‘You’re flying,’ Carolynn called out, laughing.
‘It’s you, Carolynn! It’s being with you. You make me feel amazing.’
She felt Jessie’s hand close around her own, and then they were sprinting, hurtling across the sand towards the sun, hand in hand like a couple of schoolkids at break time, running and laughing out loud. Carolynn felt an incredible rush: the rush of lactic acid building in her leg muscles as their pace outstripped her lungs’ ability to provide oxygen, the rush of the endless empty sand, the rush of knowing that she’d been right, that she was friends with Jessie Flynn.
Knuckles on glass again and the sun shining brightly, too brightly, right into her eyes. The morning sun’s rays magnified by the curved glass of her windscreen, she realized as she forced her eyes open. The knocking, not Jessie, but a man, banging his clenched fist against her passenger window. Her body telegraphed a message of discomfort to her brain, not only her legs, but her arms, neck and back as she struggled to sit up in the cramped space, raising her hands apologetically, ducking her head so that he couldn’t see her face.
‘You’re blocking the slipway,’ he shouted. ‘I need to launch my fishing boat.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she shouted back, her voice hoarse with sleep.
Shucking out of the sleeping bag, she squeezed herself between the front seats and sank into the driver’s seat. Zoe’s cat was still asleep, curled up in a tight doughnut on the passenger seat. Half-asleep still herself, Carolynn turned the key, which she’d had the good sense to leave in the ignition so she could find it easily. Thankfully the engine caught first time. Lifting a hand, she signalled a final apology, hoping that the man would be too caught up with launching his boat to wonder why she had been parked there. She would head for the A3 now and join the rush-hour traffic heading towards Guildford and London. Blend in, make herself invisible.
36
‘Did I ever tell you that I was married?’
Jessie met Marilyn’s gaze over the rim of her coffee cup. ‘That was unexpected. And, no, you didn’t, but you already know that you didn’t.’
‘Are you going to ask why I’m telling you this?’ he said, with a wry smile.
She shook her head. ‘I’m sure your reasons will reveal themselves.’
The waiter arrived with their pancakes, and they fell silent while he arranged the plates in front of them, set out napkins, knives and forks.
‘So what happened?’ Jessie asked, when the waiter had disappeared back inside. ‘To your marriage.’
‘I screwed around and she left me.’
‘It’s typical in the police. Broken relationships.’
‘Unfortunately, it is. When we first got married, we used to watch all my colleagues in Brighton having affairs, betraying their wives or husbands, splitting up. We were so smug back then. We always said that it would never happen to us.’
Jessie took a sip of her coffee, didn’t say anything. They had developed a solid professional relationship over the past year of working together intermittently, and Marilyn had become a friend of sorts, but she had never opened up to him or he to her before and she sensed that whatever she said at this point would halt, not encourage his flow. She also sensed that there was a point to his opening up to her, that it wasn’t just a sudden burning desire to unburden his soul. He wasn’t the type who needed to share.
‘How many affairs did you have?’
‘Two she found out about and one she didn’t.’
Jessie gave a cynical half-smile. ‘Well done, you’ve earned it – the moniker, bastard.’
Marilyn lifted his shoulders in an apologetic shrug. ‘I wanted to stick with it, but she had grown up with parents who hated each other and she had no interest in repeating their mistakes.’
‘And you were the one having your cake and eating it, while she was the one at home with no cake, but lots of shit.’
‘Thanks for the support.’
‘You can always contradict me.’
‘But I won’t, of course, because you’re right.’
‘And she knew that you wouldn’t change your ways, whatever you promised. Old dogs, new tricks and all that.’
‘I wasn’t such an old dog in those days.’
She smiled. ‘Leopards and spots?’
He didn’t smile back. ‘I was convinced that it was a one-off.’
‘A three-off.’
Marilyn ploughed on. ‘And that I’d change, but she knew that I wouldn’t, and she was right. Fundamentally, the whole marriage thing didn’t suit me.’
‘How did you meet her?’
‘She was a civilian worker with the police, but she gave up when we had our first child.’
Jessie raised an eyebrow. ‘I didn’t know you had children.’
‘A twenty-six-year-old son and a twenty-three-year-old daughter. We had them young. I was only twenty-two when we got married and she fell pregnant on the honeymoon. I very quickly found her, our whole life, stultifying. She was obsessed with the children, had no interest in going out partying any more, so I started going out partying with my colleagues, one thing led to another and the rest is history.’ He drained his coffee and raised his hand to summon the waiter for another. ‘With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that she was only trying to provide a loving, stable family life for our children. I was the one who was out of order. I didn’t want to face up to my responsibilities, so I dumped them all on her.’
‘Relationships are hard. God, I know that and I’ve only been in one for five minutes. Marriage was invented to protect women and children when women were totally reliant on men, when hardly anyone lived beyond the age of thirty-five and adventure meant travelling more than five miles away from home. Monogamy was never intended to last for fifty or sixty years. It just makes you human, Marilyn.’
‘Fallible.’
She smiled. ‘Fallible and human. So you left Brighton and came to live in civilized Chichester to reinvent yourself, start afresh?’
‘The only problem with new
