LITMIR.BIZ

      Over breakfast in the deserted dining room, which also overlooks the sea, she does some calculations. In the grey light of day, rested, she feels amazed that she has spent eighty-five pounds on a good night’s sleep. View or no view, she thinks, you could get two pairs of shoes for that. Decent shoes. Paying that much long term is out of the question. She can put it on credit for the time being, but sooner or later that bill will roll in, and she has eight hundred and thirty-three pounds of savings. That won’t do ten nights, let alone the rest of her life.

      The rest of her life is too large a thought to grasp. She tries, momentarily. She sips her pleasingly hot coffee, which has come in her own little silver pot, pursing her top lip over the white china cup and taking it in in tiny amounts, inhaling it almost. She tries again: but when she looks beyond the next few days, the weeks and months to come, the enormity of what is to be accomplished, it is as if her imagination shudders and baulks like a nervous horse approaching a high fence.

      Six hundred and seventy pounds of her savings came from her Uncle Malcolm – her father’s cousin, who lived alone in a council house in Loughborough and always used to say to her, ‘When I’ve gone, all I’ve got is yours.’ Her father had taken the precaution of warning her not to get excited – Uncle Malcolm was a car park attendant for Tesco, and scarcely had a bean. All the same, when he died of lung cancer at the age of seventy-two, Maria felt guiltily excited to inherit a few hundred quid – poor old Uncle Malcolm. It was the first time she had ever inherited or won anything, the first time anything had come her way that wasn’t earned. She was so excited she had put it in a building society account and done nothing with it because she didn’t want it to be gone. ‘That’s right, duck,’ her father said. ‘Save it for a rainy day.’

      Maria and her father both believed in rain. Maria’s mother had died of leukaemia when she was fourteen, and her father had heart disease and hadn’t worked for years. Maria had grown used to the idea that orphanhood was looming, had grown into it, and in due course her father died when she was twenty-two, leaving her just enough for the deposit on a one-bedroom flat in a new development on the edge of the Recreation Ground, where, on Sundays, she was woken by the malice-free shouting and swearing of the local five-a-siders and the occasional bump of a football against the boundary fence.

      That was one of Matthew’s observations of her, very early on. On their second date, they walked along the canal towpath after dark, and in a tunnel he stopped and pushed her against the wall. They kissed for a long time in the cold and dank. He pressed on her, his weight, the rough cloth of his jacket with its folds of pockets and buttons and zips, and murmured into her hair, ‘Maria, Maria, you’re an orphan, you’re all alone …’ She cried, then, a little drunk from the wine at dinner, and he held her for a long time, until her feet began to go numb inside her thin suede ankle boots. After a while, he pushed the dark, crinkled locks of hair away from her damp face and looked at her, and she closed her eyes then, knowing he was watching her. He bent his head, to kiss the butterfly-fragile skin of her closed lids, one after the other, then her salty face, and said, ‘You’ll never be alone again, now,’ and something inside her melted and let go.

      And even now, sitting sipping coffee in this crumbling wedding cake of a hotel, she can feel that warmth, inside, if she thinks about it, how good it felt, the release of it, to give it all up after all those years of being brave.

      After breakfast – a fat sausage, surprisingly good and herby, bacon a little flaccid, a glistening fried egg, and congealed beans – she goes back to reception. A pale young man is on duty, tall and thin, body like a long drink of water. She wonders if this hotel only employs pale people with fine skin. She hesitates, waiting for him to look up and wondering if she can remember how to be charming. The young man carries on tap-tapping at the keyboard behind the desk with his thin fingers, and looks up one microsecond before it would be obvious he was deliberately ignoring her.

      ‘I’m Room 212,’ she says. ‘I’m thinking of staying a few more nights. Would you do me a deal if I did?’

      Without speaking, he keys her room number into his computer and then wobbles his head from side to side in a small movement, pressing his lips together. ‘Can’t do anything on a sea view room, sorry,’ he says. ‘They’re in such high demand.’

      Pointedly, she glances around the foyer, where the only other people in sight are a bulky white-haired man in a motorised wheelchair, and a tiny Asian woman she guesses to be his wife, who finishes tucking a tartan rug over his knees before turning and bustling to the Ladies.

      ‘Really?’ she says, turning back, fixing the young man with her gaze and thinking, Have you any idea how much I need a break, you skinny git?

      He shakes his fine head. His fringe flops. She has the feeling that, if he thought he could get away with it, he might examine his nails.

      She rests her arms on the shiny wood of the reception desk and leans forward, hoping her posture is indicative of a woman who is not likely to move away before she has been accommodated.

      He gives a sigh that contains only the merest hint of melodrama. ‘Let me see what I can do …’ He taps away. ‘I could give you a reduced rate on a compact double. No view.’

      The compact double has just enough room to walk around the bed, and when she looks out of the window, it is into the brick blank of a building she could touch with the flat of her hand if she lifted the sash and leaned out. But she can afford it for another three nights.

      She walks a lot. She walks around the shops, the brash, loud chain stores in the Churchill Shopping Centre, where she passes clothes she isn’t looking at along the rails. In the pretty little Lanes, she pauses and stares into boutique windows, looking at the cashmere wraps in skin colours and shoes displayed at angles and chunky necklaces that look so cheap they must be really, really expensive. Occasionally, looking in those windows, she wonders about going inside, just

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