Fifteen years earlier
You weren’t expecting me to come, I saw that in the flash of hastily concealed surprise as you leant against your blue car.
You opened the passenger door for me and I laughed at your old-fashioned chivalry.
The drive to this mysterious destination of yours took more than an hour.
I remember looking out of the window, listening to the background wash of the Rolling Stones, your all-time favourite band if you had to choose, you said, while the sweeping plains of the Quantock Hills faded into the high hedgerows and narrow lanes of south Devon.
‘Are you abducting me?’
You smiled that peculiar downturned smile, each corner of your mouth tugged south, the face of an inverted clown.
‘I haven’t decided yet.
Let’s see how lunch goes.
’
We fell into silence.
I was thinking about Sam, thinking how he’d hate to see me sitting next to you in the low-slung car.
Everything you stood for, Sam stood against, a simple equation of fundamental opposites.
Sam’s blood-red politics had been handed down from father to son like a genetic injection; one of the few things they always agreed on was their utter derision for anyone of privilege.
Finally you brought the car to a stop in a small gravelled car park looking out across the sea.
I can still picture my first sighting of the Beach House, a battered old hut with peeling blue paint stationed right above South Milton Sands.
But then you opened the door to the restaurant and it was as if we’d stepped inside your drawing; nothing before or since could capture the romance of that moment.
It was identical: the wooden walls of a ski chalet dotted with film posters, the red and white checked tablecloths, the jam jars filled with flowers.
Outside the day was cold and grey, but inside the hut it was perfect, a fire burned in the hearth and there were candles on every table.
Nowhere in the world could have been better suited to a drawn-out secret lunch.
There was no one else there apart from a mother and daughter who were leaving as we arrived.
It occurs to me now that perhaps the restaurant was closing, but you knew the owner and he took your grandiose ‘We’ll try everything’ at face value, bringing oysters, crab, whitebait and grilled sole, a leisurely sequence of dishes that lasted for hours and remains the best seafood I’ve eaten until this day.
There was a bottle of cold yellow wine and you filled our glasses almost to the brim, just like the drawing.
Ours?
I’d been secretly observing you throughout the drive, little sideways glances that took in your long, slim fingers on the steering wheel, the frayed wrist of your navy jumper.
Now you were opposite me, front on, lit up by candles, and there was nothing to do but look.
What was it about your face, I wondered, that made you more beautiful to me than anyone I’d ever seen?
You saw me looking and smiled.
‘I didn’t think you’d come.
What made you change your mind?
’
‘The drawing.’
‘You liked it?’
‘I loved it. It reminded me of one of my favourite books as a child. You know those old-fashioned pen-and-ink drawings that make you feel as though you could disappear inside them? It was just like that.’
You nodded, pleased.
You told me drawing and painting were the only things that mattered to you.
‘Why are you at university then, reading English?’
You laughed.
‘I don’t know. Maybe a last-ditch attempt to please my mother.
Not that it’s working.
’
You told me your father had died when you were a kid, and your voice as you said it was airy, practised.
But I knew, even then, how this death had changed you.
‘Tell me your life story then,’ you said.
I rifled through my experiences for a while and could come up with nothing but contentment.
When I pictured my home life, it was always Sunday, Desert Island Discs on the radio, newspapers spread across the table, the smell of roasting chicken in the air.
Conversation that usually focused on me, the full beam of my parents’ attention, the warmth and insularity afforded by being a team of three.
I was their miracle child, born after nine years of trying, after countless doctors had given up, and they loved me with the zeal of those whose dream comes later.
‘I’m not sure my life has begun properly yet,’ I said, and your mouth curved upwards for the first time.
‘Perhaps it begins right here.’