Sunlounger - the Ultimate Beach Read (Sunlounger Stories Book 1)

by Belinda Jones

  Could it be him? She tried to picture him in an Italian newsagent’s, selecting it from a display, taking his time over it. Was it even possible to get English-language cards in Italy? Maybe he’d ordered it online. You could get anything you wanted now, shop all over the world from the comfort of your own sitting room. And the question mark would fit, since he probably didn’t write English very well.

  ‘I got a Valentine card,’ she told Patrick, but he didn’t look up from his breakfast. She set it on the windowsill, between her parents’ wedding photo and the cracked bowl of pencils and paper clips and elastic bands that she was always planning to organise.

  At work the other girls talked about the cards they’d got from husbands and boyfriends. Nobody asked her if she’d got one and she made no mention of it, knowing they’d think she’d made it up. Even if she’d brought it in and showed it to them, they’d assume she’d sent it herself. She couldn’t blame them; she knew she wasn’t the kind of woman men sent Valentine cards to.

  She hadn’t told them about the man she’d met in Italy. A few had asked about her holiday when she’d returned, and she’d talked about Sorrento and Ravello and Positano, and left him out. All through autumn and winter she’d kept him to herself, hidden him away until she got home from work, and it was just her and Patrick sitting in front of the television, and she could remember.

  Their first meeting, on the beach below her hotel the morning after she’d arrived. His shadow falling onto her crossword book, causing her to look up. His smile, those ridiculously white teeth of his, the charming broken English of his request. Self-conscious beneath his glance, wishing for her sarong to hide the whiteness of her thighs, trying to pull in her belly as she’d rummaged in her flowery canvas bag for the five euro her sunbed and umbrella cost.

  She imagined her mother’s face if she told her about him, if she said, ‘I had a holiday romance. I had a fling with a man who rented sunbeds on the beach. He kissed me under the Italian stars, he told me I was beautiful. He asked me to stay with him.’

  Her mother would not be impressed with someone who worked on a beach, or someone who wasn’t Irish, or someone who lied about her daughter being beautiful. He’d fail on all counts.

  The girls at work would ask questions, they’d want to see a photo. They’d ask what he was like in bed, they’d laugh when she blushed, tell her it was about time she found a man. But behind her back they’d doubt her story, they’d tell one another that it was obvious she was making it up, or she’d have photos. They’d pity her for having to fantasise about romance.

  She had a photo. It wasn’t a good one, his face was in profile and slightly out of focus. She’d taken it with her phone from her sunbed, waiting until he was close enough to capture, but far enough away not to realise what she was doing. She was shy about asking him, afraid for some reason that he might object.

  She’d put it up on her computer as soon as she’d arrived home. She’d stared at the screen, trying to conjure up the sounds that had accompanied it – the whoosh of the sea onto the sand, the shrieks of holidaymaking children, the cry of Italian seagulls, the muted thwack of little bats against balls. She’d traced his blurry outline, remembering the coconut-scented sun cream everyone had been slathering on, the glorious heat of the sun on her body, the salt that would cling to her skin after a swim. The music of his voice.

  In just seventy-nine days she would board a plane that was going to take her back to him. The thought of seeing him again caused a flick of nervous excitement inside her. She’d get her hair cut, maybe even try a few highlights: why not?

  When she got home from work she looked at the Valentine card again. She was beginning to doubt that it was from him. But who else could it possibly be? No Irish man had ever shown an interest in her. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d spoken outside her workplace to a man who wasn’t related to her, or married to someone else.

  An awful thought slid suddenly into her head. She picked up the envelope and looked closely at the handwriting. Not remotely like her mother’s, no resemblance whatsoever; but might she be capable of altering it so much that it was unrecognisable? Or – an altogether more terrible possibility – had she got one of the neighbours to write it?

  Surely not: as far back as she could remember, the topic of boyfriends, or lack of them, had never come up at home. Her mother was probably unaware that it was Valentine’s Day, had surely no idea that her thirty-eight-year-old daughter had just received her first card.

