They got on to the main road. Liz didn’t want to go for a drink, but anything to get out of the B&B. “What was the correct way?”
“Cut it in half lengthways, while it’s still alive. Rubber bands around its pincers, or it have your fingers off. Then shove the two halves under the grill while it’s still twitching. The old bag insisted and her from the B&B did it.”
All the way to the village in the dark — another pub I’ll never go to! Someone else’s local — Liz thought about Cliff watching the B&B woman gritting her teeth and splitting a lobster into neat halves, the knife grinding down on the wet shell.
She slept badly, even though the air was so healthy. Even though everyone round here said how it was gloriously peaceful. She lay awake and watched Cliff, who always went off like a light. Liz didn’t even have anything to read.
They hadn’t made love tonight. She didn’t know which room the B&B woman slept in or how close within hearing range it was. Liz knew she and Cliff were noisy. “What does it matter?” he complained. “We’re paying her thirty quid!”
Liz tutted. In the middle of the night she had to go to the loo. Cliff stirred. “You know me,” she said. “My bladder holds as much as a dessert spoon.” When she climbed off the too-high bed she couldn’t be bothered searching in the bags for her kimono, or anything else to cover herself. Let the dark be enough. So she crept into the hallway in a pair of pants.
She stood a moment, readjusting to the moonlight. There was a noticeboard with a map of the whole area, plastic pockets full of leaflets to do with walks and nature. Fancy someone putting all this stuff up in their own house. It was to be helpful but Liz thought it was weird. Like playing at schools. A thermometer thing on a card was pinned to the map; a universal scale reader, whatever that was. You were meant to take it out of the plastic, read your scales, and put it back. Everything on the noticeboard looked like it had rules attached.
Liz opened the bathroom door.
There sat the B&B woman, on the toilet, in her slippers with her nightie pulled up round her midriff. She was holding the Reader’s Digest at arm’s length.
Liz jumped back, shocked. But the B&B woman looked more shocked. She stared.
Liz without her wig. And in nothing but her pants.
At first the B&B woman simply didn’t recognize her house-guest. She saw a nude intruder. A skinny little man in black clingy pants. Not a stitch of hair on his pale body.
Then their eyes locked and the B&B woman knew she was looking at Liz.
They both heard the distinct plop as the B&B woman finished her nocturnal business. Liz slammed the door and hurried back to the room, her heart playing merry hell. As she flung herself under the heavy duvet, all she could think was: that woman didn’t keep by her own rules. The ‘occupied’ sign wasn’t turned round.
So the next day the B&B woman ran off to her dress-making class. She couldn’t face me, Liz thought, with a peculiar satisfaction.
She made herself up carefully at the old-fashioned dressing table. Crocheted antimacassars stood under everything, protecting the wood.
When she sat down to breakfast everything was out and ready. Liz ate some new kind of bran. Hard little brown balls. She ate sausages with mustard from Arran. Cliff had black pudding and she imagined kissing him later, pretending he hadn’t had sticky pig’s blood on his teeth. She kept eating, suddenly hungry.
“Get your money’s worth,” said Cliff, smiling.
Everything was laid out properly. Milk in a jug, even salt in a dish, with a tiny silver spoon. “What’s this?”
He sighed. “I can’t believe you’ve never seen a salt spoon before.”
“A salt spoon,” she muttered derisively and popped it into her pocket. “I want to go now,” she said and stood up. She looked around. “Fancy sharing your home with strangers.”
The B&B woman had explained she’d take just about anyone in. She wasn’t prejudiced, though she’d had some bother with Italians. They shouted from room to room and the walls here were paper thin.
Liz said, “The next time I live somewhere that’s my own, I won’t let any strangers in. It’ll just be for me and who I want.”
"What’s the matter with you?” Cliff said.
Liz shrugged. “Sometimes I feel like private property.”
It was where they had their first proper row; some sort of National Park, crammed with wonders. It wasn’t quite in public, but close enough. There were other couples wandering around the shaded, composty paths, and they all looked National Trusty, nature-loving couples, all in walking boots with leaflets open and pointing at things. Liz was embarrassed to be heard shouting by them.
“We didn’t pay the two pound to get in,” was how it started, Liz looking back at the people on the trail behind them. They were slotting coins into a perspex box on the gate.
Cliff tutted. “I’m not paying to walk round some old garden.”
"It’s a done-up garden," said Liz, sounding sullen even to herself. Small ponds were cut into the lawn, kidney-shaped and swarming with livid orange, shoe-sized fish. “You’d complain if someone climbed on your bus and didn’t pay.”
"That’s different.”
“I don’t see why.”
He grunted and they headed for the trees. “Anyway,” he said. "Scotland’s different. In Scotland you have the right to walk anywhere. It’s not the same as England. No one can tell you to get off their land.”
"I didn’t know that.”
“They think it should all be public.”
“Well," said Liz.
In the woods it smelled damp. It smelled like something left in a fridge to go off. They left the path — oh, foolishly! Liz warned herself, thinking of Red Riding Hood — and Cliff went
