‘Perhaps.’ With the weight pressing down on her, Connie had lost her enthusiasm for detective work. She changed her tone and asked brightly, ‘How’s Noah?’
Bill smiled. ‘He’s great. He’s sitting up. His favourite game is banging saucepans with a wooden spoon. And how is Sam?’
‘Sam is fine, thank you.’
‘Good,’ Bill said. He began rubbing the skin at the corner of his jaw with the side of his thumb. Connie knew by now that he only did this when he felt unhappy. She was sorry for him, and she was sorry for herself too because he was so near to her and familiar and necessary, and also absolutely desirable and equally forbidden. Love and what she hoped was contrary determination made her sit up and reach for her bag.
‘Come on,’ she said gently. ‘I’ve got to get back to work. They’ll be wondering where I’ve got to.’
‘The weather forecast’s not that great,’ Connie said. She put her foot down and overtook a horsebox with wisps of straw rustically blowing out of the tailgate. ‘I was hoping it would be sunny.’
Roxana laughed delightedly. She laced her arms beneath her long thighs and hugged herself.
‘I am not worried about sunny,’ she said. ‘Today I am going to see the sea.’
In Uzbekistan the sun blazed relentlessly out of an invariable, dust-whitened sky, or else it was harsh winter. But the weather in England was for ever changing from sun to rain and back again, with an endless sequence of halfway states in between those two. Sometimes there was even rain and sun at the same time, and the wind could chase away heavy grey clouds and leave a sparkling sky in the space of a single hour.
‘We’ll be there quite soon,’ Connie told her. They were driving towards the east coast, for the first part of the way following the same route that she had taken with Hilda and Jeanette and Bill on the day of the long-ago engagement picnic.
Connie made the simple plan and Roxana told Mr Shane that she would not be working for one night. He frowned and said that he preferred to employ dancers who wanted to dance, not take half the week off.
‘Just this once,’ she coaxed. ‘A friend of mine has invited me to make a trip to the sea. This will be my first time.’
At last, grudgingly, he agreed that she could go.
Connie caught some of Roxana’s excitement. They accelerated out of London as if they were heading for somewhere much more exotic than the Suffolk coast.
‘What did Noah say about this outing, by the way?’ Connie asked.
Noah hadn’t been very pleased.
‘What is it with you about Auntie Con, Roxy? If you’re actually going to take time off work wouldn’t you rather come for a lovely weekend at the seaside with me?’
He coiled his arm round her waist and tried to pull her closer to him, but Roxana held herself just a little apart. Noah could sometimes be more affectionate than she really wanted him to be. Occasionally she could feel her resistance to his demands breaking out all over her skin in tiny tremors of impatience. Of course, she told him, she would have liked to go to visit the beach with him. But Connie had invited her, and it was very kind of her, and so they were going.
‘Is it still so far?’ Roxana asked now, peering through the windscreen as if she could make the waves materialise out of the fields ahead. ‘I thought England was only a small country, but it seems very big.’
Now it was Connie’s turn to laugh. It was like having a child in the car on Christmas Eve.
They turned eastwards, off the main road, and drove across a flat landscape hummocked with gorse. As they approached the coast the sky hollowed out and the light turned hazy.
Connie had given some thought to where would be the
best place for them to make the first sighting. She knew this part of the coast because Sébastian had conducted a series of concerts at the Aldeburgh music festival a few miles away. While he was rehearsing she had driven for hours, exploring the salty inland creeks and the shingle spits that poked out into the changeable sea. She had taken long, solitary beach walks and sheltered with her book in hollows in the sand dunes. Thinking back to this time, as she headed down narrowing roads, it occurred to her that she had been lonely. She was glad of Roxana’s company now. Her anticipation of reaching the sea suddenly sharpened to match her passenger’s.
At last the lane swung into a sharp bend and petered out. There was a cluster of wood and tar huts around a patch of broken tarmac dusted with sand, and beyond them an undulating line of dunes.
‘Is this it?’ Roxana asked.
Connie opened the car door. A gust of salty air swept in.
‘Yes. Can’t you smell it?’
