Garden of Stars (12 page)

Laughter began to bubble up in Sarah's throat, and Scott's too, and grew and grew until they were both raucously roaring, great gales of hilarity erupting out of them, coloured by sexual tension and tinged with hysteria in the aftermath of their narrowly averted brush with disaster.

“We both look ridiculous,” Sarah managed to articulate between snorts of laughter. “And I'm freezing.”

With that she ran, wading and hopping awkwardly through the swallows, and he ran with her, and before long they were back at their pile of clothes, jumping up and down and hugging themselves. Sarah seized her viscose scarf and rubbed herself with it hurriedly, then offered it to Scott to do the same. She pulled on her bra and her dress as quickly as she could, and gingerly removed her sopping wet knickers. As she wrung them out, she danced and skipped, celebrating survival, relishing the cold, the fun, the relief, the excitement.

The danger.

For she could not dismiss the real issue. That by going out with Scott tonight, by reclaiming the Sarah she used to be, long ago, long before marriage and kids and domesticity and boredom and neglect, she had taken a risk.

The risk that nothing would ever be the same again.

9

At the hotel, Sarah and Scott retrieved their room keys from reception. They walked together through the hallways of the old palace, past the gilt-encrusted rooms crammed with elegant antique furniture, towards the modern bedroom block. When they reached the point where their routes to their respective rooms diverged, they stopped and turned to each other.

“Thank you, Scott.” Sarah felt compelled to speak, to fill the gulf that suddenly seemed to have opened up between them. “I've had a lovely evening.”

Scott raised his eyebrows. “Despite almost drowning?” he asked. His tone was jocular and light, but the expression in his eyes was serious.

Sarah blushed. “Well, near-death experiences excluded,” she concurred.

The hush in the carpeted corridor was suddenly deafening.

“I had a great time, too.” Scott had his hands in his pockets as if somehow restraining them. “I hope I haven't kept you up too late.”

“No, no, not at all,” said Sarah hastily, stifling a yawn.

They stood, looking at each other. I don't know what to say next, thought Sarah. I don't know what to do.

“How about we meet for breakfast in the morning?” Scott broke the silence, his voice overly loud in the stillness all around them.

“Yes, why not!” Sarah's reply was too quick, too eager. She tried to temper her enthusiasm, to sound casual, unperturbed. “Absolutely, I'm up for that. I'm not in any hurry tomorrow, so shall we say, I don't know, nine?”

“Perfect. See you then.” He was lingering, but she pretended not to notice.

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight. Sleep well.”

Sarah turned and walked briskly all the way to her room, aware of every step she took, conscious of his eyes following her.

Lying in bed, she played and replayed the last twenty-four hours. Her life, with its significant moments, its highs and lows, passed before her eyes as if reliving the moment she had thought she was going to drown. The day she had met Scott, at the African club, and the day she had seen him for the last time. The day she met Hugo, at a friend's party. How they had started going out and he had wooed her with his calm solidity, taking her on weekends to the country in the Alfa Romeo Spider that he had restored himself, teaching her to play tennis, which he was good at and she had never learned. Cooking her that spaghetti Bolognese. They had both been thinking of buying a place, so it seemed to make sense to do it together, and soon they were the proud possessors of a one-and-a-half bedroom flat off the Holloway Road.

Not long after moving in, Hugo had ‘popped the question', as Sarah's mother Natalie always put it, instead of using the word ‘propose'. Before long, the Big Day (another of Natalie's phrases) was upon them; their wedding day. Two days before it Sarah had panicked, told her mum she wanted to pull out.
She'd been packed off to bed with a dose of Natalie's sleeping pills, and in the morning, everyone had told her it was just bride's nerves, nothing to worry about. The wedding went ahead.

Three years later, Honor was born, traumatically by emergency C-section in the middle of a grim February night when the pavements were hard with ice and freezing fog hung in the air. Sarah had been vaguely aware of the steam rising from the drains in the roads like in a scene from a New York movie as the car, driven by a frantic Hugo, had skidded up the steep hill towards the hospital. Seeing the state she was in, a porter had got her a wheelchair and put her into the goods lift to speed her way up to the ninth-floor maternity ward. But it was another twelve hours before Honor was finally ripped out of her, blue, her heartbeat weak and erratic.

