While You Sleep

by Stephanie Merritt

  Zoe struggled, fighting to keep her face above the waves; bright patterns blinded her as she kicked hard, but it was dragging her down with surprising force. A large wave rose up behind and broke over her head, submerging her, so that when she opened her eyes there was only blurry greenish light and a frenzy of bubbles. Her lungs began to burn. Whatever was wrapped around her leg seemed to pull harder as she tried to resist, and it felt not so much like seaweed now as a hand, fingers tightly coiled, pressing into her flesh. She pushed her face up to the light, but her nostrils filled with water, just as she felt another hand grip her upper arm, lifting her firmly. The tendrils holding her ankle fell away and she allowed herself to be carried to the surface, where she sucked in painful gasps of air, coughing salt water while the strong hands that had plucked her from the sea now bore her forward until her toes scraped over sand underfoot. At last she stood doubtfully on weak legs, jagged breaths heaving in her chest, pushing the wet hair from her face as she blinked into the sun. In the same instant she remembered that she was naked.

  ‘Are you OK?’ her rescuer asked, his voice shaky.

  Zoe crouched low in the waves, shivering, one arm wrapped across her chest as if that might hide her, like Eve being expelled from Eden. Of all people, it had to be Edward. Now that she was standing on firm ground and could catch her breath, she burned with shame at her idiocy. She could not even lift her head to look at him. She would never be able to face him again.

  ‘I – uh – I only came to bring your scarf back. I thought you were drowning,’ he said sheepishly. He was shivering too, his teeth chattering so badly it was making him stutter. She managed to lift her eyes as far as his legs, bare and white and goosebumped, with the surf swirling around them. He must have torn his jeans off to dive in after her. If he hadn’t appeared – what then? The memory of that weed, wrapped around her ankle like fingers, sent another shudder rattling through her.

  ‘There are rip currents in the bay here, they can catch you out if you don’t know to watch for them.’ He was determinedly looking back to the house, away from her; she sensed he was talking to cover the awkwardness. ‘We should probably get out of the water,’ he said eventually, a sensible teacherly note to his voice. His wet T-shirt and underwear clung to the ridges of his body.

  ‘Could you, maybe …’ She pointed in the direction of the beach. ‘While I get my clothes?’

  ‘Oh God, sorry, yes.’ He sounded terribly English, as he scurried towards the house, still apologising, water streaming from his limbs, his gaze fixed obediently on the horizon. She hobbled after him, arms crooked across herself in case he should turn around, and grabbed up her gleefully discarded clothes, ramming her legs into her jeans and yanking her sweater on as fast as possible, ignoring the scrape of sand and salt on her wet skin. Her lungs rasped with each unsteady breath, her raw throat stung.

  A veil of cloud had drifted across the face of the sun, casting the beach into shadow, the bright summer cheer all vanished. Zoe could hear her teeth rattling like maracas. Ahead, Edward walked slowly towards the house, carrying his shoes in one hand and his dry jeans over his arm.

  ‘I’ll get the stove on,’ she said, not quite catching up. She still could not bring herself to look at him. Her memory tried to piece together what had happened out there: the current, her leg caught in the weed, and then his hands around her arms, bearing her up. She had been so panicked by then that what followed was unclear; had he held her, swum with her? While she was naked? Jesus; if she’d behaved like a crazy woman last night, what must he be thinking now? And yet he had driven out here – to bring her scarf back, he said, though that sounded like an excuse, even to her. He must have wanted to see her. Well, he had seen more than he bargained for.

  The kitchen felt cold without the sunlight. Zoe pulled the basket of logs over to the stove, but Edward laid a trembling hand on her arm.

  ‘I can do that, if you wouldn’t mind finding me a towel?’ He sounded so impeccably polite, as if he were speaking to a friend of his parents. Water dripped from his boxers, pooling on the tiles. She mumbled a reply and scuttled up the stairs to the bathroom. When she returned, he was stoking the fire in the stove; she thrust a towel at him and wrapped one around her own hair, not quite meeting his eye. With a nod of acknowledgement, he disappeared into the small laundry room off the kitchen. She heard the slap of his wet clothes falling to the stone floor and busied herself with filling the kettle as a distraction from the thought of him standing naked out there, beyond her eyeline.

  He padded softly back into the room as she was setting the kettle on the stove and they looked at each other frankly for the first time since they had emerged from the water. His hair stuck up in tufts where he had rubbed it with the towel, now draped around his bare shoulders like a shawl. He wore only his jeans; they sat low on his narrow hips, below the jut of his pelvis, and Zoe could see the faint line of dark fuzz leading down from his belly button. The skin of his chest was smooth, almost hairless, like a boy’s, lean and subtly muscled. Zoe dropped her gaze to the floor, conscious that she was staring.

  ‘I’ll make some coffee when that’s boiled,’ she said, for something to say, as she edged closer to the stove for warmth.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a slug of brandy in it, if you have some,’ Edward said, huddling himself into the towel. ‘And, uh – I don’t suppose you have a jumper I could borrow?’

