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27. SUMMER 2013

Robert has found Catherine, although she is Charlotte, not Catherine. He glances at his watch. He has half an hour before he must leave to be in time for his first meeting, but he can’t stop reading now. He phones ahead and tells them to put it back an hour.

One night in Tarifa, that was all John had planned. One night in the cheapest hotel and then the ferry to Tangiers early the next morning. He was in pursuit of Orwell, Bowles, Kerouac, not love. But he heard her song and he was lost. He was easy prey for a woman of her experience. A woman who was a little bored. A woman who was looking for a bit of light entertainment, just to fill in a few days before she returned home to her husband. A woman who had a child, but a child who rather cramped her style. He was a useful disguise though, this child — he allowed her to disguise herself as a mother, a woman who no longer put herself first. A good woman. Such a clever disguise. Here I am, she cried from the rocks. Looking after my child. Abandoned by my workaholic husband. I can perform the part very well. See what I’m doing? My voice is gentle when I speak to my little boy. I smile. A lot. I smile a lot. He is such a bundle of energy, a live wire, my little boy. He is happy. Because I am a good mother. Oh, but how tiring he is. He must have my attention all the time, and it is so, so exhausting. I cannot look away for a moment, his voice always calling me: Mummy, look, Mummy, Mummy, Mummy. Look at me. Look at me. And she does look at him, whenever he demands it, and she smiles and her voice is patient, but it is a performance. Her patient voice carries, she makes sure of that, so that those around her in the café will take note of what a lovely mummy she is. Now and again she glances round to check that her audience is paying attention. Look at me, she is saying, just as loudly as her little boy, but she is cleverer than he. And John heard her voice, and he was lost. He couldn’t see past the spell she was casting.

He saw her light cotton dress trailing on the ground beneath her chair; her long, tanned leg a shimmer of gold, stretching out from the split, which ran from the top of her thigh — a deliberate split, to allow her to move freely inside her long robe. It was a robe which declared modesty but whispered at the heat beneath.

The image slaps Robert across the face. He has seen it in one of the photographs — a picture of Catherine with her leg stretched out from her beach dress. Sitting in a café with Nicholas. The author really hates her and Robert detects jealousy too, seeping through the pages. He wonders again if it could have been written by a girlfriend, but didn’t Catherine say she thought it was the father? He reads on.

Charlotte bought him a beer as a thank-you for helping distract her little boy into eating his supper. And then he walked them back to their hotel; it was getting dark and he had nothing else to do. The little boy was quiet by then, sleepy, holding his mummy’s hand, and she and John talked, and he told her that he was leaving the next day to catch the ferry. She told him she was a little jealous of his freedom, but her jealousy was light-hearted, not really meant. It was still early, and she persuaded him to wait downstairs in the lobby for her while she put the little one to bed. It was his bedtime, but not hers yet, and she wanted to buy John a drink as a thank-you, and she would so enjoy some adult company. And he was flattered, at nineteen…

Robert’s hands are shaking. He holds one up and looks at the jittering fingers in surprise, as if he is holding up a specimen of something he has never seen before. Whatever he is about to read has happened. There is nothing he can do about it, and yet it holds a power over him, as if by reading it, it will happen all over again just because he is there to see it this time. He reads on, like a teenager desperate to get to the sexy bits.

… He was charmed by her shyness, her coy reluctance to let him see her naked. She had lost confidence in her body since becoming a mother, she said, and feared he might recoil at the curve of her stomach with its scar from where she’d been opened up and her son taken out and that John would be used to younger, firmer flesh. And Sarah was younger, much younger, but he didn’t tell Charlotte this or that Sarah had been his only lover. Her nervousness emboldened him, and for a moment their roles were reversed, and she allowed him to feel as if he was the one in control, leading the way.

Her son was asleep, on the other side of the door. She had closed it. They were in the room she had shared with her husband. She closed her eyes as he lifted the flimsy cotton over her head, her arms held up as if she were a little girl being undressed for bed. She was wearing her bikini, still sandy from a day on the beach. He pulled the ties at each side of the bottoms and watched them slip to the floor; then he undid the top, a tie at the neck, and one across her back, easily undone. She was naked, but he was still clothed. She didn’t help him undress, she didn’t touch him, she just watched him, and he didn’t notice the hunger in her eyes. He was beautiful and he was a stranger, and she knew he was in her power. She persuaded him to postpone his trip to Tangiers, just for a few days, just until she had to leave….

“Good book?” Robert is startled. He feels as if he has been caught looking at porn.

“Another tea?” the waitress asks. Robert nods, yes, then no. He doesn’t know what he wants, incapable of a decision.

“I’m fine,” he manages and reads on.

… and what John didn’t understand was that what she really loved was the game: the secrecy of sneaking him up to her room, so that the hotel staff knew nothing, so that they still smiled and treated her kindly; the secrecy of seeing each other on the beach but pretending they were strangers. Even her son didn’t realise that the young man lying on a towel a few feet away from them knew his mother more intimately than he ever would. And John chronicled his passion; it would be something to treasure when he was back at home in the real world, not realising that he would never see those photographs, never be able to look back at that time….