Thirteen Days By Sunset Beach (3 page)

"That too, but I was thinking of the routine with the knocks."

"Maybe now we know one Doug and Pris won't have heard at."

Sandra found plates and glasses and utensils in a cupboard under the sink, and then opened the refrigerator, where a three-litre bottle of water was growing misty with condensation. "Well, nobody's going thirsty here," she said and filled two glasses. "Shall we sit out before we go to bed?"

When they sat on their balcony the dividing wall blocked out the muffled thudding of percussion and the neon glow of Sunset Beach. Before long Ray saw the sky retreat from the sea, hinting at a vaster darkness. A star seemed to conjure forth a dozen, and then many more began to glimmer as if they were being silently born from the dark. Ray saw how intent on them Sandra had grown, and how they were bestowing some kind of peace. He could only try to count them, but he had no idea what total he'd reached when his head lurched up from nodding. "You go and catch up on your sleep," Sandra said. "I won't stay out much longer."

"Are you sure you don't mind?" This was just a way to postpone asking "How do you feel?"

"Honestly," she said with some surprise, "I feel better than I have for weeks. I wish it could always be like this."

Ray thought she meant not just herself but the night as well. He planted a hand on the slippery table to help himself up and squeezed her thin shoulder, then stooped to leave her a dry kiss. As he turned away he caught sight of a distant figure on the beach. He was glad to conclude that the sand must be firm—he'd never cared for walking on soft sand even when he was considerably fitter—since the silhouette against the neon glow was approaching at quite a pace.

He left the window open while he went into the bathroom, where he couldn't help reflecting that he could have done without the mirror or at any rate the sight of himself. Age was dangling an unreasonable amount of his face beneath the chin, dragging down his features—the baggy eyes, the wrinkled lips he had to keep remembering to hitch up at the corners, even the broad nose in which hairs too often lurked—as well as draining colour from them and his previously auburn hair. He brushed his teeth and washed his face in reluctantly lukewarm water, and then he went to the window. "I'll have to shut this," he murmured, "or the air conditioning won't work."

"I'll know you're there. Close the curtains too."

"Good night then."

"It is."

He couldn't think of any response that wouldn't betray he was loitering. He found his way to bed by the glow from the lamps in the play area, but switched on Sandra's bedside light to help her when she came in. He slipped beneath the thin quilt to discover that it hid a pair of single beds pushed together, suggesting a separation that made him unhappier than he wanted to comprehend. He thought the light would keep him awake to wait for Sandra, but it went out almost instantly, or he did.

It wakened him as well. He blinked his sticky eyes wide to find he was alone in bed. He fumbled at the bedside table, only just saving his watch from falling to the floor. When he managed to capture it he found that he hadn't seen Sandra for nearly an hour. At once his mouth was dry as sand, and yet he felt unexpectedly resigned, a preamble to all the feelings he would have to experience. He levered himself up on his shaky arms and floundered off the bed to trudge across the chill marble floor to the window.

Sandra was lolling half off the plastic chair. Her head was on one side and propped on the back of the chair, turning her face to the stars. Ray threw the curtain out of the way and hauled the window open. "Are you all right?" he pleaded.

Her head took some moments to wobble erect. "You woke me," she protested. "I was having such a dream."

"You don't want to stay out here all night, do you? I went in an hour ago. What were you dreaming?"

"It's gone." Not much less peevishly she said "All right, I'm coming in."

She relented as he shut the window. "You must have been worried," she said. "I'm here now." She used the bathroom and then joined Ray in bed, capturing his hand to draw it around her bony waist. As she switched off her light she murmured "That was it. The dark."

"What was?" Ray felt oddly reluctant to ask.

"My dream." As if trying to summon it back she said "It was dark, but there was some kind of light, and it went on for ever."

"I wouldn't want a different life." Sandra's voice wakened him. She was talking to the walker Ray had seen last night, who had sprung onto the balcony as easily as he'd come along the beach. Of course he hadn't, though Ray felt as if he was remembering it, presumably from a dream. Had the family arrived? He untangled himself from the quilt to reach for his watch. While they weren't due for hours yet, he was dismayed to find that it was nearly noon. How long had Sandra been up without him? He threw off the quilt and hurried to the bathroom.

