“Fish?” Richard said.
“Yes.” She began on his other elbow. “They fell all over the road—tiny mackerel.”
“I’ve read about that,” he said. “Water spouts or miniature tornadoes form over the sea or sometimes ponds and suck up small aquatic animals—fish or frogs—and drop them somewhere else.”
Flora sighed and shifted her knees on the bedcover. “I wasn’t after the scientific explanation.”
“What then?”
“Don’t you think it’s significant?” Flora lifted her pen from Richard’s skin, considered her drawing. “That it happened just as I was coming home? Some kind of omen?” She looked up at his face but saw no connection in his expression to what she was saying. “Forget it.” She went back to her work.
After a while, Richard said, “I can’t believe I’m in the room where Gil Coleman wrote A Man of Pleasure.” He turned his head towards the door. Flora looked too. It still felt illicit to be there with Richard, in her father’s space. The side window, which was propped open, gave a view over the nettles and a glimpse of the sea. A fold-down flap below the sill created a narrow table which could be used for writing or eating, and a wooden folding chair was hanging high up on the wall until it was needed. At the door end, an old oven glove, two chipped mugs, and a paraffin lamp dangled from hooks above the stove. Under Richard, the puce-coloured cover—bald in patches and water stained—was rucked and pushed to the side, revealing grey, musty-smelling sheets and pillows. A colour like the undersides of mushrooms came and went.
“How much of it do you think happened here?” Richard said.
“What?” Flora said. “You don’t think it was autobiographical, do you?” She laughed and the lines she was drawing on Richard rippled. “For fuck’s sake.”
“That’s what everyone said.”
“I didn’t think you would listen to literary gossip.”
“OK, at least it was here he wrote it, at that table, looking out at that view.”
“I suppose so. We weren’t allowed in.” She stuck the tip of her tongue out from between her lips. She’d got as far as Richard’s wrist, and the carpal bones were complicated.
“Why not?”
“It was the rule.”