Lifesaver (34 page)

‘What so funny?’ asked Adam, locking the car doors.

‘I was just remembering Max’s description of how lamp-posts are made,’ I said, and he grinned back.

‘Yes. I don’t know where he gets these strange ideas from. There’s a big hole in our road at the moment, and he’s convinced that it was created by a mole who’d been digging there, who then exploded, as Max said, “with a very small pop”, thus creating said hole…

I could have listened to him talk about Max all night. ‘Surreal,’ I said. ‘It must be like living with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, you know:
“It’s about this time of night that I like to slip a Caramac underneath a squirrel”.
’

We both laughed, and set off down the dark path. Adam reached over and took my hand, and we carried on in silence, the moon lighting our way. There was nobody around, although it was only ten o’clock. I released Adam’s hand briefly to zip up my thin jacket, then picked it up again.

‘Why are your hands so lovely and warm?’ I asked, as he gently chafed my icy fingers. ‘It’s freezing out here.’

He looked concerned. ‘Are you OK? If you get too cold, let me know and we’ll go back.’

I smiled at him. ‘No, I’m fine. The moon’s incredible, isn’t it? And so many stars. It’s not like that in London.’

We fell into step, taking long strides down to cover the path’s steep incline. It felt odd, being out with him like that—somehow more like a date than the meal had been. I thought of the muddy sky over our house in Hampton, of standing in the garden barefoot with Ken’s arms wrapped around me. What I thought were stars up there usually turned out to be planes, circling the night sky like predators.

‘Do you miss London?’ Adam asked, and I could truthfully shake my head and say, no, I didn’t. Omitting, of course, to add that I still lived there.

The tide was out, and we could only hear a faint swoosh and suck of waves on the shore. ‘Shame the waves aren’t bigger,’ said Adam. ‘But at least we’ll be able to walk on the beach better than if the tide was high.’

‘Is it too dark to skim stones? I love skimming stones. It’s one of my favourite things.’

‘Mine too,’ he said. ‘Let’s see when we get down there.’

As soon as our feet hit sand, I felt that long-forgotten frisson of pleasure I always got when first setting foot on a beach. I imagined the sand pouring into the sides of my shoes and contemplated going barefoot; but it really was cold. Besides, the sand was soon replaced by a thick band of large pebbles instead, easier to crunch across. I thought of Ken again; how it annoyed me when he came back from tennis and took off his trainers, permitting a cascade of little red stones from the courts to pour over our bedroom carpet until it began to resemble a very small gravel-pit.

But Ken seemed a long way away, and kind of abstract, almost like someone I’d invented. The world that night belonged solely to Adam and I. We were its only inhabitants, and I dismissed my husband with an ease which, all the same, made me uncomfortable.

‘It’s like the whole sky is there just for us,’ I said - not meaning to be sentimental; it really felt like this - and Adam stopped walked, put his hands on my arms, and kissed me, so unexpectedly that I swallowed my chewing gum. His lips were warm and dry and, over the salty tang of the air, I breathed in his glorious bluebell smell. I put my arms around him, and moved closer, opening my mouth to the kiss. His tongue caressed me, slowly and deliberately, much deeper than the way he’d kissed me after the group dinner. It felt as if he were already making love to me, and I moaned, the sound carrying away from me, lost in the wind. I felt lost.

‘Oh Anna,’ he said, sadly, as if he somehow knew I couldn’t be his. ‘You are so gorgeous.’

‘So are you,’ I replied, realizing that I was shaking. ‘You’re amazing.’

He kissed me again, and the stones under my feet shifted slightly, causing me to stumble backwards. He grabbed my arms tighter and hauled me in, like a fish on a line. His broad back made an excellent windbreak—although, thankfully, it was a lot more sheltered on the beach than it had been up on the cliff path - and I felt the skin of my face begin to heat up slightly in proximity to his own warmth.

‘I can’t tell you how nice you are to kiss,’ he said, smiling at me, dropping dozens more little kisses on my cheek. ‘I’m feeling flipping randy, actually.’

I laughed.
Flipping randy
. The anachronistic turn of phrase was so quaint. From anyone else, I’d have found it faintly ridiculous, but from Adam it aroused me. Since I’d known him, he’d come out with a selection of appealingly outmoded words that were a complete turn-on:
randy, tummy, whoops-a-daisy
…there was something blithe and disingenuous about the way he’d used them. It made me melt. Ken would have said
f-ing, horny, stomach
; Harder, more businesslike words.