  She looked at him doubtfully, this time with permission to appraise him for size. He was slim, fine-boned, but his limbs were long and his shoulders broader than hers. Nothing of hers would fit – then she remembered.

  ‘Wait here, I might.’

  She scrambled up the stairs to her room and rooted through the wardrobe drawers until she found what she was looking for: that old cashmere sweater of Dan’s; heathery blue, soft as a baby’s blanket. She held it briefly against her cheek, recalling, as she descended the stairs, how she had given it to him the first Christmas they were married. He’d worn it all the time that winter, but of course he’d failed to put it away inside the zip-up bag like she’d told him and so eventually the moths had attacked; a constellation of chewed-out holes had appeared on the back of the left shoulder. Dan had seemed irritated when she’d pointed them out, as if he were being criticised unfairly. ‘I can keep it for around the house,’ he’d said, and she had been obscurely hurt by this. Somehow she felt it reflected on her; that she too, in time, might become something he kept for around the house, comfortable, familiar, not presentable enough for his wider world. But she had snatched up this sweater from the back of the closet at the last minute when she was packing to leave, like a comfort blanket, a way of anchoring her to home while she was away, should she need that. His smell was sunk deep in its fibres; soap and Guerlain aftershave. If Dan missed it, he would think she had thrown it out. He would not suppose that it was being worn by a beautiful boy who had saved his wife from drowning.

  She handed the sweater to Edward and watched him pull it over his head, marvelling at how smoothly the skin of his stomach slid over his muscles as he shrugged his arms in.

  He pushed his hair out of his face, settled his glasses on his nose and offered a tentative smile. ‘Is it your husband’s?’

  Her face coloured. ‘I’ve had it years,’ she said, turning her back and searching for the coffee pot. It wasn’t an answer, but he didn’t press her further.

  There was no brandy, but she had bought a bottle of the local whisky in town. She dug it out of the shopping bags and poured a generous measure into two mugs.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t expecting quite so much drama,’ Edward said, with an artificial laugh, leaning his elbow on the counter and gulping the whisky down without waiting for the coffee. ‘I was afraid I might have upset you yesterday with those stories.’ He was speaking fast, as if he had prepared his speech and needed to speed through it all at once, before he lost his nerve. ‘I thought I’d bring your scarf back and see if everything was all right. Lucky I did.’

&nbs
p; Zoe took a sip of whisky, keeping her gaze trained on the mug between her hands.

  ‘God, I’m sorry. You must think I’m insane. I don’t know what happened, I just –’ she waved a hand towards the window to exonerate herself – ‘it was such a beautiful day. There was no one around, I dove in. I guess the tide took me further out than I realised. I’m usually a pretty good swimmer,’ she added, in case she had made herself sound like the kind of ditsy hippy-chick who rips her clothes off to get back to nature at any opportunity. ‘My leg got caught in some weed or something.’

  Or something. The memory of that cold grip rushed at her; she flinched visibly. Reason told her it must have been a tangle of seaweed, but to all her senses it had felt like a hand that had reached for her underwater, trying to pull her down. She thought of the woman in the song, yearning to join her drowned lover; a sudden image of Ailsa McBride flashed before her, washed up along the coast, skin white as china, black skirts waterlogged and swirling around her like an oil slick. ‘I owe you,’ she added, glancing up to meet his eye. The sentiment seemed inadequate.

  ‘Oh – well,’ he blushed and his gaze skittered away. ‘It can be dangerous to swim in the bay here, even on a calm day. It’s like that all over the island, with the currents. Mick should have told you really.’

  ‘I guess he didn’t expect anyone to be so stupid as to try skinny-dipping in October.’

  The kettle shrilled and she sprang across to the range, grateful for the distraction.

  ‘Listen, I’m sorry about yesterday too,’ she said, trying to throw the words away casually with her back turned as she filled the cafetière. ‘It wasn’t the stories. I didn’t feel too good, I had to get some air. I shouldn’t have raced off like that though.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said, with surprising gentleness. ‘You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’

  She turned to look at him. ‘There’s nothing to talk about.’ It came out sharper than she had intended.

  ‘I only meant – I understand.’ When she didn’t reply, he ploughed on: ‘I think Charles was right, the other night, at the pub. When he said everyone who comes here is running away. Or at least, leaving something behind. After Lucy – my fiancée – after she broke it off, I couldn’t speak to anyone about it for weeks. I was a mess. I couldn’t even be in company. I’d walk out in the middle of meals, I had to get away. Sometimes I’d think I couldn’t breathe properly, for the pain. Once I actually thought I was having a heart attack.’ He lowered his eyes with an embarrassed half-laugh. ‘I’m not suggesting that’s what you’re— I thought perhaps you’d come to make a new start too.’ He left a brief pause and tried again. ‘I’m not going to pry. But if there’s anything—’

  ‘Do you want milk?’ Zoe said, reaching out brusquely for his cup. She twisted away to pour his coffee and felt obscurely guilty. The way he had self-consciously mentioned his ex-girlfriend by name, as an overture of intimacy; he wanted to share his heartbreak and offer her the chance to do the same. She fought a condescending, quasi-maternal urge to pat him on the head and tell him that in a few short years he would look back and hardly remember this Lucy; that life had pain in store for him he could not yet even imagine.

