room, and there was beer on his breath, two not very nice things fused and confounding.

‘So you goin’ on your holidays with two ladies,’ Marco said.

‘Oh, yes . . .’ I said. ‘Well, my mother, and . . . a friend of ours.’

Marco stared at the water. ‘An’ which one your mother, the little one or the big one?’

I laughed and hoped very much he was joking. ‘Well, the smaller one!’

Now Marco had a smile of enlightenment. ‘So the little lady is your mother, and the lady with’ – he made a weighing gesture at chest level – ‘is her friend.’

‘Yes, that’s absolutely right,’ I said.

Marco looked at me regretfully. ‘Cos you don’t look like neither of them.’

‘Actually, I do look quite like my mother,’ I said – ready for the perpetual question about my father, but Marco seemed unfussed by that, wiser, I somehow felt, but maybe just not interested. It was the two women who preoccupied him.

‘So they avin’ the same room?’

‘Yes, they are,’ I said, ‘well, it’s cheaper, isn’t it. And also it has the bathroom en-suite.’

Marco turned his head slowly, smiled at me, steadily, for four or five seconds, said nothing, then gazed out to sea again.

Back in my room I locked the door, cleaned my teeth and got into my pyjamas and into my narrow bed, and turned the lamp off. In a minute or two the wavy-edged stripe of light above the curtains grew bolder, and the locked door was outlined by the weak all-night light from the landing outside. I heard passing voices and footsteps in the side street, a car waiting with the engine running, a bit of singing cut short, clunk of doors, then a random silence, it was like at home, but with the square taken over by the vast slow breath of the sea. Then a door slammed loudly on the floor below, and slammed again a few moments later, disturbing Esme and Mum, no doubt; I heard a woman’s voice raised, but not what she said. I lay on my back, closed my eyes, slipped away for an hour, Morgan and Roberts, Ollie and Trevor, and Marco at last, in wave over wave like a rising tide till the end, and then I fell asleep. At first I thought Tim had tried my door again but the thud and the murmur of voices was in the next room, just through the wall beside my bed. I’d had a glimpse of the room when the chambermaid was in, the door propped open by the hoover – it was like my room but confusingly bigger, with a sea view and a view in the mirror of Miss van der Hooper’s things strewn round, and the girl in the middle of it, pulling the bed apart. Miss van der Hooper herself, Estelle, I still hadn’t seen, and in the dining room Mum and Esme and I each had different ideas about which one she was. Now she’d got herself a visitor. The talk came in patches, on the verge of making sense, giggles and grumbles, just loud enough to keep me awake. I knew they were drunk from the gappy rhythm, voices rising then hushing, and a more secret sense of things being done in between without words.

It grew quiet and I slipped into the pillow zone of other lights and voices, the instant busy logic of the first dream where after a bit a dull thumping was going on and I opened my eyes again to the thinned hotel darkness and listened to the knocking of the unseen bed against the wall beside me, slow and stopping, starting again and as it got faster the voices were louder, sounds of laughter and pain, ‘No . . . no . . .!’ Estelle was yelping, but she seemed to be breathless with laughter too, and the man was making the dull stifled sounds of the one doing most of the work. In a minute the rhythm got faster still and squeakier and then for a long time there was silence, as worrying in its way as the noise. I found I was standing beside my bed, motionless, my hand in my fly, heart beating fast with excitement and shock. Then they started up again and I knelt carefully on the bed and put my tooth-glass to the wall, and at once I seemed to be inside the room, though the actors themselves were still garbled and wavering. I felt that Estelle had been anxious at first about the noise, but she didn’t care now, and the gripping thing was the thoughtless abandon of these two unseen adults, and above all, since I knew more or less what the man did, the effect of it on the woman, too carried away to care.

I didn’t sleep then for an hour or more, until I heard her door open, and then the man trying to be quiet as he unlocked the door across the landing.

I went downstairs to collect Mum and Esme, and the holiday routine that had gone on for so long had a strange new tension, on this last morning, in the light of departure, and of the old routines, out of mind for ten days . . . restarting the milk and the paper, Mavis coming in at 9 a.m. . . . that were waiting to reclaim us at home. I tapped at their door and said in a high-pitched Irish accent, ‘Good morning to you, ladies, I’ve got yer early morning tea,’ and when Mum opened the door, barely glancing at me, I went in with my imaginary tray, ‘You’ve got your cups, you’ve got your saucers—’

‘Not now, love,’ Mum said.

I lowered my arms and dropped the joke. ‘Morning!’ I said. The door to the bathroom was closed, Mum looking round quickly for her handbag.

‘Let’s go down,’ she said.

