The Night Book Read Free Page A

go against all the rules, but he couldn’t stop himself.
    He told her, ‘I love you more, I love you most. You’re my little darling. Ever since you were born I’ve loved you with all my heart, and Marcus too.’
    She knew what he was saying, that he loved her more than Elke. She knew it was wrong to say it. She was shocked, soothed, gratified.
    ‘Okay?’ he said, hugging her.
    She sighed, turned over on her back, picked up one of the striped socks and hit him with it languidly. He went out of the room, troubled. He felt as if he’d done the right thing by his girl and at the same time he had a faintly cloying, disgusted feeling, as though he’d committed a crime.
        
    Before they went back to Auckland, they flew to Australia, and Simon did a short stint as a locum at Bundaberg Hospital, where they were short of obstetricians. At the end of the month they went up to Port Douglas for a holiday and stayed in a hotel in the town, where Simon spent a lot of time on the phone making arrangements for returning to his practice in Auckland.
    There was a connecting door between Simon and Karen’s room and the children’s. Both rooms had balconies that opened directly onto the pool, and you could walk out of your bedroom, open the gate and plunge straight in. Karen worried that Elke would get up in the night and go in the pool, so Simon got hold of some wire and tied the gate shut each evening.
    After being cooped up in London, the children were wild about the pool and the white sand beach that stretched mile after mile, fringed with coconut palms. It was winter, which meant the days were hot and clear, and you could swim in the sea without having to wear a full Lycra body suit to ward off marine stingers. In Port Douglas, summer brought rain and extreme heat and the stingers, tiny jellyfish that could kill you if you were stung badly enough.
    They took a tourist boat out to the Great Barrier Reef. They were given body suits, since there were marine stingers on the reef, andthey all went snorkelling.
    Simon swam away from the group and dived in water so clear that the colourful fish seemed to hang in the brightness. He dived down and lay on the bottom. Above him tiny fish veered in dazzling schools and the sky wavered, chrome blue, above the skin of the water. He felt the cold London months washing away from him. He swam up a rope, a buoy bobbing at the top of it like a balloon. The fish swirled around him and the light danced in rings and spirals on the white sand. He came up and saw Karen surrounded by the children, spitting on her mask and laughing, and he swam lazily towards them.
    Karen took holiday photos. Elke was svelte in her Lycra suit, Claire was dumpy and brave.
    Claire stood on Marcus’s foot and he shoved her hard. She slipped and fell over.
    Claire got up and hit Elke.
    ‘Why hit her? Hey.’
    ‘She laughed,’ Claire said.
    Simon grabbed her wrist. ‘Just get over it,’ he hissed.
    She pulled away from him. All the way back on the boat she sulked, and he felt bad, but was too exhilarated by the sea and the sun to care much.
    One morning they set out to walk to the end of the beach. The sand was strewn with coconuts, the palms waved and the surf crashed sparkling onto the shore. Simon walked with Marcus, drawn to the five-year-old boy’s silent, uncomplicated presence, a relief from the undercurrents, the feminine warfare.
    He and Marcus walked fast and soon they were a long way ahead. Behind them, the others were three bright blobs in the wavering heat. The bush along the shoreline made a shimmering green wall against the sky. After an hour they came to the last stretch of beach, wherea reef ran out into the sea, the water was shallow and bronze in the sun, shirred by the wind, and they watched a group of windsurfers on the beach, the sails skimming across the water, shooting delicately over the waves.
    Around a curve of the coast the sand was dimpled with bleached driftwood and the bush near the