Lorna still had a glass of wine to finish, and she also wanted a few minutes to herself, to luxuriate in the warmth of a Greek evening. ‘In a minute, Suze. Just leave the door open, will you?’
There were kisses goodbye and then Lorna walked to the water’s edge, carrying her shoes in one hand. She trailed her feet in the water, trying not to feel guilty about Austin. She’d never meant to hurt him, and hadn’t liked being compared to his other conquests. The passage of time should have changed things for both of them.
Without meaning to, she had picked her way along the beach, away from the town. Now, stopping and looking up, she saw how far she’d walked. She noticed a path that rose over rocks and round a small headland. The sea breeze had revived her, cleared her head. Carefully in the light of a full moon, she walked up the path and round the headland.
She stopped to look up. The sky was a patchwork of huge stars, so large she could almost reach up and touch them. Lorna had never been so far from home before, and neither of her parents had been to Greece. It made her feel liberated, free; she was able to do as she wanted. She inhaled deeply, smelling warm air tinged with salt.
After a ten-minute walk she arrived at the next beach. This one was much smaller, and sat in the lee of a steep escarpment that rose high above her head. Hundreds of feet up, she saw car lights on the mountain road down which they’d travelled that afternoon. Set back from the beach was the ramshackle beach bar.
It looked as if it had been put together from driftwood. A wooden sign hung from a chain over the taverna door. Nico’s. It was closed although a solitary light burned inside. Her footsteps echoed on the bar’s wooden decking and she looked around, fearful that she may have disturbed someone. A large barbeque was set against the shack’s wall, cooking utensils scattered on a table beside it. The beach was deserted; waves lapped on the shore and were sucked away.
She sat at one of the taverna’s tables and lit a cigarette. It was warm and, after her walk, felt supremely peaceful. Austin wasn’t her problem, she had decided, he was his own.
‘Hi,’ said a voice beside her. ‘Christ, sorry! Didn’t mean to startle you.’
‘Startle me? You nearly gave me a fucking heart attack!’
‘Sorry.’
Lorna’s heart slowed to a canter.
She looked at him. ‘It looks like you’ve been following me, Leo.’
‘Not in a creepy way, if that’s what you think. I just didn’t fancy going to bed. I also didn’t fancy wasting my last night here. Tomorrow I can sleep, tonight I don’t have to. I saw you disappear over the headland.’
‘So you decided to follow me?’
‘Actually,’ he said, grinning inanely, ‘I still want to know why you want to be a lawyer.’
‘Is that some crappy way of trying to chat me up?’
He shrugged. ‘I’d just like to know, that’s all.’
She was looking at him suspiciously, drawn in by his impossibly good looks but doubting that anyone followed anyone in the middle of the night to ask inane questions. He had one eyebrow raised, his mouth puckered. He seemed on the verge of smiling, but not quite, perhaps unsure how well his entrance had gone down.
‘What on earth for?’ was all Lorna could think to say, busily prevaricating. She didn’t know who this person was, except that he was a friend of Austin’s; she didn’t know what his real motives were.
‘Because I don’t want to be a lawyer.’
A bird rose unseen from the olive trees, its wings softly beating. Lorna looked at him evenly. He’d followed her, but seemed unthreatening. His expression was guileless, now smiling; small creases at the sides of his mouth. His mouth was a little too wide, she noticed, his eyes a little too close together, his long nose bent. Lorna realised that she was trying to focus on his negatives to avoid being overwhelmed by the positives. ‘Then if you’re serious about being bored to death, you’d better pull up a chair.’
‘That’s the spirit!’ said Leo.
Lion
‘Jesus, you’re an idealist!’
‘Not sure about that, but I do have ideals.’
Leo had nicked one of her cigarettes, although he said he didn’t usually smoke. ‘It’s the same thing,’ he said. ‘An idealist is a person who has ideals. That sounds suspiciously like you.’
She’d been stupid enough to tell him that, in her opinion, without law there was nothingness, an entirely imprecise word that she immediately regretted saying and, having drunk a bucketful of Greek wine, found difficult to pronounce. She didn’t really know whether she really believed it anyway, this idea of law bringing order from chaos. It seemed far removed from dusty books and the trivia of legal precedent, but it’s what she’d kept telling herself. They sat in silence, listening to the flop and retreat of waves.
