It’s a treat to take a slow amble back to Guillemot with Kit, especially after a night in the pub when she’s not had to work. They hold hands and dawdle, looking up at the clouds scudding across the moon. He serenades her, singing snatches of pop songs, then brings his arms around her waist to spin her round and kiss her, his lips soft as a dream. Almost four months together and Hannah is still being wooed. And she loves it.
They walk down to the water’s edge, where the sea glows unearthly with phosphorescence. They lie back on the sand together and watch a satellite, a shooting star. She feels herself falling away into space, but before she loses herself completely, Kit says, ‘Come on, I’m getting cold,’ and helps her to her feet. ‘Fancy a hot chocolate?’ he adds.
‘Of course I do. But no whipped cream for me.’
‘But you love whipped cream.’ 107
‘Need to watch this,’ she laughs, patting the roundness of her belly beneath her denim jacket.
‘No, no, no!’ he protests. ‘You’re my pocket Venus!’
‘What?’
‘Small, but …’ He makes the in-out shape of her figure with his hands and pulls a kissy face. ‘My Marilyn—’
‘She’s dead,’ protests Hannah.
He slings an arm around her shoulders and she hugs him round his waist as they hurry back to the cottage to warm up.
Across the sea, the moon makes sequins of the water.
It is a new experience for Hannah, this romance. She hasn’t had many long-term relationships, and this has evolved into much more than a holiday thing. Kit is adorable. They laugh, they play. She tries not to think about what might happen next.
But he’s different. He suggests they might have a future together and he truly seems to believe that’s possible. He offers up vague idyllic plans and looks to her for affirmation. She hasn’t the heart to dissuade him from these rather lovely fantasies.
Right now Hannah is perhaps the happiest she has ever been. She’s always pleased to see Kit when he arrives, keen to meet him off the helicopter whenever her work allows. Her body delights in his. She doesn’t feel stifled by him either. He isn’t possessive. He smiles when she flirts with other customers. He allows her to be herself, claims he loves her dancing and her unique sense of style, both deemed ‘outrageous’ by Bobby; by most people, probably.
Tonight, Alison had said, ‘Er, how short are those shorts? 108You’ll feel a chill wind around the Trossachs in them!’ Not that it’s any of her business what Hannah wears when she’s off duty.
Before she snapped back at Alison, Kit retorted, ‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it,’ and he bowed to her, like she was a queen, like he was proud of her, and the barb was deflected.
He is a sweet boy. He even dances with her, and she loves that. How many straight boys has she known who like to dance?
And in some ways he’s more adventurous than she is. He persuaded her to swim with him in the sea – as shockingly cold as she predicted. She never understood the wild swimmers here: hardy types who fling themselves into the unforgiving Atlantic water all year round; the women known as the Blue Tits. Even with a wetsuit, it didn’t appeal to Hannah, but she did it, for him. The noise she made on entry sent the seabirds flapping away in terror.
She nearly drowned.
She threw herself in and flailed and inhaled water and her head went under, and he had to drag her out. ‘Why the bloody hell didn’t you tell me you couldn’t swim?’ he asked, and she said, ‘I can. Well, I did it at school. I just haven’t done it since.’
Regular swimmers swear by both the health benefits and the exhilaration promoted by their immersion in sea water, but the only joy Hannah experienced was the bacon butties and Irish coffee Kit provided afterwards.
As she dried herself on one of the big towels he’d brought down to the beach from the timeshare, still coughing, still gasping for breath, she watched him frolic in the waves like a giant Labrador. He bounded up to her when he’d finished, and her lips tingled with his icy kisses. The taste of salt on her lips, the salt in her hair making it rougher still. 109
The afternoon after the swim they walked and found a quiet spot near the bird hide by the lake. He lay down his waterproof across the gorse.
Then he lay her down beneath him.
That night he cooked her cod with samphire, and they spent their time drinking good white wine and laughing at nothing. It was, as Saint John from the gardens might say, a bless-ed day.
But there have also been nights when Kit has sobbed in her arms, crying for his father, emotionally unmoored. Hannah wasn’t sure what she felt about this tsunami of emotion at first, but she found herself responding with kindness. She’d not thought of herself as a patient person before, but something about Kit makes it easy.
Another surprise is that she finds it easy to talk to him about her own father – the big absence in her life. She’d always resented him on her mother’s behalf, but when he died, her mother cried, and Hannah felt the pain stab deep into her own chest.
Back at Guillemot, Kit sets about making the hot chocolate. He adds cream on the top of both mugs and Hannah doesn’t complain.
She sips the drink, tucks her feet underneath her on the sofa, and says, ‘Your mother looked well tonight. She put on a good show at the art gallery. How’s she really doing?’
He wrinkles his nose, shakes his head.
‘Shouldn’t you go over there to check?’
‘You want me there, rather than here with you?’
‘No, not now, of course not, but … I feel bad for her being 110on her own. She’d probably like a bit of support from you.’ Hannah’s mother had been quite clingy after her father died.
‘I can’t bear to be around her,’ he confesses. ‘She’s pushed the self-destruct button.’
‘How?’
‘She and my father always liked a drink. But now …’ He sighs. ‘She’s drowning in it. I feel like, if I’m around her, she’ll drag me under.’
‘When my father died, my mum threw herself into work. But he’d never been around, so I guess it wasn’t the same.’
They finish their drinks and go to bed. And long after they’ve worn themselves out with sex, their bodies curve around each other as they try and untangle the messy nets of emotion surrounding dead parents.
He tells her how he found it easier to love his dad than his mother, even though he felt his father was disappointed in him for not having a clear career path. He talks for almost half an hour and then asks, ‘What about you?’
Hannah has never talked about her feelings like this before – not with another lover, nor her friends, not even with her mother.
‘I hated my dad,’ she confesses. ‘Is that terrible?’
‘I hate my bloody mother right now,’ he replies.
‘I thought his cancer was karmic, you know. It started in his eye – his roving eye, as my mother called it. The grass was always greener for Szymon. I thought it served him right.’ She buries her head under his arm. ‘God, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I’m a terrible person.’
‘Of course you’re not.’ Kit kisses her forehead.
‘If you’d asked me the day before he died, I’d have said I 111wouldn’t care a toss. But when my mother called with the news … I was physically sick. I couldn’t function properly for weeks.’
It’s been, what … three-and-a-bit years now, and she might forget for months on end, but then, around mid-October she will find herself feeling exhausted, as if she’s coming down with a bug, her limbs leaden, and she realises the anniversary of his death is approaching. On the twenty-seventh of that month, she aims to take the day off, not to remember, but to lie very still until the wave of anger, sadness and regret passes once more, grieving both for the father she never knew, and the perfect imaginary figure of a dad she’d constructed in his place.
She tries to explain this to Kit. He listens without interrupting, smoothing her hair across the pillow. The unburdening makes her feel lighter. They snuggle closer, arms and legs entwined, and both sleep well.