She shouldn’t be so hard on him. He misses Derek of course. Derek had always been the softer touch: spooning jellied chunks of Whiskas into the feeding bowl when he thought she wasn’t looking and tickling Milton’s chin until the cat was rolled over, eyes closed, whiskers trembling with pleasure.
Unwilling to disturb him, Carol waits to see what the cat will do next, her senses pricked with the peculiar alertness that comes with the density of darkness after midnight. There is a bit of shuffling, then the sound of conscientious licking.
Oh Lord, she thinks, he’s washing himself. We’ll be here all night – or what there was left of it. She wonders what time it is. It feels like 5 a.m. but she refuses to look at the clock on the bedside table in case it confirms her fear there is even longer to go until daylight. Sleep is such a nuisance these days. The doctor has given her pills but she doesn’t like to take them in case she never wakes up. Besides, she knows what the problem is. She’s not used to the absence on the other side of the bed, not yet anyhow, and there’s nothing anyone can do about that. She edges her left foot to the side, like a bather testing the water. For a moment, she convinces herself that her toes are going to make contact with the warm cotton of his pyjamas but instead her foot grazes against the coolness of the sheets where Derek should be.
She shivers, withdraws her leg, wonders how many minutes have passed.
Eventually Milton settles down and starts purring, gently at first but then rising in volume until it becomes impossible for her to ignore. Carol sighs loudly, exactly how she used to when Derek was snoring, hoping he would wake up, be apologetic, give her a cuddle and allow her to sink back into the uninterrupted sleep of one who knows she is loved. But of course Milton would never respond to such passive-aggressive tactics. He is, after all, a cat.
She tries to slip her right leg out from underneath his bulk, but Milton stirs and she is caught between wanting to get back to sleep and needing his company. She lies there, eyes open, legs twisted at odd angles. If she just keeps still and tries to relax, then maybe a tiredness will ‘wash over’ her like it always does in books.
A dull glow from the street lamp outside filters through the curtains, casting a buttery grey light over the bed. She traces the beam of it as it dips and curves across the crumpled duvet and imagines the slopes and valleys of a vast desert, the sand poured across her by some unknown hand as she slept.
She had been to a desert once, with Derek, in Tunisia. It had been a package holiday a few years back, one of those deals he found on the web. He was ever so good on the computer, was Derek. He had always been able to find nice places to stay whereas she never knew where to look. He’d tried to teach her how to do the grocery shopping online at Tesco once but she’d never got the hang of it. And part of her didn’t trust the idea of it anyway: she liked to touch her fruit and veg. You couldn’t smell a cantaloupe melon through a screen, now could you?
The Tunisia deal had been ten days fully inclusive in a four-star hotel on the island of Djerba. Neither of them had a clue what to expect: all they had wanted was guaranteed sunshine, a ground-floor room for easy access and a swimming pool that Carol could lie by and read her books.
When they got there, ashen and sweaty from the flight over, the hotel had exceeded all expectations. It was an enormous white building with marble floors and balconies layered on top of each other like a wedding cake. The staff had been impeccably efficient and polite. Their room overlooked the pool and was only a short walk from reception which was good for Derek, given how bad his leg was.
For the first couple of days, they hadn’t done much, which suited them fine. They’d wake every morning at 7.30, like they did at home, then go to the restaurant for breakfast. The buffet was laden with every type of food: pastries, cereal, cheese, flatbreads, muesli, little bowls of chopped-up dates and several trays of cured meats (there were a lot of Germans, Derek pointed out with slight displeasure. Carol told him to stop being narrow-minded. ‘The war’s over, Derek, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ He’d had the grace to look shamefaced).
After breakfast, Carol would set up her sunlounger underneath a parasol by the pool, slather herself in lotion and take one of her thrillers out to read until lunchtime. For hours she lay there, stately as a galleon, while Derek pottered about indoors doing heaven knows what with his crosswords and his gadget-instruction manuals he’d brought over especially from England.
‘What do you want them for?’ she’d asked when she spotted him packing the leaflets into his leather satchel. ‘How to’ manuals for digital radios, microwaves, dishwashers, broadband connections and the like.
‘I don’t get a chance to concentrate properly when I’m at home,’ he explained, turning to look at her with an affronted expression. ‘I like to know how things work. No harm in that, is there?’
She smiled, patted him on the shoulder.
‘No love, none at all.’
At lunchtime, still full from breakfast, they’d waddle over to the poolside bar and have a salad or some fresh fish. Derek would drink a bottle of the local beer. Carol would order a fresh fruit smoothie. They’d retire to their room for an afternoon nap and then, in the early evening before dinner, they’d watch a DVD from one of the selection the hotel had on offer. On Golden Pond was a favourite. Carol cried when she saw Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda, all shaky with age and set in their ways. There was something so moving about people in love growing old. It’s a future you never imagine for yourself when you’re young. And yet she knew, without quite admitting it out loud, that the characters in the film weren’t that much older than her and Derek.
But on the third day, one of the hotel staff had asked if they wanted to go on an organised excursion to the desert and Derek had signed them up, even though Carol wasn’t sure.
‘It’ll be an experience,’ he said, holding her hand. She noticed the thinness of his fingers, the brittleness of his pale nails.
‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ she said. She was nervous of the unexpected. Derek thought it was one of her failings. No sense of adventure. People were always talking nowadays of the need to ‘get out of your comfort zone’ but Carol would really rather stay inside it, thank you very much. If you were already comfortable, why would you choose not to be? That would be like deciding to sit on a hard wooden chair rather than a big soft sofa. It wouldn’t teach you anything apart from the fact you didn’t like hard wooden chairs and she knew that already.
‘Come on, poppet,’ Derek cajoled. ‘It might be fun.’
His eyes were bright at the thought of it. She saw that he’d caught the sun without even trying: his cheeks were pinkish-brown and the tip of his nose was beginning to peel. He was still a good-looking man, she thought, even now, two years shy of his seventieth birthday. His face had filled out as he got older and the extra weight suited him, made him look dignified.
He was five years older than her. When she first met him, at her friend Elsie’s twenty-first birthday party, he had reminded her of a dark-eyed bird: rapid and precise in his movements, his face a combination of angles and planes, his nose beaky, and with a shock of brown hair that seemed to blow about even when there was no wind. He had been skinny, almost too thin, and yet she had seen something comforting in his shape as soon as he walked through the door, bending to fit his gangly height into the small, smoky room. She had felt, even then, that she could tell Derek anything and he would understand. He didn’t need to say anything and still he would be in tune with everything she thought.
‘All right then,’ Carol said, kissing her husband lightly on the tip of his peeling nose. ‘Let’s go to the desert.’
And in the end, it had been amazing. They’d been driven in an air-conditioned jeep across a Roman causeway that connected the island to the mainland and then on to Ksar Ghilane, an oasis lined with date trees and criss-crossed with shallow drainage ditches. The night had been spent in a spacious tent and, although Carol had been worried about the heat, the temperature dropped, and she found that