  Maybe it was him after all. Maybe he’d meant all the things he’d said. Why would he have asked her to come back if he didn’t mean it? He could just have said goodbye, left it at that. Maybe this one brave, terrifying thing that she was about to do was the right thing.

  She thought about the surprise of the sand after dark, how cold it had felt between her toes as they’d walked by the shore after dinner on her last night. She closed her eyes and remembered the warmth of his arm around her shoulders, the miracle of his hip pressed to hers.

  She remembered throwing back her head, laughing at something he’d said, feeling so completely happy it almost frightened her. She remembered looking up and seeing the millions of stars above them. The heat rose in her cheeks as she thought of how he’d stopped talking and pressed his mouth to her exposed neck, the feel of it making her draw in her breath, making something burn deliciously within her.

  ‘You are like little bird,’ he’d murmured against her skin, ‘you are uccellino ’ – the music of the word, the vibration of his voice against her skin making her tremble as she’d closed her eyes against the vastness of the black studded sky above them.

  ‘I want to make love with you,’ he’d whispered, his hands sliding down to cradle her buttocks and press her against him, ‘you are so beautiful.’ Drawing her down with him onto the sand, pulling off his t-shirt and sliding the strap of her sundress over her shoulder, dropping his head to kiss—

  Her mobile phone rang, making her start. She picked it up.

  ‘My back is at me,’ her mother said. ‘It’s very bad. You don’t have to come, I just wanted to tell someone.’

  She looked out of the kitchen window, saw the rain pelting against it. She thought of the pork chop she had planned to cook for dinner, still sitting in the fridge. ‘Of course I’ll come,’ she said.

  She left the card on the table and got back into her coat, wound a scarf around her neck, lifted her still-damp umbrella from the front porch. ‘Mind the house,’ she said to Patrick, half-asleep on the couch.

  She met nobody she knew in the thirteen minutes it took to walk to her mother’s house. The rain slapped against her umbrella and darkened the ends of her trousers as she picked her way through puddled streets. Seventy-nine days, she thought, skirting the flood of a blocked gutter, turning her head from the spray of passing cars.

  She propped her umbrella by her mother’s front door and let herself in with the key that lived under the window box of dying cyclamen. She slid off her coat and laid it across the banister, listening to the too-loud voices on the television. She tapped on the sitting room door, called ‘Only me’ as she opened it.

  Her mother sat in her usual armchair, a bag of crisps open in her lap. ‘You shouldn’t have come out in that rain.’

  She was all her mother had, her father having died abruptly and inexplicably in his sleep over fourteen years earlier, her brother having emigrated before that to Australia, his only contact a card at Christmas and on their birthdays, photos of his growing family, strangers to them, slipped inside. She was all her mother had left, it was to be expected that demands would be placed on the unmarried daughter. It was her duty, she didn’t complain.

  The days passed, each one marked with a red cross on the kitchen calendar as it ended. She went to work, she came home, she shopped at the weekends with two separate grocery lists. Cheddar cheese and porridge and celery soup for her mother, spaghetti and olives and prosciutto for her. Every evening she drank a small gla
ss of limoncello, after ten sit-ups and twenty squats in front of the fire, Patrick watching her impassively.

  As the fourth of May approached she lost the ability to sleep. She lay motionless and open-eyed in bed each night, her mood alternating between terror and anticipation, the questions tumbling around one another inside her head.

  When would they come face to face, how long would she have to bear the suspense of not knowing his reaction? And what would she do if he didn’t remember her, if he asked politely for her five euro as if she was a stranger? What if he’d forgotten her as soon as her bus was out of sight, and moved on to the next lonely woman?

  She peered for minutes at a time at his blurry profile, calling back his voice, the scent of him, the feel of his skin under her trembling fingers.

  ‘Will you take Patrick while I’m away?’ she asked her mother, three weeks before she was due to leave.

