Meet Me on the Beach

by Hilary Boyd

  “Come on. Let’s go . . . take off to the beach.”

  “The beach? Now? Miss the rest of the concert?”

  “Why not? It’s not yet eight thirty, and the light is so beautiful . . .”

  *

  They drove in convoy to the nearest beach. Not Karen’s, but one heading east along the coast, southeast of the cathedral city. She knew the way, so she went ahead, constantly glancing in the rearview mirror to check William was keeping up. She didn’t know what to think. It was as if he had suddenly come to a decision about something as he crushed the tumbler in his hand.

  The light was indeed extraordinary, the sun faintly veiled now by pinkish cloud, low on the horizon with only forty minutes or so till sunset, laying a soft shimmering silver across the sea. Karen felt her heart lift with joy as she stepped on to the shingle in the chill evening air. She searched the promenade for Will, but he was having trouble parking and it was a few minutes before she saw his figure walking toward her. I’ll just take these minutes for what they are, savor them, she thought.

  William stood beside her, gazing at the sunset, he too taking deep breaths of the sea air. Then, without a word, they crunched down toward the water until they reached the damp, firm sand—the tide on its way out . . . or in, Karen could never work it out—before turning west along the beach, into the sun. They walked in silence, but it was a buzzing, elated silence for Karen, her body alive with her proximity to him. She could have asked what the puppy was called, how William was getting on, whether the fête committee was driving him mad. He could have asked her all sorts of questions about her sojourn by the sea. But neither did.

  They walked the length of the beach, stepping over the slimy wooden groins, splashing in the shallow pools left by the tide until Karen’s pumps were soaked, watching the sun until it had dipped over the horizon, leaving a half-light illuminating the sand. And without a word, they turned and made their way back. It was only when they were parallel to the spot near where they had parked that they veered off the sand up the slope of pebbles to the steps leading to the promenade.

  They faced each other, meeting the other’s gaze.

  William gave her a half-smile. “Thank you. That was so beautiful.”

  She nodded, smiled, and after a moment of hesitation he pulled her against his chest and held her close for a long while. She shut her eyes, letting out a long, slow breath, her arms folding around his body.

  “Good night,” he said, when he finally pulled away.

  “Night, Will.”

  When she was safely back in the car she just sat there, unable to concentrate on driving for a moment. Nothing happened, she told herself. We did nothing wrong. It was just a walk on the beach.

  But it wasn’t to do with the doing, it was to do with the feeling.

  *

  “So how was it, the concert?” Mike asked the following morning as she stood at the counter, waiting for him to make her coffee.

  “It was amazing.”

  He was peering at her. “You OK? You look kinda spaced.”

  She smiled, trying to shake off the daze she had been in since leaving William.

  Mike frowned. “Like you’re stoned. Didn’t know that classical stuff was so powerful.”

  “It wasn’t just the music,” she said, lowering her voice because of the two couples sitting at tables within earshot—although neither of them were listening.

  “Yeah? What, then?”

  “I bumped into the guy . . . the one you call ‘not-bad-enough.’ He was at the concert.”

  Mike’s expression cleared. “Ah, now I get it. Been up all night, have you?” he grinned suggestively.

  “We just had a walk on the beach.”

  He laughed. “Must have been a good one.”

  “It was.” She couldn’t have explained to anyone that they hadn’t spoken hardly a word all evening, that they hadn’t made plans or anguished over the fact that they had no plans. That being together, not even touching, had been enough.

  He handed her the large cappuccino, his face set. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Karen. This polisher’s still married, isn’t he?”

  “‘Polisher’?”

  Mike frowned. “Polisher, wanker, tosser . . . you get the gist.”

  She nodded, recoiling from the words when associated with William, not wanting to hear what the man was saying.

  “And that makes him a cheat, whichever way you cut it.”

  “I told you, it was just a walk.”

  “A walk that’s sent you all misty-eyed.”

  “I know what I’m doing. Which is nothing. We bumped into each other, it wasn’t planned . . . I probably won’t see him again for months.”

  “Good thing too,” said Mike, and turned to a woman with a small child who was hovering, waiting to place her order.

  Chapter Ten

  It was Wednesday morning, early, when Karen received another text from William Haskell.

  Meet me on the beach? 2pm?

  She texted back.

  My beach nearer.

  She gave him the details, saying she’d meet him by the ice cream van along the front. She didn’t want Mike seeing him and possibly making his opinion known. As it was, when she went for her coffee and Mike asked her what she was doing today she lied, “Nothing much,” and changed the subject.

  She texted William later, when she’d had time to think.

  I’ll bring a picnic.

  It was another hot summer day and she dithered about what to buy for the picnic. She’d never had a meal with Will, except that dinner at Patrick’s, and she had no idea what he liked . . . no idea of anything much concerning his life. Except that she felt she knew him through and through. In the end she decided to play safe and made some ham and mustard sandwiches on sourdough bread from the deli—didn’t all men like ham sandwiches? She added some plain crisps, a punnet of strawberries, one cold bottle of ginger beer and one of lemonade, and some water to the plastic bag. She considered chocolate, but she knew it would melt in the heat. Then she went for a swim to pass the time and calm her nerves.

