Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [83]
Perhaps she was a complete bitch after all. For a second she saw herself as the mothers in the playground would see her.
And then she phoned Alec.
‘Let’s go somewhere,’ he had said at once, when she told him. He didn’t seem to consider work. It was flattering and frightening.
‘I don’t want to go to bed.’
‘Okay. That’s not what I meant.’ Had it been? ‘I just want to be with you.’ She believed him, because it was what she wanted too.
Alec took her to the beach. It was a couple of hours’ journey, and they talked all the way. Really talked. She and Patrick might have talked about where to stop for petrol, or what had happened to Bella at school that week, or whether they could get away with not having the front of the house painted this summer, but they already knew everything else about each other. It seemed to Lucy suddenly that nothing was new any more. It was different with Alec. Awkwardly at first, but then, like detectives, they asked questions that filled in for them the broad brushstrokes and the tiny details of each other. It was much more than a first-date conversation. They knew each other, didn’t they? They’d known each other for years. In that long but not wide way of most relationships.
And he kept her hand under his on the gearstick. No one had done that to her for a long time, and it felt good.
Afterwards she remembered laughing a lot.
It was a blustery day, and the seaside town was practically deserted. They arrived at lunchtime and ate fat chips from paper cones with wooden forks, leaning on groynes. It reminded Lucy of being a little girl. And then they walked, hand in hand, almost as far as the eye could see.
Alec talked about Australia, where he had grown up. He’d lived near a beach, he said, and had marked out the years of his childhood by the passing of seasons on it. Summer, when it filled with escapees from Sydney to the south, and winter, when he had it to himself most days. All his neighbours had been wonderful, noisy Greeks, he said, and he laughed, telling her stories about blazing Christmas days on the sand, and raucous New Year’s Eves. He’d smoked his first cigarette there, drunk his first beer, had his first kiss.
‘Why would you choose to make your life somewhere so landlocked and relentlessly grey?’
‘Marianne, I suppose.’
Lucy felt she should take her hand out of his, but he held it more tightly.
‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said.’
‘Of course you should. We’re talking about our lives, aren’t we? They’re part of them. Hell, they’re the biggest part of them. Of course you should.’
She stopped walking. Alec came round to face her. Suddenly she felt wild. ‘We must be bloody mad. What in the name of Christ do we think we’re doing, day-tripping like a couple of teenagers? Like it makes any difference at all, putting a few miles between us and our lives…’ She closed her eyes, and let the wind blow straight into her face. The waves were crashing behind her.
She felt him put his arms round her. ‘Sssh. Stop it, Lucy.’ His mouth was on her hair.
‘We’re wrong, Alec. We’re wrong.’
‘I know.’
They stood like that for a moment. Then Alec stepped back from her, and stared into her face. ‘And I don’t care.’
All they did was kiss. For hours. Not because it was too cold to do anything else. Not because Lucy didn’t want to go any further. She wanted to. She’d had sex a hundred times feeling less desire than she did now, today, to make love with Alec. They kissed themselves insensible on the sand. Until their mouths hurt, and her skin was raw.
She asked him if he thought she was pathetic. ‘I’m not even a proper adulteress.’
Alec lifted her chin with his finger. ‘I’m glad. It’s more Lucy. And I think you’re lovely.’
She went into a loo, and when she came out, Alec was