‘An idealist also harbours unrealistic expectations,’ said Lorna eventually, not entirely sure if this made sense either. ‘I may be idealistic in some respects, but I am not unrealistic.’
‘Austin says you’re a Trotskyite leftie.’ In the darkness, she couldn’t be sure whether he was just making fun of her.
‘So, what’s wrong with that?’ she demanded.
‘Nothing at all,’ said Leo quickly. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound condescending.’
Lorna took a deep breath. A car passed on the road above, its headlights momentarily turned out to sea. ‘Actually, I’m not a Trotskyite leftie, whatever Austin thinks.’ Lorna wondered how much Leo did know about her, Austin pouring out love/hate diatribes. ‘OK, so why are you doing law?’ she asked, to move the conversation away from Austin.
She saw his shoulders rise and fall. ‘I have no idea, none whatsoever. I thought you might be able to give me a clue. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said.
He was looking up the stars, his eyes half-closed. Then he leaned forward and planted his elbows on the table, cupping his head in his hands. ‘I don’t want to be poor but, unlike you, I have no idea how not to be poor. In other words, Lorna, I have never had the slightest inclination to do anything in particular.’
‘So, being congenitally undecided, you chose the world’s second-oldest profession.’
Something stirred in the undergrowth beyond the olive trees, momentarily silencing the cicadas. She looked round fearfully, realising how dark it had become. On the walk across the headland, she’d been slightly drunk and the full moon had guided her. Now she was relatively sober, except for difficult words, and the moon had passed overhead.
‘My father’s a lawyer,’ said Leo, ‘and he was forever badgering me about it. He owns a practice in our part of Devon. Mostly conveyancing and divorce, that kind of thing. Not doing a lot for ordinary people because they can’t afford his fees. There’s no money in legal aid, so he says. Our family doesn’t therefore specialise in righting wrongs. Anyway, he kept telling me to think about law because, one day, his business could be my business.’
‘That’s the trouble with rich people like you, Leo. You make poor people like me work all the harder.’
He laughed. The cicadas had started up again.
‘Actually, I kind of meant that, Leo. I grew up hating people like you. Posh accents, rich parents, a good job at the end of it. People like you think that the world owes you a living.’ She realised she had probably said too much. ‘Then you get married to someone called Samantha, have two adorable children, and drive them to primary school in some ghastly 4x4.’
‘But I don’t know anybody called Samantha.’
‘But you will, Leo. Racing certainty. It’s how the circle of privilege turns. You probably went to public school and own a cravat.’
‘Marlborough. So, yes, I did go to a public school. But, no, I don’t own a cravat. Or a cardigan, or whatever else you’re going to accuse me of.’
‘Cardigans aren’t posh, Leo,’ said Lorna. It was what her father habitually wore, with the buttons done up all wrong so it hung squint, and with gravy stai
ns down the front that wouldn’t wash out.
‘My father believes in family,’ said Leo, who didn’t seem to have been offended. Austin must have warned him about her dodgy views on social justice. ‘He also thinks that happy families have lots of money. He wants the best for me, I guess.’
‘So, the richer you are, the happier you are, is that it?’ She had never had his advantages and for a moment was angry with him again, for following her, scaring the shit out of her, and then telling her how well-off his family was. She didn’t want to listen to a rich boy’s sob story.
‘No, Lorna, I don’t believe in all that crap.’ There was a pause and Lorna looked closely at him. He was almost beautiful, she decided, like a Greek god: tall and strong, with his mane of untamed hair. ‘But to be honest,’ he said, clearing his throat and looking upwards at the stars again, ‘I don’t have the courage to stand up to him.’
‘Courage? Sorry, where does courage come into it?’
‘I don’t want to disappoint him,’ he admitted, his face in shadow, ‘and if I say no that’s what I’ll be doing.’ He ran a hand through his hair, brushing it from his eyes and turning them to hers. ‘Maybe I just don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a boring office.’
