‘I have a boat,’ the man says, before I even know his name.
And I have agreed to go for a sail in his boat, still before I even know his name.
It didn’t take long for Peter to hear about my visit to Lisa. He came home early the next day, wearing an expression I had never seen before. A guarded look, edged with defiance.
‘Is it true?’ I asked him, once he had taken off his coat and put his briefcase down on the chair in the hallway.
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Although I did. ‘Are you in love with her?’
He spread his hands, a gesture of expiring patience that brought the first dart of dislike out of me.
‘No. Yes, I suppose so. I didn’t go looking for it. These things just happen.’
Like getting hit by a bus, I suppose. You are just standing there, minding your own business, when adultery comes along and runs you over. Although, when I thought about it, having Lisa Kirk set her sights on you must be not unlike being ploughed over by a bus. The dislike intensified and it made me want to cry. The idea of disliking Peter was so outlandish.
After that there was a predictable series of ugly events and confrontations.
I wept, Peter retreated, Lisa widened her eyes. Instead of a calm backwater, Dunollie Mansions became a place full of gusts of misery and disbelief.
In the end, after weeks of grief and entreaty, Peter moved out and into a flat in Baron’s Court. Lisa drifted there with him and I stayed put. It was as if my husband and his new lover had climbed into the red TARDIS, pulled the door shut behind them and dematerialised. Some time later Selina had the idea that the two of us might go on a Turkish holiday together.
And now I am going on a boat trip. It is another unseasonably hot day, although the sky is hazed with a layer of thin cloud. The white sky slides into a pearl-grey sea with no line of separation. There is a small boat waiting at the jetty near the corner of the bay, as Inglis man told me there would be, and as I plod towards it I can see the man lying on the roof of the tiny cabin, straw hat tilted over his eyes and ankles crossed, apparently asleep. His hearing must be supernaturally good, however, because I am still a way off and treading quietly over the rocks when in one fluid movement he sits up and raises his arm in greeting.
He takes my hand and helps me down into the cockpit. There are cushions on the seats and the space is shaded by an awning, and I sit down with relief to be partly out of the brooding heat. Through the cabin door I can see a neat area with narrow bunks separated by a folding table.
‘No wind,’ the man says, hunching his shoulders.
‘No.’
‘I don’t like moving under engine power, but I think we shall have to. Maybe we’ll pick up a breeze outside the bay.’
I look down into the water, which is so clear that I can see the rocks ten feet beneath the surface as if they were lying under plate glass, and then up into the colourless sky.
‘Maybe,’ I agree. I don’t mind whether we find a breeze or not, or whatever else may be going to happen. I’m happy to be here, rocked by the water and with the shipshape little wooden cockpit around me.
The man starts up the engine and a drift of blue smoke rises from the stern. He jumps on to the jetty and releases the bow rope, and as the prow swings outwards in a slow arc he unties the stern and leaps back to join me and the boat. A minute later we are heading out to sea. In companionable silence we watch the water, and my white hotel and its companions as they fall away behind us.
‘I don’t know your name,’ I say.
He tilts his head sideways and looks at me. None of his features is distinctive, nor is the composite they make, yet the suggestion of familiarity comes back again. I know that I don’t know him, but I feel easy in his company.
‘Mine is Catherine Stafford. Cary.’
‘Andreas,’ he says. He makes a small adjustment to the tiller to bring us round parallel to the shore.
‘There,’ he says with satisfaction. And then, gesturing to the tiller, ‘Do you mind, just for a moment?’
I slide across and take his place as he moves forward. He runs up a sail and at once the wind fills it. Water drums under the hull and a wake churns behind us and I tighten my grasp on the tiller. I lift my head to look at the masthead, and the wind and our quickening speed make me smile. When Andreas moves back again I start to move out of his place but he makes a sign to indicate that I should stay put.
‘I can’t sail.’
‘You are sailing.’
And he is right, I am. Pleasure swells in me until I feel as taut as the white sail. We seem to skim over the water. I watch the coastline and the villages that run down into the bays like clusters of sugar cubes shaken in the fold of a napkin. The scenery is calm rather than beautiful, painted in shades of aquamarine and sepia. Andreas points out the places and tells me their names.
‘Do you live here?’ I ask.
‘Some of the time.’
After a while we pass a massive outcrop of rock, where cormorants shuffle against the sky. Immediately behind the rock, hidden by it except from an oblique angle, there is a tongue of sand between two steep rock cliffs.
‘That’s where we are going.’
‘It looks beautiful.’
He helps me to bring the boat round. In the shallows the water is brilliant turquoise. There are fish in synchronised shoals, flicking their shadows over the sand. Andreas lowers the sail and makes his boat fast to a small buoy.
‘Welcome to my bay.’
I am hot, now that we are motionless again, and the water looks enticing. I pull off the shirt that covers my swimming costume and stand up too quickly so the boat rocks wildly. Andreas puts his hand out to steady me and I cling on to his bare forearm, laughing. My own hand looks chalky against his suntanned skin.
‘Dive,’ he says and I look over the side into the water. Deep enough. We link hands and I scramble up on to the seat feeling the rough canvas of the cushions under the balls of my feet. The boat is still rocking and we are both laughing now. He puts his hands on my shoulders to steady me while I rise on to my toes and arrow my arms in front of me. Andreas’s touch is friendly, even brotherly, with no whisper of sex in it. He is protecting me and teasing at the same time. I feel a pang of loss with Peter at the centre of it, because he was my lover and I miss him so acutely.
‘Dive,’ Andreas repeats and to get away from the memory of Peter I launch myself from the boat. There is a smack and sizzle of water and I stretch, letting the momentum of the dive drive me down as far as the rippled sand. Then I am rising again and the cool water strips away the roughness of the last months and it is as if I am clean and smooth and in one piece again. When I break the surface in a dazzle of light, I notice that the sky’s white haze has receded and the sun is shining. Andreas surfaces next to me and shakes a glitter of drops from his hair. We swim together to the beach and then sit in the shallows, sun-warmed, looking out to the little boat and the slice of open sea beyond the mouth of the bay.
‘My favourite place,’ he says lightly.
‘I can see why.’
Later Andreas straps a knife to his ankle and takes a netting bag for a swim around the rocks while I lie in the sun. When he comes back