  ‘Please,’ he said, chastened.

  Zoe hid herself briefly behind the door of the enormous refrigerator, the cool air a relief on her face. She should ask him to leave. This was too fraught, all of it; his attempts to draw her out, to force confidences between them where none should exist, given the difference in their ages and experience. It was only the island that had thrown them into one another’s company, and their shared status as outsiders. She could not believe that he would ever have looked twice at her if they had met somewhere they both belonged, at home among their peers. She allowed herself to wonder if he was hoping to sleep with her. Nothing in his old-fashioned courtesy had said as much overtly, but this was the second time he had sought her out; unlikely as it seemed, she found it hard to believe his attentive manner came without ulterior motive. She ought to send him home now before it grew any more awkward, before she had to reject him outright. She took a deep breath and reached in for the milk carton.

  ‘Is this your sketchbook?’ he asked, behind her.

  Zoe whipped around; the milk slipped from her hand and she swore as it hit the floor. She hesitated, unsure which intervention was the more urgent; eventually she crouched to snatch up the carton before its contents pooled too far over the tiles, and grabbed a dishcloth with the other hand to wipe up the spillage, one frantic eye on Edward. She had left the pad on the kitchen table in the early hours of the morning, after she finished writing, her eyes barely open but her mind and pen racing; he had picked it up and begun flicking through at random.

  ‘Could you—’ she reached out a hand for it.

  ‘This one’s creepy – who is it?’ He stopped at a pen-and-ink portrait of a man standing beside tall arched windows, his face obscured by shadow, a thin birch cane in his hand.

  ‘No one. It’s abstract.’ She threw the cloth into the sink and snatched the book away from him, closing it before he could turn the page to find her fevered scribbles from the previous night. ‘Sorry. I prefer to keep it private.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. Me being an oaf again. I wanted to see some of your paintings of the island.’

  ‘I haven’t done any yet.’ Then, realising how harsh she sounded: ‘There’s this, I guess.’ She flipped the pages until she came to the watercolour of the bay she had painted on her first morning, after the first of the dreams. She held the book out towards him, keeping a tight hold of it. Edward whistled.

  ‘That’s beautiful. Really stunning. Who’s the person on the beach?’

  Zoe frowned, turning the page around to face her. She recalled her decision to paint in the figure standing on the beach, at the furthest edge of the cove where the strand curved around towards the cliffs and the sand gave way to a staggered series of sharp-toothed rocks at their foot, but she had no recollection of why she had done so. She rarely put people into her landscapes; the natural world spoke to her more clearly when it was uninhabited. But she had placed this figure – a vague outline of inky-violet – in the exact spot where she thought she had seen someone from the gallery windows after she woke from her sleepwalking that first night. You could not tell, in the painting, whether the person was looking up at the house or out to sea.

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ she said, closing the book.

  Beyond the kitchen window, the sunlight was once more muted by clouds scudding in from the horizon, the sea turned matt and dull as the day faded. Zoe stood at the sink and watched the waves cresting further out as the tide encroached slowly up the shoreline; she was beginning to learn its rhythms now. Behind her, the only sounds were the crackling of wood in the stove and Edward pouring himself another coffee. She half-wished he would leave without a prompt, but at the thought of being left in the house as daylight ebbed, a queasy dread stole up her throat – not so much a fear of the silence as of what might fill it. Why was it so hard to be alone with her thoughts, when that was what she had wanted?

  She glanced behind her and noticed the plastic bags from the supermarket lolling against the table leg where she had dropped them earlier in her wild dash to the sea. As she bent to pick one up, she saw a tray of chicken fillets inside. She had planned to make a casserole and keep what was left to eat cold, but there was easily enough food here for two people. In another bag there was a bottle of half-decent red wine.

  ‘Should I go?’

  Zoe turned and met his frank gaze through the steam rising from his mug. The question was unnervingly direct, slicing through the veil of his usual diffidence and cautious manners. She sensed a choice laid before her; he was offering her a chance to nip this in the bud before it had even begun, whatever this was. He was handing the decision to her, and all the sense that pertained to her years told her what she ought to say. She leaned down, grasped the bottle of wine by the neck and raised
it aloft.

  ‘Unless you want to stay for dinner?’

  He held her look, a tentative smile softening his face. It was the response he had been hoping for, she could tell; perhaps it was what he had anticipated all along, as he drove across the moor with her scarf, never imagining that he would have to snatch her naked from the waves. She felt a sudden rush of culpability, so intense she might almost have called it a premonition, if she had believed in such things. She hesitated briefly, and set the bottle down on the table.