Elizabeth sat on her bed, leaning against the headboard, deconstructing Dafydd’s sentence.
Would you like to sleep with me? Would you like to…? Would you…? Invitation? Hypothetical question?
Come on. Men didn’t go in for hypothetical questions – not where sex was concerned. No. It was a proposition – assuming she’d heard him correctly. She fished around for a viable alternative, failing to come up with anything better than, Would you hike to the beach with me?
As a child, her favourite party game was ‘Chinese whispers’. A message, whispered from one to the next, became distorted as it made its way around the giggling circle, finally emerging, with a bit of luck, as something drastically different and hysterically funny. They still played it, once in a while, at dinner parties when they’d had a few glasses of wine. Change is both desirable and inevitable had, thanks she suspected to Laurence’s judicious deafness, mutated to A range of delicious fruit and vegetables.
Of course there was another possibility. He might have been speaking Welsh. If that were the case, he could have been suggesting anything.
Jordan Fry was to blame for her sleep-denying confusion. It was his fault that she was tussling with the ambiguities of the English language. (Ironic, bearing in mind their recent ‘you’ dispute.) Had he not chosen that moment to switch on his light, she would be in no doubt what Dafydd had said. Or what he had meant.
She tilted her wrist until she could make out the hands on her watch. Four-fifteen. That would make it five-fifteen in France.
Laurence’s obsession still astonished her. When it had first flared up, it hadn’t taken her long to conclude that it wasn’t food (the substance that kept human beings alive) but cooking (the fiddling and faffing and showmanship) that excited him. Whatever the reason, the whole thing was, frankly, irritating since he’d not shown an iota of interest in cooking when she was juggling a job, the school run and the weekly shop (not to mention forays to music lessons, orthodontists, football practice and sporadic dashes to A&E). It would have been wonderful, once in a while, not to have had to think about meals. Bangers and mash. Beans on toast. Egg and chips. Anything would have been welcome, provided that someone else had prepared it. But it was twenty years too late to rake that up and she pictured Laurence now, snoring in his manoir, dreaming of bagging the Masterchef title and of opening a bijou restaurant in Ludlow (or Southwold or Padstow) under a heaven that sparkled with Michelin stars.
Was she being naïve? Valerie Masters – A level history teacher – had rolled her eyes disbelievingly when she’d revealed that Laurence had gone off to France to do a cookery course. For ten days. Without her. ‘You must be mad,’ Valerie had said, ‘I wouldn’t let Hugo go to Fulham without me, never mind France.’
It could be that Laurence was, at this very moment, in the arms of some … some sensible woman who had started out with every intention of learning to create gourmet meals for a trusting husband but who had, once on foreign soil, redirected her attentions to the charming, lonely London solicitor. It could be that Laurence and Mrs Sensible were, at this very moment, frolicking in a field of sunflowers, carried away by the sunrise and the scent of wild thyme. Odd that this had never crossed her mind until now. Laurence having an affair? Laurence making love to someone else? Ridiculous. But would it cross Laurence’s mind that his wife might like to sleep with (or even hike to the beach with) a stocky Welshman who said ‘different than’ and frequently dropped his aitches?
Having sidled into her consciousness, the notion of Laurence’s infidelity lodged there, as impossible to ignore as a raspberry pip trapped between her teeth. Compelled to let the scene play out, she pictured her naked husband, hearing that odd little wheezing noise he uttered when he – they – made love. Mrs Sensible – also naked and (Elizabeth couldn’t resist it) on the plump side – her chubby fingers kneading Laurence’s buttocks, pulling him rhythmically towards her as the cicadas chirruped and the sunflowers swayed.
How did she feel about that? Honestly?
Honestly? Rotten for forcing him into the situation, and worse for watching. Also a tiny bit … weird. Aroused if she had to put a name to the weirdness.
Not much caring for the way her thoughts were unfolding, she dropped a book on the floor, trying again to wake Diane. But her friend was sleeping the sleep of the innocent, untroubled by her lifelong habit of saying yes to everyone and everything. Romanians, Germans, wads of money – yes, yes, yes.
The night was bleaching into dawn as, dressed in the clothes that she’d discarded only a few hours earlier, she sneaked out of the room. Across the hall, Dafydd’s door was ajar, light glowing through the crack. She waited, half-expecting him to call her name, but there was no sound.
Leaving the sleeping house, she set off down the road towards the beach. Should she have left a note? Hell. No one else bothered to explain their movements.
It felt good to be on the move, filling her lungs with the cool morning air, not entirely sure where she was going. Mist skimmed the fields, covering them with a ghostly duvet. Sheep stared vacuously through straggly hedges. A few piebald ponies shifted restlessly in a barbed-wire corral. A dog yapped from somewhere inside a pink-washed bungalow, screened from the road by a fuchsia hedge. But there were no signs of human life. After walking for fifteen minutes or so she saw a hand-painted sign at the side of a pair of open metal gates. Hills End Campsite – PRIVATE. Undeterred, she turned off the road and through the gates.
The field in front of her fell away in a gentle slope towards the sand dunes which bordered the beach. Tall, trimmed hedges – planted, she guessed, to act as weather breaks and provide a degree of privacy – subdivided the field into half a dozen smaller enclosures. Tents of varied shapes and sizes were pitched around the perimeter of these enclosures. She picked her way briskly between them, making for the stile – the one Dafydd had mentioned last night maybe – in the far corner of the field. There was little evidence of life apart from a baby crying – or was it a seagull? – and a woman chivvying a small boy towards a squat, breeze-block building, lights still glowing above its two doors. Apart from that, a muted calm hung over the sleeping encampment. Were a heavenly hand to snatch away these tents, she thought, the field would be strewn with huddles of comatose bodies, packed together in sleeping bags like sardines which had lost their tins.
