Chapter Eight
The hotel appears at the end of the street.
It is all grand pearlescent stone and lit from below in a way that looks like a film setting for a movie about people who have their lives together.
Four enormous columns frame the entrance, conveying a place that takes itself very seriously and expects you to as well. Emma takes it in.
“Yours?” she asks.
“Mine.”
She whistles. “Swanky… and adults-only?”
“First line of the description,” I say.
She laughs but I did choose it specifically because it had just opened, and because the website said adults-only in bold, before it mentioned the pool or the spa or the sea view or anything else of any practical relevance whatsoever.
I did not want to hear a child within a hundred metres of me this holiday. I stand by this.
Walking beside Emma, I wonder if this reads as the hotel choice of a woman who is significantly older and more set in her ways.
I think about saying this. I decide not to.
I have learned tonight, with some force, that assumptions are tiring, and perhaps Emma has learned the same thing and will extend me the same courtesy.
The lobby is all white marble and low ambient music. A woman at the front desk smiles at me as we pass. I nod back with what I hope reads as the relaxed authority of a woman who belongs here and is not having any sort of evening whatsoever.
I lead Emma to the far side of the lobby and through the glass doors to the outside cocktail bar.
The pool stretches out ahead of us, lit from within — a long, still rectangle of luminous blue, a kind of pool that exists to be looked at as much as swum in.
Beyond it, the sea is out there somewhere, close enough to smell on the air, too dark to see.
The bar is relaxed, a few couples at scattered tables, soft music, a bartender moving methodically behind the counter.
We take a table at the edge near the pool.
“What would you like?” I ask, reaching for the cocktail menu.
“What are you having?”
“Old fashioned,” I say. “And whatever you'd like is on me. The hotel is all-inclusive so I can't technically take credit for it, but I'm going to anyway.”
Emma looks at me over the top of the menu. Her expression hovering just before a smile. “Espresso martini, please.”
When the drinks arrive, I wrap both hands around my glass and look out at the pool and feel, for just a moment, the anxiety of being somewhere very still and very quiet after an evening of considerable, emotional events.
The mountain was dark and vast and easy to be brave in.
This is bright and close and requires a different kind of composure entirely.
“Would you excuse me, I’ll be right back,” I say, and stand before Emma can respond.
The bathroom is inside, off the lobby, and mercifully empty. I lock the door of a cubicle, sit on the lid, forearms on my knees and exhale.
I have kissed a woman. In the dark. I have kissed a woman and she kissed me back and told me I was beautiful and got off a coach at the wrong stop and is currently sitting at a pool bar in my hotel waiting for me to come back.
I sit with this information.
I root through my bag for my lip balm and there, folded at the bottom beneath the book and the purse and the bundled tissue arrangement I still haven't dealt with, is the excursion leaflet.
Mount Teide National Park — your chance to view heaven.
I look at the delighted faces staring up at the night sky, pointing in wonder.
Then I smile, privately, at a piece of folded paper in a hotel bathroom on a Tuesday night in February, like a woman who has fully lost the run of herself.
On my way back through the lobby, I slip outside through a side door and tip my head back.
The stars are here but diminished slightly by the hotel lights.
The sky is now a paler, hazier version of what it was an hour ago on the mountain.
I scan it slowly. Then I find it — steady, fixed, exactly where we were shown it. The North Star.
Back on the terrace, Emma has company.
An older man — silver-haired, pleasant-looking, several drinks into a holiday — is standing beside our table, one hand resting on the back of my empty chair.
Emma is leaning back in her seat, arms resting along the chair, knees wide, at home in her own body and in this conversation with a complete stranger.
She is laughing, head tipped back slightly, at whatever he has said.
I slow my pace slightly.
He gestures towards the dance floor with a small, gallant inclination of his head. Emma tilts her face up with an expression that is warm and without cruelty. “Not just now,” she says. “Maybe later.”
He accepts this graciously, says something I don't catch, and moves back towards the bar with a dignified retreat.
Emma turns as I approach. Her expression becomes a warmth that wasn't there for him.
“Friend of yours?”
