ONE DAY(27)

He turned and looked at her, standing on the harbour wall, holding her wide-brimmed hat to her head in the warm breeze that pressed her light blue dress against her body. She no longer wore spectacles, and there was a scattering of freckles across her chest that he had never seen before, the bare skin turning from pink to brown as it disappeared below the neckline.

‘The Rules,’ she said.

‘What about them?’

‘We need two rooms. Yes?’

‘Absolutely. Two rooms.’

He smiled and headed off into the crowd. Emma watched him go, then dragged the two backpacks along the quay to a small, wind-blown café. There she reached into her bag and pulled out a pen and notebook, an expensive, cloth-bound affair, her journal for the trip.

She opened it on the first blank page and tried to think of something she could write, some insight or observation other than that everything was fine. Everything was fine, and she had the rare, new sensation of being exactly where she wanted to be.

Dexter and the landlady stood in the middle of the bare room: whitewashed walls and cool stone floor, bare save for an immense iron-framed double bed, a small writing desk and chair and some dried flowers in a jar. He walked through louvred double-doors onto a large balcony painted to match the colour of the sky, overlooking the bay below. It was like walking out onto some fantastic stage.

‘You are how many?’ asked the landlady, mid-thirties, quite attractive.

‘Two of us.’

‘And for how long?’

‘Not sure, five nights, maybe more?’

‘Well here is perfect I think?’

Dexter sat on the double bed, bouncing on it speculatively. ‘But my friend and I we are just, well, just good friends. We need two rooms?’

‘Oh. Okay. I have second room.’

Emma has these freckles that I’ve never seen before scattered across her chest just above the neckline.

‘So you do have two rooms?’

‘Yes, of course, I have two rooms.’

‘There’s good news and there’s bad news.’

‘Go on,’ said Emma, closing her notebook.

‘Well I’ve found this fantastic place, sea view, balcony, a bit higher up in the village, quiet if you want to write, there’s even a little desk, and it’s free for the next five days, longer if we want it.’

‘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 you don’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?’