The Last Weekend (25 page)

It was Em who suggested a swim — anything to escape the house. Breakfast had been perfunctory (cereal and fruit) and lunch just sandwiches, the heat killing all appetite. We lolled under the parasol, only Milo’s girls — sealed in factor 80 sunscreen — stirring from the shade. Even Ollie was relaxed for once, as if church had purged his nervous energy. Beyond the orchard, a heat haze trembled over the stubble. It was a day to make you dream of freezer shelves, blizzards, the down draught from helicopters, the spangled fur of huskies.

Archie was asleep or had gone off to his gig. No one seemed to know. We were all far too hot to care.

‘Walk anyone?’ Em said.

Silence.

‘Game of boules?’

Silence.

‘How about a dip?’

‘Now you’re talking.’

It was the prospect of cold that drew us — even the sun at its hottest couldn’t warm the North Sea. Ollie, taking charge, consulted his map to find a beach that ought to be quiet. Milo swept the girls off to get their swimsuits. Em gently berated me in the bedroom, whispering that she’d rather we were driving home. I kissed her on the cheek, like Judas. For me the point of the excursion was to get some time alone with Daisy.

We went in two cars, Milo driving his hosts while Bethany and Natalie came with us. They’d taken a shine to Em, who kept them going with nursery rhymes, riddles, I-spy games and silly jokes. Not knowing the way, I followed Milo, my eyes on Daisy in the back seat. Once or twice she turned and waved but there was no special affection, nothing for me. I was still brooding about her performance at lunch, when Milo said he feared he’d outstayed his welcome and was wondering
about heading back. Good idea, I thought. But Daisy would have none of it, seizing his hand and begging Ollie to ‘make sweet Milo and his lovely girls
please, please
stay another night'. I ought to have been feeling happy — it was me, not Milo, she’d slept with last night — but I needed some flag or token of her love.

The lanes were narrow and deep, and it was half an hour before we saw the sea.

My idea of a beach comes from childhood holidays in Bridlington: donkeys, ice creams, yellow sand, silent yachts out in the bay. I didn’t expect to find a beach like that near Badingley. But nor was I ready for the bleakness. It’s true that I arrived full of bad feeling, angry at Daisy, irritated with Em, jealous of Milo and dismayed by Ollie. But the melancholy of the coastline owed nothing to my mood.

We drew up near a ruined church, the girls leaping out before I’d killed the engine, frustrated, as we all were, by how long it had taken to arrive. The sea lay straight ahead, beyond the church, like a flat grey mirror, but Ollie said the sand cliffs were too steep at that point and led us off diagonally, round the edge of an open field. From there a path bent seaward through gorse and bracken. The girls ran excitedly ahead, Ollie — self-appointed leader — struggling to keep up. Em took my hand and smiled, grateful for the hint of breeze. Daisy and Milo were lagging behind; after his announcement last night, they had business to discuss. I mustn’t be impatient. Our moment would come.

The sea took its colour from the blue above, but a murky brown showed through, like old paint beneath a new coat.

At a stile, we entered a bird sanctuary or nature reserve, I’m not sure which — all I noticed was the sign: EXTREME FIRE DANGER — NO BARBECUES OR CAMPFIRES. The bracken was tinder under our feet, and I could imagine
the whole lot going up in flames. Two sticks rubbed together would be enough. Or a metal heel striking flint. Or a dropped cigarette stub. The known world had turned flimsy and combustible.

Up ahead Ollie and the girls drew to a halt. When we reached them, we saw why. The path petered out in air; from the sheared-off sand cliff, it was a twenty-foot drop to the beach below. Ollie and I were for jumping, but the others overruled us, so back we tracked, curving inland again, till freshly trodden bracken showed a path off right and we descended gently to the shore. We took off our trainers and flip-flops, digging our toes into the pebbly sand and hearing the sea’s repeated slap-and-swish.

‘Great,’ we all said, ‘really great,’ but it was not.

