Алия Уайтли: Skein Island

‘Can do.’

She clicked off the radio. ‘I already told you it all. It was closing time, he came in, he told me to get in the back and take off my clothes.’

David heard her draw breath, and swallow.

‘And I told him no,’ she said. She opened the glove compartment, then shut it again, and turned up the heat control on the dashboard. He wanted to pull over and look at her face, but all he could see were her fingers: short, unvarnished nails, the ragged thumbnail on her left hand that she bit. When she was trying to concentrate on a novel she would frown and put her index finger on each line and follow the words like a child. Her fluttering hands moved around the car, touching dials and the sides of her seat.

‘And he went?’ David said.

‘He turned around and walked out.’

‘Just because you said no?’ He should have stuck to silence; there was something accusatory rising inside him, and he had no idea why.

‘I can remember thinking – if I go in the back, I won’t come out again. That’s just what I knew, and I thought about screaming, or trying to push past him to get to the door. Time was moving slowly, I mean, really slowly, and in the end I said no, in my best library voice, the one I use on the teenagers when they try to access dirty websites on the public computers. And he stared at me, and then he left.’

It occurred to David that this was his first big test as a husband. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said.

‘I’m fine,’ said Marianne, ‘I’m really fine, I’m better than… I can’t explain it. All my life I’ve been afraid of something like this. I think, deep down, all women are afraid of some faceless man. And this guy, he came along, and I knew what he wanted, he wanted to hurt me, but he had a face. It’s not at all like I pictured it. Can you understand? Do men picture it too?’

‘Not in the same way,’ he said, ‘I don’t think.’

‘Maybe a man would just have fought, but for me, for women, there’s this question hanging over it. Whether I’d freeze or submit to anything he wanted, and I didn’t do those things. He was defeated by that. He was… surmountable, I suppose.’

‘Surmountable,’ David repeated. The word reassured him more than anything else Marianne had said. This was her, using a long word to describe a simple thing, a thing that a four-letter word could have covered.

‘It was freeing,’ she said. ‘I’m glad it happened, in a way. Yes.’

‘I hope they catch him before he tries it again,’ David said.

She fell silent.

‘You okay?’

‘I keep saying I’m fine. Forget the takeaway, okay? Let’s go home.’

It was just beginning to hit her, David thought: what could have happened. He wanted her to face it, to tremble, to fall towards him so that he could catch her and hold her together. They would get home, and not sleep tonight, but stay up all night talking it through, her crying, and it would be awful, but at the end of it they would be closer than before, he hoped, he wanted, closer in the way that survivors are.

He took the final roundabout into Wootton Bassett and turned into their estate. The Spar on the corner was still open, but he drove past, turned left, and parked up in their space. She got out of the car first and by the time he’d followed she was already at the front door, thrusting her key into the lock. The stiff lines of her shoulders suggested panic; he jogged to her, put his hands on her back as she threw open the door, and they stumbled into the dark house together.

‘Listen, it’ll be okay,’ he said, but Marianne was on him, kissing his face, putting her tongue in his mouth, her hands already at the waistband of his trousers. He tried to think rationally about it for one moment, and then felt his body respond to her. She pulled off her own trousers and took the stairs two at a time to their bedroom, the coldest room in the house due to a broken radiator; but she didn’t dive under the duvet as he expected. When he got into the room she was taking off her shirt, standing on the bed in her plain white knickers, the curtains open, the glow from the streetlight falling across her knees and feet.

‘Right now?’ he said.

‘Leave the curtains.’ She turned and knelt down, then took off her knickers. ‘This way.’

David came up behind her and pulled her towards him, his hands on her hips. She put her head down, on the duvet, giving him a view only of her body and her brown hair, tied up. He pulled it free and splayed it out over her back.

‘Now,’ she said, and he did as he was told.

He woke up, much later, when he heard the front door close.

For a moment he didn’t move. It took him a while to become aware of the room once more: the grey depth of very early morning, the still-open curtains that told him the streetlight was off, the suitcase missing from on top of the wardrobe, and the thin creases in the duvet beside him. He spread his arm into that empty expanse, then realised what it all meant.

Stuck to the cold blue face of the alarm clock was a Post-it note. On it, she had written, in small neat capitals:

He heard the car start; by the time he reached the street, in his boxer shorts, it was out of sight.

Skein Island is one of a series of women-only holiday resorts around the world. Founded in 1945, it was the first such resort ever to be opened, and until her death in 2008 it was the permanent home of the reclusive founder, Lady Amelia Worthington, heir to the Worthington fortune.

Skein Island was founded with a unique mission statement: to provide a week out of life. Any woman over the age of sixteen can apply in writing for a place, stating their reasons for wishing to attend. If a place is awarded, they are free to arrive at the resort for seven days – Saturday to Saturday, at a time of their choosing, according to availability of accommodation. The meals, the shared housing and the facilities are all free of charge. The criteria used to decide who will be offered a place are a closely guarded secret.

Facilities on the island include—

I fold the brochure and slip it back into my handbag. Lady Worthington decided back in 1945 what a woman is and who is worthy of her island, and if we want to come here we have to play by the rules that outlive her.

The room is far from full. There are seven other women; they’ve formed a self-conscious queue from the unoccupied reception desk to the dirty glass double doors. They have been my only company on the boat during the hour-long crossing. The pier at Allcombe had been deserted, too. A grey, slabbed stretch of closed kiosks and iron railings, icy to the touch, delineated land from sea.

I can’t believe I took that boat. I stepped on board the Sea Princess , helped over the threshold of the pier by a lanky young man in a bobble hat and fingerless gloves who had a businesslike set to his mouth. It was that sense of the journey as the last stage in a transaction that had, in the end, persuaded me to take that final step. And already there is dislocation from what went before. This is the breaking point of my life; from now on, everything will be different.

The women have nothing in common, not obviously, anyway. I expected the island to appeal to a certain type, although I’m not sure what type that would be. But the queue gives no information except that we are a patient lot. Nobody has arrived to take down our details. Outside the glass doors, the retreat of the Sea Princess is visible on the choppy grey waves. It will not return until next Saturday, so there really is no rush. At least, not for those of us in the queue.

But that gives me only seven days to find out why I’ve received an invitation from a dead woman.