There is coarse brown bread and a dish of tomatoes. Andreas cups the sea urchins one by one in his hand and twists the point of the knife into the underside. He piles them in front of me and I spoon the orange pulpy contents greedily into my mouth. The taste is pure sea and iodine.
When we have finished eating I lie on the cabin roof, letting the sun unpin me, and Andreas puts a tiny coffeepot on the blue flame of a gas cylinder. He brings me a little tin cupful and three figs, and I gnaw the fruit off ragged slices of skin while the juice runs down my chin.
‘This is wonderful.’
‘Good.’
‘But I don’t know anything about you.’ I smile.
He takes the last fig from me and neatly quarters it with the knife. ‘What do you want to know?’
I try to frame the questions – how old are you, where do you come from, what do you know and what are you doing here – but then the points of reference fade. There is nothing I need to ask because it is enough just to be here.
Andreas splits the flower-shape of fig segments apart, two for him and two for me. I look into his face and it is like looking into my own. As familiar as that.
‘Have you eaten enough?’
I nod.
‘Come ashore.’
There is shade under the east-facing cliff. We lie on the sand, facing each other, heads propped on our hands.
‘What are you going to do next?’ he asks quietly. It is as if he already knows about Peter. It is a relief not to have to fill in what has already happened, but to make an attempt at sketching out the future instead.
‘I won’t go back to London. I’d like to live somewhere different, where all those rocks of history don’t weigh me down any more.’
‘You could do that.’
‘I could do anything’ I start to say it with an ironic shrug, but looking into Andreas’s face the words come out with me believing them. ‘I’ll start living, instead of hiding. You know, something happened to me a long time ago – no, not happened, I did something and it changed everything that came afterwards, for me and everyone around me. I’d like to be the person I might have been, if … if that thing had never happened.’
His hand uncurls and he touches my mouth.
‘Shh. You can be, if that’s what you really want,’ he says.
And what he says is right. The certainty is soothing and I stretch myself out in the sand, suddenly drowsy.
‘I could sleep,’ I murmur.
Andreas yawns. ‘And me, too.’
We lie down side by side and I fall asleep with Andreas’s heartbeat and the ripple of water in my head.
That was how the day was. There was nothing complicated or buried or even unspoken about it; we were just easy in one another’s company as if we were old friends.
When I wake up the sky has clouded again with the morning’s thin white cover. There is only a hollow in the sand beside me and I sit up, panicky and still fogged with daytime sleep. Then I see Andreas in the cockpit of the boat and he lifts his hand to beckon me. The water feels chill as I wade in and unwillingly strike out. He helps me over the side and I wrap myself in my shirt.
‘The weather is changing,’ he says. Under the colourless sky the land looks bleak and the water is cloudy. It’s airlessly hot now, but a breath of fear makes me shiver.
‘What’s happening?’ I shake my head, trying to clear the sleep out of it.
Andreas is busy with the rope that has anchored us to the buoy. He hauls in the dripping length of it.
‘I’ll take you home.’
‘Home,’ I think and the notion was nothing to do with the white-skinned hotel. It’s somewhere else, somewhere I can’t yet locate. The sky has grown steadily darker and a few raindrops pock the water, but I hardly notice. Outside the confines of the bay there is just enough wind to stiffen the sail. We sit quietly and the coastline slides backwards until the beach hotels come into view.
We reach the jetty and he brings the boat alongside, passing a double length of rope through an iron ring to make us fast.
‘Thank you,’ I say uncertainly. The questions I dismissed earlier sound again. Who? Why?
Andreas says, ‘We will see each other again, but it won’t be another day like today.’
Why? Again, but I don’t ask the question aloud. I already know that there will be no answer, not now, no answer that would qualify as such. Maybe he is about to go away. Maybe there are other considerations that I don’t yet understand.
‘I had a very happy day, today.’
Already in my mind it is set aside, marked out with a memory. With the rhythm of Andreas’s company I have stopped thinking about Peter. There has been a whole chain of hours during which I have been completely happy and unmarked.
On the jetty, looking out at the brown hummocks of the Greek islands and the backdrop of pewter sky, Andreas briefly puts his arms round me and holds me close.
‘So did I,’ he says.
Then he kisses my forehead and lets me go.
I stand watching the boat slip away, but he has put his straw hat on and there is no glimpse of his face.
I am in my hotel room again. A handful of days separate me from the hours I spent with Andreas, but the effect of our strange encounter has stayed with me. I have been content with my own company, not needing to block myself out with reading or barbiturate-heavy sleep. My memories of Peter and our life together have been tender and untainted by bitterness. I am awake and anticipatory, and there is no weight on my back. I have walked on the beach and through the streets of Branc, looking at the people who live here and making up stories for myself about their lives. People have looked at me in return, nodding and smiling – casual greetings, just the way that ordinary people acknowledge each other. And I have not minded or shied away from the scrutiny. I feel that I have the freedom of myself.
Maybe this is normal, maybe this is the happiness of normality.
Maybe I have never known it since before my eighth birthday.
I can’t sleep.
The clock at my bedside tells me that it is a little after one a.m. The close, thundery weather has lasted for three days now, since I went sailing with Andreas. A storm would clear the air, but it never comes, and the nights are long and airless. I find that I don’t mind the absence of sleep, now, whereas only last week I would have obliterated myself with sleeping pills.
I slide out of bed and put on a pair of loose trousers, a thin shirt. I step noiselessly out of my room and walk down the hotel corridor, past the numbered and nameless doors, across the deserted lobby where the night porter is dozing in a chair behind the reception desk. Outside in the garden there is the faintest breath of wind and I pursue it down the steps on to the beach. The sand grates cool and pleasant under my bare feet. The sea is black, the sky starless. I walk for a couple of minutes, to the water’s edge and a step beyond, soaking my feet and ankles and the hems of my trouser legs. Then I pace along to the jetty where Andreas moored the boat. I walk to the end and sit down. I hook my fingers in the iron ring and dangle my legs over the edge.
There is stillness and silence except for the restless water.
I look back at the darkened town. There are few holidaymakers left, the bars and clubs are mostly closed for the season. It is as if everyone in the world is asleep.
I sit and wait.