She wouldn’t put up with this all the time, of course. Her condition for taking on me and the kids was that we’d go away together on our own every summer. The kids made a fuss but accepted it. Susy complained that everyone she knew had a real holiday with their mothers and fathers.
We tried a ‘real holiday’ at Easter and Christmas. The children became suddenly intensely competitive, it rained or snowed, they got tummy bugs, they disliked the hotel and each other and us; Susy obsessively posed us for photos, especially when we were rushing for planes, family photos that proved we were a family and made even Alexandra look ugly; Isaac unerringly left his glasses, his wallet or his dental brace in foreign hotels…
Family life remains as vivid as school, with its endless power to generate dreams. I’m an old man now but I still dream of school assembly, rushing down the corridor, always late. And I dream I’m back with Susy and Isaac, but they’re still adolescent, sometimes even younger, I’m tying shoes or packing lunches… Those routines lived out day after day. They were my family; they’re still in my head. I don’t understand how I finally left them. Only bad men leave their children, and I’m not a bad man, I loved my kids… she must have bewitched me. She is a witch. Red hair, white face, black heart.
She hated those family holidays. In the end she decided to stay at home.
‘But the children will miss you —’
‘— Liar.’
‘— and you love travelling, in any case.’
‘It’s not travelling, is it, if the children go.’
Travel meant sex, love, freedom. Every summer we sent the kids to relatives or friends and skipped off on our own. We did almost a decade of summer holidays before we decided it wasn’t enough.
They were nice, those holidays. Small-scale, innocent. Guilt (my guilt) kept us close to home so we could fly back easily if Isaac broke a leg (Isaac was always breaking things) or if Susy’s cold turned to pneumonia, as she always threatened it would. We sent frequent postcards and brought back large presents, we had no reason to feel guilty then.
I’m talking about twenty-odd years ago. From the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. The Portuguese coast had only just been discovered, and nobody thought about skin cancer then. It became the place we went to be happy. And that’s what we were, perfectly happy.
We went and lay on the blazing white beaches.
We went and ate fish in the little beach bars.
There was so much light. I remember no shadow, except the eventual need to go home. We loved those beaches, the long low dunes, the waves with the width and force of the great Atlantic stretching away behind them, dazzling. Alex always got drunk on light, her metabolism was hungry for it, and Portugal made her feel twice as alive, despite the knockout heat of noon.
This was before they started building in earnest, remember, before the great towers and ‘aparthotels’. To us it was a kind of paradise.
Alex loved flowers. My darling loved flowers. In many ways she was easy to please. In the Algarve we found an extraordinary peninsula where every inch of turf was carpeted with flowers. She ran down the goat-tracks like a child, crouching to look at the little patches of brightness — some we recognised or thought we did, tiny indigo wild irises, I remember, flowers like a small deep purple sweet pea which smelled drowningly sweet and grew everywhere, white silky things she thought were dog-roses till I pointed out the leaves were wrong. And the trees were straight from Eden; pines, figs, almonds, oranges, mimosa trees so thickly balled with yellow that there was hardly any room for the shiny dark leaves…
No one was there but us and the goats. The air was scented with resin and herbs. We were Adam and Eve in God’s garden. The flowers had sprung up after heavy rains which had washed deep gullies in the green turf; we found a sheltered place for lunch, completely hidden from the path.
‘I love to see oranges and lemons growing,’ I said.
She pulled up her t-shirt, pulled up her bra, gave me her dark-nippled breasts to eat, and I sucked them out so they were shaped like lemons…
I could hear the sea in the distance, a thin goat-bell, an alarmed bird. Her hair was thick and soft in my hands. Life was intolerably delicious. We were in shade, in the red soft earth, but we felt a great heat hanging above us, a dome of blue heat drawing everything in. I came very slowly, wonderfully slowly, luxuriating in her soft damp body, holding her breasts, kissing her forehead, which always felt cool, like marble… and when the last wave of it finally faded I said ‘Thank you’ and rolled over on my back and stared straight up into the amazing blue.
We were completely alive, and completely together.
Another of her passions was sunbathing. This was before we were all afraid of the sun, before we knew about skin cancer. Sunbathing seemed like such innocent pleasure, and Alex enjoyed it even more than me, perhaps because she spent so much time being active; she loved to doze and dream in the sun.
I was her attendant, her devoted masseur. I loved to rub suncream into her skin, it was a game we loved to play together. Innumerable times on those brilliant beaches…
I remember one time in Lagos. I was creaming her arms, which had just started to go pink. ‘Lovely,’ she whispered, and ‘… more… thank you…’, sleepy whispers, she was going to sleep. I laid her on her tummy on the burning sand and spread out her limbs in an elegant X; then I stroked cream into every inch of warm skin, loving every dent, every hollow, every dimple, each sinuous muscle, each delicate bone, oh God, I held it all in my hands; she slept in the sun, entirely mine.
I shaded her with a beach umbrella and ran down to swim in the long lines of surf, maybe half a mile, three-quarters of a mile away. On the whole beach, which extended to right and left almost out of sight, there were only ourselves and two muscular boys leading horses, probably Portuguese. They had kept their shirts on, and looked at me sideways with hard black eyes as I ran past.
The water was gloriously cold, and I struck away from land on my back, the better to rejoice in the cloudless sky. I was a good swimmer. I felt strong and young — I wasn’t forty then, after all — and on the sand she was waiting for me…
Then without warning a cramp seized my calf. I kicked out in agony and it eased, but the water was suddenly too cold for comfort. I was further away from land than I’d thought and I was all at once terribly afraid for Alex, those sturdy boys with their unfriendly eyes, why hadn’t I seen what those boys might do… I struck out for the beach with big splashy strokes and I saw through the spray that they were both in the saddle and the horses had stopped beside her body, tiny black figures on the headachey white.
I ran up the beach, my legs oddly weak, uphill the distance was twice as long, the soft sand sucked at my feet and tripped me, I was shouting but the wind took the words from my lips, I stumbled onwards feeling weak and old…
They were robbing us. They had dismounted now, they had got my jacket, they were bending over her, of course I would have to die defending her… their muscular backs and greasy heads bent over her white unconscious body, short oversized calves like acrobats, what did they mean to do to her? Fifteen feet away I shouted again, and the worst thing was that they saw me coming but didn’t stop, or run away… The horses loomed against the sun. I was the intruder, absurdly out of breath, irrelevant.
They had straightened up, at least. They spoke to me rapidly in Portuguese; they didn’t seem so much guilty as reproachful. I spoke Spanish well, but no Portuguese, and the tide of speech just made me feel more impotent.
Alex woke up, turned over, sat up and stared at us, rubbing her eyes; they took in her beauty as she tried to understand. She had learned Portuguese at college. Within seconds she was smiling at them, with sleepy, dazzled, narrow eyes, she was flirting with them, these sturdy young men, she was nodding her head and they were all smiling. Her body looked terrifyingly naked, her breasts half-bare and dusted with sand, her thighs wide open, cover yourself…