The party debris continued into the second bedroom and the kitchen: dirty glasses cramming every surface, overflowing ashtrays and used cups. I drank three glasses of water, one after the other, while I gazed out of your kitchen window at a washing line slung from a corner of the house to a metal pole. A dozen clothes pegs clung like birds on a wire, and a sock dangled from one of them. No woman lives here, I thought. I went to the toilet, tidying myself in the mirror over the bath and using a toothbrush I found in the cabinet, hoping it hadn’t been used to clean anything other than teeth. And then I went out of the front door and into the grass where I’d stood with Jonathan the night before. Everything was still. Your car was on the drive but all the others had gone.
There was a path through the grass, one I hadn’t seen in the dark, a trampled route from the house to your writing room at the far end. I can turn my head and see the room from where I sit now, with the morning sun lying on its tin roof. I thought then, and it still makes me think, that the tiny room—with its two long metal legs to keep it level—was balancing at the very edge of the garden, where the zigzag path I made now leads down the bank to the bottom gate and the beach, as if at any moment it might fling off its wooden walls and roof and leap into the water far below. The stable door to your writing room faces the house, and that morning I sidled up to it with a sense that I was trespassing. I stood on the bottom step and knocked. No reply. I knocked again and pressed my ear up against the wood. I turned the handle. The door was locked. I moved up a step and, shielding my eyes from the glare of the day, looked inside. Nothing has changed since that time: I saw the double bed built into the far end with its drawers underneath, the wood-burning stove just big enough to boil a kettle, and a folding desk with your typewriter facing a window that overlooked the sea. You weren’t inside.
I was trying to angle my head to read the title on the sheaf of papers lying beside the typewriter when you called my name. I turned to see you standing in front of your wooden house with two shopping bags in your hands. You waited for me to walk to you.
“I don’t let anyone go in there,” you said, and you were smiling but I knew I’d been warned off. There was a moment of embarrassment until you held up a bag and shook it.
“Would you like some breakfast, or perhaps we should call it lunch?”
You fried bacon and eggs, I started on the washing up and made coffee and toast, and we ate on the veranda in the sunshine. Afterwards you packed a bag for the beach (rug, apples, cheese), and led me down the chine to the sea.
The beach was crowded, a boiling Sunday afternoon in early July with the tide out: damp towels hanging on striped windbreaks, sun-faded folding chairs, terry nappies drooping with seawater, hand-dug sand holes with little boys inside, tiny crabs overheating in buckets, and curling sandwiches in greaseproof paper. You rolled up your trousers and we waded out up to our knees amongst the air beds and beach balls. We kissed, and the idea that people who knew you were watching thrilled me. We walked around Dead End Point and past the beach huts where the families would soon pack up for the day and get into their hot cars to wait in the queue for the ferry. We walked past the car park and the ice cream van, along the perfect curve of the bay, and at the sign for the nudist beach you raised your eyes and I laughed when we passed it. We undressed and neither of us was shy, only curious. I didn’t think about how old you were: your body was tanned that summer, and still firm. You held my hand and we tiptoed together, wincing, into the water. Walkers turned to watch. Something about the two of us together has always made people look: our bodies suit each other, look right together. I remember thinking that the air and then the water on every part of my body was like a lover; a new, fresh, cold lover.
We didn’t stay in for long. We lay on the rug and ate the apples, but you had forgotten a knife so we took the cheese from its waxed paper and bit chunks off with our teeth. You told me that when you were a child, sometimes whole summers would go by and you’d realise you hadn’t been in the sea, and I told you about the summers spent next to the icy waters of the Norwegian island where my father had lived.
I waited for you to kiss me again or suggest we take the rug into the dunes after everyone had left, but instead you put your hand on my skin and said, “Let’s get dressed and go back.” We dragged our clothes on over our sandy arms and legs and walked home through the dunes and along the road.
Late that evening when we were sitting out on the veranda, you said, “I don’t think we’ll ever have to shout to make ourselves heard over the noise of the rain drumming on the roof. I don’t think it’ll ever rain again.” You kneeled in front of me, took my face in your hands, and kissed me again. Then you stood and led me to your bedroom.
Yours, always,
Ingrid
[Placed in I Am the Cheese, by Robert Cormier, 1977.]
Chapter 15
The woman in the library was Flora’s age, perhaps younger, and from the front, her hair had that look of having been artificially straightened in the way it poured from her centre parting. Her eyes narrowed. “Can I help you?”
Flora stuttered an apology and backed away, stepping into someone standing behind her.