The Bay Road

Tressa opened the door with her bag still standing behind her, its handles upright as if someone else might take responsibility for them. Elian looked at her first. She was grateful for that, and annoyed by how much she had needed it.

“Come in,” she said.

He stepped into the hall, carrying his own small bag. He put it beside the radiator rather than beside hers. The difference was only a few feet, but she noticed that he had left the question where they had agreed to leave it.

She had put the car keys in her pocket. They pressed against her thigh when she sat on the bench to fasten a shoe. Through the open kitchen door she could see the bread her son had brought, wrapped now in a clean cloth. She had eaten some for breakfast. The ordinary evidence of loving him remained in the house; she did not have to clear it away to make space for this morning.

Elian waited until she stood.

“How are you?” he asked.

“Still sad about lunch. Still looking forward to the sea.”

He nodded, accepting both.

“I’m coming,” she said. “I want the weekend with you. I don’t want to spend it asking you to make the other feeling disappear.”

His face changed in a way she would remember later: relief first, then pleasure allowed to show itself without apology.

“I’d like that,” he said.

“And you can be unhappy about your walk. You don’t have to be delighted all the time to make this worth doing.”

He let out a quiet breath.

“Thank you.”

She stepped towards him. “But I hope you’re pleased to see me.”

He put down the hand he had been resting on the radiator and came the rest of the way.

“Very pleased.”

She kissed him, her palm against his cheek. His arms closed around her after she moved into them, and for a moment the hall was simply a place where she could be held by a man she had chosen. No argument was being won. No absence had been filled without its owner noticing.

When they drew apart she was smiling.

“There are two routes,” she said. “One involves a better road. The other involves stopping for a bun.”

“How much worse is the road?”

“Not very. I was arranging the question to get the answer I wanted.”

“I want the bun too. You could have asked.”

She picked up her bag. He picked up his own. They went out together, and she locked the door.

· · ·Scene break

The bun was disappointing, but in a different way from the pool tea, which gave them something to discuss for twenty miles. Elian had bought the one with cherries and found only one cherry. Tressa maintained that the singular might be deliberate. He said a bun could not be allowed to shelter behind grammar.

She drove. He read the road signs when she asked, and kept quiet when she did not. At a junction she chose the wrong lane and had to take a short detour through a town neither of them wanted to visit. He pointed out a handsome clock on a building beside the road.

“You’re being very tactful,” she said.

“I like the clock.”

“You can be irritated by the detour.”

“I’m not. I might be irritated by being told which feelings are available.”

She glanced at him, then back at the road.

“Fair enough.”

He reached across and rested his hand briefly on her forearm while they waited at a light. He removed it before she needed to change gear. She liked the smallness of the touch, how little it asked her to do in response.

They arrived at the hotel just after one. It was painted cream and stood above a bay with a long curve of sand. The receptionist gave them separate keys without displaying an opinion. Tressa realised she had been prepared for an opinion and had brought a whole unnecessary answer to it.

Elian’s room was along the corridor from hers. They agreed to meet downstairs in twenty minutes. She shut her own door, put her bag on the bed and stood still.

A room that nobody else expected her to be in. A man waiting to spend the afternoon with her. She had travelled alone often enough to know that a room could be a pleasure in itself, but this pleasure had a second door down the corridor.

She washed her face and changed her shoes. She sent Selwyn a short message saying she had arrived safely, because he had asked her to let him know whenever she drove a distance, long before there was anything awkward about the destination. She did not add a photograph or a question that required him to perform happiness.

His reply came while she was putting the phone away: Good. Drive’s a nuisance past the quarry. Enjoy the sea.

She read it twice. It was not a reconciliation. It was her son’s voice, and she could keep it without turning it into more than it was.

Downstairs Elian was looking at a map pinned beside the breakfast-room door.

“There’s a path along the lower edge,” he said.

“Of course there is.”

“You may prefer the lookout.”

“I may. You’ll have to endure seeing a large amount of water.”

They bought sandwiches and took both paths, lower first, then up a flight of steps to a bench in full sun. The sea was spread out so extravagantly that she began to laugh before he said anything.

“It’s all there,” he said. “Every bit of it.”

“You could close one eye.”

“Would that improve it professionally?”

“I’m retired. My opinions are now unregulated.”

He gave her half his sandwich because she had chosen badly. She gave him the half of hers she had not yet bitten. It was a poor exchange for him and she said so.

“You can choose badly sometimes,” he said. “I don’t need reimbursement.”

She leaned against his shoulder for a moment. He shifted so she could settle more comfortably, then went back to looking at the sea.

Nobody passing knew her as Selwyn’s mother. Nobody knew Elian as the man who came to supper with him. The freedom was pleasant and also incomplete. She did not want a relationship that could exist only in places where their names meant nothing.

“We’ll have to come home,” she said.

“On Sunday. I checked the booking.”

She smiled, but he heard the other meaning.

“Yes,” he said. “We will.”

“I don’t want to spend the whole weekend rehearsing it.”

“Then let’s spend this bit eating.”