Plastic bottles had washed up on the shoreline. Jellyfish drifted in the shallows like polythene bags. But the real killer was the wooden sign: NO SWIMMING: DANGEROUS CURRENTS. Ollie, shame-faced, was apologetic — he’d been here thirty years ago and ought to have remembered the rip tide. I wandered in up to my knees but no further, the current tugging at my feet. Despite my fear, it was tempting to give in, let go, be carried out past the breakers to the immense, cathartic cold. From the shallows, I threw stones for Rufus, careful not to land them too far out.

Offshore, two white buoys held steadfast against the wash. What was their purpose? I wondered. To provide moorings? Or serve as a warning? And if the latter, a warning of what? I could remember, as a boy, being given a little paperback called
I-Spy at the Seaside,
which included a description of buoys marking the place of wrecks ('always painted green, with the word WRECK in white letters'). They carried a score of 20 if you spied one, as much as for spotting a lighthouse or a seal. The
I-Spy
books were hard to get hold of by the
time I was born but my mother picked them up at jumble sales and I became a collector, frustrated only by my failure to acquire numbers 29
(People in Uniform)
and 35
(Everyday Machines).
I carried them round with me constantly, eager to acquire fresh points. I-Spy became my nickname at school — I-Spy Ian, watcher and sleuth.

Getting into the spirit, I invented an I-spy game for Natalie and Bethany: three points for spotting a crab, two for a cuttlefish, one for a minnow. For thirty seconds they were interested, then boredom set in.

‘Hold my hands, girls,’ Em said, taking over. Beyond them, Milo and Ollie stood in the shallows, knee-deep in divorce law by the sound of it; if Ollie resented the intrusion — divorce wasn’t his field — he was too polite to show it. Daisy, meanwhile, had wandered off, beachcombing along the shingle.

With the others distracted, I sidled after her. Beyond the horizon lay Denmark and beyond Denmark the Arctic, its icebergs shrinking in the global stew.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, feigning surprise when I caught her up — she couldn’t have failed to hear me scrunching over the shingle.

A bra strap had fallen from her shoulder and she absent-mindedly pulled it back. Her other hand was full of gleanings.

‘What have you got?’ I said.

‘Amber. Driftwood. Gulls’ feathers. Flotsam and jetsam. What
is
flotsam and jetsam? You’re the teacher.’

‘Flotsam’s washed-up cargo or wreckage. Jetsam’s stuff the crew throw overboard to lighten the load.’

‘So flotsam’s accidentally lost and jetsam’s deliberately discarded.’

‘Exactly,’ I said.

‘Well, you learn something every day.’

I glanced behind. No one had moved. ‘What else have you learned?’ I said. ‘Dunno,’ she said, not with me. ‘What did you learn last night?’ I said. ‘Last night?’ she said, thinking it a game. ‘Last night I learned … that my husband can be extremely argumentative.’

‘You knew that already,’ I said. ‘You also learned about Milo going to New York.’ ‘I did. Worse luck.’ ‘And later?’ ‘Later?’

‘You know what I mean by later.’ Three waves broke in the silence.

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said, looking nervously towards the others. ‘I was drunk.’ ‘You were wonderful.’ ‘You were rough.’ ‘I wanted you so badly.’ ‘We lost our heads.’ ‘I didn’t lose mine,’ I said. ‘Don’t say that. It makes it worse.’ ‘It’s what I’ve always wanted.’ ‘That doesn’t make it forgivable.’ ‘Don’t go all moral on me.’

She flinched, as though I’d implied she’d been a slut on the sofa. I mumbled and mammered, trying to explain, but she turned away and bent to gather some bladderwrack. ‘It’s like bubble wrap,’ she said, popping a black polyp. ‘I’m being serious,’ I said.

‘And I’m being practical, Ian. We’re with other people. End of story.’

‘It’s not the end, it’s the beginning. We made love.’ ‘That wasn’t love.’

‘It was for me.’

‘We’d been drinking. It wasn’t real.’

‘It’s more real than anything I’ve ever done.’

I reached for her hand but she pulled away, spilling stones and feathers.

‘Don’t,’ she said, kneeling on the shingle to gather them up, ‘the others will see.’

