Slapton Sands by Francis Cottam Page B

successful. Probably even more so.’
    They were all staring at her.
    â€˜Oops,’ Alice said.
    She kept quiet after that. But it was a long two hours before she could escape the room and what she thought ofas the smug and lazy preconceptions of its collective occupants.
    She lay in bed and remembered the debacle of her single American Century seminar and still she couldn’t sleep. She wished David Lucas had not said what he had about the temperature of the room. It did feel cold. It felt cold and clammy on her face and forearms, the bits of her above her duvet, and there was that faint, insistent, saline insinuation of rottenness. It could have been coming from the shore, must have been coming from there, but there was no wind to bring it, because the night was still. Whitstable was still. The town was sleeping, except for her. And it slumbered silently.
    She thought about David Lucas. He was strong and very good-looking and quite intelligent, and she felt sorry for him in her heart. She could see him as a child on the pillion seat of his father’s motorcycle, with a pair of boxing gloves knotted around his neck, on his way to be dropped at night outside some church hall in a Liverpool suburb to be educated in the bleak pragmatism of the noble art by bigger boys only too eager to inflict the lesson. She could see him in an oversized wetsuit, struggling under the weight of an air tank, his face lost inside a face mask belonging to his father, its rubber straps stretched and bunched in buckled knots at the back of his head. He’d been frightened of the big creatures that lurked under water in his child’s imagination, and his father’s solution had been to take himfor a weekend in Scotland and put a lead belt around him and bully him into dives down into the peaty blackness of Loch Ness. She’d had to tease this stuff out of him over dinner. He didn’t offer information, he surrendered it.
    She thought again about her own dad, in his Floresheim shoes, with his brush-cut hair and the kind look on his pained, honest, Pennsylvania cop’s face.
    David Lucas had called Alice Bourne’s face beautiful. And she had known he’d been telling her the truth. Her looks were to her as some alchemic miracle. Her dad had not been a remarkable-looking man. If she looked at the family album now, with sincere objectivity, she saw her dad’s expression as stolid-featured and redolent of the fortitude he’d certainly required in life. Her mother was elusive in the camera’s eye, never more than a suggestion, a filled-out shadow of how she must have looked. Her mother’s pictures suggested a wistful impermanence they’d been sadly accurate to portray. But these two people had produced a daughter, somehow, who was beautiful. It had been often and dispassionately remarked on. It was a truth. You play the hand you’re dealt. You do.
    Someone had said that at forty everyone has the face they deserve. Was it Orwell who’d said it? Auden? It had been an Englishman, she was sure. Well, she had seventeen years to play with before she earned that questionable fate.
    She was lying on her back. She coiled her body to the right, succumbing to the instinctive shelter of the foetalposition. You play the hand you’re dealt, was Alice Bourne’s last thought before sleep claimed her.
    Once again the dream left that thick taste of caramel sweetness in her mouth on waking. She flung off the duvet and tiptoed naked to the lavatory. She lifted the lavatory seat and spat. She remembered then how the bottom of the boat had been swimming in sea water and vomit in the dream and she almost retched over the lavatory bowl. She could feel goose bumps, bumpy as Braille, when to warm them she ran her fingers up and down the flesh of her bare arms. She was shivering. She flushed the toilet and fetched her dressing gown from its hook on the back of her bedroom door.
    She would make herself a cup of