Kelly thought of Thorpeness as one of God’s weird though not especially wild places; not that God had much to do with it. Thorpeness was a resort village, spirting distance from Aldeburgh on one side, and even closer to the Sizewell nuclear power station on the other. It was one of those purpose-built bits of seaside, but it had no promenade, no boarding houses, no fun fair, no ‘kiss me quick’ hats, no whelk stalls. It was not that sort of seaside. It was posh, East Anglian, civilized.
‘Created in the early part of the century by a man called G. Stewart Ogilvie,’ Kelly explained as she drove. Dexter had brought along another tape, Mahler this time, and it played as she spoke, giving her the feeling that she was doing the voice-over for a rather solemn documentary.
‘It wasn’t that Ogilvie lacked imagination, but he had a dry, limited, English sort of imagination. He didn’t want the place to be vulgar. He did create a boating lake, and there’s a golf club that thinks very highly of itself, but it’s not exactly fun city. What makes it interesting is the weird architecture. Did you ever get The Prisoner on telly in America? Well, it’s like a watered-down version of that place.’
Dexter had had a spring in his step when she’d picked him up that morning. He was still limping of course, but it was a jaunty sort of limp. He had bundled himself into Kelly’s car, and even though the effort had made him wince, he smiled once he was seated.
‘Maybe it’s just the nature of the beast,’ said Kelly, ‘that if you have the means to build a whole new village, you’re congenitally unlikely to have the imagination to build a really interesting one.’
She described the buildings of Thorpeness, said they tended to be individual and individualistic, not wild fantasy exactly, but lots of mock-Tudor, mock-medieval, mock-workers’ cottages; a great deal of mockery. There was a big crenellated gatehouse, but it was not the gateway to anywhere in particular, simply running between two blocks of flats. She described the miniature triumphal arch which was in fact the entrance to a public park, but the opening was only wide enough to let one person through at a time and it was made of concrete. She described the thatched sentry boxes, the free-standing dovecote, the almshouses, the strangely hideous church.
‘It has the feeling of an eccentric but slightly dour architectural movie set,’ she said.
This was actually a quotation from one of her father’s books. Inevitably it was her father who had first brought her here, but she came back often and, as with the doom painting in Dunstan, she judged people by their reactions to it. She had hopes for Dexter.
‘It does have two genuine tourist attractions,’ she said. ‘You could argue that neither of them is strictly speaking a folly. They’re not quite what they seem, but they’re quite useful I suppose.
‘There’s a nineteenth-century windmill, real enough but nothing was ever ground in it, at least not in Thorpeness.
Ogilvie bought a redundant mill and moved it here, to pump water out of the ground. But having got this water he needed somewhere to put it, so he built a gigantic water tank; that’s the other folly, six storeys built up around the tank. The top two look like a small cottage, with a pitched roof, bay window and chimney, perched on top of a narrow, four-storey tower. There are windows on every level, and it’s now converted into flats. But the part that looks most habitable, the top two storeys, are actually the water tank. They call it the “House in the Clouds”, which I always think is a bit of an overstatement.’
‘You’re pretty well informed for a taxi driver, aren’t you?’ Dexter said.
‘English taxi drivers always know everything,’ she replied, but she should have known he wouldn’t accept so blase an answer.
‘I just keep wondering,’ he said, ‘why a smart young woman like yourself is wasting her life behind the wheel of a cab.’
The combination of flattery and insult was maddening, and it seemed they were back to their relationship of the previous day.
Kelly could only reply, ‘I’m not that young.’
‘But surely you must have ambitions.’
‘Why must I?’
‘There’s something about you that says you’re cut out for more.’
‘What kind of something?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s in the genes.’
‘There’s only the usual stuff in my jeans,’ she said, but he didn’t get the joke.
‘Surely you must want to broaden your horizons, to have an education, to travel, to fulfil your potential.’
‘If you say I must …
‘Perhaps you need a mentor.’
Kelly couldn’t tell if he was making a feeble joke or whether, more improbably, he was testing the waters of flirtation. To be on the safe side she said, ‘So what subjects would I need mentoring in?’
‘All subjects,’ he said, and it was still impossible to tell if there was innuendo there.
‘Well,’ Kelly said, ‘yesterday you told me about Bach. So what’s it going to be today? Existentialism?’
‘Existentialism’s pretty straightforward really,’ he said, and she couldn’t quite believe it when he began to give her a pocket definition of existentialism.
At that moment Kelly felt there was more than enough reason to terminate the arrangement. She thought she could just about tolerate fighting off the boredom of his company, but she was damned if she was going to spend the next few days being mentored.
