Rosie Thomas - The Potter’s House

‘It’s too late for that.’

There was the confidence again, bred out of youth and arrogance. I wasn’t going to win. History decreed it.

What to do now?

‘I don’t care. It isn’t too late,’ I lied.

‘God, look. I love him and he loves me.’ Her words rang true now, suddenly, reality unleashed by my fury. Lisa Kirk wouldn’t let go. This wasn’t some monochrome Baz at issue; this was important to her.

But we weren’t just two alley cats fighting over a fish head, either. There was a third person involved in this. It was Peter who would determine what happened, of course. Briefly I felt the warmth of his familiarity around me, a security blanket. All would be well, because he had always made it well.

‘We’ll see,’ I said. I turned round and walked out of the kitchen, closed Lisa’s front door behind me and ran back down the stairs to our flat.

Peter was still reading. He hadn’t even noticed that I had gone.

I said nothing to him, not a word. I cooked supper and we ate together and watched the ten o’clock news. There was silence from upstairs. By being normal, I thought, maybe I could make everything normal. That shows how irrational I was.

There is a little covered souk at the centre of Branc.

I am lingering by one of the stalls, breathing in the scents of cumin and cinnamon. There are fat hessian sacks spilling out a dozen different spices and herbs, and heaps of glossy dates and dried figs. The stallholder is a fat man in a vast white shirt with a little striped waistcoat pinched around his shoulders. I am biting into the date he has passed to me to sample when a voice says, ‘I’ve got another Times , but not with me. I can drop it into the hotel later. If you would like, of course.’

Inglis man, again.

I turn round and we look at each other. He is wearing a loose shirt, pale trousers and the leather slippers. He looks ordinary, unremarkable, but familiar. He fits in here in the souk – unlike me – but I find that I can imagine him equally at home on a cricket pitch in Hampshire or in a restaurant in London.

‘Hello?’ he prompts. I have been staring at him.

‘I’m sorry. Thank you, that’s kind.’

‘Are you all right?’

The pretence seems more trouble than it’s worth. I say very softly, on an expiring breath, ‘No.’

‘No. Would you like to come and drink some coffee with me?’

Whatever my intentions might have been I find that I am following him. We duck out briefly into the white sunlight and cross a square to some tables under canvas parasols.

And then we are sitting facing each other, with a tent of shade cutting us off from the heat and brightness. Little cups of Turkish coffee arrive, with glasses of cool water and a dish of almond kernels. I pick up a nut and bite it in half, examining the marks made by my teeth in the white flesh. Then I sip at the thick, sweet coffee and gaze across the square to a mosque and the needle points of the minarets. I realise with a shock that softens my spine that I am at ease in the man’s company, am not talking or laughing or fending off. I am just sitting, enjoying the shade and the view and the faint grittiness of the coffee on my tongue.

‘I have a boat,’ the man says, before I even know his name.

And I have agreed to go for a sail in his boat, still before I even know his name.

It didn’t take long for Peter to hear about my visit to Lisa. He came home early the next day, wearing an expression I had never seen before. A guarded look, edged with defiance.

‘Is it true?’ I asked him, once he had taken off his coat and put his briefcase down on the chair in the hallway.

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Although I did. ‘Are you in love with her?’

He spread his hands, a gesture of expiring patience that brought the first dart of dislike out of me.

‘No. Yes, I suppose so. I didn’t go looking for it. These things just happen.’

Like getting hit by a bus, I suppose. You are just standing there, minding your own business, when adultery comes along and runs you over. Although, when I thought about it, having Lisa Kirk set her sights on you must be not unlike being ploughed over by a bus. The dislike intensified and it made me want to cry. The idea of disliking Peter was so outlandish.

After that there was a predictable series of ugly events and confrontations.

I wept, Peter retreated, Lisa widened her eyes. Instead of a calm backwater, Dunollie Mansions became a place full of gusts of misery and disbelief.

In the end, after weeks of grief and entreaty, Peter moved out and into a flat in Baron’s Court. Lisa drifted there with him and I stayed put. It was as if my husband and his new lover had climbed into the red TARDIS, pulled the door shut behind them and dematerialised. Some time later Selina had the idea that the two of us might go on a Turkish holiday together.

And now I am going on a boat trip. It is another unseasonably hot day, although the sky is hazed with a layer of thin cloud. The white sky slides into a pearl-grey sea with no line of separation. There is a small boat waiting at the jetty near the corner of the bay, as Inglis man told me there would be, and as I plod towards it I can see the man lying on the roof of the tiny cabin, straw hat tilted over his eyes and ankles crossed, apparently asleep. His hearing must be supernaturally good, however, because I am still a way off and treading quietly over the rocks when in one fluid movement he sits up and raises his arm in greeting.

He takes my hand and helps me down into the cockpit. There are cushions on the seats and the space is shaded by an awning, and I sit down with relief to be partly out of the brooding heat. Through the cabin door I can see a neat area with narrow bunks separated by a folding table.

‘No wind,’ the man says, hunching his shoulders.

‘No.’

‘I don’t like moving under engine power, but I think we shall have to. Maybe we’ll pick up a breeze outside the bay.’

I look down into the water, which is so clear that I can see the rocks ten feet beneath the surface as if they were lying under plate glass, and then up into the colourless sky.

‘Maybe,’ I agree. I don’t mind whether we find a breeze or not, or whatever else may be going to happen. I’m happy to be here, rocked by the water and with the shipshape little wooden cockpit around me.

The man starts up the engine and a drift of blue smoke rises from the stern. He jumps on to the jetty and releases the bow rope, and as the prow swings outwards in a slow arc he unties the stern and leaps back to join me and the boat. A minute later we are heading out to sea. In companionable silence we watch the water, and my white hotel and its companions as they fall away behind us.

‘I don’t know your name,’ I say.

He tilts his head sideways and looks at me. None of his features is distinctive, nor is the composite they make, yet the suggestion of familiarity comes back again. I know that I don’t know him, but I feel easy in his company.

‘Mine is Catherine Stafford. Cary.’

‘Andreas,’ he says. He makes a small adjustment to the tiller to bring us round parallel to the shore.

‘There,’ he says with satisfaction. And then, gesturing to the tiller, ‘Do you mind, just for a moment?’

I slide across and take his place as he moves forward. He runs up a sail and at once the wind fills it. Water drums under the hull and a wake churns behind us and I tighten my grasp on the tiller. I lift my head to look at the masthead, and the wind and our quickening speed make me smile. When Andreas moves back again I start to move out of his place but he makes a sign to indicate that I should stay put.

‘I can’t sail.’

‘You are sailing.’