Sarah sometimes felt that she was still reeling from the shock now, seven years later. Two years after she had Honor, Ruby's birth, another car-crash delivery and more stitches than a patchwork quilt. And then, two children and a husband to look after, a seemingly never-ending, and often thankless, task.

It was all exhausting. She was exhausted. Meeting Scott again seemed momentous because it was a break in the routine, she reassured herself, the kind of change that was as good as a rest. That was all it was. Nothing more than that.

The insistent tone denoting an incoming video call startled her when it suddenly started up the next morning. She had emailed Carrie, her friend from the Lisbon language school they'd both taught in, to see if she were free to chat. It seemed that she was.

Sarah clicked ‘Answer', and after a slight delay, Carrie's face loomed up on the laptop screen.

“Hey, Sarah. What are you up to?” The image kept freezing momentarily and pixellating as the signal faltered, but the sound was clear. “What on earth are you doing in Lisbon?”

“Writing an article about cork.” Sarah kept her voice as casual as she could. “You know, wine bottle stoppers etc etc.”

“Oh, put a plug in it!” Carrie roared with laughter at her own joke, making Sarah wince and turn the volume down.

“Well, it's a tough job, being in a luxury hotel in Lisbon in the sunshine – but somebody's got to do it.”

She saw Carrie look away from the screen and in the direction of the door, and then make a shooing gesture with her hand. Must be one of her kids; she had three boys already, and another baby on the way.

“Anyway, the thing is, Carrie, I've got something to tell you.”

“Oh. A good something or a bad something? Only I can't deal with problems at the moment, due to pregnancy. Not enough brain cells. Or energy, for that matter.”

Sarah fiddled with her laptop lead, which she noticed was inexplicably filthy. “I don't know if it's a problem.”

Carrie raised her eyebrows questioningly.

“It's just that – I met someone here yesterday. Guess who?” Sarah swiped away a fly that had come in through the open window and settled on her screen, rubbing its front legs together, beady eyes rotating as it did so.

Carrie held her hands up in the air and shook her head. “I have no idea. Santa Claus?”

“Very funny. But you know what, you've got the right initials.” Sarah paused. “Scott. Scott Calvin.”

“Scott! The bastard. I sent him an email circa the year 2000 that I'm still waiting for a reply to.” Carrie was looking – and sounding – suitably surprised. And interested, Sarah noted, noticing how she was leaning closer to the screen now, her face oddly distorted from the camera angle, interruptions from family members ignored. “So how come?”

“Just coincidence, he's here for a conference. He doesn't actually live here any more. We met by chance and went out for dinner last night.” Sarah did her best to sound casual, to give no hint of the finer details of their evening; the skinny-dipping, their semi-naked embrace, the stabs of guilt in her stomach that alternated with the butterflies of excitement.

“You…are…kidding me!” Carrie wolf-whistled, long and slow. “Was it dangerous? Where is he now?”

“Right here in bed beside me! Say hello, Scott.” Sometimes the only way to deflect Carrie was to play her at her own game. Sarah giggled as Carrie's mouth fell open in astonishment and she and her bump almost fell off the chair.

“Now I know you're having a laugh!” Carrie settled herself back down, holding her hands supportively underneath her belly. “But truthfully, Sarah, did you, or didn't you, shag him?”

“For heaven's sake! No, of course not.” It flicked across Sarah's mind that telling Carrie she'd met Scott might have been a mistake. She was not known for her tact, or discretion. “We're both married, and not to each other.”

“I'll believe you.” Carrie's eyebrows had almost disappeared into her hairline now. “Thousands wouldn't.”

“I'm being serious – of course it's been lovely to see him. But on Monday, I'm going back to London, to my husband and children, and he'll be going back to Vancouver, to his wife and kids.”

This was true. Incontrovertible.

Carrie didn't answer, and Sarah saw that she had turned to the door again, and was gesturing ‘two minutes' to someone.

“I better go. Dan's planned a family day out.” She paused, picked up a child's snow globe from the table, a souvenir from Sydney, and shook it slowly until it was a fuzzy whirl of white. “But Sarah. Have some fun by all means, just tread carefully. I don't know if I trust you to behave rationally where Scott Calvin is concerned.”