He could hear Sandra and their neighbour through the small high window above the shower stall. Sandra was recalling how she and Ray had met at teacher training college, where they'd been involved with other people but had always come back together; how they'd almost parted for good over whether Ray should move to Coventry to live with her or she should join him in York; how they'd compromised on Manchester when they'd both found jobs there; how they'd been heads of departments by the time they retired, Sandra running English while Ray took care of Mathematics... He didn't care to think how much this resembled an obituary, though at least her account was livelier. He tramped back to the bedside table for his morning medication, swallowing pill after pill, not to mention tablets. Once he'd pulled long-legged swimming trunks over his bulbous greying stomach he went to find Sandra. "Here's the sleeping beauty," a woman said.

She was plump and, to judge from the locks that had escaped from the towel around her head, generously red-haired. Her bare arms rested on the dividing wall, hands clasped as if in a casual prayer. "There's just one beauty at this table, and it isn't me," Ray said.

Sandra was wearing her new green one-piece swimsuit, and he was unhappy to think that by sleeping he'd kept her from venturing out of the shade on the balcony, since the sunlight was almost everywhere else. "I'm for the pool," their neighbour said. "Don't forget to see to that bite, Sandra."

As the woman started or perhaps resumed a hearty conversation in the next apartment Ray said "What bite?"

"Something must have got me when I was asleep out here last night." Sandra pointed to a red mark on the side of her neck. "It doesn't hurt," she said. "I hadn't even noticed till Jane, you just met her, told me it was there."

Peering closer, Ray saw that the mark was swollen around a hole somewhat larger than a pinprick. "We'd better put something on it all the same."

"I was going to." As she made for the apartment Sandra said "Jane was saying which tavernas they recommend."

"Are you hungry?" Ray was able to hope.

"Do you know, I think I could be. I'm thirsty, I can tell you that." Sandra drained her bedside glass of water and fetched a tube of ointment from the chest of drawers. At Ray rubbed ointment on the bite as gently as he could and winced on her behalf, she said "Let's find a supermarket too."

She donned a long dress over her swimsuit and planted her hat firmly on her head while Ray hid some of his less appealing aspects with a shirt and retrieved his own hat from its perch on top of the safe. She put on her sunglasses as he opened the door. The play area was deserted, but several children organised by a girl wearing a Sunny View cap were playing ball in the pool, around which older folk lay on loungers, reading electronic texts or books. A truck piled with vegetables was coasting through the village while the driver advertised his produce with a microphone, and the Thorntons followed in the dusty wake. Among the tavernas and small shops between the Sunny View and the village square they came upon the Superber supermarket. "Is that a word?" Sandra said.

Outside the entrance a wire stand displayed English newspapers, days old. They might have been trying to cling to the past, Ray thought, to postpone some disaster. Another stand held paperbacks so faded the covers were ghosts of themselves, with pages brown as parched grass. Beyond the glass doors the air was several degrees cooler than the street, and Sandra gave a tiny sigh. A defiantly moustached old woman in black watched from behind the till as Ray followed Sandra from shelf to shelf. Each item she placed in his wire basket—a plastic bottle of retsina, a packet of olives, a hunk of feta cheese—felt like a token of her old self. "Look, there's a bakery," she said, "we can get fresh bread in the mornings," and he saw a renewed light in her eyes. "And here's a bucket and spade for William."

When she made to pick up a bundle of six bottles of water he grabbed it with his free hand, barely managing to cross the shop before he had to dump the bottles on the counter. The old woman didn't glance at it or the basket he planted next to it, but pointed at the beach toys Sandra was carrying. "You have young," she said.

"We've had a couple," Sandra said, suppressing her amusement. "We have a little grandson now."

"Here."

Presumably this did duty as a question. "He should be on the ferry at this moment," Ray said.

"Coming here." Her next question sounded somewhat more like one. "Where you are?"

"Staying, do you mean? The Sunny View."

