‘Yes,’ she said with what sounded like a sparkle of challenging mischief in her voice. ‘Just like that time when a bunch of us booked a long weekend in a holiday camp on the Norfolk coast at the end of the autumn term and we all decided that what we needed was a refreshing swim to wake us up.’
‘God yes, it was bloody freezing. We must have been mad.’
‘And do you remember how Andrea and Suzie kept complaining about the smell in their chalet?’
‘I do. We were really mean to them because the rest of us pretended we couldn’t smell anything.’
‘Whereas the truth was it smelt like there was a rotting body hidden under the floorboards!’
They both laughed.
Then: ‘That was the weekend I planned to ask you out,’ said Ellis, ‘but Stewart beat me to it.’
‘And so you hooked up with Mandy instead,’ said Naomi.
Ellis frowned. ‘Was it Mandy?’
‘It was. I remember thinking what an attractive couple you made.’
‘Well, I think you and I make a much more attractive couple all these years on.’
Naomi smiled. ‘So how about that swim?’
‘I’m game if you are,’ he said.
Within no time they had stripped off and, clasping each other’s hands, they ran pell-mell into the sea. When they were fully submerged and gasping for breath at the coldness of the water, they swam to keep themselves warm. After some minutes of swimming in the still quiet, save for the lapping of waves on the shoreline,they swam towards each other. Linking her hands around Ellis’s neck, Naomi kissed him. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘What for?’
‘For being mad enough to do this with me.’
‘Happy to oblige the future Mrs Ashton. If that’s how the lady would like to be addressed.’
She laughed and threw back her head with an expression of joyful abandon, the moonlight casting a silvery radiance over her face so that for a split second she resembled a glistening marble statue. ‘It sounds perfectly wonderful!’ she said.
And how gloriously uninhibited she was to him in that moment and how she filled him with the strongest of desire.
Kissing her throat, and then moving his mouth to just below her ear and eliciting a long drawn-out sigh, he said, ‘You know that scene inFrom Here to Eternity, what do you think?’
She smiled. ‘If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing well, or not at all.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ he said.
But acting out the roles played by Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr was not as easy as they thought. For a start the rushing waves got everywhere, as did the shifting sand and pebbles. And it played merry hell with Ellis’s concentration, to say nothing of his staying power.
‘It’s no good,’ he said reluctantly, ‘these shoreline antics are for the young.’
So they hurriedly wriggled into their clothes and, carrying the picnic basket and empty Champagne bottle, they walked back to Anchor House, where never had the softness of a bed been more welcome.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Once again Martha and Tom were on their way to spend the weekend at Anchor House. Their visit was timed to coincide with the annual village fête, which was invariably held in the middle of June, as it was this year. Held in Jennifer Kingsbury’s beautiful manor house garden, it attracted a large crowd – not just local people, but from miles around.
As young children, Martha and Willow had loved the fête and looked forward to it with eager anticipation. Martha had particularly enjoyed the Punch and Judy show and would sit cross-legged in the front row, paying avid attention and calling out when prompted to do so. One year, much to Martha’s mortification, Willow had burst into tears while all the other children had roared with laughter at Mr Punch’s antics. Mum had had to scoop her up and then spend ages telling her that Mr Punch didn’t really hurt Judy, that it was just a game they played. Embarrassed that her younger sister had caused such a scene, Martha had stood with her hands on her hips and tutted at Willow for being such a baby. ‘There’s nothing to cry about,’ she’d said, ‘they’re only puppets, so they can’t feel anything.’
The hands on her hips pose was one she had copied from their father. She used to practise in front of a mirror to get the stance just right.She wanted so much to be like him, and to have the same sense of authority he possessed. From an early age, she knew that people respected her father and they always did what he asked of them.
She recalled the way she’d spoken to her sister that day, when Martha had only been about nine years old and Willow six, and as priggish as she must have sounded, her logic could not have been questioned. Would her own child be the same, she wondered? In her mind’s eye, she had already skipped over the baby stage and moved straight to a child old enough to articulate a strong, cogent opinion.
