Summer at the Highland Coral Beach (The Port Willow Bay series Port Willow Bay)

by Kiley Dunbar

  ‘It’s not really coral, you know?’ he said.

  This sharpened her mind. ‘It’s not?’

  ‘No, it’s bashed up ancient algae.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘No’ as romantic as coral, is it?’

  Beatrice shook her head and laughed. ‘It’s still pretty,’ she said, but the words were taken by an involuntary squeal as the water reached her belly. ‘Sheez! It’s cold, s’cold, s’cold!’

  Her free hand flapped in the air as though she could lift herself above the water and she gritted her teeth. Atholl laughed heartily, grimacing too, as the water wrapped around his waist.

  ‘It’ll pass, just hold on,’ he said, turning to face her, letting go of her hand and instead clasping her forearms in his palms. ‘You all right?’ he asked, still baring his teeth with every gentle wave that lapped around his taut stomach. ‘It really is freezin’. Yur mad tae want tae swim.’

  ‘Why did you say yes, then?’ she said, shivering but forgetting her shyness and grinning, and all the time aware of the broad expanse of Atholl’s pale chest just a touch away should she dare let her hands do what they wanted. Keep your eyes on his, she told herself.

  ‘Because you wanted to swim, of course. And you’re on holiday and it’s a beautiful day so you should swim,’ he said with a shrug, his hands still wrapped gently around her arms. ‘We should just go for it,’ he said, feet rooted to the spot. ‘Dive under the water, I mean,’ he added quickly with another laugh, but neither of them showed any intention of breaking their connection to plunge beneath the cool, clear water.

  Beatrice glanced down at where he touched her skin. ‘I’ve got goosebumps,’ she said, and in an instant Atholl responded, running his hands up and down the length of her arms to warm her and letting his eyes, at last, fall across her neck and linger over her body. She definitely wasn’t imagining it this time.

  Saying nothing, she let him look.

  Knowing they’d have to speak eventually, Beatrice found herself weakly mumbling something about never having bathed in British waters before but Atholl spoke over her.

  ‘No, you go,’ she urged.

  ‘I was saying how bonny you look today.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Which you do. Very.’

  Warmth, nothing but warmth, flooded her chest. Things like this didn’t happen to her. Handsome, strapping Scotsmen with Highland accents like flowing water over rocks didn’t whisk her away to swim in secluded summer bays, or gaze into her eyes like they were drowning in them, and they certainly didn’t compliment her on her looks.

  ‘You’re allowed to just say thank you,’ he laughed.

  She released the breath she’d been unwittingly holding and laughed too in spite of herself. ‘OK, thank you.’

  ‘Can’t have you squirmin’ and turnin’ blue over every compliment you’re given.’

  ‘I’m not really used to compliments.’

  In the silence that followed, Atholl kept his hands moving over her arms, circling the tops of her shoulders too, his touch growing lighter, his eyes following the movement over her skin, letting his hands tangle in her hair as they converged at the nape of her neck. He cradled her face, his fingertips grazing the soft skin between her ears and hairline, his thumbs straying in slow sweeps across her cheekbones.

  All the time Beatrice’s breathing seemed to quicken and their bodies moved closer together, swayed by the gentle flux of the currents around them.

  Her eyes had closed by the time she pressed herself against his bare chest and her nerves thrilled at the sound of the sharp intake of breath he made in response. That was the last thing she heard other than her heart’s drumming as she spread her hands wide and slipped them around his smooth, hard back, finding that his skin still retained the heat of the morning’s work under the sun. Atholl lowered his mouth to hers, pressing a slow kiss to her lips.

  It lasted only a moment. Long enough to confirm all her intuitions that he’d be good at this. That they’d be good at this.

  But as the warmth between them grew and the distance between them lessened, the thoughts intruded. Rich had never kissed her like this. And she’d married him. And he’d loved her. Hadn’t he? Or was it never there in the first place? This kind of connection? It certainly never, ever felt like this.

