Midnight is a Lonely Place

‘Jon –’

She was stung by the injustice of the remark but he swept on. ‘No, hear me out. You’re completely obsessive. You have no time for me at all.’

She leaped to her feet. It had taken her much of the afternoon to calm down after their exchange at the British Museum earlier. She had thought they could work things out amicably once he came home, once he had had time to think about the justice of everything she had said. ‘You … you say that, when all you ever talk about is your own work. Your friends, your parties, your TV interviews! You admitted that you only wanted me to go with you to the States as an appendage! The Jon Bevan literary circus. The wonderful, clever, stunning novelist and poet Jon Bevan and his cute girlfriend who writes such glitzy biographies – though heaven forbid that they should be taken as seriously as Jon’s oeuvre.’ Her hands had begun to shake as she realised the implications of what she was saying. She was condemning their relationship unequivocally to death. There would be no going back on this, no making up, no withdrawing of hurled insults. ‘You’re right, Jon, This relationship is not going to work. It’s over. Finished!’ Pushing past him, she flung out of the room.

Their bedroom was very small. The double bed, pushed against the wall, left space for a desk – her desk. On it her laptop sat amongst piles of books and papers. Jon’s desk was in the sitting room she had just left. Jon’s sitting room. Jon’s flat. She stared round in despair. Then she reached for her coat. Throwing it on, she turned and ran to the front door.

‘Kate. Don’t be childish. We can work this out.’ Jon followed her. Suddenly he was terrified by what he had done. ‘For Christ’s sake, where are you going?’

‘Out.’ She was fumbling with the deadlock.

‘You can’t go out. It’s nearly midnight and it’s snowing.’ His anger had gone. He saw himself suddenly as she must see him – selfish, arrogant, thoughtless, cruel. ‘Kate, please –’ He stretched out a hand towards her.

She did not answer. Slamming the door behind her she had run down the steps and out into the street.

II (#ulink_5fc5ba34-2630-570a-88ec-281b6c33acee)

She missed him.

The flat was tidy, already empty though she was still there, and the days were ticking by. She had to find somewhere, somewhere she could afford, to live, to lick her wounded self esteem, to write.

She tried to justify what had happened; to explain it to herself. He was right. It had not been working. There had been too much conflict, too much competition between them. And all the sacrifices had been hers: her time, her concentration, her money and her commitment.

Well, now it was over. All her time, her concentration, her commitment could be focussed on one thing. One man. Byron. She stood, spreading honey on a slice of bread, watching the wholemeal crumbs disintegrate. Frowning, she tried to stick the crumbs back together. She couldn’t stay in London, that was obvious. Her money – the money she had leant him – had been her sole source of income. She had spent a morning scouring her bank statement and building society book, calculator in hand, trying to see how far she could make the last few hundred pounds stretch. Thank God she had had the sense to stick some of it into a tax fund which, even for Jon, she had not touched. Without that she would be in trouble indeed. It was all her fault. She was a sucker, a classic, besotted mug. She had no one to blame but herself. And Jon. She had tried calling him names. It helped, but always she came back to the empty space in her life and the fact that she missed him.

But life had to go on, which was why, two days later, she found herself at Broadcasting House, where her old friend, Bill Norcross, ran one of the production departments.

‘So, is what I hear on the grapevine true? You and Jon are a couple no more. The beautiful Kate Kennedy has turned at bay and bitten the hand that fed her.’

Bill leaned back in his chair and waved Kate into its twin, angled on the far side of his desk.

Swallowing a retort Kate sat down, aware of his eyes sliding automatically from the top of her black leather boots to the line of her hem. Secure in the knowledge that her thighs were thickly and unglamorously shrouded in black woollen tights she crossed her legs, deliberately provocative. ‘He never fed me Bill. I paid my share,’ she said calmly.

Bill grinned amiably. She was tall, like Jon, and with a similarity of build which had led many people to take them for brother and sister. Where on Jon the look was loose-limbed and laid back, on her it was elegant and graceful, an impression compounded by her long brown hair, tied loosely at the nape of her neck with a scarlet silk scarf, and by the slender fingers which at the moment dangled the pair of spectacles which she had put on to scrutinise Bill’s face and then removed as though a ten second scan was enough for a lifetime.

‘I need your help, Bill. I need somewhere to live for a bit.’ She paused and gave him a slow, reluctant smile. ‘I wondered if I could stay in your cottage.’

Bill frowned. ‘My God! You must be desperate. Do you know where my cottage is?’

She laughed. ‘It’s up in North Essex, isn’t it?’

‘It’s in the most beautiful corner of Essex, which is, to my mind, the most beautiful corner of England. But alas, at this time of year, it is also the most inaccessible and cold. I have only a minimum of so-called mod cons, the bedroom’s full of rubble, the roof leaks and it’s very damp and cold. You’d be miserable. Has Jon thrown you out?’

‘In a manner of speaking.’ She narrowed her lips. ‘I thought we shared a flat, but apparently not.’

‘So, you have split up?’

She nodded. ‘The histrionics are over. We’re both being frightfully civilised.’ It hurt to talk about it.

She had known Bill for fifteen years, since they had been freshers together at university. He was one of her best friends, but she was not going to tell him about the money. What she had done with her savings to render her unable to pay a decent rent was none of his business. Besides, Jon had promised he would pay her back when he received his next advance. Or the next … Cheerful, generous, feckless, selfish bloody Jon! and she was the mug who fell for him!

