Her feelings towards him were so contradictory, she could make no sense of them.
“Let’s do it. Dare you.”
“Do what?” Even as she said the words, Sarah knew what he meant. They were on the beach, its wide expanse revealed now that the tide had gone out.
“Go swimming, of course.”
She paused. She was smiling on the outside, panicking underneath. I don’t have a swimsuit, she thought, wildly. Or a towel…
She felt Scott’s eyes upon her, full of expectation, assumption even, that she was still the old Sarah, the Sarah that he knew so well. The Sarah who took risks and was never staid and boring as she so often felt herself these days. There was no one else in sight. Lack of towel and costume had not put Inês off, she had not been a martyr to convention. In a split second, the decision was made. She unzipped her dress and pulled it over her head.
“Skinny-dipping at midnight,” she shouted against the wind, as she dropped the dress to the sand and undid her bra clip. “I haven’t done this since Melides!”
Melides, where the bleached sand dunes met the thundering ocean under the bluest sky and fiercest sun Sarah had ever experienced. They had wild-camped in the scrubland behind the beach and spent the white-hot days rolling in the foaming Atlantic breakers, the evenings drinking warm red wine around the campfire. In those days, the only way to the South and back without making a huge and costly detour by road was via the chain link ferry that crossed the river to Setúbal. It meant hours waiting in the dark in the weekend rush, surrounded by people and voices and lights and the deep, still silence of the future. Sarah recalled clearly how little the wait had mattered, then, when they had time, lots of it, all their lives ahead of them. And how it had not occurred to any of them, yet, that if you get it wrong, you do not always get the chance to put it right.
“Sarah! You’re still wearing your underpants.” Scott’s voice cut through the memories.
She smirked, bashfully. “Well…it just didn’t feel quite right…to – you know…strip off completely.”
Maybe Sensible Sarah had not been altogether banished. And after all, Inês had worn her slip.
Scott’s shoulders shook with suppressed laughter. “So I guess I should leave mine on, too. For the sake of propriety.”
But Sarah was already running towards the sea, drunk on the moment, exhilarated. In a few easy paces, he caught up with her, and as the first waves lapped around their toes, he grabbed her by the fingers.
“I’m not holding onto you to protect you,” he teased, raising his voice above the ocean’s gentle roar. “Just to make sure you don’t chicken out.”
Sarah turned to him, her free hand on her hip in a gesture of defiance. “Right. We’ll see who’s a chicken. Last one under is a cissy.”
Despite her bravado, she couldn’t help but shiver as they plunged forward into the breakers a few metres out. The unfamiliar sensation of the breeze fanning against her breasts and thighs was strangely sensual, and looking down she saw that her nipples were firm and erect against the cold. Every nerve tensed in preparation for the shock, she pulled loose from Scott’s grasp.
She dived, and the salty water, thick and viscous, invaded her mouth and ears and nose whilst its icy chill burnt her skin. She emerged from under the wave gasping for breath yet triumphant and there was Scott next to her, his thick hair sleek and water-darkened, his face impossibly handsome in the moonlight, his body muscular and strong.
“OK, I’ve got to hand it to you,” he shouted, above the roar of the ocean. “I didn’t think you’d do it!”
Sarah laughed. “Oh ye of little faith,” she called back, before being knocked sideways by a wave much bigger than all the rest. A frisson of panic seared through her. She seemed suddenly to be in much deeper water than she had thought and every time she tried to stand, a vicious undertow pulled her feet from under her. Amidst the crash of the rolling breakers and her spluttering attempts to find her footing she could see, but not hear, Scott chuckling, and then his expression, when he realised she was in trouble, suddenly turn to a wide-eyed stare of panic and alarm.
Half-submerged, Sarah saw him disappear as he dived beneath the surface. Then the sea tumbled her over and pulled her downwards, flooding her mouth and nose and ears with salt water that made her retch as she briefly surfaced. She gasped for breath, inhaled another mouthful of ocean, felt her arms flailing desperately against the sea’s force, her fingers grappling for a handhold that didn’t exist, her body fighting for survival. Kicking desperately to keep afloat, she shut her eyes and, not knowing what else to do, prayed.
And then suddenly Scott was there, by her side, reaching out to her, grabbing her slippery hands and hauling her towards him, pulling her back from the sea’s grasp, using his height and strength to gain a foothold where she could not. She let him help her into shallower water before falling against his chest, her breath juddering out of her in relief.
“Christ, Sarah, what the hell was that all about?” Raw fear, uncontrollable, caused him to shout. “Determined to test my lifeguard qualifications or something?” He folded her in his arms, his attempt at humour tinged by desperate relief. “I nearly didn’t get to you. I thought I wasn’t going to reach you.” He squeezed her tighter.
Sarah was shaking, tears welling in her eyes. Scott had every right to be furious with her, but she hadn’t meant to go under. At the same time as remorse engulfed her, she also became aware of her breasts against the chilly dampness of his torso, her nipples pressing against his bare flesh. Of the bulge of his penis against her belly. Of the scent of him, the sweat that his exertion had produced despite the cold, its smell so potent in her memory from another time and place. She looked up and saw his face, dark at first and then lit by the moon as it reappeared from behind a cloud, staring down at her, warming her with the brownness of his eyes. Realised how close they were, much too close; knew that she should move away and felt afraid of how profoundly she didn’t want to. She became aware also of his embrace tightening around her, and everything in the whole world stopping for a moment, coming to a total standstill as moonlight dappled the two of them and the wet, glistening sand on which they stood.
Abruptly, she pushed herself away, awkwardly attempting to cover her breasts with her arms. “I’m really sorry, Scott. I didn’t mean to frighten you, or put you in any danger.”
As she spoke, her eyes fell unavoidably to his underpants, moulded like a second skin around him, and drooping heavily at the sides as the weight of water dragged the hems downwards. His eyes followed hers, first to himself and then to her, her plain black knickers also waterlogged and wrinkled, clinging perilously to her every contour.
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.
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