A caress, too, Brenda’s hand where she stroked him, even though she no longer commanded the full attention of his flesh. In a little while he might want her again, but if not it wouldn’t matter. In fact she liked him like this: quiet, verging on sleep, with all of his strangeness sucked out of him. He was strange, yes, but that was all part of his fascination. It was one of the reasons she loved him. And sometimes she fancied that he loved her, too. It was difficult to tell, with Harry. Most things were difficult to tell with him.
‘Harry,’ she said, gently tickling his ribs. ‘Anybody in?’
‘Umm?’ the grass in his teeth gave a feeble twitch. She knew he wasn’t ignoring her, knew that he simply wasn’t here. Not here at all – not all of him – but somewhere else, somewhere very different. Now and then she would try to find out about that place, Harry’s secret place, but so far he’d kept mum.
She sat up, buttoned her blouse, straightened her skirt, brushed sand from its pleats. ‘Harry, you should do yourself up. There are people down on the beach. If they walked this way they’d see.’
‘Umm,’ he said again.
She did it for him, then curled beside him and kissed his forehead. Tugging his ear, she asked: ‘What are you thinking? Where are you, Harry?’
‘You don’t want to know that,’ he said. ‘It’s not always a nice place. I’m used to it, but you wouldn’t like it.’
‘I’d like it if you were there,’ she said.
He turned his face towards her, squinted a little, frowned seriously. He could look very serious, she thought, sometimes – in fact most of the time. Now he shook his head. ‘No, you wouldn’t like it if I was there,’ he said. ‘You’d hate it.’
‘Not if I were with you.’
‘It’s not a place where you can be with someone,’ he told her, which was as close to the truth as he had ever come on this subject. ‘It’s a place for being entirely alone.’
She wanted to know more. ‘Harry, I – ‘
‘Anyway, we’re here,’ he cut her off. ‘Nowhere else. We’re here and we’ve just made love.’
Knowing that if she tried to probe deeper he would only retreat, she changed the subject. ‘You’ve made love to me,’ she said, ‘eight hundred and eleven times.’
‘I used to do that,’ he said, presently.
It stopped her dead in her tracks. After a moment’s thought, she said: ‘Do what?’
‘Count things. Anything. Tiles on a toilet wall. You know, while I was sitting there.’
She sighed, exasperated. ‘I was talking about making love, Harry! Sometimes I think there isn’t an ounce of romance in you.’
‘There isn’t now,’ he agreed. ‘You just had it all!’ That was better. He was away from his morbid turn. That was how Brenda thought of it when Harry was vague and strange in that way of his: ‘a morbid turn’. She went along with it, wrinkled her nose playfully, was glad for his humour.
‘Eight hundred and eleven times’ she repeated, ‘in just three years! That’s a lot. Do you know how long we’ve been going out?’
‘Since we were kids,’ he answered. His eyes were on the sky again and she could see he was only half interested in what she was saying. There was something on his mind, hovering on the periphery of his awareness. Knowing him, she knew it was there. Maybe one day she’d know what it was. All she knew now was that it came and went, and that this time it seemed to be taking its time going.
‘But how long?’ she insisted. She caught his chin in a delicate hand, turned his face towards hers.
He stared at her blankly, let his eyes focus of their own accord. ‘How long? Four or five years, I suppose.’
‘Six,’ she said. ‘Since you were twelve and I was eleven. At twelve you took me to the pictures and held my hand.’
‘There you go,’ he said, making an effort and coming back to earth. ‘And you just accused me of being unromantic!’