After You Left(97)

She peered to see her watch. The music had ceased ages ago. Most of the guests, bar a few drunken stragglers, were long gone.

‘I’ve only had two beers. I think you can trust me not to kill you.’

She trusted him, anyway. Next, they were bulleting across the causeway in his car. She wound the window down. Strands of her hair danced against her cheek. The sand was slowly weighting with pools of seawater. Very soon it would be unwise for him to cross back. The sun was just coming up, and she didn’t want to let him go. Seals were singing on the sandbanks, puncturing the tonelessness of the morning. ‘I’m missing you already and I haven’t even said goodnight to you yet,’ he said, and snuffled a small laugh.

She didn’t answer, just processed the scope of what he’d said as she distantly listened to the language of larks rising on the morning air. He had taken hold of her hand.

‘When can I see you again?’ he asked, when they arrived at her door. He had got out of the car and come around to her side. ‘I mean, I assume I’m going to get to take you out on a proper date?’ He didn’t even say it like it was a question.

She had a feeling that everything about her life was going to be decided if she answered yes. And it was a glorious feeling. She was open to the recklessness of it – was sailing with it as though this were a new and enchanted form of travel. And yet . . .

He was already kissing her.

They must have kissed for ten minutes. Or perhaps it was two. When he stopped, she was dizzy. She was even more certain, and even more confused. ‘If you don’t go now, you won’t be going at all,’ she warned. Soon, the sea would fold around the island, wrapping up the locals in their own little world for those isolating few hours, dispassionately curbing an element of your free will. This occurrence of Northumberland nature would always sink Evelyn into the doldrums because she didn’t yet know the extent to which she was going to miss it.

‘And that will be just perfectly fine by me.’ He appeared in no hurry to go.

Looking out to the causeway, the increasing swell of grey seawater was now bathing the feet of a heron who was standing, blinking, in the sand.

‘Hanging around one moment longer is a very bad idea,’ she said, thinking, Will I see him again, or won’t I? Fate is going to have to decide.

Still he didn’t make any attempt to move. ‘Friday at seven o’clock?’ he asked. ‘I’ll come right here for you.’ He glanced up at their house, seeming curious and charmed by the place where she lived.

She found herself nodding, wordlessly.

‘I take it that’s a yes, then,’ he called after her, playfully.

She began walking to her front door. When she got there, she turned and looked at him again. He was getting back into his car. She watched him roll down the window.

‘If I get stuck, will you come rescue me?’

‘No!’ She chuckled, and parroted his words from earlier. ‘Go on, Eddy, live dangerously!’

He beamed a smile at her, then two seconds later he sped off. As she pushed open the door, she paused for the briefest of moments and listened to his engine burn a path through the silence.