‘What is it that you do with your life, Dexter?’ she asked as he finished his tutorial.
He looked troubled as though it was a familiar and intractable question.
‘You could say I’m a perpetual student,’ he said, ‘although in fact I only started recently.’
‘What do you study?’
‘What have you got? Music, literature, a little anthropology, a smattering of history, philosophy. You know the sort of thing.’
Kelly didn’t, but she let it pass.
‘You’re probably thinking I’m a little old to be a student.’
She hadn’t been thinking anything of the sort, but now that he mentioned it …
‘My grandfather was a doctor in LA, made a bundle of money looking after Industry people. He wanted my father to do the same but Dad was too comfortable or too dumb for college, so he became a realtor, set up his own company, made a whole new bundle of money, still does, and then he wanted me to be in the business with him. And I said fine.
‘I went into the family business when I was pretty young. Found I was good at it, in the way that only the young and uncommitted can be good. I made a small bundle of my own, got married. I was so good at what I did that by the time I was in my late twenties I was burnt out. So I took some time off. My dad was very understanding. Why wouldn’t he be? He’s a laidback California kind of guy and I was his best boy. It started out as a one month break, then two months, then six. Then I decided to go back to college, get a real education. I wasn’t very smart but I was very committed. I still am.
‘And, if you want the full story, that’s pretty much why my marriage ended. My wife thought she’d married a business whiz-kid. Turned out she’d married an over-educated slacker.
‘So that’s what I do – existentially. Whether it’s what I am is a different question.’
They arrived in Thorpeness and Kelly parked the car. Perhaps she was letting her mean streak show. She deliberately drove to a far corner of the car park so that Dexter would have to walk that much further on his bad leg. She thought a little bit of physical pain and punishment might be good for him. He did his best to retain his good humour, but when he tried to take her arm to help his progress she pointedly pulled away and walked faster.
‘What exactly’s wrong with that leg?’ she asked.
‘I don’t really know,’ he admitted glumly. ‘The doctors call it tendinitis, which means they don’t know either. Tendinitis is a condition where—’
‘It’s all right, I don’t need that much detail. Are you having treatment?
‘A little physiotherapy, some painkillers. Sometimes they pass electric current through it.’
‘Has it helped?’
‘How can you tell? Who knows how much worse it would be if I hadn’t had the treatment? It may get better with time or it may be something I just have to live with. There are good days and bad days.’
‘What’s today?’ she asked.
‘Good enough,’ he said. ‘Better than yesterday.’
‘Good.’
So they tramped around Thorpeness. There weren’t many people about and Kelly was glad. She found herself embarrassed to be with Dexter. They didn’t belong together and she was worried somebody might think they were a pair, or worse, a couple.
Today Dexter had his camera with him and he snapped away at everything he saw. That seemed desperately uncool to Kelly, too touristy, too rubber-necked, and when he asked if he could take her picture she told him not to be so silly. Even Dexter’s appreciation of Thorpeness, which seemed genuine, didn’t please her. She somehow felt he wasn’t enjoying it the right way, the way she did.
‘I suppose also,’ he said out of thin air, ‘that being in your job makes it very difficult for you to have relationships.’
‘What?’
‘People tend to pair off with partners of a similar social status. Intellectuals marry other intellectuals. Factory girls marry factory boys. But you, I can’t see that you’d be very happy married to another taxi driver.’
He happened to be right, but that didn’t win him any points with Kelly either.
‘Guess I’m still looking for Mr Goodbar,’ she sneered.
‘Maybe you’re looking in the wrong place,’ he said.
‘Gosh, you know, I think you might be right.’
It was said sarcastically enough but Dexter didn’t pick up on that either. He gave her a grand, guileless smile and seemed very happy. It occurred to her that perhaps this was all Dexter really wanted: approval, agreement, someone to say ‘how true’ after his every utterance. A gloomy silence fell over her.
They struggled up to the windmill and the House in the Clouds, and having looked at them carefully and read the information boards Dexter said he was impressed.
‘I really love your English follies,’ he said. ‘They’re so sane, so repressed. In America you have buildings shaped like doughnuts and hot dogs. In Barcelona you have Gaudi. In Vienna you have Hundertwasser. Wild people, creating wild stuff. Here in England a person needs to do so little before he’s considered crazy.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said.
‘I don’t imagine you’ve ever been to the United States, have you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘But I’ve been to Ibiza.’
‘“What do they know of England who only England know?” That’s a quotation from Kipling.’
‘I know.’
‘Good.’
And he smiled broadly again and returned to his state of happiness. Kelly couldn’t quite believe how easy it had been to work him out. Just agree with him and everything would be fine. She was filled with contempt.