Roxana sprang out. The beach café was closed and theirs was the only car in sight. Seagulls shifted on the ridge of the nearest hut, a rusted tin ice-cream sign swung and creaked in a rising wind and the undertone was the constant dull murmur of breaking waves. Connie pointed to a rough path through the marram grass, up the slope of the dune. Roxana’s eyes were wide with expectation now.
They started out at a walk but Roxana’s pace quickened as the path led upwards and for the last few feet they were sprinting, sinking into the loose sand with the grass and sea thistle clawing at their ankles. Neck and neck, panting, they reached the crest of the dune.
The fierce onshore wind snatched their breath away. Roxana would have exclaimed, but all that came out of her lungs was a gasp.
A curve of coastline expanded like a scribble of silver wire, from a low headland to the north away southwards to the dull glimmer of a tiny, toy-sized town etched against the sky and water in the far distance. The two extremities were joined by the broken combs of surf, rolling out of the mass of sea and pounding on the vast sweep of shingle. Towards the still horizon, patches of water shone an unearthly pale gold where sun broke through the towering clouds. Seagulls looped and screamed over the waves.
Roxana galloped down the steep face of the dune, straight to the gentler slope of shingle beach. She staggered as the surface changed, managed to right herself, and ran the few steps onwards to the sea. The tide was at its highest point and the waves smashed in front of her at hip height. A yard from the water she spun round and waved her arms to Connie in a wide, exuberant arc. Her mouth was a slash of glee. She kicked off her clumpy sandals and even as Connie was racing towards her, the wind snatching her shouted warning and hurling it away, Roxana dashed straight into the surf.
For an instant she was a flat shape, a cartoon of limbs cut out against a lacework of receding water. Then with the sea sucking at her calves she stumbled on the lip of a shelf, where the beach dropped invisibly away. The next wave smashed against her and knocked her off her feet, her laughter turning into a shriek of alarm. As Connie reached the waves, Roxana was thrown forwards in a tumble of surf and then dragged away in the undertow.
Connie gasped with the shock of the cold water as a wave slapped her thighs. For two seconds that stretched into an age she lost sight of Roxana under the surf. Then she spotted her, arms and legs flailing.
She had never seen the sea.
Of course she couldn’t swim.
Roxana went under again.
Connie threw herself into the waves and kicked off to the point where she had seen her disappear. The water was icy and the beach shelved very steeply. Another wave caught her and she paddled hard to crest it, then glimpsed Roxana in the next trough. She swam as fast as she could towards her and as the undertow caught her they were thrown together. Roxana flung her arms around her neck, yelling words Connie couldn’t understand as she was dragged down. With a massive effort Connie broke free from Roxana’s grasp and caught her under the arms. Another wave smashed over their heads.
There was a swirl of green water and then darkness as they tumbled over. Connie had no air in her lungs. She clenched her teeth, willing herself to hold on against the bursting pain in her chest and the urge to breathe.
Then the water rolled backwards again and somehow she was the right way up and still holding on to Roxana. Their heads broke the surface. Connie gulped in a lungful of air and kicked towards the pewter gleam of the shingle. Roxana churned in the water beside her, heavy as a barrel, but Connie’s efforts and the next wave together flung them over the lip of the shelf and their arms and legs and cheeks were suddenly scraping the sharp pebbles. Connie clawed herself to her knees and hoisted Roxana beside her. Struggling before the next wave hit them she staggered to her feet and dragged her burden into the lacy curl of foam and detritus at the high-water mark. She tottered another couple of steps, grasping both Roxana’s wrists, and then they collapsed beyond the reach of the sea.
Roxana lay in a heap on the shingle. She coughed and opened her eyes. Her eyelashes were glued into spikes with salt and mucus and her face was a mask of superficial scratches and grey-black dribbles of ruined mascara.
Connie knelt beside her.
‘You’re all right,’ she kept repeating. ‘It’s all right. You weren’t going to drown.’
Roxana began to shiver. Within seconds her teeth were chattering.
Connie made her sit up.
‘In a minute,’ she said with her mouth close to the girl’s ear, ‘we’re going to stand up and walk slowly back to the car. Then when we’re out of this wind we can get dry and warm again.’
The thunder of the waves was getting louder, and the wind was rising. Connie helped Roxana to her feet. Slowly, holding on to each other and coughing to clear the salt from their lungs, they plodded like wounded creatures to the slope of the dune and began the ascent. Connie was shivering too.