They did. Afterwards they walked until the path turned away from the sea and became less interesting, then turned back without claiming they had reached any significant destination. At the hotel she went to her room for an hour. Elian went to his. She slept for twenty minutes and woke without feeling that she had wasted something she ought to be maximising.

The blue dress was on the chair. She put it on.

· · ·Scene break

They ate early in a small restaurant on the street behind the hotel. Both drank sparkling water. Elian asked whether she had been glad to retire, and listened to the part of the answer that was not cheerful: how, for several months, she had missed having something definite to complain about.

“Everyone expected me to be grateful for the time,” she said. “I was grateful. I also wanted someone to ask my opinion about something they couldn’t decide by themselves.”

“Do you still?”

“Sometimes. But I’ve become very fond of being bad at things without anyone losing money.”

“Such as?”

“Watercolour. I have painted the same pear eleven times. None of them would be recognised by another pear.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“Immensely. It’s an outrage. I used to think enjoyment had to be a sign of progress.”

Elian considered that while the server cleared their plates.

“I might need lessons in that,” he said.

“From a woman who can’t paint a pear?”

“Your qualifications are persuasive.”

She told him she would show him the pears when they got home. It was the first small invitation beyond the weekend, and she saw him hear it.

They walked back along the bay. The sand had darkened; lights from the hotel windows lay in thin moving lines across the wet edge. Elian took her hand. She put her other hand over his for a moment, holding him there, and then let them walk normally.

In the corridor outside her room, he stopped.

“Would you like company for a while?”

“Yes.”

She unlocked the door and let him come in. He stood beside the window while she turned on the lamp. She could have made tea, opened the television menu, found a thousand ways of pretending that inviting him in was an incomplete thought.

Instead she went to him.

“I’d like you to stay tonight,” she said. “Not because of the booking. Because I want you here.”

He touched her face, waiting while she looked at him.

“I want to stay.”

She kissed him. The kiss was slower than the one in her hall, with no car to load or route to discuss afterwards. She felt the pause in his embrace and answered by drawing him nearer. His hand settled at her back, warm through the blue cotton.

He said her name against her cheek. She liked the way it sounded when it was neither a greeting nor a question somebody wanted her to answer.

When they moved away from the window, she stopped to pull the curtains. Then she turned back and left the lamp on. Elian waited beside the bed, his hand open for hers. The waiting contained desire. She could see that now without translating it into patience.

“I may get shy,” she said.

“So may I.”

She looked at him, surprised, then ashamed of the surprise.

“Of course.”

He smiled. “You aren’t the only person in the room with a body and an opinion about it.”

She took his hand.

There were choices to make, small ones spoken quietly, and he listened to each of hers as if it belonged to that moment rather than committing her to everything that might follow. She listened to his too. When she wanted to pause, they paused; the warmth did not leave his face. When she drew him back to her, his answering kiss was full of a feeling he no longer tried to make inconspicuous.

She had imagined, before this weekend, that she would spend the night watching herself from somewhere near the ceiling, making assessments. Instead she kept returning to particulars that had nothing to do with judgment: the warmth of his shoulder beneath her palm, his startled laugh when she murmured something about the solemn hotel painting, the way he became quiet when she said she liked looking at him.

“Then look,” he said softly.

She did.

Later they lay close beneath the sheet, his face near hers. She had one hand resting against his chest and could feel his breathing settling under it. She did not need a better word than happy, although happiness seemed an inadequate word for something that had room for both this and the Sunday that would be different when they returned.

Elian brushed a strand of hair from her mouth.

“What?” he asked, because she was smiling.

“Nothing I want you to fix.”

“That’s a useful distinction.”

She moved nearer and kissed him, lazily now, with the pleasure of knowing there was no immediate goodbye. His arm settled around her. The lamp made a small warm place of the bed, and beyond it the room was full of the ordinary untidiness of two people who had stopped trying to arrive correctly.

After a while he asked whether she wanted the window open. She said a little. He opened it, returned to her and complained that his own room had acquired a remarkably expensive bag-storage function.

“Mine is performing several services,” she said.

He laughed and drew her close when she reached for him.

They did not discuss Selwyn again that night. He had not been forgotten. Tressa had finally allowed a part of her life to be about the people who were actually in the room.

· · ·Scene break

In the morning Elian went along the corridor to fetch a clean shirt. Tressa showered, dressed and put her swimsuit on top of her bag for later. The hotel had told them which sheltered part of the bay had a supervised swimming area; they would check the conditions when they got there and decide for themselves.

At breakfast Elian pulled out the chair beside his, then glanced at her as if to ask rather than assume.

She sat down.

The tea came in a pot, with a second pot of hot water and a little jug of milk. He lifted his cup, tasted it and looked solemn.

“Well?” she said.

“I’m trying to remember why we accepted the other sort.”

“The view of the bin was exceptional.”

His laughter brought a glance from another table. Tressa did not lower her voice or explain the joke.

She took the map from beside his plate and opened it between them.

“After swimming,” she said, “I’d like to go this way.”

He leaned close enough that his shoulder touched hers.

“Show me.”