I turned to look. High in the thinning cliffs, martins swooped out of their hatches. Below them — leafless, broken, eerily naked — salt-worn tree trunks lay like corpses in the sand. No one was near. Milo’s girls were coming our way but still fifty yards off.

‘I know you feel bad towards Ollie,’ I said, kneeling to help her.

‘Not just Ollie, Em.’

‘What people don’t know can’t hurt them.’

‘I don’t believe that. Anyway, it’s no excuse.’

‘I’ve stopped wanting Em. There’s no desire any more. You came before her. You still do.’

‘That’s silly, Ian. You two have a life together.’

‘Not after last night.’

‘Stop going on about last night. It didn’t mean anything. Get that in your thick skull, will you?’

As Milo’s girls ran up, she brandished a stone, holding it to the sun. The stone had a hole in it. Lemmel stones we call them in the Pennines.

‘Look,’ she said, performing for them, ‘a stone with no heart.’

I wandered off, down to the tide, letting the surf wash the grit from my toes. Which was worse: to be called thick, or to be told our lovemaking had no meaning? Mr Nobody, that was me — a nothing man who’d had nothing sex with a woman who felt nothing for him. I’d been used then chucked away.

‘You all right?’ Ollie said, catching up.

‘I’m ready to head back,’ I said, wishing we’d never come — not to the coast, not to Badingley, not at all.

‘The quickest route’s along the beach. Daisy’s leading the way, look.’

And so she was, her golden legs striding off, with Milo, Em and the girls close behind.

We headed after them, through the shingle below the sand cliffs. According to Ollie, several feet of land fell in the sea each year. He could remember a house standing on the cliffs when he was last here. Erosion was a natural process.

‘No bollocks about global warming, please.’

‘Certainly not,’ I said. ‘I’ll leave that to Milo.’

Clouds lined the horizon, the first we’d seen in days. Wafts of sage came from the clifftop and ozone from the sea. But the heat felt oppressive, runnels of sweat seeping down my back. Natalie and Bethany had stopped to paddle again. Two stick figures stood beyond them, fuzzy in sea fret — Milo and Daisy it must be. She’d surely not tell him what had happened last night, but I imagined her mocking me, the nerd from Ilkeston, with his clumsy credulity. Or perhaps, since I meant nothing to her, she would tell him, and they’d laugh together at my crassness. Perhaps she’d done it with him, too, and that
had
meant something. She might have fucked me purely to spite him, after he’d told her he was going to New York. Whatever the truth, they were close now. The mist half obscured them but I could see that they were walking arm in arm.

I stopped to pick up a chunk of driftwood.

‘Has Daisy known Milo long?’ I said, handing it to Ollie.

‘A couple of years maybe. Why?’

‘No reason. I’d have guessed longer.’

‘She’s done a lot for his career.’

‘That figures.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I’m just surprised she invited him up here when you’re on holiday.’

‘You know Daisy,’ he said, tossing the driftwood in the sea, ‘she loves company.’

‘And he loves hers, that’s obvious,’ I said.

‘Is it?’

‘He admires her. I wasn’t implying there’s anything more.’

I picked up a flat stone and weighed it in my hand, then walked to the edge of the tide and skimmed it: o-o-o-o-o it went, before disappearing.

Ollie followed suit, as I knew he would: o-o-o-o-o-o-o his went, beating mine by two skips.

We skimmed stones out into the blue-brown sea, while dark clouds heaped up on the horizon. Ollie’s record was eleven bounces.

‘You don’t mean Milo’s — you know?’ he said, stepping deeper in the current.

‘What?’

‘He seems too involved in his kids to be leching after Daisy. And too married. Doesn’t he? What do you think?’

‘What do
I
think?’

‘Stop parroting me, Ian. I asked you a question.’

‘Hang on, I’m up to my knees here,’ I said. We waded back through the breakers. ‘You can’t expect me to tell you every thought I have.’

‘It’s a simple question.’

‘I should have kept my mouth shut. There’s no need to be jealous.’