‘I hope you don’t want me to feel sorry for you,’ said Lorna.
‘I wasn’t looking for sympathy.’
‘In which case, I can’t help you.’
He smiled. ‘Actually, I didn’t think you could.’
Her anger had become a knotted pulse in her abdomen. ‘But that’s not really why you’re here, is it?’
‘It isn’t?’
‘Austin.’ She said it evenly and watched him closely. His head was cocked to one side and shadows, like camouflage, moved over his face.
‘You think that ...’
‘Yes, Leo, I do. He sent you.’
Leo merely seemed amused, leaning back in his chair and stretching out long legs. ‘He didn’t.’ Leo smile was now displaying sharp white teeth. ‘Although he still feels guilty, stupid sod, about inviting you to Bristol and then rushing off to play rugby.’
Lorna’s head was tilted back. ‘He’s just an old friend,’ she said.
‘He says he’s in love with you.’
‘He only thinks that, Leo. He can’t possibly be in love with me because we haven’t seen each other for years. It was a childhood thing, that’s all.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘We grew up. That’s what happened. End of story.’
‘But you did come down to Bristol, didn’t you? No, don’t answer that ... none of my business. I’m simply telling you what he’s told me. It’s what he says, Lorna, so who am I to disagree? He hopes that one day it might all magically come together for you guys. In some respects, of course, he is a rather dull dog with very few tricks. Once he decides on something, you can’t easily persuade him otherwise.’ He laughed gently. ‘He says that the only bridge he wants to build is between the two of you. Not a very imaginative cliché, if that’s what it is, but that’s Austin for you. So, what do you think?’
‘About what?
‘About you and him.’
Lorna abruptly stubbed out her cigarette, then pushed the butt out of sight between the slats of the wooden floor. ‘You weren’t following me because you saw me on the headland, were you? You’re here on a spying mission.’
‘Lorna ...’
‘Austin did put you up to it, didn’t he?’
‘Lorna ...’
‘You bastard!’ she said loudly, frightening the cicadas, and swept up her cigarettes.
‘Austin doesn’t know I’m here.’
But Lorna was in full flow and wasn’t listening. ‘Christ, how gullible do you think I am? All that shit about doing law ...’
‘He doesn’t know I’m here,’ he repeated. He was holding up his hands, palms upward. ‘I told him I wasn’t tired and was going out for a drink. That’s not why I followed you.’ His voice was soft but insistent and something in its shaken tone made her pause. Now he was standing with his hands palms-down on the table. Somehow, in standing, his chair had toppled backwards.
‘Then, why?’
‘Because you’re a sexy lady, that’s why.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Leo! You spent half the bloody night dancing with Suzie.’ Having failed to coax her into bed, he was obviously pursuing the second-best option. Suzie was the sexy one; those beachwear catalogues couldn’t all be wrong.
‘She’s not my type,’ said Leo. ‘But that’s why I needed to know about you and Austin. I didn’t want to say something stupid.’
‘Stupid?’
‘I didn’t want to say anything stupid to you.’
‘I’m not sure I follow.’
‘I wanted to ask,’ he said, peeling off his shirt, ‘if you wanted to go for a swim.’
* * *
Her first reaction was Oh My God! He was a stranger, for Christ’s sake! Well, not quite a stranger, but close enough. She again felt a pulse of anger, at the ambiguity of his suggestion and what his definition of a swim might actually mean. Say no and it would seem prudish, say yes and, well, what would he assume she had agreed to? And did he mean skinny dipping? She watched him warily as he stood by the water’s edge, his shirt discarded to the sand, hands deep in the pockets of his khaki shorts and his lion’s mane ruffling in the breeze from the water.
‘It’s the best time to swim,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘It’s when the temperatures of the air and water are closest together.’
‘I’ve never swum at night before,’ she said, prevaricating. The North Sea was deathly cold even on the hottest day. Nobody, but nobody, ever went swimming in North Berwick at night, no matter how much they’d had to drink.
