GBH Read Free

shift.
    I stood just inside the doorway and took off my overcoat. Jean had halted at the top of the steps that led down into the sunken central area of the room, her coat still draped roundher shoulders, a negative silhouette against the blackness of the picture window that composed the entire wall opposite her, a window that always seemed a carpark’s length away. Lights decorated the rain-speckled glass like paint splashes on an abstract. I joined her at the top of the steps and draped my overcoat over the retaining rail. On the low glass table in the centre of the sunken area, Harold had left salad and a choice of rare beef or chicken, and also champagne.
    “You all right?” I asked.
    Jean didn’t answer. Instead she walked down the steps and sat down in the deepness of one of the long hide sofas that were fitted flush to the area’s sides. She sat crouched forward a little as if she had stomach ache, or was cold. The coat was still draped round her shoulders and she stared at the food on the table in front of her.
    I walked down the steps and took the champagne from the bucket, flipped the cork and poured some of it into the glasses.
    “Your very good health,” I said to her.
    No response.
    “Or should I say to our continuing good health, in view of information received?”
    Instead of picking up her glass and drinking, Jean tore one of the legs off the chicken, studying it for a moment before beginning to eat.
    I drank my champagne and poured some more. Then I walked over to the phone and lifted the receiver.
    “What are you doing?” Jean said.
    “Calling Collins. Why?”
    “Do it later.”
    “You what?”
    Jean put the chicken leg down on the table, stood up and walked over to me. Her coat was still round her shoulders and her lips shone with grease from the chicken. She put her hand between my legs.
    “Now,” she said.
    “I don’t want to miss him.”
    Her grip tightened on me.
    “No. Do it to me now.”
    She was still chewing and a sliver of chicken spilled from the corner of her mouth but neither stopped her from kissing me and putting her arms round my neck and bending her legs so that her dead weight began to overbalance me and tug me down to the floor. I fell on top of her and her legs closed tightly together and then began to slither against me frantically in expectant ecstasy. Her hands almost ripped my zip apart.
    “Do it now,” she said. “For Christ’s sake.”

THE SEA
    I COME TO THE end of the lane that leads through the gorse to the sand dunes. Then the lane becomes a concrete path that the Ministry of Defence has laid to give access between the dunes to the beach beyond. I automatically read again the sign that warns that if the red flag is flying so is the RAF, strafing the shells of old tanks and army lorries that are dotted around on the beach’s vastness. Today the flag is not being flown.
    I walk between the dunes, over the slight hillock made by the concrete path, then I descend the mild gradient and now the dunes are behind me and beyond there is only the sea and the beach.
    About half a mile to my left one of the rocket-blasted tanks squats like a fly on the edge of a table. I begin to walk across the flat sand towards it. Here there are no ripples in the sand left by the sea’s retreat; they don’t even begin until a couple of hundred yards from where I am, approximately where the carcass of an old transporter stands, the only object to give scale against the low line made by the joining of the sea and the sky.
    As I walk towards the tank, I walk alongside the undisturbed footprints of my journey of the previous day, and the day before that, and as I walk the thoughts I have are the ones that also remain from the previous journeys, and will continue to haunt me.
    One of my interests was office equipment. I’d got four shops,and a couple of warehouses. Not one inch of the business smelt. Not one filing cabinet, not one fifty-pence piece. If anybody working in that