After the meal Anna scampered away to tidy her playroom and get ready for bed. By the time Liz and Alan had washed up the dinner things, she'd had her bath and was waiting to be cuddled and put to bed. She was proud to be left alone to bath herself. Alan sat by her bed and told her an impromptu fairy story. He had no idea how to end it, but fortunately before he reached that problem, she was asleep.
He sat for a while and gazed at her. Her long eyelashes shadowed her closed eyes softly, her hair spread out on the pillow, each filament smouldering redly in the curtained light. He had never seen anything more peaceful than her face.
He was closing the door quietly when he heard Liz gasp. She was in the master bedroom, at the far end of the hall. As he hurried to her he was seeing the sea in two windows at once, and he had the unsettling impression that the house was drifting like a ship. As he reached the bedroom, Liz was standing at the open suitcase with her back to him. She had found Marlowe's box.
She turned at once. 'What is it? Is it for me? It's beautiful.'
'You should have been with me at Customs – maybe you could have persuaded him.'
'Oh, is this the artefact?' She looked disappointed. 'I assumed you would have posted it by now.'
'The post offices were shut by the time I got through Customs. Besides, you can see it needs wrapping up. I could have taken it to the Foundation when I got to London, but nobody was answering the phone. Presumably they don't work Saturdays.'
She had lifted the metal claw out of the box and was gazing at it rather wistfully. 'What is it exactly? I thought it was a sculpture of some kind.'
'I suppose it does look rather like that.' It was strange: at Customs he'd had to agree that it looked like an especially vicious weapon. You could imagine someone holding it by the long handle and using the four curved claws to tear flesh, to gouge – but Liz must have communicated her sense of it to him, for now it looked abstract and graceful, elegant in its simplicity. Only the dullness of the grey metal suggested how old it must be.
Liz replaced it reluctantly in the cotton wool. 'I expect it's very valuable.'
'I'm sure it is.' That had been one of the problems at Customs: the young man had wanted to know why, if this was such a valuable item, there was no return address on the wrapping – perhaps because Marlowe was coming back to England? 'Anyway,' he said, 'we'll have it to ourselves until next week. I'll give this Foundation a call first thing Monday morning.'
She still looked wistful. 'I'm sorry I didn't bring you back a present,' he said.
She smiled at once. 'Just so long as you brought yourself back, that's all that matters.'
'Couldn't do without me, eh? You didn't join Derek's harem while I was away?'
'Alan, that's a terrible thing to say!' She threw a balled-up shirt at him, hard enough to hurt. Quick as a flash he'd dragged the suitcase off the bed and flung her onto the sheets. 'Want a fight, eh?' he growled. 'Want a fight?'
'No, listen, be serious for a moment,' she said breathlessly. 'That situation really is getting out of hand. Jane's desperate. Someone ought to speak to Derek about it, for her sake.'
'All right, we'll talk about it.' He was struggling with the zipper of her skirt. 'But not just now, all right?'
She smiled at his erection, which was pressing against her. 'Well, maybe not just now.'
In a minute they were frantic for each other. They had no need of foreplay, and no time. As he raised himself to go deeper into her, she wrapped her legs around him. They came almost at once. It felt as though their bodies were exploding in mid-air, a long, shuddering explosion.
They subsided limply on the bed, side by side in each other's arms. After a while she wriggled her shoulders ruefully. 'It's about time you cut your nails.'
'They help me turn pages,' he joked. He was half-asleep now, hardly aware of what he was saying. He just wanted to lie here peacefully, holding her, hearing the long subtle chords of the sea. All at once he got up irritably; Anna was whimpering. Couldn't she leave them alone for five minutes? But soon the child was quiet, and Liz relaxed in his arms again. Just a nightmare, that was all.
Four
Alan sat at his desk and gazed out of the window. A steamy whitish sky pressed down on the sea, trapping the heat in his room. From up here the sea appeared to start at the very edge of the cliff, a sea like a semicircle of mercury miles in diameter, rippling sleepily. Half a mile away he could see a strip of beach, and on it what was either a reddish piece of driftwood or someone badly sunburnt. The stereo speakers on either side of his desk were playing the Goldberg Variations, but despite the glittering stream of music, he felt restless. He couldn't write.
Perhaps it was the heat. Usually music and the seascape kept him at his desk while he was searching for words, but now the distant object on the beach was distracting him. It looked like a reclining figure whose raw face was turned to him, but why should that make him feel watched? It couldn't be anyone, for although it was redder than sunburn, it was certainly wearing no clothes. Nevertheless he was waiting for it to move, and when he had stared at it for long enough, of course it seemed to stir. Eventually the smell of coffee lured him downstairs.
Anna's playroom and the living-room were on opposite sides of the ground-floor hall. Since her door was open, he tiptoed in to see what she was doing, but the room was empty except for the multitude of her things: soft toys, games, fairy-tale records in other records' sleeves, wheeled animals she had outgrown but refused to pan with. Comics were scattered across her little table, a teddy-bear slumped on her bicycle by the open window as though faint for the lack of a breeze. Small dolls peered out of a Lego house beneath wall-shelves heaped with books. For all its crowding, the large room felt lonely with the sound of the sea.
Anna was in the dining-room, reading Enid Blyton and kicking the legs of her chair. He gave her a hug as Liz came in from the adjoining kitchen with mugs of coffee.
'How's it coming?' Liz said.
He gazed at the whirligig of bubbles in his coffee. It looked like a hypnotist's aid: your eyelids are growing heavy, you cannot move.. . 'Not too well,' he said. 'I was trying to write a Nigerian chapter to get the feel of it, but it won't come alive. I feel as if I haven't got enough material.'
'You don't think you'll have to go back there, do you?'
'You won't go away again, will you?' Anna set down her mug with a thump that spilled coffee over the table. 'Please don't. Please say you won't.'
'I shouldn't think so, darling. Hurry up now, get a cloth.'
But Anna wasn't satisfied. As she mopped the table she pleaded, 'Promise you won't go away again.'
'Now, Anna, daddy's said that he probably won't. Why don't you go out and play while it isn't raining? Let mummy and daddy have a bit of peace.'
'Can't I just stay and listen to you?' But they didn't answer. 'I suppose I'll have to go and see the goats.'
'I expect she'll tell the goats we've thrown her out,' Liz sighed, when Anna had gone at last, pouting. 'I must find her a few more activities before we all go mad. I think I'll continue in the nursery while she's off school. She likes helping there.'
'All right, fine,' he said, trying to assemble the chapter in his mind.
She patted his hand. 'It'll come right. You'll see.'
No doubt that was true, but her assurance annoyed him a little; he'd reached the stage of writing where nobody could help – the stage where you fumble for the shape of the material and feel you'll never grasp it. Upstairs the Bach had ended, and the sea sounded like a trapped needle hissing in the central groove. 'I think I'll give it one more try,' he said.