  Thought followed thought until the searing warmth faded to be replaced by other things: a little guilt, a little sadness, and as Atholl’s fingertips brushed over her sides and towards her belly, a little memory of her lost baby.

  He felt her withdrawing and he too pulled back. The coral cut her soles again. Funny how she hadn’t felt it a moment ago.

  ‘Let’s swim,’ he said, giving her arms one last warm stroke. She watched him dive.

  Beatrice hadn’t been able to read his neutral expression but she had understood the feelings between them; feelings of being thwarted, sabotaged from within, and a little sting of defeat.

  Atholl was already resurfacing after the plunge beneath the water. Beatrice watched him swimming with powerful strokes out into the deeper water.

  There was nothing for it but to take a deep breath and try to make up the distance between them.

  She didn’t let her head sink beneath the surface, it was way too cold for that, and she gasped at the frigidity of the waves wrapping her body in their chilly grip. The only thing that warmed her was seeing Atholl treading water, waiting for her and they swam side by side for a while. Beatrice tried to clear her mind and simply enjoy stretching out her body and letting her muscles work.

  ‘Getting warmer?’ Atholl called as he circled her.

  ‘Much.’

  ‘Just keep moving. Shall we swim for the horizon?’ he said.

  A sail boat crossed the blue skyline and both wordlessly set it as their focus. Atholl matched Beatrice’s slow pace.

  ‘Are we OK?’ he asked after a long moment.

  ‘We’re OK.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I shouldn’t have done that, kissing you, I mean.’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you to stop with the sorries? … and I wanted to kiss you.’ Beatrice’s breathing showed she was tiring already but swimming into the deeper water felt too good to turn around anytime soon even if she was at risk of getting out of her depth.

  ‘But?’ he prompted.

  ‘But… I panicked a bit. I haven’t done much kissing lately.’

  Atholl waited. The water resisted their movements and the tiredness in her muscles felt delicious.

  ‘It’s been a while since me and Rich…’ the words tailed off as the effort of pulling herself through the water grew harder. ‘That’s my husband’s name. He moved out all of a sudden one day at the start of July.’ Beatrice hoped Atholl would say something, anything, but he didn’t, so she had no choice but to go on. ‘I worry sometimes that he blamed me about the baby. He never said as much but his dad certainly did.’

  ‘Well his dad sounds pernicious!’

  Beatrice surprised herself by laughing at the word and the fierce way it rolled from Atholl’s mouth.

  ‘I suspect your man Richard was grieving, regardless of what his father had to say about it. He’d be cut up and sorry, but he cannae have blamed you.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Some men aren’t good at speaking their feelings. It takes one to know one. He must have been suffering, only differently – or expressing it differently – to the way you did.’

  ‘Well… maybe you’re right.’ A little lightness entered her chest at Atholl’s words. How had he come by this new talent for knowing the right thing to say to relieve her pain, this man who had been so cold at first and thought himself so bad at communicating?

  ‘He still left though. But you’re right, he wasn’t pernicious, not at all, just driven by work and he wanted things to be smooth when he got home at night, and he didn’t like heavy, complicated stuff, I guess.’

  She caught her breath. They really were in the deep now. She had lost all sense of the s
eabed beneath her and the water was growing colder as they swam.

  ‘For a long time everything was easy, we were both enjoying our jobs, and we really only saw each other for an hour or so at night.’ She was panting now with the effort. The muscles between her shoulder blades were turning numb. ‘And our weekends were eaten up by work spilling over into them – I only cottoned on to the fact that he wasn’t really there for me when I was struggling to cope with everything, and I was at home alone all day, getting lonelier and lonelier, and just feeling… useless and good for nothing.’ She filled her lungs. ‘I couldn’t even trust my own body to do stuff it seemed any other woman can do. And when I tried to fix everything by getting pregnant again it just drove us further apart. I was a bit desperate and clutching at straws, if I’m honest. But I got eaten up by the sadness and eventually, it consumed our marriage, I suppose.’

