They disembarked – the first time she felt that she had ever disembarked – and immediately found a flurry of activity on the quayside as the casual travellers and backpackers began the scramble for the best accommodation.
‘So what happens now?’
‘I’ll find us somewhere. You wait in that café, I’ll come and get you.’
‘Somewhere with a balcony—’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘And a sea view please. And a desk.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ and, sandals slapping, he strolled towards the crowd on the quay.
She shouted after him: ‘And don’t forget!’
He turned and looked at her, standing on the harbour wall, holding her wide-brimmed hat to her head in the warm breeze that pressed her light blue dress against her body. She no longer wore spectacles, and there was a scattering of freckles across her chest that he had never seen before, the bare skin turning from pink to brown as it disappeared below the neckline.
‘The Rules,’ she said.
‘What about them?’
‘We need two rooms. Yes?’
‘Absolutely. Two rooms.’
He smiled and headed off into the crowd. Emma watched him go, then dragged the two backpacks along the quay to a small, wind-blown café. There she reached into her bag and pulled out a pen and notebook, an expensive, cloth-bound affair, her journal for the trip.
She opened it on the first blank page and tried to think of something she could write, some insight or observation other than that everything was fine. Everything was fine, and she had the rare, new sensation of being exactly where she wanted to be.
Dexter and the landlady stood in the middle of the bare room: whitewashed walls and cool stone floor, bare save for an immense iron-framed double bed, a small writing desk and chair and some dried flowers in a jar. He walked through louvred double-doors onto a large balcony painted to match the colour of the sky, overlooking the bay below. It was like walking out onto some fantastic stage.
‘You are how many?’ asked the landlady, mid-thirties, quite attractive.
‘Two of us.’
‘And for how long?’
‘Not sure, five nights, maybe more?’
‘Well here is perfect I think?’
Dexter sat on the double bed, bouncing on it speculatively. ‘But my friend and I we are just, well, just good friends. We need two rooms?’
‘Oh. Okay. I have second room.’
Emma has these freckles that I’ve never seen before scattered across her chest just above the neckline.
‘So you do have two rooms?’
‘Yes, of course, I have two rooms.’
‘There’s good news and there’s bad news.’
‘Go on,’ said Emma, closing her notebook.
‘Well I’ve found this fantastic place, sea view, balcony, a bit higher up in the village, quiet if you want to write, there’s even a little desk, and it’s free for the next five days, longer if we want it.’
‘And the bad news?’
‘There’s only one bed.’
‘Ah.’
‘Ah.’
‘I see.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Really?’ she said, suspiciously. ‘One bedroom on the whole island?’
‘It’s peak season, Em! I’ve tried everywhere!’ Stay calm, don’t get shrill. Maybe play the guilt card instead. ‘But if you want me to carry on looking . . .’ Wearily he made to get up from the chair.
She put her hand on his forearm. ‘Single or double bed?’
The lie seemed to be holding. He sat again. ‘Double. A big double.’
‘Well it would have to be a pretty massive bed though, wouldn’t it? To conform to The Rules.’
‘Well,’ Dexter shrugged, ‘I suppose I prefer to think of them as guidelines.’
Emma frowned.
‘What I mean, Em, is I don’t mind if you don’t.’
‘No, I know you don’t mind—’
‘But if you really don’t think you can keep your hands off me—’
‘Oh, I can manage, it’s you I worry about—’
‘Because I’m telling you now, if you lay one finger on me—’
Emma loved the room. She stood on the balcony and listened to the cicadas, a noise that she had only heard in films before and had half suspected to be an exotic fiction. She was delighted, too, to see lemons growing in the garden; actual lemons, in trees; they seemed glued on. Keen not to appear provincial, she said none of this out loud, simply saying ‘Fine. We’ll take it.’ Then, while Dexter made arrangements with the landlady, she slipped into the bathroom to continue fighting with her contact lenses.
At University Emma had held firm private convictions about the vanity of contact lenses, nurturing as they did conventional notions of idealised feminine beauty. A sturdy, honest, utilitarian pair of National Health spectacles showed that you didn’t care about silly trivia like looking nice, because your mind was on higher things. But in the years since leaving college this line of argument had come to seem so abstract and specious that she had finally succumbed to Dexter’s nagging and got the damn things, realising only too late that what she had really been avoiding for all those years was that moment in the movies: the librarian removes her spectacles and shakes out her hair. ‘But Miss Morley, you’re beautiful.’
Her face in the mirror seemed strange to her now, bare and exposed, as if she had just removed her spectacles for the last nine months. The lenses had a tendency to make her prone to random and alarming facial spasms, ratty blinks. They stuck to her finger and face like fish scales or, as now, slid beneath her eyelid, burying themselves deep in the back of her skull. After a rigorous bout of facial contortion and what felt like surgery, she managed to retrieve the shard, stepping out of the bathroom, red-eyed and blinking tearfully.
Dexter was sitting on the bed, his shirt unbuttoned. ‘Em? Are you crying?’
‘No. But it’s still early.’
They headed out in the oppressive lunch-time heat, finding their way towards the long crescent of white sand that stretched for a mile or so from the village, and it was time to unveil the swimming costumes. Emma had put a lot of thought, perhaps too much, into her swimsuit, settling finally for a plain black all-in-one from John Lewis that might have been branded The Edwardian. As she pulled her dress over her head, she wondered if Dexter thought she was in some way chickening-out by not wearing a bikini, as if a one-piece swimming costume belonged with spectacles, desert boots and bike helmets as somehow prudish, cautious, not quite feminine. Not that she cared, though she did wonder, as her dress passed over her head, if she had caught his eyes flickering in her direction. Either way, she was pleased to note that he had gone for the baggy shorts look. A week of lying next to Dexter in Speedos would be more uncomfortable than she could bear.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but aren’t you the Girl from Ipanema?’
‘No, I’m her auntie.’ She sat and attempted to apply suntan lotion to her legs in a way that wouldn’t make her thighs wobble.
‘What is that stuff?’ he said.
‘Factor thirty.’
‘You might as well lie under a blanket.’
‘I don’t want to overdo it on the second day.’
‘It’s like house paint.’
‘I’m not used to the sun. Not like you, you globetrotter. You want some?’
‘I don’t agree with suntan lotion.’
‘Dexter, you are so hard.’
He smiled, and continued to watch her from behind his dark glasses, noting the way her raised arm lifted her breast beneath the black material of the swimming costume, the bulge of soft pale flesh about the elasticated neckline. There was something about the gesture too, the tilt of the head and the pulling back of her hair as she applied the lotion to her neck, and he felt the pleasant nausea that accompanied desire. Oh God, he thought, eight more days of this. Her swimming costume was scooped low at the back and she could do no more than dab ineffectually at the lowest point. ‘Want me to do your back?’ he said. Offering to apply sun cream was a corny old routine, beneath him really, and he thought it best to pass it off as medical concern. ‘You don’t want to burn.’
‘Go on then.’ Emma shuffled over and sat between his legs, her head resting forward on her knees. He began to apply the lotion, his face so close that she could feel his breath on her neck, while he could feel the heat reflecting off her skin, both of them working hard on the impression that this was everyday behaviour and in no way a clear contravention of Rules Two and Four, those prohibiting Flirtation and Physical Modesty.
‘Scooped quite low, isn’t it?’ he said, aware of his fingers at the base of her spine.
‘Good job I didn’t put it on backwards!’ she said and a silence followed while both of them thought oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God.