I did sleep again but only fitfully, and after I’d heard St James’s strike seven, I knew it was pointless to keep trying. I turned over carefully so as not to wake Pete. He was lying on his side, facing me. He’d worked his way over to the other side of the bed during the night but his arm was stretched towards me, its open palm up. His face was open, too, unguarded: his gentle mouth, the large eyelids with their fringe of dark lashes, the cheek with its coat of stubble. I wanted to wake him up so that he would put his arms around me but I wanted him to sleep on, too, so that I didn’t have to stop looking at him.
Last night as his breathing had slowed and I felt myself beginning to fall asleep, I’d realised something. In the past his openness about his feelings and how Alice had treated him would have sent me running. However much I’d liked him, that level of honesty – intimacy – would have horrified me and immediately triggered a sabotage campaign, with me finding reasons why I couldn’t get involved, imagining faults, starting arguments, eventually conjuring up a feeling not unlike pity for the poor man who’d made the mistake of wanting me. I didn’t feel it now: I had no urge to flee.
Should I tell him about Richard, the real reason I’d come here? I wanted to, when he’d been so honest with me. But telling him would mean confessing that I’d taken Richard back when I’d known he was married. Alice had been an adulterer but I had, too. I heard him sigh as he buried his head further into the pillow. I had to try not to think about Richard here, not to let his poison seep in. Maybe it would all collapse, anyway; maybe there was just too much weighing on us. I would take that risk, though. I would take the pain later if it meant I could have this now, even for a while.
I’d kill you. My stomach turned over, and the previous day came back to me in a great swell. Had Helen heard my message? I had to get through to her. She had been seeing him, I was certain about that, but in what way? Her resistance would have made it all the more exciting for him to seduce her. Perhaps, though, that wasn’t it; perhaps he was getting closer to her, winning her confidence so that she would tell him where I was. But she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t betray my trust, not on that. I was certain.
Eventually, Pete opened his eyes. He smiled when he saw me, a slow smile that started with surprise and ended with a grin. He shifted across the bed and put his arms round me. I felt a surge of emotion, happiness but also something painfully like nostalgia, an awareness that we didn’t have long. After a few minutes, his hand slipped from my waist to my hip and the feeling changed, becoming a mix of desire and intense longing.
‘What are you doing today?’ he asked a while later.
‘No plans. It’s Saturday – no work, or not at the café at least.’ Guiltily I remembered the translation, still barely started.
‘We could go over to Ventnor and walk along to Steephill Cove, maybe have a pub lunch.’
It was so lovely, so simple – so normal – that I only just stopped my eyes filling with tears. I sat up, turning away a little, and thought quickly. ‘That’d be good,’ I said. ‘But I’ll need to go home first – to have a bath and get changed.’
‘Sure.’ He kissed my shoulder. ‘I’m going to get up and make some coffee.’ He padded out, lovely in his solid nakedness, and I saw him go across to the other room from which he emerged minutes later in a different pair of jeans and a checked shirt whose sleeves he was rolling up.
I put my clothes back on and followed him down. Cross-legged on the sofa I drank my coffee and watched the Solent beyond the window. The morning was one of those so sharp and clean it was almost too much to take in. Already the sun had set the water sparkling and there were a handful of boats out. Later, I was sure, there would be many more.
‘I’ll see you at eleven,’ I said, when we were standing in the hall.
‘Kate,’ he said suddenly, as I put my hand on the latch to open it. I turned round. ‘I don’t want to be secretive about you and me but I think we should keep it low-key. There’ll be people in Yarmouth who won’t like it – especially not so soon.’
And there’s someone you don’t even know about who would like it even less. My gut clenched. ‘Under my hat,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘See you in a bit.’
I scanned around as I came out of his front door. There were several people on the High Street but further down, towards the Square; I didn’t think anyone had seen me leaving. I’d switched my phone off before going to Pete’s but I turned it back on as I walked, hoping for a voicemail or text. However reluctant she was to listen to what I had to say, surely if she’d heard my messages, she would know I was telling the truth. There was nothing, though, not even a missed call. I tried her mobile but it was still switched off.
Back at the cottage, I started running a bath, then turned on my laptop. On a scrap of paper on the table there were telephone numbers; it took me a moment to remember that they were the ones for the estate agents I was supposed to be seeing. I’d never even let them know I wasn’t coming. While the computer was warming up, I rang them both and apologised profusely, claiming a family emergency. ‘Would you like to remake the appointments for another day?’ the second one asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Can I think? I’ll ring again in a few days.’
Heart beating uncomfortably, I opened my Hotmail account: one new message. I said a silent prayer.
I mean it – you do know that?
‘You’re quiet.’ Pete took his eye off the road for a second and looked across.
‘No – I’m OK.’ I glanced at him quickly and looked away again. The dishonesty of it, being here in the car pretending normality when I knew how thin the membrane between this – us – and the massing force on the other side had stretched.
We’d come what I now thought of as the back route towards Ventnor, along the military road rather than to Newport and down. On our right the sea was glittering, more blue again than green. A tanker was tracking across the horizon, its outline sharp in the clear light of the sky. As we rounded the steep bend where the road ran so close to the edge, I remembered something. ‘I heard once that you used to come speeding along here on an old motorbike in the dead of night. Apparently you were apprehended by the police.’
He laughed, surprised. ‘Guilty as charged. That was my teenage rebellion – the options were limited round here.’ He looked at me again. ‘I’d forgotten all about that. Who told you? Chris?’
I hesitated. ‘Sally.’
‘Well, yes. She does like to keep herself up on my business, it seems.’ His mouth straightened and I wished I hadn’t said anything.