They had lunch at a little snack bar by the boating lake. They ate dull English pies and sandwiches and she felt an urge to apologize for them. Dexter shrugged and said it didn’t matter and he exercised some theory about true sophistication meaning that you should eat caviar at the Ritz and dull pies and sandwiches at the snack bar by the boating lake. It was a question of appropriateness. This annoyed her as much as anything Dexter had said so far.
He limped over to the counter and paid for lunch and they went outside. There were a couple of rowing boats on the lake, one containing a vast woman and two small children, the other with a smoochy young couple. Kelly looked at her watch. There was still a lot of day to be got through.
‘I bought this,’ Dexter said, and he held up a porcelain model of the House in the Clouds. It had been on sale in the snack bar. It was detailed but something in the moulding and varnishing had softened off the hard edges. It was smoother and more streamlined than the real thing.
‘Would you carry it for me?’ Dexter asked. ‘I don’t have a pocket big enough.’
This was patently untrue. The model was scarcely more than four inches tall and would have fitted quite easily into the pocket of his jacket.
‘What the hell,’ Kelly muttered under her breath and took the model from him.
‘You know,’ Dexter said, ‘my knee is feeling a whole lot better. I think I might be able to take a walk along the beach with you.’
‘Are you sure?’ Kelly asked.
It wasn’t that she had developed a concern for his health. She couldn’t have cared less whether his leg got better or worse. She was trying to dissuade him because she wanted him to sit on his own and read his book like he had the day before and then she’d be able to walk along the beach by herself. Even as she formulated the idea, she knew she was being unfair. She recognized that if she was taking the man’s money she ought at least to be prepared to tolerate his company; but she was feeling selfish and ungenerous.
‘Really,’ he said. ‘I think the exercise might do me good.’
Kelly didn’t pretend to be pleased at the prospect but neither did she quite have the nerve to tell him to stay where he was. Slowly they made progress along the shingle beach. It took a certain extra effort to push forward over the rough terrain but Dexter did his best to keep up with Kelly as she set the pace.
Parallel to the beach, set back behind a run of low dunes, was a row of bungalows. No two were the same, yet they all shared a look and a spirit. There was something provisional and impermanent about them. They were more than mere shacks and they were clearly well looked after, yet they lacked the solidity of ‘real’ houses. There was something capricious about them. They spoke in a curiously dated way of holidays and parties and picnics. They had glass porches and shingle gardens that sprouted poppies or sea holly as well as old anchors and chimney pots and improvised sculpture made out of driftwood.
Most of the bungalows didn’t look lived in. They were locked up tightly to keep out the world and the sea. The only sign of life was at a distant blue and white bungalow a long way up the beach. There were a couple of cars parked in front of it and half a dozen people were sitting or standing around the steps and veranda.
By then Kelly had managed to put a certain distance between herself and Dexter. He didn’t call after her to ask her to slow down but she decided she’d walk as far as the inhabited bungalow and then stop and wait for him to catch up. As she got closer she could see and hear that the people sitting around were young, loud, probably drunk, five men, one woman. She immediately thought they looked like trouble but it didn’t bother her since she intended to give them a wide berth. But when she drew level with the bungalow and sat down on a dune at what she thought was a safe distance, she heard one of the men calling to her.
‘Hey, down there! Hey, you!’
She half turned round, not looking at the man doing the shouting, but half a turn was enough.
‘It is you,’ he called. ‘Kelly. How the hell are you?’
She turned fully now and looked at the owner of the voice. He was young, big boned, big jawed, dressed in cords and a rugby shirt.
‘I may have been a lousy lay,’ he shouted, ‘but don’t say you’ve forgotten me completely.’
And then it clicked. Oh God. One of her mistakes. The briefest of one-night stands after a New Year’s party in Ipswich. She’d been drunk and accepted a lift home with him and when it came to the crunch she couldn’t be bothered to fight him off. His name was Peter, she seemed to remember, some sort of farmer, or more likely the son of a farmer; sturdy, earthbound, bullishly dull. But he hadn’t been a lousy lay at all. There had been something direct, possibly agricultural, about the way he fucked. It lacked finesse but it was very efficient, very passionate. The passion might not have been long-lived, in fact it had worn off before the alcohol did, but that didn’t make it contemptible. Brief localized passion was a tiny, important reminder of something greater, a trailer for the main attraction. Nevertheless, she was absolutely certain she didn’t want to repeat the experience with Peter, would have been happy never to see him again, and certainly didn’t want a shouted conversation about sex in front of his friends.
‘Hello, Peter,’ she called back.
‘Come and have a drink.’
‘I’m with someone.’