  ‘That sounds common enough to me.’

  ‘That’s not all, really. I’ve got used to telling myself it was work that slowly drove us apart over the years, and we found we were somehow leading separate lives, and getting pregnant briefly brought us together again, but there’s more… you see… I was kind of hard to live with from May right through until he left. I was charting my temperature, and monitoring my hormones and taking all these supplements and eating pineapple cores and Brazil nuts because I heard they’d help me get pregnant, and I was calling Rich at work and telling him to come home because we had to… you know, there and then. And then when we did do it, I kept crying and it was probably a bit off-putting, and I went on and on like that for weeks. So, you see, it was my fault that he left. I scared him. Are you laughing?’

  ‘No, I’m not laughing.’

  ‘But you’re looking at me like I’m crazy?’

  ‘Nor that.’

  ‘And you don’t… pity me?’

  ‘Not pity, no. Admire you? Aye. Know that you’ve suffered and did your best to cope? Yes. Wish you were happier? Wi’ my whole heart.’

  Who stopped swimming first she couldn’t tell, but their legs sank under the surface simultaneously and their heads came up. Beatrice glanced back to the coral beach; it was a long way off. They faced each other, circling their legs and arms slowly, stilling themselves in the water.

  ‘I’m sorry, Atholl, I’m being a bit weird, I know it. It’s just kissing you back there… really brought all that back, all the stuff with Rich I haven’t really dealt with.’

  The thoughts had crowded in and spilled out in a rush, running as clear as the water over her back and just as cold and biting.

  ‘I’m sorry. That’s a shame,’ Atholl said, his own breath faltering.

  ‘It is a shame. I never thought I’d be forty and separated, or temporarily homeless for that matter. And I always thought I’d be a mum.’

  ‘I’d hold you if I could,’ Atholl said. ‘But I’d sink us both. It wasn’t your fault, any of it. You should know that.’

  ‘You’d have stayed in the same situation, would you?’

  ‘What? If my nerves were being tested daily by someone like, say Eugene, and I was living in close quarters with them, and they were struggling to cope? Yes, I’d stay.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You’re shivering again, keep moving.’

  They set off again for the horizon, the water so cold Beatrice’s toes and fingers felt numb, but she could see through the crystal clear water to the white coral far beneath them as though they were in balmy tropical waters.

  ‘It’s nice of you to say that, but it really was all my fault. And it got a whole lot worse as my fortieth birthday started looming. Do you know women over forty only have a five percent chance of conceiving every month?’

  ‘I didn’t know that, but I do know my mother had my wee sister when she was forty-eight.’

  She threw him a double take and blew the air from her lungs with a whistle. ‘Really? Wow! Well, the fact of the matter is I’m nearly forty. I always thought I’d be a mum by now, and here I am… five hundred miles away from my husband and hiding out in the Highlands.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When’s your fortieth?’

  ‘Tenth of September.’

  ‘So, what’s that?’ He lifted his eyes to the sky as they swam. ‘Thirteen days?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘When you wake up on the morra after your birthday, you’ll only be forty years and one day old. That’s almost the same as thirty-nine years, eleven months and… twenty-eight days as you are now. Very little will have changed between now and then.’

  ‘But the fact remains I missed my chance. It’s all irrelevant without Rich.’

  ‘You could easily meet someone new.’

  Her focus on swimming meant she didn’t see his eyes flicker or the pinched line between his brows.

  ‘And have you been on any dates recently, Atholl?’ she said, trying to lighten the tone. ‘Have you? The girls at the Hub used to show me their dating profiles and the men they were matched to. They were a gruesome crop of middle managers with hairy backs, halitosis and three mobile phones and ten women on the go at once. Half of them have wives!’

  Breathless laughter burst from them both and they instinctively turned their backs on the wide blue horizon and the grey mountains in the far distance. They’d had enough of the deep water.