Clambering over the stile, she dropped down onto a grassy footpath. Her sandals were no defence against the dew and her feet were soon cold and stippled with particles of sand and grass seeds. She followed the footpath until she reached a place where it broadened out to form an arena. Here the wiry turf was strewn with empty cans, polystyrene food trays and the skeletons of disposable barbecues. A ring of blackened stones containing remnants of charred logs showed where a fire had burned. Further on, a flag on a bamboo cane protruded from the soil but, as she came closer, she saw that it wasn’t a flag at all but a pair of torn boxer shorts, and she understood why Dafydd had been so distressed.
The path became less defined, eventually splitting into two. One spur veered to the right, cutting across rushy grassland and heading back towards the village up on the ridge. She chose the other spur which ran along behind the dunes, wandering on, seeking a way through, or over, the ridge. After a while, finding no obvious route, she lost patience and, grabbing at the sharp marram grass, hauled herself up the steep incline. She scrambled on up, the cold sand cascading in miniature avalanches, burying her feet and turning her ascent into a slow-motion affair.
As she reached the top, the blustery wind straight off the sea caught her, lashing her hair across her face, inflating her shirt like a wind-sock, drying her lips and making her teeth feel cold to her tongue. Looking west across the sea, the sky, still laden with night, was slashed with silver-blue. The tide was halfway up the beach. Lacy waves curled onto the sand and, beyond them, the pewter-grey mass of the sea swelled in lazy peaks, waiting for the sun to rise and magic back the indigo and turquoise of yesterday. What had Dafydd said when they were gazing at the stars? Puts you in your place. The night sky conveyed that message tenderly, seductively, but the sea pounded it home.
She turned to look back at Llangennith on the hill, the roadside hedges marking her route down to Hills End. From this distance the campsite might have been a scale model, perfect in every detail, ready to be placed alongside a model railway track.
Ben and Alex had briefly, with Laurence’s nostalgic encouragement, become hooked on model railways. They must have been a year or two younger than Jordan and still able (along with their father) to retreat, unashamedly, into boyhood. They’d squirrelled away pocket and birthday money to buy track and rolling stock. They’d spent hours painting miniature signal boxes and engine sheds, gluing lumps of this to bits of that, arguing about how the track should be set out, and where to locate the station and the over-bridges. After weeks of communal endeavour she would hear, from the loft, the rackety clack of trains tearing around the track, an event which signalled the end of the real fun and the need to start all over again. The harmless fixation had gripped them for a year or so, then locomotives were overtaken by electric guitars and girls, and Laurence forsook Hornby for Le Creuset.
Turning back towards the sea, she leaned into the wind. It supported her for a split second before gravity took over. Gathering pace, she made a reckless descent, stumbling and slithering, the tips of the thin-bladed marram jabbing through her trousers and into the flesh on her legs. She reached the beach and, unable to stop, lurched forward, ending up kneeling on the sand, her heart thudding as she checked herself out – no damage done – thinking how easily she could have wrenched an ankle.
She slipped off her sandals and, dangling one in each hand, began jogging across the powdery sand. When she came to the bank of bladder wrack denoting the high-water mark, she stopped. Trapped amongst the seaweed’s tendrils, was evidence of man’s thoughtlessness. A yellow plastic bottle which had contained bleach. A see-through cigarette lighter. A chunk of polystyrene. A knot of nylon fishing line. The sea had spewed up these foreign bodies, dumping them back on dry land as if to give anyone with a conscience a second chance to dispose of them responsibly.
She squatted, prodding the seaweed with the toe of a sandal and stirring up a frenzy of sand hoppers. Ughh. She crossed the tangled mass in two hasty strides and continued towards the sea, her heels sinking into the spongy sand. As she neared the water’s edge, the wind became stronger, slowing her to walking pace. Her eyes watered, blurring her vision and spilling tears across her cheeks, the wind drying them before they reached her chin. She stood still, the frothy waves cascading across the sand towards her, gasping as the first one lapped over her toes. The shockingly cold water and the shush shush shush of the folding waves made her want to pee.
An hour ago the beach had seemed the obvious place to head for but now she was here she didn’t know what to do (and there was the matter of her nagging bladder). Twenty-two hours without sleep was starting to take its toll. She felt that she was on a boat, undulating gently, side to side, up and down. It was making her feel vaguely queasy. On top of that, the wind, buffeting her hair and howling across her ears, was giving her a headache. She should get back.
She ought, perhaps, to have left a note to let them – Dafydd – know where she had gone in case they – Dafydd – were concerned for her. She pictured Diane waking. Seeing her empty bed, Diane, being Diane, would assume that she was sharing Dafydd’s bed. Where else would she be at this hour? Walking along a beach, watching the sun rise? Alone? Yeah, yeah. She felt in her pocket for her phone, already knowing that it was lying on top of the chest of drawers. Damn.
In case she needed proof of her early morning walk, she picked up a crab’s claw that was being pushed up the beach by the incoming tide and dropped it in her pocket then walked back up the beach, the wind helping her now. She recrossed the seaweed and strode along the dry sand. The dunes were steeper and more daunting from this side and, not feeling up to the climb, she needed to find the ‘official’ way through. There had to be one. They couldn’t expect – wouldn’t want – people scrambling over them as she had done. As if to prove her right, a couple of wetsuited figures appeared from a cleft in the dunes, trotting towards the sea, surfboards hoisted above their heads, and she spotted a duck-boarded track which led her through to the car park.
Diane was still asleep when she got back to the house and Dafydd’s bedroom door was shut. After a couple of paracetamols and a drink of hot water, she slid, fully clothed, into her sleeping bag.