Meet Me on the Beach

by Hilary Boyd

  “Seriously, though . . .” He paused. “And if you need money . . .”

  “Thanks, but I don’t. I’m using the money thing as an excuse, I suppose. For not going.”

  *

  “I told Johnny you hit me,” Karen said, as she and Harry drove through the gates of the golf club the following day. She wasn’t telling him in order to score points, but in the hope it might bring him up short, make him think about what he’d done . . . persuade him to take action.

  “And?” Harry waved at another golfer.

  “He’s worried things’ll escalate and you’ll kill me.” She spoke with deliberate nonchalance as she pulled into one of the parking bays. There were few people about on a Tuesday morning at the club.

  Harry let out a harsh laugh. “Wouldn’t dare. Don’t want that pious numpty camping on my doorstep waving a banner for women’s rights.” He sighed, turned to her. “Listen . . . I didn’t mean that. I’m ashamed of what I did. Of course I am. It was unforgivable.” He picked up her hand from where it lay on the steering wheel, gave it a kiss. “I’m sorry, really I am.”

  Karen, for the first time in months, heard the voice of the man she had fallen in love with, saw the softness in his eyes that told her he still loved her. She said nothing, just held tight to his fingers.

  “I know I can be a bit of a brute when I’m drinking . . . I’m not entirely stupid.” There was another sigh, this one deeper and more emphatic. His weather-beaten face went very still. “I promise it won’t happen again, Karen . . . not ever, not as long as I live. And you’re right, I should cut down on the old booze . . . it’s not doing either of us any good.”

  It wasn’t quite what Karen had longed to hear, but maybe it was a start. It was certainly the first time her husband had even vaguely intimated that he might have a problem.

  “We used to have such fun,” she said softly.

  He looked surprised. “We still do, don’t we?”

  “Ring me when you want me to pick you up,” she said as he clambered out of the car, her heart a small bit lighter than it had been in weeks.

  *

  But when she finally got a response to her texts and drove up to fetch Harry at the club, he was in a terrible state, sprawling in one of the bar chairs, the inevitable glass in his hand, eyes closed despite the group of friends sitting in the circle around the low table.

  His friend Dennis pulled a face when he saw her, nodded toward Harry’s slouched figure. “I thought I’d text you . . . Harry wasn’t about to. He’s not in a good way, I’m afraid, Karen.”

  For a moment they all looked up at her, sheepish, waiting to see what she would do.

  “Do you want a hand getting him to the car?” another friend, George, said.

  Karen stared at them. “Please, yes.” She paused. “But the best help I could get is if you guys wouldn’t let him get so wasted every time. You could have called me earlier. You’re supposed to be his friends.”

  The four men continued to look shifty, they seemed to be waiting for someone else to reply.

  “It’s not easy,” Dennis volunteered eventually. “Harry’s a force of nature, especially when he’s had a few.”

  “We do say, sometimes. But short of banning him, there’s not a lot any of us can do,” George added.

  “Yeah . . .” Karen forced a smile. “Sorry . . . it’s not your responsibility, I know that.”

  Dennis and George both got up and began heaving their friend upright. It took them almost twenty minutes to get him strapped into the car because each time they tried to make him walk or bend or sit, Harry would struggle and fight them off.

  “I’ll come back with you. You won’t get him inside on your own,” George offered, and Karen reluctantly agreed.

  On the way home, George was silent.

  “It’s got really bad,” she said, “the drinking. I don’t know what to do.” She felt like crying with humiliation at seeing her husband in such a state in front of his peers.

  George glanced over at her. “Lucky he’s got you.”

  She didn’t bother to reply. It was impossible to break through the male-dominated world of the golf club, where drinking was a badge of belonging and excess just laughed off as a personality quirk. She wasn’t blaming the club for Harry’s problem—he managed to consume the same amount at home without any help from his mates—but she certainly felt that their continued approbation only served to cement his denial.

  Harry slept off the lunchtime binge, and by supper seemed in an unusually mellow frame of mind.