At the summit, Roxana shook herself like a dog. Drops of water spun out of her hair and her clothes. She looked backwards at the pounding waves.
‘My God,’ she gasped.
As soon as they descended it was quieter, and almost warm. They trudged through the sand and Connie had a moment of panic before she discovered that the car keys were still wedged in her sodden back pocket.
‘It’s all over now,’ she told Roxana.
It was less than ten minutes since they had left the car park.
It was only when they had stripped off the outer layers of wet clothes and were in the warmth of the car that Roxana spoke. She sat in the passenger seat, staring towards the dunes as if what lay beyond might still reach out for her. Her lips were blue.
She started to gabble. ‘I am so sorry, Connie, to be stupid and make you jump into the sea for me. Don’t be angry with me.’
‘I didn’t expect you to run straight in, or I’d have warned you, but of course I’m not angry. You’re safe, that’s all that matters. Are you warmer now?’
‘You saved my life.’
Connie said, ‘No. No, nothing nearly as heroic as that. They were big waves and the sea took you by surprise, that’s all.’
‘You saved my life,’ Roxana kept repeating.
Connie started up the car and drove to the nearest village. There was nowhere to buy dry clothes and Roxana looked in urgent need of a hot drink.
‘Let’s go in here,’ Connie said. There was a teashop open in the main street. She gave Roxana an old jumper she unearthed from the car’s boot, and wrapped herself toga-style in a picnic rug. The teenaged waitress stared at their costumes and at the fresh grazes on Roxana’s face, but fortunately they were the only customers.
Connie put a cup of hot tea into Roxana’s hands.
‘We weren’t going to drown, you know. It was just the shock and cold, and losing your balance. You’d never seen the sea before, you didn’t know what to expect,’ she comforted her.
‘But I think in England many, many people must die by drowning.’
‘Some do,’ she conceded. ‘But not us.’
Roxana put down her teacup. She stared at Connie. ‘I didn’t want to die. When I was under the water and it was filling my mouth and eyes, I was thinking no, no, it’s not time for me, I am in England now and I have met Connie, and Noah, and soon all the dreams I had in Uzbekistan will come true, and now I’m going to die and everything is wasted.’
Connie said gently, ‘That’s a good response, isn’t it? To know that life is precious and you can’t bear to lose it?’
Finally Roxana nodded. ‘I am still alive. I will try harder to be who I want.’ Her gaze was fixed on Connie’s face as if she could draw the essence out of her.
Connie was thinking that when the time came, she didn’t want to die without knowing what she wanted to live for. A sense of isolation descended on her. What was she doing, sitting here with Roxana, in a place she was familiar with only because of Seb’s absence?
Suddenly she longed for Bill. She wanted to hear his voice, to close her eyes and touch her forehead to his, submerging herself in the comfort of him.
No. No, you can’t wish for that. Not now, not ever.
To Connie’s dismay, Roxana’s eyes had flooded with tears. The girl bent her head to hide it, but it was too late.
The waitress, idling beside her display of scones, was pretending not to eavesdrop.
‘What’s wrong, Roxana? What is it?’ Connie implored.
But Roxana would not be drawn. She screwed up the paper napkin that had been placed underneath her mug and scrubbed at her face with it, then winced as she rediscovered the grazes.
‘If you’ve finished your tea, let’s go,’ Connie said quietly. ‘We won’t find anywhere to buy clothes this late in the afternoon. I think we should stay up here tonight. You can have a hot bath, and we’ll dry out our things and go home in the morning.’
They drove along the coast towards the town that had been visible in the far distance. The weather was deteriorating and the sea was an angry expanse of white horses.
Connie called ahead and booked two rooms in a pub she had once been to with Seb, across the road from the sea front. She saw Roxana into her room and told her to take a hot bath, then went to her own and tried to read until it was time for dinner. The print kept dancing in front of her eyes.
When she descended again she found Roxana waiting for her in the bar with an unopened bottle of wine and two glasses on a tray. Apart from the scratches on her face she looked her normal self again. She leapt up as soon as she saw Connie, her mouth wide in a smile.