“So what?” Adam said quickly, then qualified his certainty. “Listen, it’s up to you. But it seems to me people shouldn’t get away with disgraceful mistakes like that. If he’s guilty he should be prosecuted.”
“Mistakes? I thought you said it was a conspiracy.” She thought for a second, frowning. “Maybe it explains what he was doing in Chelsea. Maybe this Wang was involved in some secret top-security thing…”
“Maybe.”
Ly-on came up from the beach at that moment with his fist clenched around something. He half opened his palm to reveal a small semi-transparent crab.
“It’s a sea-spider,” he said. “I catched it.”
Adam and Rita congratulated him and suggested he put it back in the water. He agreed and wandered back down to the shore.
Adam was thinking fast — if this John-Joseph Case man is the one they’re looking for then perhaps I might be free again. Perhaps I really am free — already, now — he thought. I could be Adam Kindred again…He looked up at the slowly gathering clouds.
“Primo?” Rita said. “Are you all right?”
“I was just thinking, dreaming, imagining something…”
Rita put the photo away in her bag, stood up, stretched, and sighed, “I just don’t understand,” she said, plaintively.
“Who can predict life’s course?” Adam said. Then suddenly he looked over his shoulder at the marshes.
Rita laughed at him. “Easy, boy.”
“I don’t know. I thought someone was watching us.”
“Oh, yeah. Some monster’s going to rear up out of the ooze and seize you — turn your life upside down.”
“It has happened before, you know.” He reached for her hands and made her sit beside him again. She lay back.
“What?” she said. “Your life turned upside down?”
“Hey, John!” Ly-on shouted from the beach. “I found another.”
“Why does he call you John?” Rita asked, kissing his neck.
“It’s just a nickname we had.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Now he kissed her on the lips, his tongue touched her teeth, his hand on her breast. She moved her thigh against his.
“Do you think we might live out here?” he said quietly, his lips on her throat. “What do you think?”
“Here?…It would be a nightmare commute, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose so. But there’s something about this place…”
“Do you want to live in a caravan?”
“No. No, no. In a house. I was thinking: we could buy a little house in Allhallows. A cottage. Pool our incomes, get a mortgage and live out here, on the estuary.”
“Pool our incomes, get a mortgage, buy a house…” Rita drew herself back a few inches so she could look him in the eye. “Is that a proposal?”
“I suppose it is,” Adam said. “What do you say?”
She kissed him. “Anything is possible,” she said. “Who can predict life’s course?”
“Good point.”
They lay silent, side by side, on their backs, silent for a while on the turf of the Kent shore of the Thames estuary, the wide flat marshes behind them. He reached for her hand and their fingers interlocked.
“I love you, Rita,” he said quietly, feeling his enormous weakness in the face of his enormous need for her.
“And I love you,” Rita said, evenly.
He felt an inward sigh of relief and release within him. It had been said so calmly, so straightforwardly, as if what they felt for each other were part of nature, as obvious as the marshes at their back, the wide river at their feet and the clouds in the sky above their heads.
“And I know for sure your name is Adam.”
Now it was Adam’s turn to draw back and look at her.
“What did you say?”
“What?”
“What did you just say?”
She thought, puzzled at the need to repeat herself.
“I said: ‘I know for sure I had those games, I had them’.”
“Right, yes, those games—”
“The Frisbee, that tennis paddle game, the diabolo, I can’t believe I left them in the shop. Someone must have stolen them.”
“No, no, no. We were in a bit of a rush,” Adam said, reassuringly, playing for time, allowing himself to calm down. “All the stuff we’d bought. Food, drink, flasks, paper cups, travelling rug. We had masses of bags. We must have left them…”
“We’ll check on the way home.”
“Yes.”
Adam sat slowly upright, realising. She was bound to find out, he thought, not letting go of her hand. The network was revealing itself. And she was a clever young woman, a police officer, too smart and shrewd not to find out one day, one day soon, and now that they were living together there would be, inevitably, too many unsuspecting clues revealed in their casual conversation, too many candid talks, too much circumstantial evidence of another, previous life for a clever young woman not to notice, not to draw conclusions, not to deduce. Perhaps he should just tell her one day, confess…
He felt light and weightless all of a sudden, as if he might float away if he let go of her hand. He would welcome that day, he thought, it would bring an ending, a conclusion of a rather miraculous kind…He experienced a few seconds of breathless, blinding exhilaration: perhaps, with Rita’s help, he might reclaim his old life, become Adam Kindred again, whatever dangers lurked out there in the world, become Adam Kindred and make clouds yield up their rain. He had a strong sense that everything would be all right now, even though he admitted to himself, simultaneously, that he knew full well that it was impossible for everything to be all right in this complicated, difficult, mortal life we lead. But at least he had Rita, and that was all that really mattered: he had Rita, now. There was always that, Adam supposed, that and the sunshine and the blue sea beyond.
EOF