  *

  “What made you come?” she asked, when they were sitting on towels at the far end of the promenade where the shingle beach opened out into a wide sandy one as it wended its way round the coast. Karen would have thought the sandy part would be more popular with families but, in fact, the pebbles were covered with people, hardly room for a pin between them—perhaps because it was closer to the facilities along the front. The tide was right out, children splashing in the distant surf in barely a foot of water, the mid-afternoon heat fierce.

  “I was in the area—” William stopped, looked ashamed of himself. “That’s a lie. I wasn’t in the area, I just wanted to see you.”

  “Where does Janey think you are?” Karen had vowed to just enjoy the moment, but she wasn’t succeeding.

  “She has a yoga class on Wednesday afternoons.” Will gave a shrug. “I know. I know everything you’re going to say about the situation is true, that we shouldn’t be doing this, I know it isn’t fair on anyone. But the other night . . . just being beside you in the theater, on the beach, not even talking, it felt like it was where I ought to be.”

  Karen sat there, gazing out to sea, her thoughts in chaos. “What are you saying?”

  “I don’t know.” His tone was quietly desperate as he turned to her, moving round till he was cross-legged, facing her, probably baking in his trousers, dark shirt and dog collar, only his shoes and socks removed. “Everything I want to say sounds so clichéd. And I haven’t the right to say anything to you anyway . . . because I . . .”

  She felt she should have been happy that he was at least being honest about his feelings, albeit in a roundabout way. But she wasn’t happy. In fact, she felt like a stupid cliché herself, loving a married man who would never be free to love her back.

  “These moments . . . being together on the beach . . .”

  She didn’t know quite what he me
ant.

  “Say something,” he said.

  “I’m not sure if I can do it,” she finally answered carefully, feeling her way around the words. “Seeing you in this way . . . and then probably not seeing you.”

  William lowered his gaze. “No, no, I totally understand. Forget I said it, I’m just being incredibly selfish.”

  They both lapsed into silence.

  “But we can enjoy today. It’s just a picnic,” she said, making yet another volte-face as she swung between her craving for William and the pain she knew it would cause her when he was gone. “Paddle?”

  He grinned and rolled his trousers up to the knee. They ran across the sand, splashing in the warm sea.

  “I wish I could swim,” he said.

  “You can’t swim? Seriously?”

  He laughed. “I could if I’d brought trunks.”

  Later they sat eating the sandwiches. William liked ham a lot, Karen found out. And strawberries.

  “Tell me about the archery,” she said.

  William considered her request for a moment. “It’s so much a part of me that I can’t really see it objectively. I think I told you, my grandmother started teaching me when I was five or six and it just became something as normal to me as eating cereal for breakfast when I was growing up.” He paused, maybe remembering his grandmother. “When you shoot you have to be totally grounded, completely still, focused . . . then the draw, the moment when you let the arrow fly . . . it’s magic.”

  “Jennifer says you’re good.”

  William laughed. “Dear Jennifer, when she decides someone is OK, then they can do nothing wrong. I have competed a lot in the past, but mostly I just do it for pleasure and I teach when I get the time.”

  “Children, Maggie said.”

  “Disabled kids, yes.” His face suddenly lit up. “It’s so inspiring, seeing what pleasure they get from it, Karen. Kids in wheelchairs who have basically been written off, they find they have a real skill . . . it’s just incredible to watch their confidence grow. They amaze themselves. That’s the great thing about shooting, you don’t have to be Superman. Even blind people can shoot.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, someone rings a bell near the target and they learn to shoot toward the sound. Just fantastic. You should come along one day, I’ll give you a lesson . . .”

  “I’d—” She stopped. They were talking as if they had some sort of a future together.

  William must have realized it too, because they fell into a tense silence, neither daring to speak as they both lay facing each other on the sand. She had insisted he put suntan lotion on his face—which, being fair, was probably already beyond rescue—and the white cream was smeared above his right eyebrow where he hadn’t rubbed it in properly. She longed to reach over and do it for him, but it seemed dangerously intimate.

  “Your grandmother must have been quite a woman, to take you on like that,” she said, plucking a sentence out of the air.

  “Wasn’t she just? I mean she was in her sixties when I was born and she literally became my parent. Dad did his best, but he was always traveling and he didn’t really know what to do with me when he did come home . . .” He paused. “I wish you could have met her. She was a life force.”

  There it was again, his almost unconscious desire to link her with his life. It made her sad.

  She pulled herself into a sitting position, took a long breath. “I thought if I put some distance between us for a few weeks, I would get some perspective. It’s ridiculous. All my life I’ve believed in the premise that every problem has a solution if you only look hard enough. But there is no solution for us.” The words hung heavy in the still air. “And God won’t even allow you to kiss me,” she added, almost angrily.

  He looked away. “It isn’t God you should be angry with . . .”

  They both turned toward the sea again.

  Suddenly the sexual tension between them was like a fizzing, writhing mass. Karen wished he would just go away. She got up, he followed, and without saying another word they packed away the remains of the picnic and walked back up the beach and along the promenade toward his car.