  ‘Don’t I always?’ Her mother pushed her cup across the table for a refill. ‘What choice do I have, when you have no one else you can call on?’

  You could do it with a little more grace, she thought. It’s the one thing I ask, and it only happens once a year. But she held her tongue and poured more tea, and watched her mother helping herself to another coconut cream. Amazing how her bad back didn’t seem to affect her appetite in the least.

  She’d waited anxiously for her period when she’d got home, cursing herself for not being prepared, for not insisting that he took precautions. But it had never occurred to her that anything might happen; the closest she’d ever come to physical intimacy with a male had been a series of clumsy spin-the-bottle kisses with a variety of classmates during her early teens.

  Since then she’d stood on the sidelines as one by one her friends had become engaged and then married, until finally all her holiday companions were spoken for, and her choice was to travel alone or stay at home. Patrick’s arrival five years earlier had made no difference in that respect, since he detested journeys of any kind, and resented even the short trip to her mother’s house anytime she abandoned him.

  And abandon him she did for two weeks each summer, craving sunshine and a little relief from her mother’s demands. Surprisingly, given her natural shyness, holidaying alone didn’t bother her. She was easy in her own company, and content to read or solve crosswords during the day. In the evenings she walked along whatever promenade presented itself before sitting alone on her hotel balcony with a glass of wine and a salad or fillet of grilled fish. Sometimes she came home from a holiday not having talked to a single person apart from shop assistants or hotel staff.

  Until the previous summer, when she’d decided on Italy, and found a small hotel by the sea, an hour south of the town of Amalfi.

  On the second of May she got her legs waxed and her hair highlighted. On the way home from the salon she called into the library and exchanged the guide books she’d been taking out every few weeks for two novels set in Italy.

  ‘Have you been yet?’

  She looked at the librarian.

  ‘To Italy – presume you’re headed there, or you were.’

  She smiled: nice that somebody noticed her borrowings. ‘I’m off on Thursday.’

  ‘Bon voyage, or whatever it is in Italian.’

  Buon viaggio, she could have said, but didn’t.

  She spent Wednesday evening packing and repacking. Her new bikini seemed suddenly too young – could an almost forty-year-old get away with such high-cut legs? But he’d seen her old one last year, she had to have something different. Maybe she’d find one that wasn’t so skimpy in the duty free.

  And her sunglasses were scratched – why hadn’t she replaced them last summer? She could have bought a new pair on the way home. But she’d been distracted, her thoughts still full of him and what they had done on the sand the night before.

  ‘Your first time?’ he’d asked afterwards and she’d nodded, mortified. He’d laughed, which had increased her mortification, but then he’d lifted her chin and touched her lips softly with a finger and said ‘Grazie’ so lovingly that she’d forgotten the fierce, unexpected pain of it.

  When her period had arrived ten days afterwards her relief had been tinged, stupidly, with a momentary but sharp disappointment. Ridiculous to imagine a baby wouldn’t have turned her life upside down; crazy to envisage returning to Italy to break the news to him, and expecting him to be overjoyed. They’d hardly known each other; of course a baby would have been a disaster.

  In the duty free she tried on three bikinis and rejected them all. The sit-ups and squats hadn’t, after all, delivered the toned, flat stomach and firm thighs she’d hoped for. She regarded her far from perfect body in the changing room mirror: the drooping breasts, the rounded abdomen, the buttocks dimpled with cellulite. What was she thinking?

  She ordered two brandies on the plane and drank them too quickly, her nose in her crossword book to deter conversation from the couple beside her. She hardly ever drank brandy, and her head buzzed halfway through the second one. She drifted into a doze and woke headachy to find the stewardess’s hand on her shoulder, asking her to put up her table top and buckle her seat belt for landing.

  She looked out at the yellow-brown earth, the white squat buildings, the gorgeously deep blue sea, the perfect pale-blue sky above it, and despite her misgivings, her heart lifted. She would think positive, and trust that she was doing the right thing.