‘Are we waiting for Esme?’

She seemed not to have heard, then said, ‘Esme’s going to skip breakfast today.’

‘Is she all right?’ I said.

‘Well . . .’ said Mum, and I followed her out with an anxious look at the bathroom door. On the landing she tidied it up a bit: ‘Shall we just say, too much hooch last night.’

In the dining room Marco was scowlingly busy, Terence shorter than ever with the elderly guests, and Maureen was nowhere to be seen. Marco treated me and Mum like strangers, said nothing about Esme’s absence, never looked at me at all until a blink and a nod in the half-second when he turned away. I was awed and instructed by his act, his way of keeping our secret. When we’d finished, Mum looked in her purse, and tucked a half-crown under her saucer; we both seemed to picture for a second the week and a half we might have had here by ourselves. At once when we stood up Marco homed in to clear the table, and I was pleased to think of him getting the tip, I half turned round as we crossed the room for my last ever view of him.

I went up to bring down my bag, and then knocked again at the women’s door. Esme was busily checking the wardrobe and chest of drawers. ‘We have to be out by ten, I believe,’ she said. The airy artificial tone of her remarks made it difficult to ask how she was. I lugged the three suitcases out to the car, and when I came back into the hall Mum was studying the barometer with awkward interest while Esme at the counter paid our bill. It was done in a quick almost wordless way, the cheque glanced at, shaken for a second and tucked into the till, no farewell chit-chat.

In the car park, Mum said, ‘You’d better go in the front, love.’ I climbed in obediently and wound down the window and watched while Esme opened her handbag and gave her the car keys.

‘I’m perfectly fine,’ Esme said, tugging open the door behind me and sliding heavily into the back seat.

I said, ‘Are you driving, then, Mum?’, with a sense of adventure at odds with the unsmiling mood. I giggled at her little jolts and starts as we moved off, though of course I wanted her to make a success of driving this huge car for the first time. She looked so small and determined, feet stretched out to reach the pedals. She had written down the route on a crumpled piece of paper, and I kept an eye out for the road signs and hardly thought of being sick.

I didn’t know what had happened, I had a horror of atmospheres and an unhappy feeling it was up to me to make things all right. I thought perhaps Esme had got Maureen into trouble, with her special favours and tips. The mood between the women fused murkily with my own guilt about going out in the town at night, I wondered if someone from the hotel had seen me and word had got back.

But once we’d passed the Somerset sign and left Devon behind us the holiday too seemed to fold itself away in the quickly receding past. The traffic was heavy on the A303, Esme in the back had slid sideways, asleep, and it was Mum, with a thoughtful stare in the mirror, who started up the singing, with our old journey favourite ‘Tea for Two’. Esme woke up with a rumbling cough of surprise more than disapproval. She indulged us, but she didn’t join in, and perhaps didn’t know the words beyond the first lines; there were changes of rhythm from one verse to the next, which gave the song a shape in my mind like connecting rooms. ‘I’m so discontented – With homes that I’ve rented – That I have invented – My own!’

‘You both sing well,’ said Esme, perhaps hoping that was the end of it, before we peaked on the couplet, ‘We won’t have it known, dear, / We own a telephone, dear!’ – smiling at each other for a moment with the collusion of duettists who had sung the song dozens of times together and loved it as a ritual as much as a song. Funnily enough it was when we were singing the jingling last lines – ‘I’m contented / Cos you’ve consented / To marry me!’ – and Mum slowed and swung the heavy wheel round to pull into a petrol station, that I noticed the pale ridge on her sun-browned finger where her wedding ring had always been before.

After we’d stretched our legs and had a sandwich, Esme declared herself fit to take over, and we reconfigured, with Mum now in the back for the final stretch home. That put paid, really, to the singing. Soon we were in country we all knew, Esme took the high road over the Downs, ‘Avoid Swindon, don’t you think?’ she said. I was wondering how to tell the story of this holiday next term to Manji, who’d been home to Bombay, and Giles, who had spent a month with his parents at their house in France, and had Harris and Blanchard to stay with them too for a couple of weeks.

There was something glaring, when we came into the town, about the car and the holiday it had been on, and the new set of relations the holiday seemed to have confirmed. But actually nobody noticed us, or seemed to, people went into shops or crossed the road with the busily bland look of extras in a film. Esme drew up in the square, outside Harding’s Electrical, and we all got out. She stood by the deep-set boot as I lifted out our bags and set them down to shake her hand, and then for the first time she kissed me, a quick forceful dart at a spot just under my right eye. Mum, standing on the pavement, gave a screwed-up grin and turned away to search in her purse for her front-door key.