‘And the bad news?’
‘There’s only one bed.’
‘Ah.’
‘Ah.’
‘I see.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Really?’ she said, suspiciously. ‘One bedroom on the whole island?’
‘It’s peak season, Em! I’ve tried everywhere!’ Stay calm, don’t get shrill. Maybe play the guilt card instead. ‘But if you want me to carry on looking. .’ Wearily he made to get up from the chair.
She put her hand on his forearm. ‘Single or double bed?’
The lie seemed to be holding. He sat again. ‘Double. A big double.’
‘Well it would have to be a pretty massive bed though, wouldn’t it? To conform to The Rules.’
‘Well,’ Dexter shrugged, ‘I suppose I prefer to think of them as guidelines.’
Emma frowned.
‘What I mean, Em, is I don’t mind if you don’t.’
‘No, I know youdon’t mind—’
‘But if you really don’t think you can keep your hands off me—’
‘Oh, I can manage, it’s you I worry about—’
‘Because I’m telling you now, if you lay one finger on me—’
Emma loved the room. She stood on the balcony and listened to the cicadas, a noise that she had only heard in films before and had half suspected to be an exotic fiction. She was delighted, too, to see lemons growing in the garden; actual lemons, in trees; they seemed glued on. Keen not to appear provincial, she said none of this out loud, simply saying ‘Fine. We’ll take it.’ Then, while Dexter made arrangements with the landlady, she slipped into the bathroom to continue fighting with her contact lenses.
At University Emma had held firm private convictions about the vanity of contact lenses, nurturing as they did conventional notions of idealised feminine beauty. A sturdy, honest, utilitarian pair of National Health spectacles showed that you didn’t care about silly trivia like looking nice, because your mind was on higher things. But in the years since leaving college this line of argument had come to seem so abstract and specious that she had finally succumbed to Dexter’s nagging and got the damn things, realising only too late that what she had really been avoiding for all those years was that moment in the movies: the librarian removes her spectacles and shakes out her hair. ‘But Miss Morley, you’re beautiful.’
Her face in the mirror seemed strange to her now, bare and exposed, as if she had just removed her spectacles for the last nine months. The lenses had a tendency to make her prone to random and alarming facial spasms, ratty blinks. They stuck to her finger and face like fish scales or, as now, slid beneath her eyelid, burying themselves deep in the back of her skull. After a rigorous bout of facial contortion and what felt like surgery, she managed to retrieve the shard, stepping out of the bathroom, red-eyed and blinking tearfully.
Dexter was sitting on the bed, his shirt unbuttoned. ‘Em? Are you crying?’
‘No. But it’s still early.’
They headed out in the oppressive lunch-time heat, finding their way towards the long crescent of white sand that stretched for a mile or so from the village, and it was time to unveil the swimming costumes. Emma had put a lot of thought, perhaps too much, into her swimsuit, settling finally for a plain black all-in-one from John Lewis that might have been branded The Edwardian. As she pulled her dress over her head, she wondered if Dexter thought she was in some way chickening-out by not wearing a bikini, as if a one-piece swimming costume belonged with spectacles, desert boots and bike helmets as somehow prudish, cautious, not quite feminine. Not that she cared, though she did wonder, as her dress passed over her head, if she had caught his eyes flickering in her direction. Either way, she was pleased to note that he had gone for the baggy shorts look. A week of lying next to Dexter in Speedos would be more uncomfortable than she could bear.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but aren’t you the Girl from Ipanema?’
‘No, I’m her auntie.’ She sat and attempted to apply suntan lotion to her legs in a way that wouldn’t make her thighs wobble.
‘What is that stuff?’ he said.
‘Factor thirty.’
‘You might as well lie under a blanket.’
‘I don’t want to overdo it on the second day.’
‘It’s like house paint.’
‘I’m not used to the sun. Not like you, you globetrotter. You want some?’
‘I don’t agree with suntan lotion.’
‘Dexter, you are so hard.’
He smiled, and continued to watch her from behind his dark glasses, noting the way her raised arm lifted her breast beneath the black material of the swimming costume, the bulge of soft pale flesh about the elasticated neckline. There was something about the gesture too, the tilt of the head and the pulling back of her hair as she applied the lotion to her neck, and he felt the pleasant nausea that accompanied desire. Oh God, he thought, eight more days of this. Her swimming costume was scooped low at the back and she could do no more than dab ineffectually at the lowest point. ‘Want me to do your back?’ he said. Offering to apply sun cream was a corny old routine, beneath him really, and he thought it best to pass it off as medical concern. ‘You don’t want to burn.’
‘Go on then.’ Emma shuffled over and sat between his legs, her head resting forward on her knees. He began to apply the lotion, his face so close that she could feel his breath on her neck, while he could feel the heat reflecting off her skin, both of them working hard on the impression that this was everyday behaviour and in no way a clear contravention of Rules Two and Four, those prohibiting Flirtation and Physical Modesty.
‘Scooped quite low, isn’t it?’ he said, aware of his fingers at the base of her spine.
‘Good job I didn’t put it on backwards!’ she said and a silence followed while both of them thought oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God.
As a distraction she placed her hand on his ankle and yanked it towards her. ‘What’s this?’
‘My tattoo. From India.’ She rubbed it with her thumb as if trying to wipe it off. ‘It’s faded a bit. It’s a yin-and-yang,’ he explained.
‘Looks like a road sign.’
‘It means the perfect union of opposites.’
‘It means “end of national speed limit”. It means put some socks on.’
He laughed and placed his hands on her back, his thumbs aligned with the hollows of her shoulder blades. A moment passed. ‘There!’ he said, brightly. ‘That’s your undercoat. So. Let’s swim!’
And so the long, hot day crawled on. They swam and slept and read, and as the fiercest heat faded and the beach become more populated a problem became apparent. Dexter noticed it first.
‘Is it just me or—’
‘What?’
‘Is everyone on this beach completely naked?’
Emma looked up. ‘Oh yeah.’ She returned to her book. ‘Don’t ogle, Dexter.’
‘I’m not ogling, I’m observing. I’m a qualified anthropologist, remember?’
‘Low third, wasn’t it?’
‘High two-two. Look, there’s our friends.’
‘What friends?’
‘From the ferry. Over there. Having a barbecue.’ Twenty metres away the man crouched pale and naked over a smoky aluminium tray as if for warmth, while the woman stood on tip-toes and waved, two triangles of white, one of black. Dexter waved back cheerily: ‘You’ve got no cloooothes oooon!’
Emma averted her eyes. ‘You see, I couldn’t do that.’
‘What?’
‘Barbecue naked.’
‘Em, you’re so conventional.’
‘That’s not conventional, it’s basic health and safety. It’s food hygiene.’
‘I’d barbecue naked.’
‘And that’s the difference between us, Dex, you’re so dark, so complicated.’
‘Maybe we should go and say hi.’
‘No!’
‘Just have a chat.’
‘With a chicken drumstick in one hand and his knob in the other? No thanks. Besides, isn’t it a breach of nudist etiquette or something?’
‘What?’
‘Talking to someone naked and us not being naked.’
‘I don’t know, is it?’