  Swimming for the shore again, no words seemed necessary. Beatrice wondered why she felt so light, buoyed up by the water, yes, but unburdened too. Atholl was being quiet but he must be as tired as her, she reasoned.

  That was when she realised she and Atholl had drifted apart.

  In fact she was struggling to keep up with his easy pace through the water. Really struggling.

  ‘Atholl!’ She had called out his name before she realised she was panicking and gripped by the feeling of a hundred hands twisting around her limbs and pulling her back out to sea. In an instant she was dragged under water.

  It took her rational brain a few moments to work out what was happening. She was unable to swim for some reason; pulled away from the shore by an invisible force. Was this a panic attack? No this was the water itself claiming her. She was going to drown.

  Fear, animalistic and profound, overwhelmed her. Her legs thrashed ineffectually, her arms pulled for the water’s surface, but she couldn’t free herself from the strange grip of the cold ocean. She resurfaced somehow and gasped a deep breath, but it wasn’t enough to fill her lungs.

  As she was about to bob under the lapping waves again, two warm hands pulled at her wrists, her head and neck cleared the surface of the water fully and she gasped at the sweet air.

  ‘Rip current,’ Atholl was panting, clasping her so tightly her skin hurt before they were wrenched apart again by another pull at her body, the cold water taking her again.

  No thoughts came. She could hear someone trying to shout. It was her own voice, but instead of words coming out she gulped great mouthfuls of salt water that made her gag.

  When she surfaced this time, Atholl was hollering from a perplexingly long distance away, his eyes fierce. They were floating further apart with every moment that passed.

  ‘You must do as I say if you want to live.’

  She was alarmed to see him struggling against the pull and his chin going under the water too. Even Atholl, with all his strength, was in danger.

  ‘Let yourself float away from me. Do not swim for the shore,’ he cried.

  She gasped for air, barely processing his words.

  ‘Float away from me. Then, when you’re free, start swimming in a great curve. That’s the only way you’ll escape the current. Don’t swim against it! Float with it, back out to sea and away from me.’ Atholl had turned onto his back and was floating in a starfish shape on the surface of the water all the while being pulled even further away out to sea but in an unseen current that was dragging him quickly away from her in a wide arc. ‘When the current drops you again, you must kick, Beattie. And don’t s
top!’

  She tried to tell him she understood but her voice was stolen by the cold water and the panic. Had he heard her? She thought she saw him turn onto his stomach and begin swimming in the opposite direction from her in a great curving arc, heading at first out to sea and then turning round towards the bay, his arms powering him in great strokes, and all the time he was shouting, ‘Go with the water until it drops you.’

  Her legs had no strength left and the tide still dragged her straight out to sea. Swim away from him, she thought. In spite of all her instincts to try to follow after him, fighting the tide, she overcame them.

  She flattened her body on the surface of the lapping waves and let the tide pull her away from the beach, from Atholl, and out to sea, astonished at its speed. How could calm water have such ferocity just beneath the surface? After a few moment’s floating, resting her exhausted limbs, she realised she was utterly alone in the water; she could no longer see Atholl and wasn’t aware that he was still calling to her now he’d reached the beach, but she replayed his words over and over as she felt the current loosen its grip, ‘When the current drops you again, you must kick, Beattie. And don’t stop!’

  So she kicked and she didn’t stop. She kicked with all her might, and dragged her arms through the water, fighting for every breath. She felt the current’s pull dissipate completely, and found she was able to turn in a wide arc. Swimming felt impossible now. Lead in her legs, her stomach empty – they hadn’t unpacked their picnic, wanting to cool off with a swim before eating, her eyes and her lungs burned from the salt water. There was no hope of making it all the way back to the furthest edge of the beach, avoiding the ripcurl current. There was no strength left in her body and she felt the fight leave her.

  Somehow, Beatrice wasn’t sure how, Atholl was in the water again, swimming towards her, his face paler than she had ever seen and he was calling out, ‘Thank God.’