‘I could kiss you all night,’ he continued. ‘I’ve been dying to kiss you again.’

We kissed, and kissed, and kissed, until I forgot about my cold hands, and slipped them under Adam’s jumper where the touch of them on his warm back made him jump and nearly lose his balance. In revenge, he took his own hands and slid them down inside the waistband of my jeans, until they cupped my bottom, but his were still warm.

‘Not fair,’ he murmured. ‘Your bum’s as cold as my hands.’

We kissed again, and I forgot about Ken. I forgot that I was married. I stopped feeling lost, and began to feel found instead.

When I came up for air, a movement startled me. I looked over his shoulder, half-expecting to see a gang of giggling teenagers pointing at us, or a disgusted-looking dog walker, but we were still alone. The movement had been the tide coming in, weaving a gleaming silent path towards us along ribbons of beach: tributaries and islets swelling the sand like the blood pumping in my veins and swelling the neglected parts of me.

‘Better make sure we don’t get caught by the sea. I don’t want my feet to get as cold as my backside is,’ I said.

Adam led me further up the beach, back onto the big pebbles. ‘Shall we lie down for a minute?’ he said, a little slyly.

I looked doubtfully at the stones, but at least they were dry, so I allowed him to push me gently down until we were lying side by side in the moonlight. I felt like Deborah Kerr in
From Here to Eternity
(?)—after I’d removed the remains of a washed-up plastic cup from by my head, and hoped that I hadn’t lain in any small oil slicks. I was unbelievably turned on by his gentle assertiveness. Despite the freezing temperatures and the uncomfortable rocks, I felt itchy with lust and full of a strange, nervous thrill.

Adam slipped his hand inside my jeans again, this time down the front of them. Then he undid the button, and the zip, and I felt his fingers find the hot centre of me. I was a little taken aback by that, but had no wish to object. Despite us acting like a couple of horny teenagers, his tenderness and disingenuous passion moved me, and it was remarkably easy to block out the cold air and the bumpy stones which were our impromptu mattress, lost in long-forgotten feelings of pure pleasure. I hadn’t even thought of objecting when he undid his own trousers and placed my hand on him, although afterwards I was surprised. His language might have been old-fashioned, but his courtship certainly wasn’t. I’d thought I was far too old to even think about alfresco foreplay, let alone on a cold, stony English beach. But it was so liberating, to just be wrapped up in fooling around for pure pleasure, rather than obsessing about making and losing babies every time I started thinking about sex.

When we returned to the car, wind-blown and—in my case - slightly dazed, I pulled down the sun visor and inspected myself in the mirror behind it. I remembered the satiny feel of his penis, and thought how, when I touched it, it had turned me into a different woman. An adulteress. In France or Spain no-one would have batted an eyelid; in Nigeria I could have been buried up to my neck in a pit, and stoned to death with rocks like the ones we had just been rolling around on. Different on the inside, and a total state on the outside; red-nosed, white cheeked, hair a mad tangle, smudged eyeliner, and with all my sparkly lipstick completely vanished. Someone who would never again be able to claim that she had been faithful to her husband. We hadn’t gone all the way, but that was academic. And now I wanted Adam even more.

I looked across at him, at his calm blue eyes; and he smiled at me as if I were the most beautiful woman in the world. In the dim light of the car, his cheeks and mouth and jaw were illuminated with the tiny sparkles from my lipstick, like far-away constellations. I’d left my mark on him, just as I had in his son.

Precisely twenty four hours later, I was sitting in another Chinese restaurant, in another town, with another man. I had a bruise on the side of my hip from a sharp pebble, and a particularly observant person might have noticed the stubble rash on my chin, but somehow—call it denial, or disbelief—I didn’t feel that I’d been unfaithful; not
really
. Non-penetrative sex on a cold beach at ten o’clock at night just seemed like something which could not possibly have happened to me, Anna Sozi. Perhaps it had happened to Anna Valentine, though, who smiled when she remembered the feel of Adam rubbing against her, and the blue of his eyes as he’d gasped with pleasure.