“Potentially,” she says. “He seems nice.”
“He asked you to dance?”
“He did.” Her eyes find him briefly across the terrace. “I said maybe later. He kind of reminds me of my grandad.”
I take in the terrace. Couples sit scattered at their tables, playing cards, tapping their feet to the music, or simply people watching. The bartender pours a brandy. An older pair twirls across the dance floor. “You may be the youngest person in this hotel,” I say.
Emma looks around with the genuine consideration of someone actually doing the maths and looks back at me. “Lucky me,” she replies, and then continues, “he probably asked me because of the statistical odds.”
“He asked you because you look like you have moves.”
“I do have moves.” Emma reaches across with one hand and draws my chair out, the invitation implicit. I take it.
“Just not with him?”
“Just not with him.” She holds eye contact for a beat too long to be casual about it.
“You're very open,” I comment. “With people.” It comes out slightly more like an observation and slightly less like a compliment than I intended.
“People are interesting,” she says simply. “Most of them, if you let them be.”
I think about myself, hours ago, at a restaurant table trying to calculate the precise angle at which to position my chair so as to minimise social contact.
“You missed bingo,” she says suddenly. “And the ABBA tribute.”
“Pardon?”
She nods towards the far end of the terrace where, behind the glass partition, a DJ has set up and is playing music with a considerable amount of bass.
“The entertainment board over there. Tonight's programme.” She moves her foot up to rest on her other knee.
“Bingo at seven. ABBA tribute at eight-thirty. DJ from ten.” A pause. “You chose the stars.”
“I chose the stars,” I confirm.
“Good choice.”
“Yes,” I say. “On balance, I think so.”
Emma raises her glass towards me with a silent invitation to cheers.
I lift my old fashioned and our glasses meet with a soft clink that feels, in the open space of the terrace, rather intimate.
The whiskey is smoky on my tongue, and I am still tasting it when I notice Emma's glass at her lips.
She takes a slow sip and a small sound of pleasure escapes her at the taste.
Over the rim of the glass, her eyes find mine, and she smiles before she has lowered it.
“You're glad you booked this holiday then?”
I consider this as I turn my glass slowly on the table. “I've never been on holiday alone before,” I admit. “This is the first time… I don't know why I told everyone it was my ex-husband who didn't want to travel. He didn't, particularly. But I didn't, either. I think I was afraid of exactly this.”
“Of what?”
I gesture at the pool, the night, the general situation.
“Finding out you liked it?” Emma asks.
“That there’s more out there than my small village,” I say. “And yes, finding out that I liked it.”
She tilts her glass on its base. “And what do you like? In general. So far.”
I think of the moon in the viewfinder, impossibly bright. The star cluster packed close as though for warmth. And my mind drifts to her bow-full lips, imagining them taking mine again. The path to heaven turned out to be considerably more surprising and beautiful than advertised.
Across the table, I meet her gaze. The pool light catches the gold of one of her piercings, glinting softly. She watches me with that steady, focused attention, and I have run out of things to deflect with. “Stars,” I say. “And kissing you. Apparently.”
There’s a small pull at the corner of her mouth. The DJ moves into a more languid song. The older couple adjusts without missing a step.
“Did it live up to your childhood video?” I ask.
Emma looks up at the sky with that same open, unguarded expression she had on the mountain, the one I have been cataloguing all evening without meaning to. Then back at me. “It was better,” she replies.
“The telescopes?”
“Among other things.”
She says it the way I said it on the mountain — among other things — and holds eye contact just long enough that there is absolutely no ambiguity about what the other things are.
“Your turn,” I say. “Tell me something.”
She leans forward slightly, both arms resting on the table.
“I was in a serious relationship for ten years,” she starts.
“We were good together, for a long time.
And then we weren't.” A pause. “I've spent the last three years working out who I am without someone else in the equation. Turns out I quite like her.”
“I'd agree with that assessment,” I say. “For someone who has known you approximately one evening.”
Emma laughs at that. “Is it cheesy to say it feels like I’ve known you longer, Cathleen?”
“It is,” I answer. “And I would know if I’d met you before on my small island.”