‘Are you really?’
Kelly pointed down the beach to where Dexter was making slow but determined progress.
‘We welcome cripples too,’ Peter said, and a couple of his friends laughed.
She could see Dexter watching her, seeing her talk to this stranger and she thought he wouldn’t welcome it, and perhaps that in itself was why she accepted the invitation; just to annoy him. She walked over to the bungalow. The little group looked like they’d been drinking for a long time. Peter offered her whisky, gin, Pimm’s, beer, wine, but she asked for an orange juice and explained that she was working.
‘Kelly’s an escort girl,’ Peter said to the others. ‘She takes it very seriously.’
There was more laughter and Kelly said, ‘Oh fuck off, Peter,’ and he bowed his head in a gesture of mock submission.
‘This isn’t your bungalow, is it?’ she asked him.
‘No. Gerald here’s rented it for a couple of weeks.’
Peter indicated which of his friends was Gerald but otherwise made no introductions. The woman, a plump, flashy young thing, seemed particularly hostile towards Kelly’s arrival. Gerald was deep in conversation, or at least he was deeply involved in listening to the sound of his own voice.
‘In a perfect world this whole area could be the California of England,’ he was saying. ‘There are lots of people who are into alternative lifestyles, organic farmers, artists, craftsmen. There’s a chap up near Beccles who still makes geodesic domes.’
Kelly glared at him, hoping to convey what an idiot she thought he was, but it did no good. She continued glaring and he continued talking, and eventually she stopped glaring in case he got the idea she fancied him.
Dexter arrived at the bungalow, and Kelly hoped that, if nothing else, he might be able to insist that Suffolk wasn’t remotely like California. He was looking pained but composed. However, Kelly’s instincts about him had been wrong. He was happy to meet some people. He introduced himself and before long he was drinking with them and performing male bonding rituals that crossed the nationality gap and were completely incomprehensible to Kelly. She remembered his hip flask and thought perhaps it was only a shared interest in booze that brought them together. Dexter immediately proved himself to be a fierce and capable drinker and that impressed the others.
Kelly kept herself some distance away from the group, feigning an interest in the weeds pushing up through the shingle, but before long she could hear that she was being discussed again.
‘Kelly’s been showing me the sights,’ Dexter said. ‘She’s pretty good at it, though I figure she thinks it’s beneath her. As a matter of fact, I happen to agree with her.’
Peter agreed too, speaking of her as though he was some old friend who’d given a lot of thought to her talents and career prospects.
‘Well, she is the daughter of a famous father,’ Peter said.
Kelly was surprised to hear him say that. How did he know? She must have been drunker than she remembered when she slept with him. Normally she only talked about her father when she was feeling particularly safe and secure. She listened as Peter proceeded to give a brief, somewhat garbled account of her father’s life. Inaccurate though it was, it appeared to be enough to intrigue Dexter. She thought he was looking at her differently, as though she was suddenly more worthy of his respect and attention. She was furious. She left the bungalow and the stupid drinkers and walked away, down to the sea.
When she got there she looked at the pebbles. She still paid homage to the Suffolk tradition of collecting stones that had holes through them, threading them together and hanging them outside the front door to keep witches away. When she was a child she could look forever and not find one. Her father always found them instantly. He had a good eye for that as well as for everything else. He used to tell her she didn’t need to keep the witches away, that perhaps she was a witch herself. At the time she’d thought it was a very odd thing for him to say, and she didn’t find it much less odd even now.
There were still days when she could comb the whole beach and not find a single pierced stone, but that afternoon she came across two or three before she got as far as the water’s edge. She was there a good long time before anyone came after her, and when at last she felt someone’s presence beside her, it was Dexter. He had got quite drunk quite quickly and he was holding out a glass.
‘Peace offering,’ he said.
She took the glass from him and asked, ‘What’s in it?’
‘Just orange juice,’ he said.
Kelly sniffed the drink. Whatever it was, it was more than orange juice. She could smell a strong whiff of alcohol coming through. The drink had been spiked. What kind of dim bimbo did he think she was? It was the last straw.
‘You’re a real charmer, aren’t you, Dexter?’ she said, and she stormed off along the beach.
She knew there was no way he was going to be able to catch up with her and she didn’t turn round and look back until she was at the car park. By then there was no sign of Dexter. No doubt he had gone back to his drinking pals. Kelly thought they all deserved each other. She got in her car and drove away.
Only when she got home did she realize she was still carrying the model of the House in the Clouds that Dexter had bought. She thought of smashing it but decided that would be childish. Instead she took it into her garden and placed it on the bird table so that visiting birds could knock it over and shit on it.