  Two and a half hours later, hot and weary after a train and two buses, she checked into her hotel, which looked more or less as she remembered. The receptionist looked familiar, but she saw no sign of recognition in the pretty, bored face as she was handed a key and given a form to fill out.

  She made her way to her room, past the plants that trailed from their giant blue pots, past the Donatello and Michelangelo and Tintoretto prints that were dotted along the white walls, up the first flight of the wide, curving marble staircase, down the corridor and around the corner to the row of rooms that faced out to sea.

  She opened the door to room 17 – next to the one she’d had before – and walked in, dropping her case onto the bed, barely registering the tiny kitchenette, the narrow wardrobe, the bathroom door, the armchair covered in the same fabric as the bedspread.

  She threw open the patio doors and stepped out onto the small balcony, drawing the warm salty air deep into her lungs. The sun was melting into the sea, colouring the water a thousand shades of red. On the horseshoe-shaped beach below, the last few holidaymakers were packing up their towels and books and lotions. The green-and-white sunbeds had been collected and stacked at the top of the beach, a stone’s throw from where she stood.

  A fat, brown little toddler dressed only in a nappy careened suddenly across the sand, arms outflung, followed by a woman in a red dress who scooped him up and brought him back, squealing. There was no sign of a dark-haired man with the strap of a small leather shoulder bag slung across his torso, no call for him to be there after the sunbeds had been tidied away.

  But he was nearby – he might be within half a mile of where she stood right now – and tomorrow she would go to the beach and they would meet. She leaned against the iron railings and watched the sun slowly disappearing, and thought of the diminishing hours until she would see him again. Maybe tomorrow evening they would watch the setting sun together.

  In the morning, after a surprisingly sound sleep, she rose and showered and pulled a pink flowery sundress over her new bikini. She packed her beach bag and walked from the room – nervous, now that the time had come, now that their encounter was imminent. She left the hotel by the front door and went a few yards down the street to a small café she’d visited regularly the previous year. She ordered a cappuccino and a plain croissant from the smiling owner, who seemed to remember her but whose lack of English prevented conversation.

  As she waited for her breakfast she watched people walking past the window in cheerfully coloured clothes. Not yet ten o’clock but the heat already intense, the perspiration tr
ickling down her back and between her breasts. She thought longingly of the sea, imagined the waves rushing to meet her as she waded in.

  Despite her growling stomach – she’d eaten nothing since a pastry on the train from Naples – she found she couldn’t manage more than a couple of bites of the croissant, so she wrapped it in a paper napkin and tucked it into her bag. She finished her cappuccino and left the café and took the little alleyway beyond it that led down to the sea, palms damp, insides fluttering.

  She stepped out of her sandals as she reached the sand and began to thread her way through the already crowded beach towards the rows of sunbeds, fifty yards or so ahead.

  And with every clumsy step she took – sinking up to her ankles in the hot, soft sand, a stagger more than a walk – she became more and more self-conscious, more convinced that everyone knew what had brought her here. They were watching her faltering progress, determined not to miss a thing.

  Her cheeks burned, her armpits prickled with beads of sweat. She kept her gaze fixed on the ground ahead, trying to calm her fluttering heart. Nobody is watching, they’re not interested in you. You’re thirty-eight years old, you’re a grown woman. When you see him you’ll smile and say hello, and if he wants to pretend he’s never met you, that’s his problem.

  After an eternity she reached the sunbeds, still not daring to look up or meet anyone’s eye. She found a free bed underneath an opened umbrella and let her bag drop with a thump beside it. She pulled her dress over her head – white skin, dimply thighs, thick calves, hair sticking to the sides of her face – and bent to stuff it into the bag.

  As she straightened up a man approached, causing her heart for a moment to tumble within her – but it wasn’t him.

  ‘You take one bed, signora?’

  He was stockier and older, with a paunch that pushed against his faded grey t-shirt, and creased cream canvas trousers and a dark blue baseball cap that said Giants. The battered shoulder bag looked the same, but it wasn’t him.