  *

  After she’d said a brief goodbye to him, she wandered back along the front, at a loss as to what to do. Mike was closing up the café as she drew level.

  “Hi,” he said, “I wondered where you’d got to. Fancy a drink?”

  They sometimes went to the pub across the road at the end of the day, and now she nodded. She didn’t want to be alone in the flat to stew.

  “I’m in a mess,” she said, when they were seated at a table in a cordoned-off area on the pavement outside the pub.

  “Yeah?”

  “This man I like. He’s a vicar.”

  Mike looked incredulous and then he began to laugh. “A bloody vicar? You’re kidding me.”

  She didn’t see what was so funny.

  “That makes him even more of a polisher. Married and a vicar. Blimey!”

  “Anyone can fall in love, can’t they?”

  “Ooh, love, is it? Not just good old lust?” He sucked his teeth. “I’m not exactly a religious man, but don’t vicars get taught in vicar school how to control their feelings . . . hair shirts and suchlike?”

  “Obviously not,” she said, wishing she’d never told Mike anything.

  He must have seen her expression because his own struggled to become more serious. “But hey, Karen, whether he’s a vicar or not—and there’s plenty who misbehave if you believe what you read in the papers—he’s being unfaithful.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “Well, he is. And you can’t trust a man who cheats on his wife . . . or vice versa.”

  “We haven’t cheated.” Karen clung stubbornly to the only-a-picnic theory.

  “What, no nooky?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not even a kiss?” He raised his eyebrows.

  She shook her head. “Not even one bloody kiss.”

  “Sounds like it’s still cheating, darlin,” from the look on your face.’

  Annoyed, she said, “And you never did . . . cheat?”

  He laughed. “You didn’t meet my missus. Wouldn’t have dared.”

  “But you wanted to?”

  He thought about this a moment. “Nope, never did. Course there were women I liked the look of over the years, but I never thought to take it further.”

  “Nor me.”

  Karen watched him take a long swallow of his pint.

  “This wife of his, what’s the story there?”

  “She seems to be a very good vicar’s wife.”

  “I meant what’s his situation with her.”

  “No idea, he never talks about her to me.”

  “Not even to say that she doesn’t understand him?” Mike gave her an amused grin.

  She wished he’d shut up. “Can we talk about something else?”

  He gave her an admonishing finger wag. “See, that’s the problem. You’re in denial. Don’t want to face the truth that this geezer’s in a perfectly happy marriage, just can’t keep his trousers zipped.”

  Jaw tensed with irritation, she muttered, “It’s not like that. I told you, we aren’t having sex.”

  “Not yet. But that doesn’t mean he’s good, just means he’s playing a long game.”

  She wanted to smack him and bent her head to avoid his censorious glance.

  Mike let out a long sigh. “Listen, it’s your life, Karen. I shouldn’t judge, I hardly know you. But it won’t end well. This guy’ll muck you about for a while, then scuttle off back to wifey. And you’ll be left with a broken heart.” In response to her glare, he held his hand up and added, “Just saying. Wouldn’t be a friend if I didn’t.”

  At the end of the uncomfortable drink, Karen hurried up to the flat, dying to be on her own. Her defenses had been breached by Mike’s well-meaning bluntness. But despite that, as she sat on the tiny balcony with another glass of white wine in her hand, she pervers
ely allowed herself a moment to indulge the possibility that whatever Mike said, whatever Will said, whatever she pretended to believe, she and William Haskell would one day be together. Their connection was too powerful to ignore. It couldn’t be right, she insisted to herself, that such a synergy wasn’t meant to be. The inevitable break-up of his marriage, the ruination of his career, these setbacks were swept aside in her love-addled brain.

  Love conquered all, didn’t it?

  *

  Throwing practical techniques at an emotional problem, Karen spent the next day making a “life map”—an idea she’d found when googling inspiration for those wanting to move forward out of a rut.

  She picked up a drawing pad and a set of neon highlighters in yellow, green, pink and orange from the newsagents on the front. Then, starting with a circle in the middle of the paper with a naive sketch of herself, her name printed below, she drew arrows and more circles, some with factual notes of her qualifications, work experience, skills, finances, location, etc. Some with personal notes such as William, Largo, Sophie, sea, love, Haydn, beach, age. It began with her usual neatness, but quickly started to ramble, extend and crisscross over two sheets of A4 until it looked like the disturbed doodlings of a crazy person.

  It obsessed her for a whole morning. But when she finally forced herself to stop, the only positive feeling she took away was one of catharsis at the process itself.

  The mishmash of neon colors on the paper in front of her just seemed to prove what a total mess her life was in. It offered no obvious way forward.

  She kept it on the table and whenever she passed she took another look, hoping that a miracle might occur and a clear path would suddenly present itself. But the only relevant path—the one where she gave William up for good—must have been obscured in the undergrowth of felt tip.

  *

  “How are you?” Karen asked, when Sophie finally answered her phone after three messages left.

  “OK,” was the short answer.

  “What are you up to?”

  Silence, then, “Nothing much.”

  Karen didn’t take offense at Sophie’s tone; there was something so flat and unengaged in her stepdaughter’s voice that it didn’t seem personal.