The Guest List(15)

I don’t want to think too hard about when the last time we had sex was, because I know the answer will be too depressing. A while, anyway. In honour of this weekend I’ve had my first bikini wax in … Jesus, quite a long time, anyway, if you don’t count those little boxes of DIY strips mainly left unused in the bathroom cupboard. Sometimes, since the kids, it’s as though we’re more like colleagues, or partners in a small, somewhat shaky start-up that we have to devote all our attention to, rather than lovers. Lovers. When was the last time we thought of ourselves as that?

‘Crap,’ I say, to distract myself from this line of thought, ‘look at that marquee! It’s enormous.’ It’s so big it looks like a tented city rather than a single structure. If anyone were going to have a really fancy marquee, it would be Jules.

The rest of the island looks, if possible, even more hostile than it did from far away. It seems incredible that this forbidding place is going to accommodate us for the next few days. As we get closer I can see a cluster of small, dark dwellings behind the Folly. And on the crest of a hill rising up beyond the marquee is a bristle of dark shapes. At first I think they’re people; an army of figures awaiting our arrival. Only they seem oddly, impossibly still. As we draw closer I realise that the strange, upright forms seem to be grave markers. And what looked like large bulbous heads are crosses, Celtic ones, the round circle enclosing the even-sided cross.

‘There they are!’ Charlie says. He gives a wave.

I see the cluster of figures on the jetty now, waving. I comb my fingers through my hair, although I know from long experience that I’m probably making it more wild. I wish I had a bottle of water to swig from to help the sour taste in my mouth.

As we draw closer, I can make them all out a little better. I see Jules, and even from this distance, I can see that she looks immaculate: the only person who could wear all white in a place like this and not immediately stain her clothes. Near Jules and Will stand two women who I can only assume must be Jules’s family – the glossy dark hair gives them away.

‘There’s Jules’s mum,’ Charlie says, pointing to the elder woman.

‘Wow,’ I say. She’s not what I expected at all. She wears black skinny jeans and little cat-eye black glasses pushed back on to a glossy dark bob. She doesn’t look old enough to have a thirty-something daughter.

‘Yeah, she had Jules pretty young,’ Charlie says, as if reading my mind. ‘And that must be – Jesus Christ! I suppose that must be Olivia. Jules’s little half-sister.’

‘She doesn’t look so little now,’ I say. She’s taller than both Jules and her mum; a totally different shape to Jules, who’s all curves. She’s very striking-looking, beautiful, even, and her skin is pale pale pale in the way that only really looks good with black hair, like hers. Her legs in her jeans look as though they’ve been drawn with two long thin lines of charcoal. God, I’d kill for legs like that.

‘I can’t believe how much older she is,’ Charlie says. He’s half-whispering now, we’re close enough that they might hear us. He sounds a bit freaked out.

‘Is she the one who used to have a crush on you?’ I ask, dredging this fact up from some half-remembered conversation with Jules.

‘Yes,’ he says, with a rueful grin. ‘God, Jules used to tease me about it. It was pretty embarrassing. Funny, but embarrassing, too. She used to find excuses to come and talk to me and lounge around in that disturbingly provocative way thirteen-year-olds can.’

I look at the gorgeous creature on the jetty and think – I bet he wouldn’t be so embarrassed now.

Mattie is suddenly busying himself around us, putting out fenders on one side, readying a rope.

Charlie steps forward: ‘Let me help—’

Mattie waves him away, which I suspect Charlie’s a little offended by.

‘Chuck it here!’ Will strides up the jetty towards us. On TV, he’s good-looking. In the flesh, he’s … well, he’s pretty breathtaking. ‘Let me help you!’ he calls to Mattie.

Mattie throws him a rope and Will catches it expertly in mid-air, revealing a slice of muscular stomach beneath his Aran knit jumper. I wonder if I’m imagining Charlie bristling next to me. Boats are his thing: he was a sailing instructor in his youth. But everything outdoorsy, it seems, is Will’s thing.

‘Welcome, you two!’ He grins and reaches out a hand to me. ‘Need a lift?’ I don’t really, but I take it anyway. He grabs me under my armpit and lifts me over the side of the boat as though I’m as light as a child. I catch a gust of some subtle, masculine scent – moss and pine – and realise with dismay how I must smell in return, like vomit and seaweed.

He has it in real life, I can tell already, that charm, that magnetism. In one of the articles I read about him, while watching the show – because obviously I had to start googling everything I could find about him – the journalist joked that she basically just watched it because she couldn’t tear her eyes away from Will. Lots of people became outraged, claimed it was objectification, that if the same piece had been written by a man the journalist would have been roasted alive. But I bet the show’s PR team opened the champagne.

If I’m honest, I can see what she meant. There are lots of shots of Will stripped to the waist, or grunting his way up a rock face, always looking incredibly attractive. But it’s more than that. He has a particular way of talking to the camera, an intimacy, so that you feel you might be lying next to him in the temporary shelter he’s built out of branches and tree-bark, blinking in the light of his head torch. It’s the feeling of a companionable solitude, that it’s just you and him in the wilderness. It’s a seduction.