She placed the globe back onto the desk, where the flakes slowly and incongruously descended upon the Harbour Bridge. “And as I said earlier, I've got this much spare capacity to take on anyone else's issues right now.” She held up her hand in front of the camera, thumb and forefinger indicating a space of a few millimetres.

And then the computer bleeped and the message popped up on screen: CarefreeCarrie is offline.

Sarah closed the laptop lid, the words ‘Scott Calvin' and ‘behaving rationally' playing at the back of her mind like a tune that she couldn't get out of her head. She opened the journal, the sound of its creaking cover and thick pages familiar now, like an old friend.

Praia do Guincho, 1935

The water was icy, and it soon became apparent that the relative calm observed from the shore had been deceptive; the undertow was fearsome and the ceaseless waves more powerful than they looked. I am a strong swimmer, but even I had soon had enough. But coming in is always much harder than going out. Every wave threw me forward, then forcefully sucked me back so that making any headway was tortuously slow. Again and again I advanced a few strokes and then lost nearly everything I had gained.

At one point, I remember turning on my back to rest for a few seconds. The silken mass of the Milky Way was spread out above me and I thought of how many thousands of years the stars' light had taken to reach me, and how indifferent to my plight those stars seemed as I floated like an insignificant speck of nothing on the surface of the ocean. And then the undertow of a huge wave dragged me down, and I was tumbling and turning beneath an Atlantic more ferocious and uncontrollable than I had ever known, my vision obscured by the sand that the sea had sucked from the ocean floor, my ears filled with the thunderous roar of the surf, unable to breathe. At that moment, I almost lost hope.

Surfacing momentarily, I choked up the sickly, salty water in my mouth and then forced my body to relax, to stop struggling, so that I could regain some energy. Dragged repeatedly back and forth I could just make out, between the rise and fall of the waves, John on the distant beach. The tiny pinprick of light from the cigarette in his hand was like a beacon reaching out to me as I battled with the sea.

I knew then that I could not give up.

Eventually, after strenuous minutes that seemed like hours of gargantuan effort, I managed to reach the point where the waves broke, but this just presented another challenge. The force of each one picked me up and dragged me under, rolling me over and over and filling my eyes, ears and mouth with sand which ground grittily against my teeth. The taste of the slimy salt water, thick and unctuous, was utterly nauseating but I fought on because I had to.

In between each wave's ebb and flow, I continued to snatch glimpses of John silhouetted against the moonlight, his shoulders hunched with anxiety, his body tense as he stared intently at me, nothing but black sea between us. I saw him raise a cigarette to his lips, then toss it disgustedly into the bushes when he found it burnt out and finished. As the next wave subsided, he lit another one, hands trembling as he protected the match from the wind, and took a long, deep drag, before turning his eyes back towards me.

I could sense him willing me back to the shore, and I mustered all my strength and vocal power to call out, “I'm fine, John!
Tudo bem!
Don't worry.”

But my words were gathered up and snatched away by the wind and I knew that he didn't hear them.

Then, as if by some miracle, I found myself far enough in for the tips of my toes to make contact with the sandy bottom of the sea, and I managed to move forward a few paces before being sent flying by the next breaker. Slowly, gradually, I crept on, inch by inch until finally I crawled out of the water on all fours and collapsed onto the beach, exhausted. The air was cold now and the sky seemed to press down on me, suffocating me. Lying on the hard, wet sand, I could feel the vibration of the waves as they continued to thud hypnotically onto the shore.

Almost at once, John was there, lifting me up by my shoulders and throwing the towel around me, kissing me and rubbing my back vigorously. “You were amazing,” he said. “But I shouldn't have let you go. It's far too rough here.”

He hugged me; he is so tall and broad, and I so much smaller than him, that he can encompass all of me within his embrace. He took a corner of the towel and tenderly wiped the globules of wet sand from around my eyes and nose. “I thought you might not make it.” I heard how his voice was granular with fear, the muscles in his neck tense and thick with it. I let him pummel me dry, gradually feeling my body begin to warm up.