This other man, Anna’s husband, had linked fingers with me too—why had he done that? He’d never used to be a finger-linker. His fingers were longer, darker and thinner: Cadburys Fingers to Adam’s Sponge, and I couldn’t help thinking they didn’t fit with mine so well. We were having noodles; noodles were lighter, warmer, and twice the price of the ones our food-obsessed neighbour had ordered in the
Taste of the Orient
. The wine was a beautifully chilled Chablis which we were drinking from elegant glasses, instead of the fizzy
Carrrl
sberg of the previous day; the waiter’s accent was Beijing not bumpkin; the dessert menu most definitely did not feature lurid colour photographs of its choices; and I got the feeling that the head chef would rather have disembowelled himself with his meat cleaver than ever serve a dish with a fried egg on top.

Yet I couldn’t shake the spooky feeling of displacement, of having been happier at the other place with its paper tablecloths and flock walls. Even when Ken looked in my eyes and said, ‘You’re so beautiful,’ it had felt more …real…when Adam had said it. Which frightened me. It frightened me that I’d immediately thought of Adam, and wished I’d been sitting opposite him instead. It frightened me that I didn’t feel guilty for thinking that. And it frightened me that all of a sudden everything upon which I’d built my married life: the trust of marriage vows, the stability of a nice home and a loving husband—it all seemed to be sweeping away down a hill in a relentless landslide of change, at the bottom of which stood Adam and Max, waiting for me.

‘So, how’s your first week on the job been?’

We were down to the last two prawn crackers - dry crunchy speckled brown crackers instead of the greasy thin MSG-flavoured white ones, of course, presented in a china bowl instead of a flimsy wicker basket - but I couldn’t face going through that little ritual again. I handed him one, and took the other myself. ‘On the job’—it made me sound like a prostitute. Which I was no worse than, in fact.

‘It’s great,’ I said, imagining it all with a pang of regret: the new faces, the exciting sets, the cable-like jumble of unfamiliar names of crew and cast, real and fictional. Cameras, wardrobe, catering. I wished I had got the job. ‘I think I did OK. I know I did much better than my screen husband. He’s crap—he fluffed his lines so often that the director threw his clipboard on the floor.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Who—my husband? Adam. His character’s called Adam, and the actor is a guy called…en Smith. I so hope I don’t have to snog him, he’s heinous. Beardy and piggy-eyed. The director’s name is Sebastian. We’re supposed to be a new family who’ve moved into the street; me and Adam, and our twin babies.’

‘Real babies?’

‘Of course.’

Ken paused and looked away, and I felt the depth of his sadness. I decided to spare him from his unspoken queasy concern. ‘It’s fine. I’m dealing with it fine. Sebastian says…’

What? What had Sebastian said? And was that even the name I’d assigned him? Suddenly I wasn’t sure if I’d said the director was called Sebastian, even though I
thought
I had, not one minute earlier. Before that too, I recalled telling Ken he was a hot new director who’d done some great ads, but couldn’t remember if I’d given him a name then or not. I felt hot with guilt and the cumbersome weight of deception. It slithered around beneath me, yielding like the rocks on the beach had the day before with Adam. Bringing Holly into it, albeit indirectly via the mention of babies, had all at once brought it home to me how hugely I was lying to my husband. Massive great ripped lies, like giant belches in his face.

It felt way too enormous for me to confront to myself. Not then, and I’d gone too far to go back. I pushed the horror to the back of my mind and gritted my teeth: I was just going to have to be a good enough liar not to be caught out, it was as simple as that. For the time being.

At least I didn’t have to be overly worried about being caught out on details—Ken had no memory for such trivia. Just in case Adam did, though, I excused myself and went out to the loo, where I found a petrol receipt in my purse and wrote on the back of it:
‘HUSBAND: ADAM. ACTOR: LEN SMITH. BEARDY, PIGGY-EYED. DIRECTOR: SEBASTIAN.’
I’d transcribe them on to my index cards when I got back to Wealton, and keep my story straight that way.

When I got back to the table, I’d hoped that the subject would have been forgotten, but Ken was clearly in one of his rare ‘must be more interested in Anna’s life’ moods. (Although, in fairness to him, my supposed new job was the first thing he’d really had to
be
interested in, since a voiceover for a brand of cheese triangles I’d done, almost eighteen months ago—and that had only been good for a two minute conversation over a G&T by the river one sunny afternoon).