  “You know what?” he said, as they sat in front of the television with a ham and baked potato supper on trays. It was during one of the ad breaks in an old episode of Morse. “We should get away, take one of our weekend trips to Paris. We haven’t done that in a long time.”

  Karen smiled. “That would be nice.” But she knew they would never actually go, because she was the one who did all the travel arrangements and she could never risk taking Harry abroad while he was drinking like this.

  “You’ll sort something, will you?” he said, as the program resumed, and she nodded.

  Harry fell asleep after supper, propped in his chair, head lolling back, his gentle snoring a backdrop to the television.

  She tidied up the supper and got ready to get him upstairs to bed. It had been a better evening, as evenings go, and she was hopeful again that things might change between them.

  “Come on . . . up you get, it’s bedtime.” She delivered her usual speech.

  “Get off . . . leave me alone,” he said, pushing her hand away roughly.

  “Harry, it’s after ten. Please . . . get up.”

  He opened his eyes, but whereas normally when she woke him like this his expression would be unfocused, this time he didn’t seem at all disorientated.

  “I was just having a nap, I don’t want to go to bed yet. I’m watching this,” he said, waving at the screen, which she’d turned off some time ago.

  “OK, up to you.” She turned to go. “But don’t fall asleep again, or you’ll be there all night.”

  Harry pulled himself up in the chair. “No harm sleeping in the chair if I want to.”

  He didn’t speak with any force, it was more a mild grumble, but Karen felt something shift in her brain, the wall of tolerance finally breached. She sat down heavily on the sofa.

  “This can’t go on, Harry.”

  He blinked. “What can’t?”

  “Us.”

  “What do you mean?” He looked befuddled.

  “Do I really have to spell it out? I mean if you don’t stop drinking, I’m going to leave you. I’ve had enough.”

  Her husband shook his head in disbelief. “Leave me? You can’t leave me. Don’t be ridiculous, woman. Where would you go?”

  “I’ll find somewhere . . . but I can’t do this anymore. Day in, day out, watching you drink yourself to death, dragging you to bed, putting up with your nastiness.” She spoke softly. “Well, I could put up with it, of course . . . I just don’t want to.” She paused again. “Why should I?”

  Harry had gone very still. He was not looking at her, but off toward the window and the heavy magenta and cream striped curtains. When he finally turned his gaze toward her, she could see the cold resentment lighting up his faded eyes.

  “Don’t threaten me, Karen, if you don’t mean it. And don’t tell me how to live my life.” He pulled himself slowly to his feet.

  “I’m not telling you how to live your life, I’m telling you how I want to live mine,” she said. She didn’t even feel angry anymore, just very tired. She got up too, laid a hand on his shirtsleeve. “Harry, please. Can’t you see what it’s doing to you . . . to us?” He jerked his arm away but she went on, anyway. “This isn’t you.”

  He seemed at a loss for words, standing there swaying in front of her.

  “You could get help . . . to stop.”

  “You honestly want to leave me?” he asked, clearly baffled. “Is it that bad? Is it
really, honestly that bad?”

  She just nodded. Was she finally getting through to him?

  But he turned away abruptly, sat down again in his chair and began fiddling with the remote until he’d found a golf game to watch.

  “Harry?”

  He looked up at her as if she were an annoying interruption, a buzzing fly. “What?”

  “Have you heard a word I just said?”

  Harry raised his eyebrows at her, his expression not far off patronizing. “Loud and clear, loud and clear, my dear. You said you’re going to leave me because I’m a tiresome old drunk.” He turned the volume up and the soft thock of a golf ball and polite spectator clapping filled the room as he reached for the whisky glass on the side table, settling back comfortably in his recliner. “Well, go if you want to. I just don’t believe for a single second you will.”

  She stood for a moment, stunned, then walked slowly out of the room.

  Does he not believe me because I don’t believe myself? she wondered as she sat at the kitchen table, a mug of tea in front of her, barely touched because her stomach was churning with anxiety. She’d never threatened to leave before, but if he was shocked, he certainly hadn’t shown it.