Leo seemed lost in thought, his feet being sloshed by incoming waves, face fixed on the horizon. She followed his gaze to a far point where featureless sea was met by stars. They seemed to be closer here; larger, more luminous, and more of them. In Scotland, the stars seemed cold and distant; here they felt warm, each one a small sun warming her skin. It was then that she really did feel herself to be in a place far away; a distant country, a place where normal rules need not apply. Her eyes returned to Leo.
Partly, of course, it was the alcohol. She no longer knew whether Leo had been sent on Austin’s fool’s errand, but it now seemed of little importance. She didn’t really believe that Austin still loved her but, whatever his feelings, they were his to sort out. She hadn’t led him on, so was innocent of hurting him. Immediately, she felt both alive and peaceful. The evening with Austin had passed off without incident; emotional fireworks had failed to detonate. She was safe from his professed love.
There was only the sound of cicadas and the lap of water. The water seemed to beckon her, recognising a child who used to jump off harbour walls and, without further thought, she slipped off her clothes and joined Leo at the water’s edge. This was a place of contradictions, a ramshackle taverna that could only be supplied by boat, but which was only a few minutes’ walk from a bustling town. The evening before, she’d been packing in an Edinburgh drizzle and now here she was by a warm sea. Above was a road, above that the stars. In front of her was also Leo.
‘Sorry, didn’t think to bring a bikini.’
‘Me neither.’
‘Believe me, Leo, a bikini wouldn’t suit you.’
‘Even a nice pink one?’ He seemed rather startled by her nakedness, not sure whether to look at her.
‘Well, maybe a lacy pink one. Samantha could choose it for you.’
‘If I ever meet her.’
‘When, rich boy. You are destined to meet her.’
She ran into the sea and dived. She had always felt safe under the water. Once she had been pulled from North Berwick’s swimming pool by a lifeguard. She’d been under the water for so long he’d thought she might be in trouble. But she hadn’t been; she’d only been lying on the bottom, listening to silence.
Lorna broached the surf
ace, tasting salt on her lips, and laughing for no reason. She felt free, filled with sudden energy. The cocktail of sea and stars had released her, making her innocent of anything she might now do.
Lorna frowned at this thought, and sat by the water facing out to sea. She didn’t know Leo, and he was Austin’s best friend and here they were, naked, Lorna sitting languidly in shallow water by the beach to watch Leo slide down his trousers. This was the strangest contradiction of them all and it sent a frisson down her spine; he was a stranger, but a friendly stranger who had followed her. She drew up her legs and laid her chin on her knees. A larger wave, the wake of an unseen ship, toppled her and she lay, laughing in the surf, trying to sit up again. Then Leo was at her side, his strong arms pulling her to her feet. Intentionally or by accident, his hands found her breasts. She hesitated for a moment, then turned to him, absolved of everything, and pulled him down to the sand. He tasted of salt and his lion’s mane was plastered to his scalp. A cocktail of time and place had removed all inhibition, leaving only this moment under the Greek sky and strong arms holding her tight. In the moonlight, the beach was the colour of yellow brick-dust. Lorna put a finger to Leo’s lips and shook her head; she didn’t want to hear words he might not mean.
* * *
Afterwards, they lay on the warm sand, Leo on his back looking at the stars, Lorna on her side with her head on his chest. She listened to his heart, her eyes closing, and they lay silently for a long while, half asleep, waves touching their feet. Lorna felt immensely peaceful. It was a new feeling for her. She was unused to freedom, from being away from books. Her nerves were energised: like the princess and the pea, she could feel every grain of sand under her body.
Lorna nuzzled into his chest hair, tasting salt, and gently stroked his face. Her eyes were closed and she was remembering another holiday, much further back when she was part of a proper family, and when she’d first fallen under Darth Vader’s spell. She knew that bad things were starting to gather, but on that riverboat they were insulated from them. She knew that Tom was ill, but it didn’t seem serious. He’d just be a little bit sick, then he’d feel better. She also knew that her dad had lost his job, but who cared about that? The world was full of people who worked and her father was just another person. It was the first time she’d tasted lamb cutlets. The best day of all was when they returned the boat. They had time to kill before heading north. Best let the kids run riot, her mum had said. That way they’ll sleep in the car. I know, I’ll make us a picnic.
The Things We Learn When We're Dead Page 22