"You stay home."

Ray was too bewildered not to ask "Why should we have done that? We like what we've seen so far."

"Home." As if she was sharing an unfavourable view of men and their comprehension she told Sandra "Home at Sunny View."

"Well, I think we'll be having some days out," Sandra said. "We'd like to explore your island."

"Not all." The old woman shut her wrinkled eyelids while she said "Not Sunset Beach."

"I shouldn't think we're tempted," Ray said, "but why not there?"

"Not for you."

"I think we rather had that impression," Sandra said.

Her hint of humour seemed to provoke the old woman, who made a visible bid to marshal her language. "They not like us."

"They aren't so very different from how we were at their age."

"And it wasn't very long ago," Ray said, "that we were teaching people just like them when they weren't much younger."

The old woman abandoned trying to communicate. She didn't so much plant each item on the counter as thump it with them. She let Sandra fumble over opening a carrier bag, and Ray had the impression that she regarded visitors as more necessary than welcome. He hoisted the bottles against his chest, and as soon as he emerged from the supermarket the heat seemed to weigh on them. The Sunny View was less than a quarter of a mile away, but his forearms began to ache before he'd trudged half the distance. They were throbbing by the time he reached the viny arch. As he stumbled across the courtyard Evadne looked out of the office and then ran to him. "You must not carry those," she cried. "Next time call Stavros."

She seized the six-pack and marched ahead, jogging up the steps to the apartment. She was still holding the bottles when Ray arrived with the bag he'd taken from Sandra, who unlocked the door to reveal the apartment had been serviced. Even the flowers on the pillows had been renewed. "Thank you for everything," Ray said.

"It is only little," Evadne said. "We value what guests bring."

She stood the bottles on top of the refrigerator and closed the apartment door so gently that she might have been quitting a sickroom. As Sandra unloaded her bag into the refrigerator she said "Are you hungry?"

Ray tried not to sound too urgent. "Are you?"

"I feel as if I need to eat. I'll have a bite."

"Would olives and cheese do the job?"

"Or we could go out for lunch. We can try somewhere close so we'll see when everyone arrives."

Ray tried to keep surprise out of his voice. "Let's do that by all means."

They were making for the door when Sandra laid a not entirely steady hand on his arm. "Remember, we mustn't give them any reason to suspect. As far as they're concerned nothing's wrong."

"We'll keep them all happy. We're a team," Ray said, but he'd been reminded how hard the next thirteen days might be.

***

The nearest taverna was across the road, in sight of the Sunny View. Beyond a low white wall draped with a mass of sapphire flowers, Chloe's Garden contained a dozen tables among pots of basil, while as many tables surrounded a bar and kitchen under a roof. As Ray and Sandra took their places by the wall a slim long-faced young woman with glossy amber skin brought them menus. "You will have wine."

It scarcely bothered sounding like a question. "How did you know?" Sandra said.

"You bought some before."

"Small place, hey? Nothing goes unnoticed." Ray wasn't certain whether to be disconcerted or amused. "We'll have a litre of your white wine from the barrel,"

"And one of water too, please," Sandra said.

By the time the waitress brought this in a bottle and the wine in a red clay jug, the Thorntons had made their selection: calamari, whitebait, beans the menu called gigantic, pork in wine. "Yammas," the waitress wished them, and they raised their glasses in response. "Yammas," Ray said to Sandra, and was reminded that the word meant health.

He was watching her sip her wine more minutely than she used to when the waitress returned with plates and a basket of bread. "Do you mind if we sit somewhere a bit shadier?" Sandra said. "We'll still see the coach."

She dropped her hat on an empty chair once they were seated in the shadow of a pine. "At least my wife won't get bitten here," Ray said.

"I pray not," the waitress said quite like a prayer. "Why do you say?"

"You're keeping off the insects." He pointed at the pot of basil behind Sandra and then at her neck. "Would that have been a mosquito?"

"None here."

"That's what I said. There must have been one on our balcony last night, though."

"There should not be that. You should not go out there again."

"I expect we'll be all right," Ray said. "We'll use a spray."