Without questioning it too deeply, he let his footsteps tend in that direction. He walked on through a garishly painted arch, on to the wooden boards, and spent 50 pence on looking through a telescope, out to sea and the cliffs that bordered it.
‘You won’t find her out there,’ said a voice behind him.
‘Julia,’ he said, removing his eye from the lens and turning to find her proffering an ice-cream cone with a chocolate flake.
‘Spotted you moping about on the prom. Thought you looked as if you needed cheering up. Come on. Walk along the pier with me and I’ll tell you about my lovers.’
‘Julia, my interest wasn’t prurient …’
‘Of course it wasn’t.’
She winked – a most un-Julia-like gesture.
‘Come on,’ she wheedled. ‘Have the ice-cream. Live a little. God knows, you need it.’
He took it and walked with her past the faded ballroom and the clapped-out funfair to the end of the structure, where beaten-down fishermen sat all day with rods and lines.
‘I met him at the seaside, actually,’ she said.
Waves rolled in and under the boards, sea spray kissing the metal spars that held them up.
‘Your husband? You had one?’
‘It was a short-lived thing. A whirlwind romance.’
‘You don’t have to tell me.’
‘I want to. I was in one dodgem car. He was in another. He wouldn’t stop ramming me – rather metaphorical, really. He drove me to the side of the ring and I couldn’t out-manoeuvre him. He said he’d let me out again if I went for a drink with him. He wasn’t my sort really – a jack the lad, all charm and flash, no class. But sometimes you get so tired of having to measure up class, don’t you find? You want to throw it all aside and get to the heart of things, to the lusts and desires that drive them.’
‘I couldn’t say …’ Adam feared he might be blushing.
‘After one gin and tonic with Darren, my legs felt like they wanted to open wide and stay that way forever. He could do what he wanted with me. He wasn’t even that good-looking, but he had charisma, that certain Pied Piper thing that makes people follow and fall for him. It was in the way he looked at me, as if he could see me naked. And the way he dropped his voice to talk to me, and the way he used his smile, and his eyes. I was a goner, then and there.’
‘You got married?’
‘I haven’t got to that part yet. Don’t rush me. That gin and tonic was the only drink I had that day – unless you count Darren’s semen.’
‘Julia!’
‘We never made it back to the bar. We went straight behind the pub toilets, this dirty little outhouse in this nasty little gravelled car park, and I let him lift up my skirts and put his fingers right up me. And then I let him lift me up and hold me against the wall and fuck me the way I’d never been fucked in my life. Properly, for the love of it, for the need of it.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Because of the way it roughens your voice and reddens your cheeks. Because it’s what you need. You need a Darren.’
‘I’m heterosexual.’
‘I’m metaphorical.’
The bold challenge of her eyes should have driven his own sideways, or upward, or somewhere that wasn’t Julia’s face, but it didn’t. Somehow he couldn’t look away from her.
‘What is it with the women in this village?’ he muttered.
Julia put her hand on his upper arm, then, when he didn’t shy away, she moved it to his face.
‘It’s not wrong, you know,’ she said gently. ‘It’s not healthy to keep it all in.’