‘I’m going if you’re looking for a table,’ piped up Louise, broadening her accent to intensify the awkwardness.
‘Oh, no, we’re fine, actually,’ replied the dad. ‘We’re running late for a thing anyway …’
‘They serve really quick,’ said Louise, getting up. ‘Hey, Mick, I’m leaving two quid for the coffees. This lovely family needs to eat and go!’ A waiter in his fifties with smeared tattoos on his forearms and a beer belly like a balloon came straight over with menus and ushered the family, who were divided between relief and annoyance, to their seats.
‘I recommend the chip butty,’ Louise added perkily, as she passed the mum, who looked the type to wonder why ten minutes a week in front of the calisthenics video didn’t shift the pounds accrued at aimless social teas.
She crossed the road and stood at the railing, looking down at the beach. The dark blue water was smooth and gelatinous. She inhaled deeply. She loved the saline scent that permeated the perimeter of the Island. Very different from the stench of the diesel-skimmed brown water that lay in the port of her home city. The sound of the wash was calm and hypnotic. It wasn’t the kind of tide that felt like it was trying to take the Island, unlike the late-autumn swells that beat over the edge of the sea walls. It was nuzzling the sand about twenty feet down from where the high tide had left a rim of seaweed. She looked at her watch. Midday. Twelve hours earlier she and Danny had bought a bottle of whisky from behind the bar and sat on the walkway staring down at the reflections of the coloured bulbs strung above that glinted in the roll of the black water. She had found herself admitting to him that she had been sacked. She regretted telling him the specifics: mention of her sleeping with another man reinforced the boundaries of their relationship, but he spiralled into a monosyllabic gloom of hurt. She remembered ignoring this and declaring that Rob de la Haye would regret the fucking day he’d crossed her.
A toddler punctured her reverie by bursting into tears as a seagull attempted to mug him for his doughnut. She remembered crying last night. Fuck. Danny was so loyal to her, carrying a torch that might have been mistaken for a lighthouse, that she tended to steel herself against the revelation of any vulnerability, but last night she had broken down, and he had put his arm round her. A pass dressed up as gallantry. He had made her a promise. She had talked about packing up and going home. The best a Mainlander like her could hope for was to serve at top table: she was never going to get a seat at it.
‘Get your own place then, like you wanted,’ Danny had slurred. When they first met, at the St Aubin hotel where she’d started as a cleaner, she’d talked of her grand plan to buy a little hotel or B-and-B and build up a business. Her fellow expats were happy to use the Island as a source of casual labour and casual sex, but not her. She didn’t like the way its people looked down their noses at her. Forty-three years ago and seventy-one miles away her granddad had run up Normandy’s Gold Beach into the jaws of death while these petty Islanders were waiting out the war with nothing more to complain about than a shortage of sugar.
‘I’m not allowed to fucking buy here, Danny,’ she’d spat back. Her grand plan had been shattered: without local housing qualifications she wasn’t eligible to buy any property, commercial or private, until she had rented for twenty years. ‘I can’t wait till I’m forty-two.’
‘Use my quallies then.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We’ll do it together. You find the money, I’ll buy it for you.’
‘Buy what, though?’
‘The Crow’s Nest is for sale.’
‘How much?’
‘Sixty.’
‘So I’d need a six-grand deposit. Plus another four or so for the refurb. That place hasn’t been touched since the seventies. Anyway, that would make you my boss. I don’t think either of us could handle that.’
‘We’d be partners. Mine on paper only. I run the restaurant, you do the rest. And we split any sale fifty-fifty.’
‘Oh, Christ, Danny. This is some weird future fantasy you’ve worked out. How many times? I don’t need you to save me.’
‘I’m looking at it as a business proposition. You’re bright, Lou, brighter than me. And tougher. I don’t want to spend my life chopping carrots and reheating shepherd’s pies so some hotelier can own three cars and a pool, but that’s all I’ve got ahead of me. You can pull me out too.’
‘Pull you out of what? You’re Jersey born and bred. You’re fine.’
‘We’re not all fucking millionaires and tax exiles. Some of us work bloody hard, same as your lot.’
‘Do not compare yourself to my lot. My lot have been shat on. How many of your school-friends have been stabbed or banged up?’
She started to feel hungry so opened her purse to check how much cash she had left. She found two pounds and a scrap of paper scrawled with Le Petit Palais, La Rue de Grassière, Trinity. Rob’s home address. She had surreptitiously obtained it from the office before she left the Bretagne. She hadn’t known why. A vicious letter to his duped wife? An anonymous threat? A dog turd in a box? She looked back at the café where the parents of the local family were wolfing their food, the wife clutching her handbag on her lap rather than risk putting it on the floor against her chair. What did she expect would happen? That it would be hooked and tossed into the throng of the great unwashed who would close ranks like a League of Thieves from a nineteenth-century romance? This Island had branded her since she had first touched down, a two-star accent in a five-star town: Scousers were thieves, untrustworthy. Very well, if that’s what the Island wanted, maybe that’s what the Island should get.
She strode back to her bedsit and used the communal phone in the hall to dial a cab, then went back to her room and took a tenner from Danny’s wallet, leaving him an IOU and a promise to be in touch in the week.
On the way into the belly of the Island, sunbeams darted through the spindly branches of the wind-stripped trees, adding to her headache. She shifted to the other side of the car and wound down the window to let the cool breeze enliven and narrow her sense of purpose. This had the bonus of drowning out the insinuations of the prying local driver.
‘Friend’s house?’
‘Yeah, going for lunch.’
‘Nice houses round there.’
She wanted to say, ‘Keep the car running while I rob them,’ but settled for ‘Hm.’
The houses on the hawthorn-edged lane began to thin out and swell. As, she imagined, did the hair and girth of the male owners, fattened by the confluence of middle age and wealth. The waists of their wives would slim with the need to retain the attention and resources of the tailored sloths.
‘Just pull up here,’ she said. She paid and got out in the road.
The white house looked big but, then, anywhere looked big compared to the council flat in which she’d grown up. It had had two windows: the front and the back. This house had twelve on the front, all with wooden shutters painted gold to match the fake Victorian gas lamps that lined the snaking drive at intervals too close for the desired effect to work.
A metallic green Renault 5 approached, its indicator flashing to turn in, so she continued walking towards the next house to muster her courage. After it had pulled into Rob’s drive, she snuck back to see who it was. She knew who it wasn’t: there was no way that the man she had fucked would drive a car like that.
She peeked round the trunk of a beech tree that stood at the edge of the front garden and saw a rowing couple get out of the now parked car. The woman was attractive, in spite of her frown, which looked to Louise as though it had become the default setting for her face. Their raised voices drifted over.
‘I can’t believe you