  Sitting there, Karen felt completely deflated. Here it was, the moment she’d been dreading for months, the scenario picking away at her thoughts whenever she let it and turning her guts to water. And now, when she’d finally plucked up enough courage—or been driven to it, more like—and told him that it was over, he had virtually ignored what she said.

  The silence in the kitchen was only broken by Largo’s soft snores in the corner. For a long while she just sat, barely thinking. But as she sat, her will gradually hardened. Gone was the “he’s old, he can’t help it” excuse, gone was the hope that he might change, and gone, finally, was the fear of leaving her home and the current rhythms of her life. She would find a flat where they allowed pets, she would get a job, she would sleep alone at night without the constant toxic presence of her drunken husband.

  “Karen! Karen . . . are you there . . . Karen?”

  She heard his voice coming from the den as if from a thousand miles away. She didn’t answer. If he wants to speak to me, he’s quite capable of getting up and coming to find me. She wouldn’t pander to him even one more time. He would be beyond rational debate by now, anyway. It was at least an hour since she left him with his golf tournament, and there had been nearly a full bottle of whisky to plunder.

  “Karen . . . come here,” she heard him bellow again. But she got up, put her mug in the dishwasher, stroked the dog, turned off the lights and walked slowly upstairs. She could hear the television, but Harry had gone quiet. Let him sleep in his bloody chair all night and see how rubbish he feels in the morning.

  As she brushed her teeth she thought she heard him shout another time, but the en suite had an extractor fan linked to the light which blocked out most other sounds. Probably wants me to help him up to bed, stupid sod, she said to herself as she got into bed. Well, he’s had his chance.

  *

  The digital clock read three seventeen when she woke up, wandered to the loo, and realized Harry was still downstairs. The anger from the night before had dissipated and she took pity on him, knowing how cold and stiff he would be if he didn’t get to bed. She put on her navy, striped jersey dressing gown and sheepskin slippers and padded downstairs, sighing in preparation for the struggle she faced in lugging her husband upstairs. The house was chilly and very quiet although, as she approached the den, she realized the television was still on.

  Harry was asleep in his chair, his head lolling against the wing of the recliner, his legs stretched out in front of him, his left hand dangling off the chair arm, his right clutching his mobile cradled in his lap, exactly as predicted. He’d dropped the remote and she picked it up and switched off the TV.

  “Come on . . . wake up, Harry, it’s three o’clock in the morning—” she began, hearing the rote delivery with a heavy heart. But as soon as she peered into his face, touched his hand, she absolutely knew.

  Harry Stewart wasn’t asleep. He was stone cold dead.

  She held her breath, her heart skittering into a syncopated beat, all the blood seemingly drained from her body. For a moment she just stood there like a statue, looking down on her husband’s lifeless form, waiting for him to wake up, to show some sign that she was mistaken. But she knew she was not. She bent and pressed her fingers to the spot on his neck, under his jaw, that she had seen people do in such circumstances on television, feeling for a pulse. But she couldn’t find one, wasn’t even sure if she was doing it right, and anyway, his skin was clammy to the touch. Then she held her palm close to his nose and mouth.

  No breath of life, no sound, absolutely nothing emanated from the pale figure nestled so convincingly asleep in the recliner.

  Karen, shaking, reached for the landline phone on the table beside Harry’s chair and dialed 999.

  Chapter Three

  Her friend Maggie, who lived just across the village pond from Karen, sat next to her on the sofa in the sitting room, holding her hand. It was still very early, not yet dawn, and the curtains remained drawn against the night, one lamp shedding a small pool of light on the two silent women. Karen was fully dressed—jeans, a white cotton vest, dark green sweater, red socks, her sheepskin slippers—it had seemed important to get out of her night clothes. But Maggie was still in the T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms she wore to bed. She had simply put on her parka and wellington boots and run across the green to the Old Rectory. Younger than Karen, not yet fifty, she was a physiotherapist—small, strong, fit, with short blonde hair like Karen, earning them the nickname “the twins” in the village. She was married to an eminent eye surgeon, Rakesh, who traveled the world setting up cataract surgery camps in India for an NGO. He was hardly ever home.