Bill leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. A stout, balding man in his mid thirties, he had a humorous, likable face which to his chagrin, failed to convey anything other than a perpetual, cheerful bonhomie.

‘Am I right in thinking Jon has relieved you of most of the dosh you made with Jane?’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Is that what he told you?’

‘Not in so many words, no. I guessed. I’ve known you both a long while, after all, before you even met each other. Are you completely skint or can you afford some rent?’

‘Some,’ she said guardedly. ‘But not London prices.’

‘No. Near me. In Essex. Up at Redall Bay. My neighbours have a cottage they want to rent to someone for six months. It’s a couple of miles from mine; a lot more civilised. Quiet.’ He gave a sudden laugh. ‘Quiet as the grave.’

‘Would they rent it to me?’

‘I’m sure they would. They were talking about it last time I was up there. They need the money. If I recommend you and if you can rustle up a cheque for three months’ rent in advance I’m pretty certain I can fix it for you.’ He leaned forward abruptly and pulled open a desk drawer. The sheaf of photos he threw onto the blotter in front of her were crumpled and much thumbed. ‘It’s bleak, Kate. You’d better think hard about it. You would be terribly lonely.’

She picked them up with a glance at his face. ‘I know it’s bleak. I know the coast. I’ve been up there once or twice.’

The pictures featured a series of holiday scenes: people, boats, dogs, children, sand, shingle and always the sea – a grey-green, muddy sea. In one she saw a small cottage in the distance. ‘Is that your place?’

He nodded. ‘I don’t go there much in the winter. I can’t stand the cold and the desolation.’

‘It looks lovely. But too crowded.’ She glanced up at him mischievously. ‘I want solitude. I am writing a book, don’t forget.’

‘What else?’ With an expansive gesture of his arms Bill stood up. ‘If I can find a tenant for Roger and Diana who can pay good solid money for the privilege of staying in that God-forsaken cottage of theirs freezing their balls off – saving your presence – I shall earn loads of Brownie points with them and they’ll be in my debt forever. Give me a couple of days to phone them and send them your cheque and I can assure you that provided it doesn’t bounce, they will welcome you with open arms.’

She stood up. ‘Don’t tell Jon where I’m going, Bill, assuming he’s even remotely interested,’ she said as she left. ‘At least for now I want it to be a complete break. On my terms.’

‘Bitch.’ It was said with great affection.

‘Well, why not. He’s dropped me in it.’ She was surprised at her own lack of anger.

‘Silly sod.’ Bill grinned amiably. ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll drive down with you at the weekend. It won’t do any harm for my place to have a quick airing, then you can drop me at the station on Sunday night and I shall abandon you to the east wind and return here to my creature comforts.’

It did not take long to clear her stuff out of Jon’s flat. There didn’t seem to be much of it – apart from her books, of course.

They had discussed it all amicably in the end, just as she had determined that they should. They had been adult and businesslike and utterly calm in the division of their affairs – a divorce without the complications of a marriage – and with a cool kiss on her cheek Jon had departed for New York several days earlier than he had originally intended. He did not ask her where she was going; they had not mentioned the money.

A half-dozen boxes and suitcases packed into the back of her car, a carton of plants, carefully wrapped against the cold wind, and an armful of unwanted clothes. That was the sum total of her life in London which she ferried to the attic of Bill’s house in Hampstead – all to be put in store except the plants which were to be pampered and coddled by him far from the East Anglian wind. That left her laptop and printer, her books, her boxes of filing cards and notes and a couple of suitcases packed with jeans and thick sweaters and rubber boots. It was not until she had piled them into her small Peugeot and gone for one last look around the flat that the small treacherous lump in her throat threatened to choke her. She swallowed it sternly. This was the beginning of the rest of her life. Slamming the front door behind her she pushed her keys through the letter box, hearing them thump onto the carpet the other side of the door with a dull finality which suited her mood exactly. She had not enquired how Cyrus Grandini would gain entry to the flat and Jon had not told her. Turning the collar of her jacket up around her ears she ran down the steps towards her car. She would pick Bill up at the Beeb on her way across London and then together they would head north-east.

III (#ulink_4bc736ee-ef79-531c-aa72-f1bf03f0caee)

The tide crept higher, drawn inescapably onward by the full moon lost behind ten thousand feet of towering cumulus. Softened by the sleet in the ice-cold wind the sand grew muddy and pliant beneath the questing fingers of water. The shingle bank was deserted, lonely in the darkness. As the water lapped the stones in silence, gently probing, a lump of sand broke away from the mound behind it and subsided into the blackness of the water. Behind it, a further fissure formed. Matted grass strained and tore, a network of fine roots pulling, clinging, interlocked. The grass hissed before the wind, grains of sand flicked into the air by a gust, veering round into the east. Now the wind and the tide were of one mind and, inexorably, the water crept forward.

The small pocket of clay, left on the floodplain of the River Storwell after the glaciers had melted, had two thousand years ago, been at the bottom of a freshwater marsh. Long ago drained, the marsh had gone and the rich pasture which replaced it had turned, over the centuries, to arable then to scrub and to woodland, and then, as the sea advanced inexorably on the eastern coasts of England, to shingle beach. Now, after nearly two millennia of change and of erosion the soil, sand and gravel which still separated the clay from the air and the light was only centimetres thick.

IV (#ulink_c6fa4df1-5df6-5ddd-8d41-ef46eb150bea)