In Ventnor he parked on the esplanade. We were about a hundred yards from where I’d been the day Sarah had called me; I remembered it all. In my bag, my mobile was on silent. I didn’t want to turn it off in case it gave Helen the wrong impression but if it rang, Pete would think it odd if I didn’t answer and I couldn’t speak to her in his earshot.
We got out and started walking. The businesses that lined the esplanade were remaking themselves for the new season. At a café with a small outside area, a woman with a bucket of water and a sponge wiped down plastic chairs; further along, a man was touching up the paintwork at a bed and breakfast. The summer that I hadn’t been able to imagine here was coming.
On the path along the cliff-top there were other people, middle-aged couples in walking boots and a man our age struggling to control a boxer that strained at its leash, but after a while, confident we wouldn’t meet anyone we knew, Pete took my hand. I galloped along, trying to match his stride, trying to fix the scene in my mind. I wanted to remember it for ever: the soft grass that covered the cliff-top here, the rooks that rose in flurries from the stand of trees beyond the path and the wind-dappled sea that stretched all the way to France like an expanse of shimmering fish-scales vanishing to a steel-blue line. I wondered briefly what my mother would think if she saw me now and decided I didn’t give a toss.
After we got back from the other side of the Island, we dropped in at the cottage for my things. Pete sat downstairs and watched athletics on television for a few minutes while I put my toothbrush and a change of clothes in a bag. Feeling dishonest again, I checked my email: no new messages. In the bathroom, I checked my phone.
When I got downstairs again, Pete was not alone.
‘Ah,’ I said, coming into the room.
‘Does he come here often?’ He turned to me. The cat known to me as Hercule regarded me with innocent eyes from over the arm of Pete’s jumper.
‘Yes. I encouraged him, I’m afraid. I think he comes for the squirrel – there’s one in the yard and he chases it. He started following me into the house and standing by the fridge. Eventually I gave him milk. Sorry.’
‘Cats do their own thing, don’t they? He comes home now, too.’
‘What’s he called?’
‘Victor. That’s what they’d called him at the shelter.’
‘I think he looks like Hercule Poirot.’
Pete laughed. ‘The dinner jacket – yes.’
Back at his house we opened a bottle of wine and cooked the steaks we’d bought at the butcher in Ventnor. Afterwards we lay on the sofa. Beyond us the Solent had turned dark and I could hear it lapping on the rocks round the bottom of the sea wall below. I remembered again how I’d heard the water that day on Tennyson Down, how I’d imagined Alice in the sound of it, calling to me, calling me over.
‘Upstairs,’ he said. ‘We’re not in the main bedroom.’
‘Of course – there’s no need to . . .’
‘I want this but I feel guilty. I feel guilty about even thinking about it – you.’ He moved on to his back and there was silence for a moment. ‘I’ll always wonder whether I could have done more. I’ll always think about her.’ He turned his head and looked at me, his eyes very green. ‘What I’m trying to say is it might take time.’
‘We’ve got time,’ I said, but even as the words left my mouth, I knew it was a lie.
On Sunday we went out on the boat. I’d woken to an empty bed and had got up immediately and gone down to the kitchen. He had been standing by the window, looking out over the Solent. I went to stand next to him, and he put his arm around my shoulder. The window was open and a cool breeze swept in around my bare legs.
‘Shall we go sailing today?’ he said.
‘I can’t,’ I said.
‘I thought you had no plans?’
I hesitated. ‘I’m feeling bad about the translation – the weeks are ticking past and it’s a tight schedule anyway.’
‘You can’t work on it all day, surely? Come, and then work this evening. Go on.’ He smiled and slipped his hand up inside the jumper I’d put on. His thumb found my nipple and circled it gently.
‘This is coercion.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘OK, then.’ I breathed in the smell of his hair as he bent to kiss my neck, then my jaw. ‘I won’t forget this, though – how you’ve lured me off the path of diligence.’
‘I should hope not.’
Out on Beatrice, I watched him from behind my sunglasses. He sat at the back of the cockpit, one hand resting gently on the tiller, the other shielding his eyes from the sun that shone directly across him. He looked more relaxed again now, though he’d been tense earlier. Just as we’d been leaving the house to get into the car, early enough to think there wouldn’t be many other people around, Tom had been coming down the High Street, clearly on his way home from the night before. He hadn’t even bothered to try to conceal his cigarette. ‘Morning,’ he’d said, his voice full of innuendo. ‘Pete. Kate.’
‘I don’t like him,’ Pete had said, when the doors were closed. ‘I never have. I don’t trust him. And this’ll get back to Sally now, guaranteed.’
‘They don’t get on, though, do they? Would he tell her?’
‘Information is power, isn’t it?’
Now I watched the shore of the mainland as we cut through the water. We were close enough in to be able to see people walking their dogs along the beach. I tried just to enjoy the moment, being out with him on the boat in the sun, but I couldn’t shake off the sense that the weekend was unreal, too good. The happiness felt snatched. Already I’d lied to Pete, and not only because I hadn’t told him about Richard. I wasn’t going to work on the translation this evening. After he dropped me off, I would wait a few minutes until he was back at home and then I would get in my own car and drive across to the ferry. I was going back to London tonight.
‘I won’t hang around,’ Pete said as he pulled in near the end of the passageway. ‘We’re probably the talk of the town already but we might as well try not to fan it.’
‘When will I see you?’
‘I’ve got a meeting over in Southampton tomorrow and dinner with the client afterwards so I’ll be late back, probably not until eleven or so. Tuesday? I could cook.’
‘Tuesday – OK. But I’ll cook.’
He smiled and touched my face. ‘See you then.’
I looked at his face for a few seconds, then I picked up my bag and made to get out of the car. Just at the last moment, though, he caught my arm and pulled me back. He kissed my lips gently. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Had to do it – stuff the curtain-twitchers.’