  “God, Karen, I can hardly believe it,” she said for at least the tenth time.

  Karen couldn’t either. She was waiting for his tread on the stair, the predictable groaning about his aching head, the demand for coffee and orange juice, the grumbling that accompanied his search for the newspaper outside the front door—the paper boy was notoriously inaccurate in his aim. That this daily sequence would never happen again was simply unbelievable.

  When Tom, their GP, had answered her call, his voice immediately alert as someone practiced in being woken in the middle of the night, she had heard herself speak with almost measured calm.

  “I think Harry’s dead,” she’d told him. “I’ve called the ambulance.” In fact, Karen didn’t “think” her husband was dead, she knew it for certain, but somehow couldn’t say so.

  The doctor hadn’t asked questions. “I’ll be right there,” was all he said. The ambulance had arrived before Tom, the men bending over Harry, conferring quietly with each other, then with the doctor when he came through the open front door. Tom had sat Karen down in the kitchen and offered her some tea, which she had accepted, then not drunk. She remembered the kitchen being very cold. Eventually the men had taken Harry away, strapped to the stretcher, his face covered—grim confirmation that oxygen, a requirement above all others for every living creature, was no longer necessary.

  “And so sudden,” Maggie was saying. “He wasn’t even ill . . . was he?”

  “No . . .” Karen hesitated. “But he drank way too much,” she added.

  “Yeah, but we all do. Except Raki, of course.”

  Karen didn’t reply. Was there any use in bringing up the nightmare of Harry’s drinking, now that he was dead? Those who knew had kept quiet about it—including herself—when he was alive, when it might have helped to speak out, to call him on it. What would be served by sullying his name now, even to her best friend? And Maggie knew, anyway. She’d been round and seen Harry in his cups on more than one occasion, and listened to Karen worrying about it. But on the whole she had avoided the issue because Karen did. Such was the etiquette of an English country village.

  “I sh
ould ring Sophie,” Karen said, as if she had only just thought of it. In fact, she had been just putting off the dreadful moment. But she still continued to sit there, clutching her friend’s hand, until Maggie got up.

  “You call her, I’ll make some coffee.”

  Without her, Karen felt oddly frightened and vulnerable, as if she weren’t safe in her own home. The room seemed so dark, the large, creaking house so empty. She reached for her mobile.

  Sophie’s message service kicked in.

  “Sophie, it’s me, Karen. Please can you call me as soon as you get this.”

  Karen wasn’t surprised that she didn’t answer. It was not yet seven, and her stepdaughter wasn’t the earliest of risers. Not to mention the fact that she never picked up for Karen, only her father. It occurred to Karen to ring from her husband’s mobile, but that seemed too creepy. She would wait. There was nothing anyone could do now, except weep for Harry Stewart, and she couldn’t even do that. Karen tried not to dwell on the possibility that she might be relieved. She certainly didn’t feel relief right now, just emptiness, disbelief.

  *

  An hour later, Maggie had gone home to get dressed, urged on by Karen, who wanted to be on her own. But as soon as she was alone, the echoes of the empty house began to clamor, pressing close, specifically Harry’s voice, shouting for her as if he were still in the den, still watching golf replays, still drinking, still very much alive.

  She was drawn back to the scene. The curtains were closed, the lights on, the furniture shifted about to clear the way for the stretcher. Karen bent to pull back the Turkish rug which overlaid the polished parquet floor. As she did so a mobile rang close by. Harry’s. She froze, a shudder passing through her body as she remembered it had been lying in his lap when she found him. Following the sound, she located it on the table by the window. The lighted display read: Sophie.

  “Sophie? Hi, it’s Karen.”

  “Oh, hi. Where’s Dad?” Her tone held the usual lack of enthusiasm she adopted—almost on principle, Karen thought—when talking to her stepmother.